By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On the last day of August, 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a scholarly body with more than 500 members, passed a resolution with 86% support of those who voted, concluding that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
These scholars study genocide professionally, researching it, theorizing it, and publishing on it in peer-reviewed journals. In peer review, the editor who receives a submission anonymizes it and sends it out to 3 or 4 major experts on the subject for the recommendation of whether to publish it and their suggestions for improvement.
I ran a Cambridge University Press journal for 5 years and sent out hundreds of papers for review. I always insisted on 4 referees and I liked to see a consensus that the article was publishable. A minority of such submissions appeared. If I published someone, it meant their scholarship was careful and solidly grounded. This kind of publishing is what these scholars of genocide engage in routinely. I underline this point because American television and social media accustom us to the idea that everyone’s views are equally worthy. No. Some arguments are bullshit. How can you tell? Because the academic experts who devote their lives to a subject have a world-beating bullshit meter.
Getting 86% of academics in a field to agree on something is a minor miracle. Professors like to pick nits and make sure their assertions rest on unimpeachable evidence. They spend years on an issue. Unlike the Beltway Bandits on television, they don’t just shoot their mouths off with shallow just-formed opinions.
So how did these scholars arrive at this conclusion? First, they looked carefully at Article 2 of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, to which Israel is a signatory. It defines genocide this way:
- In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
A lot of people think that genocide consists in killing almost all members of a group. This technical legal definition makes it clear, however, that you can genocide a people even if lots of its members survive. Genocide as defined here is more about the purpose of violence than about its magnitude. If you kill people because of who they are and because you object to that people existing, you don’t have to kill very many of them for it to be genocide.
Myanmar or Burma’s genocide against the 1.1 million Rohingya in 2016-18 likely killed 24,000 of them, but forced most of the rest out of the country. leaving 150,000 internally displaced. This relatively small death toll can still constitute a genocide because they were killed for being Rohingya and the killing was part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. The Myanmar authorities, including many in the Buddhist clerical establishment, so hated the Rohingya that they wanted them to cease existing as a minority in the country. The conditions of their peoplehood as Myanmar Rohingya was destroyed. Now they are rootless refugees, most of them stateless. In 2022, the US government branded the campaign against the Rohingya a genocide. So did Human Rights Watch. So did the the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
As the IAGS notes, “Israel has forcibly displaced nearly all of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip multiple times, and demolished more than 90 percent of the housing infrastructure in the territory.”…
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera
Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
Israel’s Assassination of Memory
“Write my name on my leg, Mama”
‘The Children Haunt Me at Night’: The Protest That’s Forcing Israelis to Face Kids Killed in Gaza
Israel kills Al Jazeera journalists in targeted Gaza City airstrike
Israel’s Genocide Is Big Business – and the Face of the Future
After the truth-shower 