The night of March 9th-10th 1945 saw the deadliest single air raid in the entirety of World War Two, and, therefore, the deadliest in history. A total of 334 B-29 bombers took off on the raid; 279 made it to Tokyo, where they delivered a payload of 1,665 tons of bombs – most of which contained napalm or white phosphorus. The result was a conflagration which swept through Tokyo’s densely packed working class neighbourhoods, where the housing – as was traditional in Japan, for climatic reasons – was almost entirely made of wood. It is generally thought that around 100,000 people died in the resultant fire (more than were killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima).
That was a single night. A few days later, on March 13th, another 5,000 Japanese civilians were killed in a firestorm in Osaka. On March 16th, it was Kobe’s turn; 8,000 civilians died in that raid. And so on, and so forth, city after city, for the entire spring and summer. Kyoto alone escaped major damage (the Americans recognised its status as one of the great treasures of human civilisation); all of the rest of Japan’s cities of any significant size were essentially levelled. The consensus is that something like 350,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the strategic bombing campaign of 1945; the number made homeless is not known, but certainly reaches the millions. Many of these subsequently starved. (For anyone who enjoys being made to weep copiously, the 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies gives an exceptionally moving insight into what went on in Kobe during that time.)
The morality of the strategic bombing of Japan during WWII is a fraught topic. The Allies did what they felt they had to, and it is important to remember that by 1945 the Americans had been fighting for four bitter years against an implacable foe who they were well aware itself showed no compunction about the murder of civilians en masse. Still, there is no question that nowadays that kind of war simply could not be fought. The public in America would not allow it. More importantly, perhaps, neither would the law. Allied conduct in the arena of strategic bombing doesn’t even come close to being consonant with the contents of the Geneva Conventions (which anyway came into effect after the war itself). Reasonable people can disagree over whether the ends justified the means, but as far as the modern law is concerned, there would simply be no debate. Indiscriminate bombing of civilians is a war crime, QED.
But what the strategic bombing campaign against Japan most certainly was not, was a genocide. Genocide is a word that is often bandied about nowadays. But it has a strict legal definition, stemming from the fact that the Allies – as should really be clear to anybody – knew that there was something about the Holocaust that elevated it to a special category of immorality. The victors of WWII were exceptionally hard-nosed people, and they had witnessed (and perpetrated) mass-murder on a colossal scale. But there is something about the Holocaust that truly shocks the conscience in a way that ‘mere’ (the word seems silly) mass-murder does not. Indiscriminate slaughter of civilians is bad enough, of course. But deliberately killing people simply and only because of who they are is something else. The former requires a certain callous disregard for individual lives. But the latter requires a contempt, even a hatred, for human life itself, and truly therefore merits the label of evil.
The 1948 Genocide Convention therefore defines Genocide not as ‘mere’ mass-murder or indiscriminate killing, but as:
[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.
The operative words there are highlighted: genocide requires the intent to destroy an entire group as such. The Latin phrase that international lawyers use here is dolus specialis, literally meaning ‘special deceit’, but in this context meaning the intention to actually inflict the particular harm in question. Indiscriminate slaughter is not enough. The perpetrator must be clearly seeking to destroy the group as a group, in whole, or in a recognised and identifiable part.
There have been two instances in history in which courts have been able to put flesh on the bones of this definition: the aftermaths of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
It is difficult now to remember the heady days of the mid-late 1990s, but to cut a long story short, at that time there was an unprecedented (and, with hindsight, probably never-to-be-repeated) window of opportunity within which international law could develop. The Cold War was over, Russia and China were both for different reasons in a warm(ish) frame of mind towards the West, and the UN Security Council could as a result actually do things. Two such things were the establishment of special international courts to try accused war criminals in, respectively, Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia, the idea being that this was the only way that such suspected criminals could get a fair trial or indeed be tried at all. (It seeming likely that if one left it to national courts in, say, Serbia or Rwanda, then perpetrators would either be let off or face a biased prosecution.)
The first successful conviction for the crime of genocide in history was handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in the case of Prosecutor v Akayesu. Jean-Paul Akayesu had in 1994 been Mayor of the commune of Taba, and during the genocide he supervised the murder of hundreds of Tutsis there, as well as the systematic rape of Tutsi women in local government offices. (Reading the accounts of some of the crimes committed in Taba at his behest truly brings home how far into the depths of depravity human beings are capable of sinking.) The ICTR, in its judgment (at para. 521), gave the following elaboration on what the dolus specialis for genocide required:
In concrete terms, for any of the acts [mentioned in the Genocide Convention] to be a constitutive element of genocide, the act must have been committed against one or several individuals, because such individual or individuals were members of a specific group, and specifically because they belonged to this group [emphasis added]. Thus, the victim is chosen not because of his individual identity, but rather on account of his membership of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The victim of the act is therefore a member of a group, chosen as such, which, hence, means that the victim of the crime of genocide is the group itself [emphasis added] and not only the individual.
This is important, because it helps explain what is meant by the dolus specialis in this context. Clearly, there have been many episodes in history in which people have been massacred, and very often the victims of a massacre will all be members of one ‘group’ which could be thought to be a part of a bigger whole. (One thinks, to use a familiar example, of the My Lai massacre, whose victims were of course all Vietnamese.) But this is not sufficient to qualify as an act of genocide. Genocide requires that the acts in question were intended to realise an ‘ulterior motive’, which is the destruction of the entire group as such – the acts must have been part of a “general context of the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against that same group” (para. 523). Again, to resort to the use of an unsatisfactory word, ‘mere’ massacre is not genocide. Genocide is directed at “the very foundation of the group”, and acts of genocide are done knowingly as part of a broader pattern. (This is why the crime’s definition includes acts other than killing, but which if carried out systematically could have the result of destroying an entire ethnic, national or religious group. It may be worth mentioning here that the inclusion of “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” in the definition was designed to address the enslavement and imprisonment in concentration camps of populations during the War, which did not necessarily result in the deaths of all victims.)
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia cast further light on this in its decision (in its Appeal Chamber) in Prosecutor v Krstic. Radislav Krstic was a Major-General in the army of the Republika Srpska, the political entity of the Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian War, and Commander of the Drina Corps, whose soldiers systematically murdered around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men at Srebrenica in July 1995. Krstic’s defence, when he was tried for genocide, was partly that the crimes that had been committed at that time were not ‘big enough’, as it were, to qualify as having been genocidal. He was just one commander, and his men had killed a comparatively small number of people, all of whom had been male. He therefore couldn’t have been intending to destroy ‘the group’ as such, since the people killed had just been a small subset of the whole (i.e., Bosnian Muslims). Simply put, 8,000 men could not meet the threshold of being ‘whole or part’ of a group given that the group in question – Bosnian Muslims – was well over a million strong.
The ICTY found otherwise. But the Tribunal made clear that genocide could not mean simply killing some number of people who happened to be members of a particular group and therefore in that sense constituted ‘part’ of it. If that was the case any act of murder could be construed as genocidal. The ‘part’ in question meant a distinct part in a distinct area. Hence (at para. 8):
[T]he part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole.
It went on (at para. 12):
The determination of when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of the group is the necessary and important starting point [but] the number of individuals targeted should be evaluated not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to the overall size of the entire group. In addition [the targeted population’s] prominence within the group can be a useful consideration.
So, while 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica constituted a relatively small part of the total number of Bosnian Muslims, the symbolic and strategic importance of destroying the Muslim population of Srebrenica went to the very foundations of Bosnian Islam and it was this that elevated the intention of the act to that of genocide:
Although this population constituted only a small percentage of the overall Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time, the importance of the Muslim community of Srebrenica is not captured solely by its size… Srebrenica (and the surrounding Central Podrinje region) were of immense strategic importance to the Bosnian Serb leadership. Without Srebrenica, the ethnically Serb state of Republica Srpska they sought to create would remain divided into two disconnected parts, and its access to Serbia proper would be disrupted. The capture and ethnic purification of Srebrenica would therefore severely undermine the military efforts of the Bosnian Muslim state to ensure its viability… Control over the Srebrenica region was consequently essential to the goal of some Bosnian Serb leaders of forming a viable political entity in Bosnia, as well as to the continued survival of the Bosnian Muslim people. Because most of the Muslim inhabitants of the region had, by 1995, sought refuge within the Srebrenica enclave, the elimination of that enclave would have accomplished the goal of purifying the entire region of its Muslim population.
The point then was that, although the number of people killed was comparatively small, the intention of the perpetrators went beyond simply killing people. It went to the foundations of the group itself.
Another way of putting all of this is that words matter. Superficially, of course, they matter because, without a sense that words can be defined and have actual meanings, the entire edifice of law itself simply collapses; there could be no agreement on what the rules even meant. This in itself is obviously important. But more deeply, words matter because morality matters, and because behaviour matters, and without a connection between words and the underlying reality of morality and behaviour we lose the ability to make sense of that underlying reality itself. If we are not clear in our heads about what we mean when we say ‘genocide’, then discerning the difference between what the Allies did in Japan during WWII and a series of events like the Holocaust becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible; all we are able to do, in essence, is emote. Why was the firebombing of Japan so different to the destruction of European Jewry? When we know what genocide means, are familiar with its contours, and understand why it is different and why it is evil, the answer is clear. When we don’t, the waters get very muddy.
We can catch a glimpse of the potential dangers here by examining the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People’s ongoing efforts to normalise the description of what is currently happening in Gaza as a genocide (a project which is going on across much of the UN apparatus). On Tuesday December 12t 2023 the Committee indeed convened a panel on the subject of ‘The Responsibility to Prevent Genocide’ in Gaza (the event was recorded and is viewable here), framing the event with a slovenly – one is tempted to call it openly misleading – reference to “Jewish civil society groups” and “Holocaust and genocide scholars” who apparently support the view that a genocide is at risk of unfolding in Palestine.
It cannot be denied that what is happening in Gaza is terrible, and one’s heart of course goes out to the innocent people who are caught up in the conflict. But one must remember – and I reiterate – that words matter, and that they matter because they allow us to make sense of the underlying reality. The necessary corollary of this notion, of course, is that where words are treated as though they don’t matter, or where they are used in a deliberately obfuscatory or meretricious way, they can have the opposite effect, and sew only confusion. This is a big problem when morality is at stake, as it certainly is here.
Nobody should be in any doubt about what is going on when UN Committees use language in the way that they are doing. By speaking as though the killing of civilians (which undoubtedly, and of course regrettably, has happened in large numbers – as it always does in modern war) is in itself ‘genocidal’, then it is brought by necessity into the same moral category as the most terrible events of the 20th century – the Armenian, Rwandan and Cambodian genocides, and, of course, the Holocaust itself. And the people who use the term in that way do so quite deliberately, and for that very reason: it puts Israel into a position of special opprobrium, and thus in their minds helps to further the cause of Palestinian statehood.
But this leaves our ability to understand the morality of the matter critically weakened. There is a hugely important distinction to be drawn between the deaths of civilians happening as a byproduct of armed conflict (i.e., ‘collateral’ to it) and the deaths of civilians who are systematically murdered simply by dint of their being part of a group – for being the wrong type of person as such. The former of these is tragic, in the proper sense of the term, in that even with the best of intentions in wartime it cannot be prevented. The latter is, frankly put, evil. And this distinction means something. It means something in law, of course, as the definition of genocide (the real definition of genocide, applied by the ICTR and ICTY) shows; and it also means something morally. If we lose sense of it, we are in a dangerous place, because we thereby lose a clearheaded idea of what is at stake in war, and what the difference between good and evil actually looks like.
I do not mean to suggest by this that I think Israel’s actions in Gaza to be good. But I do mean to suggest that by thinking about the meaning of words clearly we can thereby better identify evil. And here, it is worth re-emphasising a point that I have made elsewhere about the events of October 7th, 2023.
It is this: whatever one thinks about what has happened in the months since, the attacks perpetrated by Hamas on that day ought to have shocked the conscience of more people more thoroughly than it has. What we were given a glimpse of that morning was the naked intentions of that organisation, expressed in the clearest terms: the massacre of Jews wherever they could be found, and carried out in the most sadistic manner possible. And we therefore saw what would happen, at vastly greater scale, if ever indeed Palestine were to become ‘free from the river to the sea’ (which means, for the avoidance of doubt, the destruction of Israel).
Did the actions carried out that day meet the definition of genocide as I earlier laid it out? I’m not sure, but what I am sure about is that the only thing that stands in the way of groups like Hamas and the perpetration of such attacks against the entire Jewish population of Israel is the State of Israel itself and its security apparatus. While the acts carried out that day do not perhaps quite meet the definition of genocide following the rationale of the judgment in Krstic, then, one can have no doubt that the intention at least – the dolus specialis – is alive and well in the hearts of Hamas’s leaders and members. The recognition of this ought to chill anybody who knows anything about the history of the Jewish people to the bone. And that it apparently doesn’t for a great many people suggests that the blurring of the lines between the IDF’s actions in Gaza and the events of the Holocaust through the careless usage of the word ‘genocide’ is indeed having its intended effect.
This should concern us very much. It should concern us vis-à-vis the situation in Israel and Palestine. But it should also concern us with regard to our society’s own ideas about what good and evil actually look like. A society which does not understand the moral distinction to be drawn between the IDF’s campaign in Gaza (or even the firebombing of Tokyo) and the Holocaust, and which uses the same word – ‘genocide’ – to describe those events, is a society which is simply not serious about morality at all. It is a society which does not understand the difference between tragedy and hatred, or the moral implications of either. This, it goes without saying, does not bode well; sooner or later we will I think see the consequences of this lack of seriousness play out, and when it does we will have cause to regret it.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack, where this article first appeared.
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If the sustained killing of civilians in Gaza is not to be worthy of the 1948 definition despite seeming to meet the criteria, why not refer to it as “excess deaths”? The media will stop reporting on it and it will disappear from discussion if recent history is anything to go by.
Does that solve the genocide word-game issue without casting the Israeli regime in a negative light?
It doesn’t meet the criteria. Killing lots, does not qualify. It is killing with intent to wipe out a group.
a, b and c seem to be covered “in part”. This being accompanied by the dehumanising language by those within the Israeli camp.
They should have better caveated the term “genocide” in 1948 to avoid misuse.
What precisely constitutes killing with the intent to wipe out a group vs just killing cannot be objectively determined as intent cannot really be determined at all, only inferred. Ultimatively, this means it’s a question of power — someone has the power to declare that such-and-such event should be called a genocide and some other event shouldn’t. Which renders the whole term pretty meaningless: just another accusation some winner group employs against some loser group.
In your own terms, the winner group would seem currently to be the supporters of the Palestinians, and the loser group the Israelis.But you completely miss the point of the article.
I was replying to a comment and not commenting on the article. Further, probably somewhat to your chagrin, I still don’t care about semites massacring other semites in the middle-east. They’re always doing that.
“Excess deaths” certainly is accurate. Then again, the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel would also fit that bill as well.
Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, states:
(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
So Israel are committing genocide in Gaza according to (c) and genocide in Israel according to (d). Double genocide.
The article asks whether the Palestinian attack on Israel was a genocide (it wasn’t) but doesn’t ask the more obvious question of whether the Israeli response was and is a genocide.
Here are a number of articles by lawyers, UN Human Rights experts and legal experts and even Israeli historians who acknowledge that Israeli action is a “genocide”.
“More than 800 scholars of international law and genocide have signed a public statement arguing that the Israeli military may be committing genocidal acts against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as the total siege and relentless airstrikes continue to inflict devastation on the occupied territory.”
https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/
“Lawyers say Israel’s acts against Palestinians in Gaza amount to genocide, call on West to refrain from abetting crimes.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/15/lawyers-for-gaza-victims-file-case-at-international-criminal-court
“Even Israeli experts call it “a textbook case of genocide.” Those are the exact words of Raz Siegal, an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.”
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
“Grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making, UN experts said today.”
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against
UN’s New York human rights director quits citing US, UK collusion in Gaza genocide, follow-up post condemns ‘decades of Israeli impunity’ for ‘war crimes’.
https://skwawkbox.org/2023/11/01/uns-new-york-human-rights-director-quits-citing-us-uk-collusion-in-gaza-genocide/
“There is no room to doubt that Israel’s bombing of Palestinian civilians and depriving them of food, water and other necessities of life are grounds to invoke the 1948 Genocide Convention.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/19/craig-murray-activating-the-genocide-convention/
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021.
“The Hamas ‘operational tunnel hub’ under al-Shifa hospital has served exactly the purpose Israel intended.
It’s a red herring. The media’s endless chasing after clues as to where the tunnel is located obscures the far more urgent (and real) story of Israel committing genocide.”
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-11-15/biden-signed-up-genocide-gaza/
“Genocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/
Your selected links from various academics, UN functionaries and journalists simply underlines the proposition eloquently well put by Dr David McGrogan which is ” A society which does not understand the moral distinction to be drawn between the IDF’s campaign in Gaza (or even the firebombing of Tokyo) and the Holocaust, and which uses the same word – ‘genocide’ – to describe those events, is a society which is simply not serious about morality at all. It is a society which does not understand the difference between tragedy and hatred, or the moral implications of either “. I am less clear about what is happening in S Israel from those in place than I am, say in Ukraine, but reporting of both seem to be massively distorted by emotion which alone blurs moral and legal distinctions.
My links from “various academics, UN functionaries and journalists” eloquently rebut McGrogan’s claims.
Well at least you get the distinction between “rebut” and “refute” right, so congratulations for that. But your links just illustrate David McGrogan’s points about the failure to understand what genocide really means.
A timely article by Craig Murray from yesterday explains exactly what “genocide” means and why countries are reticent to invoke it.
“There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide……. It may sound astonishing, but to the world’s diplomats the enormity of a genocide appears less troubling than the enormity of doing something about it.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/15/craig-murray-murder/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6e090b9a-d585-4dc3-b28e-f2a38e29936e
Even the highly respected John J. Mearsheimer has denounced Israel.
“What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose.”
John J. Mearsheimer.
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza
It is the writer of the article who has lost his moral compass – if he ever had one. Shameful, but sadly predictable at Sayanim Central.
Thank you.
I’ve added another two.
“There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide……. It may sound astonishing, but to the world’s diplomats the enormity of a genocide appears less troubling than the enormity of doing something about it.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/15/craig-murray-murder/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6e090b9a-d585-4dc3-b28e-f2a38e29936e
“What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose.”
John J. Mearsheimer.
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza
What the author seems to be saying is that ultimately it’s a question of intent. The Allies knew that firebombing Tokyo and even the dropping of the atom bombs would kill thousands of Japanese citizens. But their intent was to win the war and force the Imperial Japanese government to surrender, not to wipe out the Japanese race.
In the case of Israel can we really know the intent? Yes, on the face of it, the Palestinian civilians are collateral damage in this war on Hamas. But the pronouncements of the extremists in the Israeli government suggest the intent may go beyond simple military objectives.
But hadn’t the Japanese government been trying to surrender since late 44?
No. They wanted a ceasefire/armistice.
Lets stop fighting chaps, no hard feelings, Yanks go home and leave us to continue our militarisation and butchering the Chinese – and no war crime tribunals.
Wars don’t end by ceasefires. They either end because one party surrenders and the other can than dicate whatever peace terms it desires. Or they’re ended by both parties being willing to enter into peace negotiations. A ceasefire is a usual but not a necessary precondition for that (the 30 years war ended with the negotiated peace of Westfalen/ Münster, but even while negotiations were already ongoing, warfare would continue to some degree in order to improve the negotation position of this or that party).
It’s a fundamental principle of Common Law “men’s rea” Latin for “the guilty mind” – the culpable state of mind the prosecution must prove as an element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
In English Law in prosecuting someone for incitement to hatred and violence – so called ‘hate speech’ – the Crown had to prove intent. This is difficult, so legislation was introduced to make speech causing offence a crime, or using certain words or phrases – so the Crown didn’t need to prove intent to convict. Tony Blair was the criminal responsible because he wanted to shut down debate about immigration.
Is it safe to say that JK Rowling and other so-called ‘gender-critical’ women who want to protect female sports and single-sex spaces, and deny penis-owners in dresses entry, are not guilty of genocide after all then? And talking of the screaming, blue-haired masktards, it all starts in the college/uni campuses. All of that expensive education and the propagandized, ‘useful idiots’ are too thick to even know which river and sea they’re chanting about;
”In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.”
Forty-three percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.” That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous leftist rubbish about the massive, outrageous, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. In all likelihood, they haven’t even heard of either one.
Why is that likely? Because they know virtually nothing regarding the conflict about which they claim to care very deeply: “Eighty-four percent of those in the most passionate cohort could not name the decade when Israel captured the West Bank, while 75 percent could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map.” Moreover, a full twenty-five percent of these programmed and propagandized student “placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.” Nor did just a few of them drive the Palestinians into the sea that they chant about wanting to fill with Israelis: “The class average for this blunder was 14%.”
https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/12/14/heres-the-real-reason-why-so-many-american-university-students-hate-israel-n4924761
Having also read Dr Gary Sidney’s article, it is absolutely clear to me that the UN’s use of the term ‘genocide’ is designed to condition perceptions of Israel as a genocidal regime.
Yet the UN and others refused to call it genocide at the time when the Hutu majority systematically and with determination sought to wipe out the.minority Tutsis in Rwanda.
Had they done so they would have had to intervene.
“ Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”
Net Zero.
When do The Hague Trials start?
Never and the US has The Hague Invasion Act to ensure none of their people are included.
“genocide requires the intent to destroy an entire group as such”
But the definition says “in whole or in part”.
Wasn’t the bombing of Tokyo intended to kill that part of the Japanese population who lived in Tokyo?
It was the Americans so all good. This is just verbal toss like “collateral damage” so that legal folks have an easier time defending their employers or prosecuting their adversaries.
It was a show of strength to the Russians. Nothing more. Japan had already surrendered.
This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
….
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/12/murder/
I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.
The answer is now clear to me. It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful at the International Court of Justice. It is that everybody is quite sure it will succeed. There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide in the terms outlined above.
The problem is that once the ICJ has determined that this is a genocide, it follows that not only are Netanyahu and hundreds of senior Israeli officials and military personally liable, but it is absolutely plain that “Genocide Joe” Biden, Sunak and members of their administrations are also criminally liable for complicity, having provided military support for the genocide….
Sure, bad things are no doubt going on out there – perhaps worse than I understand; but not one of these ‘it-is-genocide’ comments provides an answer to the question of what on earth Israel is meant to do in the face of events such as what happened in October, and in the face more generally of a concerted and often-expressed declaration that it needs to be driven into the sea. Can a ‘pro-genocidalist’ suggest something?
No-one is suggesting Israel is driven into the sea. This is drivel. All wars end with political agreements which last for 2 years (approx). Someone (and not Hamas) is trying to destroy Israel – its optics have been humiliating. Now it has murdered 3 Israeli hostages in Gaza who had a white flag and begged in Hebrew. Either they are lost in some kind of psychosis (likely post WWII trauma), or this is much, much bigger than Israel-Gaza – a minimum being the destruction of the US.
I generally agree with the argument put forward by the author in regard to the moral difference between genocide and ‘mere’ mass slaughter.
However, that should not be a basis for attempting to put Israel on the moral high ground.
In any, or all, of the conflicts in Israel/Palestine over the past 60 years the ratio of deaths has always been about 20:1.
The Israelis have treated Arab lives with contempt, and treated Jewish lives as being more important.
In other words, they have sown the seeds for the genocidal mentality that they have reaped.
Coupled with this is the Islamist cultural mindset, arguably similarly intransigent and uncompromising as that of the Japanese. After all wasn’t it the Japanese that invented suicide bombing, not the Islamists?
I’m genuinely intrigued to find out from the number of thumbs up and thumbs down to my comment on this article that it is approximately 50:50 (40:60 actually).
Unlike the Ukraine/Russia conflict, this seems to be a war that is genuinely dividing us Lockdown Sceptics.
Respect to those who disagree with me. Is there an overall oligarchic plot to divide and rule us? Who knows..
Oh, and if Toby Young happens to be scrawling through these comments tonight, I’d love to meet him for a pre-match drink tomorrow. His beloved QPR are away at my team, Sheffield Wednesday. We’re both in the relegation zone, and it would be a big three points for both teams.
Maybe just look at the score.
How many dead kids and women will it take before you, just maybe, condemn those in control of this genocide.
This is all well and good but the quiet part has already been said out loud. I wish it were possible to assert damage limitation at this point but I’m afraid it isn’t. You would have to be remarkably obtuse or paid off in order to claim otherwise. If I were on your side I would argue for a no-holds barred strategy. You could say, as some have, that all nations are born in blood and ours is no different. And sometimes a point comes where you have to assert your objective if you are to exist at all. Of course that would take some balls and would entail certain consequences but it would be a morally superior position.
It’s over baby. Grasp the bull by the horns or die. It is genocide. Either you accept it or you don’t. I would say in the maelstrom of your own hatred just be aware of what is happening around you.
Are you really asking the question or taking the piss? I am not naive about these affairs I grew up in that neck of the woods. I know your gameplan and I completely understand it. Please don’t try to dress it up as something else. From a public relations point of view this is what really engenders hatred. I get it I had a garden and had to deal with two small lads who intruded in it and I just dealt with it. You have to make the land of Gaza uninhabitable for two generations, that is your sworn policy objective. Just say it – I would rather live in post-war Hiroshima than live in Gaza – just say it. Don’t be shy.You are making a big mistake by trying to manage a propaganda war that you have already lost.
Fortunately, the Israelis are confirming their genocidal intentions and thereby provide plenty of sufficient evidence to make clear that they commit a genocide and for their trials: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/12/no_author/gaza-is-deliberately-being-made-uninhabitable/
“In an Op-Ed titled “Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World,” Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that even a “severe epidemic” in Gaza will “bring victory closer.””
They really are do the devils work.
Military attacks targetting non-combatants and their property for no other purpose except killing the former and destroying the latter were already against the laws of war at the time of the first world war and part of the moral highground claims of the Entente propaganda was that the German barbarians would do nothing but this while the noble fighters for democracy and the freedom of the peoples obviously never would (incidentally, both claims were false).
During the interwar years, airplane technology had progressed very quickly and this gave birth to the strategic air warfare doctrine whose essential tenets were
1) Bombers are essentially invincible.
2) Attacks by fleets of bombers on enemy cities will end wars very quickly because they’ll eliminate the enemy’s capacity to produce military goods and will cause population revolts due to breakdown of civilisation in the hostile country (morale bombing).
An early proponent of this was the Italian general Giulio Douhet.
This was essentially a regression into outright barbarianism due to technical convenience all warring states succumbed to to varying degrees although the British and – to a somewhat lesser degree – the Americans were the undisputed champions of this ‘discipline’. The military technocrats wanted this because they believed it would work. Hence, all moral and legal considerations were swiftly brushed aside. The English government went to great lengths to hide the true purpose of its bombing campaign against Germany from the English people because the military and political leaders knew all too well that neither these nor the Anglican church would ever have supported it.
This makes a really nice real-world parable about mankind’s real dedication to abstract ideals like law or morality.
Israel is not a genocidal nation. It is a nation seeking to avoid it’s own genocide! It has repeatedly attempted to offer Gazan civilians a way of avoiding destruction, while Hamas has repeatedly placed obstacles along their escape route. Civilian casualties are therefore inevitable. Is Israel squeaky clean? Of course not. Is it cleaner than Hamas? Er, yes, it is. Israel has no choice but to defend itself. If this involves the unintended and unwanted killing of civilians, so be it. An awful thing to say, but an implacably logical one, and one murderously, cravenly dictated by Hamas itself.
ISRAEL IS THE OCCUPYING FORCE. Get that in your head. You think you’d just shrug if someone stole your house and land, murdered your relatives and pushed you into exile? Of course you wouldn’t. It is the Palestinians who have a right to defend themselves from the occupying force. Once Israel stops occupying Palestine, there will be no Hamas.
Hamas entered Israel with the deliberate intention of killing as many Israeli civilians as possible and they make it very clear that their aim is the eradication of Israel and slaughtering the Jews.
The Israeli army has entered Gaza with the deliberate intention of killing as many Hamas terrorists as possible but have done as much as is reasonably possible to avoid killing Palestinian civilians by warning them when and where bombing would take place and giving them an opportunity to move to a safer area.
Whilst all civilian deaths, on both sides, are very sad it seems to be that only one side supports a genocide and it isn’t the Israeli one.
Deluded. No, Hamas didn’t want to kill as many Israeli ‘civilians’ as possible. Hamas wanted live captives to swap. And no, Hamas doesn’t want the eradication of Israel – this was removed from their Charter in 2006 as listed on the UK Gov website under ‘Terrorist Organisations’ if you could be bothered to look. Israel gives (sometimes) warnings with bar codes – pretty useless when the internet is down – and then bomb the safe areas. Wake up sonny – this is further colonisation. As for genocide – the numbers speak for themselves.
So why did Hamas slaughter men, women and children if it wanted live hostages?
And I’m not sonny, so don’t make assumptions.
‘Genocide requires that the acts in question were intended to realise an ‘ulterior motive’ – I think stealing land-registry documents from Gaza, erecting Israeli flags, pre-selling gas from Gaza marine and planning new developments in Gaza can be described as having an ‘ulterior motive’. From the River to the Sea, doesn’t refer to the destruction of Israel, merely the equal rights of Palestinians. The same phrase is part of the Likud manifesto, referring to the removal of Palestinians. This man shouldn’t be teaching anything to anyone.
So the mass killing of innocent civilians belonging to a ‘group’ is somehow worse than the mass killing of innocent civilians who do not qualify as a group, even if they are of the same nationality and killed because of their nationality? I think that is a fairly unworthy argument which makes little difference to those killed.
Would the extermination of “Useless Eaters” with a toxic bioweapon be classified as genocide?