New reports by human rights groups use the term to describe Israel’s offensive. The debate has fueled a brutal division among those who study mass violence
Apair of reports published this month by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch mark a significant contribution to the raging debate over how to characterize a war that has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and decimated Gaza.
But the reports – the first found that Israel is committing genocide, the second acts of genocide – are unlikely to quell deep divisions in the academic field of Holocaust and genocide studies, whose scholars study mass violence.
The dichotomy in the discipline is at the core of the tension, creating a split between those who hold that the Holocaust was a unique event and those who believe in a comparative view. The conflict has tapped into a foundational question: what is genocide studies for?
The divisions were on display at a conference about the “lessons and legacies” of the Holocaust held in Prague last year, one month after the 7 October Hamas attacks and after Israel had already killed more than 10,000 people in response. An argument erupted when pro-Israel scholars got angry at a colleague who condemned Israel’s offensive. When the scholars justified it by invoking terrorism, someone shot back that “genocide is worse than terrorism”. At a dinner that night, scholars holding different views sat at opposite ends of the table.
It was “like a high school fight”, said Uğur Ümit Üngör, a Dutch Turkish historian based in the Netherlands.
Even where the differences are more subtle, fear of the consequences of criticising Israel or being labeled an apologist for it have made honest engagement difficult, several scholars told the Guardian.
Since 7 October, the chorus of voices calling Israel’s actions “genocide” has grown alongside the death toll and destruction in Gaza. In January, the international court of justice found a “credible risk” of genocide. A US lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of complicity in genocide was dismissed earlier this year, but the judge in the case stressed that claims of genocide were “plausible”.
Still, there is no clear consensus: while the international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes and crimes against humanity, it has not brought genocide charges so far.
For a lot of colleagues it is very difficult to accept that a nation of victims could in itself commit genocide
Uğur Ümit Üngör, historian
But as courts and rights groups tackle the question head on, only some scholars of genocide have done so publicly, with many keeping to the sidelines.
The hesitation signals “a massive crisis in the field”, said Raz Segal, a US-based Israeli historian and one of the first scholars of the Holocaust to call Israel’s actions a “textbook case of genocide”, days after 7 October. The war, Segal told The Guardian, only exacerbated the fundamental fissure that has long divided the community.
The field of Holocaust and genocide studies originated in the aftermath of the genocide of the Jews during the second world war. It expanded in the 1990s in response to more instances of mass violence, including the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. That expansion was controversial for some, and the disagreement continues to play out.
“The idea that the Holocaust is unique, and Jews are unique, and Israel is unique, the exceptional status of Israel, is foundational to Holocaust and genocide studies,” said Segal, whose criticism of Israel led the University of Minnesota to withdraw an offer it had made him to lead its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Norman Goda, a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida who has rejected accusations Israel is committing genocide, said that 7 October and Israel’s response had brought to the surface “unresolved problems” about the language of antisemitism, terrorism, colonialism and – of course – genocide. He thinks the conclusion reached by many of his colleagues masks an agenda.
“Genocide charges like this have long been been used as a fig-leaf for broader challenges to Israel’s legitimacy,” Goda added. “In this sense they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself.”
Scholars who believe Israel is committing genocide say they are applying what they know about mass violence to the war before them.
“For a lot of colleagues it is very difficult to accept that a nation of victims could in itself commit genocide,” said Üngör, who added that it had taken him some time to reach that conclusion. “But now that Israel is doing the killing, all of a sudden we’re not supposed to apply everything we learned about violence?”
Early in the war, this debate played out in op-eds and dueling open letters. In one, more than 150 academics framed the Hamas attacks as an echo of “the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution”. In another, more than 55 scholars warned of the “danger of genocide” by Israel in Gaza and invoked states’ duty to intervene.
Some contributors to the Journal of Genocide Research, a leading publication in the field, have since dissected topics such as the end of “Israel exceptionalism” and “the senselessness of genocide studies after Gaza”. But many experts have stayed quiet, according to those who spoke with the Guardian.
“Where can the field stand if scholars from within and around it are unwilling to call the behaviour out?” Abdelwahab El-Affendi, provost of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, asked in the journal.
Climate of fear
The war in Gaza has “split the field” like no debate before, said Marianne Hirsch, a retired professor at Columbia University, whose field, traumatic memory, is interwoven with Holocaust and genocide studies.
There are ruptures, both personally and intellectually, and I don’t see how they can be healed, because we suspect each other’s motives
Marianne Hirsch, scholar of memory
“There are ruptures, both personally and intellectually, and I don’t see how they can be healed, because we suspect each other’s motives,” said Hirsch.
The crisis is also playing out against a broader challenge in many universities, particularly in the US, where the war in Gaza has become a pretext for a crackdown on academic freedom. In a climate of fear, many scholars with nuanced views are keeping them to themselves, noted Omer Bartov, an Israeli American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.
Bartov wrote a New York Times column early in the war urging the world “to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide” and has since argued that the threshold of genocide has been met. He told the Guardian that he has been called a “white supremacist” by people protesting him as an Israeli, or a “kapo” by others over his criticism of Israel.
“Clearly there’s a lot of tension. People get hate mail, people get shouted at,” he said. “People are suddenly, in America, avoiding speaking about it, or being advised not to speak, being threatened somewhat.”
Jeffrey Herf, a retired historian of the Holocaust at the University of Maryland who says he has known Bartov for more than 30 years, told the Guardian that he had not spoken with him since his comments on genocide, which Herf fundamentally rejects. Herf maintains that it is Hamas that is genocidal and that the claims Israel is committing genocide ignore what he says is a history of “Islamist and Arab collaboration” with Nazis.
“I’m very angry with Omer and he probably is very angry with me,” he said, noting that he has long respected his colleague’s scholarship but that “when he talks about Israel and genocide, it’s bad history”. He says Israel supporters in his field fear speaking out due to what he described as a dominant anti-Zionist discourse on campuses.
Bartov suggested the incendiary nature of the subject has at times become a distraction.
“One does not have to agree or spend all one’s energies on saying it is a genocide or it isn’t a genocide,” he said. He added that not all those who say the war is not a genocide are “denying reality”, as long as they recognise Israel is committing other atrocities in Gaza.
“There’s been systematic destruction of everything that makes it possible for a group to survive as a group, and so the result can be seen as an attempt to destroy the Palestinian people,” he said. “But I’m not saying that all those who say it’s not genocide are defending Israel, or apologists.”
A question of interpretation
The distinction between Amnesty and Human Rights Watch’s findings – “genocide” versus “acts of genocide”(the latter focusing on the deprivation of water) – has been the crux of the debate among international law scholars. (The former requires evidence of “genocidal intent”.)
It’s a narrower debate than the one among other scholars, and constrained by the strict parameters set by the 1948 genocide convention. Intent is an extremely difficult standard to prove, with legal experts disagreeing about whether it must be explicit or can be established based on a “pattern of conduct”.
The question of intent was also at the heart of the field’s early days, when “functionalist” and “intentionalist” interpretations diverged on whether the mass extermination of Jews had been the result of a clear directive from above or of a lower-level bureaucracy enabling mass violence.
“There was already a controversy in the aftermath of the Holocaust – everybody was like, ‘Where’s Hitler’s order?’ And there was no order,” Hirsch said.
There are “good faith conversations among people who really believe in international law and feel very strongly about it”, she said, “but people who have a more capacious view of the term really look more contextually at what disables life and what makes life unlivable”.
The war in Gaza has also prompted an unprecedented push by dozens of states that have asked the ICJ to apply the genocide convention more liberally so as to make it “more effective” at preventing mass violence, said William Schabas, a professor of international criminal and human rights law.
Schabas noted that he had been “cautious” about calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide early on, but that he now thinks there is a “strong case” for it. But he also warned that the debate about genocide should not distract from other atrocities.
Like Hirsch and others, Schabas stressed a continuing tension between the narrowness of the legal standard and what the public understands as genocide. He cited the Khmer Rouge atrocities, which are widely known as the “Cambodian genocide” even though they were mostly not prosecuted as such.
For Üngör, a former student articulated the question at the heart of the debate in an email she sent him early in the war: “Do you only study genocide or do you also want to prevent it?”
It’s a dilemma many scholars of mass violence have been grappling with. Herf, the retired historian, said that for those studying the Holocaust there was a “moral impulse – and that was to see that it never happened again”. He cited fears of Iran and a second, nuclear Holocaust.
Hirsch, the scholar of memory, believes that naming genocide implicates a response.
“Genocide prevention is a responsibility,” she said, citing Philip Gourevitch’s well known book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The book’s title implicitly calls out those watching as a genocide unfolds.
“Now, we’re watching on our iPhones, and still people are holding back.”
