A year late, the Guardian finally permits us to use the term 'genocide'

It's not the World Court, non-western states, rights groups and Palestinians who have been using the term genocide 'too lightly'. It's the Guardian that's reached the same conclusion far, far too late

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In typically mendacious fashion, the Guardian has allowed one of its columnists to write an opinion piece weighing whether it is appropriate yet to use the term "genocide" to describe what has been happening in Gaza for the past 13 months. You will doubtless be relieved to learn that the paper thinks it may finally be acceptable to deploy the g-word in relation to the ongoing erasure of the enclave and its population.

The Guardian is entertaining this debate 10 months after the judges of the International Court of Justice – the highest judicial body in the world and one not noted for its radicalism – conceded that South Africa’s lawyers had made a "plausible" case Israel’s actions in Gaza met the strict definition in international law of genocide. Conditions in the enclave have grown immeasurably worse since that ruling back in January.

As I recently noted, the Guardian – like the rest of the western media – has had an effective ban on the use of the term genocide, except in legal debates relating to the ICJ case. Whistleblowing staff told Novara Media they were under "suffocating control" from senior editors, and that this pressure existed "only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel".

So why the paper's sudden change of tune – assuming that this isn’t just a sop to address growing disenchantment among a section of its readers?

One answer may be that the Novara Media article has caused the paper serious embarrassment. Staff at the Guardian also revealed to Novara that the paper had pulled an opinion piece from its pages by the pre-eminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on the term “holocaust” to describe what she had witnessed in Gaza.

The editor, Kath Viner, offered Abulhawa a “compromise” – one Viner presumably thought more than generous – by agreeing exceptionally to let Abulhawa use the term “genocide” instead. In saying no, Abulhawa caught the Guardian off-guard.

The episode drew attention to the fact that the Guardian has been policing the language about Gaza in ways that – by treating as extraordinarily controversial any characterisation of the slaughter there as a genocide – have assisted Israel in pursuing that genocide.

There is another likely reason for its change of heart.

The Guardian is allowing this debate very belatedly – at the moment when, as the article’s headline concedes, the genocide has reached its “final stage”.

The author of the Guardian’s opinion piece, Arwa Mahdawi, cites various figures from experts that put the true death toll in the hundreds of thousands, rather than tens of thousands – something that was obvious many, many months ago to observers not pandering to the sensitivities of Israel and its apologists.

It is all but impossible to ignore the fact that the so-called Generals’ Plan for northern Gaza – Israel’s intensified bombardment and expulsion of 400,000 Palestinians from near-half of their tiny territory and the extermination of anyone left as a “terrorist” – is a text-book genocide.

With Gaza destroyed, with much of its population dead, or severely wounded and being actively starved and deprived of even the most rudimentary medical facilities, the chance to stop the genocide playing out to its bitter end may already have passed.

The Guardian is readying its alibi before the dust settles, and the true toll shocks even Israel’s supporters. The paper urgently needs to rationalise its many long months of obfuscation and procrastination, and get in its excuses before Donald Trump heads to the White House. This opinion piece is the Guardian’s vehicle for doing all that.

Even so, the paper makes sure to reinvent as a virtue its long months of failure – during which it and the rest of the establishment media have given Israel licence to carry out a genocide in Gaza by falsely presenting it as a “war with Hamas”.

The Guardian’s obscene delay in naming the slaughter of Palestinian children as a genocide is justified apparently because its resident Holocaust scholar – an Israeli one, of course – says it has only become clear recently that what Israel is doing counts as genocide.

Omer Bartov provides a useful service to the Guardian because he thinks that, for most of the past 13 months, Israel’s critics have been throwing the term genocide around “too lightly” and have thereby “watered down” its meaning. Or as he puts it: “It [the word ‘genocide’] has been used so often as a kind of anti-Israeli phrase that it has lost a lot of its value.”

So, apparently, according to Bartov and the Guardian, it is the Palestinians and their allies who have damaged the Palestinian cause by calling out the genocide too early. We should all have stilled our tongues until Bartov and the Guardian gave us permission to speak.

Do Bartov and the Guardian also think that the many experts in international law who serve as judges at the World Court and suspected a genocide was taking place way back in January have also been throwing the term around “too lightly”?

Bartov’s role here is to make the Guardian look like it is the responsible party – the adult in the room – for refusing to identify Israel’s genocide for a whole year.

There are some very obvious problems with the Guardian’s reliance on Bartov to excuse its interminable delay in entertaining the idea that Israel is carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza.

It is not just that Israel’s leaders made clear their genocidal intent – and ability to carry through that threat – from the outset of their attack on Gaza back in October 2023.

Or that Palestinians and human rights organisations have been warning for decades that Israel’s ambition – and Zionism’s – was the incremental erasure of the Palestinians as a people. It is what Palestinians mean when they speak of an “ongoing Nakba” – a reference to the destruction of most of their homeland by Israel in 1948 to create an exclusively “Jewish state” on its ruins.

Back in 2003, the respected Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling warned of Israel’s ultimate goal, labelling it “politicide” to bypass the predictable objections to the use of the term “genocide”, in his book of that very name. I published my own book on the subject, “Disappearing Palestine”, in 2008.

All that aside, it was patently obvious that Israel was not trying to eliminate Hamas but the entire population of Gaza as soon as it imposed an aid blockade and starvation diet on the enclave’s 2.3 million people, and as soon as it became clear that Gaza’s hospitals weren’t being hit as collateral damage, but were being systematically destroyed.

One cannot make sense of Israel’s actions in Gaza outside of the framework of genocide. Children, women, the sick, the elderly were always going to the first victims of such a policy, not Hamas fighters.

Bartov and the Guardian have been so slow to understand what has been staring them in the face only because for decades they have viewed Israel in completely ahistorical terms. Israel is a settler-colonial state, and, as such, its very rationale is to eliminate and replace the native people through the three strategies available to such states: ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.

For decades, Israel has had the Palestinians penned up in its own version of apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans, with Gaza the most egregious. For 17 years it had tried to incentivise Palestinians to flee Gaza by imposing a siege on it that put the population on a “strict diet” and stripped them of all dignity, while intermittently bombing the enclave into ruins – or what Israel called “mowing the lawn”.

Initially with its current slaughter, Israel hoped that, by intensifying the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and through a starvation programme – that is, by beginning a genocide – Egypt would relent and finally open the Rafah crossing so that the remaining Palestinian population would flood into Sinai.

When Cairo made clear it would not, Israel had only one settler-colonial strategy left: completing the genocide.

Though the Guardian does its best to bury his admission, Bartov does reluctantly concede that those who pointed out that this was a genocide from the outset were right. Churlishly, he notes:

There was a concerted and intentional effort [by Israel] to destroy universities, schools, hospitals, mosques, museums, public buildings and housing and infrastructure. If you look back, you could say that this was happening from the beginning.

So maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn’t that South Africa and most of the non-western world, the World Court, human rights organisations, Palestinians and independent observers threw the term “genocide” around “too lightly”. Maybe the problem is that Bartov and the Guardian have come to the same realisation far, far too late – when Israel is putting the finishing touches to its genocide.

There is another problem for the Guardian in citing Bartov as their authority for determining the moment when we are permitted to use the term “genocide”. The Holocaust scholar himself points out that he finally concluded Israel was carrying out a genocide back in May, when Israel laid waste to Rafah, an area it had declared to be a safe zone.

In other words, even Bartov thinks Israel’s genocide officially began six months ago. That is an incredibly long time for the Guardian to admit it has been dragging its feet on identifying the genocide in Gaza as a genocide.

Mahdawi writes that Bartov “believes it’s time for the media, which shies away from using the g-word, ‘to face facts’. What’s unfolding in Gaza is genocide.”

In running an opinion piece that suggests it may now be acceptable to use the term genocide about Gaza, the Guardian has admitted it has been – even according to its own resident genocide expert – complicit in obscuring that genocide for at least half a year.

Remember that when editor Kath Viner comes cap in hand once again, as she did this week, begging for money from readers for her brand of supposedly “fearless, independent journalism”.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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