The short history of the term ‘genocide’

Hitler is said to have told his accomplices not to worry about the Nazis’ “final solution” because, “Who remembers the Armenians?” Lemkin struggled to get the concept included in the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials but fell short. He then turned to the Genocide Convention of 1948 to have it incorporated into international law.

Gideon argues, to exemplify this, that if you could flip a switch and all Jews in the world forgot what being Jewish means, that would be undeniably genocidal — without killing anyone. Killing is basically murder; abolishing a people per se, is genocide.

But when it came to defining genocide legally, other concerns intervened. Big powers like the U.S., U.K. and Soviet Union wanted to assure they couldn’t be charged over obvious cases that implicated them, like the African slave trade, America’s Indigneous peoples, or the Ukrainian famine. So they insisted, for instance, on proof of intent.

Yet there’d been little direct genocidal intent in, say, the wipeout of 90 per cent of the original native peoples of the Americas. That happened mainly as a result of stealing their land. The physical destruction of its peoples, mostly by disease or war, was incidental but still, surely, genocidal.

Lemkin died alone, in poverty, in New York City in 1959, apparently certain he’d failed. Perhaps what’s truer is that he helped start a discussion that got diverted into legalisms. Genocide isn’t a settled term, like the boiling point of water. The discussion itself may be the real point. It’s an unfolding inquiry aimed at making humans more humane and aware. About what?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who taught at a seminary blocks from the site of Lemkin’s funeral in Manhattan, said, speaking about the Bible’s thundering calls for social justice: “what the prophets discovered [is] History is a nightmare.”

Part of the nightmare, I’d say, is that victims can become perpetrators of what was done to them. It sounds obscene — a term often used in rebutting such charges. In my younger years, I recall Israel’s eloquent diplomat, Abba Eban, labelling those claims obscene at the UN after condemnations of Israel during its wars in 1956 and ’67. It was powerful.

Yet people do often reprise what they suffered; it may be why a Talmudic rabbi felt the need to say, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to others.’ The lex talionis (an eye for an eye) was widespread. Most abusers were abused, though not all the abused become abusers. It’s a reality of our nature and condition.

History is a nightmare from which we try to awake. What’s more surprising, I think, is that people don’t always react in kind. All this applies in similar ways, I’d add, to both sides in the current hellscape.

As a result, the debate on whether Gaza involves genocide legally, may not be the key issue. As Gideon Levy — IMO a prophetic (in the Biblical sense) Israeli journalist- wrote, “Let us assume that Israel’s position … is right and just and Israel committed no genocide … So what is this? What do you call the mass killing, which continues even as these lines are being written …?”

In other words, the purpose of South Africa’s accusation, or at least its value, may lie less in the verdict it receives than the discussion it evokes.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.