Yuval Abraham writes:

A few months after October 7, I enrolled in an introductory course on genocide at the Open University of Israel. The lecturer began the first class by telling us — about 20 Jewish-Israeli students gathered on Zoom — that by the end of the semester we would understand exactly what genocide entails and be able to explain why Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza.

In a nutshell, his argument was this: At most, Israel might be destroying Gaza, but its actions are driven by military objectives rather than an “intent to destroy” a specific group “as such,” as the Genocide Convention outlines. Without this intent, he concluded, the term genocide does not apply.

Over the past two years, I have published numerous investigations exposing details of Israel’s open-fire policy in Gaza, several of which have helped substantiate legal claims of genocide. When South Africa filed its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024, it relied in part on our November 2023 exposé that revealed Israel’s AI-driven mass assassination campaign targeting the family homes of alleged militants. When a UN committee similarly reached the conclusion last month that Israel has committed genocide, it relied in part on another of our investigations showing that more than 80 percent of Gaza’s dead were civilians according to an internal Israeli intelligence database.

Yet few of the dozens of soldiers and officers I spoke to over the course of these investigations, many of whom served willingly as whistleblowers, saw themselves as participants in genocide. When intelligence officers and commanders described bombing family homes in Gaza, they often echoed the university lecturer’s logic: Sure, we may have committed crimes, but we were not murderers because every act had a specific military objective. [Continue reading…]