The Genocide Debate
Summary: those who call what the IDF is doing in Gaza a genocide
are accused by supporters of the Israeli war effort of being
anti-Semites and that charge can be enough to stifle legitimate
criticism.
The debate on whether it is fair and appropriate to call Israel’s
pummelling of Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip a genocide took a
revealing turn in America when on 18 November the Harvard Law Review (HLR) pulled
an already editorially approved article written by Rabea Eghbariah a
Palestinian human rights lawyer and doctoral law student at Harvard. The
article, had it run, would have been the first ever by a Palestinian
scholar published in the prestigious and influential journal.
In a thoughtful and well argued piece, subsequently published by The Nation,
Eghbariah makes the case that the carpet bombing and the ground
invasion that have caused a massive number of civilian casualties
together with efforts over decades to “erase the group dynamic: the
attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political
will as a group” constitutes a genocide. He cites the UN Genocide
Convention and numerous experts including the first chief prosecutor
of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo. Ocampo argues
that “Just the blockade of Gaza—just that—could be genocide under
Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, meaning they are creating
conditions to destroy a group.”
The Intercept in analysing why HLR
pulled Eghbariah’s article arrived at the conclusion that the reason
was fear, fear that student editors who run the journal and number 100
would be targeted and doxed with accusations that they were supporters
of Hamas and therefore supporters of terrorism. They were also concerned
about career damage. One of the editors who asked to remain anonymous
told The Intercept:
Editors expressed that they supported the piece and wanted to
uplift marginalized voices but were voting against publishing it because
they were afraid of the consequences and had worked too hard to now
risk their futures. Some also expressed concerns that the blowback to
the piece would discriminatorily target editors of colour more than
others.
Presciently Eghbariah had begun his article thusly:
Genocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in
Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United
States, has been chilling. Clearly, it is much easier to dissect the
case law rather than navigate the reality of death. It is much easier to
consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the
present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of
death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.
And he asks a challenging question: “does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it?”
![]()