Yes, It Is Genocide — Amos Goldberg

Amos Goldberg is a Holocaust and genocide researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In April 2024 he published an essay in Hebrew in Mekomit (Local Call), translated into English by Sol Salbe and republished on 18 April 2024, which opens: “Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.”

The framing of that sentence is the point of the piece. Goldberg does not present the conclusion as obvious or as arrived at eagerly; he presents it as a conclusion resisted and then conceded under the weight of six months of evidence, and he writes it in Hebrew, addressed to Israelis. The essay places the question inside Holocaust studies — the field in which Goldberg works and teaches — rather than treating it as an external accusation to be defended against.

Goldberg’s assessment is one of several by Israeli and Jewish scholars of the Holocaust and of genocide who reached similar conclusions at different points and for different reasons, among them Raz Segal in October 2023 and Omer Bartov, who did not initially regard the campaign as genocidal and changed his assessment later. The disagreement among them about timing and threshold is itself part of the record, and it is what distinguishes a scholarly debate from a slogan.

Why it matters

• A Holocaust researcher at Israel’s leading university stating the conclusion in Hebrew, to an Israeli readership.
• It documents a reasoned change of position under evidence, rather than an initial or reflexive judgement.
• It situates the question within Holocaust and genocide studies, the discipline whose concepts are most often invoked in objection to it.

Key resources

• Amos Goldberg, “Yes, It Is Genocide” (English translation by Sol Salbe, 18 April 2024)