In the late 2020s, we hear increasingly of the demise of international law and “the rules-based international order.” Donald Trump’s use of force against Iran and Venezuela and threat to use it against Greenland, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are widely seen as representing a turning point in international relations, linked to the rise of authoritarianism in domestic politics. No episode in the new world disorder speaks more to this sense of change than Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which Trump has also played a major role. It is over Gaza that the USA has most definitively rejected international law, even sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its judges. Yet many IR commentators, like Western political leaders, see Trump’s threat to the transatlantic alliance as the key dimension of international change, and increasingly argue for an alternative to Trump’s USA without confronting it over Gaza. Indeed, most of the leaders who are being forced to confront the need for such an alternative are themselves complicit in the Israeli-US genocide. Gaza therefore appears to be the Achilles’ heel of the idea that the liberal order can be salvaged from the Trumpian onslaught. The reason for this is that although international order and international law both have broader foundations than the norms and laws around genocide, the public international morality of the West has come to centre on them.
The “lessons” of the Holocaust have become a prime narrative foundation of Western ideology, shared to a remarkable degree by leaders across the political spectrum. Yet in the last two years, not only has an international order centred on the lessons of the emblematic genocide of the 20th century been responsible for the emblematic genocide of the 21st century, but Western governments, from the USA to Germany and the UK to Canada, have also used the Holocaust (and the linked priority for preventing antisemitism) to justify their support for and participation in the Israeli genocide. The consequences of this are proving severe. Internationally, the broad Western complicity in the genocide ties Europe to Trump, helps block Southern states from supporting Europe’s cause over Ukraine, and drains support from international law. Domestically, Western complicity separates centrist governments from the progressives and minority groups which are necessary components of successful coalitions to prevent Trumpian far right parties from gaining power, as they are poised to do across Europe.
Genocide was not supposed to play this role in world politics. When the great UN powers drafted the Genocide Convention after the Second World War, they saw it as criminalising the racism of the defeated powers, not their own or their allies’ violence. It was “a promissory note not intended to be cashed,” as historian Mark Mazower puts it, and duly receded to the margins of world politics during the Cold War. Even when genocide consciousness revived in the Post-Cold War years, over Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, it was assumed that the problem was one of second-tier regimes and armed movements, in relatively marginal states. Critics of Western policies argued that the problem was their failure to prevent these actors committing genocide – a feature not a bug, Samantha Power famously argued, since non-intervention actually was the policy. The solution was therefore more committed involvement by the “international community,” and new norms like the “responsibility to protect.” States upped Holocaust commemoration partly in order to symbolise this commitment.
This Post-Cold War consensus now lies in tatters. The states that were supposed to lead the prevention of genocide are not only failing to prevent it; they are actively perpetrating it. “Never again” has been shown to be a mantra, not of universal protection, but of the protection of Jews alone, cynically invoked to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. The ideas of “the Holocaust” has been so hollowed out by being harnessed to genocide, argues Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, as to devalue consciousness of the Nazi extermination programme and the real threats to Jews today – as has the idea of antisemitism, argues Holocaust scholar Barry Trachtenberg.
The sense that we are in a new age of genocide is not only due to the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the extensive complicity of Western leaders in it. The 2020s have seen genocidal violence continue in Myanmar, where the remaining Rohingya continue to be persecuted after the large expulsions of 2017; in Azerbaijan, where the remaining Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2022; in Ethiopia, where systematic violence against civilians characterised the Tigray war; and of course in Sudan, where new massacres were committed by both the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese military in 2025.
If these cases can be seen as the continuation of the “postcolonial” genocides of the last few decades, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, designed to destroy the entire distinct Ukrainian society and culture as well as state, was a strong foretaste of the change of gear that Gaza represents. Putin’s genocidal mentality and intentions were there for all to see, and although his project has been blocked by Ukraine’s Western-backed resistance, the Russian-controlled zone is subject to a genocidal occupation in which Ukrainian identifiers have been systematically expelled or coercively Russified.
That Trump has embraced Israel’s similar approach to Palestinian society in Gaza, and is happy to condone Russia’s policies in Ukraine, means that genocidal thinking has been normalized at the highest levels of world politics. Indeed, since Xi Jinping had already displayed an eliminationist attitude towards Uighur society in Xinjiang, the leaders of the three great powers share this approach. If we take into account Narendra Modi’s record in Gujerat and policies towards India’s Muslims, together with the tide of mass deportation thinking in the global far right, it is not fanciful to see a broad spectrum of genocidal dangers in the period ahead.
The return of “genocide”
This new age of genocide is the context in which the idea of genocide has returned to the centre of debate – in international law and socio-historical writing as well as in world politics. But how should we understand genocide? After decades in which the concept was sidelined, its return has been the signal for considerable confusion and indeed resistance. Even genocide scholars had neglected their previously conflicted definitional debate, and only two years before 7 October 2023, Dirk Moses argued that the “problems” of the concept were intractable.
Not all of the reluctance to countenance “genocide” in the face of Gaza can be regarded as in good faith. After more than two years of the deliberate, systematic, destruction of the Strip by Israeli forces, causing over a hundred thousand deaths and many more injuries – the tiny territory now has the world’s largest population of child amputees – many deniers are propagandists who would equally dispute the charges, levelled by the ICC against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, of orchestrating crimes against humanity and extensive war crimes.
The scope for honest disagreement surely concerns only the appropriate conceptual framing of what must be acknowledged as exceptionally grave mass atrocity. Moses argues for replacing “genocide” by “permanent security,” and this formula recognises the role of extreme security ideas in hostility of the kind we see in Gaza. Yet it is more plausible to see such conceptions of security as motives for and/or rationalisations of violence which, because it is targeted at a particular national population, fits genocide’s “group” concept. There are also important legal technicalities around whether the crimes committed by Israel, taken together, amount to genocide. The several types of crimes against humanity and war crimes are specific offences alleged against Israeli leaders, while genocide is a general, holistic charge – the distinction which can be traced to the Raphael Lemkin’s original rationale for instituting the crime, in his 1933 formulation of the idea (in which what became “genocide” was named “barbarity”).
Looking at Gaza through a socio-historical lens, it would be perverse not to consider the overall hostile intent of Israel towards the Palestinian population of Gaza as an explanation of why it has so comprehensively destroyed its society and harmed the wellbeing of its surviving residents – even if Israeli leaders had not so expressed their animus so freely and frequently as they have over more than two years.
Whether or not the grim denouement in 2026 was fully planned in late 2023, it is risible to explain it as an unintended byproduct of the war against Hamas. What is striking about Gaza is the continuous, multi-pronged attack on the civilian population, which in its systematic character exceeds that of other recent genocides. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that a “genocide” verdict has become the settled consensus of genocide scholars, human rights NGOs and a UN commission. It is striking that this charge has been accepted by large sections of Western and global electorates, according to polling, despite the very word being blocked by mainstream liberal media as well as populist right-wing outlets. Genocide may be the idea that finds it difficult to speak its name, but it is very widely understood.
The meaning and scope of genocide
It has been argued that the contested nature of the genocide concept attests to its instability and incoherence. I argue instead that this reflects the inherent complexity of any general concept which refers to a wide range of phenomena, as well as the necessarily fraught politics surrounding an idea carrying such obvious normative weight. But it is surely necessary and coherent to deploy a general concept of intentional, destructive anti-civilian violence – if “genocide” had not been coined, we should have had to invent it. And the normative weight of such a concept is self-evidently justified.
However, the normal issues which arise with any sociological concept are complicated because of the (unusual) widely-assumed priority of the legal definition. The original Convention definition has widely recognised limitations. Scholars have long criticised the exclusion of “political groups” from its scope, as well as its underlying assumption of the objective existence (rather than intersubjective constitution) of the “ethnic, national, racial and religious groups” which it protects. That the idea of group destruction is qualified as “physical” (although only in a sub-clause), does not square with contemporary understanding that human collectivities (“groups”) are constituted through social relations, which implies that they cannot be destroyed simply through the destruction of their members’ bodies.
Similarly, the Convention’s list of means makes no mention of sexual violence, even if courts have now considered rape as a method, or of cultural destruction, which Lemkin saw as crucial, even if this is also often taken into account. Perhaps most problematically, the drafters deliberately excluded the forced removal of populations, the most common method of deliberately destroying a national, ethnic or similar community, which the major UN powers had themselves carried out, facilitated or condoned – including (in Eastern Europe, India and Palestine) during the drafting period.
Subsequent jurisprudence has compounded the original difficulties of the Convention definition, especially in respect of the relationship between physical and social destruction. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in the 2007 Bosnia case that genocide was committed at Srebrenica in 1995, but not during the preceding years of wider “ethnic cleansing,” small massacres and mass rape by Serbian forces, on the grounds of which Bosnia-Herzegovina brought its genocide case against the then Yugoslavia in 1993. The argument of the Court’s majority, that only at Srebrenica, where 8,000 men and boys were massacred, could the “special intent” to destroy Bosnian Muslims as a group be proved, converting mass killing from a means of genocide into a criterion of intent.
The incoherence of this judgement, which artificially separated the Srebrenica massacre from the process of which it was the culmination, suggested the role of international politics in its shaping. In a finding worthy of Solomon, the ICJ gave Bosnia genocide recognition over Srebrenica but exonerated Serbia-Montenegro (which defended the case as successor to Yugoslavia) from direct responsibility for genocide. The verdict informed an even more negative outcome of the genocide case brought by Croatia against Serbia in 2014, which led the international lawyer Philippe Sands to complain of the excessively high threshold required to prove genocide and even to also question the utility of the concept in these circumstances.
Yet even the narrow Srebrenica verdict shows that genocide determinations are possible in the ICJ, and the convictions for genocide of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the prime Bosnian-Serbian perpetrators, in the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, as well as of leading génocidaires in the Rwanda tribunal, also show that genocide law has teeth. The case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar over the destruction of the Rohingya, which is currently being heard in the ICJ, could well see a more nuanced evaluation of the relationship of mass expulsion to genocide.
Genocide and Palestine in the new world politics
From the point of view of International Relations, therefore, it is important to understand both the importance and potential of the international law of genocide and the constraints in its conceptualisation and its enforcement. Even domestic law hardly exists outside politics; international law operates within even sharper political parameters. We should understand genocide in both legal and sociological-political terms, but we should not uncritically adopt the legal definition of genocide, which was an intellectually flawed political compromise from the outset, or defer to its legal interpreters, who are now subject to fierce new political winds. Rather, we should treat genocide as a general sociological concept with potentially broad and rich application in the analysis of contemporary violence. This approach is particularly relevant to the analysis of Palestine. Much discussion of the last two years has treated the Gaza genocide de novo; but while it is true that it represents a very distinctive episode, totally destructive in a way that is unprecedented in its context, it is also the culmination of a longer history.
The non-recognition of earlier genocidal dimensions of the Palestine conflict is partly the result of the influence of pro-Israeli perspectives on the treatment of genocide, which have excluded the Nakba and the long history of the Zionist and Israeli elimination of Palestinians from Palestine from its scope. However, it is also the result of the narrow conceptual parameters of genocide law, narrowed still further in political thinking which applies a “Holocaust standard” to exclude other putative cases of genocide. In particular, it reflects the exclusion of forced removal, pigeonholed as “ethnic cleansing,” from genocide.
The paradoxical result of the Gaza genocide is that it has broken the taboo on examining Palestine within a genocide framework. The Nakba, the “slow-motion genocide” of dispossession in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the proto-genocidal logic of the blockade of Gaza and the mini-wars after 2008, are all now legitimate topics to examine. The idea of “genocidal occupation,” the context in which Lemkin examined the Nazi genocide in the book in which he introduced the concept – it was called, after all, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe – can now be applied to Palestine as well as Ukraine.
But it is over Gaza itself that the genocide perspective will be most sharply tested. The destruction of 2023-25, the subject of South Africa’s submissions to the ICJ, will continue to cast a long shadow over world politics in the near future. This will be not least because the main perpetrators of the Gaza genocide, Israel and the USA, together with their European and Arab state partners who have been complicit, will (under the Trump “peace plan”) largely determine the fate of the survivors. Israel has taken control – which it intends to make permanent – of more than half of Gaza. As of early 2026, there has been no serious attempt to alleviate the dire conditions of the population, whose envisaged future appears to combine concentration in camps under Israeli control with expulsion outside the territory, perhaps to an isolated African region like Somaliland, which Israel has recognised as a state. The Palestinian Gaza of 2023 – a functioning society, despite the blockade – appears likely to be replaced by 2030, if Trump gets his way, by some version of his US-Israeli-Arab corporate “riviera.”
Thus Trump’s is a plan to consolidate, not end the genocide. The accelerating Israeli colonisation and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, through increasing military and settler terror as well as legislation, governmental and court edicts, represents a new phase of genocidal expulsion alongside the new occupation of Gaza. Overall, the outcome of 2023-25 appears likely to be a more complete victory of the génocidaires than in other recent cases: in Rwanda, after all, the genocidal regime was overthrown; in Bosnia, it was confined to its statelet under international supervision. This will not, however, be a final solution. Palestinians are likely to find new ways to fight back.
International solidarity has been entrenched. Israel has accomplished, through its own actions, the delegitimisation that it accused its critics of trying to achieve. In 2023, it was still largely taboo to compare it to Nazi Germany, but today the idea that this comparison is antisemitic, while still defended by Western elites, has much less purchase. The ICJ case will hang over Israel for the next few years, and when it is finally decided, may well consolidate the definition of the Gaza genocide as the emblematic case of the twenty-first century. The campaign of the Trump administration against South Africa testifies to its real fears that this case will go against Israel. Yet the delegitimisation wrought by Gaza goes beyond Israel. This genocide has tarnished the whole Western system of power. As Trump’s America retreats into the Western hemisphere, giving way to China as the dominant world economy (and increasingly in world politics), Gaza will continue stain both the rump superpower and its European vassals, even as their other conflicts threaten to pull them apart.
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