Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.</p><p>This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.</p><p>The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend."</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion</span><span class="invisible">/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Genocide" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Genocide</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/HumanRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>HumanRights</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Israel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Israel</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Palestine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Palestine</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Gaza" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Gaza</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/InternationalLaw" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>InternationalLaw</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Zionism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Zionism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/EthnicCleansing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>EthnicCleansing</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IDF" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>IDF</span></a></p>