In a commentary published on July 22 in the leading US newspaper, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens stated: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” Six weeks earlier, Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf had already stated in an opinion piece in the Washington Post: “Why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza ‘genocide.’”

“I Know One When I See One.”

The articles are reactions to a growing circle of experts, institutions, and organizations that describe Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip as genocide. These include various UN agencies, an investigation by the Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

In a guest article in the New York Times on July 15, one of the leading genocide researchers, Omer Bartov – an Israeli Jew who grew up in a Zionist family and is a former IDF soldier – explained in detail why the Israeli war in Gaza is a genocide: “Never Again. I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know It When I See It” is the title of his essay.

In the Washington Post, columnist Shadi Hamid also argued at length at the end of May: “A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.” However, the two newspaper articles by Bartov and Hamid are extreme exceptions in the American media landscape.

Self-Defense Instead of Crime

There has been no genocide debate in the US mainstream press over nearly two years of devastation in the Gaza Strip, with accusations of genocide mostly dismissed reflexively as anti-Israel, activist, and anti-Semitic. Israel’s war on Gaza is consistently framed as self-defense, while war crimes, if criticized at all, are portrayed as excesses.

The fact that the two “newspapers of record” in the US now felt compelled to publish articles referring to genocide has to do with the changed situation. After a year and a half of war against Gaza, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unilaterally terminated the temporary ceasefire in March and imposed another total humanitarian blockade on Gaza, which was later eased somewhat, triggering an artificially created famine for the more than two million Palestinians living there.

In addition, there are the drastically deteriorating living conditions, the continuing rise in the number of victims of bombings and Israeli troops, mainly children and women, multiple expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and the de facto complete destruction of the enclave, including its medical infrastructure.

No Change of Course

This openly documented reality, live-streamed every day, including images of the continuing escalation of the Gaza catastrophe, the Netanyahu government’s ongoing willingness to wage war with no endgame beyond the “disappearance of the Palestinians” from Gaza – either through physical destruction or expulsion or a mixture of both, openly stated by Israeli officials – and the unconditional support of the US government, with President Donald Trump declaring to the world that he wants to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” without Palestinians: all this has caused sympathy for Israel and its war to plummet among the US population, with even staunch supporters of Israel criticizing the Netanyahu government’s actions.

Only 32 percent of Americans now approve of Israel’s military actions (only eight percent of Democratic voters). The liberal mainstream media responded to this mood with two critical articles on Israel’s war in Gaza.

But it would be wrong to see these publications as a sign of a change of course in the media. They remain the exception that proves the rule. This is made clear by the promptly published “counter-opinions” that “neutralized” the genocide articles and stifled the debate.

Only 60,000 Dead

The authors who responded to Bartov and Hamid’s statements and portrayed the term “genocide” as nonsensical and dangerous made little effort to engage with the arguments, evidence, and investigations of experts and international organizations. NYT columnist Stephens, for example, writes the following objection to the use of the term genocide:

“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”

Why only 60,000 deaths and not hundreds of thousands, asks Stephens?

Apart from the cynical nature of the question and the fact that a Lancet study published a year ago already put the total number of deaths, including indirect deaths, at around 200,000, this argument can of course also be used against other genocides that are officially recognized in the West.

In Srebrenica, “only” 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Why not many more? The number of deaths is therefore not decisive for the UN Convention’s definition of genocide.

Hamas Massacre as Genocide

In their counterstatement, Goda and Herf content themselves with repeating the talking points of the Israeli government that the Israeli government is fighting Hamas and that civilian casualties are collateral damage, without addressing the flood of evidence that shows the opposite. At the same time, as usual, the subject is changed and the accusations are dismissed as “anti-Semitic.”

“The genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred, both conscious and unconscious, that lurk in radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam. These currents view Jews as uniquely evil and murderous. The Gaza genocide accusation has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil.”

Here, too, the question arises: What about Serbs, Sudanese, Burmese, Cambodians, or even Chinese, who are accused of genocide in the West?

While the accusation of genocide is labeled anti-Semitic, the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, is classified as genocide in the same breath. Here, too, Goda and Herf argue without evidence or arguments, without pointing out that this repeatedly made accusation has been rejected as false by genocide researchers and is not shared by expert organizations.

Please Do Not Use the Word “Genocide”

The isolated genocide articles in the two leading US media outlets had no effect on the general reporting on the Gaza war. The Israeli action continues to be described by the American mainstream media as military self-defense and a fight against Hamas, not as genocide.

Media and journalists do not use the term, even though, as we shall see, there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers and observers on the ground, UN agencies, and leading human rights organizations that Israel’s war on Gaza is genocidal.

This is certainly perceived as a threat by the press. For example, The Intercept revealed how the New York Times “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”

The German Debate

In Europe, especially in Germany, there is also no serious debate about the term genocide to describe what is happening in Gaza. In the general reporting on Gaza the term is absent, too.

There are only a few exceptions. For example, in a commentary for the left daily newspaper Taz on July 25, Pauline Jäckels, in the face of growing criticism of the German government and referring to Omer Bartov’s essay in the NYT, said that the government was not exerting enough pressure on Israel to “prevent genocide.” To be precise, Bartov considers it proven that it is already taking place. Otherwise, the accusation of genocide is virtually never used in reports.

When it does appear in the German mainstream media, it is almost always rejected or the evidence is deemed “inconclusive.” In addition, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli motives are implied.

The Loss of Humanity

One of the few journalists who puts the finger on the sore spot is Stephan Detjen. In a commentary on the public radio station Deutschlandfunk, he rightly states: “The reactions in this country, however, are either embarrassed silence or angry accusations of anti-Semitism.”

In contrast, the leading newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung condemn the Hamas attack not only as a massacre, but as a genocidal crime. The genocide in Srebrenica and that committed by Hamas are on the same level, they say. Those who do not make this an issue, according to Detlef Esslinger in his SZ commentary of October 23, 2023, but instead focus on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ultimately give up part of their humanity.”

When Genocide Is Just a Superfluous Term

Even critics of Israel who do speak of Israeli war crimes avoid using the term. For example, when asked in an interview whether he would describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide, Jan von Aken, party leader of Die Linke (“The Left”), replied that this was not “our choice of words as a party.”

He considers it wrong to use “legal terms” such as genocide or apartheid because then “you quickly stop talking about what is happening there” and “start arguing about terminology.” Leaving aside the question of whether this is true – whereby the objection would have to be raised equally against other accusations of genocide – the strategic argument is not credible.

Von Aken and Die Linke are well aware that such terms carry weight and serve to generate political pressure and force governments to act. Take, for example, the anti-apartheid movement against South Africa. The Left Party also condemned the crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State as genocide and worked to have the Bundestag recognize the acts as genocide, which it did unanimously on January 19, 2023.

Yazidis and Palestinians

Die Linke called the classification as genocide in the subsequent parliamentary debate

“historic” and the decision “long overdue.” At the same time, it criticized that there were “blanks” in the motion, e.g., a reference to “Germany’s shared responsibility for the rise of IS.” For context: Researchers estimate that around 3,100 Yazidis were killed by ISIS in 2014, half of them executed and the other half dying indirectly as a result of the siege.

In the case of Israel’s actions in Gaza, different standards apply – despite the far greater scale of the crimes, the number of deaths and injuries; the systematic and almost complete destruction of infrastructure, including medical care for the wounded, over a period of almost two years; mass killings and various war crimes; the use of hunger as a weapon of war; multiple expulsions; and the genocidal language of those responsible.

Sanctions Logic Ukraine vs. Gaza

And when von Aken says that he does not want to argue about words when it comes to Israeli crimes, but rather focus on ending the actions, this also is not convincing. The party Die Linke rejects sanctions against Israel, while supporting the EU’s enormous sanctions regime against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine war in order to end the war.

If you look at mainstream reporting on the Gaza war in the US, Germany, and Europe, you will find no significant debate about the accusation of genocide against Israel. Admittedly, the media can no longer ignore it completely, as more and more international organizations and renowned researchers are going public. But such news items are usually dismissed as side notes with skeptical to dismissive framing and escorted by voices that reject the accusation.

The UN Convention

There are certainly good reasons to be cautious in using the term genocide. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide contains two strict criteria that must be met.

According to these criteria, the acts must be aimed to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” And these acts must be carried out intentionally.

A number of institutions and experts believe that these criteria are met in Gaza. In November 2024, UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices stated in its report that “Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza” are “consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war.”

“Anatomy of a Genocide”

The statement followed a report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” In early July 2024, after analyzing the acts of violence and Israeli policy measures, the report stated that the “threshold indicating that Israel has committed genocide has been met.“

“It is important to call genocide a genocide,” various UN experts finally declared on October 31, 2024, before a United Nations committee, calling on all states to review their relations with Israel and not to be complicit in the crime Israel is committing against the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Another UN report in March this year concluded that Israel was committing “genocidal acts” through the systematic destruction of health facilities for women. “One cannot escape the conclusion that Israel has used sexualized and gender-based violence against Palestinians in order to terrorize them and to maintain a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, in Geneva.

Shortly thereafter, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stressed that “the floodgates of horror have re-opened”: “Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop.” In May, a group of UN experts once again appealed to the international community: “End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza.”

ICJ: Israel Is Committing “Plausible” Genocide

On December 29, 2023, South Africa had already filed a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and violating the UN Convention. Nearly two dozen countries, including Spain, Turkey, the Republic of Ireland, and Brazil, joined the lawsuit, and many alliances of states, such as the African Union (55 countries), the Arab League (22 countries), and the Non-Aligned Movement (121 countries), support it. France, Germany, Great Britain, and the US, among others, sided with Israel against the lawsuit.

The then German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck (Green Party) said: “You can criticize the Israeli army for acting too harshly in the Gaza Strip, but that is not genocide.” Former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) stated that “Israel’s self-defense” against the “terrorist organization Hamas” could not be considered genocide.

However, in its historic order of January 26, 2024, the ICJ considered it plausible that Israel’s actions constitute genocide and issued six provisional measures – the final ruling is not expected before the end of 2027.

Ignored Measures

Israel was ordered by the International Court of Justice to take all measures to prevent genocide. Among other things, it must prohibit and punish incitement to genocide, allow aid and services to reach Palestinians in Gaza, and secure evidence of crimes committed in Gaza.

In March 2024, the court added further measures demanding that humanitarian aid be allowed in. In May, it ordered the cessation of the Israeli offensive against the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and the re-opening of the Rafah border crossing from Egypt for aid deliveries. Israel almost completely ignored the measures demanded by the ICJ and rejected the accusation of genocide as “outrageous and false.”

Amnesty: Palestinians as “Subhumans”

Leading human rights organizations are also speaking of genocide. After Amnesty International’s (AI) published its 300-page report “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International concluded on December 5, 2024, that …

“Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”

The report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza during the nine months between October 7, 2023, and early July 2024. It interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, and medical personnel.

Over 100 Genocidal Statements

In addition, field research was conducted and extensive visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery, was analyzed. The report evaluated 102 statements by senior Israeli government and military officials and official Israeli bodies in which Palestinians are dehumanized, genocide or other crimes against them are called for or justified.

This language was also frequently repeated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content reviewed by Amnesty International showing soldiers calling for Gaza to be “wiped out” or made uninhabitable and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.

Finally, the report documents a series of genocidal killings in which entire families were wiped out in attacks without any reference to military targets. The total blockade (electricity, water, fuel) since October 7, 2023, the multiple evacuation orders to unsafe areas, the waves of expulsions, the destruction of vital infrastructure, and the prevention of minimum humanitarian standards are clear indicators that living conditions are being deliberately created that will lead to the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza over time, concluded AI.

“Our Genocide”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also states in its 179-page investigation “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water“ of December 2024 of ”Israel’s crimes of extermination“ and ”acts of genocide in Gaza.” By deliberately withholding drinking water, Israel is creating a situation in which parts of the Gaza population are being deliberately destroyed. Coupled with statements by Israeli officials who want to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli authorities are responsible for acts of genocide, according to HRW.

The international organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) also state in a report at the end of 2024 that the reality in Gaza corresponds to what legal experts and organizations describe as genocide. They made clear that they not use the term “lightly”, but after “nearly two years of extensive, firsthand information from our teams” MSF concludes:

“Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are witnessing a genocide in Gaza committed by Israeli forces. We see the impacts of mass killings; forced displacement; destruction of vital civilian infrastructure; and a punishing siege cutting off access to food, water, medicines, and other humanitarian supplies. Israeli authorities are systematically destroying the conditions necessary for Palestinian life in Gaza. No one is spared.”

On July 28, the two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, also went public and described Israel’s Gaza offensive as genocide. The report, titled “Our Genocide,” states: “Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” B’Tselem’s outreach director, Sarit Michaeli, regards Israels campaign in Gaza as a “textbook definition of genocide.”

The “Textbook Case”

Shortly after the start of the Gaza war, renowned Israeli historian, Holocaust and genocide researcher Raz Segal already had spoken of a “textbook case of genocide” in an article for the magazine Jewish Currents. According to Segal, the intentions of the Israeli governments and authorities are explicitly genocidal and are being carried out accordingly through their actions against the population in the enclave. After the article was published, Segal lost a job offer from the University of Minnesota in the wake of a smear campaign by a pro-Israel group.

“Human Animals” and “Total Annihilation”

The genocidal statements made by officials in Israel have been extensively documented in various studies and in South Africa’s lawsuit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, declared that the Israeli armed forces would reduce parts of Gaza “into rubble” and called on “the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

He also reminded Israelis of “what Amalek did to you,” a quote referring to a genocidal passage in the Bible in which the Israelites are called upon to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. There is a long list of similar expressions by Israeli government and military representatives in which they demand “total annihilation”. In numerous cases officials have dehumanized Palestinians while saying that Israel was “fighting Nazis” and “human animals,” and that there were “no innocents” in Gaza.

Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” The Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu even raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza and referred to the call later when asked.

The Growing Consensus

A number of genocide researchers were initially hesitant to speak of genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US, did not speak of genocide until May 2024, when the Israeli military (IDF) ordered one million Palestinians in Rafah to relocate to the Mawasi area on the coast, where there were no supplies for them. Rafah was then destroyed.

Since then, according to Bartov, the actions have been consistent with the genocidal intentions expressed, so that his “inescapable conclusion” has become that Israel is committing genocide. “I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

This is not just his conclusion, either. Bartov stresses, that there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers that the events in Gaza should be described as genocide.

Far from Divided

Following a survey of genocide experts, the leading Dutch daily newspaper, NRC, concluded in May this year that, contrary to media reports about polarization and division, the majority of academics in the field of genocide studies speak of genocide or genocidal violence in Gaza. The researchers point to an astonishing consensus on Gaza.

The growing chorus was joined by internationally respected genocide researchers, including many of Jewish-Israeli origin, such as genocide expert Shmuel Lederman, leading Canadian international law expert and genocide scholar William Schabas, who grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors (“absolutely” a genocide), Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York, and British specialist Martin Shaw.

Uğur Ümit Üngör, professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, stated that there are probably scholars who still do not consider Israel’s offensive in Gaza to be genocide, but “I don’t know them.”

Beyond the Western Mainstream

A number of experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict, intellectuals, and media outlets outside the Western mainstream have also been talking about genocide for a long time. These include Israeli writer David Grossman, award-winning Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and former UN special rapporteur for Palestine, Richard Falk (“the most transparent genocide in all of human history. It is the first time that the daily atrocities were broadcast and seen by the peoples of the world in real time.“) and fascism expert and son of Holocaust survivors, Jason Stanley.

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad condemned Europe for supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And former Pope Francis already spoke in November 2024 about experts seeing genocide in Gaza and called for an investigation.

In many countries of the Global South, unlike in Western countries, Israel’s actions are unequivocally condemned in public as a cruel crime and described as genocide. This ranges from Al Jazeera in the Arab world to the South China Morning Post in Asia.

Recognized Genocides in the West

But there is not only a gap between public opinion in Western countries on the one hand and the growing consensus among genocide researchers, UN agencies, and human rights organizations on the other. There is also a striking discrepancy with regard to the common use of the term genocide in the US and Europe.

For example, the United States has officially recognized a number of cases similar to Gaza as genocides, including the Srebrenica massacre with around 8,000 killed, the persecution of Yazidis in Iraq by ISIS (3,100 killed), and the expulsion of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar/Burma (approx. 9,000 killed). In Western media these crimes are also unquestionably considered genocide.

A broad understanding of genocide is applied in these and other cases. Accordingly, in the Srebrenica case in 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that, in the absence of direct evidence, intent could be inferred from the scale, nature, and intensity of the violence.

Normally, Intent Is Concealed

Applying this standard to Gaza, one cannot help but conclude that the evidence is much clearer, given the abundance of explicit genocidal calls by political and military leaders and the systematic attacks on the civilian population.

Rafaëlle Maison, professor of international law at the University of Paris-Saclay, who considers the Gaza offensive to be a genocide, points to this circumstance: “There are few cases as clear as this one [Israel’s Gaza war]. … Usually genocidal intent is concealed or downplayed, as was the case in Rwanda.” Maison is further paraphrased that in Rwanda the “government spoke of ‘fighting’ the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), a predominantly Tutsi group from abroad, and the extremist Hutu militias merely told their members to go ‘work.’”

The Case of the Rohingya in Myanmar

Western countries are particularly generous in their interpretation of genocide in the Rohingya case. In March 2022, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in a speech at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington that the United States considers Myanmar’s actions against the Rohingya Muslims in the country to be genocide. In November 2023, Germany, like other countries including the United Kingdom, joined the genocide proceedings against Myanmar initiated by Gambia before the ICJ.

We feel “a special obligation to contribute to the prevention, clarification, and combating of possible genocide and to send a signal that states will be held accountable for acts of genocide. Genocide concerns us all, wherever it occurs in the world.” The German government is at the same time asking the ICJ in its intervention in the proceedings against Myanmar to apply a broad understanding of genocide in order to hold Myanmar accountable. Like other genocide researchers, international law expert William Schabas is not convinced by this assessment:

“In the case of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, there were a huge number of damaged homes, but relatively few deaths by comparison with what we have seen in Gaza. Many people were able to flee; they weren’t prevented from escaping across the border into Bangladesh. These were clearly war crimes and crimes against humanity, but according to a strict interpretation of the Convention, I don’t think it was genocide. In Gaza, by contrast, the infrastructure has been massively destroyed, people have been unable to escape – and then there were the awful statements made by Yoav Gallant …”

“Weak and Casual”

Israeli Holocaust researchers Goldberg and Blatman also have doubts:

“The statements by Myanmar officials about Myanmar intent to exterminate the Rohingya are weak and incidental compared to the flood of genocidal statements heard from all corridors of politics, society, media, and the military in Israel, expressing extreme dehumanization of Palestinians, and a desire for their widespread extermination.”

In the case of the Rohingya and other massacres and war crimes, however, the mainstream media in the US and Europe unanimously and unquestioningly assume that these are acts of genocide. While an often broad understanding of genocide is used in this context, the opposite is true in the case of the Gaza catastrophe.

Defensive Strategies

In order to deflect the classification of genocide from Israel’s offensive, it is repeatedly claimed that there is no plan to destroy Gaza, that it is a military war against Hamas, that only a few Gaza residents have been killed, or that no court has yet ruled on the case. But these criteria are neither decisive according to UN conventions and genocide research, nor are they otherwise applied by the media.

In the cases of the Yazidis, Uyghurs in China, and the Rohingya, there is also no court ruling, no extermination plan, and even a lower death rate compared to Gaza, yet the crimes against them are consistently described as genocide.

And in Srebrenica, the massacre also contained a military response by Serbian militias, while it was not until 2007 that the ICJ ruled that Srebrenica was genocide (Serbia was, however, acquitted of the charge of having carried it out). But the media were already talking about genocide shortly after the massacre in 1995 and thereafter, when no judicial decision had yet been made by the ICJ.

The Double Standard

The double standard in usage is obvious. For example, comments in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, used the term “genocide” seven times and the term “genocide” six times this year (January 1, 2025, to August 7, 2025).

It concerns the crimes against the Rohingya in Myanmar, in Srebrenica, Kosovo, the Soviet Holodomor (“death by starvation”) in present-day Ukraine, Darfur, Sudan, and Rwanda. In no single case are these terms associated with Gaza, even though the Gaza war is mentioned in 65 SZ commentaries during this period (according to the SZ online archive).

This unequal treatment is by no means new and follows a pattern. It could be described as follows: crimes and massacres committed by opponents of the US-led West receive enormous attention, are portrayed as historic atrocities, and are often condemned as genocide, even if this classification weakens the term.

In contrast, the acts of aggression, wars of aggression, and war crimes committed by the US and its allies are not targeted as criminal acts, but are ignored or legitimized as protective measures. They are not labeled as genocide.

Cambodia: “Decade of Genocide”

So everyone is familiar with the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. What enabled the rise of the Khmer and provoked their acts of violence, the unprecedented bombing of the Cambodian rural population by the US military in the wake of the illegal Indochina wars, which resulted in also high numbers of victims and extreme devastation, did not provoke outrage, but were swept under the carpet or justified as anti-communist acts of defense.

Before the most brutal phase of the US war in Cambodia began in the 1970s, the then National Security Advisor to US President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, worshipped in the West and awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize, sent an order to General Haig, his military advisor: “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” A call with clear genocidal intent.

Critics of US foreign policy Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, who have extensively researched the Indochina War, speak of a “decade of genocide” with two phases: the US war from 1970 to 1975 and the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot from 1975 to 1978. In the West, only the second phase exists.

“Never Again Auschwitz” in Kosovo?

Or another example. During the Yugoslav Wars, there were warnings of an impending Holocaust in Kosovo by Serbian troops, and the then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party) spoke of “Never again Auschwitz.” This was followed by a flood of genocide accusations against Serbia in Western media which was aimed to justify the “humanitarian intervention” in the form of bombings.

In fact, investigations show that it was NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” (a war in breach of international law and without a UN Security Council resolution) that triggered bloody chaos, including widespread displacement. In the year prior to the bombing, fighting between the separatist militia “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) and Serbian troops left around 2,000 dead, mostly Albanians. Certainly, as in all wars, there were war crimes, but no systematic extermination operations.

This was also known in the West. In a rare exception, the Wall Street Journal published an in-depth analysis of the investigations on December 31, 1999, entitled: “War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn’t.” According to the article, on-site investigations found no evidence of mass graves or systematic atrocities against civilians. The fighting had mostly taken place in separatist militia strongholds, while NATO tried to cover up its own atrocities and those of the KLA.

From Fallujah to Srebrenica

The list of double standards could go on and on. The cruel acts of the US against Iraq were “overlooked” and whitewashed in the West. The murderous sanctions pushed by Washington, including the boycott of medical supplies, cost the lives of over half a million children and a total of 1.5 million Iraqis and were described as “genocidal” by the UN humanitarian coordinators for Iraq, Hans Graf Sponeck and Dennis Holliday, who therefore resigned from their UN posts in protest.

After the US war of aggression against Iraq, supported by NATO allies, began in 2003, many war crimes were committed. One that bears similarities to Srebrenica is the attack by US troops on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.

Women and children were allowed to flee if they could – in Srebrenica, they were driven out in buses. The city was then bombed for several weeks while the army marched in.

The central hospital in Fallujah was taken over, patients were forced to lie on the floor and were tied up by American soldiers. The city was left in ruins. The attacking US army denied the Red Cross aid organization access. No official investigations were carried out, so the extent of the crimes is unknown.

A study from July 2010 shows that the increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the heavily bombarded city of Fallujah surpass those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This is likely a consequence of the use of uranium ammunition by US troops.

Guatemala: US Support for Genocide

All these US crimes are not present in the Western consciousness as historical acts of inhumanity, massacres, or even genocidal acts, as public opinion has glossed over them and justified them with explanations.

Also few might remember the genocide in Guatemala. During the civil war, especially between 1981 and 1983, a so-called “Silent Holocaust” was committed against the indigenous Maya population in Guatemala, leaving hundreds of thousands dead.

The military government that committed the genocide carried it out with the support of the US, which had business interests in the country.

That is why this crime is kept quiet in the West and no culture of remembrance is cultivated – as is the case with Srebrenica, the Khmer Rouge, or even Rwanda (whereby in the Rwanda case, the US role and assistance in the crimes committed by Tutsi rebels against the Hutu that triggered the genocide are ignored).

The Inflation of the Genocide Term Strikes Back

Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip present a dilemma for the West. The inflation of the term “genocide” is now coming back to haunt governments and the media. Anyone who speaks of genocide in relation to the Yazidis, Rohingya, Bosnian Muslims or the Uighurs cannot ignore the term when referring to the Gaza catastrophe.

As mentioned above, there is a consensus among genocide researchers, UN agencies, and human rights organizations that what is happening in Gaza is genocide, with the devastations breaking ever new records, leading journalist Branko Marcetic at Jacobin to conclude that “Israel’s war on Gaza is one of the worst crimes in history.”

However, cracks are also appearing in support for Israel. Genocide researchers in the US, Europe, and even Israel have left the sidelines and are taking a stand, which is having an effect on media coverage, too. In the Global South, there is unambiguous talk of hypocrisy.

In the US Congress, a majority of Democratic senators have now voted against arms deliveries to Israel for the first time due to public pressure. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) announced that he would no longer supply Israel with weapons that could be used in Gaza.

The chief prosecutor and judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity – in the past, the ICC has only prosecuted Africans. At the same time, the International Court of Justice accepted South Africa’s complaint that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and ordered measures against Israel’s plausible genocide.

Once Again: What Is Genocide?

Whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza cannot be answered conclusively in the end. As with any political term, it depends on how it is understood.

If you apply a very narrow definition, whereby the destruction of an entire group must be ordered by the central government and largely consummated, as in the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, Sinti and Roma, and other groups, you will hardly find a clear case of genocide in the post-war period.

If one takes the rather vague UN Convention (intent to destroy part of a group is sufficient; genocide does not have to be carried out) and the broad interpretation applied by the ICJ in the Srebrenica case, then one cannot avoid recognizing genocide in Gaza, as experts do.

Another Victory for Hypocrisy?

In the West, the dilemma is circumvented by remaining silent or, when nothing else works, by saying that it doesn’t matter how the Gaza war is described or that the debate is even detrimental to the solution. But then the question remains: Does this also apply to all the other atrocities decried in the West?

Remember the genocide denial accusations against those who dared to critizise the Western politicization of the term when used in relation to crimes committed by enemy states. In those cases, it was anything but irrelevant.

Whatever one’s position on the term genocide, the same standards must apply. That is the real scandal and should not be dismissed as irrelevant. For as long as the West continues to apply double standards to Israel’s actions in Gaza (and, in a broader sense, to its own actions and those of its partners), there can be no end to the catastrophe created by Israel and the many others.

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