Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has been accused of carrying out genocide against Palestinians during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Israel's actions since 2023 during the Gaza war have led to increasing numbers of international legal scholars concluding that Israel is committing genocide. Debate continues over whether Israel's treatment of Palestinians prior to 2023—since the 1948 Nakba—also constitutes genocide, and whether such actions are continuous or limited to specific periods or events. This treatment has also been characterised as "slow-motion genocide", as well as a corollary or expression of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and indigenous land theft. Those who believe Israel's actions constitute genocide point to the entrenched anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and genocidal rhetoric in Zionism and in Israeli society, and point to events such as the Nakba, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the 2014 Gaza War, and the 2023–present Gaza war as particularly pertinent genocidal episodes. International law and genocide scholars have accused Israeli officials of using dehumanising language.
On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, alleging that Israel's conduct in Gaza during the 2023 war amounted to genocide. South Africa asked the ICJ to issue provisional measures, including ordering Israel to halt its military campaign in Gaza. The Israeli government agreed to defend itself at the ICJ proceedings, while also denouncing South Africa's actions as "disgraceful" and accusing it of abetting "the modern heirs of the Nazis". South Africa's case has been supported by a number of countries. On 26 January 2024, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling finding that the claims in South Africa's filing were "plausible" and issued an order to Israel requiring them to take all measures within their power to prevent acts of genocide and to allow basic humanitarian services into Gaza.
Israel and the United States have rejected the assertion that the former is engaging in genocide. While some scholars describe Palestinians as victims of genocide, others argue that what took place was ethnic cleansing, politicide, spaciocide, cultural genocide or similar. Some critics of the accusation have argued that charges of Israel committing genocide are commonly made by anti-Zionists with the aim of demonising or delegitimising Israel.
History
20th century
Nakba
The Nakba was the violent displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The Nakba began during the 1948 Palestine war; the term ongoing Nakba has been used to describe the continued persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel throughout the Palestinian territories. Palestinians continued to be expelled after the war, and more Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, with new Israeli settlements established in their place. Israel has been accused of carrying out forced displacement (ethnic cleansing), looting, psychological warfare, and rape and sexual violence during the Nakba.
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted and about 400 Arab-majority towns and villages were depopulated. Many of these areas were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jewish residents and given new Hebrew names. Approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs (about half of Palestine's Arab population) fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army.
In 2010, historians Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov debated whether the 1948 Nakba should be regarded as a genocide, with Shaw arguing that it could and with Bartov disagreeing. Daud Abdullah, the former Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, has said: "Given the declared intent of the Zionist leaders, this wholesale destruction and depopulation of Palestinian villages fit[s] easily with the definition of genocide as cited in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." Australian historian John Docker has also argued that the Nakba is a case of genocide. Several scholars have written that Palestinians suffered ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, but that they did not consider the event to have been genocide.
Naksa
Academic Clare Brandabur includes the Naksa (known as the 1967 Palestinian exodus) in the actions conducted by Israel that show a pattern that seeks the "destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group". This view is supported by later academics as well. The Naksa was the expulsion of around 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, including the razing of numerous Palestinian villages.
Sabra and Shatila massacre
In September 1982, between 460 and 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shia Muslims—were killed in Beirut's Sabra neighborhood and in the adjacent Shatila refugee camp during the Lebanese Civil War. The killings were carried out by the Lebanese Forces, one of the main Christian militias in Lebanon at the time. Between the evening of 16 September and the morning of 18 September, the Lebanese militia carried out the killings while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had the Palestinian camp surrounded. The IDF had ordered the militia to clear out the fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Sabra and Shatila as part of a larger Israeli maneuver into western Beirut. As the massacre unfolded, the IDF received reports of atrocities being committed, but did not take any action to stop it.
On 16 December 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the Sabra and Shatila massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide. The voting record on section D of Resolution 37/123 was: yes: 123; no: 0; abstentions: 22; non-voting: 12. The delegate for Canada stated: "The term genocide cannot, in our view, be applied to this particular inhuman act". The delegate of Singapore – voting 'yes' – added: "My delegation regrets the use of the term 'an act of genocide' ... [as] the term 'genocide' is used to mean acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Canada and Singapore questioned whether the General Assembly was competent to determine whether such an event would constitute genocide. The Soviet Union, by contrast, asserted that: "The word for what Israel is doing on Lebanese soil is genocide. Its purpose is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation." The Nicaragua delegate asserted: "It is difficult to believe that a people that suffered so much from the Nazi policy of extermination in the middle of the twentieth century would use the same fascist, genocidal arguments and methods against other peoples." The United States commented that "While the criminality of the massacre was beyond question, it was a serious and reckless misuse of language to label this tragedy genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention". William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, stated: "the term genocide ... had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision".
That same year an independent commission headed by Seán MacBride investigated reported violations of International Law by Israel and four of its six members concluded that "the deliberate destruction of the national and cultural rights and identity of the Palestinian people amount[ed] to genocide". In its conclusion, the commission recommended "that a competent international body be designed or established to clarify the conception of genocide in relation to Israeli policies and practices toward the Palestinian people". David Hirst believes that while the decision of the U.N. General Assembly could still be called biased, it was harder to say the same about the McBride Commission, as well as about individuals around the world, especially Jews, who shared the opinion of its four members.
The massacre was also investigated by the Israeli Kahan Commission. The commission concluded that although no Israelis were directly involved in the killings, a number of Israeli government ministers and military were indirectly responsible. They should have taken into account the sentiments of their Lebanese allies after their leader Bachir Gemayel had been assassinated along with 26 other Phalangists in a bomb attack 2 days earlier, and also have taken decisive action to stop the killings when the first information was received. The commission's findings were reluctantly accepted by the Israeli government, amid violent, rival, pro- and anti-government protests.
In interviews with film director Lokman Slim in 2005, some of the fighters of the Lebanese Christian militias reported that, prior to the massacre, the IDF took them to training camps in Israel and showed them documentaries about the Holocaust. The Israelis told the Lebanese fighters that the same would happen to them too, as a minority in Lebanon, if the fighters did not take action against the Palestinians. The film was called "Massaker", it featured six perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and it was awarded the Fipresci Prize at the 2005 Berlinale.
21st century
Second Intifada
At the UN-backed 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, the majority of delegates approved a declaration that accused Israel of being a "racist apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". Reed Brody, the then-executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticised the declaration, arguing that "Israel has committed serious crimes against Palestinian people but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide", while Claudio Cordone, a spokesman for Amnesty International, stated that "[w]e are not ready to make the assertion that Israel is engaged in genocide".
During the 2002 battle of Jenin, numerous Palestinian officials, as well as a British forensics expert who entered the camp as part of an Amnesty International team, accused the Israel Defense Forces of carrying out a massacre of Palestinian civilians numbering in the 100s at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. A. N. Wilson, a columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, wrote that "we are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide", while Yasmin Alibhai-Brown called for Ariel Sharon to be tried for crimes against humanity. Subsequent investigations by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations confirmed that there had been no massacre, but accused Israel of committing war crimes.
Blockade of Gaza
The restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza imposed by Israel date to the early 1990s. After Hamas took over in 2007, Israel significantly intensified existing movement restrictions and imposed a complete blockade on the movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip. In the same year, Egypt closed the Rafah Border Crossing. Many protestors across the globe called the blockade an act of genocide, with the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez recalling Venezuela's ambassador in Israel and calling Israel's attacks "genocide".
Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappé has argued that genocide "is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip". In his 2017 book, Ten Myths About Israel, Pappé wrote: "Israel's claim that its actions since 2006 have been part of a self-defensive war against terror. I will venture to call ... an incremental genocide of the people of Gaza." In an article published in 2022 in the International Journal of Human Rights, Mohammed Nijim voiced his belief "that Israeli policies that were enacted after the introduction of the Blockade of the Gaza Strip amount[ed] to slow-motion genocide", following previous descriptions of Israel's treatment of Palestinians as a "slow-motion genocide". This is in line with Uğur Ümit Üngör's application of Lemkin's description of genocide as the "imposition of the national pattern" as being "genocidal as incremental forms of slow violence." Through the period of the blockade various other commentators from political and news organisations have labelled the blockade variously as genocide and sociocide. The 2007 blockade has continued since its implementation.
2008 Gaza War
In the 2008–2009 Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead, The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict found that Israel, at least in part, targeted the people of Gaza as a whole. American human rights lawyer Francis Boyle and historian Ilan Pappé both consider Israel's actions against Gaza in the 2008 Gaza War to be genocidal.
2014 Gaza War
The 2014 Gaza War, also referred to as Operation Protective Edge, was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip. Al-Haq, a Palestinian Human Rights organization, concluded in a report that serious violations of international law were committed in the course of the 2014 Israeli offensive against Gaza. The organization, along with other Palestinian human rights organizations the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and Addameer, submitted a legal file to the International Criminal Court encouraging it to begin an investigation and prosecution into the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the course of Israel's 2014 Gaza offensive. The crime of genocide was referenced as an Israeli crime by these groups. Additionally, dozens of Holocaust survivors, along with hundreds of descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims, accused Israel of "genocide" for the deaths of more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 Gaza War. In a September statement to the United Nations, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas stated that the war amounted to a genocidal crime. Political analyst and diplomat Abukar Arman drew parallels between what he called the "genocide in Palestine" and the Darfur genocide, highlighting what he believes to be political motives for the international community labelling Darfur a genocide, but not Palestine.