-Analysis-
BOGOTÁ — There have been increasingly urgent discussions on whether or not a genocide is happening in Gaza. Some, like Colombian writer and academic Carolina Sanín, believe the matter is clear, and argue that this is not the right label.
Fascination for a particular word, she argues, “Without looking into its meaning or even considering how something can be terrible, a human rights crime or even a massacre without being genocide,” constitutes at the very least “hidden antisemitism.”
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Genocide, it is pointed out, is an intrinsically problematic concept. Debates around the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, are in fact far from over.
Historians Matthias Bjørnlund, Eric Markusen and Martin Mennecke have pointed out three outstanding issues here: intentionality — or a premeditated desire to commit genocide — as well as the categorization of the targeted groups, and the total or partial grade of annihilation which the definition would require.
Do you need an explicit extermination plan for a genocide? Are ethnic, racial and religious groups the only ones that can suffer a genocide, or can this crime against humanity affect political groups as well? Must annihilation be total, or can it be partial, with the goal of definitively expelling a population from a territory rather than wiping it off the face of the earth?
Why does it matter how we define ‘Genocide’?
The unresolved nature of such questions has had at least two consequences. Firstly, they crop up wherever charges of genocide are heard. In Colombia, for example, people have used the word genocide when referring to the crimes committed against the (communist) Patriotic Union in a bid to eliminate it from politics. Yet the Inter American Human Rights Court abstained from using the word, as its norms exclude the word for political parties.
The other, and rarely discussed, consequence is that genocide cases are taken to court extremely late, and long after they happen, which makes such trials broadly ineffective in terms of deterrence or prevention. Thus, the situations that might constitute genocide are normalized and become the subjects of complex, if not arcane, discussions, while punitive judgments are emitted far too late.
A newspaper column is no place to provide a juridical definition of what is happening in Gaza, but clearly, it would be both facile and brazen to exclude the term’s pertinence simply for not finding a specific Israeli plan to exterminate the Gaza Palestinians, or because the aim seems to be to push them out of the Gaza Strip and to destroy Hamas.
Legitimate defense
Yet, as some have pointed out, it may also be abusive to dismiss those using the term for Gaza as antisemitic. The confusion between rightful indignation at current events and antisemitism has become an illustration of the crisis of international law in the West, which previously lived with utterly incoherent and longstanding situations such as apartheid in South Africa or the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
Previous cases of genocide, like the mass killings in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda, also presented arguments of legitimate defense. Yet the UN Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, says Israel cannot invoke self defense against a threat from a territory which it occupies.
That may be a vital point: the situation of an occupation recognized and condemned as such in multilateral forums like the UN. Ignore this, and all you will see is a military operation, and possible abuses, taking place in response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
