The Question of Genocide

It really is not simple, nor should it be

The Bochnia Massacre during German occupation of Poland. December 18, 1939.

Early on in 2024, a story from the Israel-Hamas War emerged that did not just tug on the heart-strings; it ripped them free and threw them to the ground. On January 29th, a family, including five children, was fleeing part of northern Gaza by car. According to a Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) report, the car was struck by an IDF tank, killing everyone inside except a five-year-old girl named Hind Rajab and her fifteen-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh. According to an investigation by Goldsmiths, University of London research group Forensic Architecture, the tank had fired 335 rounds into the black Kia that carried Rajab and her family. CNN, which lead the reporting on this incident, described what happened after the initial strike as follows:

Hind’s cousin, 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh, made a desperate call for help to emergency services that was recorded by the PRCS and shared on social media. Audio of gunshots heard during the call revealed that Hamadeh was killed while making the call.

“They are shooting at us. The tank is right next to me. We’re in the car, the tank is right next to us,” Layan screams, amid intense gunfire in the background.

Layan then goes quiet, and the rounds of fire stop.

The paramedic on the phone tries to speak to her, repeatedly saying, “Hello? Hello?” but there is no response.

Alone, terrified and trapped in the car with the bodies of her relatives around her, Hind made a desperate call for help.

“Come take me. Will you come and take me? I’m so scared, please come!” Hind can be heard saying in a recording of the call to responders, released by the PRCS.

Rajab and her family were not discovered until two weeks later, all dead, along with two of the paramedics dispatched to rescue them nearby in their destroyed ambulance. According to the PRCS, “The occupation deliberately targeted the Red Crescent crew despite obtaining prior coordination to allow the ambulance to reach the location to rescue the girl Hind.” According to the IDF, they initially were “unfamiliar with the incident described.” In the weeks and months that followed, the story of Hind and her family’s death reverberated through activist circles and among those invested in the outcome of the ongoing war, with everyone from Hamas’ Foreign Ministry to the rapper Macklemore weighing in on Israel’s alleged crime.

Hind’s death likely served as a major catalyst for the growing agitation on many of the United States’ college campuses in the spring of 2024, though there were certainly many other factors at work during those fevered months. Some reactions were blunt, with the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor calling Hind’s death “a planned execution carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza City in broad daylight.” Some were more diplomatic, with the Washington Post writing that, after a thorough review of the evidence by six munitions experts, it was clear that while none “could say definitively what munition caused the damage or killed the paramedics based on the ambulance alone,” it was also clear that “the damage to the ambulance [sent to rescue the family] was consistent with the potential use of a round fired from Israeli tanks that match the vehicles captured in satellite imagery in the area that day.”

But amid all of this analysis and opining, there was a word that kept being repeated: genocide. This was evidence, one piece among many, that Israel was committing a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. It was not just student activists or ideologically-possessed opinion writers saying this either; UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese said much the same thing just a month after Hind’s body was discovered. It continues to be said many months later, and will likely be said for many months, if not years, to come.

But was it truly—is it truly—genocide?

This question has been asked many, many times before, especially in the decades following the Second World War and the revelations of the Holocaust. Perhaps the best known case, at least in modern history, is the Srebrenica Massacre—sometimes called the Srebrenica Genocide—that occurred during the chaotic post-Yugoslav years of the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It has taken on a level of symbolic horror for countless Bosnian Muslims, and for good reason. Occurring during the final year of the Bosnian War (which was part of the long-running disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the years that followed Josip Broz Tito’s death in 1980), forces from the Army of Republika Srpska (the army of the Serbs of Bosnia) under Radko Mladić captured the town of Srebrenica on July 11th, 1995, after overwhelming the Dutch soldiers of the UN Protection Force stationed there. Despite the town of Srebrenica being declared a humanitarian “safe area” for civilians, the days that followed were an orgy of death and destruction.

The exhumed bodies of the victims of the Srebrenica Massacre.

From July 13th-22nd, groups of men and boys were taken to various sites near Srebrenica and executed by gunshot in batches of a few hundred at a time. Sometimes this was out in picturesque meadows, sometimes it was near rivers, and sometimes it was over pre-dug graves, often times dug by the victims themselves. Not all were killed, with some survivors managing to create a picture of the horror that befell the Bosnian Muslims of the area. One survivor of the men and boys killed at Branjevo between July 14th and 16th would recall the following:

When they opened fire, I threw myself on the ground…. And one man fell on my head. I think that he was killed on the spot. And I could feel the hot blood pouring over me… I could hear one man crying for help. He was begging them to kill him. And they simply said “Let him suffer. We’ll kill him later.”

On the first day of the killing, another survivor would describe his attempt to escape after several farm sheds in Kravica were used as killing centers:

I was not even able to touch the floor, the concrete floor of the warehouse... After the shooting, I felt a strange kind of heat, warmth, which was coming from the blood that covered the concrete floor and I was stepping on the dead people who were lying around. But there were even men (just men) who were still alive, who were only wounded and as soon as I would step on him, I would hear him cry, moan, because I was trying to move as fast as I could. I could tell that people had been completely disembodied and I could feel bones of the people that had been hit by those bursts of bullets or shells, I could feel their ribs crushing. Then I would get up again and continue.

The cruelty exacted upon the people of Srebrenica had no discrimination for age either. Often times, mirroring the savagery visited upon the Serbs by the Croatian Ustashe during the Second World War, public torture and murder for the amusement of the occupying soldiers was carried out against children. Survivor Zumra Šehomerovic later testified that at one point, the soldiers attempted to force a boy to rape his nine-year-old sister and was killed when he refused. In the same writ of summons, Kada Hotić testified that she saw a baby get its throat cut because its mother could not silence its cries. And Ramiza Gurdić testified that a Serb in a Dutch uniform (presumably taken from the overwhelmed UN forces) killed a ten-year-old boy sitting next to his mother, cut his head off, and “placed the head of the young boy on his knife and showed it to everyone.”

Many of the victims’ bodies were not exhumed until 1996, and even later.

With the exception of horrifying events like these, the men and boys had been separated from the women and girls, but the latter did not escape the torment of their captors. By the thousands, women and girls were frequently and repeatedly raped by the Serb soldiers. A Dutch medical orderly would testify during the Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic judgment the following:

[W]e saw two Serb soldiers, one of them was standing guard and the other one was lying on the girl, with his pants off. And we saw a girl lying on the ground, on some kind of mattress. There was blood on the mattress, even she was covered with blood. She had bruises on her legs. There was even blood coming down her legs. She was in total shock. She went totally crazy.

Other survivors testified that many rapes like this occurred and many women often killed themselves by hanging afterward, often times to avoid the shame of being impregnated by their rapist. This was not unreasonable for them to fear. The systematic nature of the rapes was made even clearer by the fact that they often occurred in specially-designated zones, including gymnasiums, camps, and most disturbingly, the infamous Vilina Vlas spa, that came to be known as Bosnia’s “rape hotel.” This hotel was the headquarters of the White Eagles, headed by the now-imprisoned-for-life Milan Lukić. Lukić himself was accused of multiple rapes, including of a woman who accused him of doing so before killing her 16-year-old son with a knife. Ultimately, the Srebrenica Massacre—which is indeed also known as the Srebrenica Genocide—claimed the lives of up to 8,372 people, with 6,838 being identified through DNA analysis as of 2012. However, this figure does not include the estimated 20-50,000 women who were systematically raped during the three-year war. And much of that rape, it has been suggested, was done in service of what could reasonably be called “genocide.”

The use of rape as an ethnic cleansing strategy—or even genocide—is shocking and disturbing, especially to modern readers, so it requires a deeper examination because it provides insight into the most contentious aspect of genocide accusations: that of intent to destroy a population at its very root. While it is extremely difficult to apply this standard to every conflict in history that has involved sexual assault, it is much easier when looking at the Bosnian War thanks to the explicitly genocidal nature of the mass rapes that occurred. Between 1992 and 1995, it had been known that Bosnian Serb troops were using rape as an explicit weapon of ethnic cleansing. According to the Remembering Srebrenica charity in England, “The rapes were carried out in fulfillment of official orders as part of the Bosnian Serb strategy of ethnic cleansing of the region. Several victims recalled how Serb soldiers remarked that, ‘It is better to give birth to Chetniks than to Muslim filth.’”

Rape victims like this 18-year-old girl often had to go through abortions to rid themselves of their forced progeny by Serb soldiers.

However, while rape was certainly involved, from a legal and even philosophical perspective, calling it genocidal in and of itself is not quite accurate. In fact, the genocidal nature of the crime is, like all genocide, in the intent behind the rapes that occurred. That is, the goal of forced impregnation. As legal scholar Siobhan K. Fisher wrote in a paper about this phenomenon:

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia also raises a question beyond the criminal treatment of rape during war. For perhaps the first time in modem history, an aggressor in a military conflict may have used rape not only as a tool of war, but also to implement a policy of impregnation in order to further the destruction of one people and the proliferation of another-a policy of genocide by forced impregnation. […] [F]orced impregnation, as an intentional policy of an aggressor to destroy a group of people, is distinct from the crime of rape and is, at its core, a crime of genocide.' Genocide, as defined in the Genocide Convention of 1948, involves the destruction of a group of people.' It may seem counterintuitive that impregnation, the creation of new life, can in fact be an instrument of genocide. But forced impregnation-interference with autonomous reproduction-can destroy a group. This interference in the group's reproduction may take a number of forms. First, women may be psychologically traumatized by the pregnancy and unable to have normal sexual or childbearing experiences with members of their own group. Second, women who are raped and bear the children of the aggressors may no longer be marriageable in their society. Third, the women, simply because they are pregnant with the children of the aggressors, cannot bear their own children during this time-their wombs are “occupied.”

It is indeed counter-intuitive, and yet, that is what makes this interpretation so chilling. It is also illuminating because the aforementioned intent behind the rape—the desire to eliminate (or at the very least curtail) an entire population of people based on ethnic and religious characteristics—lines up with the most important part of the definition of genocide. The hard truth for so many to accept is that this most important part almost certainly applies to the story of Srebrenica, and, at least as of October 7th, 2024, almost certainly does not apply to the suffering experienced by young girls like Hind Rajab.

…

A home in the Be’eri kibbutz. Photo credit: Kobi Gideon.

It has been one year since Hamas unleashed its attack on Israel that left approximately 1,200 people killed, in an effort to instigate that country into its furious retaliation that has left their international reputation in tatters for many people. Central to that tattered reputation is the oft-repeated claim that Israel is engaging in a genocide. And to support this claim, many stories, like those of Hind Rajab, have been cited in order to tug on the heartstrings (and understandably so). Others point to the fact that the United Nations—no stranger to seemingly singling Israel out compared to other, more nefarious nations—investigated Israel for its alleged war crimes (and eventually came away with a conclusion that clearly pleased nobody) as evidence of genocide. And still others, probably most persuasively (but still insufficiently), will point to some of the comments made by members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Some of these included a Likud member of the Israeli parliament named Ariel Kallner saying that Israel needed to conduct a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of '48.” Similarly, another lawmaker named Revital “Tally” Gotli demanded that the IDF “do everything and use Doomsday weapons fearlessly against our enemies.” And perhaps most chillingly, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying, “If Hezbollah makes mistakes of this kind, the ones who will pay the price are, first of all, the citizens of Lebanon,” which honestly, at surface level, does resemble “Hitler’s Prophecy,” at least if one is assuming the worst about what was being said.

The argument over genocide in general is nothing new. The previously-discussed Srebrenica Genocide was downplayed by the likes of Noam Chomsky, who never ceases to amaze with his seeming willingness to pretend genocide does not exist unless it is perpetrated or allowed to occur by the United States. In a sense, it might be more honorable to show restraint in calling things genocide, but only if that standard is applied equally, which it almost certainly is not when it comes to Chomsky and his ilk, who tend to have a funny way of getting proven wrong many years after the fact. Of course, that could well happen in my case here—and I will be the first person to admit I was wrong if this comes to pass—but based on the information we do have about Israel’s conduct during the past year, as well as examples of actual, proven genocide in history and the legal precedent they set, the claim that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians does not really pass muster.

The most difficult part of defining genocide is trying to define it while it is happening, because intent matters so much in making such a determination. This is simply the unfortunate reality of such things, and it is understandable that no one concerned about genocide is going to feel happy about needing to wait for the killing, rape, and ethnic cleansing to be over in order to make the most accurate determination on whether or not the horrible events unfolding were, in fact, genocide. But that is the nature of the beast. Stating intent is relevant to the diagnosis of genocide, but it is also insufficient on its own.

The UN General Assembly meeting during which the definition of genocide was ratified.

Genocide is, in its most basic definitional sense (according to the United Nations General Assembly that created the definition in 1948 and ratified it in 1951), involved the following:

[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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

Many have little trouble recognizing the emotional truth of connecting many, if not all, the five different criteria to what Israel is doing to Gaza (or Lebanon), but that is fundamentally unhelpful and inaccurate to what is indeed happening, In the end, what Israel is doing, according to the evidence of what we have, does not fall under any of these criteria because of what is known as the mens rea, or provable mental state of the person committing the so-called genocide. Are there genocidal-sounding statements being made by members of the Netanyahu cabinet and his party’s government? Absolutely. Are they proof-positive of the response to the worst pogrom in Jewish history since the Holocaust constituting a genocide? Unfortunately (for those who believe in their heart of hearts that they are), the answer is, as of 2024, no.

What animates the people who sincerely believe that what Israel is doing in its efforts to destroy Hamas (and now Hezbollah) constitutes genocide is, when not colored by a deep-seated antisemitism, perfectly normal and even admirable in a way: it is despair at the destruction of innocent life. And when not educated on the history of genocide, it is understandable that this—namely, the deaths of civilians—is what genocide means. However, that would also require these same people to admit that what happened on 10/7 was a genocide as well (and hence why the sneakier among those who try to minimize the horror of 10/7 will bring up Israel’s conscription laws, forgetting about the many migrants who also found themselves getting butchered that day). Based on the standards of genocide, I am still inclined to say that the Hamas massacre on 10/7 was not a genocide. This is not because the intent to slaughter every Jew in Israel was not present—it almost certainly was, held back only by means and opportunity.

Many protesters simply hate death and killing. Photo credit: Hannah McKay, Reuters.

Conversely, Israel has both the means and opportunity to slaughter every single human being in Gaza, Lebanon, and possibly even Iran, and yet they do not. This is another major factor in determining whether or not Israel is engaging in genocide; I would wager that this fact alone is why the term does not apply. However, because Hamas did not have the means and opportunity to do what they did on 10/7 and their leadership almost certainly knew that (given that their strategy was almost certainly to provoke Israel into overreacting in order to boost their popularity and diminish Israel’s, as well as their jihadist rivals), I do not believe it is fair to call the events of October 7th, 2023 a genocide. A massacre? A crime against humanity? Absolutely. But not a genocide. And while I believe Israel does not get enough credit for their attempts at precision in destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, I can certainly accept the argument that their efforts to “mow the grass” in Gaza has produced an excess of civilian death and suffering. But again, that is not genocide. Perhaps it will emerge that there was a criminal element to what Israel has been doing, but unfortunately, it will not become truly clear until the conflict is essentially over.

The point being: genocide does not need to be the qualifier we use in order to demonstrate that something is a tragedy beyond the pale. The deeper point: genocide should not be a qualifier at all. It is simply a fact, and one that can be proven, and, more importantly, an accusation of a crime; the most unspeakable crime in which a group or nation can engage. That is why it is no better to throw around accusations of genocide than it is to accuse a person of being a pedophile, a rapist, or a murderer. In this context and with the evidence available, I cannot say whether or not Israel is actually guilty of genocide (though I am inclined to say it is not). And indeed, while I cannot say one way or another, neither can anyone else. Statements made by the more bigoted and imperialistic members of Israel’s government are not proof enough on their own, troubling as they might be in the context of so much violence. Those still unconvinced of this might try to point to the notion that Israel is targeting the people of Gaza in order to destroy them “in part,” thus meeting the criteria for genocide, but the problem is that there is still no evidence that Israel’s government intends to exterminate the Palestinians, even in part, as a people. The euphemistic term “collateral damage” understandably leaves a sour taste in anyone’s mouth who utters it, but there is really no other way to define the civilian deaths in Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas. The notion that war crimes have been committed is a far more defensible position, but that is not what most people critical of Israel, like John Mearsheimer, have been arguing for the past year. As always, it is genocide.

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The women of Tantura during the Nakba.

Many have pointed to the Holocaust-shaped elephant in the room when it comes to this debate. A common phrase I have heard is “why were the Palestinians punished for the crimes Germans committed?” as if 1948 was Year Zero for this conflict. As I, and many others, have hopefully made clear, that is a twisted reading of the Holy Land’s modern history. A less common, but far more useful retort (since it deals with the actual history), involves the Germans’ efforts to expel the Jews rather than massacre them, namely with their infamous Madagascar Plan, in which all Jews in the Reich’s path would be shipped off to Madagascar in exile. This plan is often lumped into the wider context of what would become the Holocaust—a step toward the Final Solution. Why, a hypothetical interlocutor may ask, does that get counted as genocidal and not what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 during the Nakba? That is a good and fair question.

What happened to the Palestinians in 1948 was indeed horrible and I would even agree with the idea that it was a form of ethnic cleansing. Many people died as a result of the mass expulsion too. However, it was never the goal to destroy the Palestinians; “just” to take their land. The goal of the Nazis, even with their Madagascar Plan, was indeed to destroy the Jewish presence in Europe by any means necessary. According to historian David Blackbourn, “It hardly needs to be said that implementation of the Madagascar plan would have meant high death rates by attrition, and it was intended to.” [Emphasis added]. Blackbourn also explains that the genocidal nature of the proposed Jewish displacement is even clearer with the proposed plans to “resettle” them in the Arctic Circle, a plan bearing a striking similarity to the “resettlement” of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915. Historian Dan Stone, in his recent book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History also concurs with this analysis, writing that, “One should not overlook the fact that, as with ghettoization policy, the plan to deport millions of Jews to an island with no infrastructure to accommodate them, was itself genocidal. Its failure constituted a psychological icebreaker for genocide in the east.”

One may wish to make the argument that a similar fate befell the Palestinians in 1948, but crucially will miss the fact that the Nakba was anything but the “psychological icebreaker” for further destruction. It was the event. And a horrible one for hundreds of thousands of people, victimized by historical forces (and having the worst possible leadership, as has been covered at length on History Impossible). And frankly, attempting to frame the Nakba (whose name is already problematic enough, given the linguistic linkages) as morally comparable to even parts of the Holocaust, feels like what it often is: cynical and contrarian piggybacking. This is made all the more distasteful when the facts do not even line up to support such a comparison, as I hope this essay has demonstrated.

In the end, one can believe all one wants about what has been going on in the Holy Land during the last 365 days. However, the fact remains that the truest tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they have almost always had the worst advocates. This includes the people who repeat traditional bromides about “Free Palestine,” and decolonization, and so on, but it is most apparent that the Palestinian people themselves have had the worst international advocates in modern history. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to that history because their first international advocates were literal Nazis. It does not really matter that the Nazis had ulterior motives, or that the Arab nationalists with whom they had allied themselves were not representatives of the Arab nationalist movement as a whole, or for that matter, the Palestinian people in general.

Ultimately, we are just as responsible for how our cause is remembered as those doing the remembering, if not moreso. This is not to say that people in 2024 are responsible for what figures like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, or Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, or any of the other Arab nationalists or Bosnian Muslims or other Islamists who allied themselves to the Third Reich said or did. Far from it. It is to say, however, that because of what these people did and said, and what mark they left on history—on the collective memory they themselves created with their actions and words—there will be effects that are conducive upon anyone who takes up their respective causes in the modern day to counteract. One cannot, in other words, blame anyone, much less a Jew or Israeli, for flinching or getting defensive when they hear “from the river to the sea” and make the same claims or even similar-sounding claims that were being made by actual Nazis and their allies while the Holocaust was burning its way through Europe. If one does not care how it sounds, fair enough, but one should not be surprised when the pushback against a sentiment that was often shared and even amplified across the world by the Third Reich is harsh, and even uncompromising.

Stories like those of Hind Rajab do not have to be classified in any particular way for them to be as heartbreaking as they self-evidently are. Stories like that of Srebrenica and of Vilina Vlas do have to be classified as such because it was instrumental in meting out justice to the perpetrators. If such malice and evil can be proved when the now-year-old war in the Holy Land has concluded, then the conversation can and should start to change. But until then, the cheapening of one of our most vital classifications continues to do no one any favors, much less the victims of war.