Israel condemns genocide scholars’ resolution as ‘disgraceful’

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday denounced a resolution passed on Aug. 31 by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) accusing Israel of “widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide” as “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard.”

“It is entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein. “The IAGS did not do the most basic task in research, which is to verify the information.”

The resolution was backed by 86% of IAGS members according to Reuters, though according to IAGS member Sara Brown only 129 of 500, or 25%, of members did so. It included a litany of accusations against Israel, from burying thousands under rubble to attacking doctors, journalists and aid workers to depriving the population of food, medicine and water.

“Above all, the IAGS has set a historic precedent—for the first time, ‘Genocide Scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide—despite Hamas’s attempted genocide against the Jewish people, murdering 1,200 people, raping women, burning families alive, and declaring its goal of killing every Jew. Disgraceful,” said Marmorstein.

The resolution called on Israel to immediately end actions alleged to constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza.

It also called on International Criminal Court member states to uphold their obligations by cooperating with the court and surrendering individuals subject to arrest warrants. (The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.)

Additionally, the resolution urged all states to enforce international law, including the Genocide Convention, the Arms Trade Treaty and humanitarian law in relation to Israel and “Palestine.”

The academic group referred also to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, which it called “international crimes.” It did not call upon Hamas to release the hostages in its resolution.

IAGS member Brown, author of “Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda” and who also serves as regional director of the American Jewish Committee in San Diego, sharply criticized the resolution and the process by which it was passed.

“Anyone who considers themself a genocide scholar should feel embarrassed by this vote,” she posted to X, part of a series of posts venting her disgust at the resolution.

“I have been a member of @GenocideStudies for over a decade and can confirm the process was a disaster from start to finish. Those of us against the resolution tried to submit our concerns for discussion but were blocked by the leadership,” she wrote.

Members had been promised a virtual town hall, which is typical for controversial resolutions, but the association president reversed that promise, she continued.

“The association has also refused to disclose who were the authors of the resolution,” she added.

“This resolution does real harm by recklessly bandying the term ‘genocide’ to describe this war and gives fodder to the people who will read this resolution and leverage it to justify hurting Jews,” said Brown.

“This resolution is incorrect in its assessment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It includes many unsubstantiated claims, is poorly cited (using deeply biased, questionable sources), and perpetuates an intentionally distorted analysis of the Israel Hamas War,” she added.

Others have commented on the sources cited by the resolution, most of them known for an extreme anti-Israel bias, including Amnesty International; DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), a U.S.-based NGO that has sought arrest warrants against Israelis; B’Tselem; Human Rights Watch; and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, recently sanctioned by the United States.

The IAGS was founded in 1994 and describes its purpose as gathering individuals from a wide variety of disciplines with the aim of preventing genocide.

Prior to the resolution, other scholars have accused Israel of genocide, most prominently Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, in a July 15 op-ed in The New York Times.

Bartov came in for criticism from a host of scholars, including John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point.

“Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm” in Gaza, said Spencer, including warning before attacks, opening safe corridors, canceling missions because children were in the vicinity and withholding return fire even when under attack because civilians might be harmed.

Spencer also noted that “Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime.”

In late July, Israel’s main Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, categorically rejected claims that Israel was perpetrating genocide as “dangerous distortions” of historical truth that “desecrate the memory of the victims” of the Nazi genocide.

Yad Vashem stands “firmly against the instrumentalization of genocide-related language and Holocaust imagery for political purposes by anyone, including scholars and public figures in Israel and abroad,” a museum spokesman told JNS.

Israel Charny, a co-founder of the International Association of Genocide Scholars who died in Jerusalem on Dec. 14, 2024, said in February 2024 that Israel was acting in self-defense and even if there was a ceasefire, “Israel should underscore its readiness to return to massive destruction of Gaza in response to any further bombings or invasions by Hamas.”

“I believe that Israel should stop the war at the earliest possible time,” he said. “But I would insist on prior release of the Israeli hostages whose kidnappings constitute crimes against humanity.”