Expert Commentary, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Question of Genocide: Prosemitic Bias within a Scholarly Community?

Few of the world's ongoing wars stir sentiments among such a wide-ranging and globally diverse set of constituenciesfar beyond those of just Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabsas the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 1 In this piece I examine the relationship of the conflict to one highly influential constituency: the scholarly community.In keeping with the aim of this journal's forum, I turn a lens on one particular section of this community: scholars in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS).Opinions from this community on cases of mass atrocity have considerable impact in the public sphere not only because these scholars have relevant expertise, but also because genocide is seen as the "crime of crimes" and the Holocaust is widely-viewed as an especially egregious case of genocide.Yet a serious question has arisen as to whethercontrary to the scholarly commitment to the impartial exercise of their expertisethe HGS community has also been affected by the political polarization and emotional bias that characterize the global public debate on the conflict.Expert opinion from the HGS community manifested powerfully following an attack of unprecedented scale on Israel organized by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, with the participation of other groups, on 7 October 2023.Militants killed 838 civilians and 327 soldiers, and although not all were Israeli Jews, the attack represented the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.The Israeli state's response was also unprecedented.It reacted with a campaign of aerial bombardment whose scale, speed, and severity make it one of the most destructive in history, 2 accompanied by a ground campaign, that together have killed over 20,000 Palestinians and is ongoing as I write.While the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is intensely disputed, the Gazan Ministry of Health data point to some 70 per cent of these victims being women and children. 3