Millions of people believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza because they have heard or read the claim from academics, NGO workers, and diplomats whom they regard as reliable sources.
Shaw, an emeritus professor of international relations at the University of Sussex and a research professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, is one of those allegedly reliable sources. His New Age of Genocide will be widely cited as proof of Israel’s alleged crimes. The problem is that Shaw offers no proof of genocide and ignores evidence that contradicts his pseudo-scholarly book.
He treats “the genocide in Gaza” as an a priori fact and uses the term loosely, never acknowledging that Israel has the military capacity to kill every living being in Gaza but chooses not to.
Modern-day “genocide scholars” like Shaw who focus on Israel must find a way to adapt the term Rafael Lemkin coined to describe Nazi Germany’s deliberate effort to destroy the Jewish people. Their biggest problem is Lemkin’s criterion that genocide must be an intentional act. To compensate, they redefine genocide in ways that make intent secondary.
Shaw transforms Lemkin’s clear and familiar term to encompass any loss of civilian life. As he puts it, “even if we distinguish genocide from war and repression, in historical reality they are usually closely related.”
In a wonderful example of how an academic turns the obvious into something dubious, Shaw, referring to Lemkin and those involved in the 1946 deliberations that led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, writes: “Almost all agreed that genocidal destruction was necessarily ‘intentional,’ but what did that mean, and should not a purposive understanding of genocidal acts be related to the concerns of social scientists and historians with ‘structural’ phenomena?” So much for intention.
With intention out of the way, “civilian” deaths become the main criterion for genocide scholars, who lazily use data from the “Gaza authorities” (i.e., Hamas) and the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (a front for the PFLP). The purportedly high civilian death toll prompts Shaw to claim that “in Israel’s campaign, therefore, we can identify an unusually intimate (emphasis in original) relationship between war and genocide.”
It is not merely Israel’s wars against Hamas that Shaw regards as genocide; he also interprets Israeli counterterrorism measures through the concept of “permanent security.” But no protester or anti-Israel ideologue chants, “Israel is engaged in permanent security.” They shout instead, “Israel is committing genocide.”
Big difference.
Shaw offers a few pro forma, halfhearted condemnations of Hamas but quickly equivocates. Only a bad historian or an ideologue calls October 7 “the first Gaza war not to be initiated by Israel.”
Readers expecting at least a chapter in a book titled The New Age of Genocide on China’s genocide against its ethnic minorities in Xinjiang will be disappointed, as the Uyghurs have been largely cleansed from Shaw’s book, meriting only two references, one in which Shaw refers to Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping as an “axis of genocide.”
Apart from a chapter on Ukraine, the book is almost entirely about Israel, with chapters titled “The Gaza Genocide,” “The Structure of Genocide in Palestine,” and “Conclusion: Theses on Genocide: Thought and Action After Gaza.”
Francesca Albanese, the infamous Israel hater, whose absurd official title is U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, blurbs the back cover, praising the way Shaw’s book “deepens and contextualizes our collective grasp of what genocide is, and invites us to confront its meaning in our own time.”
Shaw returns the favor, quoting Albanese’s U.N. speeches as “authoritative” and crediting her with having “published the first full ‘anatomy’ of the [Israeli] genocide.” He even cites her claim that IDF deliveries of food and water to Gazan civilians were “faux ‘humanitarian’ mitigations . . . largely performances for the benefit of Western opinion.”
At the top of the list of anti-Israel academics Shaw relies on is A. Dirk Moses, a political science professor at the City College of New York and the author of several books on genocide. Moses in turn blurbs Shaw’s “compelling new book,” calling him a “pioneering scholar of war and genocide.” In the book’s list of references, 13 are by Moses. The only author Shaw cites more often than Moses is Shaw himself, with 15 of his works listed there.
Shaw’s book will find a small readership among fellow travelers and reviewers. Most readers will learn everything they need to know in the acknowledgments, where Shaw confesses on page viii that “my ideas have been largely ignored by the mainstream British media.” Kudos to the mainstream British media.
