Journal of Genocide Research

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Inescapably Genocidal

Martin Shaw

To cite this article: Martin Shaw (03 Jan 2024): Inescapably Genocidal, Journal of Genocide
Research, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2023.2300555
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2023.2300555

Published online: 03 Jan 2024.

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JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2023.2300555

FORUM: ISRAEL-PALESTINE: ATROCITY CRIMES AND THE

CRISIS OF HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES

Inescapably Genocidal
Martin Shaw
Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, University of Sussex

The war provoked by Hamas’ atrocities on 7 October 2023 exposed sharp divisions in the
fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In November, over 150 “scholars of the Holo­
caust” signed a condemnation of Hamas’s terror, claiming that the “indiscriminate killings
of children, women and men whose only crime was being Jewish unavoidably bring to
mind the mindset and the methods of the perpetrators of the pogroms that paved the
way to the Final Solution.” They went on to denounce a “global explosion of antisemitism
which … is a testimony to the power of forces which seek to threaten not only the Jewish
people but, at the same time, to destroy the basic tenets of the democratic system.” While
“deploring” the “humanitarian catastrophe of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” they
claimed that “it derives directly from the use of civilians as human shields by the Hamas.”1
Later, 55 “scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence” felt “compelled” to
warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s counterattack. While “deeply saddened and
concerned” by both Hamas’ atrocities and the death and destruction which Israel had
caused, their statement focused on the latter, itemizing it together with “dozens” of state­
ments by Israeli leaders that indicated genocidal intent. Referencing a longer history, they
argued that
“we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation
violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007,
and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who
speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism.”

The statement concluded by calling on governments to uphold their obligations under

the Genocide Convention.2
The editors of this journal, having observed this “clear difference” in reactions within
the field to Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response, invited contributors to comment on
the “powerful motivation” that emerged to take a position on the violence and the “jus­
tification” given for “the strong distinction made in how the loss of life on each side

CONTACT Martin Shaw mshaw@ibei.org Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27,
08005 Barcelona, Spain
1
Jan Grabowski et al., “Scholars of the Holocaust Condemn Hamas Terror and Denounce the Rise of Global Antisemit­
ism,” November 2023. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfM8f78BT77iwUO4B-82YKWTsVOpvR_
zcSIJxTlLJJYP99yKw/viewform?fbclid=IwAR3XLGCM6IzEXN-qIrsiXpwh4ps7dFkT6uTq2FFNo0O-GnLaA6q7csDVt_Y. Last
accessed December 22, 2023.
2
Raz Segal, “Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7
October,” Contending Modernities, December 9, 2023. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/
statement-of-scholars-7-october. Last accessed December 22, 2023. I signed this statement although with some reser­
vations reflected later in this piece.
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. SHAW

should be classified and evaluated.” In follow-up correspondence, they suggested that

there was a “crisis” in the field.
It was certainly very disappointing to see the Grabowski statement misrepresent
Hamas’s victims only as Jews – when they were targeted primarily as Israelis – and
the Gazan catastrophe as the responsibility only of Hamas – when its direct cause
was Israeli bombing. Its clear priority for Jewish victims, at a time when Palestinian
dead already outnumbered them, manifested an unabashed Jewish nationalism,
whereas the Segal statement adopted a universalist approach that did justice to
the Israeli victims and justified its focus on Gaza by the fact that Israeli killing was
ongoing.
Yet such differences over Israel-Palestine were hardly new. For example, attempts to
engage with the 1948 Nakba within a genocide perspective had led to very strong reac­
tions, such as Omer Bartov’s accusation (against the present writer in this journal) that
they are “clearly meant to delegitimize the state [of Israel] and to say that it was born
in the blood of innocents and should therefore also go down in blood,” although this
is not a necessary implication of the position.3 Yet since ours are academic fields rather
than political associations, such disagreements do not need to become entrenched.
Indeed, during the Israeli assault on Gaza, Bartov was one of the first to warn of the
“potential” for genocide, despite the objectively more critical implications of an allegation
of current genocide for the state’s legitimacy.4 Extra-scientific attachments undoubtedly
influence longstanding tensions in the relationships between the Holocaust and Geno­
cide fields, but these also have deep intellectual roots and can continue to be addressed
in theoretical and historical work.
Rather than representing a crisis, the rush to judgment highlighted the risks when
Holocaust and Genocide Scholars turn advocates, as well as underlying theoretical
difficulties. Criticism based on the legal conception of genocide, while understand­
able in political terms, did not fully engage with the dynamics at work. Both state­
ments overlooked the fact that Hamas’ atrocities could accurately be called a series
of “genocidal massacres” in the sense that Leo Kuper proposed, and that this geno­
cidal cast had provoked Israel into its radical attempt to pulverize the entire Gazan
society.5
Likewise warning of the potential for genocide as a maximal end-state obscured the
genocidal process that was already occurring, while presenting Gaza as a “textbook gen­
ocide” failed to address the reality that this was not a genocide tout court but a counter-
genocidal war, of a kind familiar from historical colonial contexts, in which each side shat­
tered the opposing civilian population while pursuing military goals.6 Moreover, if the
United Nations Genocide Convention was an inevitable reference point, the choice to
hew close to a legal tick-box exercise not only allowed defenders of Israel’s violence to
argued that the criteria had not been met. It also sidelined the Convention’s manifold
defects, recognized in the field since its inception, and those of the subsequent

3
Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov, “The Question of Genocide in Palestine, 1948: An Exchange between Martin Shaw and
Omer Bartov,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, nos. 3–4 (2010): 258.
4
Omer Bartov, “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide,” New York Times, November 10, 2023.
5
Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 45–46. Genocidal mas­
sacres are a particular form of the “partial” genocide that the Convention envisages.
6
Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, October 13, 2023. Since genocides like wars are historical
phenomena in the full sense, the idea of a textbook genocide is inappropriate.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 3

jurisprudence, recently exposed in the case of Ukraine.7 It was as though the rich historical
and sociological debates which had, to a considerable extent, left the law behind, were
overlooked in the need to respond.
Genocide is mostly not a standalone, but a hybrid phenomenon, to be approached
largely in a war-and-genocide perspective.8 The analytical roadblock was the absence
of a framework for understanding genocidal war that could grasp how Israel could perpe­
trate a genocidal attack on Gazan society through its military campaign against Hamas.
The paradox of “targeted” strikes resulting in massive destruction could be partly
explained by Israel’s Dahiyah doctrine of using “disproportionate” violence, developed
in its 2006 assault on Lebanon and manifested in previous bombardments of Gaza.9
However, in the new war it deliberately expanded the legitimate parameters, so that it
became acceptable when aiming to kill individual Hamas leaders or groups of fighters
to simultaneously kill dozens, scores or even hundreds of civilians – and to destroy the
neighbourhoods and infrastructure of thousands.10 No wonder that even Joe Biden
came to see this as “indiscriminate bombing.” In this light, Israel’s supposed mitigating
tactics, such as its invocations of international humanitarian law (which it systematically
misinterpreted11), directions to “safe” areas and intermittent permissions for relief were
part of a strategy to neutralize global surveillance.
What Israel especially aimed to massage, and even critics missed, was a new convergence
of its hostilities towards Hamas and to the Gazan population as a whole. Largely unlike even
“degenerate” US-led wars, in which risks were transferred to local civilians mainly in order to
minimize military casualties, Israel’s violence towards Gazans also reflected its view of them
as an enemy, both as part of its “Palestinian problem” and because of its assumed support for
Hamas.12 Now, if it could no longer tolerate Hamas, neither would it accept the continued
existence of the society that in its eyes sustained the organization. Therefore, the overall con­
sequences of its huge bombardment – mass killing, huge displacements, destruction of
infrastructure, hunger, thirst, and disease – were not merely “risks” of its tactical decisions,
but also represented a strategic choice. The dislocation of Gazan society was so comprehen­
sive that it can only have been intended at the policy level. Excessive weight may have been
given in some commentaries to the genocidal ravings of Israel’s ideologues, but these were
not just noise; they reflected the inner meaning of the “war.”
Moreover, since Israel’s doctrine was known and Gaza had already experienced its con­
sequences, it was not only Israel that intended this destruction. In an irony that escaped
most critics and reflected the field’s preoccupation with the one-sidedness of genocide,
Gaza’s rulers had not only launched their own genocidal assault; they had also knowingly

7
Martin Shaw, “Russia’s Genocidal War in Ukraine: Radicalization and Social Destruction,” Journal of Genocide Research
25, nos. 3–4 (2023): 352–370.
8
Martin Shaw, “The General Hybridity of War and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 3 (2007): 461–473.
9
Wendy Pearlman, “Collective Punishment in Gaza Will Not Bring Israel Security,” New Lines Magazine, October 30, 2023.
10
Yuval Abraham, “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza,” +792 Magazine, Novem­
ber 30, 2023. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza. Last accessed
December 20, 2023.
11
Leonard Rubinstein, “Israel’s Rewriting of the Rule of Law,” Just Security, December 21, 2023. https://www.justsecurity.
org/90789/israels-rewriting-of-the-law-of-war. Last accessed December 22, 2023.
12
I introduced the ideas of “degenerate war,” to categorize the systematic targeting of civilians in total war, in my War
and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity 2003), and “risk-transfer war,” to describe modern
Western warfare, in The New Western Way of War (Cambridge: Polity 2005). Yagil Levy, Whose Life is Worth More? Hier­
archies of Risk and Death in Contemporary Wars (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019) has used the risk-transfer
idea to analyze earlier Gaza wars, but it is insufficient to explain the current devastation.
4 M. SHAW

provoked Israel’s greater one. Hamas understood that its atrocities would incite Israel to
its own campaign, which they must have calculated would cause global outrage that
would ultimately constrain Israel. For Hamas, thousands of Gazans were also necessary
sacrifices, just as some of the hostages were for Israel. In these senses, both sides of
the genocide were co-productions of the contending forces and indeed of the external
powers that supported them.13
The focus of Israel’s critics on the phenomena of mass death, while very understand­
able, was also insufficient. The body count was shocking by any standard and it could
be argued that Israel was deliberately inflicting on the Gazan population “conditions of
life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” “in part,” as per Article II(c) of
the Convention. However, partly because of its ambiguity over the meaning of group
“destruction,” this focus missed the far larger problem of social destruction, rendering
much “genocide” commentary imprecise.
Here, the genocide field’s difficulty reflected conceptual issues that dated to its origins.
As Dirk Moses had long highlighted, Raphael Lemkin’s concept combined the notions of
the “extermination” (mass murder) and “crippling” (non-murderous weakening) of subju­
gated peoples, creating a tension which, he recently argued, rendered the genocide
concept intrinsically unstable.14 However, it can be argued that Gaza shows us, instead,
the strengths of this combination. Deliberate mass killing has once again been one
element of a larger destructive thrust, the overall aim of which seems to be to cripple
rather than exterminate, providing scope for a sociological concept of genocide that is
broader than the prevailing legal definition.15 The tension that cannot be resolved,
until the law better incorporates socio-historical understanding, is between invoking
such a concept to provide a satisfying analysis and the legal framework for the purposes
of advocacy, as well as prosecution.
Moses’s own proposal to resolve these dilemmas was to replace “genocide” with “per­
manent security,” by which he means a state’s attempts to “solve” perceived existential
security crises in a once-and-for-all manner. He now argued that Gaza involved a “crystal­
lization of Israel’s attempt at a permanent security solution.”16 Initially, it was unclear how
far this would go. Given Hamas’ sudden breakout, the contingent character of the
response was significant: the Israeli overreaction initially covered up the deep failure rep­
resented by its concentration of its forces in the West Bank, where they supported settlers
terrorizing Palestinian villagers, leaving few to defend the Gaza border. Benjamin Neta­
nyahu, seeking to save his premiership, sought to expunge his humiliation through a pre­
viously unthought-of level of aggression.17 Yet egged on by a popular demand for

13
Tareq Boconi, “What Was Hamas Thinking?,” Foreign Policy, November 22, 2023, argues that there is some uncertainty
about its intended level of violence; but civilian massacres were clearly planned and could not have failed to produce a
massive response.
14
A. Dirk Moses, “Lemkin, Culture and the Concept of Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald
Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33, quoting Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Carnegie Endowment for Inter­
national Peace, 1944), 81; A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Trangression
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 238.
15
Martin Shaw, What is Genocide?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
16
A. Dirk Moses, “More than Genocide,” Boston Review, November 14, 2023. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/
more-than-genocide. Last accessed December 23, 2023.
17
Little attention was given to the limits of this type of response, of which the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan pro­
vided ample evidence.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 5

revenge stoked by much of the media, the damaged regime, supported by most of the
political class, appeared to be converging on a more radical and permanent solution,
the expulsion of all or part of the Gazan population.
It was therefore essential to recognize that in genocidal war, policies radicalize. Israel’s
initial genocidal thrust contained the potential for a greater genocide, which might turn
the right’s most ambitious ideas into reality. However, the dynamic and contingent char­
acter of genocidal war could also work against this. The dislocation of Gazan society
depended not only on Israel’s goals and Hamas’ response, but also on the tolerance of
the USA and the wider West for its violence, of Egypt for its ambitions to expel Gazans,
and of the Israeli public for the sacrifice of its hostages. Israel was operating under
global political, legal, and media surveillance, obliged to placate its patrons and
manage public opinion, internationally as well as at home. At the end of 2023, it was
far from certain that the war would actually produce the final solution of Israel’s Palesti­
nian problem about which many fantasized, even in the sense of general expulsion, even
from Gaza.
Despite Moses’ proposal to replace “genocide,” the new Israel-Hamas war confirmed
the concept’s discursive inescapability.18 While permanent security was an important
explanatory concept for Israeli violence, it did not negate the significance of genocide
as a naming concept for it, alongside the more obvious “war.”19 Once again, we have
seen that the idea of genocide is essential to a historical paradigm for understanding
large-scale atrocity. Recognizing the “problems” of genocide, and especially of the inter­
national legal framework that is too often held to sufficiently define it, it is important also
to address the potential of the concept once it is liberated from that framework, and to
utilize it to inform a more sophisticated public discourse.

Notes on contributor
Martin Shaw is Research Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and Emeritus
Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. A historical sociologist,
his books include War and Genocide (2003), Genocide and International Relations (2013) and What is
Genocide?, 2nd ed. (2015). Ukraine, Gaza, and the Problems of Genocide will appear in 2025. He
received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Network of Genocide Scholars in
2022.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

18
The war was not an exceptional event, even if it was difficult not to reflect on the relative absence of “genocide” from
debates about many other wars, including Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Myanmar. I have analyzed its prevalence
in Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 2013).
19
The distinction derives from Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated by Edward Shils (New York:
Free Press, 1949). I develop this argument in “Permanent Security: A Conceptual Alternative to Genocide?,” in my
Ukraine, Gaza and the Problems of Genocide (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, forthcoming).