The 108 IAGS Yes Votes Still Travel as Scholar Consensus

In August 2025, 108 members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars voted that Israel’s war in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. The group has about 500 members. Its president called the result a definitive statement from experts in the field.

The number that then moved through headlines, briefings, and argument was not 108. It was 86 percent of those who voted. More than a year later, that figure is still the one that gets pasted as proof that genocide scholars have spoken.

Israel’s Policies Meet the Legal Definition, IAGS Declared

The association, founded in 1994, put the measure to an email ballot and recorded passage on 31 August 2025. The text is dated 28 July 2025. Melanie O’Brien, the IAGS president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, described it as a definitive statement from experts that what is going on in Gaza is genocide.

The three-page resolution on the situation in Gaza opens by calling the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 horrific and an international crime. It then states that Israel’s response has targeted the entire Gazan population, not only Hamas, and that the legal test in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention has been met.

WHAT THE RESOLUTION DECLARES

• The core finding: Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 convention, and also amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.
• The casualty claims it recites: more than 59,000 adults and children killed by “official UN estimates,” more than 143,000 injured, more than 50,000 children killed or injured, nearly all of 2.3 million people displaced, and more than 90 percent of housing destroyed.
• The intent evidence it lists: Israeli leaders’ language about “human animals,” “flattening Gaza,” and turning Gaza into “hell,” plus Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backing of a U.S. plan to expel Palestinians from the Strip with no right of return.
• The courts it invokes: International Court of Justice provisional measures in 2024, which the text says found it “plausible that Israel is committing genocide,” and International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued on 21 November 2024 for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
• The groups it cites: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, and the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.

Those citations are the scholarly product. Sara E. Brown, a genocide researcher who sat on the IAGS advisory board for two 4-year terms, said the text leaned on groups that had already stretched the legal definition so it would fit Israel, including Amnesty International and Francesca Albanese, the U.N. rapporteur, whom Brown described as carrying a record of antisemitism and extremist rhetoric.

“The content of the resolution and the way it was forced through speak to an embarrassing absence of professionalism,” Brown said. She holds the first Ph.D. in comparative genocide studies from the Strassler Center at Clark University and directs the American Jewish Committee’s San Diego office.

108 Yes Votes Became an 86 Percent Headline

Brown said 129 members voted, in a body she put at around 500. The split that circulated among members and in later tallies was 108 in favor, 18 against, and 3 abstentions. IAGS presented the outcome as 86 percent support among those who voted, above the two-thirds mark its rules require of the people who actually cast a ballot.

THE GAZA RESOLUTION BALLOT

Just over a quarter of the roll took part. About one in five of the whole membership voted yes. IAGS said members had 30 days, a personal ballot, and several reminders, and that voting is anonymous and never compulsory. Emily Sample, the communications officer, told members the share who voted was “pretty standard” and “represents a much larger percentage of the organization that did support this.”

O’Brien’s “definitive statement from experts” did not carry those fractions with it. Israel’s Foreign Ministry rejected the text as based on “Hamas lies” and poor research and called it an embarrassment to the legal profession.

The Town Hall That Never Happened

Brown’s complaint was not only the math. She said IAGS usually puts a fight like this in a virtual town hall before the ballot, and that leadership first promised one, then pulled it. Internal emails described the session as happening “as with previous resolutions.” A few days later the executive board reversed that plan.

The association also refused to name the drafters and blocked dissenting notes on the members’ listserv, calling that list the wrong forum. Brown said many colleagues sat the vote out because they did not feel qualified on the Israel-Hamas war, which in practice “favors those activists who are seeking to advance a false narrative about Israel.”

THE PATH TO THE BALLOT

1. Late July 2025: Leadership tells members there will be a town hall on the Gaza text, as with previous resolutions.
2. Days later: The executive board cancels the town hall. Drafters’ names stay unpublished. The listserv is closed to dissent.
3. 28 July 2025: The resolution is marked current as of this date. Members then have 30 days to vote.
4. 31 August 2025: The resolution passes.
5. 1 September 2025: O’Brien’s “definitive statement” line leads global coverage.
6. 2 September 2025: Brown goes public on the cancelled debate and the 129-vote roll.
7. 4 September 2025: The executive board defends the process, freezes new joins, and takes the member directory offline.

“The appearance is that this was a unanimous vote on behalf of the entirety of the association. It was not, and they refused to have a transparent, critical discussion,” Brown said. “The leadership, in my opinion, had an agenda.” The public, she added, is “going to see, ‘Genocide experts agree.’ No, we don’t, and we were deliberately silenced.”

Membership Is Open by Design, IAGS Says

The association does not require a doctorate, a university post, or a publication record. Good standing means dues are current. Sample confirmed that policymakers and civil-society members can join, and said, “We are not accepting large swaths of activists who are anti-Israel.”

After the vote, critics paid the dues, joined, and then pointed at the open door. IAGS answered that it had been hit with fake names and abusive addresses, including the name of a genocide perpetrator, and that it had therefore suspended the join form. It also disabled the public and private directories, citing members’ safety, and said board members had received hate mail.

The same board text is blunt about who it wants in the room. It says it keeps the door open to artists, advocates, independent scholars, Indigenous scholars, global-majority scholars, marginalized communities, and survivors, including people who may not have PhDs or institutional affiliation. It says the membership is still mostly scholars and academics, plus people who work in prevention, education, and punishment, and that if it errs, it errs on inclusivity. It called some attacks on the geographic mix of members racist.

Brown has said that mix can be a strength and, in the same breath, that it “opens the door for something like this to happen.” In Brown’s later account of the vote, she put it more sharply: anyone with a credit card can join and then take part in decisions the public hears as expert findings. She joined as a doctoral student in 2013, after work in Rwanda on women who killed and women who rescued during the 1994 genocide, and she wrote that the 2013 version of her would be shocked by what the association had become.

IAGS Says the Process Matched Its Bylaws

Sample rejected the charge that the association had broken its own rules. Town halls, she said, are not required by the bylaws and have not been held for every resolution. Open listserv fights were too unwieldy to moderate, and few members had asked for a public discussion of this text.

We felt, and the authors of the resolution felt that there was sufficient contextual information for all of the scholars in the community to make their own informed decision before the vote. The space for discussion is through articles and other publications.

Emily Sample, IAGS communications officer

The IAGS executive board’s 4 September statement went further. It said the Gaza text followed the same path as other resolutions, with peer review by the Resolutions Committee, the executive board, and the advisory board, and several rounds of revision. Turnout of the size recorded, it said, sits in the usual band of 25 to 34 percent. Town halls, it added, have typically been hosted by the authors as teaching sessions for historical cases members may know little about, which is not how it treated Gaza.

The bylaws, last revised in 2017, set two bars: a quorum of more than 20 percent of paid-up members, written as 20 percent plus one, and then a two-thirds majority of those voting, by email or at the biennial meeting. On IAGS’s own accounting, both bars were cleared. That is a different claim from O’Brien’s line about a definitive statement by experts in the field. One is a club rule. The other is how the result was sold.

IAGS also treated the coverage itself as proof of value. The board said there had been broad interest from scholars, from media worldwide, and at the United Nations, and that this “reinforces the value of our association passing resolutions.” Feedback, it said, had been overwhelmingly positive. The association did not retract the text.

How Did a Minority Vote Travel as Expert Consensus?

That is the part that did not end in September 2025. The useful output of the ballot was never a journal article. It was a sentence other people could lift: the world’s leading genocide scholars say Israel is committing genocide. IAGS fed that sentence. It then pointed at the pickup, including at the United Nations, as evidence that the sentence had done its job.

In late September 2026, the same 86 percent still appears in online argument as if it were a census of the field. The 129 ballots, the cancelled town hall, and the open dues almost never travel with it. The stamp is easier to move than the footnote.

Benny Gantz, the former Israeli defense minister and former IDF chief of staff, called the resolution deceitful malpractice on the day it hit the wires. His point was operational: a military that aborts strikes over civilian harm, warns before attacks, and opens humanitarian zones, he wrote, would be an oddly inept genocide machine, and the word was being cheapened for an anti-Israel brief.

The resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) on Israel is nothing short of deceitful, disgraceful malpractice.

A military that calls off strikes targeting terrorists due to potential civilian collateral damage, sends prior warning of… pic.twitter.com/X2cXo46tsd

— בני גנץ – Benny Gantz (@gantzbe) September 1, 2025

People who backed the finding answered him on the same terms, that a warning before a strike does not change what the strike does. The argument that followed was about Gaza. The credential both sides were reaching for was still the IAGS vote.

More Than 500 Scholars Asked for a Retraction

On 9 September 2025, the Academic Engagement Network released an open letter signed by more than 500 scholars, former prosecutors, and other professionals in law, history, Holocaust studies, and genocide studies. The letter called the resolution a clear misapplication of law and history, objected to a ballot in which only 129 members voted, and said IAGS had failed to honor pledges to host town halls and publish dissent.

Mia Bloom, a professor of communication and Middle East studies at Georgia State University and a founding member of what became IAGS, said in that letter that the resolution “does not reflect the majority of genocide scholars.” Fewer than a third of members had voted in favor, she said, and membership was no longer limited to serious scholars of genocide. To single out Gaza while remaining silent on the 7 October atrocities, she said, exposed IAGS as a virtue-signaling body rather than a credible scholarly association.

Brown’s September column went further on Hamas. She wrote that IAGS issued no urgent resolution after 7 October 2023, even though Hamas’s attack, in her view, was genocidal violence against Jews as Jews, and that a peer-reviewed policy brief she published that December, which asked the association to say so, was ignored. The Gaza text, she argued, cheapens the word, dishonors past victims, and can be used to justify more hostility toward Jews. Absent a retraction and a change in who may vote, she wrote, journalists and policymakers should stop treating IAGS as a credible authority.

IAGS has not taken that advice. The resolution remains the association’s position. The 108 yes votes remain the ballot. The line that still gets used is the one about experts, and 86 percent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Share of IAGS Must Vote for a Resolution to Pass?

The 2017 bylaws require two separate majorities. More than 20 percent of paid-up members must take part, written as 20 percent plus one, and then two-thirds of those voting must be in favor, either at the biennial meeting or by email. IAGS says the Gaza ballot met both tests. A town hall is not one of the tests.

Who Can Join the International Association of Genocide Scholars?

Anyone the association accepts as committed to work on genocide, from a range of disciplines, can join if dues are current. The board has said that list is meant to include artists, advocates, independent scholars, survivors, and people without PhDs or a university post, and that affordable dues exist so money is not the gate. After fake sign-ups following the Gaza vote, IAGS temporarily froze new applications and hid the member directory.

Has IAGS Passed Genocide Resolutions on Other Cases?

Yes. A resolution passed on 8 December 2022 declared that atrocities against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang constitute genocide and crimes against humanity and called on the United Nations to say the same. The association also passed a Rohingya resolution treating the persecution as genocide and a June 2005 Darfur resolution, adopted unanimously at its Boca Raton meeting, that called on the United Nations to authorize an armed intervention.

What Did the Gaza Resolution Say About the 7 October Attack?

Its first clause calls the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 horrific and says the attack itself constitutes international crimes. It does not find that Hamas committed genocide. The rest of the operative text is directed at Israel, including a call for states to pursue arms-trade and humanitarian-law obligations “with regards to Israel and Palestine,” and a call for repair and transitional justice for the people of Gaza.