Journal of Genocide Research

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A World Without Civilians

Elyse Semerdjian

To cite this article: Elyse Semerdjian (24 Jan 2024): A World Without Civilians, Journal of
Genocide Research, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2024.2306714
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JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2306714

FORUM: ISRAEL-PALESTINE: ATROCITY CRIMES AND THE CRISIS OF

HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES

A World Without Civilians

Elyse Semerdjian
Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA

Mary Kaldor claimed that before World War II one civilian died for every eight combatants,
that figure inversed with eight civilians dying for every soldier afterward.1 Kaldor’s
averages are only slightly different in the post-9/11 era of “humane war” where civilians
now comprise 90 per cent of wartime casualties.2 In an attempt to justify illegal acts of
collective punishment and targeted assassinations, states have declared civilians “collat­
eral damage” (acceptable casualties) and “human shields” (permissible targets). Neve
Gordon and Nicola Perugini have systematically documented how blurring the distinction
between combatant and non-combatant has served states that seek to efface protections
civilians are afforded under the Fourth Geneva Convention.3 In Gaza, as conflict zones in
Syria and Chechnya, civilians are declared “human shields” even while they attempt to flee
areas for safety or live inside “safe zones.” These new norms of genocidal warfare are an
ominous portent for a posthuman future in which entire populations are no longer
categorized civilian.
After the 7 October Hamas attack, in which 1,139 people were murdered – among
them 695 civilians, thirty six children, 373 Israeli security personnel, and seventy one
foreigners – Palestinians were collectively blamed.4 Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared
at a 13 October press conference, “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible,”
blaming the civilian population for not rising up against Hamas.5
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently called Gaza “a graveyard for children” –
a foreseeable outcome when indiscriminate bombs meet one of the most densely
populated places on earth where half the population is under age eighteen.6 At the

CONTACT Elyse Semerdjian esemerdjian@clarku.edu Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark
University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA
1
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars Organized Violence in a Global Era. 2nd ed (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999,
2007), 9, and on “Humane War” see Samuel Moyne, Humane: How the United States /Abandoned Peace and Reinvented
War (New York: Macmillan, 2021).
2
“Ninety Percent of War-Time Casualties are Civilians,” UN Meetings Coverage, Security Council, 25 May 2022, https://
press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm
3
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2020).
4
“Israeli Security Data Reveals True Picture of What Happened on Oct 7 Deaths,” France 24, 15 December 2023, https://
www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths.
5
Solcyre Burga, “Is What’s Happening in Gaza a Genocide? Experts Weigh in,” Time, 14 November 2023.
6
Press Release: “Gaza: 3,195 Children Killed in Three Weeks Surpasses Annual Number of Children Killed In Conflict
Zones Since 2019,” Save the Children, https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-3195-children-killed-three-
weeks-surpasses-annual-number-children-killed-conflict-zones and for population figures including the latest casual­
ties and maiming from the war see Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/default.aspx. Pre­
sident Joe Biden has begun to refer to the bombing campaign as “indiscriminate,” US officials now admit that over
40% of the bombs used as “dumb bombs” completely unguided, Nicole Frölich “Israel Using Dumb Bombs in Gaza: US
Intel,” DW, 22 December 2023.
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. SEMERDJIAN

time of writing, the Israeli bombardment has claimed over 23,000 Palestinian lives;
approximately 8,000 others remain entombed under the rubble. Shockingly, 70 per
cent of the casualties are women and children non-combatants. Many of the men
being killed are also non-combatants whose right to life is negated due to the presumed
capacity to fight.7
After decades of mythologizing “precision” and “smart” warfare, observers are incredu­
lous at the indiscriminate killing power of modern precision weapons. Zoé Samudzi
informs us in this forum that among the new weapons to emerge is an AI-generated
assassination machine called “The Gospel.”8 As it confirms 100 kills per day expediting,
allegedly, the assassination of Hamas fighters, AI face scanning software has been
proven to be racially biased against Black and Brown people and is already being used
in American cities to assist law enforcement.9 Today’s “First AI War” is a continuation of
Gaza use as a laboratory for necrocapitalism, where weapons field tested on Palestinians
fetch higher dollars at market that, in turn, enriches the weapons industry and politicians
with ties to it.10 Yet, despite these technological advances, US officials now admit that 40–
45 per cent of the ordinance dropped by Israel are “dumb bombs,” which Israeli officials
argue offer precision when used with controlled pilot dive bombing techniques.11 In
terms of damage and precision, state-of-the-art precision capable weapons are being
used to create “fire belts” of repeated hour-long strikes on a single city block levelling
neighbourhoods as crudely as a Syrian barrel bomb. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari
noted military emphasis is “on damage and not on accuracy,” an application of “the
Dahiya Doctrine” where an indiscriminate, disproportionate military response was exer­
cised in Lebanon in 2006.12
Many have supported this war as one of “self-defense,” yet legal scholars have claimed
Israel does not have a right to self-defense as an occupying power and is instead legally
obliged to protect the civilians it occupies.13 Eradicating Hamas is a military goal as meta­
physical as America’s self-proclaimed “crusade” against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Islamic
State in its Terror Wars. But the global campaign to fold the legal category of civilian into
that of combatant has a long history in the occupied territories. Its adoption and adap­
tation to the US War on Terror is believed to have claimed as many as 4.5–4.7 million
direct and indirect casualties.14 Furthermore, as the civilian/combatant distinction has

7
The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics places the rate of disability in Gaza at 47%. In 2022, most debility was related to
walking. https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/site/lang__en/1095/default.aspx.
8
Zoé Samudzi, “‘We are Fighting Nazis’: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) after 7 October,” Journal of Genocide
Research (2024).
9
Yuval Abraham, “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza,” +972 Magazine, 30
October 2023, https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
“Companies Must Act Now to Ensure Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence,” Amnesty International,
14 June 2023.
10
The argument is best summarized as “war sells weapons,” Antony Lowenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel
Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (London: Verso, 2023; New York: Verso, 2023); Matt Kenard,
“How Israel Privatized its Occupation of Palestine,” The Nation, 26 October 2017.
11
Natasha Bertrand and Katie Bo Lillis, “Exclusive: Nearly Half of the Israeli Munitions Dropped on Gaza are Imprecise
‘Dumb Bombs,’ US Intelligence Assessment Finds,” CNN, 14 December 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/
politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html.
12
Ishaan Tharoor, “The Punishing Military Doctrine that Israel May be Following in Gaza,” Washington Post, 10 November
2023.
13
Noura Erakat, “No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense in International Law Against Occupied Palestinian
Territory,” Jadaliyya, 11 July 2014, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27551.
14
“Indirect Deaths in the Post-9/11 Wars,” Cost of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University https://watson.brown.
edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 3

collapsed, and given the scale of civilian destruction, it appears the distinction between
the targeted bombing promised by “humane war” and indiscriminate bombing has
largely vanished. Since everything from taking shelter in hospitals or fleeing for safety
is declared a form of human shielding, the entire civilian population has been transformed
into a legal target. This too is the logic of genocide.
We are witnessing the use of modern weapons to terraform a new Gaza without Pales­
tinians. While Israel claims it is targeting Hamas, it is also clearly targeting food, water,
medicine, hospitals, schools, homes, and agricultural land. Future habitation is threatened
by the salting of the earth with sea water being flushed into Hamas tunnels, something
that permanently endangers the aquifer and drinking water. Third-party observers like the
UN have lost more personnel than in any other conflict since its creation – UNRWA,
specifically created to support Palestinian refugees, is yet another lifeline under fire.
The magnitude of the destruction on life-sustaining infrastructure confirms that the cam­
paign is not as “indiscriminate” as President Joe Biden now claims, but in fact a very coor­
dinated attempt to make all of Gaza into the uninhabitable moonscape that has already
begun to manifest on our screens.
Having framed Gaza an existential threat to Israel, lawmakers uncontrollably blurt their
genocidal intentions on air. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant openly declared “we are
fighting against human animals” upon ordering a blockade of food, water, fuel, and medi­
cines in Gaza.15 Our field, grounded in the careful study of the Holocaust, is facing a for­
midable challenge. Is genocide a unique category of crime when states have taken a
pickaxe to international conventions and modern warfare increasingly resembles “the
crime of crimes”?
In The Problem of Genocide, Dirk Moses argues that genocide as a category fails to
recognize how modern warfare, especially “total war,” indiscriminately targets whole civi­
lian populations and not always based on genos or ethnos as defined in the UN genocide
convention.16 Under “the permanent security state,” a category that he argues should
serve as a substitute for the crime of genocide, the international order is unwilling and
unable to manage the problem of mass killing of civilians, which helps explain how
such crimes occur in broad daylight and are broadcasted on Instagram live for all to see.17
The field of Genocide Studies also includes a group of scholars who have argued that
settler colonial warfare is genocidal, often deploying “slow violence” or “slow genocide” to
achieve its aims in infinitesimal acts of violence interspersed with larger genocidal epi­
sodes.18 Many of these acts are not visible for those living in what Mark Rifkin has
called “settler time,” through which powerful settler colonial states exert their sovereignty
over chronology. The struggle for time was evidenced with the repeated attacks on those
who sought to provide context in discussions of 7 October. The Republic of South Africa’s

15
“Defense Minister Announces ‘Complete Siege’ of Gaza: No power, Food, or Fuel,” Times of Israel, 9 October 2023,
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-
or-fuel/.
16
A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2022), 11–12.
17
David J. Scheffer, “Ethnic Cleansing is Happening in Nagorno-Karabakh, How Can the World Respond?” Council on
Foreign Relations, 4 October 2023; Ruslan Javadov, “As an Azerbaijani, I Have to Speak Out About my Country’s
Ethnic Cleansing of Armenians,” The Guardian, 9 October 2023.
18
Sheri P. Rosenberg, “Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 7,
no. 1 (2018): 18.
4 E. SEMERDJIAN

84-page application filing proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice
addresses chronology when it states:
[I]t is important to place the acts of genocide in the broader context of Israel’s conduct
towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-yearlong belligerent occupation
of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, including the serious and
ongoing violations of international law.19

Genocide-as-process is only visible through the long durée of settler colonial violence,
which necessarily demands the temporal shift found in South Africa’s application.20
Importantly, South Africa refused to separate the Palestinians in Gaza (called “Gazans”
by activists and journalists alike though many are refugees displaced to Gaza from pre­
vious wars) from those in the West Bank. South Africa tied the conditions in Gaza to
the broader context of ongoing settler violence, mass arrests, and erasure of Palestinians
in the West Bank.
Many scholars, including myself, believe that war, especially its colonial variety with its
eliminationist logic against the native that seeks to remove all physical and cultural traces
of indigenous peoples from the land, carries with it genocidal capacity that our existing
legal frameworks enable.21 Terms like “civil war,” “conflict,” and even “counterinsurgency”
frequently serve as legal cover for genocide, and in its wake, form the repertoire of gen­
ocide denial.22 This includes the world’s ongoing demand for a “perfect victim,” one that
does not resist oppression whether through violence or non-violence though other
instances of resistance are valorized. Historians know that in every case of genocide,
victims resisted and that resistance was always framed as a criminal provocation for
mass killing.23 For many, the killing of Palestinians in Gaza is justifiable self-defense. In
the wake of 7 October, America and European allies offered support for Israel’s unrest­
rained “right to defense” for “permanent security” in the tradition of America’s own
War on Terror. The problem is, genocides are also premised on the right to security
and self-defense against an existential threat.
Israel has already levelled more than half of Gaza and destroyed 80 per cent of its
housing stock, displaced 85 per cent of the population squeezing an already overcrowded
population along the Egyptian border. Netanyahu revealed his intent to erase 2.3 million
Palestinians completely from Gaza by pushing them into the Sinai, a plan he has packaged
as humanitarian “voluntary emigration” after the US and some European countries
objected to “forced displacement” of Palestinians. The Misgav Institute for National and
Zionist Strategy offered the government a plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza in
the first weeks of war. However, political analyst Mouin Rabbani has recently shown
that this is nothing new. Plans to deport Palestinians have been discussed since the

19
“Application Filing Proceedings,” https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icj-southafrica-israel-genocide-29dec2023/.
20
Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017).
21
These debates about the connections between war and genocide are outlined well in Jeffery S. Bachman, “Four
Schools of Thought on the Relationship Between War and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 4:
(2020): 479–501; Martin Shaw, War and Genocide (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Wolfe does not think settler coloni­
alism is always genocidal. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide
Research 8, no. 4 (2016): 387–409.
22
Michelle Moyd “Genocide and War,” in Genocide: Key Themes, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2022) 236, 245.
23
Noura Erakat, “The Violence of Demanding Perfect Victims,” Jadaliyya, 10 October 2023, https://www.jadaliyya.com/
Details/45383.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 5

late nineteenth century beginning with political Zionism’s founding father,

Theodor Herzl.24
An optimistic person would expect the international system to work and for R2P
(Responsibility to Protect) to be activated at the UN, an international tool developed
specifically to prevent genocide after Rwanda and Bosnia. Created as a tool for genocide
prevention after Bosnia and Rwanda, recent history shows that R2P has been selectively
applied based on the political and economic interests of powerful nations. For example, it
was never invoked during the genocidal campaign against Armenians in Artsakh where
after nine months of starving the population of food, water, electricity and medicine, fol­
lowed by Azerbaijan’s military bombardment of the capitol in October 2023, the starved
and depleted population willingly evacuated when the only corridor was opened.25 It only
took a week for the Armenians who had lived in the enclave for over 2,000 years, since
recorded history, to be completely erased from their indigenous homeland. Like the
Armenians, the world is not going to invoke R2P to protect the Palestinians. Instead,
the UN, hamstrung by the desires of the most powerful nations within it, will watch as
Palestinians are removed from Gaza by attrition. Currently, a fraction of supplies
needed are being allowed into Gaza, surgeries including amputations are performed
without sanitation and anesthesia, medical kits for women and babies are being
blocked, and famine has already emerged as the population starves from depravation.
These conditions and more were listed within South Africa’s opening statements at the
ICJ as violating genocide convention articles 2a, 2b, 2c, and 2d.
Recently Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu claimed the option of nuking Gaza
was on the table, and when the statement received condemnation, he backed away
from the comment by saying it was a metaphorical expression. But the slow violence
of modern warfare essentially nukes populations without conventional nuclear warheads,
a phenomenon Toby C. Jones has called “nuclear waste-turned weapons.”26 The toxic
nature of war exempts no one, neither Arab nor Jew – not even political elites can
escape our shared ecology that bleeds across borders. Homes, neighbourhoods, and
even futurity is endangered by the toxicity of modern warfare.27
Legitimating civilian targets further emboldens the indifference of rich nations of the
Global North as we face environmental collapse, mass die-off, and mass migration of
climate refugees hard hit in the Global South. Israel is currently negotiating with the
Congo – where genocide, mass rape, and displacement has ravaged the population for

24
The secret plan was offered to the Israeli government by the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy.
It was published as a PDF titled “Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Paper on Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023”
translated and published by +972 Magazine, 30 October 2023. https://www.scribd.com/document/681086738/Israeli-
Intelligence-Ministry-Policy-Paper-on-Gaza-s-Civilian-Population-October-2023. Mouin Rabbani posted a threat on
Twitter/X that was published as an article “A Long History of Zionist Proposals to Ethnically Cleanse the Gaza
Strip,” Mondoweiss, 28 December 2023, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/the-long-history-of-zionist-proposals-to-
ethnically-cleanse-the-gaza-strip/.
25
Christina Maranci, “What Cultural Genocide Looks Like for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Time Magazine, 12
October 2023, Ethnic Cleansing is Happening in Nagorno Karabakh: How Can the World Respond,” Council on
Foreign Relations, 4 October 2023, https://www.cfr.org/article/ethnic-cleansing-happening-nagorno-karabakh-
howcan-world-respond.
26
See the definition of “slow violence” in Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 2; Toby C. Jones, “Invisibility and the Toxic Economy of War in Iraq,’ Jadaliyya, 29
August 2017, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34519.
27
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2020), 181–3.
6 E. SEMERDJIAN

three decades – and other African countries to accept the Palestinians they plan on expel­
ling from Gaza.28 In this version of the political upside down, expelled Palestinians will be
offered a variation of the Uganda Plan (1903) that Theodor Herzl proposed at the World
Zionist Conference in Basel to temporarily house European Jews fleeing antisemitism until
deliverance to Eretz Israel. Demonstrating Edward Said’s claim that the histories of Pales­
tinians and Jews are inextricably intertwined, Palestinians are a stand-in for the stateless
Jews of the past.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank editor A. Dirk Moses, Frances Tanzer, Mouin Rabbani, and Hrag Vartanian for
reading and commenting on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Elyse Semerdjian is Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of
Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A social his­
torian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the
empire’s Armenian subjects, she authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community
in Ottoman Aleppo (2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (2023).

28
Shalom Yerushalami, “Israel in Talks with Congo and Other Countries on Gaza ‘Voluntary Migration’ Plan,” Times of
Israel, 3 January 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-
voluntary-migration-plan/.