Why what Israel is doing is genocide while October 7th was not

October 7th was a terrible and tragic day. The civilians who died in that attack were innocent and did not deserve to die. What Hamas did constitutes a horrific war crime.

Still, there are those who, in their determination to minimize how the state of Israel has responded to this attack, have characterized October 7th as a genocide. (This is especially striking in the face of Israel itself, at this moment, carrying out what the International Court of Justice has termed plausible genocide—actions that, just from the gist of things, appear to be just that.)

Indeed, this idea that Hamas is carrying out a genocide—instead of the state power with an entire arsenal and army at its disposal—also powers the idea that a phrase about freedom actually implies genocidal ideation.

So, that is what spurs this essay. I am no fan of Hamas, but I am a fan of preserving the lives of innocent people. The 30,000 Palestinians that have died, and the 70,000 Palestinians who have been maimed or who are among the missing—the vast majority of those people were and are innocent. Indeed, the vast majority of them are children, who are innocent by definition. It is for those people that I write.

Israel apologists keep pointing to October 7th as though it was a genocide but deny that Israel’s retaliation should be considered as such. Often, the reason for the latter stance is, “Hamas began the current round of fighting, so they deserve anything that they get.” This doesn’t pass muster; but, more importantly, the assertion distracts us from the consideration on the table, that Israel is itself engaged in genocide.

To dispense with the comparison, we must attend to the fact that what Hamas did on October 7th was in fact not a genocide.

“A genocide” is a strange formulation in the first place. As many genocide experts have stressed, genocide is a process, not an event. It doesn’t simply “take place” — it unfolds. It has dimension. There are stages; there are steps. It’s not something one can do in one’s spare time. 

Genocide is not incidental: it is systematic. It is a group activity—a group crime—planned, usually by a central authority, and carried out once a set of conditions (i.e., a threshold) is met.

That said, what I mean to attend to is the fact that genocide is not a one-off. It is a pattern. In fact, it is by observing that pattern that outside observers can even determine whether genocide is actually underway. No pattern, no genocide.

The October 7th attack, as horrendous as it was, fits more the category of terrorist attack and/or massacre. It was brutal; it was an ambush; and innocent non-combatants were killed, resulting in the populace at large becoming terrorized. That’s kind of the definition of terrorism, though additionally terrorism is violence intended to effect a political outcome, and that’s precisely what has happened. In all respects, October 7th fits that definition.

The closest comparison that the American press has drawn to October 7th is September 11th, the attack in 2001 that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Yet even we Americans, at the time and all the time thereafter, have referred to September 11th as a terrorist attack. 

Despite the fact that genocide has, as part of its definition, “the intent to destroy a group . . . in whole or in part,” and those 3000+ people constituted a part of the American whole, we didn’t classify the attack as genocide. 

First, that’s because there’s no indication that the attack meant to destroy the group as such, which is another part of the definition. Indeed, the general consensus at the time was that the World Trade Center was chosen for its symbolic value, as a landmark and as a hub of international trade.

But, more than that, the attack was a one-time event. Thus, it fell closer to terrorism than genocide, on the spectrum of societal violence.

Patrick Wolfe, historian and anthropologist who contributed to the field of genocide studies, said this of September 11th:

[T]he strike on the World Trade Center is an example of mass murder but not, in my view, of genocide. Certainly, the bulk of the victims were US citizens. On the scale of the whole, however, not only was it an infinitesimal part of the group “Americans” (which, strictly, is not a consideration), but it was a one-off event. This does not mean that the perpetrators of 9/11 are not guilty. It means that a genocide tribunal is the wrong court to bring them before. Mass murders are not the same thing as genocide, though the one action can be both. (“Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research [2006], p. 398)

He added that “there can be summary mass murder without genocide, as in the case of 9/11, and there can be genocide without summary mass murder, as in the case of the continuing post-frontier destruction, in whole and in part, of Indigenous genoi [people].”

Other genocide scholars corroborate Wolfe’s point. Helen Fein, in her article “Defining Genocide as a Sociological Concept,” delineated the term in question:

Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim. (“Defining Genocide as a Sociological Concept,” Current Sociology [1990], p. 24, emphasis in original)

Note the grounding of the definition on the word ‘sustained’. She further stressed that documenting genocide

demands (at the very least) identifying a perpetrator(s), the target group attacked as a collectivity, assessing its numbers and victims, and recognizing a pattern of repeated actions from which we infer the intent of purposeful action to eliminate them. (Ibid., p. 25, emphasis added)

Now, regarding efforts by some to defend Israel’s actions in response to October 7th, I’ve seen some people compare the level of destruction by Israel to that of the Allies in WWII, specifically saying that the nuclear attacks on Japan have never been considered genocidal. And that’s true, for several reasons (first and foremost being that the Genocide Convention wasn’t established until after WWII, so the attack at the time fell under no such understanding).

So that wasn’t considered genocide. However, Michael Walzer, noted historian, stated that the atomic attack on Japan in 1945 was certainly an act of terror.

(“Terrorism and Just War - Michael Walzer” — Institute for Advanced Study, YouTube, June 3, 2016, 14:01)

That goes directly back to what Wolfe said, that “there can be summary mass murder without genocide.” 

The attacks on Japan were singular events. (Though they took place three days apart, on August 6th and August 9th, they are usually seen as constituting a single action.) Had a series of such attacks occurred beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one could very credibly make the argument that there may have been genocidal intent on the part of the American government. Outside of a pattern of behavior, however, such an argument tends to fail.

Indeed, it is precisely that characterization of the attacks on Japan that make them more comparable to September 11th, not to the sustained, continued attacks that Israel has launched on Gaza in the wake of October 7th. Except for a brief window in which hostages and detainees were exchanged, Israel has commenced to bomb, strafe, bulldoze, and otherwise indiscriminately attack citizens and citizen infrastructure in Gaza every day for nearly five straight months.

Here we have examined, through contrast and comparison, the claim that (a) Hamas perpetrated a genocide on October 7th and (b) Israel has not perpetrated genocide in its campaign since then. Both of these claims are unsupported and, indeed, are disproven by the understanding we have of genocide as a method:

• It is a process;

• it is usually not substantiated by a one-time event; and

• it is through the pattern of attack that genocidal intent can be discerned.

Yet equally important is the idea of capacity. Hamas has not the capacity to commit a pattern of action that could cumulatively constitute genocide. That requires an army (or a sufficiently sized group of people) to carry out the act(s), a plan, and means (which normally constitutes an arsenal). From all accounts, the attack on October 7th took years to plan and to put into effect. There’s no army in Gaza. October 7th took the world by surprise precisely because Hamas does not have an arsenal at its disposal but instead must operate as an irregular force.

You can have all the ideation in the world, but without the capacity to effect that idea, it remains a fantasy. It’s the entire concept around putting someone involuntarily on a medical hold if that person expresses suicidal ideation: in that environment, without access to means, that person cannot effect any plan toward what they’re thinking. Their ideas are moot. It is the capacity to transform a plan into concrete action that gives that plan its power. 

Hamas can claim, weeks after October 7th, that they want to keep repeating that action over and over, but that’s bluster. It’s obvious bluster, because October 7th itself took years of planning. They have neither the materiel nor the capability of taking that idea and having it become reality, primarily because they no longer possess the element of surprise. The threats of continued action by Hamas representatives add to the terror that the Israeli population is suffering—of that, there’s little doubt. But in and of themselves, those words are not genocide.

Conversely, Israel has all of these factors at its disposal: an army, an arsenal, central planning. Not only have key figures in the administration indicated genocidal intent, but the actions on the ground have paralleled those verbal intentions. We see the utter devastation. The scale and the scope are plain. The fact that these two things are twinned means that we observers can tell that what we observe fits the definition of genocide as put forth in the Genocide Convention.

Thus I would like to put to bed the idea that genocide “took place” on October 7th (that is, as an event) and that what Israel has done (as an ongoing practice) is simply war. Genocide usually occurs under the color of war. What Hamas did, though despicable and atrocious—a massacre of immense proportions—was not and is not genocide. What Israel has done since then, however, qualifies as such. One actor in the conflict is definitely guilty of the crime of crimes: that’s the state actor of Israel.