OPINION:
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, has repeatedly described Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a genocide. Last month, he insisted that this is not “my own independent assessment” but rather a “reflection of leading genocide scholars from across the world.”
Mr. Mamdani isn’t alone in the tactical invocation of experts. In May, social media provocateur Mehdi Hasan announced to his 1.7 million X followers, “Genocide experts are almost all in agreement that what’s happening [in Gaza] is a genocide.” The experts, Mr. Hasan said, help us “avoid being gaslit by apologists for Israel.”
Are the experts really experts? Ten days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, some 900 scholars claiming expertise in “international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies” issued a statement concerning “the crime of genocide” in Gaza. The signatories actually included scholars of medieval art, “racial” capitalism, veterinary medicine, chemical engineering, IT business administration, Chilean street art, forests in India, Kurdish feminism, queer theory, classics, linguistics, Irish philosophy and performance theory.
Are real experts in agreement? In August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars issued its own resolution that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. To pass it, the association leadership cheated. Less than 30% of its membership participated in a rushed online poll, with no serious discussion allowed before the vote. Discussion might have been useful; the resolution contained numerous factual errors.
The Jewish state is hated like no other, but Israel’s military has protected its existence. Israel’s right to exist is another matter. Genocide allegations have aimed at this right since Israel’s founding.
Today, social media algorithms augment the drumbeat, but the music, sung to postmodern accompaniment where “narrative” replaces truth, is also new. Hamas’ actual genocidal attack of Oct. 7 is thus painted as resistance against a Gaza occupation that ended two decades ago. Hamas’ strategy, based on more than 300 miles of fortifications built under apartments, hospitals, schools and mosques, is ignored. Accusations of deliberate starvation ignore the 2.2 million tons of aid entering multiple crossings, information on which is available to anyone.
This is because the accusation itself is central. In December 2023, South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice. From Beirut, scholar Maha Yahya of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace revealed the stakes. Regardless of outcome, Ms. Yahya said, the accusation alone “has profoundly tainted” Israel. It exposed the world’s mistaken “sense of Israeli exceptionalism, based on the suffering of the Jewish people.”
And the Holocaust? Just another Western, colonial-style crime, this time carried out against Europeans. Afterward, Israel became the colonial perpetrator par excellence.
Still, disappointment with the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 refusal to label the war a genocide led to numerous public claims that the court found Israel’s actions to be plausibly genocidal. Court President Joan Donoghue corrected this false reading, but plausible genocide was never enough anyway. It was time for the experts to bypass the court.
Foremost is Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinians, who claims to be an “international lawyer.” Mr. Mamdani doubtless thinks of her when referring to the “findings of a number of U.N. experts.” Having never sat for the qualifying exams to practice law, Ms. Albanese is untethered to quaint notions such as evidence.
Ms. Albanese has produced several reports, the most recent of which was released last month. All are based on the falsehoods of her July 2024 report, “Anatomy of a Genocide.” Her claim that 70% of fatalities in Gaza were women and children was (quietly) debunked that May by the United Nations itself. Her insistence that Israel deliberately starved Gaza ignored that Israel, weeks earlier, opened its Ashdod port to humanitarian deliveries along with three truck crossings into northern Gaza. These Israeli steps followed requests by the World Food Program, whose executive director, Carl Skau, told the U.N. Security Council in February 2024 that the main problem was moving food convoys from southern Gaza to the north amid combat. Ms. Albanese never mentions the World Food Program.
The special rapporteur also leans on settler colonial theory, a current rage in academe, which argues that European settlement means eventual extermination of indigenous peoples. Genocide here becomes a societal structure, not a singular crime. As the theory bypasses historical evidence, Ms. Albanese can insist that “erasing the Indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a “Jewish state.” Despite its acceptance of numerous peace initiatives, Israel is genocidal by nature.
Ms. Albanese’s reward has been stardom within the genocide expert universe. Her appearances at elite universities and her recent speaking tour in South Africa have triggered rapturous ovations, but neither she nor her admirers can hide the vapid nature of it all. “It doesn’t really matter,” Ms. Albanese said at Princeton, “whether a court has finished investigating.” This is because, as she said at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, “Israel cannot run away … without the sticker on [its] back of an apartheid state which has committed genocide.” It is the sticker that matters. Gaslighting indeed.
• Norman J.W. Goda is the Braman professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida.
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