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 mos