What is genocide? Scholars clash on Irish claims that Israel may be committing 'genocidal' actions in Gaza

Meanwhile the head of the International Network of Genocide Scholars has indicated she takes a different view, namely that the word could be applied to both sides.

Invoking the word "genocide" has become common across the UK and Ireland in recent weeks.

For example, in just one of the Dail sittings above, the word “genocide” was used in reference to Israel 24 times, while People Before Profit’s representatives in Northern Ireland and the south have deployed the word constantly since October 7.

But what is genocide?

According to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, which most of the world is signed up to, it "means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

"(a) Killing members of the group;

"(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

"(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

"(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

"(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

This, Dr Verena Buser says, is an "awfully broad definition".

As such "it takes more than quoting from the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and quotes taken out of context, to certify genocide".

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Dr Buser, who works as a researcher on from Western Galilee College's Holocaust Studies Program, told the News Letter: "It is very surprising [how] Holocaust and genocide researchers very quickly come to the conclusion that a genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, or warn that one could take place.

"In the course of the terrorist, anti-Semitic and racist attacks and mass murders by Hamas and its collaborators on Israel, the quote by Yoav Gallant who spoke of 'human animals' and ordered the complete siege of Gaza (still not realized today) is often cited.

"The reality is that the IDF is building corridors for the civilian population and allowing aid supplies into Gaza. Is that genocide!?

"Incidentally, the comparison to animals is not a valid one – animals do not kill out of pure murderous lust or to destroy another species."

While it would be possible to interpret Gallant's words "as an order to completely annihilate all Palestinians", as opposed to Hamas, any historian doing so would be "working dubiously, and not serious at all".

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Dr Joanna Michlic from the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London told the News Letter: “The left that expresses these ideas have no intellectual knowledge of international laws making clear distinctions between different ways of killings.”

Namely, this is between “the massacre of October 7 and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza that entails urban house-to -house fighting that regrettably creates many civilian causalities, as in other wars of this type”.

She added: "Importantly, Hamas, deliberately embedded itself underneath many hospitals, schools and mosques in Gaza knowing that this would result in killings of innocent Palestinian civilians, children, women, and elderly.

"It is regrettable that some members of the Irish parliament are not capable of grasping of Hamas’s destructive acts and future intentions and plans against Israel.

“Given the painful Irish history of the modern era, Irish politicians should ask themselves a question about how would they have reacted if a section of their civilian population was brutally slaughtered within their own country and then the Irish state and its people be branded the criminal by acting in self-defense against those who slaughtered them.”

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Elisabeth Hope Murray, the president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars, takes a different tack.

She is a professor at Embry-Riddle University, Florida.

When asked if the Gaza events are "genocide," she quoted approvingly from a piece by one of the network's members – Professor Martin Shaw – which she says "summed up well" the issue.

It said: "In the terminology of genocide scholars, the war (between Israel and Hamas) is one of asymmetrical counter-genocide.

"Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians constituted a wave of 'genocidal massacres,' localized mass killings whose victims were defined by their Israeli-Jewish identity; their escalated rocket attacks are a more diffuse kind of anti-civilian violence that in the current context serve to sustain the terror of the original attacks.

"The purpose of these assaults in relation to the Israeli population as a whole appears to be purely exemplary - they cannot represent a threat of total destruction because Hamas is in no position to inflict that on Israel…

"Israel’s bombardment and escalating invasion of Gaza, in contrast, have affected the whole population of the territory, far more extensively and deeply (except in a moral and emotional sense) than the Israeli population has been affected by Hamas’s violence…

"Israel doesn’t attack Palestinian civilians because it hates them, even if hatred is present.

"But its war, driven by both security and revenge (including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s need to expunge his humiliating failure to protect Israelis), nevertheless demonstrates genocidal intent."