United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect
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Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

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?

  • porcupine
    27·
    9 months ago

    Killing all of the indigenous people in a colonized place results in there being no more of that people. The same isn’t true of killing all the settlers in a colonized area, because they came from somewhere else by definition. My vulgar understanding of genocide is the elimination of an ethnic group, but if you’re going by the UN definition, I see your concern.

    My problems with the UN definition is that it emphasizes intent rather than effect, that it includes actions as abstract as “causing mental harm”, and that it encompasses nearly any grouping of people “in part”. This definition can be stretched by those with power and motivation to fit almost anything. Did your post irritate me? Well, my friend, you have just committed acts that caused mental harm to part of the white racial group. I conclude despite your claims to the contrary that your act was committed with intent to destroy me, an individual part of a racial group. Congrats on doing a genocide. The UN definition is constructed such that, in practical terms, whoever has power at the UN gets to determine whether any action is a genocide regardless of context or conditions. That is to say, in practical terms, that a genocide is whatever the the imperial core says it is at any given time. Given that the imperial core is composed of the largest historical perpetrators of genocide, you can see the contradiction.