Why is Calling It Genocide So Hard?

 I have been thinking about this for quite some time, and I have a few half-written blog posts addressing the G word: is the Gaza operation genocide?  I learned today that calling it such may be "anti-semitic" according to the standards of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so that could be a deterrent.  However, since the guy who wrote the IHRA guidelines is opposed to the weaponization of his guidelines, maybe that shouldn't deter us.

One of the big challenges in calling something genocide is that it is supposed to require not just heaps of war crimes but proven intent.  I have gotten into arguments with a friend about this.  What counts as intent?  Heaps of statements by those in the Israeli government but not by Netanyahu himself?  Does Israel need to issue a statement that their intent is to commit genocide for us to call it genocide?  And to be clear, most genocide scholars have called it genocide while most holocaust scholars have not.  

Again, the crime of genocide is "“intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”  I find this strange because it makes intent more important than the actual reality of what is being done, and what is being done in Gaza and what is starting to be done in the West Bank is the destruction of a people because of who they are.  It is more than a few war crimes but an operation defined by war crimes--killing of kids and of journalists, destruction of hospitals and water facilities, and now the perfection of starvation.  For me, genocide is the attempted destruction of a people in whole or in part because of their identities.  How is what is going in Gaza not that?  I think we can discern intent from the fact that this has been going on for some time and that the violence has been systemic.  It is not an accident that the destruction has been this complete.  It is not an accident that Palestinians are dying of starvation.  I think we can infer intent from the patterns.  

Yet, for me and for others, it has been very hard to use the G-word.  Why?  There are two reasons, I think, with one being far more important than the other, but both probably matter.  The lesser reason is that if you call something genocide, you are obligated to do something about it.  The Genocide Convention and all the discussion around it involves not just an obligation not to engage in genocide, but also not to stand by when one observes it elsewhere.  I am old enough to remember when the Clinton Administration was reluctant to call the Rwanda Genocide what it was as it was happening because that would mean doing something about it less than a year after the mess in Mogadishu.  

How do you stop a country from committing genocide?  The efforts by countries to invoke international law have failed to stop Israel.  Of course, cutting off arms shipments would be a first step that should have happened long ago.  But that too would be insufficient given the commitment made by Netanyahu to stay in power to continue the war against the Palestinians.  Regime change?  That would seem to be the way to go, but that opens all kinds of questions that people don't want to consider.  But, still, I don't think that is driving discomfort with the G-word. 

The biggest problem for Jews to call it genocide is that it cuts to heart of Jewish identity.  Note that one of the IHRA restrictions is comparing Israel's actions to the Nazis.  Why is that?  While anti-semites may do that all the time, why is it inherently anti-semitic if the behavior is similar?  Because the Holocaust is so burned into Jewish identity, that Jews as victims, as survivors, is part of what it means to be Jewish.  As an atheist, I don't feel my Jewish identity when it comes to religious stuff,* but I feel it when the Holocaust comes up as a topic.  I have joked that I learned three things in Hebrew school (2-3 times a week, mostly afternoons after my public school education): how to read (not understand) enough Hebrew to barely get through my Bar Mitzvah, various mythologies about the creation of Israel (I cannot express how mind-blowing and nauseating it is to hear Israeli politicians refer to a second Nabka, which means they are acknowledging what was long denied--that Israel expelled the Palestinians in 1947),** and the Holocaust.  

It is now fundamental to Jewish identity that genocide was done to us.  Indeed, some of the discourse around the Holocaust is disturbing because it focuses on the six million Jews and not the eleven or so million victims, in an effort to make the Holocaust a uniquely Jewish experience, rather than including Roma, LGBTQ, the disabled, opposition politicians, and others.  Anyhow, if being the target of genocide defines in part what it means to be a Jew, how can Jews engage in genocide?  It is possible but really hard to recognize this reality, as it hurts.  It feels awful, it creates much emotional conflict within oneself and with others, including family.  It is far easier to label the behavior of others, such as Serbs in Bosnia, as genocide than to consider one's own people guilty of it, especially when it is key to one's identity.  

And, yes, another element is that others in bad faith use the genocide word.  But again, as the Superman movie reminds us (as did a series of books that have now been betrayed by their author), it is the choices we make, it is what we do that matters.  What the Israeli government is doing is horrifying.  The scale of destruction, of collective punishment, is appalling.  What is the appropriate life for a life ratio?  Yes, Hamas killed more than a thousand people in October a couple of years ago, but does that justify killing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands?  Again, collective punishment is inherently evil, it is what Nazis did to Lidice because of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.  

There I go, making comparisons to Nazis.  I guess that means I am anti-semitic.  I don't hate Jews, but I do hate the government of Netanyahu.  And there's the rub--Jews in Israel are protesting that government, so they aren't anti-semitic, are they?  So, if folks on this side of the Atlantic protest the actions of the Israeli government, does that make them anti-semitic?  I would think not, but the weaponization of the IHRA standards, mostly by actors of bad faith (the Trump administration and the GOP are full of anti-semites from the top down), says otherwise. 

There has been plenty of real anti-semitism directed at American Jews, including members of my family.  But what is not anti-semitism are accusations that Israel is engaged in genocide.  Sure, that makes Jews uncomfortable, but being made uncomfortable is not a hate crime.  Here's another parallel that will surely annoy people--being informed about the slavery and its legacy makes white people uncomfortable in the US but is not a hate crime and should not be driven out of classrooms.  Similarly, criticism of Israel for its war crimes and, yes, for its genocidal campaign, will make Jews uncomfortable, but is not necessarily anti-semitism. That depends on the speaker and, yes, their intent.  

So, yeah, what the government of Israel is doing is genocide.  It does not make Hamas right or justified or good.  Hamas is evil, perhaps more evil than Israel because it deliberately endangered the people they claim to represent to score points.  Israel, for all of the harm it does, is doing it in the name of protecting its people, even it is mostly about keeping Netanyahu in power and out of prison.   But one can think the two things at the same time--that Hamas is evil and Israel is engaging in genocide.  It is awful, it is uncomfortable as hell, but it is also reality.  

* I have long been a "bad Jew" not just for being an atheist but also for marrying a non-Jew.  So, devout Jews can take all of what I say and throw this blog post out.  But again, I feel this identity keenly when Nazis are back in fashion in the US as I know that I would be sent to the gas chambers along with those who believe.  

** Israel is also central to Jewish identity, something I am reminded of as I read Sandra Fox's book on Jewish summer camps.  But is it the government or the place that is central?  I think making any government central to one's identity to be problematic, but that is a topic for another day.  I have dodged all kinds of questions and issues, but this post is long enough.  We can discuss Zionism some other day. 

Thinking about the G Word

Maybe not genocide, almost
certainly a war crime.

 I have been reluctant to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  I am not an international lawyer so my hesitance is less about the fine points of international law and more about how fraught the word is--that it is a very inflammatory accusation, that it turns people's minds off, that it ends conversations.  It is pretty much the worst thing you can accuse someone of doing, especially an Israeli given the history of the Jews.  It also raises in some people's minds a false equivalency between this event or that event and the Holocaust.  For the legal beagles, the question is of intent--is the aim to kill in part (the in part thing is important) or entirely a group of people because of their race, religion, language, or some other ethnic marker.*  For an excellent discussion of much of this, see Page Fortna's op-ed.

And then I got into a conversation with a family member about ethnic cleansing versus genocide.  I am far more confident that what is happening in Gaza is ethnic cleansing.  We have had a variety of statements from Israeli officials referring to this as a/the nabka--a repeat of something that had long been denied--that the new Israelis expelled the Palestinians from contested territories in 1948.  Reports that Netanyahu has been looking for other places to settle the Palestinians are very disturbing. The level of violence and its targeting, as this WP analysis illustrates only too clearly, is suggestive.  Israel has more done more damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure in a couple of months than other contemporary campaigns and it is not close. Remember, the 21k civilian casualties in Gaza is almost certainly an undercount that will get worse as the destruction of the health care system and the shortages of food and water kick in.

Israel and its fans will claim that they need to eradicate Hamas because it has genocidal intent.  I sympathize with that, but genocide is partly about power.  One cannot engage in mass killing unless one has the powers of a state or something close to it.  So, in the genocide conversation, one can argue that one side might have intent, but it is the other side that has the ability to engage in large scale destruction and is doing so.  Hamas may present a threat to engage in genocide, but it is Israel that is actually killing large numbers of people, mostly civilians including many, many children.

I need to mention one dynamic here: conflating all Palestinians with Hamas and arguing Hamas needs to be eradicated leads to the conclusion, intentionally or not, implicit or explicit, that to destroy Hamas, one needs to eliminate the Palestinians.  Which leads to the biq question:

Is the intent of Israeli leaders to eliminate all Palestinians?  Just those living in Gaza? Not so clear, so one could argue it is not genocide.  But that is really a quibble.  Israel is forcing Gazans to move south, and so-called safe zones are not so safe (which reminds me of Bosnia).  Israels and its supporters can argue about genocide/not genocide, and maybe that is a conversation that could be more comfortable than addressing the contemporary situation--Israel is killing large numbers of innocents out of revenge, rage, and/or a misconception that hitting much, much harder will ultimately lead to deterrence.  I included the bluesky post because it illustrates something very, very powerful--that Israel is engaged in a variety of horrific tactics and no strategy (if Israel had one) could justify it.  Attacking hospitals and refugee camps is simply wrong--it is immoral and it is also bad strategy.  Netanyahu recently said he was seeking to destroy Hamas,** demilitarize Gaza, and deradicalize the Palestinians.  This campaign may be temporarily successful at the second, but it will not destroy Hamas, and it will do the opposite of deradicalizing the Palestinians.  

I remarked that when Israel had hit the 20,000 casualty figure, was that disproportionate enough, given that something less than 2,000 Israelis died on or after October 7th? It is quite clear that Israel has violated international humanitarian law repeatedly and intentionally.  I get that Israelis think international relations is gamed against them--all the UN votes by countries that have deplorable human rights records, etc.  That international law is less important than survival, but some of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy--that Israel burned whatever goodwill it received in the aftermath of October 7th by engaging in a campaign of revenge and collective punishment.

One of thing that has been so disturbing is the realization that there are two meanings to Never Again--never again will Jews be victims or never again will we let mass killings take place.  It is clear now that Israeli leaders and their supporters believe that Never Again means that Jews will never be victims again, even if it means victimizing others.  The lesson I thought I had learned growing up was that Never Again meant fighting against oppression, persecution, victimization, regardless of the targeted group.  I can't help but think that all of this is a betrayal of what we were supposed to learn from the Holocaust.

All of this is awful.  Hamas is awful, Netanyahu is awful, terrorism is awful, collective punishment is awful.  Whether one wants to call it genocide or not, what Israel is doing is awful--it is counterproductive and it is immoral.  So, from a strategic perspective, Israel's campaign is bad.  From a moral perspective, it is wrong.  Hamas's gross violations of human rights do not justify violating international humanitarian law, even if it were producing a successful outcome, and it is certainly not doing that.

Thus, I avoid using genocide as a label for all of this because it is largely superfluous--one can condemn what Israel has been doing without it.

 

* The term politicide was invented to cover the attempt to kill many/all people of the same party or movement that is ethnically heterogeneous.

** None of this justifies Hamas or legitimates what Hamas has done.  The recent story about the systemic gender violence committed by Hamas makes abundantly clear that Hamas is an awful, awful organization.  That they deliberately use their own people as shield not to protect the organization but to raise the hypocrisy costs for Israel--that is, they are deliberately getting Palestinians killed--makes them utterly deplorable.  They should be defeated and destroyed.  But Israel is actually empowering Hamas by walking into the traps it has set.