As the world's leading experts declare genocide in Gaza, the UK government still won't

The International Association of Genocide Scholars has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Now I'm no legal expert, but I didn't have to be part of the world's most respected genocide scholars' group to figure this one out, and it didn't take me 23 months either.

Still, if you needed to hear it from the world's leading experts, rather than just Palestinians, here it is.

The IAGS has issued a three-page resolution that states:

"Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)".

Eighty-six percent of the 500 members of the IAGS voted that Israel is committing genocide. The other 14% should be hounded out of their profession in disgrace. It might have taken far too long, but the declaration from the IAGS matters because it makes it much harder for organisations like the BBC to pretend this is not a genocide.

For the first time, the BBC ran a headline accusing Israel of genocide without including an Israeli denial or offering some weird framing to obfuscate - and that's because it couldn't.

The headline simply read:

"Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, world's leading experts say"

There was no attempt to create a false middle ground or pretend that telling the truth is bias because anything other than a straightforward headline would have screamed genocide denial.

The BBC have a guy called Raffi Berg whose job it is to rewrite headlines to obfuscate and not even he could help Israel here. He must have been squirming in his seat. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy must be seething.

Let's not forget, it's about two or three months since Nandy prepared a speech declaring the BBC is "institutionally antisemitic" and apologising to the war criminals. She bottled out at the last moment when a draft of the speech was leaked by Declassified UK.

While the BBC has been forced to concede that the consensus of experts is that a genocide is taking place, it has not explained in detail why the IAGS has declared a genocide.

The IAGS calls for Israel to "immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians, including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population."

It says: "the actions of the Israeli government against Palestinians have included torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual and reproductive violence; deliberate attacks on medical professionals, humanitarian aid workers and journalists; and the deliberate deprivation of food, water, medicine, and electricity essential to the survival of the population."

It says: "Israel has forcibly displaced nearly all of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip multiple times, and demolished more than 90 percent of the housing infrastructure in the territory."

The IAGS resolution goes on and on, going into the level of detail that would prompt an inquiry into antisemitism, had the the BBC done the same. That's the ludicrous thing about the UK: no one is allowed to tell the full truth about Israel, not without risking getting into a lot of trouble.

So far I have been unable to find any response from the UK government to the IAGS resolution. Lammy and Starmer must be panicking because any ackowledgement would be a confession.

David Lammy was recently forced to concede that the famine in Gaza is "man-made", but he still won't say genocide. What is a man-made famine if not a genocidal action?

The UK government is taking the stance that it won't treat Israel's actions as genocide until there is a formal ruling from the International Court of Justice. This position is nonsense because the ICJ's provisional ruling that a genocide is plausibly taking place means all governments have a legal duty to act to prevent genocide.

Continuing to arm and train the IDF, and conduct surveillance flights to help Israel pick its targets, makes the UK a partner in this genocide. You can't just say you were happy to be a partner in genocide because there had not been a final ruling from the court. Those rulings always come after the genocide has concluded.

Israel's defenders have absurdly claimed it can't possibly be genocide because Israel could have wiped out every Palestinian by now, but genocides don't work like this.

As IAGS president Melanie O'Brien points out: "genocide is a process involving years of persecution, apartheid, and conflict, not just a single event." Note the word "apartheid", another crime western politicians and journalists have shamefully denied or ignored.

So many human rights groups and legal experts, including Israeli genocide scholars, have concluded that Israel is comitting genocide that any continued denials are obscene.

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