On 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, I had recently completed an essay defending the concept of genocide and criticising A. Dirk Moses’ much-discussed proposal that the term was “inherently unstable” and should be replaced. Moses argued that armed actors—“liberal” as well as illiberal—commit mass atrocities in order to future-proof themselves against all possible attacks, and thus that “permanent security” is the better concept for understanding such violence. I argued instead that the term “genocide” is necessary to set apart cases in which civilian populations are treated as enemies to be destroyed in themselves (as a “group”) from those where civilians are killed as a way of defeating armed enemies. Permanent security may be a motive in both cases, but how the perpetrators identify their enemy is central to the distinction between genocide and other forms of mass violence.

This was a friendly argument between a historical sociologist and a conceptually-oriented historian. I saw no urgency to publish my paper, and it had not appeared publicly when Hamas’ attack took place. While waiting, I had gone back to finishing a history of the antinuclear movement. But my return to genocide theory, on which I had worked from the turn of the century, helped prepare me for the fallout of 7 October. As the vast anti-civilian violence that Israeli leaders unleashed matched their extreme rhetoric, it was soon clear that they intended to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza. For them, this was not merely a means of defeating Hamas, but an end in itself; they had a genocidal as well as a military goal. This “war” was different from, say, the US-UK invasion of Iraq, despite the large civilian harm that this invasion caused as well.

It was important for me to advance this conclusion in the public domain. One does not enter genocide studies in order to stand on the moral sideline, and I had to write about Gaza as I saw it. This included acknowledging, unlike many of my peers, the “genocidal massacre” that Hamas had committed, which partly explained Israel’s rapid move to full genocidal war. ¹ This “countergenocidal” dynamic is familiar from colonial history—for example, in the German genocide in South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904. Given the humiliation of Israel’s leadership and its established “Dahiyah doctrine” of inflicting disproportionate civilian harm, it seemed unlikely that Israel’s assault would amount to anything less than full-scale genocide.

The challenges of advancing this view of Israel’s campaign were immense. There were debates, often in the form of friendly exchanges, with those who acknowledged Israel’s atrocities, but were not convinced—at least at first—that genocide was the right frame for understanding them. But mostly there was a struggle, highly politicized, against the formidable disciplinary power, ideological, legal and administrative, which Israel mobilised to deny its crimes. Its supporters aimed to ban even the word “genocide” itself from the public sphere; characterising Israel’s campaign in this way was labelled antisemitic and a declaration of support of Hamas.

In the climate of fear that this mobilisation has fostered, people often found my public stance brave. Yet as a well-established scholar, I was relatively protected, while many—especially in Germany and the USA—were not. In Britain, younger colleagues told me they dared not speak out; student activists were disciplined; peaceful civil protest was criminalized as “terrorism.” My interventions were designed to bring my sociological authority to bear against the extensive denial. Mainstream media outlets were not open to my case—even in the Guardian, only an Israeli Holocaust historian could write of “genocide” in the first year after 7 October—but some independent and academic journals were.