Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
To deny a genocide as obvious as the one in Gaza is proof of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Bret Stephens once again tries and fails to deny Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is a despicable piece of writing. It could be ignored entirely except that it has been published in such a high-profile paper.
Stephens’ argument is as weak as it is appalling. He ignores the overwhelming evidence that has led Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and U.N. experts to conclude that the Israeli government is committing genocide. He does not engage any of the arguments made by genocide scholars, including Omer Bartov, who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times just last week in which he made a compelling case that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. Bartov was initially reluctant to say that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza because he didn’t believe that the evidence supported the charge, but he changed his mind as the evidence piled up:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could [bold mine-DL]. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
It isn’t just Bartov who has reached this conclusion. This is now the consensus among genocide scholars. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman said earlier this year, “I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide.” Stephens doesn’t acknowledge any of this.
Stephens also has nothing to say about the Netanyahu government’s deliberate policy of starvation or its systematic destruction of objections indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Like a good regime apologist, he doesn’t talk about the famine conditions that the Israeli government has created. It is the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon and its destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure that show their genocidal intent. They are starving millions of people on purpose. They know what the consequences for the population will be, and they continue doing it in full view of the world.
To deny a genocide as obvious as the one in Gaza is proof of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is no coincidence that the arguments Stephens musters in this bad cause are some of the flimsiest imaginable. He points to the official death toll and asks what he thinks is a very clever question: “Why isn’t the death count higher?”
For one thing, the death toll in Gaza is certainly far higher than the official count of the Ministry of Health. No one can know the exact number because of Israel’s comprehensive destruction of Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure and the sheer devastation that has left many thousands of bodies trapped under the rubble of their homes. It is also difficult to know exactly how many have died from starvation and disease. Conservative estimates last year put the real number of “traumatic injury deaths” in mid-2024 at more than 64,000 at a time when the official count was 37,877. Another study found that more than 80,000 Palestinians had been killed as a result of the military campaign through January 2025. These figures don’t include deaths from starvation and disease. If the official count is now nearing 60,000, the real count is presumably in the hundreds of thousands.
It is important to understand that the Israeli government can be committing the crime of genocide long before it has killed most of the people in Gaza. There is a common misconception that it can’t be genocide until the mass killing reaches a certain level. What matters is the intent to destroy in whole or in part the members of a group. Stephens thinks he has found a loophole because he pretends that the Israeli government is not killing Palestinians “as such,” but from the very start of the war Israel’s political and military leadership has made it clear that they intended to inflict collective punishment on the entire population. That is what they have done for almost two years. The collective punishment is ongoing. The crime is still in progress, and the number of victims will increase as long as the Israeli goverment is allowed to keep killing them with bombs, bullets, and starvation.
Genocide is not a charge to be made lightly, but in this case the evidence is incontrovertible. It is available to anyone willing to look at it. Stephens pretends to care about “cheapening” the charge of genocide, but this isn’t a serious argument. He says that “the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military situation we don’t like,” but that isn’t happening. If this were being done by almost any other government in the world, there would be no serious debate over what to call it.
Genocide denial in the face of such overwhelming evidence is indefensible, and it is also dangerous. Last week, Bartov made this point:
The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.
What is happening in Gaza isn’t just “any military situation,” but the steady, deliberate destruction of an entire people. Genocide is a uniquely horrific crime, and the Israeli government is committing it against the Palestinians of Gaza. The only question now is whether we allow the genocide to continue or act to bring it to an end.
The current goal of Netanyahu apologists is to ban all language that might realistically describe government policy in Gaza and the West Bank.
Stephens knows he is lying and he does not care. His goal is to provide cover.