Genocide, Domicide, and Israel’s Mechanism of Denial Regarding Gaza

In mainstream Israeli public and academic discourse, the prevailing argument posits that labeling the war in Gaza as genocide is merely a political weapon designed to delegitimize the state’s existence. Even mainstream Israelis who recognize that the atrocities in Gaza are horrifying and demand moral accountability, or who even acknowledge that Israeli war crimes have occurred, recoil at the term “genocide.” From their perspective, applying this label transforms a complex military conflict into a totalizing indictment aimed at turning Israel into a pariah state isolated on the international stage.

This stance reflects a deep-seated mechanism of rejection and defensiveness, which was powerfully displayed in the Israeli backlash to the documentary film NAZA. The primary line of defense in Israeli discourse relies on constructing a sharp firewall between the formal legal definition of genocide and its public, historical perception. On the legal plane, the defense focuses almost exclusively on proving an explicit “intent to destroy,” detaching it from the reality on the ground or the number of casualties. Publicly, on the other hand, the concept is viewed as strictly reserved for extreme cases of total, systematic annihilation, such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.

This distinction creates an artificial shield separating the question of destruction from the question of intent, as if the sheer scale of Gaza’s total devastation were a horrifying fact in its own right, yet incapable of serving as legal or moral evidence to evaluate intent.

The legal framework of genocide requires examining both destruction and intent. The original conceptualization by Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the term “genocide,” included the destruction of a group’s social, cultural, and institutional foundations. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention adopted a narrower definition, focusing primarily on the physical or biological destruction of a protected group.

Yet the extent of physical and institutional destruction is not irrelevant. When evaluating an allegation of genocide, the magnitude of destruction cannot be removed from the equation. This is not merely about the number of damaged homes or decommissioned institutions, but about the physical and institutional dismantlement of a society of over two million Palestinians. In recent years, international legal discourse has developed the concept of “domicide,” describing the massive, systematic destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure essential to a population’s survival.

We must, therefore, begin with the facts themselves. A joint report by the UN, the World Bank, and the European Union found that 82 percent of structures in the Gaza Strip were damaged, and 371,888 housing units (76.6 percent of all residential units in the strip) were destroyed or damaged. Furthermore, estimates by human rights organization Euro-Med Monitor indicate that the volume of explosives dropped on Gaza exceeded 70,000 tons, a quantity surpassing the Allied bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and London in World War II combined.

Yet, the vast majority of this destruction remains effectively invisible to the Israeli public. International news outlets have been barred from entering Gaza independently, while Israeli television rarely broadcasts the full scope of the devastation. Updated satellite imagery on Google Maps offers visual evidence that is impossible to ignore: entire neighborhoods wiped off the map, replaced by blank gray expanses where homes, streets, public buildings, and infrastructure once stood.

The military campaign has struck at the heart of collective life, collapsing most of Gaza’s civil infrastructure. All 12 universities in Gaza have been destroyed or severely damaged, halting the education of over 90,000 students. Schools, municipal archives, libraries, cultural centers, water facilities, bakeries, and hospitals have been ruined or rendered inoperable. The destruction of universities obliterates the capacity to sustain higher education and train the next generation; the destruction of archives and legal institutions undermines a society’s ability to preserve its institutional memory; and the collapse of healthcare and water systems does not merely disrupt vital services; it destroys the foundational conditions necessary for civic life.

Why, then, is this reality so difficult for mainstream Israeli society to confront? Part of the answer lies in a political culture that for decades segregated Israel’s self-image as a democracy from the regime of control established in the territories after 1967. This compartmentalization enabled Israeli society to safeguard its democratic self-identity without wrestling with the fundamental contradiction between democracy inside Israel and the system of occupation and inequality beyond the Green Line. In this sense, what emerged was essentially a “gated democracy.”

The outcome is a form of moral compartmentalization: a political culture capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of citizens to defend domestic democratic institutions, while simultaneously excluding the occupation and the Palestinian right to self-determination from the mainstream agenda.

This political pattern is essential for understanding the struggle to face Gaza’s destruction today. In this context, the documentary NAZA is not merely a film about the war. It brings to the forefront of Israeli discourse the psychological mechanisms driving the widespread destruction: fear, demonization, and revenge. This is why many brand its creators as traitors. The film challenges a worldview carefully cultivated over years of Israeli governance, particularly under Netanyahu, where fear and demonization became central lenses for viewing reality. This perspective is not shared by all of Israeli society. Alongside it exists a smaller public that insists on seeing Palestinians as human beings possessed of rights and freedoms, including the right to self-determination, and strives to confront this collective blindness.

Framing the allegation of genocide exclusively as a campaign of delegitimization enables Israeli society to deflect attention from the physical destruction onto its own sense of victimhood, shifting the focus from what Israel is inflicting upon Gaza to what the world is allegedly doing to Israel. The accusation itself is immediately reframed as an outrage against the nation, neutralizing substantive discussion about the devastation.

But the debate over Gaza cannot remain trapped in semantic disputes or tactical arguments over specific testimonies. Those who defend Israel against allegations of genocide are entitled to dispute the legal definition, debate the evidence of intent, or question particular accounts. However, they cannot erase the empirical record. The question is not whether Gaza has been destroyed. It has been. The question is what this destruction, when examined alongside patterns of behavior and evidence of intent, reveals about the nature of the war itself.

The near-total physical erasure of Gaza is not a rhetorical exercise. It is a reality visible from space.