Like many of you, I’ve occasionally had exchanges on social media over the last few months with Israeli sympathisers who innocently claim to be bewildered and deeply offended by any suggestion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. But these people, whether they realise it or not, rarely agree with each other on the exact reason they offer for what is happening not being a genocide, which may be a clue that they’re not on the firmest of ground. By far the weakest argument I’ve encountered is that a genocide is the destruction of a whole people, and because Israel isn’t doing that, it can’t possibly be committing a genocide. But in fact the UN’s definition of genocide is much broader than that –
“a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part“
Which is why the ICJ had no difficulty in stating that there were plausible grounds for believing genocide was taking place. Even Hitler didn’t kill the entirety of Europe’s Jewish population – he killed just under two-thirds. The current claimed death toll of Palestinians in Gaza since October is just under 30,000, which is almost certainly a massive underestimate. The population of Gaza is around 2.4 million, and the population of the wider Palestinian territories is around 4.8 million (excluding residents of the illegal Israeli settlements). That means if the target population for genocide is considered to be Palestinians as a whole, a minimum of 0.6% have been killed so far, and if the target population is considered to be Palestinians specifically in Gaza, a minimum of 1.2% have already been killed. There comes a point where that can be considered a non-trivial “part” of the overall ethnic group, especially when no end to the killings is in sight and the numbers can only vastly increase, especially due to man-made (ie. Israeli-made) starvation.
But if the governor of New York had her way, Israel would already have taken the genocide much, much further. Kathy Hochul said this –
“If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day”
On that analogy, she thinks Israel should have totally annihilated all 2.4 million people in Gaza, and possibly all 4.8 million people in the State of Palestine, on 8th October. Presumably this would have had to be done with nuclear weapons, because there is no other realistic way of destroying an entire ethnic group of millions in a single day. To make the analogy more exact, of course, she would have to assume that Canada’s attack on Buffalo was in retaliation for decades of US military occupation of Canada, which would mean under international law that the Canadians have a right to self-defence against the US, but the US do not have a right to self-defence against the occupied peoples. That does not imply what Hamas did on 7th October was a legitimate form of self-defence, but it does mean that Israel haven’t got a leg to stand on in suggesting that mass killings and mass destruction of infrastructure are a legal self-defence response to the events of 7th October, because they quite simply have no legal right to self-defence in Gaza at all.
Ms Hochul is, grotesquely, not a gun-toting Republican nutjob, but an elected Democratic Party governor in one of America’s supposedly most liberal states. And yet she not only cheerleads for genocide but thinks it hasn’t gone anything like far enough yet. As long-term readers of this blog may remember, I have a vote in US presidential elections, and it’s been an almighty struggle to find a Democratic primary candidate who has even a vaguely human stance on the Gaza conflict. There was a Congressman who I agreed with on almost every policy, but when I got to his view on Israel/Palestine, I discovered that he thinks it’s all the fault of the dastardly Arabs and everything would be as right as rain if they would just leave poor old Israel alone (ahem). To my relief, I did eventually find a candidate who is standing on an explicit pitch of stopping the war and ending arms supplies to Israel.
As there are suggestions that Keir Starmer would like the SNP to change their pro-ceasefire Commons motion so he can allow Labour to vote for it, could I urge the SNP to stand firm and refuse any request to remove the words “immediate ceasefire” or to put any conditions at all on the immediacy.
