Dov Waxman

As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here's what changed my mind The incitement for genocide in the Israeli public sphere is undeniable. So why are so many of us liberal Jews so reluctant?

Coincidentally, just after I wrote about why I had changed my mind about what's happening in Gaza and reached the conclusion that Israel was committing genocide, my colleague in the field of Israel Studies, Dr. Lihi Ben Shitrit, published a similar piece: forward.com/opinion/7598...

We are completely horrified and sickened by the cynical videos of hostages Rom Braslavski and Evyatar David, who are starving and emaciated, that were published this weekend. (1/5)

This. It is tragically obvious that the goal of freeing the hostages has been deemed far less important to the Israeli government than ethnically cleansing Gaza and keeping Netanyahu in power. If the priority were the lives of the hostages, this war would have ended a long time ago.

I acknowledged in my thread my internal resistance to accepting the genocide charge, but it wasn't just personal bias. I've tried to evaluate the arguments and evidence for and against the genocide charge and also take into account the fact that Israel's policies toward Gaza have shifted over time.

The accounts of Palestinians in Gaza certainly shaped my understanding of Israel's conduct there. It was their actual experiences that led me to understand the genocidal impact of Israel's actions. It's always of fundamental importance to me to listen to the first-hand accounts of victims.

Inside the Crisis at the Anti-Defamation League The group used to believe the rights of Jews were inextricable from the rights of everyone else. Its war against anti-Zionism has changed everything.

This is a well-reported deep dive on how the Anti-Defamation League went from an organization that at least on paper tried to balance support for domestic US liberalism with Zionism, to an organization that is no longer even trying for the former: nymag.com/intelligence...

No Limits: The Biden Administration's Support for Israel's War on Gaza The war in Gaza that Israel launched in response to the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, has been the longest and deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian confli....

My article, coauthored with @djpressman.bsky.social, titled "No Limits: The Biden Administration's Support for Israel's War on Gaza," has just been published in the journal World Affairs. The article is freely available for everyone to read and share: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

12. I still don't believe that committing genocide was Israel’s goal from the outset. Nor do I believe that genocide is Israel’s primary goal today. That goal is, effectively, ethnic cleansing. But I believe that committing genocide against Palestinians has become a means of achieving this goal.

11. Israel’s intent to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza is clear. At a minimum, Israel’s actions are having a genocidal impact on Palestinians in Gaza. Because this impact is foreseeable (there have been countless warnings), one can infer genocidal intent from Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

10. Intentionally making it impossible for Palestinians to live as a group in Gaza crosses the legal threshold for genocide (“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” constitutes genocide).

9. Israel’s actions, such as the destruction of civilian infrastructure, restrictions on humanitarian aid, and the concentration of civilians into overcrowded and dangerous zones, clearly indicate that it is making life for Palestinians in Gaza unbearable, unsustainable, and increasingly impossible.

8. I'm now convinced the Israeli government’s policy is to make living in Gaza so miserable and dangerous for its Palestinian population that many, if not most, will be forced to leave the territory. This is the explicit goal of the far-right ministers to whom Netanyahu is politically beholden.

7. Netanyahu was deliberately prolonging the war in Gaza for his own political and personal reasons, and some senior government ministers were hoping that the destruction and depopulation of Gaza would pave the way for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements there.

6. I increasingly came to believe the Israeli government’s intention was not just to defeat and destroy Hamas and bring all the hostages home. I suspected that other undeclared goals were increasingly driving Israel’s actions in Gaza.

5. As the months passed and the death and destruction in Gaza mounted, I still did not believe that Israel’s brutal, inhumane, and often indiscriminate actions in Gaza met the legal criteria for the crime of genocide. Still, I was gradually becoming less certain of that than I had initially been.

4. The evidence presented back then to support the genocide charge—some statements of Israeli officials—seemed insufficient to me to demonstrate the Israeli government’s intention to commit genocide (although I recognized that this rhetoric could be read as incitement to genocide).

3. The Israeli government was shockingly indifferent to the killing and suffering of Palestinian civilians, but I did not think it actually wanted to kill them. I thought that their killing was the by-product of a ruthless war against Hamas.

2. The crime of genocide requires intent, and I firmly believed back then that the Israeli government had no intent to commit genocide in Gaza. Instead, I thought that it wanted to defeat and destroy Hamas, regardless of the cost to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

1. During the early months of the war in Gaza, I publicly disputed the charge of genocide that some were already making. While I thought that Israel was committing war crimes, I felt sure that Israel was not committing genocide.

For the past 21 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in the Gaza Strip, I've been wrestling with the contentious question of whether Israel is committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. I initially rejected the genocide charge, but now I don't. A thread on why I've changed my mind:

Arab States Call for Hamas to Disarm Amid Push for a Palestinian State

Significantly, all 22 member states of the Arab League have signed onto a declaration condemning Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and calling for Hamas to disarm. The next necessary step is for all these Arab states to apply real pressure on Hamas to disarm: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/w...

This is an excellent interview, it is mandatory viewing.. for those who care about human rights, Gaza, Palestine and Israel, as well.

More than half of the Senate Democratic caucus voted for a resolution to block arms sales to Israel. Things really are changing.

Is starvation in Gaza really Israel's fault? The facts are clear Rising starvation in Gaza may have a number of factors. But Israel's wartime policies on humanitarian aid are inarguably among them.

For @forward.com, I wrote about how we know that Israel has been withholding food as a military tactic because Israeli officials have said versions of “we are withholding food as a military tactic” for the entirety of the war and pretending otherwise is willful ignorance forward.com/opinion/7586...

60,000 Gazans have been killed. 18,500 were children. These are their names. Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one per hour since the war began.

Israel's military campaign in Gaza has killed 60,000 people. 18,500 were children. Here are their names. www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

Poll: Right-Leaning Faculty Likelier to Be “Hostile” to Jews On the other hand, non-Jewish faculty who identified as “extremely liberal” were more likely to be hostile to Israel, a survey found. But 90 percent of all non-Jewish faculty were hostile to neither J...

Well this undermines some widespread narratives out there: www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

U.K. Will Recognize a Palestinian State in September, Barring Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire

The UK should recognize a Palestinian state, but not as a punitive action against Israel. Recognition is a long-overdue step that acknowledges the Palestinian right to self-determination and could help save a two-state solution. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/w...

Britain and France Have Pledged to Recognize a Palestinian State. What Would It Mean?

I'm glad that the UK has finally expressed a willingness to recognize a Palestinian state. For those who think this is a purely symbolic step without practical significance, this article provides some explanation of what it could mean in practice: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/w...

Adam Shatz · The World since 7 October The war with Iran is far more than an attempt to prevent nuclear weapons from getting in the hands of mullahs (if it...

The World since 7 October www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Remember what happened after Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981: this attack set back Iraq's nuclear program, but it intensified Saddam Hussein's desire for nuclear weapons, which he then pursued covertly.