Israel’s Genocidal Assault on Gaza: A Lecture with Raz Segal

Within days of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 mass murders across rural communities around the Gaza Strip, 1.1 million Gazans had been ordered to flee northern Gaza. At the same time, the death toll in Gaza was rising under Israel’s constant bombing of the densely populated walled-in strip. Raz Segal, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, was among the first in his field to raise the alarm, calling Israel’s response “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” By November 2nd, 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned “Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.”

The International Court of Justice has since ruled the Israeli assault a “plausible genocide.” Against the backdrop of the Jewish High Holy Days and the grim one-year anniversary of the conflict, Professor Raz Segal visited the University of Notre Dame on October 10, 2024 to discuss the Genocide Convention as it applies to the Israeli attacks on Gaza and more recently on the West Bank and Lebanon. Professor Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at Notre Dame and Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, South Bend-based MD OBGYN who volunteered in Gaza in June 2024, responded. Below is a recording of the lecture followed by a short summary of key ideas from the lecture and question and answer section. The event was co-sponsored by Contending Modernities, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Center for Social Concerns.

 

Key Ideas and Highlights from the Lecture:

“I have to admit I’m just mostly very sad these days,” opened Segal. Marking one year of this most recent assault and over 100 years of historical context leading up to it, Segal detailed examples of an “intent to destroy” an entire community of people–not just fighters–expressed publicly by Israeli government officials with command authority. He then matched this intent with Israeli military action in Gaza. He highlighted in particular the tactic of mass starvation, noting: “at a certain point of these long processes of starvation, right, perpetrators cannot anymore deny that they [don’t] know and understand the consequences of their actions”; that they have “created conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.”

The war in Gaza is unprecedented in many ways, Segal noted, but key among them is the rise of global Nakba memory, not least in the repeated Israeli government claims of creating a new “Gaza Nakba.” The history of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 by proto-IDF forces during the creation of the State of Israel, while the Genocide Convention was being written and signed, has long been silenced. “Nakba denial is structural in Holocaust memory, but also in the international legal system,” Segal told the audience. But now, “the Israelis are saying the quiet part out loud.”

Ernesto Verdeja, himself a scholar of genocide and mass atrocity, followed up on Segal’s comment that the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies was in crisis and that for many scholars of the Holocaust, it was “business as usual,” per Segal. “Many genocides were always examined and assessed to the extent that they were in conformity with what we knew about the Holocaust,” Verdeja explained. ”The crisis of Genocide Studies that Raz has emphasized for us, means also questioning some of the foundational concepts at the very heart of how we make sense of mass atrocities. What does it mean to be a perpetrator? How do we think of the nature of ideology? How do we think of the motives and the intentions of particular actors and the rights of victims, and who is grievable and who is not grievable.”

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, who lives and works near  Notre Dame, spent three weeks in Gaza in June 2024 as a volunteer MD OBGYN through Baitumaal. It was very difficult to go to Gaza, she shared, flipping through photographs of the approval process and her travel from Jordan into Israel and through a Gaza checkpoint and the rubble of bombed apartment buildings. “They couldn’t guarantee our safety.” She worked in a hospital with no soap, no air conditioning, performing surgeries at 104 Fahrenheit. Through a hospital window she could see the churned earth where a mass grave with over 300 people, including health care workers, was found after Israeli forces raided the Al Nasser hospital. The hospital director was released from 7 months of detention while she was at the hospital. Hospital staff were all living in tents, sick from the lack of clean water, working though they had not been paid in 9 months. Her fellow volunteers were among the 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics who sounded the alarm that they were frequently seeing young Palestinian children with bullet wounds to the head and chest.

 

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Selected Excerpts

The audience of students, staff, faculty, and community members had the opportunity to share questions after a brief discussion period. A few selections from the lecture and Q&A are highlighted below, lightly edited for clarity.

Does “military necessity” mean there isn’t a genocide?

Verdeja: Part of the point about genocide is that what makes genocide somewhat distinct from other major crimes in international law is the emphasis not only on group destruction and not just group repression but also on the question of intentionality. That is, that the actions have to be committed in such a way that the perpetrators intend to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.

But this is an important point, because I think a lot of the debates at the present moment tend to obfuscate some of the really important analytical points here. Often you will see, “Well, Israel is not committing genocide because it’s engaged in a war of defense or national security.”

There’s a distinction between intentionality, which is what the crime requires proof of, and the motives that underpin that intentionality. There are many different motives or justifications that are compatible with the intent to destroy: it can be territorial acquisition. It can be a claim to security, it can be ethnic or racial supremacy or eradication, etc. We can imagine a lot of different types of motivations, but the point is that those motivations are compatible with the intention to destroy a group in whole or in part. So, the issue of whether it’s genocide or not is an issue that is irrespective of the motives underpinning what the perpetrators themselves are doing.

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How do you navigate discourses that we need to “engage with both sides of the conflict”? 

Segal: I don’t think there are sides in this sort of violence, whatever we want to call it right? And you know, we have to understand also that even in cases [where] there’s a significant consensus that they’re a genocide, right? I mentioned the Herero and Nama, for example, in German Southwest Africa…. The genocide was a result of the uprising of the Herero, which was very violent, that is, they attacked German settlers and their families and murdered them.

The German colonialists were acting from their perspective of what we would call today “self-defense.” And like the Israelis, they were fighting a war against “barbarians.” This, by the way, harkens back to the origins of international law because international law was always about regulating wars between “civilized” nations. That is, Europeans. It was never meant to apply to colonial warfare. Right? That’s just the basic history of how international law emerges. So that’s what we’re seeing in front of our eyes. Now, there are no two sides to that. I know that’s more complicated.

But I don’t see sides here when we see a destructive assault of this kind against a people and a culture and their society and their lands in this way. Now this, this attack is meant… The rationale of the Israeli State has always been that this is the way to provide security to Jews. Or this is one of the rationales of the Israeli state.

Okay.

Now, this, of course, was a system that meant that my security as an Israeli Jew was based on the insecurity and the oppression of Palestinians. Now, has this worked? You know we can ask Israeli Jews, “has this worked? Do you feel safe today?”

Of course it hasn’t worked. Of course it hasn’t worked.

Verdeja: I think, on the question of how to navigate discourses that talk about both sides, the kind of the both side-ism question, I would simply emphasize that whenever we’re talking about any complex political phenomena you have to take seriously asymmetries in power, right?

And the discourse or the language of both sides sometimes functions to cover up or obfuscate that because it treats all of the different sides, so to speak, first of all as monolithic sides, as if there is a “Jewish side,” and we’ve just heard the complexity around that, or a “Palestinian side,” or a “Muslim side,” etc. So we need to disentangle that a little bit. One.

And two we need to take seriously that there are again power differentials here. And so the language of side-ism, I think, reproduces this myopia around what actually is happening on the ground, which is why, following my earlier comment, one has to start from the perspective of evidence. What is the evidence?

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Not a Post-Holocaust World:

Segal: We still live in a world structured, politically and ideologically, in the same way as the Holocaust world was.

But we are also living in a time of change that few could have imagined before October 7th. For the voices of Palestinians who are facing Israel’s genocidal assault are now, for the first time in the history of the ongoing Nakba, front and center around the world, really front and center. Also in national and international courts from California to the Hague, marking an era beyond impunity for Israel, when the crime of genocide might serve, not as it emerged, to blur the Nakba, to deny Israeli state violence, but now to support the struggle against it, and the effort to envision a truly different decolonial world.

It is indeed the voices of Palestinians that now point to a new era when the promise of Holocaust memory will center the voices and experiences of survivors and forcibly displaced people; that promise, now, at the beginning of what, again, I suggest we can call perhaps the era of global Nakba memory. That promise may finally be realized.