The meaning of ‘genocide’

Since the attack on October 7 and Israel’s war in Gaza, the word “genocide” has become a touchstone in public debate. A symbol of uncompromising commitment for some, it is no longer a matter of law, but an absolute moral imperative. In this article, Matthew Bolton analyzes the shift in meaning of this term—from legal accusation to ontological condemnation—and shows how its use, fueled by the theory of “settler colonialism,” leads to cutting off any possibility of political action against the war of destruction being waged by the Netanyahu government in Gaza. For by positing that Israel is acting on a logic of annihilation intrinsic to its very existence, the equation “Israel = genocide” becomes the axiom of an ideology that rejects any political solution to the conflict on principle.

 

 

In February 2024, the British social media personality Ash Sarkar interviewed the veteran leftist US senator Bernie Sanders. She posted a four-minute segment of the interview on her X account. It quickly went viral, racking up more than 8 million views. ‘I asked Bernie Sanders three times whether he thinks Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes a genocide,’ she wrote. ‘This is what he said.’^[1] To the first question, Sanders replied that ‘what Israel is doing is absolutely disgraceful, horrible’ and that he was doing ‘everything I can to end it.’ He said he ‘led the opposition’ in Congress to a bill which would have sent $14bn in American aid to Israel, because he didn’t ‘want to see the United States complicit in what Netanyahu and his right wing friends are doing right now to the Palestinian people.’ He called for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ and negotiations to ‘work out…some kind of long term solution.’ Sarkar was not satisfied. She asked again – was it a genocide? ‘We can argue about definitions,’ said Sanders, but what mattered was preventing further deaths and getting aid into Gaza. Sarkar tried once more: genocide or not? ‘We can talk about that,’ Sanders replied. ‘But what does that mean in real terms?’ What he was trying to do, he repeated, was to stop American aid to Israel so that ‘Mr Netanyahu and his right wing friends may decide it is not a good idea to continue’ with their war of destruction.

The response to the clip was savage. Sanders was ‘craven and cowardly,’ ‘spineless’ and a ‘grifter.’ The way he ‘was dancing around the question was so telling.’ Some went further. Sanders – who is Jewish and in his youth had spent time on a kibbutz similar to the ones attacked on 7 October – was a ‘Zionist and [that] explains everything he’s been doing and saying since Oct 7th.’ A week later, another video clip was posted on X, showing Sanders speaking at the University of Dublin. Here his views on term ‘genocide’ became a little clearer. ‘When you get to the word [genocide],’ he said, ‘I get a little bit queasy…and I, you know, I don’t know what, what ‘genocide’? You’ve got to be careful when you use that word.’^[2] At this, those filming the video exploded with rage. They began yelling at Sanders: ‘it is a genocide…Bernie you have funded Zionism yourself, you have funded the Israeli settler state… liar, liar, genocide denier…you are a child killer, you are a genocide denier…the Native Americans are still being genocided [by the USA], I have never heard you once speak about genocide.’ Sanders has faced similar protests at his public appearances ever since.

The treatment of Sanders – a man who almost singlehandedly put the idea of democratic socialism back on the political agenda in the USA – encapsulates the totemic role the concept of ‘genocide’ has come to play in the opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Here we have a leading politician who is forthright in his rejection of the war and who is acting concretely against it at the highest levels of American government. Yet because he refuses to use a particular word to describe the violence he seeks to prevent, he is mocked, vilified and excommunicated. And Sanders is not alone in this regard. The opposition to a war whose initial justice has been progressively undermined by its indefensible conduct is thus split and weakened, perhaps fatally. This raises the question: If the priority of the anti-war movement is preventing further death and destruction in Gaza – and the urgency of this demand, certainly since the resumption of Israeli bombing and blocking of aid in March 2025, cannot be doubted – why does it matter what it is called? Why is it worth sacrificing the unity of the movement on the altar of ‘genocide’?

On one level, the immediate take-up of the ‘genocide’ label – with the first charges issued while the dead were still being gathered from the Nova field and the kibbutzim – is simply further evidence of a general semantic inflation of the term over recent decades. From accusations that governments slow to impose Covid-19 lockdowns were committing genocide, to specious notions of ‘trans’ or ‘white genocide,’ the emotional power carried by the concept has made it a wearyingly ubiquitous rhetorical weapon in a social media-driven attention economy.

‘[T]here was always a nagging sense of guilt about what was done to the Jews. The charge of genocide wipes this guilt away once and for all. Now anyone can say that the Jews do not deserve any more sympathy, because they are as bad as or even worse than the Nazis’ – Philip Spencer

Yet when it comes to the application of the concept to Israel, there is, as ever, more at stake than internet posturing. For some observers, the appeal of the concept of ‘genocide’ in this context can be explained by the opportunity it affords to engage in a victim-perpetrator reversal, or Holocaust inversion. By accusing Israel – a state that rose from the ashes of an annihilated European Jewry – of genocide, of doing to others what was once done to them, Israel is placed on the same level as the Nazi regime. As Philip Spencer puts it, ‘[t]here was always a nagging sense of guilt about what was done to the Jews. The charge of genocide wipes this guilt away once and for all. Now anyone can say that the Jews do not deserve any more sympathy, because they are as bad as or even worse than the Nazis.’^[3] At the same time, for Spencer, by spuriously accusing Israel of genocide for its response to Hamas atrocities which were themselves laced with genocidal intent, ‘the concept and charge of genocide is turned on its head.’ 

The eagerness with which so many grabbed the chance to accuse Israel of genocide in the aftermath of 7 October surely does have something to do with the taboo-breaking thrill of inverting, and thereby finally cancelling out, the Shoah. That for Pankaj Mishra – in a lecture delivered, bizarrely, as a sermon from the lectern of St James’ Church, Clerkenwell – it is Israel’s war that is ‘dynamiting the edifice of global norms’ built after ‘the Shoah’– rather, say, than Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad’s flagrant use of chemical weapons, or the US invasion of Iraq – is no coincidence.^[4] Nor is it just chance that the terminology of ‘concentration camp,’ ‘Auschwitz,’ ‘Warsaw Ghetto,’ ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ itself has long been ostentatiously used to condemn Israel’s treatment of Gaza and the Palestinian people.  Sanders’s ‘queasiness’ at the use of the term by the anti-war movement no doubt stems from his recognition of this dynamic. That Sarkar too is aware of the weight of the word for Sanders is what lends the interview the uncomfortable air of a forced confession. 

And yet to limit the meaning of the genocide charge to Holocaust inversion is to miss something significant about the work the concept is doing in contemporary debates about Israel. The claim that Israel is committing genocide ‘like the Nazis’ is an argument made at the level of action and intent. It is, despite its gross exaggerations and projected fantasies, at root an empirical claim, which can be proven or disproven by evidence and reasoned argument. It says: there is evidence that Israel is acting in such a way that it should be found guilty of the crime of genocide. This crime has a legal definition (‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group’) and a juridical apparatus built to prosecute it.

Generally, an accusation of genocide such as this is targeted at particular perpetrators – the specific political leaders, faction, government or ‘regime’ held responsible. Thus, aside perhaps from the radical left anti-Deutsch movement^[5], the claim that the Nazis perpetrated a genocide against European Jews does not inevitably lead onto the argument that Germany should not exist as a state. Rather, the German state is presented as being hijacked by the radical right, who won over the population through a combination of terror and ideology, and then used that state’s apparatus to commit genocide. The defeat of the Nazi regime was thus followed by a programme of ‘denazification’ aimed at removing its remnants from the German state and reintegrating it into the democratic world order. This story is, of course, complicated by the division of Germany, and the ‘success’ of denazification was shortlived at best. But the point is that the accusation of Nazi genocide stopped short at the German state itself. 

The claim that the Nazis perpetrated a genocide against European Jews does not inevitably lead onto the argument that Germany should not exist as a state.

In Sanders’ interview with Sarkar, he repeatedly tries to make ‘Mr Netanyahu and his right wing friends’ responsible for the ‘disgraceful’ conduct of the war. Sanders is following here the same political logic that led to post-war denazification. The Israeli hard-right is responsible for the carnage in Gaza: they should be deprived of funds, removed from power and a new government formed which will negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians and reintegrate Israel into the democratic world order. The same argument is made by the Israeli left: in a discursive context broadly free of antisemitism and the threat of Holocaust inversion, some even accuse ‘Netanyahu and his friends’ of genocide. And there is certainly no a priori reason why Israeli political and military leaders could not, hypothetically, be legitimately accused of genocide today: the fact that your ancestors experienced genocidal violence might aggravate the charge but it does not inoculate you from inflicting genocidal violence on others. Moreover, there is ample evidence that some Israeli politicians have repeatedly engaged in incitement to genocide since 7 October, even if a direct connection between far-right rhetoric and actions on the ground has yet to be shown.^[6] 

But for Sarkar and her fellow travelers, attempts to politicise the war in Gaza – by focusing on the actions of particular named individuals or specific political currents – are wholly inadequate, even outright dangerous. Not only does politicization bring the actions and ideology of Hamas into play, complicating a simple moral fable by attributing agency to both sides of the ledger.  Once political differences between the Israeli right, left and centre are acknowledged, one is in danger of missing the fact that – and here the differences from the German case become clear – it is not the Netanyahu ‘regime’ that is the problem, but the Israeli state itself. That is, the charge of genocide to which Sarkar demands Sanders accede is not aimed at a particular Israeli government or political faction as a result of their actions. It is not, in fact, a matter of doing at all – it is a matter of being.

The theoretical basis of this understanding of ‘genocide’ as being rather than doing are revealed in the shouts of Sanders’ Dublin hecklers: Israel is a ‘settler state’ whose ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is akin to that of the Native Americans. What is active in this concept of ‘genocide’ is not principally the discourse of Holocaust inversion but rather that of settler colonialism. As Adam Kirsch has recently noted, the notion of genocide is fundamental to the settler colonial theory that has, from its modern origins in the Australian ‘history wars’ of the mid-1990s, now attained a dominant position within numerous scholarly fields and political movements.^[7] According to the theory, what distinguishes settler colonies like Australia, the USA, and Canada from the ‘extractive’ colonialism of British India or French Algeria is that in the latter the ‘natives’ are needed for their labour. In the former, they just get in the way, and are therefore ripe for genocide. For the British-Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, one of the founding fathers of settler colonial theory, a ‘logic of elimination’ underpins virtually everything a settler colony does from the initial moment of ‘invasion’: elimination of the ‘natives’ ‘is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.’^[8]

At the most extreme end of the settler colonial continuum of ‘elimination’ stands the act of bodily extermination. But it goes far beyond this: for Lorenzo Veracini, the Australian editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies, the singular logic of what he terms ‘transfer’ extends all the way from physical ‘liquidation’ and pushing ‘bodies…across borders’ – that is, ethnic cleansing – to ‘transfer by assimilation’ – offering citizenship to ‘natives’ – and even ‘diplomatic transfer,’ the establishment of ‘sovereign or semi-sovereign political entities’ independently controlled by the ‘natives.’^[9] Once this radically distended concept of ‘elimination’ or ‘transfer’ has been grasped, including the equivalence it seems to draw between physical annihilation, citizenship and the establishment of ‘sovereign political entities,’ it becomes clear that, once the status of ‘settler state’ has been assigned, there is nothing that state can do which is not either explicitly or implicitly eliminationist. As Kirsch puts it, ‘the ideology of settler colonialism proposes a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.’ Genocide makes up the essence of the settler state: genocide is the state, and the state is genocide.

The charge of genocide to which Sarkar demands Sanders accede is not aimed at a particular Israeli government or political faction as a result of their actions. It is not, in fact, a matter of doing at all – it is a matter of being.

It follows that there is nothing that can be done to salvage a settler colonial state. While an ‘extractive colony’ run by a minority of settlers can be overthrown through an anti-colonial national liberation movement, the remains of an eliminated ‘native’ people cannot destroy a long-established state in which ‘settlers’ make up the vast majority of the population. Unlike the post-Nazi German state, which could at least attempt to make some kind of reparation for its genocidal actions, the only reparation a settler colonial state can make for its genocidal being is its abolition. Opposition to settler colonialism and its genocidal essence is by definition all or nothing. And this means, in concrete political terms, it is invariably nothing: it is, as the infamous tweet put it, merely ‘vibes, essays, papers.’ There is one ‘settler state,’ however, where the prospect of abolition appears to be tantalizingly in reach: Israel. 

While modern settler colonial theory is a thoroughly Australian production, it is possible to trace a subterranean origin story in which Israel provides the template for the settler colonial model. Certainly the works of 1960s PLO theorists such as Fayez Sayegh contain elements of the ‘logic of elimination’ that would later be formalized by Wolfe and Veracini. In any event, the latter certainly wasted no time in applying their ‘structure not event’ model to Israel, its formation and relation to what were increasingly described as the ‘indigenous’ Palestinians.^[10] The use of ‘indigenous’ here is not, in general, criterial – that is, the claim is not that Palestinians have been on the land since ‘time immemorial’ in the manner of Australian Aborigines or Native Americans (although this dubious assertion is increasingly common in popular discourses). Rather Palestinian indigeneity is understood here in relational terms – Palestinians are indigenous because Israelis are settlers. The concept of ‘indigeneity’ therefore makes up the third element of the settler colonial syllogism: one cannot say (Israeli) ‘settler’ without saying (Palestinian) ‘indigeneity’ – nor ‘genocide.’ 

The attempt to force the history of Israel into the Australian model was not without its struggles, however. As Benjamin Wexler has noted, Wolfe was obliged to acknowledge a series of distinct features of Jewish settlement in the Middle East that distinguished it from that of European settler colonialism elsewhere.^[11] Jewish settlers, Wolfe admits, had no colonial ‘mother country’ from which they moved; up until the 1947-48 Arab-Jewish wars, Jews legally purchased land rather than ‘invading’ and taking it by force; in the Jewish case, uniquely, an independent national identity preceded rather than followed settlement; the choice of land was not based on economic or political happenstance but deeply connected to the identity of the settlers, an identity shaped by a historical narrative of prior expulsion from the very land in which they now sought to (re)settle; Jewish settlement was initially limited by the desire for territorially contiguous parcels of land, rather than the American or Australian model of ever expanding ‘frontier’ settlement; and it was characterised by collective land ownership rather than private property.^[12] For his part, Veracini argues that Israel differs from the US and Australia because it is an incomplete settler colony: the acceptance of partition, intermittent territorial wars and the existence of Arab-Israelis (or Palestinian citizens of Israel) means that Israel has been unable to ‘supersede itself,’ to erase its origins.^[13] It is the partiality of the Israeli settler colonial project which makes it, uniquely, vulnerable to attack.

The Nakba is stripped of its status as a distinct historical ‘event,’ with its own specific causes and consequences, and becomes an overarching genocidal ‘structure’ that has determined the history of Israel and Palestine from the moment the first Jewish settlers (or returnees) arrived.

Yet rather than concluding that the number and significance of these exceptions meant that the concept of ‘settler colonialism’ and its accompany logic of elimination is of little explanatory value when analysing the history of Israel, Wolfe came to the opposite conclusion. The various exceptions are highlighted in order to prove that, in its essence, Zionism is even more a settler colonial project, and even more committed to elimination, than those which do fit neatly into the pattern. At the centre of this argument are the events during the 1947-49 war that would be later conceptualised in Palestinian discourse as the ‘Nakba’ (or ‘catastrophe’). For Wolfe, these wartime episodes of violent expulsion and flight of Arab inhabitants within parts of what would become the state of Israel revealed the core ‘logic’ of elimination that was the hidden essence of Zionism all along. Effectively, Wolfe reads history backwards from the events of the ‘Nakba.’ He argues that, for all the pre-history of limited, non-violent legal purchase of land, and all the ‘soothing assurances’ in which Zionist leaders ‘asserted their intention to live in harmonious tandem with Palestine’s Arab population,’ it was only contingent circumstances – the presence of the British, a relative absence of Jewish immigrants prior to the Holocaust – that prevented Zionist settlers from unleashing a campaign of violent land appropriation. The Nakba ‘was Zionism’s first opportunity’ to fulfil a plan that had long been in the works, namely a ‘more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination’ than anything seen in Australia and North America. The Nakba was thus a ‘consolidation’ of Zionism’s innate essence, ‘rather than a point of origin.’

This argument has been taken up wholesale by settler colonial theorists, with the events preceding, during and following the 1947-49 war – indeed, right up to the present day – reconstructed so as to slot neatly within the pre-prepared conceptual architecture of Wolfe’s theory. The Nakba is stripped of its status as a distinct historical ‘event,’ with its own specific causes and consequences, and becomes an overarching genocidal ‘structure’ that has determined the history of Israel and Palestine from the moment the first Jewish settlers (or returnees) arrived. Indeed, the specificity of any ‘event’ within that history is erased by the need to make it fit within the totalising logic of the settler colonial paradigm. Once this logic has been identified, any historical evidence that contradicts or counters it can, and must, be discounted as mere ‘Zionist apologism.’^[14] Wolfe openly declares that one ‘should not submit to the tyranny of [historical] detail,’ if doing so lessens the explanatory power of the structure.^[15] The result is a circular argument in which the theorist filters the historical record to select events which appear to cohere to a pre-established logical pattern, discards all elements which do not fit, and then asserts that those events, and thus the entire history, can only be explained by that logic. 

Just as historical ‘detail’ is rendered irrelevant in the face of the genocidal being of Israel, so too is politics. Attempting to historicise or politicise the process which resulted in the Nakba, 7 October or, like Sanders, the ‘disgraceful’ war that followed is to remain hopelessly marooned at the level of superficial ‘superstructure’ rather than objective ‘base.’ From the settler colonial perspective, regardless of the stated subjective intentions, political beliefs or actual actions of any given Zionist settler, their objective meaning can only be one of elimination. On the other side, no matter how clearly Hamas state their desire to erase Jewish presence in the Middle East, as the representatives of an eternal ‘indigenous’ sovereignty, their actions can at an objective level only ever be ones of righteous restoration: the erasure of political distinctions is as effective on the side of the ‘indigenous’ as much as on that of the ‘settler.’ Given this, the speed with which Israel was convicted and Hamas acquitted of genocidal intent in the wake of 7 October should be no surprise. As a settler state Israel is always-already genocidal, meaning that there was no response to 7 October that would not, in the end, fall under the logic of elimination. 

The settler colonial Weltanschauung draws a veil of dehistoricisation and depoliticisation over the conflict, making it impossible to see the current catastrophe as anything but the inevitable expression of an irresistible logic, rather than the contingent result of a series of historical encounters, political struggles and moral choices.

This, then, is the weight carried by the concept of genocide in the current debate. The demand that one accepts the word, the insistence that no other method or means of opposing the war are permissible, is a demand to abandon the open-ended terrain of history and politics in favour of the strictly guarded ground of essentialised meaning and inexorable logic. It is a demand that Israel be held to account not for its actions, for its leaders, for the political trajectory that has led to a rampant far-right holding the reins of government, but for its essence, its very being. At an ontological level, there is nothing an Israeli can do to purge themselves of their original settler sin – and nothing a Palestinian can do to cast doubt on the righteousness of their actions. The absolutism of this position mirrors, ironically enough, nothing more than that of the Zionist far right, for whom there is no Israeli action that cannot be justified, and no Palestinian claim that should not be immediately dismissed. 

Acceding to ‘genocide’ here is not, then, a question of evaluating this or that piece of empirical evidence about Israel’s conduct of the war. It is not, in fact, a claim that can be proven or countered by evidence at all: whether the International Court of Justice rules Israel to have committed genocide or not is of no consequence here, as demonstrated by the widespread misrepresentation of the legal meaning of the term ‘plausible’ in the ICJ’s January 2024 provisional ruling.^[16] Indeed, the legal definition of ‘genocide,’ with its outmoded focus on ‘intent,’ is increasingly derided as a regrettable obstacle blocking the more elastic – and politically amenable – notion of ‘structural genocide.’^[17] Instead, the intonation of ‘genocide’ today has become a ritualistic incantation signalling wholesale acceptance of the settler-indigenous-genocide conceptual field, one in which each element presupposes and necessitates the next, all impervious to critique or refutation. Once adopted, the settler colonial Weltanschauung draws a veil of dehistoricisation and depoliticisation over the conflict, making it impossible to see the current catastrophe as anything but the inevitable expression of an irresistible logic, rather than the contingent result of a series of historical encounters, political struggles and moral choices. But it is only by recognising this historical contingency – and with it, the understanding that things could have been different, and still can – that it becomes possible to assign political and moral responsibility, and, like Bernie Sanders, try to find a way out. 

In September 2024, Susan Watkins, the long-standing editor of the rabidly anti-Zionist New Left Review, was heavily criticised by the journal’s readership for questioning the anti-war movement’s insistence on ‘genocide.’ Watkins said that there had been ‘ongoing disagreement’ within NLR over the ‘analytical…precis[ion]’ of the term ‘genocide’ as a description of Israel’s actions.^[18] She suggested that ‘genocide’ had been chosen by the movement not because of its ‘accuracy’ but to make its rhetoric as ‘emotionally powerful as possible’ and therefore ‘build the biggest movement.’ While acknowledging the effectiveness of this strategy, Watkins argued that choosing ‘terms on the basis of their alarmist character is bad politics.’ Watkins correctly recognises that the use of ‘genocide’ has been, for the most part, motivated by emotion and group identification rather than sober analysis. But her conclusion should be pushed further. Approaching the Israel-Palestine conflict through the rigid formula of settler-indigenous-genocide is not just ‘bad politics,’ but opposed to politics altogether. 

The totalising logic of the settler colonial model leaves no space for the working through of conflicts, the mutual recognition of shared interests or the creation of new modes of collective life that is the basis of political action. It therefore abandons politics as a potential – perhaps the only – source of concrete change, and replaces it with an abject fatalism disguised as uncompromising radicalism. To the extent that such fatalistic anti-politics can find external expression at all, it is limited to isolated acts of terrorism in which the momentary ecstasy of pure violence takes precedence over political strategy, social critique or ethical considerations. It has as little interest in contributing to Sanders’ ‘long term solution’ as it does in recognising the shared historical basis of Israeli and Palestinian identities – in acknowledging that each ‘side’ has developed historically through, rather than against, the other. The threat that this abandonment of politics and history poses to Israelis – and to any Jewish person who refuses to collapse a critique of Israeli action into that of Israeli being – should not be underestimated. The murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim on the streets of New York, and the celebration of those for whom the only fate a ‘settler’ deserves is physical (rather than conceptual) elimination, testify to that. But if the dead end of anti-political absolutism is the only language Palestinians are permitted to understand their past and to forge a new future for themselves, it is they, once again, who will ultimately bear the brunt.

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Matthew Bolton