A recent Israeli attack on the Al-Mawasi refugee camp near Khan Younis. This place was reportedly declared a “safe zone” by the occupation army itself. This attack is in addition to the one that took place a few weeks ago at a Palestinian school, which left more than 100 dead. More than 40,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the constant attacks of Israel in the Gaza Strip.
Gaza was, until before the Israeli attacks, one of the most densely populated places in the world with a high poverty rate. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 80% of the population is dependent on international aid and 90% of water is unfit for human consumption. In addition, 80 per cent of its residents are refugees from previous conflicts.
At the beginning of the Israeli attacks, it was reasonably believed that Israel had the right to defend itself because it had been subjected to systematic attacks on civilians by Hamas. In the context of the ethics of war, it was accepted that a response to this attack would be a just cause for initiating war actions. These actions did not, however, permit a disproportionate and indiscriminate response. As the days went by, Israel intensified its attacks, which far exceeded any reasonable measure of proportionality and discrimination: schools, hospitals, and aid caravans were explicitly established as military targets. The snipers explicitly killed journalists, children and humanitarian workers. The traditional moral constraints of the theory of just war were ostensibly transgressed to give way to unlimited violence.
How can we make sense of this moral evil? What has happened to the minimum conditions of respect for the most essential moral goods of the human person? The first point we can highlight, before delving into the more thorny issue of the moral nature of what is happening in Gaza, is the failure of the international community, international law, and traditional just war ethics. The international community has proven utterly powerless to stop the massacre in Gaza. The arguments put forth by most representatives of the international community are futile if Europe and the United States are determined to support Israel. Humanitarian international law is of no use if it cannot help stop the massacre. It is meaningless to assert that Israel has systematically violated the principles of Ius in Bello and Ius ad Bellum if there is no intrinsic motivation or external incentive (through international pressure) for it to comply.
I will not address the moral responsibility of the countries that support Israel (notably the United States and the Western European powers like Germany and the United Kingdom). They are undoubtedly complicit. I will, however, discuss the moral qualification of what, after months of massacre and over 40,000 dead, we can qualify as genocide.
Is it genocide what Israel is doing? I think so. The qualification of genocide is not a simple matter to state, since, for example, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has not charged Israel with this charge, nor has the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Specifically, the charges brought by the ICC are: war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the targeted killing of civilians, deliberately causing starvation in the civilian population, persecution, among others. Genocide, according to the ICC’s Rome Statute, defines in its Article 6 genocide as acts against a human group such as killing, serious injury, subjection to conditions of existence which are to result in their physical destruction, among others, that have been committed by “the intention to destroy wholly or partially a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. All of this is happening, at least since the intensification of Israeli attacks on Gaza.
All acts for which Israel is being accused constitute genocide when the intention is to eliminate a human group on grounds of nation, ethnic or racial origin. The evidence is manifold. On the one hand, the dehumanization of the Palestinians that appears in the speeches of certain parts of Israeli society as well as their leaders. These speeches appear from time to time in the records of interventions by these leaders, as well as in the records of soldiers who are intervening in the massacre. For example, the words of Netanyahu’s minister Amihai Eliyahu when he said that dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza was one possibility. What kind of conception about the Palestinians and their humanity reflects these words? Or the countless phrases of Ben Gvir, when he pointed out, for example, that all Arabs who are not loyal to Israel should be expelled. Or when he publicly defended – and defends – the Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslim Palestinians and wounded 125 others. Or when he took part in clashes between Israeli and Palestinian settlers, asking the police to shoot at the Palestinians, as well as shouting: “we are the owners of the land”. It is true that many of these incidents occurred before October 7, 2023, but they reflect a dehumanizing conception of the Palestinian and the Muslim Arab. This way of seeing is clearly manifested in a significant group of Israeli settlers, and he, as part of the Israeli government and political establishment, also reflects the conception of the government. The evidence, then, of a conception contrary to the Palestinians of Gaza as a national, ethnic and religious human group, by the government and by part of the Israeli society (whose paradigmatic example are the settlers) is clear. We are, then, in the presence of genocide, and not only war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On the other hand, the way in which war is conducted also generates new evidence that, combined with the dehumanizing intention and conception we have seen, makes the presence of genocide clearer. The bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps and humanitarian aid sectors shows that the Israeli forces’ intention is not simply to destroy Hamas but also the Palestinian people in Gaza. The same places that the Israeli forces have established as safe havens are also being bombed.
The genocide of the Palestinian people has a long history. What has happened since the response to Hamas attacks is just a faster realization of the guilt of the state of Israel. The story of bombing and wars did not begin on October 7, 2023. In the same way as the dehumanizing mentality against the Palestinians. Ben Gvir’s sayings have been around for a long time, and reflect a mentality that does not arise with him. The numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel’s actions in various conflicts against Palestine are an additional precedent. The statements informing and condemning the use of white phosphorus in the conflict are along the same lines.
The dehumanizing conception of the Palestinian people as a national, ethnic and religious group is what explains in some sense the cruelty not only of the policy of the State of Israel but also of those who are fighting this war. And this dehumanization cannot happen, without the perpetrator also dehumanizing himself. To kill in a war, and celebrate it (as several testimonies of the same Israeli soldiers on social networks) is systematically required that who kills another gratuitously and without ethical-military justification (because, for example, the victims are children, humanitarian workers, journalists or any non-combatant civilian) denies the other its human nature. Jonathan Glover, in his book Humanity and Inhumanity, argues that the perpetrator loses his natural empathy: “the other is not someone like me”. In addition, the perpetrator is often in a situation far from his daily life where his own moral identity is blurred: “I am not the one who does these things”. In some cases, it is war that promotes the dehumanization of soldiers. In other cases, such as the genocide of the Palestinian people, it is a socio-political narrative that is promoted, as in the case of Eliyahu and Ben Gvir, from the very core of Israeli political power.
The dehumanization of the Israeli soldier is a reflection of this mentality. In his book Killing, Daniel Grossman points out that the natural attitude of humans, who also share with other non-human animals, is never to attack to kill. And even before attacking, he favors the threatening posture. This behavior is also manifested in war. The person has, in this sense, a natural empathy in which, when it is time to kill, he inhibits himself. Grossman’s book points to hundreds of cases where soldiers emulate a threatening posture or pose as shooting, but do not actually shoot. The most characteristic thing about a person is to refuse to kill. To be willing to do so is a process of dehumanization, of systematic loss of natural empathy.
The events in Gaza reveal a flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the ethics of war and international law, and reveal their failure. These events constitute a large-scale international and social moral drama, alongside the most terrible events of the twentieth century. The systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people, evidenced in the actions and speeches of Israeli leaders and soldiers has promoted a historical and systematic violence that can be described as genocide. This qualification is relevant for purposes of establishing a characterization of the facts, in addition to possible legal consequences. But, regardless of it, we are facing an unprecedented moral evil, where all our normative categories cannot cope with a tragedy without name.
Fernando Arancibia-Collao, is a Doctor of Philosophy and Professor at the Institute of Applied Ethics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His academic areas of interest are the ethics of economics and the ethics of war. His publications on the ethics of war include: Economic Sanctions, Well-being, and the duty to trade.
