Democrats Shouldn’t Deny The Gaza Genocide

Genocide denial is bad

Like many of his peers, the Democratic Governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear is effectively running for president right now. As part of that effort, he sat down with Dasha Burns of Politico for a lengthy interview, during which she asked him if he agreed that Israel’s actions in Gaza should be characterized as a genocide.

Here’s Beshear’s response:

Yeah, that...that’s becoming uh, one of those new litmus tests that we said we would never uh, do as a...as a party again. It’s trying to...to throw out a word and are you going to raise your hand or are you not going to? I understand that Israel was hit with a terrorist attack the likes of which it had never seen and it has been through a lot and that it deserves the right to defend itself and to eradicate that terrorist organization. I believe that it could have been done without a lot of the suffering, but I put a lot of that blame also on Donald Trump. If he’d said we are coming in and we are bringing food and aid and you are going to make sure that we’re safe, it would’ve happened.

This is an ugly response for many reasons—not least the refusal to acknowledge Biden’s role in the horrific slaughter of 73,000 Palestinians, including 21,000 children 248 journalists and 224 aid workers. Trump’s role in Gaza and the Middle East has not been constructive to say the least, and he has his own horrific list of war crimes and atrocities to answer for—including the extension and embrace of the genocide. But that genocide was well underway long before he reentered office. It began under Biden, it was supported by Biden, and to imply or say otherwise is partisan wishful thinking, otherwise known as a lie.

The main issue, though, is Beshear’s refusal to acknowledge that the genocide is a genocide—and his assertion that being asked to speak with moral clarity on this issue is an illegitimate “litmus test” put forward by purists to divide the party. A presidential candidate whining that he shouldn’t be asked to take clear policy stances is unimpressive in any context. But this sort of shilly-shallying about genocide is particularly dangerous. There’s a reason that genocide denial is considered a reprehensible and immoral act in itself. It is bad for the party, bad for the country, and bad for the world that a certain strain of Democrats is now befouling themselves in this way.

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Yes, it’s a genocide

Beshear’s vacillation (and the vacillation of Democrats like him) is difficult to understand as a political maneuver. Currently 65% of Democrats view Palestinians more favorably than Israelis, while only 17% view Israelis more favorably. A poll of Texas primary voters recently released showed that 76% of them believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. James Talarico’s criticism of Israel appears to have been one key issue that helped him defeat Jasmine Crockett in the state to become the Democratic Senate candidate.

Of course, voters aren’t always right, and this is an issue where it’s important to follow evidence and experts. If there was a strong argument that Israel was not committing genocide, then Democratic leaders could and should defy their base.

In this case, though, the consensus of voters is also the consensus of genocide experts and scholars. Amnesty International, the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars all have said that Israel has committed and is committing genocide in Gaza.

The argument that Israel has committed genocide is straightforward. The definition of genocide according to the UN is (to quote the most relevant part) “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” In other words, you must show intention (“deliberately”) and you must show efforts to bring about physical destruction of Palestinians in whole or in part.

There are numerous examples of Israeli officials declaring genocidal intentions, according to an Amnesty International report . On October 9, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was fighting “human animals” and that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” On October 13, President Isaac Herzog said, “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly called on Israel to remember Amalek, a reference to a Biblical story in which God tells the Israelites to murder all of the Amaleks, including women and children.

The report notes that, “Israeli officials often failed to investigate the misconduct of soldiers, and the misconduct of the soldiers on the ground was largely unpunished. These failures establish that actions and misconduct of the Israeli security forces were fully consistent with the orders they had received and reflected the true motivation of the military operation.”

In addition, the UN Commission of Inquiry listsa range of genocidal acts committed by Israel intended to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part. These includ targeting of civilians, severe mistreatment of detainees, repeated acts of forced displacement, destruction of medical facilities, denial of access to medical services, and blocking humanitarian and food aid. The Commission also points to the December 2023 attack on the largest fertility clinic in Gaza; the Israelis destroyed 4000 embryos, showing an intention not just to kill Palestinians but to prevent their birth.

These actions, again, all occurred in a context in which Israelis leaders told its soldiers and people that Palestinians were collectively responsible for Hamas’ murders, called for the destruction of the entirety of Gaza, and urged them to remember past genocides as a blueprint for the current response. This is not a borderline case or one that is especially confusing, which is why so many organizations and scholars have reached the same conclusion: Israel committed (and is still committing) a genocide.

Yes, genocide denial matters

So, if it’s clear it’s a genocide, why does it matter if Beshear, or other Democratic leaders—like, say Daniel Biss—call it a genocide? Biss in particular has called for restrictions on military aid to Israel and has condemned Israel for human rights violations. Shouldn’t that be good enough?

If we could get to a point where we were no longer supplying Israel with weapons, no longer blocking censure resolutions in the UN, no longer joining Israel in horrific war crimes in the Middle East, that would all be good, obviously. But it’s also important to call a genocide a genocide. And the reason it’s important is that genocide denial is part of the genocide itself.

Genocide Watch states that “Denial is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres.” Historian Richard G. Hovannisian notes that “Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was, to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all.”

Defenders of Israel—even people like Biss who want to hold Israel accountable and stop war crimes—want to avoid calling the genocide a genocide because doing so requires certain political and moral consequences. If Netanyahu, his government, and his soldiers have committed a genocide, they are subject to international sanction and international trial.

More, to call the genocide a genocide would require the US and Israel to grapple with the truth that Israel has in fact done to Palestinians what Hitler did to Jewish people. Israel has long claimed unique moral stature on the basis of the past victimization of Jews. Israeli officials like Shimon Peres have even in the past insisted that the Armenian genocide was not a genocide because it was not equivalent to the Holocaust. This was in part to solidify relations with Turkey, but it also functioned as a way to make Jews unique victims, and therefore to claim that Israel’s existence is uniquely moral. (Netanyahu recently personally affirmed the Armenian genocide, though Israel has still not officially recognized it.)

For Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish, Israeli and American) Israel’s identity is inseparable from its view of itself as the victim of genocide, not the perpetrator. But that is simply another way of saying that Zionists justify genocide on the grounds that Zionism is always morally righteous, always embattled, and therefore can never commit atrocities. To admit to a genocide would be to give up the right to commit genocides. It would mean grappling seriously with not just the Gaza genocide, but the longterm genocidal implications of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and unremitting violence against the Palestinian people. To repeat the words of Genocide Watch again, genocide denial, in general and in the case of Israel in particular, “is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres.”

Beshear’s refusal to call a genocide a genocide is not just a weaselly response, nor is it just a way to position himself as a centrist. It’s not even just transparently poor strategy given the current Democratic primary electorate. It’s a moral failure which makes him complicit in concrete ways with not just the past genocide, but with ongoing atrocities and the erasure of the lives and experiences of Palestinian people.

If someone refused to call the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide a genocide, we would not call that a “litmus test”. We would call it a lie and a cowardly collaboration in evil. Democrats, the nation, and the globe deserve better.