Yes, it is genocide

By: Amos Goldberg 4/17/2024

In most cases of genocide, from Bosnia to Namibia, from Rwanda to Armenia, the perpetrators said they were acting in self-defense. The fact that what is happening in Gaza does not resemble the Holocaust, writes Holocaust researcher Amos Goldberg, does not mean that it is not genocide

Yes, it is genocide. Although it is so difficult and painful to admit this and despite all efforts to think otherwise, at the end of six months of a brutal war it is no longer possible to escape this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the sign of Cain of the "crime of crimes", which will not be able to be erased from its forehead. As such it will stand the test of time.

From a legal point of view, it is not yet known what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of the increasing number of reports by jurists, international organizations and journalist-investigators, it seems that the direction is quite clear.

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Already on January 26, the court ruled by an overwhelming majority (14 to 2) that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. On March 28, following the deliberate starvation that Israel imposes on Gaza, the court issued additional orders (and this time by a majority of 15 to 1, Judge Aharon Barak) calling on Israel not to deny the Palestinians their rights protected by the Genocide Convention.

The detailed and reasoned report of the UN Special Mission on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanza, reached a slightly more decisive conclusion and is another step in establishing the insight that Israel is indeed committing genocide. The detailed and updated report by Dr. Lee Mordechai, which gathers information on the level of Israeli violence in Gaza, reaches the same conclusion. Very senior academics such as Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University (and a Jew with a warm attitude towards traditional Zionism), who is regularly consulted by heads of state all over the world on international issues, speaks of the Israeli genocide as a matter of course.

Excellent investigations such as those by Yuval Avraham in "Tasha Mekimim", and especially his recent investigation on the artificial intelligence systems used by the army in selecting and harming those destined for elimination, further deepen this accusation. The fact that the army allowed, for example, the killing of 300 innocent people and the destruction of an entire residential district in order to harm one Hamas general, shows that military goals are almost incidental goals for killing the civilians and that the Palestinian mind in Gaza is in fact a son of death. This is the logic of genocide.

yes. I know, they are all anti-Semitic or self-hating Jews. Only we, the Israelis, who feed on the messages of the IDF spokesperson and are only exposed to the images that the Israeli media filters for us, see the reality present. As if endless literature has not been written about the social and cultural denial mechanisms of societies that commit serious war crimes. Israel is truly a paradigmatic case of such societies. , a case that will be studied in every university seminar in the world dealing with the subject.

It will be a few years before the court in The Hague gives its verdict, but we should not look at the catastrophic reality only through legal glasses. What is happening in Gaza is genocide because the level and pace of the indiscriminate killing, the destruction, the mass deportations, the displacement, the starvation, the executions, the elimination of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of the elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians - create an overall picture of genocide, of intentional and conscious crushing of the Palestinian existence in Gaza.

In known ways, Palestinian Gaza as a geographical-political-cultural-human complex no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it - not all of its individuals. And this is what is happening in Gaza. The result is undoubtedly genocidal. The numerous declarations of extermination by senior officials in the Israeli government, and the general destructive public atmosphere, which was rightly pointed out by Carolina Landsman, show that this was also the intention.

Israelis are wrong to think that genocide should look like the Holocaust. They imagine trains, gas chambers, incinerators, killing pits, concentration and extermination camps, and a systematic persecution of all members of the victim group until the last one. An event of this kind does not take place in Gaza. Similar to what happened in the Holocaust, most Israelis also imagine that the group of victims is not involved in violent activity or in an actual conflict, and the killers are destroying them due to a crazy and irrational ideology. This is not the case of Gaza either.

The brutal Hamas attack of October 7 was a heinous and terrible crime. During it, about 1,200 people were killed or murdered, of which more than 850 were Israeli citizens (and foreigners), including many children and the elderly, about 240 living Israelis were abducted to Gaza and even atrocities such as rape were committed. This is an event with catastrophic, deep and lasting traumatic effects, for many years, certainly for the direct victims and their immediate circle, but also for Israeli society as a whole. The attack forced Israel to respond in self-defense.

However, although each case of genocide has a different character, in terms of the scope of the murder and its characteristics, the common denominator of most of them is that they were committed out of an authentic sense of self-defense. From a legal point of view, an event cannot be both an event of self-defense and an event of genocide. These two legal categories are mutually exclusive. But historically, self-defense is not at odds with genocide, but is usually one of its central factors, if not the main one.

In Srebrenica - which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia determined in two instances, that genocide took place in July 1995 - "only" about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men, over the age of 16, were murdered. The women and children were deported earlier.

The attack by the Bosnian Serb forces, who were responsible for the murder, took place in the midst of a bloody civil war, during which both sides committed war crimes (though the Serbs far more) and which erupted following a unilateral decision by the Muslim Croats and Bosnians to secede from Yugoslavia and establish an independent Bosnian state, in which the Serbs were a minority.

The Bosnian Serbs, with painful past memories of persecution and murder from World War II, felt threatened. The complexity of the conflict, in which neither side was innocent, did not prevent the tribunal from recognizing the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide, which went beyond the other war crimes committed by the parties, since these crimes cannot justify genocide. The court reasoned this by the fact that the Serbian forces deliberately destroyed, through murder, deportation and destruction, the Bosnian-Muslim existence in Srebrenica. Today, by the way, Muslim Bosnians live there again, and some of the mosques that were destroyed have been restored. But the genocide continues to haunt the descendants of the killers and the victims alike.

The case of Rwanda is quite different. There, for a long time, as part of the Belgian colonial control mechanism, which was based on a policy of divide and rule, the Tutsi minority group ruled, and it oppressed the Hutu majority group. However, in the 1960s a revolution took place, and upon gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, the Hutu took over the country and adopted an oppressive and discriminatory policy against the Tutsi, again this time with the support of the colonial powers.

Gradually, this policy became intolerable, and as a result, a brutal and bloody civil war broke out in 1990, which began with the invasion of a Tutsi army, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which consisted mainly of Tutsis who fled Rwanda after the fall of the colonial government. As a result, in the eyes of the Hutu regime, the Tutsi became collectively identified with an actual military enemy.

During the war, both sides committed serious crimes on the soil of Rwanda, and also on the soil of other countries to which the war spilled over. There were no absolute righteous and absolute wicked. The civil war ended with the Arusha Accords, which were signed in 1993 and were supposed to lead to the participation of the Tutsi in the government institutions, the army and the mechanisms of the state.

But these agreements collapsed, and in April 1994 the plane of the president of Rwanda, a member of the Hutu tribe, was shot down. To this day, it is not known who shot down the plane, and it is believed that it was Hutu fighters. However, the Hutus were convinced that the crime was committed by Tutsi underground fighters, and this was perceived as a real threat to the state. The Tutsi genocide was underway. The official rationale for the act of genocide was the need to remove the Tutsi existential threat once and for all.

The case of the Rohingya, which the Biden administration just recently recognized as genocide, is very different. Initially, after the independence of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in 1948, the Rohingya Muslims were seen as equal citizens and part of the national body, which is mostly Buddhist. But over the years, and especially after the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1962, Burmese nationalism has been identified with several dominant ethnic groups, mainly Buddhists, which did not include the Rohingya.

In 1982 and later, citizenship laws were enacted, which deprived most of the Rohingya of their citizenship and rights. They were perceived as foreigners and as a threat to the existence of the state. The Rohingya, who in the past had small rebel groups among them, made an effort not to be drawn into violent resistance, but in 2016 many of them felt that through peaceful means they were unable to prevent the denial of their rights, the oppression, the violence of the state and the mob against them, and the gradual and underground deportation of their children The Rohingya attacked Myanmar police stations.

The reaction was brutal. In the raids of the security forces of Myanmar, most of the Rohingya were expelled from their villages, many of them were massacred and the villages were completely destroyed. When Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken read the announcement at the Holocaust Museum in Washington in March 2022 acknowledging that what was done to the Rohingya was genocide, he said that in 2016 and 2017, about 850,000 Rohingya were deported to Bangladesh and about 9,000 of them were murdered. This was enough to recognize what was done to the Rohingya as the eighth genocide

The reaction was brutal. In the raids of the security forces of Myanmar, most of the Rohingya were expelled from their villages, many of them were massacred and the villages were completely destroyed. When Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken read the announcement at the Holocaust Museum in Washington in March 2022 acknowledging that what was done to the Rohingya was genocide, he said that in 2016 and 2017, about 850,000 Rohingya were deported to Bangladesh and about 9,000 of them were murdered. This was enough to recognize what was done to the Rohingya as the eighth genocide recognized by the US, apart from the Holocaust. The case of the Rohingya reminds us of what many genocide researchers have established in terms of research, and it is very relevant to the case of Gaza: a connection between ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The connection between the two phenomena is twofold, and both are relevant to Gaza, where the vast majority of the population was expelled from their places of residence, and only Egypt's refusal to accept masses of Palestinians in its territory prevented their departure from the Strip. On the one hand, ethnic cleansing signifies the willingness to eliminate the enemy group at any cost and without compromise, and for that reason it easily slips into genocide or is part of it. On the other hand, ethnic cleansing usually creates conditions that allow or cause (eg diseases and hunger) the partial or complete destruction of the victim group.

The sense of threat in the small settler community in Namibia, numbering only a few thousand, was real, and Germany feared that it had lost its deterrent power against the natives

In the case of Gaza, the "safe zones" have often turned into death traps and intentional extermination zones, and in these refuge areas Israel is deliberately starving the population. For this reason, there are quite a few commentators who estimate that ethnic cleansing is the goal of the war in Gaza.

The genocide of the Armenians during the First World War also had a connection. During the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians developed their own national identity and demanded self-determination. Their religious and ethnic diversity, as well as their strategic location on the border between the Ottoman and Russian empires, made them a dangerous population in the eyes of the Ottoman government.

Terrible outbreaks of violence against the Armenians occurred already at the end of the 19th century, and because of that some Armenians did sympathize with the Russians and saw them as potential liberators. Small Armenian-Russian groups even cooperated with the Russian army against the Turks, calling their brothers across the border to join them, which led to the strengthening of the sense of existential threat in the eyes of the Ottoman government beyond all proportion. This sense of threat, which developed during a deep crisis of the empire, was a central factor in the development of the Armenian Genocide, which also began during the process of deportation.

The first genocide in the twentieth century was also carried out out of a concept of self-defense by the German settlers against the Herero and Nama people in South-West Africa (today's Namibia). As a result of the harsh oppression of the German settlers, the locals rebelled and in a brutal attack murdered about 123 (perhaps more) unarmed German men. The sense of threat in the small settler community, which numbered only a few thousand, was real, and Germany feared that it had lost its power of deterrence against the natives.

The response was accordingly. Germany sent an army led by an uninhibited commander, and there, too, out of a sense of self-defense, most of the members of these tribes were murdered between 1904 and 1908 - some by direct killing, some by the conditions of hunger and thirst that the Germans imposed on them (again by deportation, this time to the Omaka desert) and some in camps Imprisonment and brutal labor. Similar processes also occurred during the deportation and extermination of the indigenous peoples in North America, mainly during the 19th century.

In all these cases, the perpetrators of the genocide felt an existential threat, more or less justified, and genocide came as a response. The collective destruction of the victims was not opposed to the act of self-defense, but from an authentic motive of self-defense.

In 2011, I published a short article in the Haaretz newspaper about the genocide in South-West Africa, and concluded with the following words: "From the genocide of the Herero and the Nama, we can learn how colonial control, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, could slide, in the face of the rebellion of the local inhabitants, into crimes Horrific like mass deportation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The case of the Herero rebellion should serve as a horrific warning sign for us here in Israel, which has already known one Nakba in its history."