Why Israel’s War Is Genocide — and Why Biden Is Culpable

Seth Ackerman

Since October, Israel has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, an estimated 70 percent of them women and children, in what a leading scholar of aerial bombing has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Israel has been killing more than five times as many Gazans per day as the Nazis did, per capita, in the London Blitzkrieg. It killed roughly fifteen times as many children in the war’s first two months alone as Russia did in Ukraine in the invasion’s first eighteen months.

The Associated Press, citing analysts who specialize in mapping wartime bombing damage, reported that “the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.” Israel’s campaign has destroyed the homes of a third of Gaza’s residents, damaged almost two-thirds of all dwellings, and displaced 85 percent of its population, or 1.9 million people, through forced evacuations. More than ten Gazan children per day, on average, are estimated to have lost one or both of their legs.

The carnage is entirely deliberate. As a leaked analysis by the Dutch defense attaché in Tel Aviv put it, Israel “intends to deliberately cause enormous destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers”; this is what explains the “high number of deaths” among civilians.

Israel’s claim that the civilian destruction is the inadvertent consequence of strikes targeting Hamas fighters is merely “a fig leaf for harming the civilian population,” according to a detailed investigation of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) targeting protocols published jointly by the Israeli news sites +972 and Local Call. Citing “conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,” journalist Yuval Abraham reported that the IDF’s established procedure is to identify the type of civilian site it wishes to destroy, such as a residential high-rise, and then afterward search a database to find some link to a militant group.

Within the IDF, strikes of this nature are called “power targets.” “If you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” explained a former intelligence official quoted in the report. Official claims that such targets are tied to Hamas are “an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza,” said a source who was involved in developing targets in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza. “That is what they told us.”

“It Doesn’t Get Any Worse”

In the current conflict, Israel has devoted special effort to destroying hospitals — which it openly admits to targeting. Of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals, only sixteen remain partially functional, with occupancy rates “reaching 206 per cent in inpatient departments and 250 per cent in intensive care units,” the UN reports. “What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned. It was a plan to close down all the hospitals in the north,” said Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders.

In the first half of January, aid groups planned twenty-nine critical missions to deliver emergency medical supplies to the northern Gaza Strip; twenty-two of them were refused by Israel. As a result of its attack on Gaza’s health system, “doctors operate on screaming children without anesthetic, using mobile phones for light,” the UN’s top human rights official said in Geneva.

In addition to direct attacks, “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” Human Rights Watch reports. “Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israeli inspectors turn away aid trucks without providing a reason, and “if a single item is rejected,” the New York Times reported, “the truck must be sent back with its cargo and repacked to restart the inspection process.” The security alibi is bogus: as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem notes, Israel is prohibiting humanitarian organizations from purchasing food from Israel itself, a step that would obviate the need for security inspections.

Alex DeWaal, a leading expert on humanitarian crisis response at Tufts University, wrote that Israel’s starvation of Gaza “surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years” in terms of “the rigor, scale, and speed” of its blockade of needed supplies and destruction of humanitarian infrastructure. According to the UN’s famine prevention unit, the proportion of Gaza households experiencing a life-threatening lack of access to food is currently “the largest ever recorded” by the organization, and if current conditions continue, by May a minimum of twenty thousand Gazans per month will likely be dying of famine. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed,” said Arif Husain, chief economist of the UN World Food Program. “It doesn’t get any worse.’’

He is not alone in that view. “Officials at humanitarian and health-care organizations with lengthy experience in major conflict zones said Israel’s war in Gaza was the most devastating they had seen,” the Washington Post reported in December. “For me, personally, this is without a doubt the worst I’ve seen,” said Tom Potokar, a Red Cross chief surgeon who has worked in conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Ukraine.

“What’s happening right now in Gaza is beyond any disaster that I’ve witnessed at least in the last 15 years or so,” said Zaher Sahloul, a doctor who heads a humanitarian medicine NGO and worked in Aleppo during the battle for the city. Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, called it “the worst ever,” adding: “I don’t say that lightly. I started off in my twenties dealing with Khmer Rouge . . . I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before, it’s complete and utter carnage.”

“Stay and Starve, or Leave”

The reason the carnage is as great as it is is that Israel is trying to kill or expel as much of the Palestinian population of Gaza as possible. Its direct attacks on civilians are part of a larger plan: to create “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” as Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland, an adviser to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, put it. “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf,” the adviser wrote in October.

In the policy jargon of the Israeli government, this is referred to as “voluntary emigration.” It will be presented as a choice: in Eiland’s words, “The people should be told that they have two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave.”

The “voluntary emigration” plan is not just a hypothetical scenario. It is government policy — although, as the pro–Benjamin Netanyahu newspaper Israel Hayom reported in December, “It is not discussed in these forums [official meetings of the Security Cabinet] due to its obvious explosiveness.” The plan was explored in an October 17 paper by an influential think tank close to the Netanyahu government, which spoke of “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip.”

The same conclusions were advanced in an internal Intelligence Ministry paper, which found that the “transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai” could “provide positive and long-lasting strategic results.” According to Israel Hayom, the prime minister has tasked his confidant, Ron Dermer, the minister of strategic affairs, to “examine ways to thin out Gaza’s population to a minimum.” At a party caucus meeting of Knesset deputies in late December, Netanyahu personally pledged that he was working to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so,” according to news site Israel Hayom, adding that the matter “needs to be settled” because it had “strategic importance for the day after the war.”

These objectives are widely understood within the Israeli government and military. “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future,” said the deputy head of the Civil Administration, Col. Yogev Bar-Shesht, on November 4. “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yisrael Katz on October 13. “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” said Avi Dichter, the former head of Israel’s internal security agency, on Israel’s Channel 12 news, in a reference to the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians.

By law, Israel’s supreme authority in national security matters is the inner ministerial grouping known as the Security Cabinet; its decisions are binding policy. Dichter and Katz are currently members, as are Netanyahu and Dermer. Adding the two extremist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, at least six of the fourteen members of the Security Cabinet are on record as being in favor of “voluntary emigration”; only three are generally believed to be opposed to it — Gadi Eisenkot, Benny Gantz, and Yoav Gallant.

“A Textbook Case of Genocide”

There is a consensus among scholars of genocide that ethnic cleansing does not automatically imply genocide, but that the two often go together. According to Omer Bartov, an Israeli American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past.” From this he concludes that “the possibility of genocide is staring us in the face.”

There are many signs that this is already happening. Reports are multiplying of point-blank field executions of civilians by Israeli troops, such as a December 13 incident in which, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Al Jazeera, “women, children, and babies were killed execution-style by Israeli forces” while they were sheltering inside the Shadia Abu Ghazala in northern Gaza. Or a December 19 incident, confirmed by the UN, in which soldiers “summarily killed at least 11 unarmed Palestinian men in front of their family members in Al Remal neighbourhood, Gaza City”:

The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least 11 of the men, mostly aged in their late 20’s and early 30’s, in front of their family members. The IDF then allegedly ordered the women and children into a room, and either shot at them or threw a grenade into the room, reportedly seriously injuring some of them, including an infant and a child.

These reports can hardly be surprising: the Israeli command authorities have clearly communicated to their troops that the objective of the war is to rid Gaza of Palestinians. The defense minister has announced, “I have released all the restraints.” Moshe Saada, a member of Netanyahu’s party who sits on the National Security Committee of the Knesset, recently rejoiced that even left-leaning Israelis now agree on the need for a policy of extermination: “Former colleagues who once “fought with me on political matters,” he said, now “tell me, ‘Moshe, it is clear that all the Gazans need to be destroyed.’”

This is why other genocide experts, such as the Israeli historian Raz Segal, endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University, are more definitive than Bartov. “What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is a textbook case of genocide,” Segal said. The same terms were used by Craig Mokhiber, the New York director of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a thirty-year veteran aid official, who called Gaza “a textbook case of genocide” in his October 28 resignation letter. Fifteen UN special rapporteurs — senior independent experts who are neither employed by the UN nor nominated by any government — released a statement in November calling the situation a “genocide in the making.”

Biden’s Complicity

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli negotiator who has served several prime ministers, urged the Biden administration to exercise “the very real diplomatic and military leverage at its disposal” to push Israel to accept a cease-fire. “That demand cannot be one of rhetoric alone. The administration should condition the transfer of further military supplies on Israel ending the war.” The former Israeli ambassador to France, Élie Barnavi, made a similar point in an interview last month: “You know, we can’t make war without munitions or replacement parts for our planes,” he noted. “Either a solution will be imposed or there won’t be one. The Americans, upon whom we’re extremely dependent, can force our government.”

Joe Biden, however, has made his choice, however reluctantly: he’s supporting Israel’s operation. On December 29, his administration approved an emergency weapons sale to Israel using a legal loophole allowing it to go around Congress — the second time it had done so that month. “Despite Netanyahu’s defiance, Biden is committed to persuading him through private appeals,” the Washington Post reported last week. “There is no serious discussion inside the White House about changing the strategy in any significant way, according to several senior admin officials and outside advisers.”

The choice Biden has made has earned him the sobriquet “Genocide Joe” in some quarters — an epithet many consider unfair. They have a point. There should be no rush to judgment. Like Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, and the state of Israel itself, he is fully entitled to his day in court.

(Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin. Courtesy: Jacobin, an American socialist magazine.)

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The Silence of the Damned

Chris Hedges

There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.

Israeli soldiers routinely enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations – on Wednesday troops entered al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave – as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff. On Tuesday, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept.

The cuts to funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12 its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in Gaza into a tidal wave of death.

The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.

The allegations, of which details remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees — most certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to see 18 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency. UNRWA is all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.

Eight of the UNRWA employees accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, where 1,139 people were killed and 240 abducted, were fired. Two have been suspended. UNRWA has promised an investigation. They account for 0.04 percent of UNRWA’s staff.

Israel is seeking to destroy not only Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure, but UNRWA which provides food and aid to 2 million Palestinians. The object is to make Gaza uninhabitable and ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands are already starving. Over 70 percent of the housing has been destroyed. More than 26,700 people have been killed and over 65,600 have been injured. Thousands are missing. Some 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population has been displaced, with many living in the open. Palestinians have been reduced to eating grass and drinking contaminated water.

Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated: “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.”

“UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the problem of the Palestinian Refugees,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2018. “It also perpetuates the narrative of the so-called ‘right of return’ with the aim of eliminating the State of Israel, and therefore UNRWA must disappear.”

An unnamed senior Israeli official praised the suspension of funding to UNRWA, but insisted on Wednesday gggthe government was not calling for its closure.

More than 152 of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza — including school principals, teachers, health workers, a gynecologist, engineers, support staff and a psychologist — have been killed since the Israeli attacks began. Over 141 UNRWA facilities have been bombed into rubble. The death toll is the largest loss of staff during a conflict in the U.N.’s history.

The destruction of healthcare facilities and targeting of doctors, nurses, medics and staff is especially repugnant. It means the most vulnerable, the sick, infants, the wounded and elderly, and those who care for them, are often condemned to death.

Palestinian doctors are pleading with doctors and medical organizations from around the world to decry the assault on the healthcare system and mobilize their institutions to protest.

“The world must condemn the acts against medical professionals happening in Gaza,” writes the director of Al-Shifa hospital, Muhamad Abu Salmiya, who was arrested along with other medical personnel by the Israelis in November 2023 while evacuating with a World Health Organization (WHO) convoy, and who remains in custody. “This Correspondence is a call for every human being, all medical communities, and all health-care professionals around the world to call for these anti-hospital activities inside and around the hospitals to stop, which is a civilian obligation according to international law, the UN, and WHO.”

But these institutions — with a few notable exceptions such as The American Public Health Association that has called for a ceasefire — have either remained silent or, as with Dr. Matthew K. Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, attempted to justify Israeli war crimes. These doctors — who somehow find it acceptable that in Gaza a child is killed every 10 minutes on average — are accomplices to genocide and stand in violation of the Geneva Convention. They embrace death as a solution, not life.

Robert Jay Lifton in his book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” writes that “genocidal projects require the active participation of educated professionals — physicians, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers — who combine to create not only the technology of genocide but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate, and organizational process.”

A group of 100 Israeli doctors in November 2023 defended the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, claiming they were used as Hamas command centers, a charge Israel has been unable to verify.

The deans of U.S. medical schools and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association (AMA) have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media to turn their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA shut down a debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,” although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There is a cost to denouncing this genocide, a cost they do not intend to pay. They fear being attacked. They fear destroying their careers. They fear losing funding. They fear a loss of status. They fear persecution. They fear social isolation. This fear makes them complicit.

And what of those who do speak out? They are branded as antisemites and supporters of terrorism. George Washington University clinical psychology professor Lara Sheehi was pushed out of her job. The former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, was denied a fellowship at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy because of his alleged “anti-Israel bias.” San Francisco professor Rabab Abdulhadi was sued for supporting Palestinian rights. Shahd Abusalama was suspended from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K after a vicious smear campaign, although the institution later settled her discrimination claim against it. Professor Jasbir Puar at Rutgers University is an ongoing target for the Israel lobby and endures constant harassment. Medical students and faculty in Canada face suspension or expulsion if they publicly criticize Israel.

The danger is not only that the Israeli crimes are denounced. The danger, more importantly, is that the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of the institutions and their leaders are exposed.

This brings me to Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose call to halt bombing hospitals and to examine the impact of Zionism as a racist ideology unleashed a torrent of vitriolic attacks against her, attacks tacitly endorsed by the medical school where she works.

She has been slandered as an antisemite and targeted by the Canary Mission, a Zionist organization that seeks to defame and destroy the careers of students and faculty that criticize Israel and defend Palestinian rights. She has had speaking engagements rescinded and received death threats and messages such as: “kill yourself you retarded grifting n*gger,” “Jew baiting c*nt,” and “White people are the greatest people on Earth. You know this.”

There is a striking contrast between the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Urology, ‘liked’ social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”

“Cooperberg’s endowed chair comes from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, UCSF’s largest donor, which to date has gifted some $1.15 billion dollars to the health campus,” Marya writes. “In 2018, due to a mistake on a tax form, the Helen Diller Family Foundation was exposed as a funder of the Canary Mission. The Foundation attempted to erase its connection after this exposure.”

She goes on:

As a faculty member at UCSF, disgraced dermatologist Howard Maibach exposed and injected over 2,600 imprisoned Black and brown people with chemicals in experiments that echoed the experiments put on trial at the Doctors’ Trial just a few years before he went to medical school in Pennsylvania,” she goes on. “There he studied under Albert Kligman, who taught him how to exploit Black people for medical experimentation, documented extensively in the horror nonfiction book, Acres of Skin. Maibach also advanced notions of racial differences in skin, furthering racist ideas from the pseudoscience of eugenics. Race is a social construct that enshrines supremacism. It is not a biological reality.

Most of Maibach’s experiments were conducted without informed consent, and while UCSF issued an apology, Maibach is still employed by the University of California. His family supports the Friends of the IDF, and he is represented by Alan Dershowitz, who also argued for the bombing of hospitals in Gaza. Dershowitz attempted to prevent me from speaking at the AMA’s first National Health Equity Grand Rounds, where scholar Harriet Washington, who studies medical experimentation on Black people, highlighted Maibach’s racist practices. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, UCSF faculty, trainees and students of color brought Maibach’s story to light, and many have expressed their horror that they have to continue to sit in the same room as this man during Dermatology Grand Rounds. But the problem is not just one man. It is a system that allows someone with these values and actions to continue to be present in our learning and practicing community.

The dehumanization of Palestinians is lifted from the playbook of all settler colonial projects, including our own. This racism, where people of color are branded as “human animals,” is coded within the DNA of our institutions. It infects those chosen to lead these institutions. It lies at the core of our national identity. It is why the two ruling parties and the institutions that sustain them side with Israel. It feeds the perverted logic of funneling weapons and billions of dollars in support to Israel to sustain its occupation and genocide.

History will not judge us kindly. But it will revere those who, under siege, found the courage to say no.

(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. Courtesy: The Chris Hedges Report.)