The politics of US-backed genocide in Palestine
"Genocide" is a problematic and much abused word, but we must use it
There is a lot I don’t like about the word “genocide”. Years ago, I‘ve not only balked at applying it to Apartheid Israel’s crimes, I’ve considered not using it ever - about any crime at all.
And yet I’ve never used the word so much as I have since Palestinian fighters based in the concentration camp of Gaza launched military raids on Apartheid Israel on October 7. [1] Dozens of Israeli military personnel were captured, including high level officers. The Israeli response to the raids has been so savage that the word “genocide” simply had to be used against it and its western backers (who were led, as always, by the US).
Problems with the word “genocide”
The UN defines genocide as specific acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Killing members of the group is only one of the acts defined by the UN as potentially genocidal. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm”, or more generally “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part“, “measures intended to prevent births”, and ”forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” may all be acts of genocide according to the UN definition.
I’ve highlighted the words “in part” because that’s one glaring problem with the definition. How big a part? The UN Office on Genocide Prevention says “Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and ‘substantial’.” How “substantial”?
Let’s cut the crap. We know how these legal niceties are settled in practice: according to what the world’s most powerful gangsters want. In 1995, in the small town of Srebrenica, thousands of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) were massacred by Serbian forces: 8,000 according to an international tribunal, 3,000 according to credible skeptics (out of a population of about 2 million at the time). [2] The crime was perpetrated by official enemies of the US, so it ended up being labelled a “genocide” by International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) later accepted the ICTY’s ruling.
It was a horrible atrocity but thanks to the “genocide” label, it was absurdly placed in a category with the Holocaust, the near annihilation of indigenous peoples in the Americas by white settlers, and the ravages of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africans.
One could clarify “in part” by adding exact numbers to the definition - say 100,000 victims or 10 percent of the population. But any numerical limits are arbitrary. And even crimes that everyone agrees were genocide can differ widely. The Holocaust took place with extraordinary speed. It eliminated about a third of the world’s Jews in a few years. By contrast, the near total annihilation and dispossession of the indigenous peoples in Canada and the US took place over centuries and is still ongoing. Indigenous people were reduced from being the overwhelming majority of the population, the sole possessors of the vast natural wealth of Canada and the US, to a small and very poor minority.[2] So in some ways it was an even more successful genocide than the Holocaust. In fact, in Mein Kampf, Hitler pointed to genocide in the Americas as proof of white supremacy.
What about political groups?
Speaking of Hitler, his worldview highlights another problem with the UN definition of genocide: the exclusion of poltical groups. As I discussed in my review of Mein Kampf, to Hitler, Marxism and Judaism were inextricably linked. He could not envision eradicating one without eradicating the other. But what if antisemitism had not been central to his worldview? What if he had primarily been an anti-Marxist determined to build a German superstate by conquering the Soviet Union and parts of western Europe? He project would still have killed tens of millions but it would not fit the UN’s definition of genocide.
US aggression for the past century in Haiti, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan took millions of lives, and displaced tens of millions since 2001 alone. It was aimed at trying to eliminate political movements (often communist or leftist but sometimes simply nationalist) that threatened the US empire. Of course, racist disregard for the victims is required to maintain an empire, but seeking the eradication of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is not necessarily required. The exclusion of political groups from the genocide definition looks convenient for capitalist states that promote fanatical anti-communism, even to the point of honouring Nazis.
Do we need a word that appears to make the Srebrenica Massacre of 3-8,000 people a much worse crime than the US killing millions of Vietnamese to prevent communists from winning power through elections? Like I said, I’ve sometimes wondered if avoiding the word entirely was best.
The genocide shoe fits. Make them wear it
But as problematic as the word “genocide” is for the reasons discussed above, it is now important to jab western hypocrites in the nose with the word they’ve shamelessly weaponized against the left and against official enemies (recently against China). As Apartheid Israel has many people scared that it may drive Palestinians from Gaza into tent cities in Egypt; as homicidal maniacs like Keir Starmer, leader of the UK Labuor party, says that Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza’s two million inhabitants is acceptable for “self-defence”, now is surely the time to weaponize the word “genocide” against western leaders like Joe Biden, who by the approved UN definition, are transparently genocidal.
NOTES:
[1]The Israeli newspaper Haaertz gives a list of names of Israelis killed during October 7 raids. It names 96 civilians, 171 Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and 41 police
[2] An International Crisis Group report said that, in 1991, 43.5% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's population of 4.4 million were Muslim (Bosniak).
{3] In Canada, indigenous people are 5% of the population and have a poverty rate nearly double the national average.