“Israel, Israel, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide,” chanted the students at UCLA.
We have heard a lot of talk about how Israelis are committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. It reminded me of an article my friend Ben Madley (a professor of History at UCLA) wrote about the genocide of the Yuki Indians of Inyo County. In it, he wrote the following:
“In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as:
“Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such;
a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
“… First, perpetrators must evince ‘intent to destroy.’ Second, perpetrators must commit at least one of the five genocidal acts against ‘a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’
“In United States criminal law, ‘intent’ is present where an act is intentional, not accidental. The international crime of genocide involves more, comprising ‘acts committed with intent to destroy’ a group ‘as such.’ International criminal lawyers call this ‘specific intent,’ meaning destruction must be consciously desired, or purposeful.”
In sum, genocide is one or more of the five processes identified above, deliberately undertaken with the partial or total destruction of the group acted upon being the desired outcome.
It is easy to see how one might accuse the Israelis of a) through c) based on the headlines of the New York Times, but where is the intent? Where is it written that the partial or total destruction of the Palestinian people is the desired outcome of the Israelis? Where is the Israeli version of the Hutu Ten Commandments? When did the Israelis hold the equivalent of the Wansee Conference? When did the Israelis produce a document the equivalent of the Hamas Covenant that says, among other things “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Or this, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
Has not Hamas killed Israeli Jews because they are Israelis? Have they not caused serious bodily or mental harm to Israelis? Have they not deliberately inflicted on the Israelis conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (e.g., the thousands of rockets they have hurled at Israel over the past decade)? Have they not kidnapped Israeli children and forcibly transferred them into Gaza? And does their covenant not show that they have done so with the partial or total destruction of the Israelis (and Jews everywhere) as the desired outcome?
Who would be the real instigators of genocide?
The chanting of the students at UCLA is that thing that Goethe so feared: Es ist nichts so schrecklich als eine tätige Unwissenheit. “There is nothing so terrible as active ignorance.”