I keep seeing the war in Gaza as being classified a genocide.
genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Now, when I look at the Iraq war, the goal was to destroy Ba’athist Iraq. By the same definition, wouldn’t that war have been a genocide as well? As an outsider, I observed awful humanitarian suffering during the Iraq war and don’t necessarily see the difference with the new situation in Gaza or see it as uniquely evil.
Clearly the US wanted to remove Hussein and his Ba’ath Party government, not wipe out literally anyone who was in favor of him.
The 2003 US-Iraq war was awful for multiple reasons, but it wasn’t a genocide.
Clearly Israel just wants to remove Ismail Haniyeh and his HAMAS coalition government, not wipe out literally anyone who was in favor of him.
FWIW, I have also been personally deliberating over whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are technically a Genocide as opposed to, say, ethnic cleansing (which it undeniably is, and has been for decades).
However, I can understand why the term is in widespread use at the moment regarding Gaza:
With Genocide, there has to be a discernable intent on wiping out the people themselves, not just their government.
According to reports from the Iraq Body Count project, over 190,000 civilians died as a direct or indirect result of the war. This reflects the disproportionate toll on innocent lives during military operations.
The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq faced criticism for disrupting essential services like water supply and electricity. The New York Times reported that in the first few months after the invasion, “Iraq’s power generation has fallen to less than one fifth of its prewar level.” In addition, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced that “the distribution of food rations has been severely restricted due to looting and other security problems.”
In the case of indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas, American forces used massive airpower against Iraq during the initial phase of the invasion. Operation Shock and Awe included thousands of bombs dropped on Baghdad within three weeks, causing widespread devastation, particularly in urban areas.
The wholesale destruction of public infrastructure in Iraq is another parallel with the situation in Gaza. Infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and roads suffered extensive damage during the invasion and subsequent years of conflict. For example, according to the New York Times, many Iraqi hospitals had their generators destroyed, resulting in a lack of medical care for thousands of people.
During the lead-up to the Iraq War, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld infamously referred to Iraqi civilians as “dead enders” – a dehumanizing term meant to refer to those who opposed the American presence. This echoes the genocidal and dehumanizing language used by Israeli government officials toward the civilian population in Gaza.
These are valid points, but I still think what sets apart the current situation from Iraq is 1) the scale and 2) the intent.
With regards to #1, bear in mind that those figures for Iraq are calculated over a period of fourteen years as opposed to just six months in Gaza. For the latter, the daily death rate is four times higher. Similarly, the fact that most of Northern Gaza is now an uninhabitable pile of rubble dwarfs even the destruction that occurred in Iraq. With regards to the genocidal language, the comment from Rumsfeld is a far cry from Isaac Herzog saying “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” for October 7th or Yoav Gallant saying “We are fighting human animals.”
As for #2, the vast majority of Palestinians are have been displaced southwards and are now basically trapped in Rafah with nowhere to go. The equivalent in Irag would have been for US to build a wall around Baghdad and prevented any women and children from leaving while they carried out their bombing campaigns. Also, the steps that Israel have taken to block humanitarian aid from getting to desperate and starving people sets the behavior apart from the US in Iraq. There’s also the sense of “collective punishment” in Gaza that wasn’t present in Iraq.
Again, I am still somewhat in two minds about use of the word, but I think there are still distinct differences that makes the current situation what the ICJ terms a “plausible genocide”.