Settler colonialism and genocide: Palestine in context
Keir Starmer and other UK Government ministers deny that Israel’s mass killing in Gaza meets the legal threshold for genocide – or even that there is a serious risk of genocide. This denial enables the UK to continue selling weapons to Israel and allows the RAF to carry out over 500 surveillance flights over Gaza during the genocide peak, directly assisting the killing below.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) disagrees with Starmer and Lammy. In December 2023, the IAGS issued a statement declaring that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute the crime of genocide.
AGS represents the world’s leading academic experts on genocide and mass atrocity crimes. It based its conclusion on intent, scale of killing, destruction of civilian life, and statements by Israeli officials. This is the clearest and most authoritative use of the term “genocide” by an international scholarly body.
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been campaigning against Israeli genocide long before October 2023. The Scottish Government recently acknowledged the Israeli genocide, following the findings of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. As part of that campaigning work, you are invited to a full-day public event on Saturday, 31 January, featuring outstanding speakers.
SPACES ARE LIMITED – REGISTRATION REQUIRED
Mark Levene
Leading member and former executive member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is the author of numerous major scholarly works on genocide, including ‘The Crisis of Genocide’, a multi-volume study comprising ‘Devastation and Annihilation’. He is Emeritus Professor of Comparative History at the University of Southampton. His book ‘The Crisis of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912–1953’ received the biennial Lemkin Award from the New York-based Institute for the Study of Genocide in 2015.
Sai Englert
Author of ‘Settler Colonialism: An Introduction’ and teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His work focuses on understanding settler colonialism as a global system and historical process. Englert investigates how settler colonialism continues to shape the global economic and political order through the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, Indigenous dispossession and genocide, and the development of racism as a form of social control.
