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.

215 and Then So Many More

 Canada has been shaken by the discovery of a mass grave for 215 Indigenous kids at a residential school.  Children from Indigenous families were taken away from their communities and forced to go these schools that were designed to remove their identities and make them as white and as Christian (Catholic, either mostly or entirely, I have not read enough to be sure) as possible.  The conditions at these places caused tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases to thrive, not unlike concentration camps I have toured in Germany, and priests and nuns and others abused the children.  

As an immigrant, I did not have the opportunity to be failed by Canadian schools (my Canadian friends report not getting much info about this stuff when they went to school).  Instead, I learned only a smidge as this stuff was referred to in the citizenship guide we read to prepare for the test:

This text understates the harm as the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that 4,000 children died at these schools--a far higher rate than kids in the rest of the population--and a number that many see as an underestimate.  What always gets me is that these policies and schools continued into the 1990s.  Well, that's not fair.  They continue to this day but in a different form.  Instead of residential schools akin to concentration camps, we have kids taken away from their families due to welfare policies where the parents are seen as unfit due to the scars and legacies of the past--that past oppression and persecution has lead to poverty and other poor conditions, so the state comes in and takes kids away.  

The Commission had all kinds of recommendations including spending money on finding the rest of the mass graves.  It does appear that some of this has been funded, but it is not clear to me why so little progress has been made.  

The US has a similar situation as the equivalent of re-education camps were set up in the US, they had high rates of death and disease and accidents.  I don't know if this stuff is covered in the Native American museum in Washington, DC, as my visit there was cut short.  Each year (except during pandemics), my daughter and I visit a few Smithsonian museums on the Mall in DC.  Three years ago, we went to the Native American History Museum, but we didn't stay long.  My daughter was really uncomfortable with the government that continues to persecute Native Americans curating a museum about them.  There were displays that were critical of the Trail of Tears and about Standing Rock, but I don't remember anything about the damage done to the kids.  

Anyhow, because I didn't know that much about the Canadian experience, I felt a bit more comfortable with genocide being used to describe what the US did to Native Americans than what Canada did to the First Nations.  The more I learn, the more I realize that the word fits only too well.  Much more needs to be done to recognize what happened, to compensate for the damage, and to improve the policies and the realities that the Indigenous people of Canada face. 

75 Years and Now What?

Entrance to Sachsenhausen

Today is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest death camp run by the Sachsenhausen last spring.  I have been to numerous memorials and museums including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 
Nazis.  I have not yet visited it, but I have been to Dachau (33 years ago) and

On this particular day, I am feeling more outrage than sadness.  Why?  Because the lesson of Never Again is being eclipsed by the utility of hate.  The White House is chock full of white supremacists and, yes, anti-semites who have it quite useful to play up hatreds to gain and stay in office.  Trump started his campaign by calling all Mexican immigrants rapists and then promising a ban on Muslims.  Since then, the US has not only spent money on a farcical wall, but has set new lows in the number of refugees admitted.  So, instead of never again, it is more like Again, FFS?!

Yad Vashen, room that
identifies the victims

I still wonder whether Trump is genuinely a fascist, but I have no doubt that he and his administration are the greatest threat to large swaths of the American people (and to folks elsewhere).  Autocratic Trump does not see any limits on using the powers of the state against his enemies, and his enemies include people of color, women (at least those who don't go along with his crap), immigrants, and, yes, Jews.  Sure, he proclaims himself to be a philo-semite, but that is what modern anti-semites do--buy into stereotypes about Jews and suggest that these are positive things.

What is left of Sachsenhausen's crematoria

Of course, Trump is not alone in empowering anti-semites.  The aspiring autocrats of Europe are using the same playbook--all using George Soros as the modern day equivalent of the Rothschilds--a rich Jew portrayed as the evil force behind everything.  Even the Prime Minister of Israel is empowering these folks.  When in Israel, I asked folks why they put up with Netanyahu as the most anti-semitic leader of Israel, and they basically said that folks see Netanyahu siding with right-wing anti-semites against left-wing ones (anti-zionists).  Seems like a dumb way to go and one that betrays those lost in the Holocaust.

I happened to be reminded by a tweet about the Dutch museum of resistance, which made it more clear than most museums of this kind that there are three choices--resist, do nothing, or collaborate.  It can get complicated, but the right stance today is to resist the Trump Administration as much as possible.  Because Never Again requires work and effort, not sitting by and watching folks deploy hate against those who are different.

Sachsenhausen

Because I didn't get any interviews scheduled for today, I decided to learn from the past, rather than the present, by going to Sachsenhausen, the most significant concentration camp that is close to Berlin. See below the break for pics and some thoughts along the way:

Justice Delayed Better than None at All

Ratko Mladic was convicted by ICTY (the Intl Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia) of committing genocide at Srebrenica.  That was not his only crime against humanity, as he led the Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war, and those forces did many, many bad things--and he was convicted for many of those as well..  At Srebrenica, 7000 Muslim men were killed simply because they were Muslim men.  Very much an act of genocide.   And yeah, it took 22 years for Mladic to be convicted.  He had to be found, and he was running free i Serbia for much of this time, despite suspicions he was still in Bosnia.  That Serbia gave him up was significant progress for that country.  This conviction is still more progress.  There were bad guys on all sides, but he was the biggest and the baddest with the possible exceptions of Slobodan Milosevic who died while on trial by ICTY and Radovan Karadzic (was found earlier and convicted).

While much is well known about the genocide at Srebrenica, a few things are less well known and always get my attention:

• The Dutch government fell in 2002 due to a report that came out that criticized the Dutch performance in 1995.  Yes, a seven year delay but I find it remarkable that a government would fall for something that happened early and... was mostly not their fault.  It was mostly the UN's fault for not allowing NATO planes to strike the Bosnian Serbs that were attacking "safe areas" that were supposed to be under UN protection.  To use force, NATO and UN officials had to agree--a dual key system.  And, no, the UN guy failed to give his consent.  It is more complicated than that, of course, but more blood is on the UN's hands on this than on the Netherlands's.
• The Canadians were in Srebrenica before the Dutch but chose to re-deploy so that they would not be present during something like what happened.  So, yeah, the Canadians owe a bit of an unknown debt to the Dutch for taking the hit for the team.
• The chase for PIFWC's (persons indicted for war crimes) took longer not just because of Serbia hiding some but also
• the US didn't try to fulfill this key part of the NATO Stabilization Force mandate in its sectors because Bill Clinton told his commanders that the highest priority was force protection--that the US not experience another Blackhawk Down and suffer casualties in a peacekeeping op.  Since chasing PIFWCs was something that could lead to confrontations, riots and such, the US military avoided doing it for a while
• When they did start, it was done by Special Operations, so I would get kicked out of the room when this stuff was discussed in 2001-2002 as it was above my Top Secret clearance level.
• That when these searches did happen, it seemed that the French forces in the NATO mission would alert the Bosnian Serbs.  In the name of getting the support of the local authorities but perhaps more likely helping the side with which they had some historical affinity.  Oops.  
•  

One conclusion, of course, is that multilateral peacekeeping is hard.  Originally, the Dave and Steve NATO book was going to cover Bosnia and Kosovo, but Afghanistan ate the book (the Libya chapter fell in our laps, more or less).  So, we would have covered some of these challenges.

Anyhow, happy Mladic Conviction Day!  Better late than never.

Holocaust Remembrance

This is the time, Yom Hashoah, that Jewish folks remember the Holocaust, as the date was apparently set to coincide with the anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto--the most notable but not the only time Jews fought back.  Some disagree about the timing, but what I find a bit frustrating about discussions of the Holocaust is how focused it is on one group.

I know that distant relatives of mine were killed by the Nazis because they were Jewish, but I cannot help but notice that other people died as well for just being who they were.  The Nazis killed gays, Jehovah Witnesses, Roma, folks on the left side of the spectrum, the disabled, and so on, totaling at least eleven million.  That does not include those killed by the wars that Hitler started, which included a fair amount of less organized and less focused killing of non-combatants and prisoners of war in addition to the tens of millions killed in combat (more Soviet than anyone else by far).

I was reminded again of this just the other day in Paris:

The triangles of many different colors mark the various groups that were identified for potential/actual deportation to the concentration camps. 

My point here is simply this: we need to remember all of the victims of the Holocaust--the Jews and everyone else.  It was genocide and then some.  Remembering the other victims does not diminish the crimes committed against the Jews.