Genocide happens when Israelis believe they’re above the law, Holocaust scholar says
Palestinians queuing to collect aid supplies from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 29 May 2025
Yasmine El-Sabawi writes in Middle East Eye on 12 June 2025:
When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on [10 June] after being deported by Israeli authorities, a reporter asked her why governments around the world weren’t mobilising to break the three-month siege on Gaza, as Thunberg had just attempted. “Because of racism, that’s the simple answer,” she said, making several references to Israel committing “genocide”.
After 20 months of Israel’s war on Gaza, more than 55,000 have been identified as dead – a number presumed to be an undercount, according to the medical journal The Lancet – and an air, land, and sea blockade is preventing food aid from entering the strip.
What is happening to the people of Gaza has not been officially assessed as genocide by the very governments that drew up the post-World War II international order. But several countries, as well as many international rights groups and experts, now qualify Israel’s actions as an act of genocide.
The legal definition of genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The operative word being “intent”. That definition was written in a different era, and with different dynamics in mind.
‘War between civilised nations’
Raz Segal, an Israeli associate professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, told Middle East Eye that labelling the war on Gaza a genocide is critical because he sees the issue as beyond the stipulations of international law.
“Israeli Jews are imagining that they’re fighting a colonial war against barbarians,” he said. “[They] are completely thinking they are outside the law. [This] goes back to the origins of international law, which emerged in order to regulate wars between civilised nations – that is, between Europeans. It was never supposed to apply to what we might call today ‘counterinsurgency’ or ‘colonial warfare’.”