from Mondoweiss
On July 28, 2025, the reputable Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published an eighty-eight-page report entitled Our Genocide, in which it accuses the State of Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza. While the report’s potential significance—particularly in shaping both international and domestic public opinion—remains undeniable, the widespread acclaim it has received warrants critical scrutiny. This is due not only to the protracted delay of over twenty months before B’Tselem adopted the term “genocide,” well after numerous international organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) and Palestinian human rights groups (including the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and Al-Haq) had already done so, but more fundamentally to the rhetorical and analytical strategies deployed throughout the report.
To be sure, the report is noteworthy in that it situates the ongoing genocide in Gaza within a broader historical framework shaped by a settler-colonial logic of elimination. However, on page 12, it states:
The [Genocide] Convention’s definition emphasizes the centrality of intent to destroy a group as such… Genocide requires a specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy the group in whole or in part, and each of the acts defined in the Convention qualifies as genocidal only if committed with that intent. International tribunals dealing with cases of genocide or suspected genocide have ruled that intent can be inferred not only from official documents and statements … but also from the pattern of conduct of the state or of forces perpetrating the crimes, if such intent is the only inference that can reasonably be drawn from that conduct. There is an inherent gap between the legal and the historical analysis of genocide. The legal definition is narrow, having been shaped in large part by the political interests of the states whose representatives drafted it. From a historical perspective, violent destruction of groups in both the distant and recent past has occurred in a wide variety of ways, many of which do not align with the stringent legal definition.” (emphasis added)
The report continues:
The case of Israel and Gaza illustrates this problem: while the legal debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip is both important and necessary, there is a critical gap between the amount of time it will take the formal legal institutions deliberating on the issue, chiefly the International Court of Justice, to issue binding decisions. (emphasis added)
Both observations are, in themselves, correct. Scholars such as Dirk Moses have long argued that the narrow legal construction of genocide has obscured the recognition of colonial violence as genocidal, by recasting it in the language of security imperatives. Likewise, it is true that proceedings before the International Court of Justice can take many years. But these observations cannot be instrumentalized to justify deferring—or avoiding altogether—a clear and unequivocal acknowledgment that what is occurring in Gaza constitutes genocide in the legal sense. Yet that is precisely what the report does. As the authors themselves note, the report “relies on the legal definition of genocide as outlined in the UN Convention, but adopts a broader analytical framework, drawing on Raphael Lemkin’s original conception as well as historical and sociological research” (emphasis added). While the broader historical and sociological dimensions are unquestionably important—particularly in framing the current genocide as part of a longer trajectory of settler-colonial elimination—they are, in this context, deployed in a manner that avoids direct engagement with one of the core elements of the crime of genocide...
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