Obliteration and the West’s Complicity
A Two-Part Q&A on Dr Steinbock’s The Obliteration Doctrine
DG Team
Dr Steinbock’s highly topical new book The Obliteration Doctrine is about the genocide in Gaza, the West’s complicity and long struggle against genocide prevention.
In the Bosnian genocide, mass atrocities took place in just a few days in July 1995. In the Rwandan genocide, all hell broke loose in the course of just three months in 1994. Gaza is in a class of its own. Starting in October 2023, Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza – reliant on arms transfers by US-led West – have been perpetrated 22 months, day after day, night after night, and they have happened in real time while “the world is watching.”
How is such indifference possible?
Question (Q): That is the central question addressed by your new book.
Dr Dan Steinbock (DS): Yes. In my previous book, The Fall of Israel (2024), I examined Israel’s economic, political, military and regional path to the Gaza catastrophe. In The Obliteration Doctrine, I examine the military doctrine and the US-led West’s complicity behind Gaza’s devastation and the West’s long failure of genocide prevention – and try to show the way out.
After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, indifference to genocide is not possible. It violates everything I revere in the Jewish legacy of social justice. With genocide, silence is not an option.
Obliteration as a deliberate state policy
In his pained foreword for The Obliteration Doctrine, Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad, the longest-serving prime minister of Malaysia, cautions that the word genocide may not be adequate to describe “the deliberate mass killing of the Gaza Palestinians by Israel.”
According to Ahmet Davutoğlu, former Prime Minister of Türkiye and prominent scholar of international relations, “The Obliteration Doctrine is a timely theoretical framework that warns against the emerging destructive warfare in the 21st century.”
The notion that the decimation of Gaza is likely to be a harbinger of much worse to come runs through the book. “The West did not flounder into genocide complicity, it plunged into it willfully,” as former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis puts it.
Professor William Schabas, perhaps the leading scholar of genocide and international law believes that, with the term Obliteration Doctrine, the book “adds a new term to the lexicon on genocide.”
These endorsements are seconded by Richard A. Falk, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine; Alfred de Zayas, former UN and international expert on human rights and ethnic expulsions; Alex de Waal, an internationally renowned authority of famine at Tufts University; Edgar Morin, the French philosopher who has fought fascism since the Spanish Civil War; Curtis F.J. Doebbler, the highly-regarded international human rights lawyer; Scott Horton, Director of the Libertarian Institute and the Antiwar.com; and Dr Feroze Sidhwa, the trauma surgeon who has volunteered extensively in Gaza and elsewhere.
Gazan genocide and weaponized starvation
Q: When did the weaponization of starvation start in Gaza?
DS: Israel first weaponized famine in Gaza almost two decades ago (for a book excerpt on TRT World, click here). When Hamas won the Palestinian election, Israel blockaded the Strip with the support of the US-led West. After the Hamas offensive of October 7 and Israel’s ground assault in that fall, starvation deaths were seen already in early spring 2024. However, those images were largely suppressed in the West. The current media coverage is a belated effort at an absolution – but only after the genocide in and decimation of Gaza.
Q: The Obliteration Doctrine shows that famines have often served as a prelude to genocide and that starvation has occasionally been purposely weaponized.
DS: As the pioneering genocide scholar Raphael Lemkin stressed in 1945, murder is the most direct technique of genocide, but not the only one. Genocide may also “be the slow and scientific murder by mass starvation or the swift but no less scientific murder by mass extermination in gas chambers.” In the case of Gaza, cumulative evidence of mass starvation is abundant, overwhelming and impossible to deny.
Q: Among other things, you use data on daily calorie intake in a comparative historical analysis.
DS: It’s a rough measure, but better than nothing. The calorie level in certain parts of Gaza has been less than the daily intake needed for survival, but also lower than the level observed amid Imperial Britain’s human experiments in the late 19th century India, which caused the deaths of millions. In certain areas of Gaza, it has also been lower than in the German concentration camps in 1940 and at the end of World War II.
Genocide Convention and accessorial liability
Q: Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide. Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention, including “complicity in genocide.” When did you first conclude that Israel was engaged in genocide in Gaza?
DS: Toward the end of 2023. That’s when I began to use the term “genocidal atrocities.” In spring 2024, when I concluded in The Fall of Israel, these atrocities already fulfilled most conditions of legal genocide, as defined by the UN Genocide Convention…
Q: … which highlights the issue of complicity. The Obliteration Doctrine asks how complicity should be defined: Who is responsible for Gaza?
DS: In 1945-46, the Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced 22 of the most important surviving Nazi leaders for their mass atrocities. In 1946-48, the Tokyo Tribunal tried 28 important leaders of Imperial Japan for their mass atrocities. By contrast, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has focused mainly on the operational leaders of genocidal atrocities. In spring 2024, ICC targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Q: What about the others?
DS: For now, they have been ignored.
The Israeli case
Q: Who are they?
DS: Behind Netanyahu and Gallant, there have been at least half a dozen other Israeli cabinet members, including the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir, the self-proclaimed fascist Bezazel Smotrich, defense minister Israel Katz with his key role in the devastation of Gaza and its infrastructure, the far-right Kahanite Amihai Eliyahu endorsing “nuking Gaza” and so on. All of them contributed directly to crimes against humanity, with some insisting on more destructive measures. And many were supported by Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, and Ron Demer, Netanyahu’s US-born advisor.
There is also another set of cabinet members that’s less known internationally but they have played a vital role in the protracted genocidal atrocities. These include Miri Regev, the self-proclaimed “happy fascist” supporting torture in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp; Galit-Distel Atbaryan tweeting for the “erasure of Gaza”; May Golan pushing openly for “another Nakba” to cleanse Palestinians from Gaza; and so on.
Finally, the Netanyahu cabinet has featured military leaders – the not-so-moderate Benny Gantz; and Gadi Eisenkot, the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine whose role was also vital in the aftermath of October 7.
Q: Are you saying that the ICC should charge them all?
DS: If the ICC is to deliver its promise, it should proceed according to the Articles 2 and 3 of the Genocide Convention, which should be enforced equally in genocidal atrocities – wherever they occur.
US-led West’s complicity
Q: Does the accessorial liability also apply to the Biden administration and certain European leaders, due to their arms transfers and financing?
DS: According to the Genocide Convention, yes. Article 3 is explicit on crimes that can be punished under the convention, including “complicity in genocide.”
DS: In the US, accessorial liability would seem to start at the highest level of decisionmakers, including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin and a long list of their subordinates who failed to raise the alarm on the use of arms transfers to Israel in blatant disregard of U.S. foreign policy. But the broader net is more extensive. It features Vice President Kamala Harris touting continued military aid to Israel amid the atrocities; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen enabling the ceaseless flow of arms in both Gaza and Ukraine at the same time; and so on.
Q: What about the Trump administration?
DS: With its continued arms transfers, intelligence and diplomatic support, coupled with open support for ethnic cleansing and direct participation in regional escalation, the Trump administration has managed to take the horrors of complicity to an entirely different, deeper and far more destructive level.
The beneficiaries of obliteration
Q: Has war profiteering overridden the humanitarian catastrophe?
DS: Yes, obviously. Worse, revolving doors prevail between the US administration, the Pentagon and the Big Defense, and their preferred think-tanks, as shown by The Obliteration Doctrine. These generate huge moral hazards and conflicts of interests. Arms transfer fatten the margins of the defense contractors; peace doesn’t.
Q: Who are the beneficiaries of the genocide in Gaza?
DS: The US accounts for two thirds for arms transfers to Israel, but Europe – Germany and Italy, the UK and many smaller players – supply the rest. Israel depends on US for arms and Europe for trade.
In Gaza, Israel pulled the trigger, but the supply of bullets and arms, financing and intelligence comes from the West. Complicity set the stage for genocide.
Dr Steinbock’s new book, The Obliteration Doctrine: Genocide Prevention, Israel, Gaza and the West (Clarity Press) builds on his previous The Fall of Israel. Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
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