When reasoning obscures reality

A response to Lord Biggar's claim that Israel’s acts are not genocidal

Lord Revd Nigel Biggar, from Wikipedia

On 28^th November 2025 the Church Times published an article entitled “Israel’s acts are not genocidal” by Lord Revd Nigel Biggar. The article is a response to a Church Times interview with the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, published on 20^th November, in which he reflects on his recent trip to the West Bank to visit the Anglican community there; and in particular to Archbishop Cottrell’s description of Israel’s action in Gaza as “genocidal acts.”

Lord Biggar sits in the House of Lords and is “Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford”. He is a controversial figure on account of his role in defending the legacy of British colonialism. However, this article will be restricted to a critique of this particular article in Church Times, and the arguments made within it.

The 37-minute interview with the Archbishop of York primarily focuses on his recent experiences of visiting Palestinians in the West Bank and the responsibility that he feels to speak honestly about what is happening there. He only briefly mentions Gaza using the term “genocidal acts” to describe Israel’s deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, and children.

Archbishop Cottrell’s initial defence of his use of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the situation in the West Bank, and “genocidal acts” to describe Israel’s action in Gaza, is not outstandingly strong.

Archbishop Cottrell praying at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (from Church Times)

He said that he decided to use these words, firstly, because he heard Muslim, Christian and Jewish people using them to describe what is happening; and secondly, because he doesn’t know what other words to use to describe what is happening there. Neither of these points explains why Israel’s actions warrant the use of these terms. However, he makes up for lost ground, somewhat, in a much stronger subsequent statement: “We use these hard phrases because what is happening is deliberate, systematic, persistent, and intentional; and its impact is devastating on Christian and Muslim Palestinian people.”

Given the politically controversial nature of this topic, and the Church Times’s commitment (it would seem) to allowing space for a range of views among Anglicans, it is perhaps not surprising that it published an article the following week expressing a contrary point of view. However, it might have baulked at publishing an article with such a weak evidential basis. Speaking of 44,000 deaths in Gaza, Lord Biggar couldn’t even get his statistics in the right ballpark. This figure is well below Gaza’s official death-toll of over 70,000 and far below estimates of deaths published by such authorities as the Lancet and the Max Planck Institute.

No right to express an opinion?

Lord Biggar’s article begins by questioning the right of Archbishop Cottrell to express an opinion on this matter at all, and suggesting that he is doing so from a position of self-importance. And yet in the interview Archbishop Cottrell clearly explains that Anglican Palestinians had explicitly asked him to speak up and take action in their defence; and how he sees this as an important part of his commitment to the Anglican communion. But even if that weren’t the case, Archbishop Cottrell would still have every right to speak out on this issue as a pressing moral, political, and social issue, in which everyone has the right to take an interest and express concern.

Lord Biggar is himself being presumptuous in thinking that he has the right to gatekeep who does or doesn’t have the right to speak to this issue. It is difficult to see this as anything other than a disingenuous attempt to undermine solidarity for Palestinians, who need the support of anyone and everyone willing to offer it in order to shift the balance of power and end their dreadful decades-long oppression.  

When Lord Biggar goes argues that Israel’s action in Gaza should not be described as genocide, he completely disregards the views of experts. This, again, is extremely presumptuous given that most of the world’s genocide scholars believe Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza. They include highly respected Jewish and Israeli genocide scholars such as Professor Amos Goldberg and Professor Omer Bartov who were initially reluctant to come to this conclusion. Contrary to what Lord Biggar claims, genocide scholars do not regard the Nazi death camps to be the unique paradigm of genocide. As Professor Amos Goldberg has explained, they are very much an outlier. Most genocides do not involve the attempt to murder an entire population.

The Genocide Convention itself explicitly recognizes this by defining genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a group "in whole or in part." The killing of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 was legally recognized as genocide despite representing only a small portion of the Bosnian Muslim population. The Armenian genocide is estimated to have killed  1 to 1.5 million Armenians which, although devastating, only represented part of the Armenian population. In Darfur, approximately 400,000 people died through violence, starvation, and disease in what the U.S. Congress recognized as genocide. Again, though terrible, this nonetheless represented only part of the targeted group.

Lord Biggar’s insistence on using the World War II Holocaust's industrialized death camps as the standard of what constitutes genocide effectively places the bar so high that almost no other atrocity could ever qualify, thereby undermining the very purpose of the Genocide Convention which was designed to prevent such crimes.

Furthermore, systematic mass murder is only one of many ways of destroying a group "in whole or in part." In the case of Gaza the primary aim is to make Gaza uninhabitable and prevent Palestinians from reconstituting as a group, as explained by Professor Omer Bartov in his New York Times piece of July 15, 2025 "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” Other genocide scholars who have written articles or given interviews on this topic include Professor Amos Goldberg, Professor Raz Segal, and Dr Melanie O’Brien.

On 31^st August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world's leading professional organization of genocide experts with around 500 members, passed a resolution with 86% support stating that Israel's actions meet the legal definition of genocide under the 1948 UN Convention. These expert analyses and the Association's position show that the views expressed by the Archbishop of York were, if anything, overly timid, as there is a consensus among experts that Israel has committed genocide and not merely “genocidal acts.”

Contrary to what Lord Biggar states, Israel has acted deliberately and indiscriminately

Lord Biggar goes on to state: “As far as I can tell, the IDF has not generally acted indiscriminately.” This just doesn’t square with the evidence. From the very start, Israeli officials explicitly announced a policy of collective punishment. For example, on October 9^th, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: "We are putting a complete siege on Gaza... No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it's all closed" - despite the fact that the average citizen of Gaza bore no more responsibility for the events of October 7^th 2023 than the average citizen of the UK. This is the very definition of collective punishment, and is rightly regarded as a war crime and prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The vast majority of Israel’s targets in Gaza have been civilian in nature, including hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, sewage systems, power plants, factories, bakeries, farmland, and greenhouses. Over 80% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Given the precision of Israel’s strikes on Iran during the so-called Twelve-Day War (in June this year), including drone strikes which targeted specific rooms within high-rise buildings to assassinate military leaders whilst leaving the buildings standing, it is simply not credible to think that this level of destruction was anything other than an attack on the entire population of Gaza. [Note: This is not an endorsement of Israel’s actions during that war, which was an unjustified war of aggression carried out in the middle of negotiations].

And this is not to mention Israel’s killing of Palestinian journalists (now more than 250), which according to the Cost of War Project, is a higher figure than those killed while active in their profession in both World wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan combined.

Lord Biggar invokes the Allied bombing in World War II to make the point that civilian deaths are not necessarily deliberate. His reasoning here is deeply flawed. Firstly, it is widely recognised that the Allies committed serious war crimes during that conflict including deliberate attacks on civilian targets. The Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians was adopted in 1949 precisely to address such conduct, and many of the Allies’ actions would now violate international humanitarian law and be considered serious war crimes.

But even setting that aside, the comparison is fundamentally flawed. Hamas is not a powerful army like the Nazi Wehrmacht or the Japanese Imperial Army. Hamas is a non-state armed group with limited conventional military capacity and no air force, navy, tanks, etc. The circumstances bear no resemblance to World War II and, if anything, the comparison only highlights how disproportionate and indiscriminate Israel's actions have been.

Lord Biggar acknowledges that Israel's military actions in Gaza have been morally wrong, but backs this up with a misleading statement,  that: “deaths caused in pursuit of an impossible aim are futile and unjustified, and I do not believe that the aim of completely destroying Hamas is feasible.”  

His reasoning obscures the fact that mass civilian deaths, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the rendering of Gaza uninhabitable are not consequences of a failed military objective, but the primary aim of Israel’s attacks on Gaza.

His second reason for questioning Israel’s military actions in Gaza rests on firmer ground when he says: “Second, I do not see how Israel’s military actions in Gaza are co-ordinated with a political strategy to achieve a just and lasting peace…” This is certainly true, even if it considerably understates the reality of what Israel is trying to do to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

However, overall, Lord Biggar’s article demonstrates how moral argument, when detached from evidence, can easily serve to obscure reality rather than illuminate it.