DaysofPal – As the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza deepens, prominent scholars and rights advocates are calling Israel’s actions genocide and warning the international community of the broader implications.
When Greta Thunberg landed in Paris on Tuesday, deported from Israel after attempting to reach Gaza in solidarity with besieged Palestinians, she didn’t mince words. “Because of racism, that’s the simple answer,” she told reporters when asked why world governments weren’t intervening to stop Israel’s blockade of the Strip. She repeatedly referred to Israel’s campaign as “genocide.”
Her remarks came amid mounting pressure from legal experts, humanitarian groups, and scholars who argue that Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, now in its 20th month, meets the definition of genocide.
More than 55,000 people are estimated to have been killed, according to The Lancet. Gaza’s infrastructure has been decimated. Important humanitarian aid is still unable to enter due to a total blockade that is in place on land, in the air, and at sea.
However, the majority of Western governments continue to avoid using the term “genocide,” even though many of them played a key role in creating the post-World War II legal framework intended to stop such crimes.
Segal: “They believe they are outside the law”
But for Dr. Raz Segal, an Israeli scholar of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, the debate goes far beyond semantics.
“Israeli Jews are imagining that they’re fighting a colonial war against barbarians,” Segal told Middle East Eye. “They are completely thinking they are outside the law.”
Segal points out that international law was originally crafted to regulate conflicts between European powers. “It was never meant to apply to colonial wars,” he explained. This legacy, he argues, has contributed to the normalization of disproportionate and destructive military campaigns against non-Western populations.
Speaking at the Arab Center Washington DC’s annual Palestine conference this week, Segal emphasized the depth of Palestinian dehumanization in Israeli society.
“This kind of social and political atmosphere doesn’t change quickly. It’s an intergenerational process,” he said. “In 1945, Nazi Germany is defeated. Does that mean that millions of Nazis changed their minds overnight?”
The destruction in Gaza has reached extraordinary levels. Satellite imagery analyzed by Kent State University’s Dr. He Yin shows up to 98 percent of the enclave’s vegetation has been destroyed—rendering basic survival nearly impossible.
In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded it was “plausible” that Israel’s actions in Gaza violate the Genocide Convention. But Segal urges people not to get lost in legal terminology, pointing instead to the broader historical pattern of Palestinian displacement, known as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
“It’s about elimination, destruction, forced displacement, and removal. About creating a greater Israel with maximum territory and minimum or no Palestinians,” he said.
Legal system under threat, Callamard warns
Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, reinforced that message in her keynote speech at the same conference. She rejected the notion that Israel’s campaign is driven solely by military necessity.
“There is absolutely no doubt that there is a genocidal intention,” Callamard said. “It is intentionally engineered. It’s not recklessness; it’s deliberate.”
She also warned that the international legal system is under direct threat, citing political backlash against the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The court also issued warrants for three Hamas leaders, all of whom have since been killed by Israel.
Segal added that if international law is seen to apply unequally, it could collapse entirely.
“International law had discarded millions of people, Palestinians among them, well before October 7,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth saving.”
For Segal, the only viable path forward requires dismantling the concept of a Jewish ethnonationalist state and establishing a political structure based on equality.
“It needs to be a state where everyone—Jews, Palestinians, and others—have equal rights,” he said. “That’s the change of the political structure we need.”
He also noted that Israeli political rhetoric over the past two years has consistently conflated Hamas with all Palestinians and blurred the lines between military operations and civilian targeting.
“It doesn’t take a degree in comparative literature to see this,” he remarked. “The only way [many Israeli leaders believe] to deal with Palestinians is to destroy them.”
Callamard called for immediate international action. “We must be very loud about the fact that people must fear, fear their complicity in genocide,” she said.
Both Segal and Callamard warned that failure to act doesn’t just doom Gaza; it endangers the entire international legal system.
“Israel’s attack on Gaza,” Segal concluded, “is becoming a model for the very small and murderous minority of people around the world.”
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