Dear Michael Gove: yes, it's genocide

Gove smeared Zack Polanski over Gaza. He should answer these questions

Dear Michael,

You have accused the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, of “depriving the word genocide of its meaning” and of exploiting prejudice against Jewish people for electoral gain.

To recap: he said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. You responded:

Zack Polanski then cited the range of organisations - from the UN to Israeli and international organisations - which have concluded that Israel is committing genocide.

You responded:

Let us be absolutely clear about what that accusation entails.

Zack Polanski is Jewish. You are not. He is the only Jewish party leader and one of only five in our country’s history.

You have not just - as is standard practise among Israel’s apologists - conflated the crimes of Israel as a state with Jewish people as a whole. You have accused a Jewish politician of making this claim in order to appeal to prejudice against his own people to achieve political power.

You have done this to promote the denial of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. This is hardly surprising given that you served as a Cabinet minister in a Conservative government which spent nine months arming and facilitating that genocide.

But both your smear and your denial demand a response. I have posed several questions to you based on that smear and denial. If you have integrity, you should try to answer them.

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Are Israeli genocide scholars also exploiting prejudice against Jews?

Omer Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars in genocide and Holocaust studies. He has concluded Israel is committing genocide, as his New York Times essay set out.

In that piece, he said the following:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

Michael: Do you believe that this Prof. Omer Bartov is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

What of Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

He wrote an article for Israeli publication Local Call two years ago headlined ‘Yes, it’s genocide’.

He wrote:

In the way we normally understand such concepts, Palestinian Gaza as a geographical-political-cultural-human complex no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate annihilation of a collective or part of it — not all of its individuals. And that’s what’s happening in Gaza. The result is undoubtedly genocide. The numerous declarations of extermination by senior Israeli government officials, and the general exterminating tone of the public discourse, rightly pointed out by Haaretz columnist Carolina Landsman, indicate that this was also the intention.

In this piece, he specifically answers your use of the Holocaust and Rwanda to argue that the people Gaza has not suffered genocide.

He notes that genocide takes different forms, giving as examples the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Armenian genocide and the fates of the Rohingya people, and the Herero and Nama people. There are big differences between all of these genocides, Goldberg notes, but also commonalities.

All were justified as being self-defence, he argues, with the victims presented as an existential threat.

In another interview conducted with Amos Goldberg for Le Monde in October 2024, he said: “What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore”.

This has itself been echoed by Donald Trump, who said “A civilization has been wiped out in Gaza”.

Michael: Do you believe that Professor Amos Goldberg is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

And what of Professor Daniel Blatman, Head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

He co-authored with Amos Goldberg an essay in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Once again, it specifically addresses your objection. It’s titled ‘There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide’ with the subheading ‘This is precisely what genocide looks like’. In the piece they write:

According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Gaza’s population have been displaced from their homes multiple times and are living in subhuman conditions that only increase mortality levels. The murder of children, starvation, destruction of infrastructure, including that of the health care system, destruction of most homes, including the erasure of entire neighborhoods and towns such as Jabalya and Rafah, ethnic cleansing in the northern Strip, destruction of all of Gaza’s universities and most cultural institutions and mosques, destruction of government and organizational infrastructure, mass graves, destruction of infrastructure for local food production and water distribution – all these paint a clear picture of genocide. Gaza, as a human, national-collective entity, no longer exists. This is precisely what genocide looks like.

Michael: Do you believe that Professor Daniel Blatman is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

We could go on.

Dr. Shmuel Lederman, Israeli academic scholar in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, who in June 2024 declared.

The accumulated effect of what Israel has been doing in Gaza was basically genocide in terms of the harm done to the Gazans as a group.

And Israeli-American Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dr. Raz Segal who was one of the first to raise the alarm in his article ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’.

Michael: Do you believe that Dr. Shmuel Lederman and Dr. Raz Segal are depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

These are all Jewish Israeli scholars who dedicate their lives to the study of genocide and specifically the Holocaust. Decades and decades of scholarly work, knowing the subject inside out.

Do you accept that if pre-eminent scholars of genocide have concluded that genocide has taken place, then there must at the very least be overwhelming evidence that Israel has committed unspeakable acts against the Palestinian people?

How do you believe it is possible that scholars immersed in the field of genocide could arrive at a conclusion that is so devastatingly wrong?

For your smear to be accurate, there must be an outbreak of antisemitism amongst Jewish Israeli scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies - or abject incompetence - or both. Which is it?

Do you believe that you know more than these scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies, and if so, why?

You may respond that you simply disagree with them, and to argue that you are entitled to do so, regardless of your lack of qualifications.

But you did not simply disagree with Zack Polanski. You made clear that the argument that Israel has committed genocide is outrageous and beyond the pale.

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What about Jewish-Americans?

It’s not Jewish Israeli scholars who have arrived at this conclusion.

Four in ten Jewish Americans believe - like Zack Polanski - that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people. That rises to 50% of Jewish Americans under 35.

So another question for you, Michael:

Do you believe that millions of Jewish Americans are depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against themselves?

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Do you also deny other genocideS?

Michael, you must know that genocide is defined in law.

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group - including killing members of the group, inflicting serious harm, or deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.

Do you agree with the legal definition of genocide?

Here are some other examples which are very different from the Holocaust.

In the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys aged 12 and above. This was classified as genocide.

But there are genocide deniers when it comes to Srebrenica - not least in Israel.

Israel’s Ambassador to Serbia, Yahel Vilan, caused outrage in 2024 after he told Russian state media that calling Srebrenica a genocide “diminishes the importance of that term, which, in my opinion, should only be used for genocides”. He added: “Srebrenica should not be called genocide”.

The accusation of genocide has caused outrage among Serbs - because they were victims of Nazi genocide in World War II.

Do you believe that because the Serbs were victims of the Nazis, it is therefore outrageous to accuse Serb forces of genocide decades later?

Do you believe that Srebrenica was a genocide even though it took a very different form to the Holocaust?

Here’s another example. Myanmar’s campaign against the Rohingya was deemed a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice in 2020; the United States formally determined genocide in 2022.

Thousands of the Rohingya have been killed, many of their villages destroyed, and hundreds of thousands have been killed.

As heinous as this atrocity has been, the absolute number and proportion of the Rohingya people killed by Myanmar’s junta is lower than the death toll in the Gaza genocide.

Do you believe that therefore Myanmar has not committed genocide against the Royingya people?

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The Netanyahu test

There is another instructive example.

Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Turkey of committing genocide against the Kurds.

For example, in December 2023, Netanyahu said:

Erdogan, who commits genocide against the Kurds, who holds a world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his rule is the last person who can preach morality to us.

This should be regarded as a confession by the Israeli state.

What has Turkey done to the Kurds that is worse than what Israel has done to the Palestinians of Gaza?

To be clear, I think that Turkey has committed many crimes against the Kurdish people in its war on Kurdish national self-determination. But I do not believe Turkey has committed genocide against the Kurdish people - and that includes in the 1990s under Erdogan’s predecessors, when the violence was on a much worse scale than today.

That’s the determination of human rights organisations, which have accused Turkey of war crimes, but not genocide.

By any metric what Israel has done to Gaza is much worse than what Turkey has done to the Kurds. So if Netanyahu believes that Turkey is committing genocide against the Kurds, then he must believe he has committed genocide against the Palestinian people.

Do you accept that if Netanyahu has concluded that Turkey has committed genocide, then that incriminates Israel in Gaza?

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What is the really wicked act?

You call it wicked to use the word “genocide”.

What is really “wicked” is wiping Gaza from the face of the earth: destroying the large majority of its homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, universities, archives, places of worship, and historical monuments.

Israel has destroyed most agricultural land, livestock and even plant life - in a systematic attempt to make Gaza unlivable.

Netanyahu has made clear that making Gaza unlivable is the end goal.

Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel’s legislature:

We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.

And what really is “wicked”, Michael, is exterminating such a large proportion of its people in such a small amount of time.

Repeated peer-reviewed analyses suggest the official death toll is a significant undercount.

A study in world-renowned medical journal The Lancet found that mortality levels reached 3 to 4% of the pre-genocide population within little more than a year - an intensity of killing without parallel in recent 21st-century conflicts.

As professor Michael Spagat notes:

if Gaza were a normal war then we would expect a much stronger overrepresentation of the youngish-to-pre-elderly-male demographic than what we actually see in Gaza.

The demographics of death resemble more closely Rwanda 1994 and Cambodia 1975-79 than, e.g., the post-2003 Iraq war or the various Balkan wars.

46% of those killed in Gaza are women and children, who can be immediately ruled out as combatants. Many of the men killed are not combatants either: they are more likely to leave shelter to look for food, for example, or to attempt rescues, or to be treated by the Israeli army as fair game to be killed.

But the proportion of women and children killed is much higher compared to devastating conflicts such as Yemen and Syria.

That’s because this isn’t a conflict. It is a genocide.

The evidence for genocide is overwhelming. That’s not simply because of the consequences, but because Israeli political and military leaders have made their genocidal intent repeatedly clear. There has been no attempt to disguise the official belief that the Palestinian population as a whole is the enemy.

For example, on 9th October 2023, COGAT - the IDF’s civilian wing - posted a video in which Major General Ghassan Alian declared:

Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified. Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.

There is no other way of interpreting this comment. It makes clear that the civilian population is deemed to bear collective guilt and will face the military consequences. This attitude is core to genocidal intent. This is not a one-off: there has been an avalanche of these statements.

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History will judge

You were a senior minister during fourteen years of catastrophic Conservative rule. During this war, your government backed Israel politically and militarily and cut funding to Gaza’s main humanitarian agency - UNRWA - during a humanitarian catastrophe on the basis of false and disproven Israeli smears.

Now you sit at the helm of a hard-right magazine and declare it wicked to use a word that genocide scholars, Israeli academics, international lawyers and human rights organisations have all concluded is the accurate term to describe Israel’s conduct.

You accuse a Jewish political leader of exploiting prejudice against his own people - because he accepts the overwhelming evidence that has led pre-eminent genocide scholars to conclude that Israel has committed genocide.

Like other cheerleaders of Israel, you have sought to turn reality upside down. But you can only turn the world on its head for so long.

Yours sincerely,

Owen