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 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.”
In fact, Israel is just this moment engaged in displacing a million Palestinians from Gaza City, most of them already reduced to being tent people.
The resolution had noted:
- “[Recognising that] according to official UN estimates, at the date of this resolution, has killed more than 59,000 adults and children in Gaza;
Recognising that these crimes are estimated to have left many thousands of people buried under the rubble or otherwise inaccessible, and most probably dead;
Recognising that this bombing and other violence is estimated to have injured more than 143,000 people, with many maimed;
Recognising that the actions of the Israeli government against Palestinians have included torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual and reproductive violence; deliberate attacks on medical professionals, humanitarian aid workers and journalists; and the deliberate deprivation of food, water, medicine, and electricity essential to the survival of the population . . .”
What about Israeli intent? Do Israeli leaders want Palestinian society in Gaza to cease to exist in whole or in part? Manifestly, they do:
- Recognising that Israeli governmental leaders, war cabinet ministers, and senior army officers have made explicit statements of “intent to destroy”, characterizing Palestinians in Gaza as a whole as enemies and “human animals” and stating the intention of inflicting “maximum damage” on Gaza, “flattening Gaza,” and turning Gaza into “hell”;
Recognising that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed the current US President’s plan to forcibly expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with no right of return, in what Navi Pillay, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has said amounts to ethnic cleansing;
Recognising that the deliberate destruction of agricultural fields, food warehouses, and bakeries and other violence that prevents food production, in conjunction with denial and restriction of humanitarian aid, indicate the intentional infliction of unlivable conditions resulting in starvation of Palestinians in Gaza . . .”
“Genocide 1,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
All of these “Recognising-s” are leading up to a “therefore,” of course, and here it is:
- “Therefore, the International Association of Genocide Scholars:
Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948);
Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;
Calls upon the government of Israel to immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population;”
etc.
The case here is much stronger, in my view, than for the Rohingya genocide, which has a strong case and is widely recognized. Yet the United States government and the Holocaust Memorial Museum haven’t categorized Gaza as a genocide. This is because genocides are political acts by states, and the recognition and the memory of genocides have a political dimension. States are like teams to which fans are loyal and the crimes of which the fans are often willing to overlook.
But the IAGS is not a state, or a cause, and it isn’t made up of partisan fans. It is a membership organization of field experts who are critical thinkers. And those field experts are overwhelmingly convinced by this case.
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