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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Alice Speri

Defining genocide: how a rift over Gaza sparked a crisis among scholars

faded image of destroyed cityscape
The division over the term ‘genocide’ has caused what a historian calls ‘a massive crisis in the field’. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A pair of reports published this month by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch mark a significant contribution to the raging debate over how to characterize a war that has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and decimated Gaza.

But the reports – the first found that Israel is committing genocide, the second acts of genocide – are unlikely to quell deep divisions in the academic field of Holocaust and genocide studies, whose scholars study mass violence.

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