Talking about Genocide (II)

An article in today’s NY Times reports on the loosening hold of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on the Democratic Party. AIPAC, which is effectively dedicated to the proposition that Israel can do no wrong, has long been regarded as one of the two or three most powerful lobbies in Washington. Thanks largely to AIPAC, serious criticism of Israel for decades was almost never heard in the halls of Congress. But that’s changing: a dis-endorsement by AIPAC is no longer invariably regarded as a kiss of death for a Congressional candidate. Much of the change reflects evolving public opinion, especially among Democratic voters, in revulsion at Israel’s evisceration of Gaza. Now, some Democratic politicians even go as far as to say that Israel is guilty of genocide.

The Times article tells the story of Scott Weiner, a candidate in the Democratic Congressional primary election that will choose a successor to Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. At a candidates’ forum, Weiner demurred in response to the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, while two of his opponents readily responded in the affirmative. Later, Weiner, a prominent figure in the San Francisco Jewish community, came out with a clarification: For a long time, “…because of the extreme sensitivity in the Jewish community…I’ve stopped short of calling it a genocide, but I can’t anymore. To me, the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and push Palestinians out, and that qualifies as genocide.”

Weiner’s hesitancy is understandable. In most people’s understanding, the term “genocide” is ineluctably associated with scale: it brings to mind the Holocaust, or one of the very few other events in history whose scale of killing was in the many hundreds of thousands if not millions. There’s also the question of proportion: we tend to think of genocide as an attempt to eliminate most of the target population, not just a large part. The toll in Gaza, horrendous as it is, doesn’t measure up, so its characterization as genocide may seem extreme, over the top. Arguably, it’s just wrong to put Gaza in the same category of events as the Holocaust. I myself have explained my reluctance to characterize Gaza as a genocide, even while acknowledging that it may well qualify as such under international law. (See also the comment by Art in that same post.)

My solution to this conundrum is to coin a term: “mini-genocide.” It reflects my own assessment that what Israel has been doing in Gaza is genocidal in nature even while falling well short of genocide in scale and proportion. (Anyway, let’s not trivialize the scale and proportion: the 70,000+ deaths reported thus far will almost certainly prove to be a gross underestimate after deaths from exposure, disease and starvation are counted and more bodies are uncovered from the rubble. So, probably well over 5% of the population.) Israel has been engaged in the deliberate destruction of a functioning society, in part by killing a large number of its people. Critics of Israel who are justifiably reluctant to invoke Holocaust imagery by using the term “genocide” should have no trouble with calling the mass slaughter in Gaza a mini-genocide.