Gaza and the Crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Public Lecture by A. Dirk Moses, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at City College of New York.

The Israeli destruction of Gaza has shaken the overlapping fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Some scholars think the destruction is a tragic result of a war between the IDF and Palestinian armed groups, which are responsible for Palestinian suffering by embedding themselves in the civilian population in the context of dense urban warfare. Other scholars, be contrast, see a genocide by the State of Israel. This paper takes a conceptual approach by reconstructing the founding error of the legal codification of genocide in its distinction from warfare. In fact, Raphael Lemkin originally conceived of genocide as a mode of warfare: “wars of extermination.” Recovering this insight corrects the error made in the second half of the 1940s when genocide became law.