The title of this article paraphrases the famous 1992 Bill Clinton campaign line, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The intention is the same: to return to what is essential. Genocide is not synonymous with war, destruction, civilian deaths or even war crimes. It is a crime with a specific legal definition and an exceptionally demanding requirement of intent.
The word has become so ubiquitous in international coverage of Gaza that it seems to have lost that specificity. It is repeated in political statements, protests and news reports—sometimes in quotation marks, sometimes in columnists’ own words and sometimes absorbed into the narrative itself. Repetition has a powerful effect, as an accusation still being adjudicated begins to be perceived as an established fact.
That transformation was on display this week at the United Nations. Addressing the General Assembly, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke not of allegations of genocide, but of “the genocide perpetrated by the Netanyahu government” in Gaza. Yet the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where the genocide case against Israel is being adjudicated, has not ruled on this.
Another revealing example comes from Turkey, which has asked Interpol to issue a Red Notice for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in connection with a criminal case involving the Gaza flotilla, with allegations including genocide, crimes against humanity and torture.
There is a historical irony that rarely accompanies those headlines.
Between 1915 and 1916, Ottoman authorities carried out massacres that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, an episode widely recognized as genocide. The Republic of Turkey, established later, continues to reject that designation. Netanyahu, now accused of genocide by Ankara, leads a country whose government formally recognized the Armenian genocide in June. The government subsequently announced the decision to the Knesset and said it intended to bring the matter before parliament for a vote.
None of this absolves Israel of any violations of international law it may have committed, nor does the Ottoman past prevent Turkey from criticizing Israel. Violations of the laws of war can and do occur in armed conflicts without, by themselves, constituting genocide.
The court’s 2015 judgment in Croatia v. Serbia shows how high that bar is.
The more interesting point is another. Turkey itself insists on a strict legal definition when rejecting the genocide designation for the Armenian massacres. It argues that genocide requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and maintains that such a determination should be made by a competent court.
In an official foreign ministry overview of Turkey’s position on the events of 1915, Ankara puts the principle even more bluntly: “Genocide is a clearly defined crime. Genocide is not a generic word to be used loosely to describe some grave atrocity.” The document goes on to argue that judgment on such an accusation should not be left to political considerations and that parliaments should not take the place of courts. It is difficult to formulate the principle any better.
The term genocide was coined by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944, amid the Holocaust, and incorporated into international law through the 1948 Genocide Convention by the United Nations. But the distinction is not merely semantic. Genocide requires dolus specialis: the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. And that intent cannot simply be presumed from the scale of suffering.
The ICJ has set a demanding standard. When there is no direct evidence of genocidal intent, such intent can be inferred from a pattern of conduct only if no other reasonable inference can be drawn from the acts in question.
The court’s 2015 judgment in Croatia v. Serbia shows how high that bar is.
The ICJ found that killings and serious bodily or mental harm had been inflicted on members of the Croat population—acts constituting the physical element of genocide under the convention. Yet it still rejected Croatia’s genocide claim because the specific intent to destroy the group had not been established.
That distinction is crucial. Even acts that fall within the physical element of genocide do not, by themselves, establish the crime of genocide. The specific intent must also be proved.
That matters enormously in the Gaza Strip. Civilian deaths do not by themselves establish genocidal intent. Neither does widespread destruction, displacement, hunger or alleged violations of the laws of war. Each may raise grave legal questions of its own. But genocide requires something more: evidence that such acts were carried out with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians, in whole or in substantial part, as a group.
The ICJ has yet to issue a judgment on the merits in South Africa’s case against Israel. It has ordered provisional measures, but those measures are not a finding that genocide occurred. The court has not found that Israel committed genocide.
In this debate, it is also worth noticing which voices receive less attention. John Spencer at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, one of the best-known experts on combat in densely populated areas, has visited Gaza during the war and compared the Israeli operation with U.S. battles against terrorists, such as Fallujah (2004) and Mosul (2016-17) in Iraq, and Raqqa (2017) in Syria. He argues that Israel adopted unprecedented civilian-harm mitigation measures while confronting an extensive underground infrastructure and fighters embedded in civilian areas.
His conclusions can, of course, be challenged. But that is precisely the point. If genocidal intent is to be inferred from a pattern of conduct, then evidence pointing in another direction cannot simply be ignored. Yet while the accusation of genocide circulates relentlessly, analysis such as Spencer’s receives far less attention.
The problem is not reporting the accusation of genocide. Nor is it investigating every allegation of wrongdoing by Israel. Both are necessary. The problem is allowing repetition to turn an accusation into a verdict and allowing evidence of wartime horror, however appalling, to substitute for the specific legal element that distinguishes genocide from other international crimes.
Perhaps Turkey has inadvertently supplied the best argument for greater precision in the debate over Gaza: Genocide is not a political synonym for wartime horror. It is a crime with a specific legal definition.
Words matter. In international law, some matter even more.
Genocide is one of them.
