(RNS) — In the past four years, the United States has recognized the Uyghur genocide in China and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Just this past week (Jan. 7), the U.S. accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide.
But when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, injured thousands more and flattened the coastal strip, making it largely uninhabitable, the U.S. government is nowhere near arriving at that conclusion. The same is true for many U.S. religious groups, including Jews and Christians who have, with some exceptions, remained silent despite growing recognition of the crime.
In a lengthly New York Times interview earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken denied there was a genocide. And in a sign that the incoming Trump administration would likely take the same position, the U.S. Congress last week passed legislation that would impose sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court for seeking to charge Israeli leaders with war crimes. Forty-five Democrats joined Republicans to approve the measure, which has a good chance of passing in the new Republican-led Senate.
Increasingly, a growing list of international organizations, including the United Nations and various human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. So, too, have dozens of Holocaust scholars.
Last week, members of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of professional historians, overwhelmingly approved a resolution that said the destruction of most of Gaza’s education infrastructure amounted to “scholasticid …