This week, the International Court of Justice begins consideration of whether the devastation and deprivation that Israel is inflicting on the Gaza Strip constitute genocide. The impetus for the ICJ taking up the case is a filing by the government of South Africa, a country that knows a thing or two about what it means for one ethnic group to oppress another. The South African initiative has received explicit support from several other governments, the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Countries, numerous nongovernmental organizations worldwide, and even some concerned Israelis.

The eighty-four-page filing is carefully constructed, exhaustively documented, and judiciously worded. It places the current crisis in context with regard not only to the jurisdiction of the court but also to the entire history of Israeli subjugation of Palestinians. It describes in excruciating detail the various facets of what Israel has imposed on Gaza, including the killing of thousands of civilians, the injuries, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, the forced dislocation, and the deprivation of food, water, sanitation, and medical care. It then documents the numerous statements from Israelis themselves—from the president and prime minister on down—indicating that their lethal actions are targeted not just against Hamas or some other group that has done Israel harm but against Palestinians in general.

Despite the voluminous evidence of what has been happening in the Gaza Strip during the past three months, there exists significant resistance to invoking the concept of genocide. Some reasons for this resistance are general and apply to almost any case in which that concept has been mentioned. Other reasons are more specific to the case of Israel and the Palestinians.

One general reason is anxiety about comparisons with historical cases that were even more egregious than whatever case is at hand. The highly egregious case that immediately comes to mind is the Nazi Holocaust, and there is legitimate concern about debasing historical understanding of that event if the concept of genocide begins to be applied too frequently elsewhere.

Another general reason to worry about follow-on implications is if the ICJ makes a formal legal judgment that genocide has occurred. The relevant legal framework is the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which 152 nations (including Israel, South Africa, and the United States) are parties. The convention calls for criminal prosecution of persons who have committed any of the acts the convention covers. If a national court fails to discharge that responsibility, then an international tribunal—such as that other standing tribunal that meets in The Hague, the International Criminal Court—may do so. 

Reasons specific to the Israeli-Palestinian case include all the political factors that, especially in the United States, but also to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, have led to Israel being given a pass for most of what it has done to the Palestinians. 

Now, with the United States having supplied thousands of tons of munitions that Israel has employed in the devastation of Gaza and having used its veto power to block international calls for a cease-fire, the United States has assumed a share of the responsibility for the devastation. This makes relevant Article III of the Genocide Convention, which lists as punishable acts not only genocide itself but also, among other things, “complicity” in genocide.

It thus is not surprising for the Biden administration’s public response to South Africa’s initiative at the ICJ to be, in the words of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, that the South African submission “is meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” It is unsurprising but highly inaccurate as a characterization of a filing filled with well-documented and relevant facts. The U.S. response is only slightly farther off the rails than Israel’s hysterically-toned official assertion that the South African action is “blood libel,” a response that no doubt reflects genuine concern in Israel that the South Africans have a strong case.

A concept that is also applicable to what Israel is doing to Gaza but is a bit milder than—and without the same legal implications as—genocide is ethnic cleansing. There is no “ethnic cleansing convention,” although some actions that generally have been placed under the label of ethnic cleansing constitute violations of international law, including the laws of war. There is some, though not all, of the same hesitation to apply that label as to apply the label of genocide, and for some of the same reasons, mostly involving attempts to protect one’s own government and its clients from accusations of nefarious behavior.

In an article in the current issue of Political Science Quarterly, Meghan Garrity of George Mason University argues for discarding the term ethnic cleansing. One reason is that the term originated with some of the perpetrators, especially in the former Yugoslavia, who applied the term with non-pejorative intent to their own actions. Another reason is conceptual confusion resulting from commentators referring to different specific behaviors when talking about ethnic cleansing.

Garrity proposes, in the interest of descriptive and analytical precision, replacing that term with four more specific components of the kind of ethnic oppression to which the term is usually applied. Those components are: 1) control, intended to subjugate the target population; 2) coercive assimilation, intended to eliminate a unique cultural identity; 3) mass expulsion, intended to remove the target population; and 4) massacre, intended to annihilate that population.

Garrity wrote her article before the current Israeli assault on Gaza, but her typology corresponds to different aspects and different phases of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Assimilation into Jewish-dominated Israeli life has never been part of that policy. Still, denial of a unique Palestinian national and cultural identity certainly has been, dating back to early rationalizations of the Zionist project as “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Subjugation through control has been the dominant continuing aspect of Israeli policy in the half-century since Israel’s conquest of Palestinian territories in the 1967 war. Expulsion—involving the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians—was a central feature of the Nakba or “catastrophe” associated with the 1948 war in Palestine. Now, the Israeli minister of agriculture (and former head of the security service Shin Bet) openly declares that Israel is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” As for massacres, the mostly civilian Palestinian death toll from the current carnage in the Gaza Strip—now approximately 23,000 and still rising—is the largest of all the rounds of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

In current Israeli policy, massacre and expulsion are complementary. Israel is pressing countries from Egypt to the Congo to accept Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Israel euphemizes such relocation as “voluntary,” even though the only alternative for the Palestinians involved would be more Israeli-inflicted death and destruction inside Gaza.

So, how does the concept of genocide fit into this picture? Garrity observes that it is part of the same conceptual and semantic confusion that has afflicted references to ethnic cleansing. She notes that some analysts and commentators consider genocide a subtype of ethnic cleansing, some treat the two phenomena as separate, and some consider them as overlapping. 

Garrity has scholarship in mind and suggests that her substitution of the four dimensions of control, assimilation, expulsion, and massacre facilitates rigorous research into why, for example, a regime chooses one of these methods over another. Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian case provides ample material for such research, such as dissecting the Israeli decision to rely heavily at this time on the combination of expulsion and massacre.

The policy lesson in all this should be that substance matters more than semantics. As the South African case proceeds at the ICJ, expect Israel and its defenders to try to turn the proceeding into one of semantics—to define genocide narrowly. To the extent this tactic succeeds, it will deflect attention from what is actually happening in the Gaza Strip, including the immense human suffering involved.

Such use of semantics to deflect attention from substance is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s supporters repeatedly shouting “no collusion” to try to deny the nature of Trump’s ties with Russia. An absence of the kind of master plot hatched in a back room that might meet someone’s idea of “collusion” does not negate the fact that during the 2016 election, Trump and his campaign encouraged, facilitated, exploited, and provided cover for Russia’s interference in the election to his benefit. It also does not negate continued reasons to be concerned today about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Russia.

Just as the use or non-use of the C-word does not make the Trump-Russia problem go away, neither does the use or non-use of the G-word—by the ICJ or anyone else—cause the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the policies that have generated it, to go away. Control, cultural denial, expulsion, and massacre are all despicable policies for one ethnic group to apply against another and should be opposed, regardless of whether a court or anyone else applies a particular overarching term or label to such policies.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.