"By any definition": Clarifying whether Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza
Follow up to u/oliver-coffee's insightful breakdown.
And by 'clarifying' - I'm not talking about me, some goober on reddit, clarifying anything. Rather, one of the world's foremost experts, Alice Nderitu:
Recognize that face? You’ll be forgiven if not. Corporate media has suppressed her story nearly completely. She’s one of the leading experts in the world on genocide. When Oct 7 happened, she was the UN's Special Adviser on Genocide Prevention (aka the UN’s top genocide expert). Look her up in NYT, BBC etc - you’ll see plenty of articles declaring her expertise… (before Oct 7 only, though). Throughout her career, she’s been committed to atrocity prevention and ensuring the term "genocide" retains its legal clarity, moral power, and gravity. As the war in Gaza escalated, “powerful voices attempted to transform [her warnings about the conduct of the IDF] into official declarations of genocide.” In her words:
“[there was a strong] push that I should say that there’s a genocide going on in Gaza. I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody. This was a war. Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side… By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the U.N. was created for.”
Despite daily pressure from UN colleagues to publicly declare Israel’s military campaign a genocide, she refused to bow to the political pressure and do so. This stance was not taken out of condonation for the IDF actions, but rather out of a conviction that the war was not genocide “by any definition”.
What did she mean by “by any definition”? Her office has put out some breakdowns:
The assertion that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constituted a genocide collapses when evaluated systematically against actual, historically verified genocides. Below is a structured comparative analysis across 6 core criteria used by historians and legal scholars to define genocide
Component 1: Death Toll | Demographic Net Change & Total Number Killed
A defining hallmark of genocide is meaningful demographic destruction.
- Holocaust: -63% net change. ~6 million killed out of 9.5 million Jews. Still fewer Jews on earth today than in 1938.
- Rwandan Genocide (1994): -76% (Pre-Event Population of 1M tutsis reduced to 260,000 in 100 days).
- Cambodian Genocide (1975–1979): -25% (~1.5–2 million executed/starved).
- Armenian Genocide: ~1.75 million → ~650k (−26%).
- 2023+ Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Focus: Genocide of Palestinians): 0% to +2% net change. 60,000+ killed. High birth rates offset casualties, maintaining a flat-to-positive demographic curve.
Component 2: Specific Intent (Dolus Specialis) to Destroy Civilians
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, there must be proven explicit intent to destroy a protected group. Historical comparison:
1. The Holocaust
- The Intent: Nazi stated intention was the total, systematic physical extermination of every Jewish person in Europe.
- How Intent Was Executed: Concentration camps, ghettoes, death squads (Einsatzgruppen).
2. Rwandan Genocide
- The Intent: Hutu extremists (Interahamwe and government forces) sought the complete eradication of the Tutsi population.
- How Intent Was Executed: Radio propaganda (RTLM) broadcast names and locations of Tutsis. Machetes and firearms were distributed nationally.
3. Cambodian Genocide
- The Intent: Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge intended to forcibly dismantle modern society and create an agrarian communist utopia by eliminating "corrupting" elements.
- How Intent Was Executed: "Killing Fields," forced labor, targeting of minorities & Intellectuals.
4. Armenian Genocide
- The Intent: The Young Turks pursued an official policy to rid the empire of its Christian subjects.
- How Intent Was Executed: "Killing Fields," forced labor, targeting of minorities & Intellectuals.
5. Gaza (2023–Present)
- The Intent: IDF objectives are defined as destroying the military infrastructure of Hamas, eliminating its leadership, and recovering hostages following the October 7th attacks.
- Operational Conduct vs. Historical Intent:
- Unlike historical genocides, the IDF utilizes warning mechanisms (SMS, phone calls, roof-knocks, map-grid evacuations) to warn & remove civilians from target zones before strikes.
- Israel facilitates ongoing humanitarian operations, including coordinating mass polio vaccinations for over 500,000 Gazan children and permitting aid corridors inside an active warzone.
- The primary military target is an embedded insurgent force operating within dense civilian infrastructure, not the physical eradication of the Palestinian population as an ethnic group.
- Note: The intent of the IDF, to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible, is inverted two-fold by Hamas. First, they obviously intend to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. Second, by embedding rocket launchers, armories, and command posts directly inside and beneath schools, mosques, residential towers, and hospitals (such as Al-Shifa), Hamas ensured that any Israeli attempt to destroy military targets would guarantee high-value civilian collateral damage. Again, their goal in this strategy is to kill civilians - Gazan civilians. This behavior is unlike any true genocide.
Component 3: Ability of Victim Group's Leadership to End the Conflict
In a true genocide, the targeted group is powerless to stop their own extermination—the perpetrator's intent is total destruction regardless of victim behavior.
European Jews could not end Nazi extermination by negotiating a ceasefire. Armenian civilians could not stop deportations by releasing hostages. Gaza differs because Hamas is an armed organization whose decisions about hostages, disarming, and negotiations affect the conflict.
On Oct 7, Hamas initiated the war, which some mainstream media and political powers like the UN are trying to twist into a genocide. If they succeed, it will be the only genocide where the victims's initiated it.
Component 4: How did the victim group respond when violence ended?
The psychological and behavioral baseline of victims in a genocide is survival and profound trauma, not military celebration. The survivor response is universal: profound mourning, trauma, displacement, search for missing, demand for recognition.
After the conflict in Gaza, the population celebrated their "victory" in the streets. Hamas leadership called Oct 7 and the entire war a divine success, promised to repeat it, and then began executing rival Gazans. That is not survivor leadership behavior. That is combatant leadership behavior.
Anyway, Alice stood up for the truth, and the political repercussions were expected. It's the UN, after all:
LMK if you guys know all this. Here's their info in a table:
