Incitement

The legal category was written into the Genocide Convention because of what the drafters had just lived through: propaganda preceded the killing, and prosecuting only the killing would have left the machinery intact. Article III(c) therefore makes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” punishable alongside genocide itself, and Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute carries the same offence into the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The threshold is high — the speech must be direct, public, and aimed at the commission of genocide — but the offence is inchoate: it is complete at the moment of utterance.

That article was invoked before the International Court of Justice in the proceedings South Africa brought against Israel in December 2023. In its order of 26 January 2024 the Court set out, as examples of the statements it had taken note of, three by serving Israeli officials. On 9 October 2023 Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza City, with “no electricity, no food, no fuel,” and “everything [was] closed”; the following day, addressing troops on the Gaza border, he said: “I have released all restraints … You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” On 12 October 2023 President Isaac Herzog said of Gaza: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen up.” On 13 October 2023 the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, Israel Katz, wrote: “All the civilian population in [G]aza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

The Court also recorded a press release of 16 November 2023 in which 37 Special Rapporteurs, independent experts and members of Working Groups of the UN Human Rights Council voiced alarm over “discernibly genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials,” and an observation by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of 27 October 2023 that it was “[h]ighly concerned about the sharp increase in racist hate speech and dehumanization directed at Palestinians since 7 October.” Israel argued before the Court that such statements may amount to a criminal offence under its own law, including that of incitement, and that several cases were being examined by Israeli law enforcement. The Court ordered, by sixteen votes to one, that Israel “shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.”

The word travels in the other direction too. Israeli government bodies and allied monitoring organisations use “incitement” as a standing charge against Palestinian political speech, textbooks and media, and the accusation has shaped donor conditions on Palestinian institutions. Those claims are made by interested parties and are contested in their particulars; they are also, definitionally, a different thing from the Convention offence, since they concern the speech of a stateless population rather than of officials commanding an army. The archive records both usages and keeps them separate, because collapsing them is how the legal term loses its meaning.

Incitement matters here for a reason beyond law. Genocide scholarship treats dehumanising language as a precondition rather than an ornament — the step that converts a population into a category against which anything is permissible. That is why courts examine what ministers say about civilians, and why an archive concerned with a people’s humanity has to record the sentences as they were spoken, with the speaker, the date and the venue attached.

Sources

• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Article III — United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 78, I-1021 (PDF)
• International Court of Justice, order on provisional measures of 26 January 2024, South Africa v. Israel, paragraphs 51–53 and the dispositif (PDF)
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 25 — United Nations, Office of Legal Affairs