UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, International Court of Justice President: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Indigenous Palestinian People.
… [I]n the capsized version of international humanitarian law that Israel has developed to fend off accountability, it has institutionalized the deliberate killing of masses of protected members of the group and the systematic destruction of all the infrastructures sustaining and supporting the group’s collective life. This has subjected the inhabitants of Gaza to levels of bodily and mental harm unprecedented in Palestinian history. Mass murder and mutilation have been perpetrated in the context of a state policy of protracted siege and starvation,153 inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction, while portraying them as compatible with IHL rules. Israel’s genocidal intent is inscribed in its strategies of humanitarian camouflage. To detect Israel’s genocidal intent, we must decipher how Israel has codified policies of elimination and destruction into a liberal, IHL-mimicking vernacular.
— Palestinian Centre for Human Rights – PCHR (@pchrgaza) March 26, 2024
“Through this liberal language of international humanitarian law, basically, Israel is searching for impunity. That’s how they immediately defended themselves from the beginning, at the ICJ… This mobilization of international humanitarian law at the service of genocide has also another function. It has- and it will have- the function of telling future generations- or trying to tell future generations- how to narrate the genocide. Israel is constantly trying, like all colonial powers, to write history while erasing the colonized. And so, that’s the function of this mobilization of international humanitarian law. To present and to shape the meaning of violence as legitimate violence, so that in the future- in the next decades- people will remember this genocide, not as a genocide but as something else. As a counter-insurgency campaign which had some excesses but, overall, abided by international humanitarian law.”
The very different ways in which Holocaust scholars, on the one hand, and those working in Genocide Studies, on the other, have responded to the unfolding mass violence in Israel and Palestine after 7 October point to an unprecedented crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We argue that the crisis stems from the significant evidence for genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has exposed the exceptional status accorded to Israel as a foundational element in the field, that is, the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide.
…It is, of course, true that many cases of mass violence – past and present, genocide or not – have been and are marginalized and disavowed within Holocaust and Genocide Studies. But this moment of reckoning with a foundational case of marginalization and disavowal – and justification – of mass violence in our field holds potential for the kind of systemic change that goes well beyond calls for balance in the way we study and teach about mass violence.
…The voices of Palestinians in the CCR case thus point, together with the voices of dozens of Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholars such as Trachtenberg, to a new era of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in conjunction with a new era of international law, past the denial of the Nakba and the silencing of Palestinians, perhaps even to the emergence of a new global focus on the Nakba as well as on the atrocities unfolding in front of our eyes in Gaza since October. In this way, if Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza exposed the futility of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as political scientist Abdelwahab El-Affendi has argued in this forum, it has also prompted a process of unprecedented change in the field that may prove anything but futile.
