Of Course It’s Not Genocide; But Why?
Body counts from Hamas and the disrespectful use of the term “genocide”…
Words are important.
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide. It says:
Article I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
The first article is interesting because it emphasizes that one can still be guilty of genocide while at war. In other words, being ‘at war’ is not alone a sufficient defense against the crime of genocide. But if you think about what war is, a conflict of ideologies, differing ideologies are often mapped to different nationalities, ethnicities, races, or religions. This is a problem because…
The second article reveals that an act of genocide requires an intent to kill in whole or in part a group defined by nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Well, if we recognize that the ideological differences that are the basis for wars can often, at least partly, characterize different nationalities, ethnicities, races or religions, then effectively any killing during war could be characterized as genocide. The intellectual maneuver is that the intent is not genocide, the intent is to change the ideology that is in conflict.
The concept of “intent” is critical to most law, and in this case it seems as though it could have been drafted a bit more precisely and say that “genocide requires an intent to kill in whole or in part a group because of its defined nationality, ethnicity,….” If drafted this way it would be clearer that in war when people are targeted because of a particular ideology that is not exclusively a characteristic of a nationality, ethnicity, etc., then the intent is not genocide.
If you apply this understanding to the Israeli conflict it is rather striking.
1 The aggressive assertions that being anti-zionist is not anti-semitic is fanciful. Zionism is such a strong component of general Judaism that being anti-zionist to the point where you would kill all zionist is very obviously a genocidal position.
2 Conversely, attacks by Israel into Gaza have been military ones that had the aim of recovering all hostages and the removal of the Hamas government. Non-combatant Gazans have been given safe zones to relocate to and within those safe zones, where it would be very easy do mass executions, there are none. Still, many people that appear to be non-combatants have been killed, but that is because of the Hamas way of war which is to integrate its combatants with civilian infrastructure and not consistently clothe themselves in distinguishing uniforms.
They choose to disregard the duty of distinction expected of combatants who, presumably, want to protect non-combatants. Recent statements by Hamas have indicated that the vast majority of Gazans killed have been members of Hamas and their families which further supports that the assertion that the civilian losses in Gaza are mostly due to the Hamas way of war and its failure to distinguish. And to be clear, the duty to distinguish doesn’t mean you cannot have military infrastructure near civilians, but it must be easily distinguished from the non-combatants.
In general, whether you ask people or Google, you will be pointed to an event called The Holocaust as the most well-documented example of a genocide. It, The Holocaust, is characterized by the identification, collection, and murder of a defined group of people – Jews. The were collected, often without physical resistance, and subject to mass execution. In this context, I cannot imagine anyone not describing The Holocaust as a genocide.
But if I were to change the facts and say that this defined group, Jews, had been killing non-Jewish persons in Germany first because they were not Jewish, would that change the interpretation of The Holocaust?
What if I changed another fact and removed the collection and murder of Jews and stated that only the Jews that were engaged in attacking, or supporting the attacks on the non-Jews, were the ones targeted to prevent further attacks on the non-Jews?
Envision that the way the Jews chose to fight with the other non-Jewish Germans was to not distinguish their combatants from their women, children and non-combatants. They would hide weapons and launch attacks from the less suspicious, or even presumptively innocent, homes and refuges of typical non-combatants, maybe even from their holy synagogues.
Does changing these facts of The Holocaust change how you would define it? The Jews become far less the passive innocent victims that they were; they become…Hamas.
Witness the large number of “Palestinians” that live well within Israel, see that large concentrations of “Palestinians” that are not subject to anything close to genocidal conditions, and then simply look at the frequently fabricated, misrepresented, and simply wrong data used to assert genocide. The idea is one created, years ago, as Hamas crafted its warfighting strategy that intentionally exposes its non-combatants to death rather than protect them in order to fuel this evil propaganda effort.
The Israeli war against Hamas is not a genocide, not even close to one. But it is easy to envision the aggressive violent ideology of antisemitism becoming one.