Max Ajl at Jewbonics had an interesting take
on the Martin Kramer genocide charge:
The question about Kramer’s insane burblings is not whether use of the word “genocide” is analytically appropriate to describe what has been going on in Palestine for the last 60+ years. The question is if Kramer’s argument met the legal definition of genocide, a different matter. Here’s why. “Genocide scholars” and international lawyers have been scurrying around the library and poring through their law books and social-science textbooks for decades trying to muster up a coherent understanding of genocide. For now, we use the 1948 Convention, and Electronic Intifada referred to it (I assume) because it has cachet in academic and legal liberal circles, where unearthing instances of “genocide” is very important business, especially when they’re committed by enemy states or Africans. They isolate “Genocide” as a unique evil, because of its tacit referent: the Holocaust, when a state consciously chose to destroy (several) others. Nazism and the Holocaust occupy a special place in our moral imaginary, and leaving aside the instrumentalization of the phenomenon and these events, referring to them, and deploying the concept “genocide” is meant to provoke a very specific reaction and a very specific judgment: here is one more apologist for Israeli atrocity who has crossed the line by advocating genocide, and should be censured. Cool with me. We should keep pushing back the line of what the academy will tolerate or let pass without criticism or rebuke.
On “genocide” more generally, here are the lines directly in front of what EI quoted: “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” Quickly looking over this definition—international lawyers and genocide scholars have refined it endlessly—the problems are obvious. No one is dumb enough to declare “intent” anymore, and what could “causing serious…mental harm” with the “intent to destroy…a national [etc.] group” possibly mean? No matter the protestations of people working on creating a usable definition, defining genocide tends to founder on its legal incoherence.
But even that is a false issue. Elevating “genocide” is a direct result of elevating the Holocaust and placing Nazi evil and Jewish suffering on a pedestal. It counter-poses Nazi evil with justified acts like terror-bombing Tokyo or incinerating Hiroshima, not to “destroy…a national…group,” but to win a war or intimidate the Soviets, respectively, or in the case of the mass murder of the American Indians, to clear the frontier and create a country.
In this construction, the lunatics are those who kill to destroy an ethnic group. To reach some reasonable goal by utterly insane means is fine. That this ideology has the effect of sanitizing American and, arguably, Israeli mayhem is another part of it. At the end of the day, genocide is a way of labeling mass-death with a word that evokes Auschwitz, and is an exercise in demonization rather than analysis or conceptualization. This is a problem insofar as it demonizes Nazis, rather than placing their crimes on a human spectrum of atrocity, that our own crimes may and have approached, even if bereft of certain particularly disgusting features of Nazi industrial massacre. Still, I don’t find the word very helpful. It’s descriptive and evocative rather than analytical. But insofar as using what Anees calls a “strong word” to rouse the emotions of people who will respond to it, in this case, let’s use what we have.
Well said, Max.
Both the US and Israel have ratified the
Genocide Convention of 1948.
A clear example of a US federal genocidal act against Native Americans was the involuntary sterilization of approximately seventy thousand Native-American women. The federally funded Indian Health Services carried out these sterilizations between 1930 and the mid-1970s. They were often done without informed consent, covertly, or under a fraudulent diagnosis of medical necessity. This directly contravenes the UN Genocide Convention. Destroying a group’s ability to reproduce is an obvious and crude method of ensuring the inability of the group’s survival. However the US did not ratify the treaty (which contained a proviso requiring consent of the USA for any action under the treaty against it) until 1988 (Israel ratified it in 1950). Usually international treaties are not retroactive.
Israel, Sudan and the United States — have “unsigned” the Rome Statute, indicating that they no longer intend to become states parties and, as such, they have no legal obligations arising from their signature of the statute.
The UN Security Council says it has the responsibility to prevent and stop genocide anywhere in the world:
link to en.wikipedia.org
And how any times has the US vetoed a resolution negatively implicating Israel?
And, re Max’s criticism of legal jargon in the 1948 definition of genocide–how many starved, polluted, bombed, maimed, killed, deprived of shelter or deprived of natal-care (Kramer’s contribution) Palestinians would it take to make “in part?”
2 wrongs don’t make a right, but 4 rights make a box–you know, the one the Palestinians are in?
The real disturbing question here is not so much whether a series of actions by Israel and supporters constitute a “genocide”, but what they would do should the world avert its eyes.
It’s not for nothing that the definition of “genocide” revolves around “intent”. Legal scholars, politicians and generals can argue about what that means ad nauseum. Many of us don’t need to argue because we know what’s in people’s hearts, which is where true intent lies. The extremely sad truth is that a majority of Israelis – and zealous supporters abroad – would like nothing more than for the Palestinians to disappear – as an entity and as people. They differ only in the “how” not in the “whether”. For the “left” hiding anything palestinian behind an impenetrable wall (also known sometimes as “border”) is good enough, as long as it is hermetically sealed. For the right, listening to Lieberman and ayalon and Likud MKs and people like Martin should give us an inkling. It’s just a sanitized version of much worse that’s heard from “the man in the street” in israel, and the “man” behind the curtain in community rooms
For people like Martin, who blurted out what was in the hearts and minds of many, the Gaza model is a crude laboratory. As such, it is only faulted for not being efficient, fast or clean enough. Let’s not pretend that Martin – like Derschowitz and cohorts – do not wish for the “process” to be accelerated, as long as they find a way to push it deeper under the carpet – be it legally or physically. The only question in the minds of martins everywhere, is just how much can they get away with and how to better hide the evidence.
The Nuremberg Trials were and are thought by some people to be progress. Didn’t Germany successfully prosecute some government leader in the Balkans for genocide a few years ago? We need more such cases brought under the 1948 treaty and the Rome treaty, not less. Darfur and Gaza rings bells. Look at Israel counterpunching at Turkey about the Armenian genocide, one of the events in mind when the term “genocide” was invented. Don’t wanna concede, that because the Shoah was unique?
Unique or just more hi-tek?
It’s not nearly as succinct, but I try to use ‘occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonization’ instead of ‘genocide’.
The vast majority of Americans interpret genocide as large-scale physical extermination, which is clearly not happening. Nuanced academic definitions, including the specific verbiage in the Geneva Convention, are irrelevant in a campaign to wind hearts and minds amongst the general population.
I think that many if not most people have a reasonable idea of what military occupation and ethnic cleansing are, and can understand what contemporary colonization means when it is placed in the context of being their objective and purpose.
Lots of Americans never heard of the term genocide, nor of the terms occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonization. Or if they did, say once upon a time in some school class, it never sunk in. But they’d know what “fuck over” means; and would then even ask, what do you mean? As in, “fucking over the Palestinians, how so?”
I agree with this–until this Kramer flap occurred, I’ve always avoided using the word “genocide” with respect to the I/P conflict because the popular understanding of the term involves mass killing intended to wipe out an entire group. If you use it, you are guaranteed to have fights with people who will point out that Israel is not killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. “Apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes” are all accurate descriptions of what Israel does, and I willingly use those terms.
I have used the g word about Kramer because I think what he advocates seems to fit the legal definition, but if one said he was advocating racist eugenic policies I’m fine with that too.
There are many reasons for generally shying away from using genocide to describe the situation in Israel/Palestine. But in this case, EI deployed a legal and emotional register that academics and legal scholars can be relied upon to respond to, without being dishonest, and I think that was wise and that there’s nothing wrong with it. More generally, the word is polemical and not analytical, and I shy away from it.
In legal terms he is talking about the necessary “elements of the offense.”
The preambular material in the General Assembly resolution that contained the International Convention on the Crime of Apartheid noted that, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, certain acts which may also be qualified as acts of apartheid constitute a crime under international law. In 1984, a study conducted by a UN panel of experts suggested that apartheid was just a special instance of genocide. The major difference between the two is that genocide requires the mental element, meaning the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”
A systematic policy or practice of apartheid may produce identical results without any such intent and still result in criminal liability. The situation is somewhat analogous to the crimes of murder and manslaughter.
The legal definition seems to be set up for political manipulation. Taken literally it would make a drunken brawl in which a Belgian is assaulted, maybe with lethal intent, and someone shouts ‘One Belgie less would be good!’ as genocide, but then you seem to have two political options. First of saying that violence on such contemptible terms does not share in the grand wickedness of Armenia 1915 or Rwanda 1994, second of saying that even in brawling, even in angry verbiage, the seeds of something quite terrible lurk.
Both views are defensible but the fact that both are available allows people to make a rather cynical, politically motivated choice – ‘polemical rather than analytical’ indeed.
As to the elements of crime, the one thing that to me does not seem in doubt when an academic figure calls in cold blood for a clear policy clearly aimed at reducing the numbers of a human group, we would have to say, at least were the policy enacted, that this was more like murder than like manslaughter, malice aforethought rather than negligence.
But then I’m worried about the whole idea of ‘genocide’ since it gives the idea of race rather than of individuality such an absolutely cardinal position in moral discourse.