It has been nearly two hundred years since the Great Famine which saw one million people die, one million emigrate and which haunted the survivors in one form or another for decades after. Whilst nobody alive on the island of Ireland today has lived experience of it, the impact of that historical inflection point has echoed across the centuries. It is a testament to the impact famine can have on a people, particularly when that famine is man-made, that the Irish have never forgotten. Some have argued it was the moment Britain lost moral legitimacy in Ireland, and made Irish independence an inevitability (even though it would take most of a century to get there). It’s important to bear our own history in mind as we look at another people who have had hunger inflicted upon them. We know in our bones what a famine of this scale means. No wonder so many of us feel such a powerful empathy with the people of Gaza as they stare into that same abyss.
A man-made famine is a war crime and worse, a tool of genocide. Genocide is a powerful word, even the prosody of it on the tongue feels dark when you say it. The term itself has been subject to decades of overuse; examples of mass slaughter or death were labelled as genocides by observers overwhelmed by the horror of what they were experiencing and who lacked the language to express what they were seeing other than reaching for the terminology reserved for the worst act of all. Whilst understandable, it did lead to the sapping the term of meaning and allowed those accused of it to quibble, to minimise appalling crimes against humanity by arguing it wasn’t genocide. Now it may seem irredeemably cold to look at examples of mass death and suffering and say ‘that wasn’t a genocide’ but if genocide is to mean anything, if it is to be held as the worst crime possible to be committed, the standard must be remarkably high to hold it above other atrocities, no matter how appalling those atrocities are.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which saw tens of millions of Chinese peasants die because the policies enacted by Mao at the time triggered mass starvation, is not considered a genocide for example even though living through it (and dying during it) must have constituted an unspeakable horror.
The critical factor in genocide is intent, as you can read in the definition taken from the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ I have reproduced below (Israel is a party to this convention since 1950 by the way).
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Mao’s Great Leap Forward was not a genocide because the aim was not to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group but to enforce Maoist ideology and he simply didn’t care how many people died in pursuit of that goal (though that distinction doesn’t absolve him of his crimes or remove him from the pantheon of Humanity’s greatest monsters in which he is firmly ensconced).
But there is little doubt globally that Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting a genocide in Gaza. Now that question is subject to a legal case brought before the International Court of Justice so an official finding of genocide is probably years away, but we’ve all seen the footage of the results of Israel’s near total blockade of the territory. Of starving infants too weak to cry or of crowds of desperate people fighting for whatever aid they can get from the orwellian ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ wherein the very act of approaching their distribution sites seems to be grounds for the IDF forces at the sites to start indiscriminately firing (nearly fourteen hundred people have died this way in a little over two months). Even the sea is off limits, so any Palestinian that is minded to try and fish to feed themselves and their families is likely to die in the attempt.
The famine itself is simply the most recent component of the unfolding catastrophe triggered by Israel’s assault on the territory that has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, killed by Israeli action. This ceaseless tide of death whether caused by military action or as a consequence of the man-made famine alongside the ever-swelling number of injured, to say nothing of the mental toll inflicted on the population, surely meets the first and second criteria of the definition.
The third criteria has also been met. Gaza has been levelled, its infrastructure shattered, its agricultural sector razed and the annihilation of its healthcare system can be seen as nothing else than as ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. When you remember that the destruction of so many buildings in Gaza has flooded the enclave with poisonous asbestos, and factor in that the effects of famine are not only physically deleterious for survivors but can lead to life-long damage (particularly for developing children) then you understand that even if the war ended tomorrow, Israel has inflicted a terrible fate onto all who live in Gaza, a healthcare time bomb of shortened lives characterised by ill health.
Given everything that is happening, it seems the fourth criteria is met as well. The constant displacements from one end of Gaza to the other, the constant, grinding warfare and the deliberate policy of starvation all seem to be unhelpful in being able to start or expand a family. The only criteria that doesn’t seem to have been met is the fifth, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, and a cynic might say that the only reason seems to be the IDF doesn’t value Palestinian children that much.
Of course that returns us to the key question of intent. Israel denies the charge of genocide. Instead, they frame everything in the context of military necessity in their mission to destroy Hamas. The blockade of food? A military measure designed to ensure no aid reaches the enemy. The establishment of the GHF? Designed to ensure Hamas stops stealing aid shipments and selling them on to fund their military operations (though Israel has never provided proof of this accusation, which inexorably leads to the conclusion the accusation was made to justify the blockade policy). The constant deaths at those GHF aid sites? Hamas militants are attempting to attack the distribution points and the IDF has the right to defend themselves. The overall horrific death toll? The most moral army in the world has to kill the terrorists and they surround themselves with civilians so in reality it’s again the fault of Hamas (in fairness, Hamas does embed itself into civilian infrastructure but that doesn’t absolve the IDF from pulling the trigger. Repeatedly).
In this view, Israel is innocent of the crime of genocide because all the killings are the result of Hamas cynically using its own people as a human shield. The deaths are a consequence of the desire to defeat Hamas rather than the intent to destroy the Palestinian presence in Gaza.
But to fully accept this view you have to ignore the evidence provided by journalists on the ground in Gaza as well as the constant stream of international organisations such as the UN drawing attention to the man-made catastrophe in region and instead accept Israeli explanations uncritically.
Now don’t get me wrong, I fully condemn Hamas and what they stand for, not only the atrocity of October 7th but their desire to set up an authoritarian Islamic theocracy over all of pre-mandate Palestine. They don’t wish to liberate their people so much as become their oppressors in turn.
I don’t weep for Hamas and as a result I know many will take issue with what I say next. Hamas in my opinion does bear a measure of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. It triggered the war with Israel through its assault on October 7th and it persists in giving Israel the excuse it needs to continue the slaughter by not surrendering. And for those angered by the suggestion that Hamas should surrender in the face of Israel’s unjustifiable (what happened on October 7th is no excuse for this barbarism), genocidal aggression, I have to remind you that mass Palestinian death was the point of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a cynical calculation to sacrifice the lives of their own people en masse in an attempt to turn the world against Israel. They may have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams at that, but only because the level of the Israeli response has exceeded anyone’s darkest nightmares.
And I refuse to excuse the group’s actions over the past three decades where it connived with the Israeli Far-Right in the greatest Palestinian-Israeli collaboration in history, to undermine the peace process that had so much promise in the 1990s because like their extreme Zionist counterparts they couldn’t bear to live with compromise.
But the lengths to which Israel has gone are completely out of proportion to the threat the group now represents. Hamas has been comprehensively shattered, its leadership is dead, its arsenal depleted and while they may boast of having recruited as many new fighters during the war as Israel has killed, there is bound to be a qualitative difference between a fighter trained in relatively peaceful times with Iranian support and a functioning command structure and trained now when the best that can be managed is likely an angry teenager handed a gun by the commander of a relatively autonomous unit whose first real training is going to be going up against combat hardened Israeli soldiers.
Hamas is no longer a threat to Israel, likely never will be again, and was a not a threat that required the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the maiming and injury of tens of thousands more and the destruction of the enclave to defeat. The intent of the Israeli government was for something different.
It is my belief that the Israeli government, dominated by Far-Right parties on whom Benjamin Netanyahu is dependant not only for his office but his very liberty, co-opted a traumatised nation to begin pursuing their own long-held projects in Gaza. Namely, the depopulation of the region and its conversion into a part of Israel. This Al Jazeera article from a year and a half ago already describes the ample documentation of Israel’s intent regarding Gaza, quoting Israeli leaders dehumanising the Palestinian population and justifying collective punishment.
Far-Right Israeli leaders, including members of the Israeli government, also recently met at a conference in which the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and its annexation to Israel were discussed. As the ‘Godmother of the settler movement’ Daniella Weiss who attended the conference told the Guardian
“Gazans will not remain there. They will go to other countries. Supporters of Hamas we will fight. But those who want to live a normal life, they will have to leave Gaza because of the 7 October attack.” Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and other unspecified “African countries”, she added.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich bluntly stated a few months ago that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”.
Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared yesterday that
“From [the Temple Mount] — the place where we’ve proven sovereignty is possible — we must send a message: conquer all of Gaza, declare sovereignty over the entire Strip, eliminate every Hamas member, and encourage voluntary emigration. This is the only way that we will return the hostages and win the war…”
And Israel and the US are asking other countries to see if any would be willing to accept Palestinians from Gaza with Ethiopia, Libya and Indonesia mentioned as possible destinations. Every official act reflects the publicly stated intent of powerful and influential individuals within Israel, people who state as plain as day that their goal is to force the Palestinians out of Gaza (whilst eyeing up the West Bank).
The best actual defence that can be mustered is a retreat to semantics, the quibble. This isn’t genocide, at worst it would be ethnic cleansing some might say. But remember the definition of genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Destroy doesn’t have to mean kill them all (or else criteria 5, removing children from the group to be raised by another wouldn’t be a criteria). It means creating the conditions for the group diminishing and vanishing.
The intent is obviously present to destroy the Palestinians in their homeland by immiserating them to the point that they flee it. Ethnic cleansing becomes genocide when the ultimate goal is the dissolution of the group in exile, severed from a land of their own, which is what the result of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Palestine would be.
We can see it all, and the Western powers stand by.
Trump and the Republican party backing Israel to the hilt is a given, we expected nothing less before his re-election (unless you were an Arab voter in Michigan) but other Western powers have taken few concrete actions. These past few weeks the other big story regarding the war in Gaza has been the decisions of France, the United Kingdom and Canada to recognise the State of Palestine in defiance of Israel and the United States. Whilst a step forward, it’s an ultimately symbolic move that will change little on the ground. Some Western governments, for reasons of self-interest, are still reluctant to officially recognise what everyone else can see, a genocide unfolding in the ruins of Gaza because to acknoweldge what is plainly going on is to invite the follow up question of ‘well what are you doing to stop it?’.
Giving a government undertaking such a horrific course of action a free pass because of their strategic and economic utility and confirming the hypocrisy of the supposed Western commitment to international law and human rights merely reaffirms that Israel is the West’s North Korea. Exceptionally problematic for its allies, but too useful to cut loose or alienate in the long term. Just as the extreme oppression Kim Jong Un imposes on his people doesn’t bother the leaders of Russia and China, so the far right cabal in Jerusalem is ultimately assured that they can try and finish what the genocide they are undertaking in Gaza without overly provoking their western sponsors.
And we know it’s a genocide because the Israeli government have demonstrated by action and by word that that is the intent and in doing so shown us all that never a hollower phrase was uttered than ‘Never Again’.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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