Commentary: Here’s what the mass violence in Gaza looks like to a scholar of genocide

I cannot stop thinking about the dozens of Israeli children held in captivity by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in underground tunnels in Gaza, while above them Israel’s attack has killed, so far, nearly 4,500 Palestinian children. Stopping the violence, and returning the hostages, is urgent for any person who values all lives. That it is very difficult to imagine how this happens tells a terrible truth: Those with the most power to effect change refuse to recognize the humanity of all people.

There is little doubt that the Palestinians who participated in the mass murder of more than 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers on Oct. 7 did not see their victims as humans, and that decades of Israeli and children as military targets; of “death to the Arabs” have characterized the annual settler through the Old City in Jerusalem; and students as young as 13 in Israel anti-Palestinian songs, “hoping that your village burns down.”