Genocide is Not a Dirty Word. It’s a Legal Term.
What exactly do you mean by genocide?
This week, on the evening of Monday May 13, seventy year-old Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was taken by the FBI for interrogation upon arriving in Detroit. Pappe’s phone was taken from him and he was detained for two hours. ‘Are you a Hamas supporter?’ they asked. ‘Do you regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? What is the solution to the ‘conflict’? Who are your Arab and Muslim friends in America?’. Pappe is one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’, who have long challenged the official narrative of the establishment of the State of Israel. Pappe was forced to leave Israel in 2008 after being condemned in the Knesset and receiving death threats.
Obviously the most serious accusation amongst these questions was that Pappe is a ‘Hamas supporter’. The US has designated Hamas, which has governed Occupied Gaza since 2007, as a terrorist organisation, as has Australia, New Zealand and the European Union. Here, the FBI are explicitly asking a seventy year-old history professor if he is a terrorist. However, the question that was more significant to me was ‘Do you regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide?’
In terms of the action of genocide, the convention is clear. What succeeds in complicating the question of genocide is affective, or emotional, responses to it. There is also a strong tradition of First Nations genocide denial in Australia and the United States. Many Australians will have an image of the Jewish Holocaust impressed on them at a young age. In Western Society the Jewish Holocaust essentially symbolises genocide as a whole, through familiarity. Grappling with the idea that genocides are still happening may prove a difficult psychological process. Genocide feels like something that happened in the past to many, and even that there is still a reluctance to name previous genocides, such as the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides at the hands of the Ottomans, correctly.
So what is genocide? There are five acts of genocide under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 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, 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 was the first adoption of genocide as a crime. The term genocide was coined by Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, from the Greek geno (culture, kin) and the Latin cide (killing). Lemkin learned of the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian massacres (now termed genocide) by the Ottoman Empire as a law student in his twenties. He was outraged at the atrocities and sought to establish safeguards against the targeted destruction of ethnic and religious groups. In 1944 Lemkin introduced the concept of the crime of genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin’s concept of genocide is far more detailed than the UN genocide convention, which doesn’t quite get across Lemkin’s perception of genocide as a crime of the state, as ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’.
The popular Western understanding of genocide generally doesn’t stretch further than ‘killing’, because of the image of the Holocaust, and because of First Nations genocide denial prevalent in the Anglosphere. Piers Morgan claimed that ‘Israel could, if they wanted to, kill everyone in Gaza. They’ve decided not to do that. Genocide is where you want to kill everyone’. This is not the definition of genocide from the genocide convention, nor Lemkin’s conception of genocide. This is, in fact, genocide denial.
Because our governments and the Murdoch press are desperate to confuse the public about the actual act of genocide, to understand genocide broadly, Lemkin’s detailed definition of genocide must be applied. In his chapter on Genocide Lemkin idenitifies two stages of genocide:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.
The first step in a genocide is occupation. Lemkin defined the ‘Techniques of Genocide in Various Fields’, using German-occupied Poland as his case study. We can find examples of each of Lemkin’s techniques carried out by Israel on Palestinians and other minorities, before and after October 7th 2023. Lemkin’s definitions of techniques of genocide fall into the following categories:
Political: The occupier’s pattern of administration is imposed. ‘Every reminder of former national character [is] obliterated’. Lemkin lists ‘signs and inscriptions on buildings, roads, and streets, as well as names of communities and of localities’. German names could be imposed on people. A register of Germans (Volksliste) was established and special cards entitled them to certain privileges. Non-Germans married to Germans could also apply for inclusion on the Volksliste. ‘Special Commissioners for the Strengthening of Germanism’ are created, their task to promote German propaganda. Nazi party organizations were established granting political privileges to their members, and other political parties dissolved. Polish populations were displaced and Polish properties were allocated to German settlers, who received incentives such as tax exemptions to encourage settlement.
A total of around 7000 Palestinian place names have been Hebraized over the past 125 years.
Israel's control over the Palestinian population is based on a system of colour-coded IDs in the occupied territories that establish different rights, and restrictions; for instance, citizens in Gaza cannot travel outside the city.
Israel’s Nation State Law defines Israel as the ‘nation-state’ of the Jewish people, claims the right to self-determination is exclusive to Jewish Israelis, and downgraded Arabic from an official state language to one with ‘special status’.
Social: the abolition of local law and local courts and the imposition of the occupation’s law and courts, and also by implementing the occupation’s judicial language. The occupation ‘endeavors to bring about such changes as may weaken the national spiritual resources’. Intellectuals, writers, artists, and academics are often targeted by the occupation.
Israel has inflicted its laws on Palestinian people to carry out human rights abuses.
The Israeli occupation has ‘targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in Gaza in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice, killing 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students.
Cultural: the cultural technique of genocide includes the mandating of national language, the control of art such as painting, music, and literature, the destruction of educational facilities, cultural heritage sites and the looting of cultural artifacts.
As above, Israel downgraded Arabic from an official state language to one with ‘special status’.
The Palestinian Flag was banned in Palestine from 1967 to 1993, and flags may still be removed if they are considered ‘a threat to public order’.
‘Nearly 80% of Gaza’s built environment and farmlands have been decimated. Civilian infrastructure, including residential and public buildings, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and churches have been intentionally targeted. Additionally, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture has reported that 207 archaeological sites and buildings of cultural and historical significance, out of a total of 320, have been reduced to rubble or severely damaged. These include old mosques, churches, cemeteries, museums, libraries, and archives.’
Economic: economic destruction is straightforward. Lemkin notes that ‘the destruction of the foundations of the economic existence of a national group necessarily brings about a crippling of its development, even a retrogression. The lowering of the standard of living creates difficutlies in fulfilling cultural-spiritual requirements’.
The United Nations has found that ‘“Israel’s system of policies and practices has systematically stripped the Palestinian economy of vital elements for its healthy operation, whose productive base continues to shrink, thereby exacerbating dire living conditions’.
Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinian olive trees, vital to Palestinian agriculture, have been illegally uprooted by the occupation.
Biological: A policy of depopulation is pursued, with the intent of decreasing the birthrate of the occupied peoples.
In 2022 Israel passed a law denying naturalisation to Palestinians from the occupied West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens, forcing thousands of Palestinian families to either emigrate or live apart.
Targeting another minority, Israeli doctors administered contraceptive injections to Ethiopian Jewish women without their knowledge or consent.
‘This report sheds light on the Israeli measures intended to prevent births amid lack of protection from military attacks, poor health services and unsafe access to healthcare, restricted access to adequate food and dire living conditions elevating risks during pregnancy’.
Physical: Lemkin defines the characteristics of physical destruction of a group as Racial Discrimination in Food Rationing, Endangering of Health, and Mass Killing.
Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid in Gaza has caused a famine.
Israel’s attacks on medical staff and hospitals are endangering the health of the entire population. During COVID-19, Israel denied vaccines to Palestinians.
43, 640 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7th, 2023, including 15,971 children, 10,382 women, 39,675 civilians and 3,140 detained or kidnapped.
Religious: the occupier tries to disrupt the national and religious influences of the occupied people, as well as the destruction of church property and persecution of the clergy.
Israel has attacked worshipers during Ramadan on many occasions. Israeli police often allow hundreds of Israeli Jews access to Al-Aqsa Mosque which violates the agreement that Israel, Jordan, Palestine and the United States affirmed in 2015.
This page has documented some of the attacks on Christian churches, church property, and desecration of graves in the last five years.
Haredi Jews were captured on video spitting on Christian worshippers last year. Murder suspect Elisha Yered, an ultranationalist settler leader and former adviser to a lawmaker in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, defended them, arguing that spitting at Christian clergy and at churches was an “ancient Jewish custom”. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials publicly condemned the attack but a border police officer took no action in response to the spitting.
The medieval Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius was deliberately targeted as it was sheltering 450 Christians. 18 were killed in the attack and 12 injured.
These acts of intimidation and destruction are designed to, as Lemkin describes, disrupt the religious influences of the occupied people.
It is obvious that ‘mass killing’ was not Lemkin’s only priority when it came to safeguards for religious and ethnic groups. The prevention of genocide is best understood through Lemkin’s conception of it, and it begins with occupation. To quote the first page of his essay on genocide
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.
Lemkin says that
The confiscation of property of nationals of an occupied area on the ground that they have left the country may be considered simply as a deprivation of their individual property rights. However, if the confiscations are ordered against individuals solely because they are Poles, Jews, or Czechs, then the same confiscations tend in effect to weaken the national entities of which those persons are members. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social-institutions, of culture, language, national feelings: religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
The seizure of the property of Palestinians who had fled persecution during the Nakba was the first step in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Plan Dalet called for the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of their population outside the borders of the state. Since the Nakba, at least 130,000 homes and other structures such as farm buildings, reservoirs, mosques, community buildings and schools have been destroyed, before October of last year. Israel has carried out Lemkin’s description of genocide since 1948. Lemkin describes genocide as the ‘destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.’ The killing is the last step. The final phase of the Palestinian genocide is being carried out before our eyes.
Today, the 19th of May, commemorates the Pontian Genocide at the hands of the Ottomans. My great-grandfather escaped the final phase of the Greek & Armenian genocide in 1922, in Smyrna, when the Greek and Armenian Christian population were raped and massacred and the city razed to the ground. He was fourteen years-old, he had to swim for his life, and he never saw a single member of his family again. Turkey still denies that the genocide took place, despite the nationalist songs and annual public ceremonies that celebrate it as a ‘liberation from their enemies’. Erdoğan routinely threatens to ‘throw Greeks into the sea’ while maintaining that there was no genocide. We know that the Turkish government has been getting away with genocide denial for over a century, despite the documented massacres of between 1.2 - 2.5 million Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians. Just because these ethnic groups were not entirely wiped out, it does not mean that a genocide was not waged upon them. As Lemkin defines, genocide begins with the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group, and then the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. The Greeks were under Ottoman occupation for four hundred years. Israel has implemented the final stage of the genocide of the Palestinian people in less than a century.