Gaza, Israel, and Genocide: Some Reflections

 

 

Is Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza? What would it take to answer this question? And would Israel’s actions be any less morally obnoxious even if it is not committing genocide? These are some of the questions I wish to tackle in this post. I will argue that the evidence is unclear; that if Israel is committing genocide it is for the sake of two other goals (revenge and ethnic cleansing); and that regardless of whether Israel is committing genocide, what it is doing is morally revolting.

 

Let me begin by briefly rejecting three reasons as to why Israel is not committing genocide.

 

First, people tend to think of Israel as a country of supreme moral values. Why? Well, it is a safe haven for the Jews after the Holocaust, and victims cannot be victimizers. It is also allegedly (but falsely) the only democracy in the region, and democracies don't commit such horrendous deeds.

 

This reasoning is mistaken. There’s no reason why a victim cannot be a victimizer. Indeed, being a victim might make one refuse to tolerate any amount of harm toward one (“never again”) and to crush the entity committing the harm in the strongest and toughest of ways. Second, democracies have committed horrendous acts before. Consider American mass killings during the Vietnam war, American mass killings of Native Americans, and the Algerians killed by the French. There is also, for those of us who do not adopt the view that anything was morally permitted during World War II, the indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities by the allies. That democracies do not commit atrocities is simply an article of faith. After all, who is to stop them, especially if the people who vote the leaders into office are themselves in the grip of a national hysteria about the enemy that they are fighting? Also, Israel is a country, a state, and like all other states it engages in whatever is politically convenient to maintain whatever it decides needs to be maintained. So there is no reason to think that its conduct is somehow above the usual conduct of other states. Finally, it has a record: its displacement of Palestinians in 1948, its occupation in 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza, and the moral ugliness that these two events have caused provide strong evidence that Israel’s conduct since 1948 has been far from decent. The history books are there for anyone to read.

 

(I don’t deny that Palestinians have engaged in morally atrocious acts: at the level of the conduct of war, both sides have committed horrible actions, though Israel has the lion’s share if we go by number of casualties and who has dispossessed whom.)

 

Second, one might argue that Israel is just defending itself against Hamas, so it is not committing genocide.

 

I do not wish to deny that Israel is defending itself. But it is also possible that it is not just defending itself, and if it is not just defending itself, then it can be engaged in more than one type of action at once: it can be defending itself and committing genocide. Indeed, even if Israel is just defending itself, it might be doing so in a morally abhorrent way: it might be defending itself by or through committing genocide. So this reason is not convincing.

 

Third, one can argue that Israel is not committing genocide because if Israel had wanted to commit genocide it could have done so before. Or that if Israel had wanted to commit genocide it could have done it much more quickly and efficiently than what it is doing now—after all, its military capabilities are quite powerful.

 

But just because Israel could have done something in the past does not mean that it is not doing it in the present, much like just because I could have eaten this apple yesterday does not mean that I am not eating it now. Perhaps the above reasoning assumes that genocide requires an intention (a point I will discuss shortly), and that if Israel had this intention, it would have acted on it already. But perhaps the intention to commit genocide came about after October 7, 2023. Or perhaps Israel always had the intention but was wary of acting on it and needed a cause (which October 7 provided). The point is that even if genocide requires an intention, the intention does not need to be long standing (it could be newly adopted), or that if it is long standing, there could be reasons why the entity committing the genocide had not acted on it before.

 

As to the point that Israel can commit genocide much faster than it is now allegedly committing: yes, this might be so. But just because Israel can commit genocide faster does not imply that it is not committing a slow genocide (since when do genocides have to be fast?). There could be various factors to prevent it from doing so. Annihilating an entire population in a matter of a few days can have its own costs (e.g., swift and actionable world condemnation), whereas elongating it can have its own benefits (e.g., claimed as part of a long process of war to defeat Hamas).

 

My point so far is not to argue that Israel is committing genocide, only that the reasons given for why it is not committing genocide are not convincing.

 

There is general legal and philosophical consensus that to commit genocide requires an intention to do so. (This intention need not use the term “genocide” and can be under be verbalized or thought of as “to kill or annihilate this society.”) Does Israel have the intention to commit genocide in Gaza? Many people have understandably resorted to the pronouncements of Israeli officials to that effect or that imply the intention to commit genocide. For example, the Israeli president Herzog said that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The prime minister Netanyahu said that Israel is fighting the Amalek, a Biblical reference in which God orders the Jews (e.g., in Deuteronomy) to completely obliterate the Amalek (and their livestock, because, after all, the oxen are guilty, too). The defense minister Gallant said that Israel is fighting human animals. The agriculture minister Dichter said that “we are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba” (“the Nakba” refers to the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians left their lands and homes through a combination of fear and active expulsion campaigns by the Jewish militias at the time). The heritage minister, Eliyahu, said that there were “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza. And Vaturi, the deputy Knesset speaker, said that Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

 

Although some of these remarks exhibit genocidal desires, they need not express intentions. They can also be explained away (and they have been by Israeli apologists): the Amalek and the human animals, for example, need not be a reference to all Gazans, but only to Hamas fighters (somewhat of a stretch since the Biblical references were not only to Amalek fighters, but to the entire nation). Others can be attributed to passions running high, while others need not reflect official Israeli policy, even when uttered by members of the government, because it is one thing to mouth off, and another to officially declare government policy. I submit that such statements are not only reckless, but also reflect moral arrogance and a prevalent mentality among Israeli officials (and even laypeople, as evidenced by some TikTok videos) toward the humanity of Palestinians, the dispensability of their lives, and the willingness to do horrible things to them if necessary. Despite this, they do not provide an airtight case of an intention to commit genocide.

 

Intentions, however, need not be accessed only through verbal pronouncements. In the philosophical debate about artistic intentions, anti-intentionalists argue that we cannot chase after mental, private states in the artist’s head or trust what artists explicitly say about their artwork. Intentionalists reply that artistic intentions tend to be evident in the work itself. So we need only look to the artwork (and perhaps previous artworks by the same artist) to access the intentions and even figure out where the intentions might have misfired or been poorly executed. Whether intentionalists about art make a convincing case is debatable, but one thing they say is true, namely, and generally speaking, that we infer intentions from actions, not just from explicit verbal statements. It is the action that most crucially reflects the agent’s intentions (the agent in philosophical lingo is the person who commits the action). Indeed, if you constantly tell me that you love me but you also beat me up all the time, I’m hard pressed to not pick your actions as revealing what you truly feel about me. Actions, as we say, speak louder than words. This is not to say that verbal statements are not forms of actions (Ludwig Wittgenstein: “words are deeds”), only that we are not confined to them to access intentions, and they might not even be the primary go-to evidence for intentions.

 

Israel’s actions are no exception. Consider: Israel has cut off food, water, electricity to the Gaza Strip, and allows some rations to enter at will. Whatever rations it allows, they are miniscule and hard to administer under constant bombardment. Its bombing has targeted all and sundry and has caused the death (so far) of about 25,000 people and the maiming and orphaning of thousands of others. As I write this (January 25, 2024) Al-Jazeera reports that Israeli tanks “open fire on 200 people queued up for a delivery of desperately needed aid.” Israel’s bombardment has systematically and intentionally destroyed hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, factories, mosques and churches, homes, and even cemeteries. To what will the Gazans return (if they are ever allowed to return)? Almost the entire social and cultural infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed, and Israel is far from finishing its job. In short, Israel is engaging in the systematic destruction of Gaza’s “social, political, economic, cultural, demographic, and other conditions that make it possible for individuals to be linked together” as a group, that make it possible for them to continue to form a society (Mohammed Abed, “The Concept of Genocide Reconsidered,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 328-356, at p. 340).

 

One might argue that given that most Palestinian Gazans are still alive, Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza. But, first, the bombing is not yet over. We do not know how things will end. Israel claims that its fight against Hamas is ongoing, so if it has a genocidal intention, it is still being “rolled out” (to use Dichter’s colorful expression, as if we are preparing for the Oscars). There’s also another possibility, which is that Israel’s intention of genocide ebbs and flows depending on how things go.

 

Second, we need not understand the genocide of a people to mean the physical death of most of its members. Instead, Israel can commit genocide on Palestinian Gazans by ensuring that they cannot form a group anymore by, say, scattering Gazans around the globe. (Apparently Israel is talking to some African states to receive exiled Gazans: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-negotiating-african-countries-expel-palestinians-gaza-report.) Mohammed Abed, in the article cited above, argues that not all mass murder is genocide (insofar as genocide targets groups) and not all genocide is mass murder. He gives the example (p. 338) of sterilizing the members of a group, which means, of course, that they can no longer have any descendants, which would be genocide that does not involve mass murder. What is crucial to genocide is that the members of a group cease to exist as a group. If that is the case, then Israel could be committing genocide in various ways: partly through mass murder, but partly through eviscerating Gazans as a group.

 

The point is that just because not enough Gazans have been killed does not show that there is no genocide (and, honestly, I don’t know how high the number has to be for it to be sufficient for genocide).

 

Still, it is unclear whether Israel is committing genocide because the evidence points to two other goals at which Israel is aiming, namely, revenge (or punishment) and ethnic cleansing. Both of these intentions can be inferred, quite clearly it seems to me, from its current actions and the history of this conflict.

 

So, first, Israel is punishing or taking revenge on the Palestinians as brutally as it can get away with for what Hamas has done (Herzog again: “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”), not only for killing many Israelis on October 7, but also for wounding Israel’s pride and shattering its image as a highly militarily and technologically capable country—the best in the region, and one of the best in the world. Remember also that Hamas breached Israel’s territory by using quite unsophisticated devices and mechanisms. This must have been quite a slap in Israel’s face.

 

The second intention is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza. This would relieve Israel from having to deal with Gaza and would allow it to regain the strip as part of its land. Given the level of destruction wrought on Gaza and the number of people killed, we can infer that Israel intends to disperse the Gazans by sowing the terror of death and destruction in their hearts and lives, and by ensuring that they have little to return to. Whether the Gazans are eventually scattered or form a society elsewhere matters little to Israel. What matters is their displacement.

 

The destruction of Gaza, however, is not the only evidence. As I mentioned, the history of the conflict or what this conflict is about—territory—is another crucial piece of evidence. Since even before its establishment as a state, and throughout its existence, Israel has had to deal with the Palestinians, a people whose very presence calls into question, morally and otherwise, the Zionist project of settling historic Palestine and making it the Jewish state. Israel knows very well that Palestinians may press legitimate claims to the land, so the farther they are geographically and temporally from Israel, the weaker their claims are and the weaker that the Palestinians are able to press them.

 

Thus, that Israel has the intention of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians can be well explained by both its current actions and by its long-standing desire to ensure that historic Palestine is as Jewish as possible, which it can achieve by ensuring that the Palestinians are unable to make their case to the same land. In short, Israel is able to pull out one thorn from its side, namely, Gaza (the other thorn is the West Bank, which Israel has been slowly pulling out since 1967 through an active settlement program and all the accoutrements that come with this program).

 

Pro-Israelis like to claim that what Israel is doing in Gaza is just self-defense—that all this destruction and mayhem is to obliterate Hamas. The problem with this claim is that much of what Israel is doing in Gaza seems unrelated to this goal. For example, if, by Israel’s own claims, Hamas operates in the underground tunnels, it is difficult to see how the destruction of above-the-ground buildings helps fight Hamas. For another example, destroying the lives of an entire community, coupled with the refusal to give the Palestinians a proper state, will lead to another Hamas-like group rising from the rubble, once, or rather if, Israel completes this war.

 

One final point. One might wonder whether, just like Israel might be defending itself against Hamas by or through committing genocide (as I agreed above that this is a possibility), why can’t Israel take revenge and ethnically cleanse Gazans by or through committing genocide?

 

Israel can, of course, be doing this. One issue here is whether to commit genocide the genocide has to be done for its own sake or whether the genocide can be committed for the sake of another goal. I see no reason to insist that for an action to be genocide it has to be done for its own sake. Most of history’s examples, actually, are of the second type: of genocides committed for the sake of another goal, especially territorial or racial purification (from the victims of the genocide). So, yes, absolutely: Israel can be taking revenge and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians by or through committing genocide.

 

But consider the following thought experiment: suppose that, somehow, in one day, all Gazans were transported by God out of Gaza to some other territory. Would Israel chase them down and bombard them? Would it even try to dissolve their society without necessarily killing them? I doubt that. It does not seem to me that Israel is interested in killing Palestinians simply for the sake of killing them. It basically wants them out of its hair so it can claim the whole territory to itself. This means that if Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it is for the sake of something else, which is ethnic cleansing and revenge.

 

Let’s not lose sight of a crucial point. Even if Israel is not committing genocide, what it is doing is in itself morally disgusting. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza of its inhabitants and erasing their history so that Israel—the “light unto the nations”—can be the Jewish state in all of historic Palestine is, as the Bible says, an abomination.