As both an academic and legal practitioner, there are a few individuals who have studied genocide the way William Schabas has for over 35 years.
At the start of his career, he was among the first Western voices to warn of an impending genocide in Rwanda back in 1993. Today, he is professor of international law at Middlesex University and professor of international human rights at Leiden University.
Canada-born Schabas, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, also sits on the advisory board of the Israel Law Review and the Journal of International Criminal Justice, and has published dozens of books, including Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge University Press).
As a legal practitioner, Schabas was one of the commissioners on the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported to the UN in 2004, as well as a commissioner on the Iran Tribunal Truth Commission in 2012. Two years later, he was appointed the head of a UN Committee investigating the role of Israel in the 2014 Gaza war, and was then subsequently involved in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case between Croatia and Serbia, regarding claims of genocide.
In 2019, Schabas represented the state of Myanmar at the ICJ, arguing that the crimes against the Rohingya did not meet the threshold of genocide, prompting criticism from friends and foes. Of these criticisms, Schabas told Reuters: “I am hired as a lawyer, they’re my client… Both sides have a right to have competent representation.”
The New Arab sits down with William Schabas to talk more:
The New Arab: What is the consensus among genocide scholars with regards to Gaza?
William Schabas: With a lot of the genocide studies, people are (now) quite open about describing what’s happening in Palestine as genocide. There’s probably a large contingent of international lawyers who do that as well, albeit less so, since international lawyers usually have a “let’s wait and see what the court says” mentality.
But it’s hard for academics, certainly in Western countries, to make this call without paying a potential price for condemning Israel’s genocide. A price in terms of career promotions, appointments, or even the threat of dismissal in some cases. So, for younger people in academia there’s a strong tendency to keep your head down.
Part of the problem in the field is the fact that genocide studies are often linked to universities’ Holocaust studies department. I think this has helped fuel reluctance in the field in calling Gaza a genocide, as many of these people’s focus is the suffering of the Jewish people, making them potentially less inclined to be as critical of Israel as they should be.
How come you’re unafraid of losing your job for calling out Israel’s genocide?
I’d like to say it’s because I’m a principled person. Or maybe I’m 74 years old, and don’t have anything to lose.
How do you analyse the West’s inability to use the word genocide in Gaza?
We’re in a world where genocide is a term that gets used in a creative and broad sense for political purposes – and is rejected and denied for the same types of reasons. For example, the US government issued statements four years ago condemning China for a genocide against the Uyghurs. The US had no compunction about denouncing it as genocide, nor did the UK, even though China have not even killed tens of thousands of civilians, like Israel has in Gaza.
They will call it genocide when it is politically convenient to them, because China is viewed as a threat and a country to be attacked. But they won’t apply it when it’s a friend of theirs, like Israel.
Biden spoke about genocide being committed in Ukraine by the Russians. It’s an absurd claim. And then, when South Africa claims genocide against Israel, they dismiss it as being meritless and frivolous; you will have Starmer and Lammy contradict themselves and say that “such claims should be left for the courts to decide”.
These politicians readily acknowledge the genocides against the Jews, Armenians, Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims, but are now tongue-tied to call out what Israel is doing. If they can call the other cases genocide, then by the same logic they should be questioning what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. These double standards are clear.
One day Western countries will all recognise what happened in Gaza as a genocide. It will be like apartheid South Africa, when the West stayed silent for decades, and then suddenly grew conscious when they think it is safe to.
What are some of the factors that make you see a genocide in Gaza?
When I visited Rwanda in early 1993, about 15 months before the full-blown genocide (as part of a fact-finding mission) we warned the UN of genocide because there were very visible statements calling for the destruction of a group, married with actual massacres being committed with blessings from of the highest authorities in the country.
It was a combination of those factors, and I see the same thing at work in Gaza. Just take the infamous statement by Yoav Gallant about Israel denying water, food, electricity and fuel to Gaza – this is just one example. But calling out genocide is not a simple formula on your phone. We’re interpreting the UN Genocide Convention in light of the way it’s been interpreted in the past. The intent of the leaders of Israel appears to be to destroy the Palestinian people, certainly the people in Gaza.
What strategy will be most successful for those taking Israel to court?
It will be helpful if the court adopts a broader understanding of the definition of genocide than it has adopted in previous cases. There are genocide cases from the Balkans where the ICJ adopted a fairly strict definition. But there are many things that suggest that this is not going to happen again, given how many countries are intervening in the proceedings and calling for a broader interpretation.
In late 2023, there was an intervention by the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Denmark that asked the ICJ to take a more flexible approach to the genocide convention – to make it easier to prove genocidal intent. They were arguing this in the case involving Myanmar, where they wanted to support the argument that Myanmar is committing genocide. They could not have known and could not have anticipated that months later South Africa would file its case against Israel and that all of their arguments would be helpful to South Africa and very unhelpful to Israel. That’s something we’re seeing unfold at the ICJ, adding to the momentum that the court takes a broader view of genocide.
What do you say to the Israeli argument that: “We’re not committing genocide, we’re at war”?
Going back to the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in the First World War or to the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the Second World War, both of these, and others, were carried out in the context of a war, so that argument is not going to prosper well before the ICJ.
Israel might also argue that those in their government who made genocidal statements are marginal people. But you will find among all the recognised genocides that there were some ideologically fanatical people and then there were those who were just doing their jobs. Israel’s mantra of self-defence also won’t go far in court. This is a familiar argument. Once again, almost every recognised case of genocide involved perpetrators who claimed to be fighting in self-defence.
What do you say to the Israeli argument that: “Our combatant-to-civilian kill ratio is not as bad as the US and UK wars in Iraq”?
They are saying “we’re not as bad as you”. This won’t go far in court. The Rule of Proportionality (as it’s known in international law) is about when you’re actually attacking military objectives. But the Israelis are not attacking military objectives in Gaza. They’re attacking hospitals, they’re attacking schools, they’re attacking civilian residences and communities.
There, the issue of proportionality is not relevant. They shouldn’t be attacking those sites and then coming up with the pathetic excuse that Hamas fighters hide under every building, something for which we simply don’t see the evidence.
To what extent do you blame the US for Israel’s actions?
We must not underestimate the direct participation of the US in what’s going on. They like to portray the whole as them trying to keep a leash on this mad dog that they’re friends with. But in reality, they’re feeding red meat to the mad dog. It’s their dog, and none of this would have happened if they hadn’t allowed it to.
This is US policy at work. They want to control a part of the world. They have various financial, political and military interests in the Middle East, and since the 1940s their core policy has been to keep a powerful military ally in the region via Israel, a “Western state” that they trust in a way that they haven’t with an Arab state.
One of the ways that the Western media and political class have justified Israel’s actions is by describing what happened on October 7 with words like “barbaric”. It was a classic example of Europeanised forces trying to demonise people from other parts of the world by suggesting they’re uncivilised, that they don’t fight by the same rules and that they engage in something savage and primitive.
It’s a profoundly racist vision. It’s been characteristic of American and British propaganda for a long, long time. And I think that’s a feature of how they’ve been talking about Palestinians in general, not just those who were engaged in the attack on October 7, 2023.
What do you see as Israel’s strategy going forward?
They have made Gaza into an unbelievable place and I fear that it’s going to get worse and worse. Now, in the West Bank, the same sort of thing will happen alongside the continued movement of settlers.
Israel is a country that was built to a large extent on using force against people whose land you had stolen. Those actions have coloured everything since then. They have had opportunities to try and reach agreements and go back to the Oslo process. There were elements in Israel, at that time, who were prepared to try and find a peaceful way. There’s no inherent reason why both people shouldn’t be able to co-exist. But Israel has been absolutely unable to make the radical compromises necessary to live in peace with the Palestinians.
Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman
Follow him on X: @seblebanon
