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Genocide: the underside of a powerful and complex word
On social networks as on the rest of the Web, in Canada and elsewhere in the world, several dignitaries, researchers, organizations and members of civil society describe the Israeli attacks launched since October 8 as a prelude to a “genocide.” This is not without causing heated debates in the public space and among the political class. However, specialists are calling for Western media not to use this term immediately. Despite everything, the ongoing massacres in Gaza are daily described as “genocide.” The term seems to persist in people's minds. How can we explain this paradox? And is a genocide taking place right now in front of our eyes?
On the other hand, when can this legal concept be used and what are its limits? La Converse extended the microphone to experts in order to untangle the threads of this issue with its complex ramifications.
Who is talking about genocide and why?
In Gaza, several local journalists document the fate of their people on a daily basis since the Hamas attacks in Israel. Between power interruptions and the impossibility of regular access to the Internet, their reports make the rest of the world discover the hell in which this small strip of land has been plunged since October 8. Continued bombardments, lack of water and food, limited or even non-existent health and emergency care, forced displacements, decimated families... fear and insecurity lurk.
On November 21, 5 Palestinian journalists relayed a message signed by their colleague Yara Eid on the Instagram network. Supporting videos, the latter shouts a heartfelt cry: “Gaza is still being annihilated. [...] We need you to ask for a permanent ceasefire. We still need you to call for an end to this genocide.”
At the same time, on the Israeli side, several elected officials are publicly making dehumanizing remarks about Palestinians and welcoming the fate that awaits them. “We are fighting human animals,” for example, declared the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, on 9 October. Ghassan Alian, a top general of Netanyahu, repeated the same expression a few days later and added a promise of “destruction” and “hell.”
On October 28, the media Mekomit revealed the content of a document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence recommending the forced transfer of the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza to Mount Sinai, in Egypt, raising fears of ethnic cleansing among several observers.
For journalists in Gaza and many human rights defenders, these words and revelations leave no doubt that the ongoing attacks amount to genocide.
On the side of the demonstrators who have been meeting every week since the start of the Israeli assault, the words of Yara Eid are repeated and chanted loud and clear. In Montreal, the signs and chants repeat the same thing: “A ceasefire now! Put an end to the genocide immediately! ”
Among the Montreal crowd, we meet Rama El-Malah, who is of Palestinian origin. She is one of the organizers of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). The student has been living intensely with the attacks that have targeted her own for more than a month. “It was very difficult, that's for sure. I think everyone in the community can attest to that. Everyone copes with it in their own way. Some people are grieving, especially those with family in Gaza... It's a completely normal reaction. Others continued to organize.”
She is worried about the fate of Palestinians in all of the occupied territories, while there is also an increase in attacks against civilians in the West Bank. “All eyes are on Gaza, but that goes without saying because of the genocide that is currently taking place there.”
In the four corners of the world, other voices are being raised to talk about an imminent or ongoing genocide on Gazan territory. Among them, more than 800 researchers and practitioners in international law and in the studies of conflicts and genocides, who sign a collective statement on 15 October to sound the alarm, raising fears that a genocide is under way in Gaza.
Following them, the United Nations referred to “a risk of genocide in Gaza” on November 2. UN experts express concerns about serious violations committed against Palestinians. These are “an increase in the incitement to genocide”, according to this group of experts.
In Paris, two months after the attacks on Gaza began, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) adopted a resolution that recognized “the ongoing genocide” of the Palestinian people and urged the international community to do everything possible to stop it.
Several weeks ago, human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber left his post as director of the New York office of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights with a bang to express his dismay at the UN's inaction. According to him, the situation in Gaza is improving “of a typical case of genocide”.
In his letter, Mr. Mokhiber — who has also worked on the genocides suffered by Tutsis, Yazidis, Bosnian Muslims and Rohingyas — refers to “the current massacre of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial ideology, in the continuity of decades of systematic persecution and purification, based entirely on their status as Arabs, and associated with explicit declarations of intent on the part of Israeli government and army leaders, leaves no room for doubt or debate.”
The lawyer calls on the major Western powers, who “facilitate the genocide” by supporting Israel economically and militarily, and by refusing to ensure compliance with the Geneva Conventions. He also blames the corporate media in these countries for being complicit in the continuous dehumanization of the Palestinian people, and for disseminating “propaganda for war and the call for national, racial or religious hatred.”
This public outing to raise the alarm against what many consider to be a genocide in Gaza joins that of several Jewish voices, of which Gabor Maté, a Canadian whose parents are Holocaust survivors. The author and doctor admits to having “never seen such atrocities, committed in plain sight on TV, and where the victims are presented as the aggressor”.
What is genocide?
The word genocide comes first and foremost from a legal framework, that of international law. The term is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, written in 1946. It corresponds to “the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”, by means of one or other of these five acts:
a) Murder of members of the group
b) Serious harm to the physical or mental integrity of members of the group
c) Intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence that should result in its total or partial physical destruction
d) Measures to prevent births within the group
e) Forced transfer of children from the group to another group
For an event of mass violence to be officially recognized as such, a court of justice must issue a verdict ruling that there has been genocide. The only bodies empowered to try this type of crime are the International Criminal Court (ICC), some national courts in ICC member countries or even the international courts set up following resolutions voted by the UN. In most cases, justice is served several years after the events: in the case of former Yugoslavia, it was in 2004 — nine years after the massacres — that the decision was made.
For jurists called upon to rule on a possible genocide, the main difficulty is to establish the reason for intent. It is this special intention that distinguishes the crime of genocide from other international crimes.
With regard to the current situation in the Israeli-Palestinian zone, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, recently visited Israel and Ramallah. On December 3, he said that his office was documenting Israeli and Hamas attacks to investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, despite the fact that Israel is not a member of the ICC, unlike the Palestinian Authority. For the time being, the ICC has not indicated that it wants to take steps to investigate allegations of genocide in Palestine.
Proving intentionality
According to Professor A. Dirk Moses, a historian specializing in genocide studies and editor of the journal Journal of Genocide, the very definition of the term “genocide” is restrictive, making it difficult to use it in international courts.
Indeed, in the eyes of international law, and as stated above, genocide occurs when one or other of the acts in question is “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, As such ”. For the professor, the mention “as such” restricts the field of application and interpretation of mass violent events.
“To say that we are facing a genocide, you have to prove that one of the targeted acts was committed against members of a group only because they are members of a group.” States will therefore be able to claim that they attacked members of that group not because they are members of the group, but because they were suspected of participating in an insurgency.
According to him, it is therefore very easy for states to deny the genocidal nature of their attacks: “They say that their behavior is motivated by a military or security logic of victory, rather than by a destructive logic of genocide.”
The restrictive nature of the term would exist purposely, in order to protect the sovereignty of States in the face of the Convention, specifies the researcher. According to him, the first signatory states deliberately introduced a loophole in the definition of genocide in order to be able to use violence and defend their interests with impunity.
“States... want to be in a position to fight the kind of wars that the Israelis are waging today, or that the Americans fought in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, or the Russians in Chechnya in the 1990s. [...] In other words, violent attacks on the civilian population in the context of a civil war.”
A political lever
In this context, what weight do the voices that denounce an ongoing genocide and point the finger at the Jewish State and its allies, such as that of the President of Colombia Gustavo Petro or, closer to home, that of the Ontario deputy have Sarah Jama ? Is their fear well-founded?
In the opinion of the historian, Western powers are reluctant to side with sympathizers of the Palestinian cause who denounce genocide. After all, he recalls, the legal concept of genocide was modelled after the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, and the memory of that event remains strong. The symbolic weight of the past therefore weighs heavily in the balance. “In a way, Jews are the ultimate victims of the genocide. So they cannot be the perpetrators of an event similar to the Holocaust.”
Despite this particular situation, Mr. Moses notes that this difficulty in obtaining recognition is most often the fate of peoples in the global South. Conversely, media attention and popular support in the West quickly focused on the war in Ukraine. Two months after the outbreak of hostilities, in February 2021, The President of the United States, Joe Biden, used the term to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau subsequently expressed concern that the escalation of violence “looked more and more like a genocide.”
Recall that the ICC issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, last March for war crimes, just two weeks after the ICC's chief prosecutor's office announced that it was opening a file to investigate allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
All of this illustrates the colonial and racial aspect of the concept, the professor believes. He cites as an example the War in Biafra (1967-1970), which caused more than 3 million deaths. At the time, a solidarity movement called for an “end to the genocide.” But the systematic rape of women, the deaths by the thousands or the deliberate use of a siege to deprive the civilian populations of Biafra of water or food were not elements used to qualify these atrocities as genocide, neither at the time of the events nor to date.
Genocide thus appears to be “the international crime par excellence”. But the bar is high for horror to be described that way.
“For colonized peoples, it is difficult to claim that they are victims of destruction. This is obviously a powerful concept for victim groups because it is considered the crime of crimes under international law, and if you can successfully argue, if you can convince people that you are the victim of a genocidal campaign, then you get recognition and, perhaps, intervention.”
Faced with this political maze, Mr. Moses questions the hierarchy of the various international crimes: it is “grotesque” that these categorisations ensure that innumerable tragedies occur without much attention being paid to them. Regardless of which group it is directed at, “mass violence should cause a stir strong enough to be at the heart of the concerns of international actors and to be stopped by a rapid and appropriate response.”
Settler colonialism and the genocidal process
In the wake of the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7 October last year, the majority of Western mainstream media focused exclusively on condemning Hamas. However, several have criticized lack of historical context to understand root causes of this traumatic event for Israel, which was also the trigger for a series of massacres in Gazan territory.
According to Michaël Séguin, an assistant professor at Saint Paul University and a sociologist of ethnic relationships by training, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of a process of settler colonialism. However, these decades of repeated attacks in the Gaza Strip against the background of occupation by the Jewish State present all the characteristics of a genocidal process. The Israeli assault would be just the tip of an iceberg submerged in time.
At the end of the 19E century and at the beginning of the 20E, the architects of political Zionism made alliances with major Western powers, in particular Great Britain (1917). Thus, despite the Holocaust and the tragic repression of Jews in Europe, “the State of Israel is a construction sponsored by Westerners, which is based on the gradual appropriation of Palestinian land”, recalls the professor.
Before the arrival of European Jewish colonists, relative harmony existed under the Ottoman Empire between Christian and Muslim communities who lived in Palestine alongside Jews. Under The British Mandate (1920-1948), the process of land grabbing intensified and culminated in 1947 with the inequitable division of historic Palestinian territory.
The year 1948 marked the creation of the State of Israel and a turning point in relations between the two peoples. “In the ensuing war — which the Israelis refer to as the war of independence, and the Palestinians as Al-nakba (the disaster) —, 750,000 Palestinians become refugees and 500 of their villages are destroyed by the new state. Today, three-quarters of the residents of Gaza are themselves refugees and descendants of refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign,” said Mr. Séguin.
In the wake of the Nakba, Israel held 78% of Palestinian territory. It only leaves under Arab control the enclaves of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. In 1967, Israel continued to expand in these territories.
In 2002, the young state began building a wall between itself and the West Bank, described as an “apartheid wall” by Palestinian activists. Several Israeli settlements are being established along the wall, at the expense of Palestinian farmers who are being dispossessed of their agricultural land. Starting in 2007, in reaction to the election of Hamas, Israel began the siege of the Gaza Strip: controlling the whereabouts of Palestinian civilians as well as monitoring the airways and access to the sea.
According to a 2022 Amnesty International report, this situation is similar to a apartheid regime. “In this context, it is inevitable that there will be resistance that will emerge and that, for the most part, is relatively peaceful, as we saw during the peaceful Fridays of the March of Return. But sometimes, this resistance periodically takes on armed forms, with all its share of tragedies for those who are victims,” says Mr. Séguin.
But what about the accusations of genocide in Gaza against Israel? “Settler colonialism is based on a process of erasing the presence of indigenous peoples in order to implant a colonizing people in their place (...). It is based on a genocidal process., I am not inventing that, it's documented*. We are in the long term in Israel-Palestine: we are facing a process of replacing populations that leads to ethnic cleansing and, ultimately, to genocide,” Mr. Séguin continues.
This does not necessarily indicate that we are facing a government that has long planned the immediate disappearance of the 2.2 million Gazans who live on a territory as big as the Island of Montreal, nuances the researcher, however.
Reactions from the international community
On the international scene, it would be surprising if countries like Australia, the United States, or Canada — all of which have a colonial history and are regularly accused of being genocidal powers against indigenous populations living within their borders — choose to adopt a position that goes against Israel's interests.
Solidarity between Israel and Canada is not new, and the country has been multiplying economic partnerships and brands of alliance with Israel since the beginning of Justin Trudeau's era, recalls Mr. Séguin. “Canada does not have a veto at the UN, but for at least a good twenty years and every time there is a motion condemning the occupation and colonization of Israel, Canada opposes systematically and even more so than the United States has anything that could be an explicit condemnation of Israel.”
However, in a joint statement with the leaders of New Zealand and Australia dated 11 December, the Canadian Prime Minister did an about-face by declaring that he was lining up behind members of the international community and calling for a permanent ceasefire. Canada had previously called for humanitarian breaks.
The eyes of a genocide survivor
The echoes we hear from Gaza resonate in a particular way for survivors of mass violence, war crimes and genocides.
This is the case of Pierre*, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has lived in Canada for several years. Affable face, calm voice and a philosophical tone by necessity, the speaker has shared his story more than once to honor his promise to cultivate the duty of memory.
Obtaining the recognition of a genocide is becoming David and fighting against Goliath, explains Pierre. Having closely followed the developments leading to the trial of accomplices and perpetrators of the atrocities committed in 1994 in Rwanda, he recalls how these judicial episodes were a series of roller coasters interspersed with frustrations.
“Whether we are talking about genocide or war crimes, (...) the law is political. It's a minefield. Powers like the United States or the United Kingdom will not point the finger at another state if it does not serve their interests. If that's the case, they'll put resources into it and use their influence to make it happen.”
He also discusses the difficulty of putting together a case to prove genocide in a court of justice. “In the case of Rwanda, the facts were crystal clear, but they were met with a hard line, and we still had to go through the whole process. There is very little consensus on this.”
With regard to the current situation in the Israeli-Palestinian zone, he wanted to make one thing clear: “As a genocide survivor, of course, I have a lot of compassion for the Jewish people and what they have endured as a people. Anti-Semitism has existed for centuries, and it is still present in our societies. But the line between being a victim and being an aggressor is thin, and changes in the story are possible.”
Even though he considers it futile to mobilize the word “genocide” because of its strong political load, Pierre believes in the need to sound the alarm to prevent the loss of life. “I think that people are right to demand a ceasefire. I condemn Israel's actions in the strongest terms. What is happening before our eyes is a disproportionate response to the anger of a nation that was humiliated in the first place.”
“I hope that peace will prevail and that the guns will be silent,” he concludes.
The massacre of the last two months is unprecedented in the history of the conflict. At the time of publishing these lines, according to information reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there are nearly 1.9 million displaced people and nearly 18,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, which exceeds the Nakba figures. For its part, the number of civilian victims on the Israeli side was revised downwards to 1,200 deaths. Approximately 135 hostages remain captive following the Hamas attack on 7 October.
To go further:
In French: Uighur genocide: the emergence of a scientific consensusCoercive population modification
In English: Knowing and Not Knowing: Canada, Indigenous Rights, Israel and Palestine — Michael Keefer
* In French: https://www.uyghur-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Article-genocide-en-Region-ouighoure-vf.pdf