OPINION:
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We are being subjected to endless allegations that Israel is committing genocide. From college campuses to the International Court of Justice, Israelis have been accused of this most heinous of crimes. Furthermore, we keep hearing that anyone who supports Israel should be castigated as a supporter of genocide.
As a lawyer, whenever I confront an accusation, my first focus is on relevant definitions. Thus, as I contemplate the increasing dissemination of the accusations against Israel in connection with the war in the Gaza Strip, I find myself seeking a valid definition of the critical word that is at the heart of the accusations being directed at Israel and its supporters. Obviously, that word is “genocide.”
“Genocide” is a recent concept. It arose after the most egregious example of an attempt to destroy a people in recorded history, the German mass extermination of Jews known as the Holocaust. As the horrors of that event emerged after World War II, Western society struggled with the question of how to define what had transpired.
A Polish lawyer of Jewish descent named Raphael Lemkin came up with the word genocide. The term was based upon the blending of “genos,” the Greek word for race or tribe, and “cide,” the Latin word for killing. Lemkin directly and unambiguously defined his newly created word “genocide” as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” This was codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The industrialized mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany epitomized Lemkin’s notion of an effort to destroy an entire ethnic group. The systematic killing of some 6 million Jews is evidence of Nazi Germany’s goal of committing genocide. But it is not the only evidence.
The clear intent of the Germans to commit genocide can better be understood by their actions in 1944. Shortly after D-Day, the day that Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy and began to push the Nazis out of France, it became apparent that Germany was unlikely to prevail over the assembled Allied forces and could lose the war. Logically, it would have been expected that the Germans would muster all of their resources in an effort to overcome the Allied onslaught in order to retain their control over Europe.
But the Germans did not do that. Even as Allied forces moved rapidly through France defeating German troops at every turn, the Nazi government pursued its efforts to exterminate the Jews. In fact, they accelerated their efforts to arrest and ship Jews to death camps when, from a military point of view, they should have been using all of their resources to fight the Allies and make every effort to prevail militarily. But their effort to destroy Jews was more important to them.
This persistence in seeking the extermination of a particular people, even to the potential detriment of the perpetrators, is the ultimate expression of the intent to commit genocide. Recognizing this aspect of the definition of the term “genocide” and the manner in which the first and foremost practitioners of that activity — the Nazis — pursued it, can shed important light on what is actually going on in Gaza.
The Israelis are waging war against Hamas forces in Gaza, as a consequence of a conflict initiated by Hamas through the perpetration of the most heinous massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Israel, as the victim of unprovoked aggression, has the perfect right under international law to seek the defeat of those who perpetrated that aggression and threaten to continue the process.
The Israelis have made it clear that their objectives are the freeing of hostages taken by the terrorists, the dismantling of Hamas and the replacement of Hamas by a government prepared to live in peace with its Israeli neighbors.
The accusation that Israel intends to destroy a people or a nation (assuming for the sake of argument that the Palestinians who live in Gaza are either a people or a nation) is facially false and preposterous. And Gaza residents could readily put that issue to the test. They could rise up and cause their Hamas government to free the hostages and stop all armed activities. If the Israelis are truly seeking to commit genocide, then the Israelis will continue fighting in spite of this. But if Israel’s goal is defensive and not an attempt to commit genocide, then the killing will stop and quiet will return to Gaza.
In light of Israel’s past behavior, when, despite its overwhelmingly superior military force, including a likely nuclear arsenal, it has refrained from wanton killing, it is clear that if Hamas puts down its arms, the killing of Palestinians in Gaza will stop. This will confirm that Israel is not engaging in genocide, but rather is engaged in an act of self-preservation that is, as war inevitably does, causing collateral deaths.
Today, it can readily be observed that Hamas, knowing that it cannot win a war against Israel, is nonetheless insisting on fighting, potentially to the last Palestinian in Gaza. This is nothing less than a kind of self-inflicted genocide by and of these Palestinians — an action whereby a group is wantonly and intentionally causing the killing of its own people.
Contrary to the inflammatory accusations, it is not Israel that is committing genocide. Rather, it is the Palestinians who are themselves engaged in an effort that could result in their own destruction. They may provide the world with a horrific new term: auto-genocide.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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