by Daniel Lazare
How did a term invented by a rightwing Zionist turn into an anti-Israel battle cry? And what does it say about today’s pro-Palestinian movement that it has?
The term is “genocide,” a word seemingly on everybody’s lips ever since Hamas’s bloody assault on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s devastating military response. Academic groups from the International Association of Genocide Scholars to the Middle East Studies Association agree that the term fits Israeli policy to the letter. Despite writing skeptically about “genocide” and its origins, a prominent British sociologist named Martin Shaw has swung over to the other side, declaring a month after “Al-Aqsa Flood” that the Israeli offensive “demonstrates genocidal intent.” The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé agrees that Israeli policy reflects a “genocidal impulse ... to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza.”
Also on board are 758 Mideast scholars surveyed by the Brookings Institution in June 2024. When asked to describe Israeli actions, a majority replied that they amount either to “genocide” or “major war crimes akin to genocide.” This summer, some 1,300 professionals and academics in public health, health care, and the social sciences signed a similar statement in the Lancet that genocide was underway. Amnesty International takes the same position as does a recent report by a special UN commission of inquiry, which concludes that Israeli is guilty of four specific genocidal acts:
n killing members of a group,
n causing them serious bodily and mental
harm,
n deliberately inflicting conditions
calculated to destroy the group,
n and preventing births.
So the verdict is in. Israel is guilty of genocide as charged. Case closed – or so it would seem.
Except that it’s not. With an estimated 67,000 Palestinians killed, 170,000 wounded, and vast swathes reduced to rubble and dust, it’s hardly surprising that millions who are justifiably angry with these atrocities would seize on the worst word possible to describe the Israel onslaught. If ever a polity stood on the edge of absolute destruction, Gaza is it. But the dirty little secret about the dubious field of “genocide studies” is that nobody knows what it means. Misuse of words like “anti-Semitism” and “racism” is bad enough, but at least they contain a kernel of meaning at the core.
But “genocide” doesn’t. It’s fundamentally incoherent. As one scholar puts it: “Definitions of ‘genocide’ are like denominations of Protestant Christianity: every attempt to end schism with a new, more catholic proposal only succeeds in producing another schism.”[1] Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish refugee who coined the term in 1944, defined it so broadly as to cover just about anything that might disturb a given minority. This included religious interference since the established church, according to Lemkin, “in many countries provides not only spiritual but also national leadership.” It includes cultural interference since would-be genocidaires might wish to “create an atmosphere of moral debasement through promoting pornographic publications and motion pictures and the excessive consumption of alcohol.”[2]
So booze, porn, and movies can be instruments of genocide as much as gas chambers or death squads. To be sure, the UN General Assembly drastically narrowed the definition when it unanimously adopted its Convention on Genocide in 1948. Instead of movies and alcohol, the new treaty declared that genocide consists of violent or coercive acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”
But this still left any number of problems unanswered. What, for instance, does “in whole or in part” mean? Is it genocide when 70 percent of a given population is killed (the portion of Tutsis who died in Rwanda in 1994), 67 percent (the portion of European Jewry that perished in the Holocaust), or less? And what about “destroy” – is the verb to be understood physically or, as Lemkin might have preferred, economically or culturally?
“Intent” is equally problematic. One can have intent to murder, but unless there’s
dead body, it’s not homicide. But with
genocide, intent somehow ends up displacing the deed. In 2016, for example, the Center for
Constitutional Rights accused Israel
of genocide against the Palestinian people even though the combined population
of the West Bank and Gaza by that point had more than quadrupled since the 1967
war.[3] By the same token, the US State Department charged
China in 2021 with genocide against the Uyghurs in the western province of
Xinjiang even though the Uyghur population had
risen 15 percent over the previous decade. This is not to say that the repression of the
native populations in these areas was not real and that such repression had an
impact on the birth statistics of these populations, but is it genocide? It’s still genocide, evidently, even though
population statistics say the opposite.
Finally, there’s the question of what “genocide” adds that phrases like “mass murder” don’t. Killing six million people is bad, obviously. But is killing six million worse if they come from a single ethno-religious group? If so, does that mean that a concept like European Jewry has value over and above the individuals who comprise it? Conversely, are deaths less significant if a common group identity is lacking? Indeed, the US Holocaust Museum in Washington has been accused of “elevating the particularity of Jewish suffering” above that of Soviet POWs, political prisoners, gays, and others who fell victim to the Nazi death machine because they don’t fit into Lemkin’s ethno-religious framework.[4] Deaths turn out to be more serious when they’re part of a genocide than when they’re not.
It’s a debatable question. Whether or not we ascribe intrinsic value to a group, we certainly regard forcible eradication as among the most heinous crimes imaginable. But "genocide" confuses more than it clarifies. Samantha Power, whose 2002 bestseller, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, helped turn genocide prevention into a rationale for stepped-up US intervention, was candid enough to admit that the concept “suffers ... from several inherent definitional problems.”[5] Chief among them was that of threshold, i.e. how many people have to die before the g-word kicks in. Based on the UN definition, the number could be relatively small. But it could also be very large. As A Problem from Hell explained:
On the question of how many individuals have to be killed and/or expelled from their homes in order for mass murder or ethnic cleansing to amount to genocide, there is – and can be – no consensus. If the law were to require a pre-specified percentage of killings before outsiders responded, perpetrators would be granted a free reign up to a dastardly point. The law would be of little use if it kicked in only when a group had been entirely or largely eliminated. By focusing on the perpetrators’ intentions and whether they were attempting to destroy a collective, the law’s drafters thought they might ensure that diagnosis of and action against genocide would not come too late. The broader, intent-based definition was essential if statesmen hoped to nip the crime in the bud.[6]
It was an invitation to outside military powers to improvise as they went along. This was the word’s great gift to the neoconservative upsurge of the 1990s since it combined maximum ideological fire power with a high degree of definitional elasticity. Any number of people on Washington’s enemies list could be accused of genocide if America and its allies agreed. If not, they could stand by and watch on the grounds that “genocide” was not the mot juste.
A Problem from Hell thus ushered in a sea change in US policy. In 1994, the Clinton administration refused to intervene in Rwanda for reasons that turned out to be far from unreasonable even if from an imperialist perspective. Information was scarce, violence would have been difficult to contain because it was erupting simultaneously across the country, while the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the main Tutsi force, opposed foreign intervention because it thought it would prevail in the end – which it did. US troops would have wound up fighting the very people they were supposed to save. Nonetheless, the White House suffered heavy criticism. So when reports began flowing in that Serbian forces had begun massacring ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo in 1999 – reports that turned out to be inaccurate and one-sided – NATO intervention was assured. “Whether you live in Africa or Central Europe or any other place,” a chastened Bill Clinton now declared, “if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it.”
“Genocide prevention” was a product of the growing militarism of the 1990s and at the same time a stimulus that spurred it to greater and greater extremes. After reading a summary of the chapter in A Problem from Hell dealing with US inaction in Rwanda, George W. Bush would later scribble in the margin: ‘NOT ON MY WATCH.”[7] The forever wars were on.
Lemkin
Not surprisingly, a neologism cooked up by a rightwing crank turns out to be an endless source of mischief and confusion. Lemkin was a tragic figure who lost nearly his entire extended family to the Nazis in Poland. A trained jurist, he was able to escape to Sweden and eventually make his way to the United States where he landed a teaching job at Duke University. With war raging on three continents, he then devoted himself to an idea he been nurturing since the early 1930s, which was that beleaguered minorities merited special protection under international law. In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment published Lemkin’s 675-page treatise under the title Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In it, he sketched out the need for a new word: “‘genocide,’ a term deriving from the Greek work genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide).” Campaigning nonstop, he succeeded in getting the word inserted into the Nuremberg Trial proceedings and then in winning over the UN.
 |
| Raphael Lemkin |
But Lemkin was anything but a progressive. To the contrary, he was a rightwing Zionist who maintained “a warm friendship” with Hillel Kook, a leading member of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s semi-fascist Revisionist Zionist movement. In the 1920s and 30s, his answer to Polish anti-Semitism was not class struggle at home but the establishment of “Jewish sovereignty” abroad. His attachment to Jewish nationalism was passionate and romantic: “It is not enough to know Zionism, one must imbibe its spirit, one must make Zionism a part of one’s very own ‘self,’ and be prepared to make sacrifices on its behalf.” Otherwise, the false god of “individualism” would lead to “anarchy and collapse.”[8]
His response to the Nazi persecution was in the same spirit. Regardless of what happened to individuals, it was the group that counted. Declared Axis Rule:
[N]ations are essential elements of the world community. The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and a well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world.[9]
A few people took exception to Lemkin’s concept of nationhood über alles, e.g. an Austrian academic refugee named Leopold Kohr who sent Lemkin a draft review of Axis Rule that called it nothing less than “dangerous” on the grounds that it concentrated its fire on the German people and “does not mention National Socialism once.” (Actually, it did mention Nazism at various points, but only fleetingly.)[10]
Ironically, Lemkin fell into genocidal thinking himself according to his own definition when it came to Germany. “The mere fact that the vast majority of the German people put Hitler into power through free election,” Axis Rule declared, “is evidence that they freely accepted his program which was secret to nobody.” Lemkin went on:
Consequently, Germans should be punished, not individually but collectively. Lemkin therefore advised the Allies to “replace the aggressive industrial potential by [imposing] objectively more peaceful patterns of economic life, such as for example, agriculture.”[11] Considering that genocide can be economic, any such effort to throw German society into reverse fitted the definition all too well.
Compare this with a statement issued by British, French, Belgian, German, and other sections of the Fourth International in January 1946:
The lie propagated through the years by Goebbels’ propaganda machine – that Hitler and the German people are one and the same – has now become the official pretext for the treatment imposed by the victorious Allied powers. Vansittart in England, Morgenthau in America, and Ehrenburg in Russia all preach with equal hatred that the entire German people bear the guilt for Hitler’s crimes. The partitioning of Germany, the annexation of territories, the forced agrarianization of Germany, the plundering of machines from factories, requisitioning of all types, the confiscation of arms, deportations, the evacuation of millions from their native homes, the hunger blockade, reparations running into billions – this is the ‘peace’ given the German people under the excuse that they are collectively guilty.
German working people in the cities and on the farms! In this situation, we, the International Communists, feel obligated to stand by you with all the power and conviction of our class solidarity. ... Today it is you, the German proletariat, the proletariat of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who above all need the solidarity of the proletariat of other countries.[12]
 |
| Cover of Fourth International magazine with Manifesto of Solidarity with German workers |
This was one of the Fourth International’s finest moments. On one side, bourgeois nationalists like Lemkin wanted to punish Germans by forcing them to return to an earlier mode of production while, on the other, socialist internationalists wanted to maintain industry so that German workers could continue the class struggle.
It was amid deepening Cold War tensions that the genocide convention sailed through the UN General Assembly in 1948. The reason it did so was simple. It was a feel-good resolution that allowed members to pose as lofty humanitarians while betraying democratic principles at every turn. Observes Martin Shaw:
The United Nations was formed by the victors of the Second World War, who made themselves permanent, veto-wielding members of its Security Council. The Genocide Convention was one of its early projects, and the great powers and their allies had overwhelming influence in its drafting. The exclusion of ‘political groups’ is notoriously put down to the influence of Stalinist Russia, which wished to ensure that the Convention could not be used to criminalize its political persecutions, but it was also supported by Britain, which feared its impact on colonial questions. ... From 1946 to 1948, when the Convention was being drafted, the USSR and its allies were concluding the expulsion of millions of Germans, which the USA and Britain condoned. The British were overseeing the Indian Partition, in which forces linked to the emerging ruling parties of both India and Pakistan were involved in expelling millions, accompanied by large-scale murder and rape. The UN itself voted for the partition of Palestine, which contributed, during the 1948 war just before the adoption of the Convention, to the forced removal of three quarters of a million Arabs from the territory of emergent Israel.[13]
Shaw estimates that half a million Germans died in the expulsions.[14] It should be noted that once the wartime alliance broke up and the Soviet Union and the western powers went their separate ways, Lemkin was happy to see the Americans use his ideas for imperialist purposes. “[G]enocide,” he wrote, “is a concept that carries the highest moral condemnation in our cold war against the Soviet Union.”[15]
Israel and Palestine
Making “genocide” the centerpiece of the Palestinian defense movement couldn’t be more ironic given Lemkin’s imperialist sympathies. Still, it is not surprising that the term caught on. Not only have Israeli military tactics been ruthless, but Zionist rhetoric has been little short of exterminationist. As then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked asked in 2014:
What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? ... They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
October 7 drove such language to new heights. In the wake of the Hamas rampage, Knesset members have called for a second Nakba “that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48” and for “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.” A Knesset member named Amit Halevi recently outlined his victory goals: “One, there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel. After we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom.” Other Knesset members have casually discussed the nuclear option in order to reduce Gaza to smoke and dust.[16]
As for Netanyahu, three weeks after
Al-Aqsa Flood he quoted a notorious biblical
passage concerning Israel’s ancient enemies: “you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy
25:19). It was a
clear call for mass destruction.
So “genocide” seems to be the fitting word in response. Yet the GIGO principle – garbage in, garbage out – still applies in that a flawed concept leads to flawed outcomes. In Rwanda, the word served to distort the nature of a brutal civil war that had arisen out of real, material conditions by turning it into a manifestation of metaphysical evil that had arisen out of nowhere. This served the purposes of Washington warmongers who would later declare a holy war against “evil-doers” in the Middle East, but it did was otherwise meaningless. The same goes for Gaza. Ubiquitous charges of “genocide” serve a political purpose by making it seem that Israel has embarked on a program of national eradication for no reason other than it is infinitely evil when in fact it was engaged in a military effort aimed at rooting out a difficult and intractable enemy. This may seem like a distinction without a difference since the effect is to destroy Gaza regardless while feeding into the ethnic-cleansing program advanced by people like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Trump (who has called for Palestinians to be temporarily removed while Gaza is rebuilt as a "Riviera of the Middle East"). But it’s important from an anti-Zionist perspective in that it is impossible to defeat an opponent without an absolutely clear-eyed view of its aims and objectives.
“[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” Orwell declared. But “genocide” distorted the conflict in another way as well – by making it seem as if the problem is all on one side.
This is pernicious nonsense. Hamas is a brutal rightwing dictatorship that has imposed endless suffering on its own people. Repeated waves of protest have erupted since it took power in 2006:
n 2011: In an offshoot of the Arab Spring, protesters calling themselves the March 15 Movement take to the streets in support of new elections. Hamas security officials respond by using batons to break up a sit-down demonstration in Gaza City and making multiple arrests.
n 2017: Chanting “we want electricity,” protesters take to the streets in response to rising electricity prices and widespread blackouts. Hamas’s response: more beatings and arrests.
n 2019: Chanting “we want to live,” crowds take to the streets to protest soaring prices, tax increases, corruption, and rampant unemployment. Again, demonstrators are beaten and around a thousand are detained. Hamas blames “infiltrators,” agents of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and Israeli puppets for the disturbances.
n 2023: More protests triggered by new fees and taxes and worsening power cuts amid a brutal summer heatwave. This time crowds chant, “The people want to topple the regime,” as Hamas uses even heavier forces to scatter protesters, assault individuals, and confiscate cell phones and other equipment.[17]
Yet supposed pro-Palestinian forces in the west remained silent throughout. Gazans are under a double siege by Zionism and their own government. Yet constant repetition of the term “genocide” serves to focus attention on one gang of cutthroats while letting the other off the hook. As a Gaza resident named Alaa Radwan recently observed:
Hamas is not just a resistance movement. It is a governing authority, one that has controlled Gaza for nearly two decades through fear, repression, and militarization. It has arrested, tortured, and silenced political opponents and journalists. It has rewarded loyalty over need and made dissent a punishable offense. For Hamas, resistance is not just about confronting the occupation. It is about controlling its own people. And yet, these realities are often absent from international discourse. Too many voices abroad flatten the Palestinian experience into a single narrative: one where Hamas embodies resistance and Palestinians are interchangeable martyrs.[18]
Hamas and genocide
Mindless slogans lead to mindless politics. They also help cover up an all-important truth: if Israel is guilty of genocide, then, according to the UN definition, Hamas is too. After all, Hamas killed some 1,200 people on Oct. 7, most of them civilians, the equivalent of some 40,000 people in a country the size of the US. Worse, it repeatedly vowed that more bloodshed was on the way. “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad declared on Beirut TV just two weeks after the assault. “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”
What was Tel Aviv to make of this other than a promise
to keep killing and killing until no Israelis were left? If genocide is the “intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” then how
does this not fit the bill? When it
comes to exterminationism, Hamas rhetoric mirrors that of Zionism all too well. In July 2020, the
head of the Hamas Women’s Movement told a rally in Gaza:
“This is our fate, my beloved sisters, to be Allah’s hand on Earth, the hand that will finish off the Israelites, this Zionist enemy, Allah willing. Allah brought them here in droves, so that Palestine becomes their graveyard, Allah willing.”
Three years later, a Hamas religious official named Hamad al-Regeb declared in a Friday sermon:
“O Allah, bring annihilation upon the Jews. Paralyze them, destroy their entity, tear them apart, and bring upon them a terrible punishment. O Allah, enable us to get to the necks of the Jews.”
In June 2023, an Islamic scholar named Hussein Qasem declared on Hamas’s official television station:
“The Jews are not the enemies of the Palestinians alone – they are the enemies of humanity as a whole and the enemies of every monotheist in the world. ... Why shouldn’t we be furious? Why shouldn’t we burn the ground under the Jews’ feet?”[19]
And so on. Hamas apologists will no doubt argue that cherry-picking such quotes is misleading because it fails to acknowledge the vast power imbalance between Palestine and Israel, because it serves the interests of Israeli hasbara or propaganda, or because it obliterates all nuance. The anger of the weak must not be equated with the cruelty of the strong and so on. Perhaps – but the anger of the oppressed must also not be used to justify a brutal slaughter that does nothing but discredit the cause of freedom.[20] This is what the theory of genocide does by encouraging an ideology of victimhood that emphasizes the sins visited on one side while ignoring those visited on the other. As a famous rabbi once remarked: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). But “genocide” discourages any such concept of moral reciprocity. If Lemkin could use the concept to heap blame on the German working class, then Israelis can use it to heap blame on ordinary Palestinians.
Imperialism and bourgeois legalism
Finally, there is the question of bourgeois legalism. One reason for the constant harping on “genocide” is to steal the thunder of the Zionists by arguing that Gaza is just as bad as the Holocaust, if not worse. But another is to appeal to the international community on the grounds that the UN Genocide Convention is an integral part of international law. If Israel is in breach of the convention, then foreign intervention is warranted, just as the arch-neocon Samantha Power argued in 2002.
This was the subject of a bizarre speech that Colombian president Gustavo Petro delivered on Sept. 23 before the UN General Assembly:
“What we need is a powerful army of countries that do not accept genocide. That is why I invite nations of the world, and their peoples most importantly as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies and to defend Palestine. I invite the armies of Asia and the brave people, the brave Slavic people who defeated Hitler and the Latin American people of Bolivar, of Garibaldi, and others. ... We’ve had enough words. Today the time has come to use the slogan of Bolivar: freedom or death.”[21]
Never has the Third World “leftism” that Petro and others like him represent been more laughable. The idea of a neo-czarist dictator like Vladimir Putin riding to the rescue of the Palestinians is ludicrous – he has his hands full with the Ukraine. The same goes for Xi Jinping – this, after all, is a man who cares only about trade deals and who thinks nothing about consorting with autocracies like Saudi Arabia or the UAE. As for millions of Latin Americans crossing the oceans to do battle with the Zionists, the idea shows just how out of touch people like Petro are. Latin American workers want jobs, education, and an end to ferocious drugs wars waged by both the US and the cartels, wars that turn everyday life into a nightmare. These are needs that Petro is unable to satisfy, so instead he engages in absurd fantasies about his people off on a military adventure in the Middle East. After decades of ferocious anti-imperialist rhetoric, the pro-Palestinian movement is so thoroughly depleted that international imperialism is the only force it looks to for aid.
“Genocide” thus serves to draw Palestinians into the spider’s web of international law. Not everything about international law is bad, of course. Certain aspects seem sensible enough – maritime law, for instance, or laws governing the exchange of embassies. But considering that one of Marx’s first journalistic forays was an article attacking a proposed law forbidding peasants to gather dry firewood in forests, Marxists should look upon international law, like all bourgeois law, with the deepest suspicion. The pioneering 16th-century Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria used international law to justify the spoliation of the American Indians. The 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius used it to justify piracy on the high seas. Thomas Hobbes used it to justify driving native Americans off their lands, as did the 18th-century Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Even though the UN Convention holds that UN premises “shall be inviolable,” Perry Anderson recently noted that, just as it was holding its inaugural session in San Francisco in 1945, US military intelligence a few miles away “was intercepting all cable traffic by delegates to their home countries; the decoded messages landed on the breakfast table of American Secretary of State [Edward] Stettinius the next morning.”[22]
The first principle of international law is thus that rich and powerful nations get to violate laws that lesser folk are required to obey. Bodies like the UN or the International Court of Justice are nothing more than exercises in organized hypocrisy. Rather than liberating Palestinians, all they will do is crush them more thoroughly.
Islamic fundamentalism will not liberate them either, and neither will the aimless and reactionary violence that groups like Hamas promote.[23] The only thing that will liberate them, rather, is the international proletariat. This may sound like pie in the sky, but it is in fact eminently practical. Desperate Palestinians need a labor movement that will fight against the gunmen of Hamas, against the international police force that Trump, Netanyahu, and the gulf oil monarchies are currently assembling, and against the profiteers who will undoubtedly swoop down if “Gaz-a-Lago” goes into effect. Any such movement will need allies – in the workers’ movements of Europe and America, of Jordan and Egypt, and, most importantly, of Israel as well, home of the most advanced proletariat in the Middle East.
Just as
Trotskyists extended the hand of proletarian solidarity to German workers in
1946, Israeli proletarians must do the same to their fellow workers in Palestine
today. With disaster looming on both
sides of the divide, there is no other way.
[1]
Christopher Powell, “What do genocides kill? A relational conception of
genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 9 (December 2007), 529.
[2] Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of
Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1944), xii.
[3] The
combined population of the West Bank and Gaza was just under 955 thousand as of
1967. By 2016, according to the World
Bank, it was more than 4.3 million. As
of 2024, it was 5.3 million. See https://www.levyinstitute.org/palestinian-census/
and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=PS.
[4] Nicci
Shall, “Through the Window: An Analysis of the US Holocaust Museum,” in David
M. Seymour and Mercedes Camino, eds., The
Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories (New
York: Routledge, 2017), 99.
[5] Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), 65.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Stephen Wertheim, “A
solution from hell: The United States and the rise of humanitarian
interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of
Genocide Research 12 (September–December 2010), 163.
[8] James Loeffler, “Becoming Cleopatra:
The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal
of Genocide Research 19 (September 2017), 344, 350-51.
[9] Lemkin, Axis Rule, 91.
[10] Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against
Humanity (New York: Vintage, 2017), 184-85.
[11] Lemkin,
Axis Rule, xiii-xiv.
[12]
“International Solidarity with the German Proletariat,” Fourth International,
January 1946, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol07/no01/german.htm.
[13] Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 43.
[14] Ibid.,
75.
[15] Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of
Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide,’” in Dominik J. Schaller and
Jürgen Zimmerer, The Origins of Genocide:
Raphael Lemkin as a historian of mass violence (London: Routledge, 2009),
113.
[16]
International Solidarity Movement, “The Language of Genocide: Israel’s
Exterminationist Rhetoric,” Jan. 2, 2024, https://palsolidarity.org/2024/01/the-language-of-genocide-israels-extermination-rhetoric/.
[17] Alaa
Radwan, “What Gaza Was Like Under Hamas Rule,” Sept. 13, 2025, https://alaafromgaza.substack.com/p/what-gaza-was-like-under-hamas-rule.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Avraham
Russell Shalev, “Hamas’ October 7th Genocide,” Cambridge Univ.
Press, Aug. 8, 2025, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/israel-law-review/article/hamas-october-7th-genocide-legal-analysis-and-the-weaponisation-of-reverse-accusations-a-study-in-modern-genocide-recognition-and-denial/322198E636341BE82F37ED7147FEB0F5.
[20] See
“Terminal Stupidity,” Apr. 9, 2025, at http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2025/04/terminal-stupidity.html. See also “Mans and Ends in Gaza” by the New
Zealand Trotskyist James Robb at https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/means-and-ends-in-gaza-a-note-on-morality-of-the-7-october-massacre/.
[21] The
remarks begin at 36:23: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAeq1YlYS7c&t=3407s.
[22] Perry
Anderson, “The Standard of Civilization,” New
Left Review 143 (September-October 2023), https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii143/articles/perry-anderson-the-standard-of-civilization.
[23] See
“The New Reality in the Middle East,” Aug. 6, 2025, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2025/08/the-new-reality-in-middle-east-death.html.
17 comments:
A very strange article. The meaning of genocide is clear. It's spelled out in the Genocide Convention as the destruction of an identity. It is also clear that not one person has to die for the atrocities to count as genocide. The crux is rather, are the atrocities carried out to extinguish an identity. That is why China's current in mass confiscation of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur children and tormenting them in Chinese-only residential schools ("Indian Schools"), certainly counts as genocide.
Of course it's a crime to attempt to destroy an ethnic group such as the Uyghurs. The question raised in the article is whether calling such an action a "genocide" adds clarity rather than confusion. Citing the Genocide Convention as the arbiter for this question in no way resolves the problem because the Genocide Convention relies on and takes for granted the inherent contradiction at the heart of the definition of genocide which the article examines.
It would be one thing if the aim were to call into question bourgeois conceptions of genocide, but to reject the category altogether is an absurdity. Lazare’s focus on Lemkin is a transparent attempt to construct a straw man. The conception didn’t just spring from the mind of one petty bourgeois, it comes from the historical experiences of the 20th century, above all that of the Holocaust. There’s no shortage of scholarship on genocide, but Lazare prefers to ignore all that - much easier to equate the whole concept with the ideas of Lemkin.
Marx spoke of “the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins…” Yes, the “extirpation” of the indigenous, because extirpation was plainly the aim of the colonizing power. It may be unclear to Dan Lazare what the use of the word “extirpation” adds that phrases like “mass murder” don’t. Did the extirpation, entombment, and enslavement meet certain critical thresholds? The whole notion of “extirpation” suffers from “inherent definitional problems,” actually, it's thoroughly legalistic and bourgeois, and Marx's use of it is just muddled thinking, "GIGO" really.
It’s not a question of whether a moralist “ascribes intrinsic value to a group.” To cast things in these terms is pure sophistry. What defines a genocide is that there is an attempt to destroy a national or ethnic group. Whether an “internationalist” like Lazare thinks there is any “intrinsic value” to such Earthly categories, the perpetrators are consciously acting on them.
Because of the events of the last two years, masses of people around the world have come to recognize that the Israeli state is embarked upon a program of ethnic cleansing. They understand what Lazare will not, that the aim was not “a military effort aimed at rooting out a difficult and intractable enemy,” but an attempt to “erase Gaza.” The real death toll is almost certainly more than 10% of the population (not the 67,000 death toll Lazare quotes, which anyone who is paying attention knows is a vast underestimate.)
And at this precise moment, Dan Lazare chooses to question whether “genocide” is even a meaningful concept at all. But if it is, Hamas is guilty of it too: “When it comes to exterminationism, Hamas rhetoric mirrors that of Zionism all too well.” Whatever his personal intentions, the effect is to blunt criticism of Israel, obscure the real nature of this "war," and to sow doubt about the most powerful language available to those resisting Zionist violence. He may not consider himself a Zionist, but politically his argument functions as a defense of Zionism’s interests.
"But the dirty little secret about the dubious field of “genocide studies” is that nobody knows what it means. Misuse of words like “anti-Semitism” and “racism” is bad enough, but at least they contain a kernel of meaning at the core.”
Clearly "genocide," whatever contradictions one can identify in an "official definition" (and definitions are by their nature often subject to all sorts of limits), does have a "kernel of meaning." To the extent that one can "deconstruct" the term "genocide" one can probably "deconstruct" anything (and so it appears that "deconstructing" basically anything has become an academic hobby of its own - one which, suffice to say, is not Marxist.)
"One can have intent to murder, but unless there’s dead body, it’s not homicide. But with genocide, intent somehow ends up displacing the deed."
It's hard to understand the point of this line of argumentation. One could, perhaps, introduce some new category, "attempted-genocide," which would replace the existing category of genocide, but what would this accomplish other than perhaps downplaying those crimes which have historically been called "genocide"? This argument and the others based on the same line of reasoning seems to me to add nothing.
"Ubiquitous charges of “genocide” serve a political purpose by making it seem that Israel has embarked on a program of national eradication for no reason other than it is infinitely evil when in fact it was engaged in a military effort aimed at rooting out a difficult and intractable enemy."
I find it hard to take this argument seriously. Were acts of genocidal violence carried out against various indigenous people not actually genocide because they were "aimed at rooting out a difficult and intractable enemy" rather than being a product of some totally irrational and unexplainable "evil"?
"Yet constant repetition of the term “genocide” serves to focus attention on one gang of cutthroats while letting the other off the hook."
This can be true, but is less an argument in line with your main thesis (which seems aimed against the very word genocide, rather than its misuse) rather than an argument against particular political forces. Any number of words can be "misused" by political actors - (you mention the "Misuse of words like 'anti-Semitism' and 'racism'") but the fact that Zionists call all opponents of the Israeli regime anti-Semites does not thereby mean Trotsky's description of German fascists as anti-Semites was incoherent.
"If so, does that mean that a concept like European Jewry has value over and above the individuals who comprise it?"
This word "value," or the later "intrinsic value," if it is not to be an idealist metaphysical abstraction, needs to be understood socially, materially, etc. - and in our time society does indeed value defending the existence of peoples against their forceful extermination/elimination, and and not just because they are "individuals." Moreover, from the standpoint of the development of humanity and the productive forces, different groupings that exist over and above individuals preserve within themselves different ideas, practices, etc. which can contribute in the future, as national, etc. distinctions fade into the background, to the development of a richer and more fruitful world-culture... Further, it seems hard to accommodate this attitude with, eg, the Leninist position in favor of self-determination. That being said there are a good deal of underlying issues involved which I have not/can not adequately explore here.
Conversely, if we're to adopt "intrinsic value" as some sort of metaphysical term, we can also ask what "intrinsic value" individuals have. Too many of these arguments seem to be treated as "one-offs" where they actually entail opening so many cans of worms.
/continued
"This was the word’s great gift to the neoconservative upsurge of the 1990s since it combined maximum ideological fire power with a high degree of definitional elasticity. Any number of people on Washington’s enemies list could be accused of genocide if America and its allies agreed."
This is, again, subject to the same counter-argument as the statements about the mis-use of the word genocide by certain opponents of Zionism. It also occurs to me that the SEP made similar arguments about the invocation of "self-determination" by imperialism in support of the breakup of states on its enemies list in order to jettison recognition of the right to self-determination from the program of Bolshevism.
"Not surprisingly, a neologism cooked up by a rightwing crank turns out to be an endless source of mischief and confusion."
One imagines that any number of words in the popular lexicon, which we would recognize as valuable, could have their origin traced to unsavory individuals. This seems more like crude "guilt-by-association" than objective historical analysis.
"It was amid deepening Cold War tensions that the genocide convention sailed through the UN General Assembly in 1948. The reason it did so was simple. It was a feel-good resolution that allowed members to pose as lofty humanitarians while betraying democratic principles at every turn."
Whereas earlier the significance of "intent" was downplayed, now it seems to be of primary importance!
"In Rwanda, the word served to distort the nature of a brutal civil war that had arisen out of real, material conditions by turning it into a manifestation of metaphysical evil that had arisen out of nowhere."
It is hard to see how a word, in-and-of itself, can do all of this... "Facts," like words, in a given context can serve all sorts of unsavory, problematic, etc ends, but do not thereby cease to be facts. (This line is itself an example.)
"This is what the theory of genocide does by encouraging an ideology of victimhood that emphasizes the sins visited on one side while ignoring those visited on the other."
If one would make the same argument against those that accuse the Germans of committing genocide against Jewry, they would find themselves in the same camp as, eg, Kevin MacDonald, the darling academic of modern neo-nazis.
"Just as Trotskyists extended the hand of proletarian solidarity to German workers in 1946, Israeli proletarians must do the same to their fellow workers in Palestine today."
This line seems deliberately intended to provoke. If either the workers of Israel of Palestine are to be compared to the German workers, it is surely the Israeli workers, who inhabit an imperialist state engaged in mass slaughter, just as German workers did.
All this said, this article is not completely lacking in some good sides (eg criticisms of the uncritical supporters of Hamas, and the absurd "third worldist" "leftism" of Petro,) but because so much seems problematic I have naturally focused on those sides which I think deserve criticism.
Peter, I think you are missing the main point of this article which is that words have meaning and the use of words in a political context have real life consequences. Neither Dan nor anyone else on this website questions that the Israeli assault on Gaza is and remains a horrible crime against humanity regardless of whether you call it "genocide" or something else. I think Dan gave some historical examples of how the label "genocide" has been applied for all sorts of nefarious purposes. So maybe it makes sense to interrogate just exactly this word means? But your plea to use the most "powerful language available to those resisting Zionist violence" does not advance the struggle for a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine-Israel one iota if that "powerful language" is self-contradictory and incoherent. The analysis is then taken out of the context of class relations which can be investigated rationally and turned into a mythological struggle of "good" against "evil". Such muddled thinking becomes an avenue for those who support the reactionary Hamas. If the worst crime imaginable is being prosecuted by Israel then, so goes the argument of the so-called "resistance", any means are justified, no matter how awful, in opposing them and regardless of their long term consequences. Therefore you have people like the despicable Norman Finkelstein saying, in reaction to October 7, that "I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled." This was his reaction to the slaughter of approximately 1,200 Israeli's, the overwhelming majority being civilians including women, children and the elderly. Furthermore Finkelstein had the chutzpah to compare October 7 with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Also, you say that by Dan's questioning of the use of this language "the effect is to blunt criticism of Israel". Why is that? Why is it impossible to mount a full-throated opposition to the crimes of Israel while at the same time seeking some clarity as to the nature of this war and the role of Hamas? This reminds me of the charge that was hurled by Stalinists against Trotskyists during the Second World War that the call for the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy undermines the defense of the Soviet Union. Finally there is the denial of reality that characterizes your assessment. While we can agree that more people throughout the world are today inclined to oppose Israel and the US policy in the Middle East, to list that as a positive outcome of October 7 is to blind yourself to the larger context - namely that Israel with the assistance of U.S. imperialism, has achieved a dominant position in the Middle East while the so-called anti-Zionist resistance has suffered a massive defeat.
Anonymous No.2 here.
I want to try to clearly distinguish the points that make up my position.
1. Palestinians are nationally oppressed by Zionism, in economic, cultural and military respects. This is chiefly directed against the palestinian working class (as opposed to the small layer of palestinian capitalists).
2. In that sense, it is the case that one nation oppresses another and there are „unsolved national-democratic problems“, as Trotsky would put it, that have to be solved by the working classes of those nations. This asymmetry between the two nationalities has to be acknowledged. Lenin made the important distinction between socialists „negatively“ fighting against national oppression, but not „positively“ lending credence to bourgeois-national programs.
3. I think from this follows that socialists should firmly support a struggle against Israel as a colonialist construct and that we also support attempts to save Palestinian heritage and culture from being destroyed, while stating our aim to transcend national culture.
4. From this it further follows, in my view, that Hamas and other reactionary bourgeois-national forces must be clearly designated as being a tool of the class enemy. Even if we take the limited struggle for national liberation as our point of departure, Hamas‘ leadership has acted in practice as an agency of Zionism by targeting Israeli workers (thus preventing any unified class movement) and by leaking the plans for the uprising to Israeli intelligence. It is precisely the toxic nationalism of Hamas and others that ironically poisons the „struggle for national liberation“.
5. Of course, socialists draw a clear distinction between Hamas‘ bourgeois leadership and workers who happen to support or take part in it.
6. From this standpoint, I think a systematic marxist-socialist critique of the Palestinian nationalists is welcome and crucial: With the aim of contributing to the political independence of the Palestinian working class and to proletarian internationalism. Agency must be assigned to „Palestinian workers“, not merely „Palestinians“.
7. The term „genocide“ for me is problematic precisely insofar as it diminishes the subjectivity of the Palestinian working class and serves to blunt the class contradictions within the Palestinian nation. No distinction is made between those millions of palestinians who suffer from genocide and those - like Hamas‘ leaders - who attempt to politically profit from it.
Dan, I do not believe you addressed much of the counter-arguments nor did you add anything that hadn't been said by you previously.
I don't think this linguistic formalism really has anything to do with Marxism... Peter's comment seems much more in line with Marxist materialism: "The conception didn’t just spring from the mind of one petty bourgeois, it comes from the historical experiences of the 20th century, above all that of the Holocaust." Ideas are not the product of an individual brain existing in a vacuum. If Lemkin had not created the word/concept of genocide someone else would have because it reflects real phenomena.
Further, all sorts of concepts have various contradictory definitions which are themselves not able to live up to your implicit idea of a "perfect" definition. The definition of a nation often used by most Marxists (and provided by Stalin), that "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture," obviously has plenty of limits (The Swiss come to mind. IIRC Michael Banda used this definition to argue against supporting the right to self-determination for some nations which did not meet all of these criteria.) None of this means, of course, that the concept of "Nation" has no rational kernel...
Perhaps there would be no contradictory or imperfect definitions if we lived in a world free of contradictions. Further the fact that it is not always clear when a particular concept applies does not negate the concept, it just means science is not easy.
In apparently seeking to downplay the crimes of the Israeli regime, and to relativise its war crimes as a both sides conflict, surely you are inviting a whole host of positions that you may not intend.
Is Lazare denying that the Nazi Holocaust was a genocide? Does the concept of genocide, i.e., the attempt to destroy in part or in whole a group, have no applicability to the systematic annihilation of European Jewry?
"How about someone whose goal is to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth, but who seeks to do so democratically by making society so open and welcoming that Jews will be unable to resist blending in with the larger population?"
This is a bizarre comment. Is there an actual historical example that you are referencing, or is this completely a completely ahistorical thought game? The idea that secularism and social equality are or could be an attempt to efface religious or ethnic identity has always been associated with religious fundamentalists and racialist nationalists.
That is exactly Lazare‘s point. In the hands of reactionary nationalists, the charge of genocide can be twisted to mean all kinds of things. In such twisted logic, peaceful socialist revolution and secularism can be reinterpreted as „genocide“ as it seeks to overcome religion and nationality.
I am not sure if I agree with all points of the article, but I think this specific point is valid and clearly argued.
Anonymous 2
"In the hands of reactionary nationalists, the charge of genocide can be twisted to mean all kinds of things. "
And other words/concepts can not be twisted by reactionaries? We might as well throw out all concepts at this point!
In regard to the comment above -- "Is Lazare denying that the Nazi Holocaust was a genocide? -- it should be obvious that if I regard the term "genocide" as innately flawed, then it remains so whatever group it is applied to. So with regard to the Jews, "mass extermination," "Shoah (i.e. catastrophe)," etc. are all preferable. "Anonymous" also takes issue with my comment about whether genocide would apply to a democratic effort to eliminate Jews by creating a society that is so open and welcoming that Jews will want to blend in with the larger mass. This is "bizarre," he says. "Is there an actual historical example that you are referencing," he asks, "or is this completely a completely ahistorical thought game?" But it is not the least bit bizarre. With a US intermarriage rate currently estimated at 60 percent or more, the continued existence of the Jews is indeed open to question. Although he didn't use the g-word, Steven Bayme, a top official of the pro-Zionist American Jewish Committee, described intermarriage in 2016 as a "tragedy" and a "crisis," adding: "We’ve lost two million Jews over the last 25 years.” Needless to say, Marxists view it differently. If US society is so accepting in this respect that it's practically killing Jews with kindness, then what should do -- complain that there's too little anti-Semitism and that there should really be more? It may be sad to see Jews go, if that's what's really in the works. But it's sad to see Gaelic speakers go in Wales or Scotland. But if assimilation is an inevitable by-product of democracy, how can we possibly hold it back?
A separate topic, but do you plan to publish anything on the possibilities for building momentum for socialism in the wake of Mamdani's victory in NYC?
I think that's an excellent idea. The response from what we can call the "propaganda left" is to write boiler-plate critiques pointing out Mamdani's limitations. All that is fine, but without at the same time putting forward a position that lets the hundred thousand volunteers of the Mamdani campaign know that we stand with them against the Democratic Party establishment, and their implicit (and sometimes explicit) sympathy for socialism, those types of critiques amount to words that will convince no one but themselves. How to reach those people who were energized by Mamdani's campaign is a question that is never asked by the "propaganda left".
Yeah, for the WSWS, it's like Syriza and Sanders all over again, with no questioning of why they haven't won millions of voters to their party in ten years.
We explored the kind of questions raised by the Mamdani campaign in relation to the reaction to Syriza's election victory in 2015 in this article:
Experience in scare quotes: Sectarianism and the Greek election
Then as now you had sectarians - what is understood as the "propaganda left" tut-tutting the working class for its naivete in placing their faith in Syriza. This is a lifeless activity because it rejects with contempt the necessity of the working class to educate itself about the shortcomings of SYRIZA - or today of Mamdani - from out of their own experience. If we are to play a positive role in such movements it is assist the working class in taking the next step, in learning the lessons from their own experience. It is not possible to do that if we stand off on the side and hector the working class about how they are being deceived. At the same time we do not hold back our critique of the limitations and contradictions of these movements but we understand that not everyone will agree with us. Therefore we look for common ground with the participants in these movements and go through the experience with them in fighting for certain demands that have been promised. Exactly how we do that is itself an important theoretical and practical question and there are no ready-made formulas. This is in the spirit of what has been called the "transitional method" that was developed by Trotsky as a bridge to assist the working class in getting from their present level of consciousness to revolutionary class consciousness. The sectarians of the propaganda left never even consider such questions. For them it is enough to write articles pointing to the coming betrayals of such movements while the experience of the working class is seen by them as one huge inconvenience that gets in the way of the working class adopting the "wisdom" we are imparting to them.
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