The Dam of Gaza Genocide Denial Has Broken

The sociologist Stanley Cohen, a colleague of mine in England when I was young, later spent some years in Israel and, on his return to London, wrote a definitive study, “States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering,” which was partly informed by his experience researching the torture of Palestinians in the state’s prisons and detention centers. Stan’s book, published in 2001, is rich and complex, but he boiled down his ideas to three “elementary forms”: literal, interpretive and implicatory denial. I’ve been thinking about these, and Stan (who sadly died in 2013), as the Gaza genocide has ground on.

When I first wrote about Gaza for New Lines in November 2023 — four weeks after Hamas’ brutal attacks had provoked Israel’s (already) hugely destructive response — there was plenty of literal denial, as mainstream media in Western countries suppressed the raw facts of the mass death and suffering that were being inflicted, together with Israel’s responsibility for them.

Yet what I focused on was what Stan called “interpretive” denial. To me, as someone who studies genocide, Hamas had committed “genocidal massacres,” killings which, because of the group’s capabilities, were necessarily localized and limited. But Israel, a powerful state backed by the most powerful state in the world, was carrying out genocide on a vastly greater scale, with no end in sight. Its leaders clearly proclaimed their intention to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, not just Hamas, and the pattern of conduct of Israeli forces — including mass displacement and the deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of life as well as killing and wounding — also indicated this intention, the very essence of genocide.

What I saw in the responses of Western leaders and journalists, however, was a determination to avoid, at all costs, the “G-word” in evaluating Israel’s actions. I focused on the dominant frame that they used to deny the genocidal meaning of Israel’s actions: I said they invoked “the logic of war to protect themselves from such questions” and described civilian casualties as “collateral damage” from the war against Hamas, which was made responsible for what Israel itself was doing.

In particular, Western opinion-makers referred to Israel’s “right to self-defense” — but in international law, that right, which some legal scholars have argued does not apply to Israel as an occupying power, is not a right to revenge. They also reproduced, uncritically, Israeli claims that it acted in accordance with international humanitarian law, although Israel had long since adopted a doctrine of “disproportionate” civilian harm and proclaimed the loosening of its criteria to the point where scores of people could be killed to destroy one presumed militant. Last but not least, politicians and media labeled those who challenged Israel’s violence as “supporters of Hamas” and “antisemites.”

All these were forms of interpretive denial: denying Israel’s responsibility (and that of its Western supporters) for the killing and destruction, and denying that they amounted to genocide. In 2023 and 2024, these forms of denial were very effective. Even genocide scholars, many of whom come from Jewish or Israeli backgrounds and/or study the Holocaust, struggled to recognize what Israel was doing. The Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, for example, has written that acknowledging Israel’s genocide “was a painful conclusion to reach, and one I resisted as long as I could.”

He criticized Israel from the start but held off recognizing the genocide until May 2024, five months after South Africa brought a devastating dossier on Israel’s actions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and four months after the court itself had recognized a “plausible risk” to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under the Genocide Convention. Since then, to his credit, Bartov has used his position as the preeminent Israeli Holocaust scholar in the United States to campaign against the genocide.

Interpretive denial has been highly institutionalized. Major media organizations, such as the BBC, have systematically minimized the harm Israel is causing and its deliberate character, given Israeli excuses prominence even when they were disproved, and largely excluded critical (especially Palestinian) voices. The New York Times banned “genocide” from its coverage — as, indeed, even The Guardian did for a long time, allowing the word only sparingly in opinion pieces by critics of impeccable Jewish credentials, such as Bartov. Across the Western world, center-left as well as right-wing politicians and press reproduced this pattern.

Meanwhile, Israel inexorably killed and destroyed. By the time South Africa brought its case to the ICJ, Israel’s policy of restricting food and other essentials of life from entering Gaza had already produced mass hunger, and in January 2024, the ICJ issued orders to the state to allow relief into the strip to avoid a humanitarian emergency. (By focusing on the threat of starvation, the court avoided dealing with the bombing and the military action, which was wiping out Gaza’s food systems and making life precarious in every way, because Israel claimed it was only fighting Hamas.)

Israel ignored the first order, so the court issued further orders in March and May 2024. There was a brief relaxation, but by late 2024, the food crisis was back with a vengeance. Most of Gaza’s hospitals were destroyed. Almost all of the population had been displaced many times over. Gaza had the highest proportion of child amputees in the world; Israel even bombed the prosthetics depot.

The United States, which together with Germany and the U.K. was arming Israel, was preoccupied with a presidential election in which the eventual Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, would not even allow elected Democrats to deliver vetted comments about the Gaza war at the Democratic National Convention. Yet outside center-left political bubbles, in the U.S., the U.K. and even Germany, the reaction against Israel’s genocide was gathering pace.

In May 2024, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court brought charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes (but not yet genocide) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, and in November, the judges issued warrants for their arrest (the prosecutor also wanted to charge Hamas leaders, but Israel killed them). At the end of the year, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International acknowledged that Israel was committing genocide, with the latter issuing the most authoritative compilation of the evidence and legal arguments supporting the accusation.

What had been a marginal opinion when I wrote for New Lines in November 2023 was now becoming mainstream. In the first half of 2025, the dam of interpretive genocide denial has well and truly broken. While Israel’s supporters in Western governments and media still reject the charge of genocide — even while, in some cases, they finally acknowledge some of the harm being caused to civilians — many media outlets, especially on the center-left, have been queuing up to acknowledge genocide or, if still ducking the genocide label, to publish strong opinion pieces and shocking accounts by people in Gaza of the suffering that Israel is inflicting. The Guardian has finally come off the fence, and even the New York Times — a determined center of pro-Israel denial — recently published an op-ed by Bartov with the headline “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” adorned with a huge “Never Again” graphic.

Meanwhile, Israel’s reputation in Western states has deteriorated drastically, according to recent opinion polling. It still has the upper hand among MAGA supporters, but Democrats are now clearly more pro-Palestine. In Britain, only the partisans of Reform UK, the anti-immigrant Trump tribute party led by Nigel Farage, are still pro-Israel in the majority; every other demographic has turned. Even in Germany, where the political class ganged up after October 2023 to make “anti-antisemitism” a state religion, the facade is cracking as public opinion shifts. As many as 47% in the U.K., according to one recent poll, now agree that Israel is committing genocide — a remarkable fact when one considers that virtually no mainstream media outlets have even allowed this opinion to be expressed for almost two years.

There are two main reasons that this shift in public sentiment has begun to affect media coverage and usher in increasing acknowledgement of Israel’s genocide. First, Israel’s decision in March 2025 to break the January ceasefire and begin a new starvation policy made it apparent that it, rather than Hamas, was behind the continuation of the conflict. Second, the decision to destroy the existing humanitarian aid system and replace it with U.S. contractors, and the repeated images of desperate people being mowed down by Israeli troops as they tried to get food, graphically demonstrated the genocidal meaning of the situation, just at the point when many people were realizing that the horror was not going to end.

You may have noticed that I have not yet mentioned Stan Cohen’s third idea, “imprecatory denial.” This, he explained, is where there is no attempt to deny the facts or the obvious interpretation, but “the psychological, political or moral implications” that should follow from these are “denied or minimized.” Unfortunately, this is where we seem to be heading now. I may have missed something, but the major Western publications that have recently carried “genocide” editorials or prominent features have devoted virtually no space to the measures that governments should take against Israel to stop the genocide. It’s as though they are saying, “Yes, it’s a genocide, but what can we do about it?”

It would be very surprising if most of those who have come around to the genocide view don’t feel the same way. It is something they watch — very intermittently, if they rely on mainstream media or are not part of a pro-Palestine social media milieu — and there has been enough, over such a long period, that they have formed a view that Israel is committing horrible crimes, even committing genocide. But can they do anything about it? They can’t even do anything about the decisions that affect their own lives! Why should they protest, when committed pro-Palestine protesters in the big cities have been protesting for 21 months and no government has changed its policy?

Despite the shift in opinion, the Palestinian movement appears largely unable to mobilize the growing opposition to Israel. This is partly because it is threatened by repression, not only in Trump’s America, but also in the U.K., where the Labour government has banned the direct-action group Palestine Action as a “terrorist organization,” and in Germany, whose new conservative government continues the repressive policies of its predecessor.

Actually, this implicatory denial highlights the incompleteness with which those who are crying “genocide” have discarded literal and interpretive denial. Few of the now genocide-aware media outlets have explained exactly how thegovernments of their own countries are complicit in Israel’s actions. In the U.S., this may be fairly obvious, since Trump is up-front about backing the forced removal of Palestinians and Congress gives Netanyahu standing ovations. Elsewhere, it remains hidden behind the kind of camouflage that obscured the Biden administration’s complicity: the formulaic expressions of concern and behind-the-scenes urgings that Israel do things differently, by governments that still regard Israel as an ally. Moreover, few of the media organizations have accounted for their earlier denialist stances, which in many cases included giving space to extreme pro-Israel propagandists.

So, how many of the media outlets that have declared a “genocide” have identified the structures of support behind it? How many have reported on United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s pathbreaking report on the political economy of the genocide, which provides the receipts on corporate complicity? How many have identified the arms flows from their countries to Israel? How many have reported on the deep political ties between their ruling political parties and Israel? Or have covered military collaboration, which in the case of Britain has helped the Israeli military to keep bombing civilians over 21 months, through surveillance flights over Gaza and extensive data sharing? In Britain, it has been left to the small independent outlet Declassified UK; mainstream British print and television outlets have simply not picked up on this story, which has now been documented over many months, seemingly in deference to an official ban.

Since even genocide-aware media are not reporting how Israel’s policies are made possible by wider Western support, they are also very weak in identifying policies that might break it. A state is committing genocide, but governments can continue to trade with it, allow its companies to operate, welcome its politicians (even those who are internationally indicted) and army commanders into our countries, engage in military collaboration, sell it arms. For many media outlets, it seems we can’t actually demand that any of this stops. A particular problem here is that leaders in other Western states, especially in Europe, are scared of Trump as well as the damage he can do to their economies and to the causes they care about a little more, like Ukraine.

A conspiracy of helplessness is abandoning Gaza, trickling down from leaders to media to voters. “The philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it,” Karl Marx famously wrote. Today, genocide scholars, the serious press and even voters have interpreted Gaza as a genocide — but the point is to stop it. Until we do that, we are still in denial.