A growing chorus of voices internationally is describing the Gaza slaughter as a genocide. Here are some of those voices and lastly, a definition of the term from a leading human rights lawyer, who says that genocide entails two things, 1, the intent to destroy a people in whole or part, and 2, acts of genocide, killing members of that group or inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction, in whole or part, of the people you’re trying to destroy.
Historian Ilan Pappe has called it incremental genocide:
“Israel’s present assault on Gaza, alas, indicates that this policy continues unabated. The term [genocide] is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action—then and now—within a wider historical context.”
A top Brazilian diplomat agrees:
“For the love of God, what we have here is genocide, a massacre, to the point where top UN officials are starting to talk about war crimes” against Palestinians, Brazil’s Special Adviser for International Relations Marco Aurelio García told reporters.
The Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, adjusted the statement, agreeing with the massacre part:
“What’s happening in Gaza is dangerous. I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think it’s a massacre.”
Film legends Pedro Almodovar, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz signed a letter calling the bombardment “genocide:”
“Gaza is living through horror these days, besieged and attacked by land, sea and air.
“Palestinians’ homes are being destroyed, they are being denied water, electricity [and] free movement to their hospitals, schools and fields while the international community does nothing.”
Naomi Wolf states:
I mourn genocide in Gaza because I am the granddaughter of a family half wiped out in a holocaust and I know genocide when I see it.
Turkish Premier Erdogan said that the Israelis were perpetrating a “genocide” that outstripped what the Nazis had done to the Jews– an analogy that rendered his comments offensive in Washington and elsewhere.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini also uses the word:
“What Israeli authorities are doing (in Gaza) today is a genocide and a big historical disaster.”
International human rights lawyer Michael Ratner explains why he believes that the targeting of schools and hospitals and the overwhelming percentage of civilian deaths constitute a genocide, at the Real News. He also explains the meaning of the term:
I want to emphasize today is these killings are part of a broader set of inhuman acts by Israel constituting international crimes, carried out by Israel over many years, going back to at least 1947 and 1948. They include crimes that aren’t talked about that much in the media or the press, the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and apartheid. These crimes can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court and are defined there. They include what the well-known Israeli writer Ilan Pappé called incremental genocide. Pappé says he wants to place the barbarity of what Israel is doing in its proper context.
I’m a lawyer. I’ve looked at genocide. Genocide has two elements. One element is the mental element, the intent to destroy the whole or in part a national or ethnical or racial or religious group. Palestinians are clearly a national and ethnic group. And you don’t need to kill them all. You just need to have the mental intent to kill part of them. For example, it would be enough to have the mental intent to kill the leadership of the Palestinians or to kill people in one region. No doubt about that.
Genocide also requires that there be acts of genocide–killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, or inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction, in whole or part, of the people you’re trying to destroy. There’s no doubt again here this is “incremental genocide”, as Ilan Pappé says. iIt’s been going on for a long time, the killings, the incredibly awful conditions of life, the expulsions that have gone on for from Lydda in 1947 and ’48, when 700 or more villages in Palestine were destroyed, and in the expulsions that continued from that time until today. It’s correct and important to label it for what it is.
Disclosure: This article contains quotations from Michael Ratner, who was a financial supporter of our website at the time the article was published.
A genocide aided, abetted, armed, and supported by the United States of America.
Every time you see an American politician, leader, or pundit, stand in front of the people in this country and spew bull about Israel being the victim of this genocide on the Palestinian people – remember he/she is complicit in this genocide, and trying to insult our intelligence by lying to us.
It is genocide. Israeli intent.
13 days ago, LtCol Lerner spelled it out on radio, and I commented here:
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2014/07/israel-launches-invasion.html#comment-686968
““Distance the terrorists from our borders”.
Given the warning orders for people to move out of the north of Gaza, and the same for those in the east, it seems clear that they are going to force the people into a much smaller area of the ghetto/enclave, and increase vastly the barren no-go buffer zone. Maybe a couple of miles?”
And so it is, from this map, 3 kilometers:
http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/GazaStrip_IDP_Sitrep_A3.pdf
Clearing a whole 3k along the Gaza/Israel border as an increased no-go/buffer zone. Total destruction.
>> Bumblebye: link to reliefweb.int
The page at that link has been moved. This (PDF) appears to be its new location. (Looks like they removed an underscore from the original URL.)
FWIW, there’s also this page (PDF).
I’ve always been reluctant to use the word with regard to Palestine. It seemed a wild exaggeration that would discredit us. And then what word do we use when the next Israeli government campaign is even worse? But now when the borders are all closed, shelling is indiscriminate, everything is a target, racist mobs run free to cheer the killing…what other word can describe what the IDF is doing? I think a confusion in my own mind is thinking “genocide” means the intent to kill ALL of a people like the Nazis wanted to do with the Jews. But a simple google search for “genocide definitions” gives: “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.” A thousand is a large group, ergo…
precisely.
Murder is murder. A crime.
Slaughter is slaughter. Crime.
Massacre is massacre. Crime.
Genocide should never go unrecognized. Criminal. Why reserve it to one “group”? It’s not ‘special’ or reserved in honor only for ‘some’, it’s abundantly criminal and never more so in my lifetime than for, and toward, the Palestinians.