Despite the US government’s incessant claims that it is working to secure a ceasefire, the genocide that has unfolded in Gaza over the past year has been a joint US-Israeli endeavour. Israel would not be able to inflict anything approaching the degree of violence it has on the Palestinian people without American weapons, intelligence, and political cover.

To pursue these policies, the US government needed a critical mass of the American population to support or go along with its policy of working with Israel to exterminate the Palestinians. To sustain it, President Joe Biden’s administration has adopted a staunchly pro-Israeli narrative and sought to justify Israeli actions and its own by citing Israel’s “right to self-defence”.

Influential voices in American media have also contributed to creating the necessary ideological conditions for public acceptance of US-enabled Israeli atrocities. They, along with the Biden administration, are partially responsible for the genocide in Gaza.

In 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) issued the first-ever convictions for incitement to genocide, concluding that “the genocidal harm that was caused by [Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines] programming” during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Incitement to genocide is “inchoate”, that is, a crime that promotes the commission of one crime while also being an offence itself.

For the ICTR, demonstrating that someone has committed incitement to genocide does not necessarily require showing that their speech directly led a person to carry out genocidal acts. In one scholar’s view, for a genocide to occur, a climate must be created to enable such crimes to be committed.

Commentary that has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal can be thought of in these terms. Pundits in these papers have engaged in a form of incitement to genocide, albeit a distinct one because Americans do not need to go to Palestine and kill people to contribute to the genocide; they just have to acquiesce to their government’s participation.

Gregory S Gordon’s Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition offers thought-provoking approaches to incitement to genocide and other forms of hate speech. Applying his arguments to US media coverage of Palestine-Israel after October 7, 2023 suggests that much of it amounts to genocide........

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