Gaza: What is Genocide?

[NOTE: This was originally delivered as a speech at a vigil in Wakatū/Nelson but footage of the speech was lost so I re-recorded it and appended text below]

What is genocide? Legally it is described in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which tells us “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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.”

The convention does not mention complete extermination, it does not mention Nazis nor gas chambers, and it does not mention special intent. These things are not intrinsic to genocide.

Being focused on criminal acts, the convention reflects the concept of genocide, but it does not describe its nature. This has allowed a vacuum into which people have poured their prejudices in order to demonise those they hate and wash clean the blood from the hands of they support.

The convention defines genocide in legal terms but it does not define it in terms of meaning. This has made the concept and the law vulnerable to political power and manipulation. The way we discuss genocide is fraught with double-standards. People who know nothing about the concept are the keenest to police its usage. They proclaim, as Piers Morgan recently did that it is not “technically” a genocide unless a million people die. Yet we accept as uncontroversial the finding that Australia committed genocide when it took Aboriginal and so-called “mixed-race” children from their families. In contrast it is desperately controversial to suggest that the 76 year-long co-ordinated multifaceted unrelenting and often savagely violent programme by Zionists to cleanse Palestinians from the land of Palestine is genocidal.

So, to understand the law, we need to ask – what is genocide? Raphael Lemkin created the word and the idea. He was a lawyer, but most importantly he was a driven humanitarian. Ethnically Polish and Jewish, he grew up in what is now Western Ukraine. From a young age he developed a deep abhorrence for mass violence against people because of their identity. Pogroms against Jews; historical instances of persecution and massacres of Christians; and the horrors of the Armenian Genocide (which happened when he was 15) all shaped him profoundly.

In 1939 Lemkin was forced into a gruelling and dangerous flight when Germany invaded Poland, leaving behind his life as a prosecutor in Warsaw. When safe, he devoted himself to trying to understand the unprecedented brutality unleashed on the world at that time. He came to realise that violence against people because of their group identity (which he had previously termed “barbarism”) was not in fact distinct from the destruction of the cultural, social and political institutions of that group (which he had previously termed “vandalism”). Combining these two concepts he coined the term “genocide” and said it denoted “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups….”

If there is one sentence that Lemkin wrote that captures best the meaning of genocide it is that genocide is war directed against subjects and civilians not against sovereigns and armies. The key word is war, and Lemkin made clear that he knew that those who commit genocide do so as a form of warfare. He wrote that “the Germans prepared, waged, and continued a war not merely against states and their armies but against peoples. For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” Genocide can sometimes occur in other forms, but it is almost always portrayed by perpetrators as armed conflict.

Genocide is a policy, it is a strategy. Violent hatred is less a cause of genocide than it is a consequence of it. The dehumanisation and demonisation of the victim group is a top-down process that seeks to shape the minds of the ordinary men and women who carry out acts of violence so that all members of the victim group are seen as a threat, and as a target. The key to getting people to commit acts of genocide is not getting them to hate it is getting them to believe that their genocidal violence is an act of warfare, an act of defence.

IDF soldier Guy Zaken was a bulldozer driver who testified the he had “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” Why does he call them “terrorists”? In the context, it is not a meaningful descriptive term. These people cruelly mangled (to death or in death) would mostly have been non-combatants if there were truly hundreds. The word “terrorists” has no meaning here at all other than to make the victims sound dangerous and worthy of extermination. Genocide makes even a small child a threat. As an ordinary Zionist recently put it, “By the time they are 6, they are already radicalized! They are the TERRORISTS of the future!”

Genocide is a “coordinated plan” – a process, a strategy, a policy. But really, what is genocide? It is what the victims experience that truly defines what genocide is. Genocide unleashes the violence of murder, rape, and torture; it unleashes the aggression of those who glory in destroying heritage, community, culture, family, and home. More than that, though, it prevents any possibility of appeal to the human traits of mercy, compassion, or even simple empathy. It turns perpetrators into implacable machines; unmoved by the tears of those whose homes are demolished; unconcerned by their own acts of murder; unreachable by the grief of a parent cradling their dead child; inured to the suffering of those shot, crushed or burnt; untouched by the pleas of those who do not want to die; happy to destroy food needed by starving people; callous in the face of inhuman living conditions that spawn disease; indifferent to the terror of a people living under ever-present threats and unending loss; able to look at the people who endure the relentless terror of bombing; missiles, shelling and drones, and call those people terrorists.

What is genocide? There can be no better answer than that it is what is happening now in Gaza.