{"id":54295,"date":"2025-07-23T10:03:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=54295"},"modified":"2025-07-23T10:03:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:03:13","slug":"yes-israel-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/23\/yes-israel-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bret Stephens once again\u00a0tries<\/a>\u00a0and fails to deny Israel\u2019s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is a despicable piece of writing. It could be ignored entirely except that it has been published in such a high-profile paper.<\/p>\n

Stephens\u2019 argument is as weak as it is appalling. He ignores the overwhelming evidence that has led\u00a0Amnesty<\/a>\u00a0International<\/a>,\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>, and\u00a0U.N. experts<\/a>\u00a0to conclude that the Israeli government is committing genocide. He does not engage any of the arguments made by genocide scholars, including Omer Bartov, who wrote an\u00a0op-ed<\/a>\u00a0for The New York Times just last week in which he made a compelling case that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. Bartov was initially reluctant to say that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza because he didn\u2019t believe that the evidence supported the charge, but he changed his mind as the evidence piled up:<\/p>\n

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach,\u00a0and one that I resisted as long as I could\u00a0<\/strong>[bold mine-DL]. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.<\/em><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just Bartov who has reached this conclusion. This is now the\u00a0consensus<\/a>\u00a0among genocide scholars. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year, \u201cI think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide.\u201d Stephens doesn\u2019t acknowledge any of this.<\/p>\n

Stephens also has nothing to say about the Netanyahu government\u2019s deliberate\u00a0policy of starvation<\/a>\u00a0or its\u00a0systematic destruction<\/a>\u00a0of objections indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Like a good regime apologist, he doesn\u2019t talk about the\u00a0famine conditions<\/a>\u00a0that the Israeli government has created. It is the Israeli government\u2019s use of starvation as a weapon and its destruction of Gaza\u2019s civilian infrastructure that show their genocidal intent. They are starving millions of people on purpose. They know what the consequences for the population will be, and they continue doing it in full view of the world.<\/p>\n

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at\u00a0Eunomia<\/a>. He is former senior editor at<\/i>\u00a0The American Conservative. He has been published in the<\/i>\u00a0New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and<\/i>\u00a0Culture11,\u00a0and was a columnist for<\/i>\u00a0The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bret Stephens once again\u00a0tries\u00a0and fails to deny Israel\u2019s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is a despicable piece of writing. It could be ignored entirely except that it has been published in such a high-profile paper. Stephens\u2019 argument is as weak as it is appalling. He ignores the overwhelming evidence that has led\u00a0Amnesty\u00a0International,\u00a0Human Rights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[747],"class_list":["post-54295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"To deny a genocide as obvious as the one in Gaza is proof of moral and intellectual bankruptcy."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54298,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295\/revisions\/54298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54295"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=54295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}