Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Clear enough, right?
Under this definition Israel’s occupation and war of extermination is absolutely genocide, unquestionably. The goal is to kill, mutilate, and displace the Palestinian people. The goal is the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza, by any means necessary. Israel’s war on Gaza is genocide.
However, under this definition are the completely justified goals of Hamas also genocide? They intend to destroy the settler-colonial monstrosity that is Zionism and eradicate the nation state of Israel; Palestine from the river to the sea. That, technically, means they are committed with intent to destroy the national group of Israelis by displacement, death, or simply making them into Palestinians after destroying Israel’s government.
That doesn’t seem right to me. I am absolutely in solidarity with Hamas and Palestine in their struggle against the Zionist entity. An occupied people destroying their occupier’s government and settler identity can’t be considered genocide, because it creates this legal and ethical equivalency with the settlers.
And yet, technically, that seems to be the case. Am I wrong?
And, by pointing out this technicality, am I just a dog for Zionism?
What really made me question the usefulness of the term genocide when examining contemporary conflicts was reading that Milošević was posthumously exonerated for his alleged participation in genocide during the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.
Even liberals cannot agree that genocide was the driving motivator for the conflict. However, the staunchest opponents to socialism – those hawks who eviscerated a multicultural nation in favor of replacing it with smaller ethnostates – are staunch in their support of the accusation.
It, ‘genocide’, is an easily weaponized thought-killer best reserved for discussion and examination of historical atrocities, imo. Hawks love comparing everything to the shoah. We see it weaponized against China, Yugoslavia, Russia, the USSR… hell, even the DPRK is regularly accused of having “genocidal” ambitions, somehow. Against Koreans? Who knows.