The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza

A major question raised by the ongoing, largely one-sided, confrontation in Gaza is that of the so-called “subaltern genocide”: Can marginalized and occupied minorities and peoples perpetrate genocide against their oppressors and/or occupiers? Many scholars argue that genocide is almost exclusively perpetrated by states. Yet powerful state-like or state-backed minorities can and have committed genocides, especially in colonial settings, where minorities enjoy imperial backing. The Jews were a minority in Palestine (26 per cent) when they inflicted the Nakba (calamity) on the Palestinian Arabs in the form of the pre-meditated uprooting in 1948, judged by some as the start of a “slow-moving” genocide of the Palestinian people focused on their social destruction. However one characterizes the dislocation in 1948, it should be noted that the Jews in Palestine enjoyed British colonial support for much of the time and so arguably were not a marginalized minority. More recently, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sudan committed, in its ongoing war with the incumbent regime, a series of genocidal massacres against particular ethnicities in Darfur. While the militia is minority-based, its capacity to perpetrate genocide was a function of its own centrality in a weak state, and its role in its partial collapse; in addition to support from influential regional actors. Other InformationPublished in: Journal of Genocide ResearchLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2305525