Boundless
Characterisation of the claim of genocide in Gaza
This essay will attempt to characterise the claim of genocide in Gaza. What are its attributes? What is it like? What does it do? My purpose is not to rebut the claim so much as to analyse its nature.
Most obviously, the purported genocide in Gaza is unlike all cases where genocide is plausibly alleged. Where is the Babi Yar, the Srebrenica, the Nyamata massacre? Where are the systematic shootings, slayings, the rounding up and execution of masses of people? Outside of legal arguments, which we will treat later, where is the character of genocide?
The deaths in Gaza were caused overwhelmingly by air strikes and during urban combat. Which is to say, people were killed in ways that are typical for modern urban warfare and atypical for genocide.
What would we expect prima facie a genocide through aerial bombardment and urban ground operations to look like?
Well, we would expect the genocidaire to concentrate the targeted group, fighters and civilians alike, into tightly packed areas and obliterate them. Israel certainly has the military capacity and the aerial dominance to do this, and Gaza’s small, densely populated, urbanised terrain lends itself very well to such annihilation.
We would not expect the genocidaire to move civilians out of harm’s way. We would not expect the genocidaire to give advance warning of bombings. We would not expect humanitarian pauses. We would not expect the genocidaire to facilitate huge quantities of aid to civilians or to carry out mass vaccinations of children. Nor would we expect the genocidaire, in two years of sedulous genociding, to preside over an increase in the population of the group targeted for destruction.
One could imagine an attempted genocide in Gaza where the best efforts of the genocidaire were thwarted by the enemy, which went to huge efforts to protect civilians in its vast tunnel network. But of course the opposite was the case.
The claim of genocide in Gaza, then, is abductively weak. We are expected to believe that Israel committed genocide while consistently acting in non-genocidal ways.
Our puzzlement increases when we consider the civilian-to-combatant death ratio in Gaza of around 1.5 to 1[i], which is not only way below what you would expect for a genocide, but way below the average for wars generally of about 9:1[ii]. (In fact, analysis of the latest figures released by the Gaza Ministry of Health suggests that the ratio may even be close to 1:1[iii].)
When we bear in mind the constraints faced by the IDF – the tunnels, the booby-trapped buildings, the firefights in densely populated urban neighbourhoods, the closed borders, the enemy’s avowed disregard for the lives of its own civilians – the charge of genocide becomes implausible to the point of absurdity. We are expected to believe that the IDF, while striving to wipe out the Palestinian people in Gaza, was far less effective in its annihilation of civilians than belligerents in other conflicts who were not committing genocide at all.
As rum as the claim of genocide already seems, the implausibility is far from exhausted. It is estimated that around three percent of the population of Gaza died in the two-year war. In the Holocaust, the Nazis and their helpers killed around two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. In the Armenian genocide, the Ottomans killed more than half of the Armenian population. In Rwanda, the Hutu killed around three-quarters of the Tutsi population.
Again, we see the unlikeness of the war in Gaza to widely recognised genocides. The Bosnian case provides an instructive point of comparison. During the Bosnian War, it is estimated that around 65,000 Bosniaks were killed. This is similar to the death toll in Gaza (around 69,000 deaths according to latest casualty data[iv]) and accounts for some 3-4 percent of the Bosniak population. However, the determination of genocide in Bosnia does not apply to the war in general. Rather, it refers only to Srebrenica. And as we have already noted, Srebrenica-style massacres are signally absent in Gaza. (If anything resembles Srebrenica, it is the slaughter of Israelis on October 7.)
To underscore the point: The Bosnian War as a whole is not deemed to be a genocide even though the proportion and overall number of Bosnian Muslims killed are similar to those of Gazans in the recent war.
Another oddity is the identity of the group supposedly being eradicated. I referred above to the Jews, the Armenians, the Tutsi, the Bosniaks. What, we might ask, is the equivalent group in Gaza? The answer is not quite so straightforward. People constantly refer to the genocide in Gaza, but of whom ? Who is the genos?
When this question is addressed at all, “the Palestinians in Gaza” or some such periphrastic formulation is generally used. It is clearly not a genocide of Palestinians tout court, as war was not waged on the populations of the West Bank / Judea and Samaria. Nor was it waged on Israel’s sizable Arab population – whom close to 100% of those alleging genocide would view as Palestinian. Neither did the trauma of October 7 lead to a spate of indiscriminate vigilante reprisals against Palestinian Arabs in the region.
Rather, the IDF waged war against the fighters of the ruling power in Gaza and similarly hostile militias. That is to say, the Israeli military fought the forces who had attacked them, continued to attack them, and who held their people hostage.
According to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, genocide requires the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” It is perfectly legitimate to see Gazans as part of the Palestinian people (even if such identification is recent and still feels rather provisional) and for the killing of Gazan Arabs in war to be seen as destroying the Palestinian people in part.
Consider, however, that the 3% figure is part of a part of the Palestinian people. If we add in the population of the West Bank / Judea and Samaria, the percentage falls to about 1.2%. And if we add in Israeli Arabs, the percentage falls below 1%.
This broader view serves to highlight that the Israelis have not been conducting an ethnic campaign. This becomes even more obvious when we remember that Gaza has been almost 100% Arab since the Israeli government forcibly removed the last Jews and handed over the territory in 2005. In many genocides, different peoples have lived cheek by jowl in regions and villages for centuries if not millennia. Naturally, this complicates and slows the act of extermination. In Gaza, if Israel genuinely wanted to wipe out the Palestinian Arab population – effectively everybody – how much easier it should have been.
The point here is not that a genocide has to be fast, or efficient, or total, but that the actions of the supposed genocidaire have to be consistent with genocidal intent. A simpler way of putting this is: The story you’re telling has to make sense.
In this light, and given Israeli military superiority, complete aerial dominance, and the two-year duration of the campaign, accusations of genocide seem positively ridiculous.
Not even the legal arguments for genocide in Gaza are devoid of silliness. Invariably, they latch on to some isolated ambiguous statement by an Israeli official, take it out of context, force the maximally hostile interpretation, and infer, contrary to all evidence of policy and action, the existence of genocidal intent. South Africa’s vexatious case at the International Court of Justice exemplifies this approach.
For making an ass of the law, however, nothing beats the proposal of the Irish government, which intervened in the South African case, to broaden the ICJ interpretation of genocide. Seeking an ad hoc reinterpretation of genocide is not only a tacit admission that you do not believe Israel is committing this crime, but a confession that you are willing to jettison the most fundamental principles of law, of reason itself, when it suits your animus.
One of the fishiest aspects of the genocide claim, meanwhile, is its predating of the war. Assertions that Israel is committing genocide have been around in leftist circles since they were seeded by Soviet propaganda in the late 1960s[v]. The aim of this propaganda was not to produce a compelling argument for genocide, but to associate the term with Israel.
The idea that Israel is a genocidal state is also a staple of the ideology of settler colonialism. According to its adherents, genocide is an ongoing process that is being carried out every day by the non-indigenous inhabitants of countries like the United States, Canada and Australia. When a black descendant of slaves washes her car, or a first-generation Mexican immigrant eats a sandwich, they are committing genocide.
This hyper-attenuated definition of genocide can also be applied to Israel by ignoring the ancient and continuous Jewish connection to the land. Indeed, the activist academics who practice this discipline have (with tiresome predictability) cast Israel as the quintessential settler colonial state, with the Jews committing genocide every second they exist in their ancient homeland[vi].
The allegation of genocide in Gaza is thus profoundly ambiguous: Is it the half-baked assertion, the opportunistic slur, of Soviet propaganda? Is it the eccentric thing the scholars of settler colonialism mean? Or is it the actual crime that activist legal scholars allege? For many accusers, certainly, it does not matter: The main thing is to leverage the power of the word.
The Soviet propagandists had the disappearance of Israel as their goal, and the same goes for the theorists of settler colonialism and the overwhelming majority of scholars making legalistic arguments for genocide. Although none of the three strands mean the same thing by ‘genocide’, they all converge in their overarching wish for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state. We might wonder, then, if the incoherent claim of genocide is subordinate to this higher unified goal.
On 18 October 2023, an open letter appeared in the London Review of Books which quoted “UN expert” Francesca Albanese as saying that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted ethnic cleansing and quoting “Israeli historian” Raz Segal as describing the situation in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide”. Full of militant language, the letter was signed by 750 writers and artists[vii].
The claim of ethnic cleansing was of course false, and Gaza remains almost 100% Palestinian Arab. It is important to realise here that Albanese, as quoted by the letter, was not speaking of the risk of ethnic cleansing, but saying categorically that ethnic cleansing was taking place. I quote: “The UN expert Francesca Albanese has warned that Israel’s current actions in Gaza constitute a form of ethnic cleansing.” Fundamentally, claims like this are not sincere – they are asserted, quietly dropped, reasserted as convenient.
The most significant thing about the letter, however, is its date. Published just eleven days after 7 October, it can allege genocide so quickly because, as we have seen, the genocide claim was prepared long in advance; the word associated with Israel long in advance. The claim of genocide did not emerge organically from an observation of the facts, but was rolled out alongside the claim of ethnic cleansing.
The Raz Segal article quoted in the open letter makes a ramshackle legalistic argument for genocide. Appearing just six days after 7 October, it follows the pattern I described above, blowing an ambiguous statement by Yoav Gallant out of all proportion and appending a ragbag of statements by Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen and unnamed television interviewees and online commentators in an attempt to establish intent. It is all so jerry-built and profoundly unserious as not to require further discussion – readers can follow the link and judge for themselves[viii].
More significantly, Segal nests the genocide claim in a cluster of accusations – apartheid, Jewish supremacy, settler colonialism – that are routinely deployed in concert. If the dubious meanings these terms have acquired seem to fit Israel perfectly, it is because they have been bent and twisted specifically to that end.
The disappearance of Israel is not just the goal, but the singular passion of many of the activists alleging genocide. And if you want the Jewish state to be gone, what better way to prepare the ground than to make people believe it is genocidal? This would mean, of course, that the Jewish state is like the Nazi state in its most awful guise. And if those two crimes – the Holocaust and the Jewish-committed genocide – cancel each other out, then the West’s ever so briefly felt commitment to the safety of Jews would be undermined. Moreover, if the Palestinian Arabs were to overrun Israel one day, perhaps with the help of Arab neighbours, and massacre every Jew they find – 7 October on a larger scale – they would just be balancing the books.
The claim of genocide in Gaza, therefore, is not just preprepared, but preparatory. It has lodged a grave and bogus crime against the Jewish state (we note in passing the ancient pattern) to provide the justification, if needed, for the real thing. We saw a glimpse of this reaction on 7 October and the following days, when the mass murder was widely celebrated in certain circles. Finally, the genocidal, apartheid, settler colonial state got a taste of some decolonisation!
In sentiments like this, in the writings of people like Raz Segal, in the fulminations of leftist firebrands, we see that the function of terms like genocide, apartheid and settler colonialist in relation to Israel is not to accurately name, but to name-call.
This anathematization has long been the dominant mode of discourse in Ireland when it comes to Israel. As an illustration, let us look at a debate in the Dáil, the principal chamber of the Irish parliament, on 21 May 2025. On that ignominious occasion, as I detailed in an earlier essay[ix], 22 different members of the house repeated, no fewer than 34 times, a stupid, wildly implausible falsehood about Gaza – despite the fact that the claim had already been thoroughly debunked.
I am referring to the ridiculous statement by UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher that “14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.” Remarkably, not a single member of the house corrected the falsehood, nor did the reporter for Irish state broadcaster RTÉ.
During the same debate, the word “genocide” and its derivatives were used as an assertion of fact over 90 times: “genocidal maniac”, “genocidal atrocities”, “genocidal regime”, “genocide being livestreamed on handheld devices”, “apartheid, genocide and colonisation” – and on and on.
What does this repetition resemble, this vitriol? To me, it looks like baying. A mob scarcely cares, while its blood is up, that what it is alleging is implausible. Again, we note in passing the ancient pattern.
It is of course possible that the Dáil, with no dissenting voices, could spread one stupid lie (14,000 babies) while being accurate with another allegation (genocide). What is striking about the heated rhetoric, however, is how the insults, the taunts, the obvious falsehoods come so easily from the lips of the mob. It is an atmosphere where factual truth is immaterial and accusations are subrational.
A recent address by Francesca Albanese at an Al Jazeera forum has generated a furore as to whether or not she described Israel as the common enemy of humanity, but it is another part of her speech that is germane here:
We have been spending the last two years looking at the planning and making of a genocide. And the genocide is not over. The genocide as the intentional destruction of a group as such is clearly unveiled now. It’s been in the air for a long time and now it’s on full display[x].
This word salad is a window on to the spectrality of the claim of genocide. It has no bottom, no centre, no boundaries, no beginning, no end; it does not map on to objective reality. Ultimately, it is a postmodern construct – slippery, glib, forever stalking the unfalsifiable, and not even wrong.
In his diaries, Victor Klemperer often expressed his disgust at the shamelessness of the Nazi regime’s lies, manipulations and hypocrisy[xi]. With his keen philologist’s ear, he analysed how the National Socialist propaganda machine relied on the abuse of language, repetition, exaggeration and inversion to brainwash the German people. These effects were possible because the Nazis were a totalitarian regime with an iron grip on the media. For the same effects to be achieved in the age of social media, it would seem, all it takes is for the maligned group to be much smaller in number than the groups who are historically primed to hate them and believe literally anything about them.
Now that the dust has begun to settle, it is clear that exceedingly few individuals without a serious pre-existing health condition died of starvation during the war[xii]. The screams of mass starvation from the UN, national governments, NGOs and the vast majority of the media, left- and right-wing alike, were, in a word, bullshit. Nobody in the Dáil has had to apologise for the 14,000 babies lie, or retract their false statements. Nor has the originator of the lie, Tom Fletcher, faced any consequences. In fact, supposedly reputable media organisations still cheerfully quote him as a reliable authority.
Meanwhile, the mass slaughter of Iranian citizens by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has failed to excite Irish politicians to passionate denunciations, special sittings of the Dáil, the excitable embrace of ridiculous lies, or grand flights of invective. Nor has it inspired humanitarian flotillas to the Persian Gulf.
At the Al Jazeera forum in Doha, Francesca Albanese spoke (via video link) alongside a leader of Hamas and, even more shamelessly, the foreign minister of Iran, while the Iranian regime continues its executions of innocent protestors. This is the Albanese of whom the Irish government has declared itself to be a “steadfast supporter”[xiii], and whose determinations of ethnic cleansing we are asked to take seriously.
If the motives of Albanese and the Irish parliament were simply humanitarian, we would expect them to direct diatribes against Hamas and Iran with, at the very least, the same passion as they condemn Israel. But it is only the Jewish state that gets the blood of Irish parliamentarians and UN special rapporteurs coursing.
In a diary entry for 13 May 1934, Victor Klemperer deplored the “boundless hate”[xiv] evident in a speech by Goebbels, in which the Reich Minister for Propaganda gave a “final warning to the Jews”. The claim of genocide, it seems to me, partakes boundlessly more of this hate than it does of reality.
References
[i] Henry Jackson Society report from April 2025: https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/HJS-Hamas-Casualty-Reports-Report-WEB-correct.pdf
Since then, each new release of Gaza MoH figures has tended to lower the ratio.
[ii] According to the United Nations: https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm#:~:text=25%20May%202022-,Ninety%20Per%20Cent%20of%20War-Time%20Casualties%20Are%20Civilians%2C%20Speakers,during%20the%20all-day%20debate.
and
https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdr1998encompletenostats.pdf
These figures rely on 1990s data. In an analysis from 2021, the INEW network of NGOs gives a ratio of 9:1 for armed conflicts when explosive weapons are used in urban areas:
https://www.inew.org/media-release-a-decades-data-9-10-casualties-in-armed-conflicts-are-civilians-when-explosive-weapons-are-used-in-towns-and-cities/
[iii] https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/hamas-debunks-the-genocide-narrative/
[iv] See iii above.
[v] Be a Refusenik by Izabella Tabarovsky, which I review here: https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/i-disagree
[vi] On Settler Colonialism by Adam Kirsch, which I review here: https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/of-despairing-and-despairing-of
[vii] https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/an-open-letter-on-the-situation-in-palestine
[viii] https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
[ix] https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/a-most-fiery-and-heartfelt-blood
[xi] I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer
[xii] https://www.jns.org/unicef-data-show-there-was-no-famine-in-gaza/
[xiii] https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/ireland-remains-steadfast-supporter-of-francesca-albanese
[xiv] The original German is “maßlose Hetze”. While the word “Hetze” more specifically means incitement or rabble-rousing, it maps on well to our nominal use of “hate” in these contexts today.
Brilliant essay, Donal. A pleasure to read. With the genocide claim, I'm always reminded of 'Brandolini's Law': the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is by orders of magnitude greater than that to produce it. It is one of the most nefarious examples of manufacturered concensus I can think of.
Tellingly, none of the lay articles or NGO reports ever deal with the ‘dolus specialis’, or special intent, in any legally or intellectually serious way. In the relevant caselaw (the Bosnia case you refer to, and also the Croatia v. Serbia case), the court has interpreted the mens rea of intent very narrowly.
In the Bosnia case, there is an insightful quote about the type or pattern of conduct that could infer genocidal intent from the judgment: "for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence of its existence, it would have to be such that it could only point to the existence of such intent." That is to say, genocide must be the ONLY intent that can be inferred from the conduct of a belligerent.
As the IDF's "pattern of conduct" in the Gaza War can clearly be inferred as the pursuit of legitimate war aims—destruction of Hamas' infrastructure, degrading Hamas' military capabilities, and return of the hostages—then de facto it is not possible to only infer genocide from their conduct. In the Bosnia case, genocidal intent was the only inference possible because at Srebenica, there was no longer any military aim—the town had been taken.
In Gaza, conversely, the civilian deaths, while tragic, occurred in the context of a "pattern of conduct" that related to the legitimate prosecution of a war, which a party to a conflict is entitled to pursue.
You make the point really well and all your arguments accumulate convincingly. Genocide requires intent to destroy a protected group as such. As your article says, Gaza looks like devastating urban warfare against a terrorist organisation that embedded itself inside civilian infrastructure with tunnel networks that civilians had no access to. That alone is convincing. A news report today said that the Gaza tunnels where less like a metro system and more like an underground city which makes the point even sharper. Why did civilians not have access to this extensive underground system.
Warnings, evacuations, aid entry, vaccination campaigns, and combatant targeting also sit uneasily with a genocide claim. Those percentages you gave also stood out, they showed that the scale of death is not remotely comparable to recognised campaigns of extermination.
So the question should be analytical: does the pattern look more like a war fought in brutal urban conditions against a terrorist group embedded in civilian structures or more like an attempt to eliminate a people?
Your article convincingly supports the former.