Some words ought to retain their weight, and genocide is one of them in my view. The word has a clear etymology and commonly understood definition. It has a serious and sober history behind it, as befits such a subject. There is a vast scholarly literature that attends to the word in its legal, historical and moral dimensions. Understanding genocide is key to understanding, not just human atrocities past and present, but the entire global order after World War II. It should not, in my view, be invoked casually, without caution, care and due consideration. To over-apply the accusation in the discourse of world affairs is to dilute a concept designed to codify the very worst depravities of human and societal evil.
The horrors of the mid-20th century were so vast and so extreme they needed a new language to describe them. During the war, a Jewish lawyer from Poland called Raphael Lemkin loudly raised the alarm about the atrocities being committed in Eastern Europe under the cover of war. In 1944 he coined the word genocide to describe this style of mass murder by combining the Greek word for ‘people’, genos, with English suffix cide, for murder. “New conceptions require new terms,” Lemkin wrote, “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. This crime was distinct from warfare between the armies of nation states, in being specifically targeted at the annihilation of one or more racial or ethnic groups, and as such genocide could happen internally as well as externally. “Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group”.
The word took on an immediate importance within the world of international jurisprudence which was emerging from the ashes of total war. Before the word Holocaust was in common usage, Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials were accused of “deliberate and systematic genocide – Viz., the extermination of racial and national groups – against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people, and national, racial or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others”.
Genocide was first condemned in a United Nations resolution in 1946, but it wasn’t until 1948 that, thanks largely to Lemkin’s campaigning, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defined genocide as, “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, and which forms the basis of the concept in international law. Lawyers, scholars, statesman and historians have debated about the word – about the boundaries of its definition, its application and its usefulness – but they have remained consistent on genocide meaning, at its core, the deliberate attempt by one group to annihilate another.
Why, then, do I see so many people online, and so many people in the streets holding placards, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza? Those throwing around the accusation do not give the impression of being well informed participants in the debate. They probably couldn’t tell you who Raphael Lemkin was, when the Armenian Genocide took place or what the Holodomor was about. They couldn’t tell you who was killing who in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans or Somalia. Yet they are positive Israel is committing the very worst of all crimes against humanity.
A sober assessment of the horrific situation in Gaza would understand that the distressing scenes of destruction and loss of life are the result of war, not genocide. If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against the Palestinians, it could turn the entire Gaza Strip and West Bank to glass overnight. They are not doing anything like that. They are fighting an asymmetric war against the terrorists that govern the Gaza Strip, and who are responsible for the worst pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust.
The IDF has a clearly defined target and they have acted according to the standards practises of counter-insurgency armed conflict. They have repeatedly warned civilians to evacuate areas of attack, for example, at an obvious strategic cost to themselves. If the number of civilian casualties remains high, that is because Hamas uses human shields, not because Israel is deliberately targeting civilians. That is on them. Hamas could have used their billions to build bomb shelters for their people, instead of funnelling it into their vast apparatus of state terror, all while embedding themselves among a terrified, captive populace.
You might argue Israel is being too forceful, too intense and too destructive in its actions. Fine. But what Israeli forces are doing is the very opposite of indiscriminate, and comes nowhere near the threshold of mass racial extermination of civilians that defines the category of genocide. The genocides of the past claimed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. Israel has been in often bloody conflict with its Arab neighbours for over 75 years, yet the population of Palestinians has increased fivefold during that time. Some genocide.
Detached from history, ethics and jurisprudence, the misapplication of the term for political purposes is an especially cruel barb to throw at Israel, for the obvious reason that the Jews are themselves the victims of the worst genocide in history. It is another species of Holocaust inversion; another way of telling the victims of the Nazis they are acting like the Nazis. To go for the central wound in Jewish memory and use it against the world’s only Jewish state speaks volumes about the true motives of the Free Palestine mob.
People want to do all of the feeling and none of the reading or thinking.
THE VIEW FROM DIAMOND TOWERS 