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More than Genocide

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Summary

A. Dirk Moses, writing in Boston Review on November 14, 2023, argues that the genocide frame for Israel’s assault on Gaza is fundamentally limited by the concept’s legal parameters: the 1948 Genocide Convention was written by states so as not to inhibit their own pursuit of Permanent security — extreme self-defense that targets whole civilian populations to avert future threats — so the law “occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense” (More than Genocide, lines 129, 139, 169). Israel’s campaign after Hamas’s October 7 breach of the Iron wall is, on his account, the crystallization of a permanent security solution — destroying Hamas and corralling or expelling Gaza’s population — and whether or not it is legally genocide is “a distinction without a difference for the victims” (lines 151, 155, 177).

What the file is

  • An article in Boston Review, Fall 2023 issue, published November 14, 2023 as displayed in the text copy (line 121) and in the original HTML’s structured data (datePublished 2023-11-14), downloaded from https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/ (access basis: publisher-free). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (about 4,395 words, lines 1-296) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
  • The article itself runs lines 123-185, with the author note at line 187. The rest of the text copy is the page frame: navigation and controls (lines 1-98), the head matter, standfirst and photo caption (lines 99-121), two pull-quotes repeating sentences from the article (after lines 129 and 143), and the donation appeal, related-articles list, newsletter signup and magazine footing (lines 189-295).
  • Text quality: the article’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. The footing’s ”© 2026” at the end of the file belongs to the page as captured, not to the 2023 piece.

Section by section

  • The genocide debate unleashed (line 123): Raz Segal and Martin Shaw argue the assault is genocide; Palestinian and international legal academics and the Center for Constitutional Rights’ suit against the U.S. government press the same claim; other legal experts condemn Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis as itself genocidal, and Holocaust scholars liken it to “the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution.”
  • The present toll and the protest movement (lines 125-127): the claims’ urgent moral point; Gaza’s toll as Moses writes — over 11,000 killed, more than two-thirds women and children, over a million displaced, hospitals targeted — settler terror in the West Bank, and the largest protest movement since the Second Gulf War, which places Israeli violence in the Holocaust frame: Haidar Eid’s “our Warsaw Uprising moment” against Israeli commentators’ Dresden comparison.
  • The frame’s legal limit (line 129): international law’s high standard makes genocide seem a rare act of “rogue” states, while collective punishment, deportation and destruction of peoples lie at the foundation of modern states; the broader history of state violence and violent resistance must be considered.
  • Self-defense and empire (lines 131-135): mass state violence is “baked into statehood itself”; the Spanish conquest onward, reprisals as “self-preservation,” the Doctrine of double effect, civilizational and racial hierarchies, the Christianizing then civilizing missions, “bringing democracy to the Arab world” and Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the “villa in the jungle”; and how colonial wars and the Atlantic slave trade financed the European modern state, whose powers killed any who resisted while claiming their hands were forced.
  • First lesson — Permanent security (line 139): the concept defined, with Putin’s Ukraine reasoning, Myanmar’s 2017 expulsion of the Rohingya, and China’s mass incarceration of Uyghurs as its present instances.
  • Second lesson — reprisals and Subaltern genocide (lines 141-143): vicious reprisals when resistance attacks colonizers’ families (the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857–1859, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Herero uprising of 1904 to 1907); millenarian resistance movements and “subaltern genocide”; and the asymmetry — anticolonial uprisings “invariably smashed with far greater violence,” the Maji Maji suppression at at least 75,000 and perhaps 300,000 African fatalities (1905-1907).
  • Hamas’s millenarian position (line 147): Khaled Mashal’s Arab-television interview — struggles lasting over a century and costing millions, Gazans unconsulted yet bound to pay the price, “no nation is liberated without sacrifices,” and Hamas “not responsible for them” on Israeli civilian casualties.
  • Mowing the Grass and the Iron Wall (line 149): Israel’s attrition strategy as the contemporary expression of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1923 argument, quoted at length (see Key passages): Palestinian resistance understandable, inevitable and anticolonial; colonization only “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
  • The permanent security solution for Gaza (lines 151-155): after the October 7 breach, destroying Hamas plus corralling Gaza’s population south, a permanent buffer zone in the north and eventual expulsion into Egypt, the resettlement pressure logic and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy’s grand plan; two million Palestinians subjected to “serial war crimes and mass expulsion”; Netanyahu’s October 16 “crushing victory … once and for all,” the statement the article attributes to “The Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz” (see Open questions), the UN Special Rapporteur’s October 14 new-Nakba warning, Avi Dichter’s “rolling out the Gaza Nakba” and Ariel Kallner’s “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”
  • Population transfers, the impossible position, and suppressed nonviolence (lines 157-161): twentieth-century transfers to homogenize empires and nations; indigenous peoples punished for violent resistance and overlooked in nonviolent subjection; Abdaljawad Omar on the violence in the insistence on nonviolence; BDS virtually criminalized in many U.S. states and Germany; the Great March of Return toll (233 killed, nearly 6,000 injured and maimed, 2018-2019); Issa Amro harassed; and Helena Cobban’s observation, as Moses presents it, that Hamas reasons Palestinians have nothing to gain from the U.S.-led “rules-based international order.”
  • How genocide is (and is not) prosecuted (lines 163-167): courts, not unilateral declarations, prosecute individuals; Karim Khan’s jurisdiction declaration is so far about war crimes, not genocide; Israeli statements with genocidal connotations (“human animals,” Netanyahu’s October 28 Amalek comparison, the Convention’s incitement prohibition); and why proof is extraordinarily difficult — the 1947-1948 negotiators distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, and the restrictive definition’s “as such” (the dolus specialis) requires targeting solely by group membership, not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency.
  • Impunity and incidental killing (lines 169-171): states would not permit the Convention to inhibit permanent security; postwar imperial and secession wars killed many millions with impunity and genocide allegations in some “none stuck”; the Holocaust analogy is virtually impossible for Palestinians against Israel to make; the disproportionality dispute over “incidentally” killed civilians; Western acceptance of the “human shields” reasoning; the unpressed question of the “war of starvation,” against the Convention’s predicate act of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; and why a lifted siege after Hamas’s defeat would make the genocidal-act argument difficult in a legal context.
  • Dahiya doctrine and “Hama rules” (line 175): Breaking the Silence’s deterrence reading and Thomas Friedman’s coinage, from Hafez al-Assad’s killing of 20,000 Islamist rebels in Hama in 1982; “Excessive reprisals, we should recall, are a staple of colonial warfare and state consolidation.”
  • The victim’s perspective (lines 177-179): “a distinction without a difference for the victims”; Itamar Mann on the genocide claim as a symptom of the “utter failure of international law in responding to war crimes and crimes against humanity (including apartheid)”; and the closing charge on the Convention: “It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.”
  • History withheld, Resolution 194, and the South (line 181): Western states’ closing of ranks and sole-responsibility claim against the withheld history — most Gazans are refugees from the 1948 cleansing of their villages, holding UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948 — and the Global South’s second question, whether Palestine has a right to exist as well; Hamas’s attacks make peaceable coexistence impossible for the moment.
  • Kohn and egalitarian binationalism (lines 183-185): Hans Kohn, who left Palestine after the 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron, understood the violence as a colonial uprising and judged colonization behind the British iron wall untenable; Bashir Bashir’s “Egalitarian binationalism” as the workable successor vision; and the close: “Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.”

Key passages

  • “Mass state violence against civilians is not a glitch in the international system; it is baked into statehood itself.” (line 131)
  • “Acts of collective punishment, deportation, and even destruction of peoples lie at the foundation of modern states.” (line 129)
  • Jabotinsky, quoted by Moses: “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population” (line 149); “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach” (line 149)
  • Mashal, as Moses presents him: “no nation is liberated without sacrifices” (line 147)
  • Netanyahu, quoted by Moses: “a crushing victory over Hamas, toppling its regime and removing its threat to the State of Israel once and for all” (line 155)
  • Dichter, quoted by Moses: “rolling out the Gaza Nakba” (line 155)
  • Kallner, quoted by Moses: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” (line 155)
  • Omar, quoted by Moses: “There is violence in this insistence on nonviolence by the international community,” “because it is effectively an invitation for Palestinians to lie down and die.” (line 159)
  • “In other words, states would not permit the UNGC to inhibit their right to pursue permanent security, whether against internal or external enemies.” (line 169)
  • “It is a distinction without a difference for the victims.” (line 177)
  • “But the UNGC does not reflect the victim’s perspective. It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.” (line 179)
  • Resolution 194, quoted by Moses: “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date” (line 181)
  • “Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.” (line 185)

Evidence the work relies on

  • Moses’s own earlier framework: the concept of permanent security is presented as his own coinage (line 139), and his author note identifies his book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression as the work behind it (line 187).
  • Jabotinsky’s 1923 “Iron Wall” argument, quoted at length in Moses’s presentation — the Aztecs/Sioux passage, the cannot-be-bought-off claim, and the iron wall conclusion (line 149).
  • The 1948 UN Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC) as Moses presents it: its definition with “as such,” the dolus specialis / actus reus structure, its incitement prohibition, and the conditions-of-life predicate act, each quoted or paraphrased (lines 165, 167, 171).
  • Statements by named Israeli figures as Moses presents them: Netanyahu (October 16; the October 28 Amalek comparison), the statement attributed to Gantz, Dichter and Kallner (line 155; line 165).
  • Mashal’s interview on Arab television, as Moses presents it, for Hamas’s position (line 147).
  • The Misgav Institute’s grand plan, as Moses presents it, for the resettlement logic (line 155).
  • Breaking the Silence’s Dahiya Doctrine observation and Friedman’s “Hama rules” op-ed, each as Moses presents them (line 175).
  • Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s “war of starvation” phrase, Omar’s November 9 piece, Cobban’s observation in Boston Review, and Mann’s observation, each as Moses presents them (lines 159, 161, 171, 179).
  • Historical cases as Moses presents them, with the figures he gives: Maji Maji (at least 75,000, perhaps 300,000), Hama 1982 (20,000), the March of Return (233 killed, nearly 6,000 injured and maimed), and the postwar wars in Korea, Vietnam and Chechnya and the Nigerian and Pakistani secession wars (many millions, no figure itemized) (lines 143, 161, 169, 175).
  • UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948, quoted in part (line 181).
  • No footnotes, bibliography or links are given in the text copy for any of these; each item is presented in Moses’s own prose.

Analysis

  • Method: a conceptual-historical essay, not a legal brief or a documented report. Moses does not try to prove or disprove genocide in Gaza; he explains why the legal category cannot capture the violence by tracing the category’s design (the 1947-1948 negotiations, the “as such” intent requirement) back to states’ determination to preserve permanent security, and by placing both Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response inside a five-hundred-year history of colonial reprisal, in which each side’s violence is presented as a recurrent type rather than an exception.
  • Perspective: Moses writes as a genocide-studies scholar (editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, per his author note) whose own book supplies the essay’s central concept; his sympathy in the piece is with the victims’ perspective and the protest movement’s moral claim, while his legal judgment is that the claim will likely fail on intent — a combination he presents as an indictment of the law, not of the claimants.
  • Limits, on the piece’s own terms: it is dated November 14, 2023, five weeks into the assault, and its tolls are those of that moment; its Gaza-specific factual claims (the buffer-zone and expulsion aims, the resettlement logic) are presented as inference (“presumably,” line 155) from statements and a think-tank plan it does not reproduce; several quoted figures (Mashal, Dichter, Kallner, Omar) are given without a named outlet or date in the piece; one office attribution in it is wrong as printed (see Open questions); and it names no source for its casualty figures for Gaza, Maji Maji, Hama or the March of Return beyond presenting them in its own prose.

People, organizations, places and events

A. Dirk Moses, Raz Segal, Martin Shaw, Haidar Eid, Khaled Mashal, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Avi Dichter, Ariel Kallner, Abdaljawad Omar, Issa Amro, Helena Cobban, Karim Khan, Thomas Friedman, Hafez al-Assad, Itamar Mann, Hans Kohn, Bashir Bashir, Center for Constitutional Rights, Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, Breaking the Silence, Boston Review, Hamas, Gaza, Great March of Return, Genocide Convention, Nakba

Concepts

Permanent security, Genocide, Subaltern genocide, Doctrine of double effect, Iron wall, Mowing the Grass, Dahiya doctrine, Hama rules, Egalitarian binationalism, Human shields, Settler Colonialism

How it relates to other sources

Open questions

  • The article attributes a statement to “The Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz” (line 155). In the article’s own period the defense minister named elsewhere in the ingested record for October 2023 is Yoav Gallant (see A Textbook Case of Genocide, line 72); Gantz’s office is not otherwise identified in the article. The attribution is recorded as printed, not corrected, and the two accounts stand side by side.
  • The article does not name the UN Special Rapporteur who warned of a new Nakba on October 14 (line 155), the far-right minister advocating recolonizing Gaza, or the former IDF intelligence officer quoted at line 165; all three are unnamed in the piece as printed.
  • The piece gives its Gaza toll — over 11,000 killed, more than two-thirds women and children, over a million displaced, as of writing (line 125) — and its Maji Maji, Hama and March of Return figures without naming a source in the piece; they stand as Moses’s figures, as of November 14, 2023 where the piece dates them.
  • The Misgav Institute’s “grand plan” is characterized but not quoted or dated in the piece (line 155); its content beyond Moses’s characterization cannot be accounted for from this file.
  • The text copy’s footing is dated ”© 2026” while the piece is dated November 14, 2023 (line 121) and the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished 2023-11-14; the footing date is the capture’s, held here rather than reconciled.

Coverage

lines 1-296 of 296, read in full.

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