WHY DOES GAZA’S GENOCIDE STILL NEED EXPLAINING?

The silence has been broken. The unthinkable has been said. And the world can no longer look away

- By Nuha Faiz

For months, we’ve danced around the word. Politicians have carefully avoided it. Media outlets have sanitized it as "conflict" or "war." Even genocide scholars, those whose life’s work is to identify and prevent humanity’s greatest crime, have hedged their language, speaking in careful academic terms about "patterns" and "concerning developments.

But Dr. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, has shattered that careful silence with five devastating words: "Israel is committing genocide." This isn't some activist with a megaphone or a politician scoring points. This is a man who grew up in a Zionist home, served as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, and has spent decades studying the very crime he now accuses his former homeland of committing. When such a voice speaks, the world must listen.

The Weight of Words

Genocide. The word carries the weight of history's darkest chapters. Coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 as Nazi extermination camps operated at full capacity, it was designed to capture something beyond mere mass killing; the deliberate attempt to destroy a people as a group, to ensure they could never reconstitute themselves as a political, social, or cultural entity.

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defined it precisely: "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Two elements must converge: intent and action. For ten months, even as Gaza’s death toll mounted and its infrastructure crumbled, many scholars argued the intent wasn't clear enough.