Was It Genocide?

That's the wrong question.

Photo by Leeloo the First on Pexels

“Do Trump supporters believe what he says?” That’s the wrong question. The right question asks what his rhetoric accomplishes: rousing a crowd? Distracting attention?

“Was Trump a good businessman?” That’s the wrong question, too. “What counts as a good businessman?” is better. But the best is this: “Is governing a country like running a business?” (The answer is no.)

Asking the wrong question can be a waste of energy. I think that’s what happened during the war in Gaza.

“Was it genocide?”

That question was passionately debated from early on. Now that a fragile cease-fire is holding, I want to look at the question critically. Were Israel’s actions, or Hamas’s intentions, genocidal? I believe the question is largely a wastes of energy. Furthermore, it’s rarely useful to quantify and compare evils.

Evil does come in degrees, of course. Shoplifting is less serious than grand theft. But evil also comes in kinds: Shoplifting is different from rape, and both are different from embezzlement. The courts have to put all three on a single scale; each crime is punished with incarceration, long or short. Many times in ordinary life we make the same kind of judgment. He lies occasionally; she abuses her children. Friendship with him is easy, with her complicated or impossible.

For practical purposes, then, sometimes we need to compare evils with one another. Usually, though, the point is to get the facts – which is hard enough – and then evaluate them. Lying or misdirection? Self-defense or revenge? Civilian deaths proportional or not? Beyond that lies a garden path, luring us into debates that don’t really matter.

Whether a mass killing constitutes genocide matters in international law. The answer, though, has few consequences.

International law comprises treaties, courts, tribunals, and more. Decisions within it are hard to enforce. The UN’s International Court of Justice, for instance, can reach a verdict, but it has no troops. For military action the UN depends on forces volunteered by member nations. It cannot use those forces without the approval of the Security Council, and that is rarely forthcoming; approval can be blocked by any of the Council’s five permanent members. As a result the UN has done little to stop genocides (although it sometimes prosecutes perpetrators after the fact).

Declaring that a mass killing is genocide does have symbolic value. The declaration may galvanize resistance, or lead some countries to abrogate treaties. Those decisions, however, rarely stop the slaughter.

For that reason I find debate over the label pointless. I have another reasons well: I don’t like ‘genocide’ being applied to events that don’t mirror the Holocaust.

The Essence of the Holocaust

The Holocaust was a systematic massacre aimed particularly at Jews. Other groups were targeted, too, including gay men, Roma, and the disabled. Nazis considered these people “unfit for life” from the moment of birth, and sought out and killed as many as they could, often using them first as forced labor and in medical experimentation. That identification of certain people as less than worthless, as requiring annihilation, defines genocide for me. In spite of cries of “human animals,” Israel’s goal was to prevent further attacks on itself. If all Palestinians agreed to move to a south sea island, Israel would supply the ships. Similarly, Hamas would rejoice if all Israelis just moved away.

So for me, neither side in the Gaza war was attempting genocide.

Those who disagree can point to the word’s official definition, shortened to “violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” The phrasing is broad and ambiguous. From the beginning the word was intended to refer to a spectrum of mass killings, from the Armenian genocide through Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainians. Motivations in both cases were mixed or ambiguous. Hitler’s were not.

History records many other mass killings. I’m not interested in whether any of them is “really” genocide. Instead I argue that, outside international law, asking “Was it genocide?” is usually a distraction. One that flows from confused assumptions about kinds and degrees of evil.

Is genocide the ultimate evil, dwarfing all else? As a matter of intention, yes. Mass killings always involve treating people purely instrumentally: Killing these people will convince their leader to surrender. Or it will slake our desire for revenge, or prove to the world how strong we are. As awful as those motives are, they are not as deeply wrong as killings that are not even instrumental, that are considered good in themselves.

Beyond intentions, though, are other dimensions of evil. One is the sheer number of deaths. Hitler killed 6 million in the camps — genocide; but his war killed many tens of millions of others. The two sets of deaths, one worse in intention, the other in extent, cannot be weighed against one another.

Besides those two dimensions, there’s at least one more: the manner of death. Death by gunshot is one thing, deaths by fire or downing or torture are all different.

There’s no point in trying to rank all mass killings on a single line of awfulness. Evil is a multi-dimensional space. Genocide is the ultimate in one dimension, not all. It’s useless to try to rank the genocide of the Yazidis against the firebombing of Dresden. Such questions are unanswerable, and they’re obscene.

So, about Gaza. Don’t argue about whether what happened was a genocide. The question is a distraction. Instead confront the horrors of the war and try to prevent its restarting. That’s what matters.

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