The Genocide Scholars Who Can’t Define Genocide
14th September 2025
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (“IAGS”) recently announced that 86 percent of their members had concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. This was extremely misleading. First of all, only around 28 percent of their members voted on the resolution and a mere twenty percent of total members approved it. And this was not the only problem with the resolution. It also misrepresented the crime of genocide.
Genocide is an act undertaken with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such. If you cannot establish a specific intent to commit this crime (such an intent is known in legal parlance as dolus specialis), you cannot establish genocide.
The IAGS resolution did not even attempt to establish such an intent, relying instead on statements made by other entities and by extrapolating from what the organisation B’Tselem has described as a “broader analytical framework.” However, legally, genocide requires a fully conclusive finding, meaning that no other explanation exists for the event or events in question other than the intent to commit the crime of genocide. This does not apply here, as there are alternative explanations for the casualties in Gaza that the IAGS fails to recognise.