Palestinians gather to receive food from a charity kitchen, amid a hunger crisis, in Gaza City, on Monday.Khamis Al-Rifi/Reuters

Mark Kersten is an assistant professor in criminal justice at the University of the Fraser Valley and a senior consultant at the Wayamo Foundation.

A growing consensus of Israeli and international human-rights organizations, editorial boards, Israeli Holocaust historians and former attorneys-general, as well as Canadian figures like Roméo Dallaire have all come to the same conclusion: What is happening in Gaza is a genocide. But it is clear there remains confusion about what genocide is and how it is perpetrated, which breeds misinformation and polarization. Given the atrocities being perpetrated in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and Palestine, it has never been more important to understand the nature of genocide precisely.

If I could impart one piece of knowledge from my decade-plus of researching and teaching about the topic, it would be this: Genocide is a process, not an event. That insight is critical to understand if we hope to prevent genocides and hold their perpetrators to account.

Genocide, after all, is not perpetrated instantaneously; it does not “just happen.” Rather, those who seek to commit genocide must prepare their population to either support violence or to turn a blind eye to it. They do so through a process of dehumanizing their target group, often through apartheid-type discrimination. They foster a narrative that the well-being of one group cannot bear the continued existence of the other, whose killing is justified by collectively reducing........

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