As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind
I grew up believing that all genocides look exactly like the Holocaust. I was wrong.
A girl reacts during the funeral for victims killed by Israeli bombardment on the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis, at Nasser Medical Complex in the Gaza Strip on July 28. Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images
As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide.
This is a copout.
It’s true that I cannot offer an authoritative legal answer. But I respond to these questions the way I do because it’s been hard for me to talk, or even think about the question. For a long time, it wasn’t clear to me exactly why. In a private conversation many months ago with an Israeli colleague who is a law professor and a scholar of international law, I let my guard down:
“Surely, this is not a genocide, right?”
“Why do you think that?” she asked.
“Because I hope it is not a genocide,” I answered.
With a lot of compassion, she told me that it was important that I hoped it was not a genocide, but that did not change the facts on the ground. “You should think about why it’s important to you that what you see in front of your eyes is not a genocide,” she said.
The destruction of Gaza, including the killing of thousands of children and the restriction on humanitarian aid is undeniable. The incitement for genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Israeli public sphere — from the government, in the pro-government media, and in everyday speech is also undeniable. Then why are so many of us liberal Jews still reluctant?
I’ve thought about my colleague’s words every day since we spoke, and I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it.
People think genocide should look like the Holocaust
For many Jews, and even more so for Israelis, our education about genocide begins and ends with the Holocaust. We have been educated to understand genocide as presenting in one, very specific fashion. Yet, the Holocaust was a unique instance. Sadly, there are many other expressions of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shares case studies from its Center for the Prevention of Genocide of “threats of large-scale, group-targeted, identity-based persecution” that could possibly become a genocide. They include incidents in Sudan, Ukraine, India, China and many others. None of these cases include gas chambers or numbers tattooed on forearms; most of them do not have a death toll in the millions. Yet they are deemed dire enough to appear as cases to monitor under the museum’s mission to “confront genocide.”
As I read about Myanmar, where the USHMM determined in December 2018 that genocide had been committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority, I was struck by how similar the incitement against the Rohingya sounded to what I constantly heard in Israel. The Burmese officials called all Rohingya “terrorists” and a threat to the nation. Israeli ministers say that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. They say Gaza should be flattened and burned and they outline exactly how they are preventing humanitarian aid from entering. In March 2025, the government’s security cabinet formally approved setting up an agency to direct the expulsion of Gaza’s residents.
The more I learn about genocide, the more shocked and embarrassed I am by my own ignorance. Once I actively tried to be better informed about genocide, the picture in Gaza became terrifyingly clear.
Critics claimed ‘genocide’ on day one
Another reason many wish to disbelieve Israel is committing genocide is because it has been accused of it since the Oct. 7 attack. For example, Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal published an article in Jewish Currents on Oct. 13, 2023 titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” Israel had just begun its retaliatory strikes on Gaza (which at that point had killed over 1,800 people), and the quick jump to the assertion of genocide, which Segal was not the only one to make, seemed startling.
I was taken aback by Segal’s certitude. How could he have gathered the data and performed the necessary rigorous analysis so quickly? I felt he was being alarmist and irresponsible as a scholar, jumping to a conclusion before there was clear evidence.
Nearly two years later, I understand that Segal was primarily talking about Israeli leaders’ public incitement for war crimes that was “quite explicit, open, and unashamed” from day one. His article was a warning about the murderous destination that dehumanization and violent rhetoric lead to.
The difference between me and Segal was that I thought the threats barked by Israeli politicians and generals were the macho bluster of panicked leaders responsible for the worst security failure in Israeli history. I didn’t believe they intended to do what they said they were going to do. He, however, believed them.
I realize now, as the international community has failed to stop the total destruction of Gaza, that the speed of his and others’ prompt pronouncements was not irresponsible, knee-jerk scholarship. If anything, when it comes to the threat of genocide, being alarmist is precisely what is needed.
Some people who allege it’s a genocide are antisemitic
There is no doubt that antisemitism has reared its ugly head in the aftermath of Oct. 7. I was stunned by some of the rhetoric I heard coming out of many campus protests, and how justifiable outrage at Israel’s actions translated into hatred toward individual Jews and Israelis. Yet the fact that some of those who charge genocide may be motivated by antisemitism does not in itself settle the question of what’s happening in Gaza.
It seems to me that this muddled terrain has made many liberal Jews think they have to choose between fighting antisemitism and confronting the reality of Gaza. In some circles, I have even encountered a trend of labeling the mere discussion of genocide an antisemitic act to silence speech.
I understand the fear of giving fodder to antisemitism in a time when this ancient hatred is again spreading like a pandemic. But even if you believe that many, if not all, of the allegations of genocide are motivated by antisemitism (which I do not), the urgency of starving and maimed children in Gaza necessitates our informed and urgent attention to what Israel’s government is doing, particularly if we care about Israel.
It’s emotionally devastating
There are several intellectual reasons why I struggled to confront the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. But the biggest hurdle was emotional.
Even as an Israeli who has always been critical of the occupation and apartheid in the West Bank, and as a scholar far-right Israeli politics (which now dominate the government), I still feel deeply connected to my home. I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt.
As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses.
Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility toward and solidarity with our Israeli kin and our Palestinian neighbors. Writing this article is my first step in this direction.
Another emotion that prevents us from speaking honestly about this question is fear. Only two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined experiencing such fear around free speech in the U.S. When my colleague said I should ask myself why I wanted to believe it wasn’t genocide, I didn’t have a clear answer. I now know that I was confused, ignorant and ashamed. Now I am afraid. I worry about the personal, professional and communal consequences of speaking honestly. But the answer to fear cannot be silence.
