05/28/2025
Throughout history, atrocities have usually been committed under cover of darkness. The perpetrators know that what they are doing is wrong. They hide it. They deny it. They speak in euphemisms. But what happens when they no longer feel the need to hide? What happens when they say the quiet part out loud?
This is what is happening in Gaza today. The mask has come off.
Ethnic cleansing has become the official policy of Israel. The nation’s leaders are admitting it, without apology. There was barely a pretense before. But now there’s not even that. And these admissions, combined with mass killing on the ground, point to something even more horrific: genocide.
On May 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers that Israel’s war on Gaza is intended to render large parts of the territory uninhabitable, forcing Palestinians to flee: “We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to.” Even the Trump administration — which is, or at least was, about as pro-Israel as you can get — understands what is happening. As President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff recently said, “Israel is not ready to end the war. Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress can be made.”
When the intent becomes so explicit, we are forced to confront our own complicity. For Israel’s defenders, the cognitive dissonance is difficult to bear. I get it. Many Americans have long seen Israel as an ally, a country that shares our values — a Western, liberal outpost in a sea of supposed Arab barbarism. But Israel’s actions in Gaza should shatter that perception.
That a close ally of the United States would declare its intention to displace a population is remarkable. But many Israelis, including senior officials and ministers, have been saying this for a long time. Just one month into the war, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” explicitly referencing the 1948 expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. In December 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “what needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration” and that having “100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million” would allow the desert to “bloom.” This month, Smotrich offered further clarification. The goal is to leave Gaza “totally destroyed,” he said. These are not opposition figures or fringe elements. These are members of the Israeli cabinet.
This kind of language has always been central to ethnic cleansing campaigns. But what is happening in Gaza goes beyond ethnic cleansing and crosses into genocide. “Ethnic cleansing” refers to the forced removal of populations from territory, while genocide involves physical destruction of a group or part of a group. What makes the situation in Gaza so horrifying is that it is both.
The scale of death and destruction is staggering. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert described the reality starkly in a May 22 op-ed: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of annihilation: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal and criminal killing of civilians.”
As the Economist recently reported, new research suggests that as many as 109,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel — which would represent about 5 percent of the prewar population. Even the lower-bound estimate — 77,000 killed — is 44 percent higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health’s figure of 53,500 dead.
About 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many multiple times, forced to flee from one “safe zone” to another as Israel’s military levels entire neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of housing units have been destroyed or damaged.
The engineered humanitarian emergency is equally damning. Israel has weaponized starvation as a method of warfare, blocking food and supplies from entering the territory for 10 weeks. The new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report finds that 22 percent of the population faces catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with 71,000 children younger than 5 facing acute malnutrition.
The facts fit the definition. Many people think of genocide narrowly as the attempt to obliterate an entire people by mass murder, but under international law, the definition is broader. The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by 153 states, including Israel and the United States, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including by “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
A new consensus is slowly emerging. Numerous genocide scholars — those who have dedicated their lives to studying this most extreme form of violence — now concur that what Israel is doing in Gaza meets the definition. Once-reluctant experts, including Israeli scholars such as Omer Bartov and Shmuel Lederman, have shifted their position in the face of mounting evidence. As another professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, Raz Segal, put it: “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t think it’s genocide? No.”
We have also witnessed in Gaza the stages inherent in genocide. First comes the dehumanization of the targeted population. The historical pattern is consistent from Rwanda to Bosnia — a process that begins with stripping away a group’s humanity through rhetoric and symbolism, segregating them and identifying them as an existential threat. Then comes the creation of conditions that make life unbearable. Starve the population and cut off supplies. Create, in other words, an environment where people cannot survive. Then call their exodus “voluntary.” Of course, in this case, they have nowhere to go. Gaza isn’t so much an open-air prison. It’s an open-air killing field.
Israel’s defenders will argue that it is waging a just war precipitated by Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7, 2023, attack, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis. They will point to Hamas’s continued rocket fire and its strategy of operating in densely populated areas. Urban warfare inevitably produces “collateral damage,” they’ll insist, and Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for embedding itself within civilian infrastructure.
These talking points cannot absolve Israel of responsibility for the scale of carnage it has unleashed. There must be a limit. Hamas has argued that everything Israel did to Palestinians before Oct. 7 justified Oct. 7. Israel argues that because of what happened on Oct. 7, everything it does in the name of war is justified. They’re not the same, but both rationales deploy a maximalist logic: that the laws of war are suspended when you’re dealing with a uniquely barbaric enemy.
Just as Hamas has agency, so does Israel. Israel has not been “forced” to do anything. Israel has made its own choices.
Whatever legitimacy Israel’s initial response had has been obliterated by the scale, duration and deliberate brutality of its war on Gaza. No democratic nation that claims to share “Western values” destroys entire family lines, bombs refugee camps or shoots at starving crowds seeking food. The destruction of civilian infrastructure — hospitals, universities, bakeries, water treatment plants — isn’t what nations do when they’re fighting a “just war.” We are witnessing the destruction of a people in Gaza — a genocide.
As the U.N. Genocide Convention states, the most difficult thing to prove in genocide is intent, which is why there have been relatively few formally recognized genocides over the past century. But Israeli officials have declared their intent and are doing so with a newfound honesty.
Faced with assault on a population of this magnitude, one might expect universal condemnation. Yet, when atrocities are committed by a country perceived as sharing our values, powerful psychological forces activate to protect our beliefs. Israel can’t be that bad. It’s an advanced nation, where people speak English, vote in regular elections and launch tech start-ups. They seem like us. When it comes to atrocities, psychologist Stanley Cohen identifies three forms of denial: literal denial (it didn’t happen), interpretive denial (it wasn’t what it seems) and implicatory denial (it doesn’t matter).
Confirmation bias plays a part here, too. Imagine you had a close friend or family member who was accused of unspeakable crimes. You’d have strong incentives to explain away their actions — or, better yet, deny that they committed them in the first place. To admit that someone you love was capable of evil can simply be too difficult, because in some sense that realization would implicate you as well.
The reality of antisemitism — expressed violently in the May 21 killing of two Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington — contributes to the reluctance to speak out with clarity. There’s also the profoundly uncomfortable reality that a country, Israel, forged in part as a response to genocide is itself committing genocide. It brings to mind Edward Said’s famous remark that Palestinians were — and still are, decades later — “the victims of the victims.”
The reluctance to use the term “genocide” has precedents that should give us pause. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, U.S. State Department officials were instructed to avoid using the word partly out of concern it would create legal obligations to intervene. About 800,000 Tutsis were massacred while the world debated terminology. In Bosnia, it took years for international courts to officially recognize the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — in which more than 8,000 men and boys were systematically executed — as genocide, long after timely intervention might have saved lives.
Words matter because they determine action. When we avoid naming a genocide for what it is, we become complicit in allowing it to continue. Terms like “humanitarian crisis” or even “war crimes” can function as euphemisms that fall short of triggering the moral and legal imperatives that genocide demands. The power of naming isn’t some academic exercise; it’s practical. It determines whether the international community mobilizes to stop atrocities or simply manages their aftermath.
There was a time when I would have cautioned against using a word like “genocide” too freely, worried about diluting its meaning. But we are well past that now. Shielding people from uncomfortable truths is self-defeating. Words have meaning, and they should be used when they describe reality. Otherwise, we’re in denial, and atrocities at this scale shouldn’t be denied.
Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian population in Gaza has gone on too long. These are unspeakable — and, more important, indefensible — crimes. We cannot be complicit in minimizing them or pretending that they are not happening. Because they are. Enough.
We can no longer hide the uncomfortable truths of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
