Genocide in Gaza?
On the initiative of South Africa, a procedure accusing Israel of genocide for the events in Gaza has been activated at the International Court of Justice. We do not know what outcome it may have: although in theory, it is a legal matter, in reality, the judgment will be deeply influenced by political perspectives, as is always the case in such situations. The judgment would not have concrete effects, but it would strengthen the opposition to Israel for those events, which is already widespread in the West, prevalent in the rest of the world, and practically unanimous in Islamic countries. Since Israel's survival is guaranteed by the West, an expansion of anti-Zionism in the West could lead democratically elected governments to withdraw unconditional support for Israel. For this reason, Israel has decided to intervene in the debate before the court and present its arguments to avoid a conviction. However, let's examine the validity of the accusation beyond any legal subtleties: are the events in Gaza really considered genocide? Obviously, the answer depends on what we mean by genocide and how we interpret the events in Gaza.
There is a definition of genocide in the 1948 International Convention:
"This Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as:
a) killing members of the group b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
c) deliberately imposing living conditions calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction, in whole or in part
d) measures intended to prevent births within the group e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
As always in international conventions, there is a tendency to extend the concept for humanitarian reasons, which often makes these conventions extendable without well-defined boundaries, but we won't dwell on this. The essential point is that intentionality and partial or total destruction of the group are required. Now, it is true that the 20,000 deaths in Gaza, in proportion to the population composition, evoke great emotion, but they represent around 1% of the population: can it be considered a destruction, if not total, at least partial of the group? The convention does not provide an exact proportion, but it certainly implies a substantial portion, and Gaza does not seem to fit this case. On the other hand, it is true that the 20,000 deaths in Gaza are much more than the 1,400 Israeli victims on October 7: but the Israelis could kill not only 20,000 but 200,000 Gazans or even more, while if HAMAS has killed 1,400, it is only because it has not succeeded in killing more. There is, therefore, no Israeli intention to exterminate the Palestinians, an intention that could be hypothesized for HAMAS (but not the proportion).
Therefore, there is neither the intentionality nor the facts that can define it as genocide. We could say that the Israelis are the invaders, that the Arabs are fighting a just war, that there are excesses in Gaza, and much more, but the accusation of genocide appears entirely unfounded. But regardless of the always very relative legal criteria, let's look at historical facts. Certainly, the Shoah was an intentional genocide in which 6 million Jews lost their lives, and the survivors survived only because the Nazis failed to exterminate them. It is a unique fact in history: millions of people deported and killed ONLY because they were Jews, where that ONLY means that they had done nothing against their killers, indeed, they let themselves be deported disciplined and orderly, unaware of their fate.
The Jews did not fight the Germans, no military advantage could accrue to their persecutors; on the contrary, it diverted part of their forces, especially in terms of communication. I would add that alongside the genocide of the Jews, there was that of the Roma, which has similar characteristics even though numerically much lower. Another genocide of the 20th century that is remembered is that of the Armenians, but it does not have the same characteristics. The Turkish army was engaged on the Caucasus front with the Russian army on the border that then divided Turkish Armenia from Russian Armenia. In the Turkish part, a pro-Russian movement spread to reunify the two Armenias, and many Armenians deserted from the Turkish army to join the Russian one. The Turks felt threatened from behind in the territory where they were fighting and wanted to deport all Armenians to the borders of Syria. The lack of means and organization resulted in a huge massacre in which most of the population perished due to the insensitivity of the deporters, and only a small part reached Syria (later some settled in Jerusalem). The exact proportions of the massacre are not known: the most common figures are 1.4 million deaths out of a population of 1.75 million. There was, therefore, no real intention of extermination at the beginning, but supposed wartime needs. Later, the Turks did not recognize the genocide with Kemal Ataturk and defined it as a dramatic wartime event, and they still maintain this position, and speaking of genocide is considered a crime in Turkey. The intentionality remains somewhat uncertain, but there was still a massacre.
The third genocide mentioned is that of the Tutsis: it falls within the context of a secular rivalry punctuated by mass massacres. In 1994, the plane of the Rwandan president of Hutu ethnicity was shot down by a missile: the Hutus then revolted and killed mostly with machetes and sticks all the Tutsis they could in three months of horrific massacres. The numbers are not certain, but it is estimated at around a million deaths, and only about 200,000 managed to survive. In this case, the extermination intention was clear and undeniable; there were no immediate wartime needs, and around 85% of the Tutsis were exterminated.
As you can see, the events in Gaza cannot be compared to these tragic episodes, both in terms of intentionality and especially the percentage of deaths.
Later, extending the concept, there has been talk of genocide for Native Americans in the American West, for natives by Spanish conquistadors, for Australian Aborigines, and for many other cases, but this is an extension to other times and circumstances. Ultimately, in history, it sometimes happens that entire populations are exterminated in conflicts. However, the Palestinians today are about five or six times those at the beginning of the conflict with the Israelis.
In today's Middle East, we could talk about the genocide of the Yazidis during the caliphate: men were killed, and women were given as sex slaves to caliphate fighters not because the Yazidis fought against the caliphate but because they belonged to a religious group incompatible with Islam, even though they had always lived with Muslims. However, the percentage of deaths does not exceed 3 or 4%: it cannot be considered genocide.
I would say that with an extension of the term, one could talk about genocide concerning Christians, whose number in the Middle East has decreased dramatically, and the flourishing communities of the past are disappearing (especially the Chaldeans in Iraq). However, they have not been exterminated but have emigrated due to the difficulties they have faced with the rise of Islamic radicalism: we could talk about ethnic cleansing at most.
In general, let's say that religious conflicts always have a somewhat genocidal character: it is difficult to convert a population that follows a different creed (usually a sect of the main branch), and therefore the conflict itself ends up coinciding with the physical suppression of its members (think of the Albigensians or the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants).
Therefore, nothing of what we could still associate with genocide is happening in Gaza, where, instead, a terrible war is taking place, and indiscriminate bombings are the bloodiest aspect. Unfortunately, for a century, bombings on civilians have been one of the most used and important weapons: from Guernica to those in London, Dresden, almost entirely flattened Germany, even more deadly ones in Japan culminating with the atomic bomb, and more recently in Vietnam, Serbia for withdrawing from Kosovo, Iraq in the First Gulf War, and perhaps the deadliest on the caliphate: the list would be endless. The declared purpose has always been to hit enemy forces, but the real one is to break the spirit of the enemy nation.
In the specific case of Gaza, being unable to directly hit HAMAS because it is not an open-field army, the territories they control and support are targeted in an attempt to make the population stop supporting them.
It cannot be said that HAMAS is not Palestinian. It would be like saying that the Americans should not have bombed Germany but the Nazis. Hamas would then be a band of strangers, and the Gazans should hand them over to the Israelis. But in reality, Hamas represents not only Gaza but a significant part of the entire Arab world from which it receives funding and, above all, encouragement.
It is true that the laws of war prohibit deliberately targeting civilians, but they have not been respected for at least a century, except for some exceptions like the Arab-Israeli wars of '56, '67, '73, and they always apply reciprocally: it doesn't seem to me that on October 7, HAMAS respected them.
The Palestinians fall into a war like countless others in human history, from the mythical Trojan War to the holocausts of World War II, from the siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. with episodes of cannibalism to that of Leningrad where half a million civilians died of hardships and parents had to choose which child to try to keep alive.
In today's Middle East, there are many wars and massacres in which the fallen Palestinians are very few in comparison: just think of the millions of deaths in the Iraq-Iran war, Syria, the immense massacres of the caliphate, the repressions of dictatorial regimes installed everywhere in the Arab world.
Unfortunately, war is an evil, a tragedy that, as such, must always be avoided. Wars are fought with the necessary means to win them: we cannot delude ourselves that the means can be chosen according to humanitarian criteria. This is the sad, very sad reality.