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What is genocide?

What is genocide?
Illustration: Harry Haysom / FT

By: Simon Cooper / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

As the fragile ceasefire in Gaza begins and we approach the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – next Monday – I have been reading the book Genocide [Genocide] by my cousin, Leo Cooper, published in 1981. I remember Leo as a wise old man, wandering around his book-filled bungalow in Los Angeles. The Jewish sociologist, born in Johannesburg in 1908, served as an officer in British intelligence during World War II and later joined the generation of scholars who developed the concept of “genocide.” Shocked by the Holocaust, he hoped to prevent future atrocities.

Leo’s book is both historical and visionary in approach. “Can anyone doubt,” he wrote, “the possibility of a genocidal conflict in the Middle East, colored by religious divisions, with an international component shockingly reminiscent of the Nazi era”? I wonder if he could have imagined a time when many scholars in his field would conclude that Israel had committed genocide.


The UN Convention on Genocide, adopted in 1948, defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Note the word “in part.” Killing only part of a group, as in the massacre of 8,372 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995, is also genocide. The convention obliges the 153 signatory states to “prevent and punish” genocides. Most have not. But I mention this convention because it is an internationally accepted legal definition of genocide that can help us move beyond the heated debate over Gaza.

Israel exists primarily to protect Jews from genocide. Historian James McAuley, who is writing a book on Holocaust memory, says: “It’s hard not to draw a Zionist conclusion from Auschwitz.” The cry after Auschwitz was: “Never again.” For Jews like Leo, that meant “Never again for anyone.” But for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it seems to mean: “Never again for us.”

Hamas’ massacre of more than 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, repeated the greatest nightmare in Jewish history. As I write this, Hamas still holds about 90 hostages from that day. But genocide or crimes against humanity by one side does not justify those by the other. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, there were 64,260 Palestinian deaths from traumatic injuries. This is 41 percent more than the figure reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The International Criminal Court has indicted Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israel claims to have killed in self-defense. Leo had addressed this issue. In 1915, some Turks justified the expulsion (and later the killing) of Armenians by accusing them of “supporting enemies of the state.” Leo wrote that this could justify the “disarmament” or “exile” of Armenians, but not “massacres.”

The intent to commit genocide is usually impossible to prove. Killing a group as a secondary consequence of another goal, such as seizing control of oil fields, does not legally constitute genocide. But Holocaust scholar Raz Segal says that some Israeli leaders have made “clear and open statements of destruction.” For example, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” President Isaac Herzog called “the entire nation” “responsible” for the Hamas attack. Many scholars, including Israeli Holocaust historians Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov, say that Israel committed genocide.

In our age, where shared truths are lacking, Israel’s defenders denounce critics as anti-Semites. This accusation cannot be proven false. No one can prove that the critics were not anti-Semites. Perhaps some were. But that is not the main issue. The question is whether Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide.

If so, then we have failed again to intervene. Horrifying photographs taken by a British reconnaissance plane in 1944 show smoke rising from the crematoriums of Auschwitz. The Allies knew, but did nothing. This almost always happens.

Leo died in May 1994, during the Rwandan genocide. He was disheartened by every failure to stop the atrocities, but he never became cynical. He co-founded the NGO International Alert to provide early warnings about ethnic violence. Decades before the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002, he dreamed of a court that could bring perpetrators to justice. Today, more and more states claim “universal jurisdiction” to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, wherever they occur.

In 2022, a German court convicted a 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp of being an accomplice in more than 10 murders. Justice sometimes works slowly. Every tragedy is unique. The number of victims of the Holocaust was almost 100 times greater than that of Gaza. But the law remains the law. /Telegraph/

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