We are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza
Arwa Mahdawi
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide
studies. He has issued a grim warning on Gaza
Wed 6 Nov 2024
Want to know a fun fact about Palestinians? They’re hard to kill. You can bomb
them, bury them under rubble, burn them alive and they still don’t seem to die
at the rates of normal people. How else do you explain the fact the death count
in Gaza barely seems to budge, even though not a day seems to go by without
another new massacre and with starvation and the spread of disease only
getting worse?
A staggering 43,000 dead Palestinians. That’s the official number the most
recent coverage cites. That’s when a number is cited at all: many pieces on
Gaza don’t even mention the death count anymore.
I obviously have no idea how many people have been killed in Gaza. Partly
that’s because – and I don’t understand why every single journalist in the west
is not appalled by this – the foreign press is not freely allowed in. Meanwhile –
and, again, I don’t understand why every single journalist in the west is not
enraged by this – Palestinian journalists are being wiped out. There is
essentially a media blackout. So it’s hard to assess the death toll. But what I do
know is this: citing that official 43,000 figure without providing a long list of
caveats feels like journalistic malpractice at this point.
First, anyone citing the death toll should include the fact that UN estimates
from May (which was months ago!) found there are likely 10,000 people buried
at the bottom of the rubble in Gaza who can’t be counted. Not to mention the
fact that there are people dying of preventable diseases every day because
adequate medication is not being allowed into the strip and the healthcare
system is barely functioning.
And they should stress the fact that counting is almost impossible; there is no
infrastructure left by which the dead can measured or properly mourned.
Palestinians are being blown into such small pieces at such alarming rates that
there are frequently no meaningful remains to count. I recently spoke to Dr
Nizam Mamode, a British surgeon who worked in Gaza with Medical Aid for
Palestinians during August and September, who told me people in the hospital
morgue have to weigh body parts to try and assess how many people are killed:
“So 70 kilograms is one body because they will just get brought in bits of
bodies.” Mamode, like everyone who has actually been on the ground in Gaza,
emphasizes that the official death figure is likely an underestimate.
By now, many people believe the actual death toll is likely in the hundreds of
thousands. In July the Lancet medical journal published a piece that estimated
around 186,000 total deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in
Gaza – roughly 7.9% of its population. Writing in the Guardian last month, Devi
Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that if
deaths continue at this rate estimated deaths by the end of the year would be
335,500 in total. That’s 15% of the population. Sridhar has also noted that the
Lancet used a conservative estimate and actual figures may be much higher.
Apologists for what is happening will shrug their shoulders and say: this is what
happens in war. It’s tragic, but it’s war; innocent people die all the time. But,
here’s the thing, wars have rules. They have limits. The scale of destruction in
Gaza strongly suggests that this is no longer war by any normal standards.
Indeed, numerous experts are raising the alarm that this is now a genocide. Still,
much of the mainstream media seems to be blithely ignoring these warning
bells, continuing the pretence that what is happening is a normal war rather
than a systematic extermination.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian who is a professor of Holocaust and
genocide studies at Brown, is one of the experts who believes what is
happening in Gaza is a genocide. He didn’t always believe this to be the case.
Last November, Bartov wrote a piece for the New York Times stating: “I believe
that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place.” But this came
with a disclaimer: “There is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal
action … There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a
genocide.”
Intent is a key component of genocide, which is legally defined as committing
certain specified acts (including killing and imposing measures intended to
prevent births) with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such.
The genocidal intent Bartov mentions is the dehumanizing language and
threats of total annihilation from Israeli politicians and influential figures. There
are hundreds of these statements out there. Bartov cites an example from 9
October, when Major General Giora Eiland wrote in the daily newspaper Yedioth
Ahronoth: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is
temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote
that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
In November, when Bartov wrote his Times piece, those genocidal intents
hadn’t fully been matched with genocidal action. But that changed, in Bartov’s
view, in May 2024, when the IDF started its assault on the city of Rafah, despite
being warned not to by the US. That was a major tipping point, Bartov told me
in a recent phone call. That was when it became genocide.
“When you look back, you could see that there was a concerted effort, not only
to move the population over and over again, but also to destroy everything that
makes the life of a group possible,” Bartov says. “There was a concerted and
intentional effort to destroy universities, schools, hospitals, mosques,
museums, public buildings and housing and infrastructure. If you look back, you
could say that this was happening from the beginning. But the kind of proof in
the pudding was this last effort in Rafah.”
Rafah was a grim milestone. But the very last stage of this genocide, Bartov
says, is happening right now in Jabalia in north Gaza, where over 1,000 people
have been killed in the last three weeks. What’s happening in north Gaza
should not be considered – as it often seems to be in the media – as just more
bombing. Rather, Bartov notes, it is a genocidal campaign clearly based on The
General’s Plan.
“This is a plan sketched out by retired General Giora Eiland, which has been
discussed for months now in the Israeli media, to empty that region of civilians
through military pressure and starvation … This is a first step toward annexing
the Strip north of the Netzarim Corridor, which will lead to its settlement by
Jews and will itself be only the first phase in the gradual takeover of increasing
portions of the Strip, squeezing civilians into ever shrinking areas and
eventually either forcing them out of the Strip or causing ever larger numbers of
them die. In short, this is a genocidal plan.”
The ICJ will likely not rule for years about whether the situation in Gaza meets
the narrow legal definition of a genocide. But Bartov believes that the operation
in Jabalia is so blatantly genocidal that “it is possible that the ICJ will find this
operation to be genocide even if it hedges on the war in Gaza as a whole.”
Which is what happened in the case of Bosnia, where the massacre in
Srebrenica was found to be genocide.
Genocide – coined by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin during the second
world war to describe the Nazi extermination campaigns – is obviously one of
the most serious words there is. It’s not a term that anyone should throw around
lightly. There were a lot of Israel’s critics, Bartov believes, who were using the
term irresponsibly in the days after 7 October, and labelling Israel’s actions a
genocide when they had not yet reached that point. The term, he notes, has
been watered down to some extent: “It has been used so often as a kind of
anti-Israeli phrase that it has lost a lot of its value.”
At the same time, says Bartov, because the genocide convention comes in the
wake of the Holocaust, there’s a tendency to say that if it’s not the Holocaust
then it’s not genocide. “If we don’t have extermination camps, if it’s not being
done across the continent, if it’s not the Nazi regime carrying it out, then it’s not
a genocide.”
More broadly, genocide can be a problematic term. The genocide scholar Dirk
Moses, who wrote a 2021 book called The Problems of Genocide, has argued
that it isn’t really fit for purpose anymore because it “produces a hierarchy of
mass death that organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction”. Its
legal definition is also so narrow that even if the entire population of Gaza were
wiped out it might still not be considered genocide.
Even with all those qualifications, however, Bartov believes it’s better to have a
legal definition of genocide than not to have it. “Because if you are aware of it
and you are aware of what are the indicators of that possibly about to happen,
then you can try to stall it in various ways.”
Again: genocide is a loaded term. It is not a term that Bartov, who is a leading
scholar of genocide, throws around lightly. And yet, he believes it’s time for the
media, which shies away from using the g-word, “to face facts”. What’s
unfolding in Gaza is genocide.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
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