Genocide, Then and Now

A millennium later, the armies of Genghis Khan set out to bring an end to the Tatar people, ordering the execution of their men and the sexual enslavement of their women. A few hundred years down the road the Spanish are wiping out the indigenous people of South America. The Americans are annihilating the Red Indians – the Wounded Knee massacre being the most noted. Move on a few hundred years and we find Americans massacring the Moros in the Philippines. The French are slaughtering the people of Algeria.The Portuguese are committing structurally determined mass violence in Mozambique.The British are committing massacre upon massacre throughout their empire. Hitler oversees the Holocaust in Europe.

More recently, we have the My Lai (America, again) massacre.The Hutu people in Rwanda kill every Tutsi they can. Daesh massacre and rape the Yazidi people.The Darfuris in Sudan endure twenty years and counting of systematic extermination, rape, forced transfer, and torture. And in Gaza the ‘most moral army in the world’, as described by the former Israeli Defence Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shows that its morality permits displacement, mass starvation, targeted killings of civilians, mass deaths of children, sexual violence, and the destruction of all means of life for an entire people.

Human history is plagued with stories of mass murder and exterminations. As an optimist, I think that the stories about people and societies recorded in the history books that I read growing up show an abiding good in the human spirit.What you might simply call humanity. But I am forced to admit that there is significant evidence that my optimism is misplaced. As my reading matured, I mulled over what stories tell us about what it means to be human. I was captivated by novels with evil characters – Iago of Othello, Richard III, Count Dracula, Professor Moriarty, Milady of The Three Musketeers, even Napoleon in Animal Farm. But this was balanced by Plato’s The Symposium and The Republic. My copies of J S Mill’s On Liberty and Voltaire’s Candide were among my most thumbed and worn. Not to forget the humanity that one finds in Rumi’s Masnavi or Attar’s Conference of the Birds. But after visiting sites of genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia and others, and living through and learning about genocide in Rwanda and Myanmar, it is difficult to fathom that human beings can be reduced to such a level of barbarity that their humanity all but evaporates. I am horrified by the very idea that some humans think they are superior to others. Indeed, all humans are equal, ‘but some are more equal than others’ as Orwell put it.

Society after society has persuaded itself that the ‘enemy’ is less than human, and requires domination, humiliation, and ultimately annihilation. What causes one group to see another as lesser, as lacking even a minimum of human dignity; this impulse towards hatred, this willingness to degrade the other as subhuman, and so to justify its eradication? And, just as importantly, what can we do about it? How can we protect what are the most vulnerable groups across the globe – the minorities, the displaced, the refugees, the marginalised - from becoming the victims of genocide and other crimes against humanity? Thinking about these issues, I became fascinated with the notion of human rights, and the idea that there are certain rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of who they are. These enquiries ultimately led me to become a human rights lawyer. For me, human rights are not just a utopian and idealistic set of philosophical values. They are, or should be, practical constraints which protect humanity today from the worst transgressions of human dignity, and so maximise our collective ability to become fully human.

Origins

The United Nations’ 1948 Declaration on Human Rights begins by recognising ‘the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. This is a social and political declaration as much as it is a legal one. One way in which the international community of states has sought to give it some force is by the imposition of a treaty of binding and enforceable international obligations. One such obligation is the prohibition on committing acts of genocide, today located in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Although genocide has its roots in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was the horrors of the Second World War which led to focussed thinking. The term itself was the construct of one man, the Polish Jew and jurist Raphael Lemkin. He fused the Greek term genos (race or tribe) with the Latin suffix cide (killing) to make the modern word, genocide. In Lemkin’s definition, genocide is ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’ or, more precisely, ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.

Lemkin was explicit that while his term genocide was a ‘new conception’, it did not describe novel behaviour. As he put it, this was a ‘new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development’. Genocide, in Lemkin’s conception, was aimed at the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups’. Interestingly, Lemkin himself was not wedded to the term genocide, but also proposed the term ethnocide as an equivalent alternative.

Lemkin’s purpose was to break away from the conception of war as an act committed by states against one another, and to recognise that states at times waged war against peoples, not other states. He gave as examples, amongst others, the devastation of Carthage, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Christian crusades, and the wars of Genghis Khan.While mass killings were of course part of Lemkin’s conception of genocide, they were not its only component. Lemkin observed the political, cultural, economic, biological, physical, moral, and religious domination and subjugation of a people as all-encompassing elements of the term.

Writing, as he was, in the early 1940s, Lemkin’s preoccupation was with the crimes of the Nazi state and its Holocaust in Europe. Part of his purpose was to give shape to, and pin down, what had previously been described, by Winston Churchill, as ‘a crime without a name’. It is perhaps surprising then to know that genocide was not amongst the charges of which Nazi leaders were convicted at Nuremberg. Reference was made to the term in the indictment and in several of the prosecutors’ speeches, but not in the Tribunal’s statute or its final judgment. Nonetheless, the term quickly took root and was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was further promoted by thinkers such as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who in his 1968 book On Genocide represented the VietnamWar as a form of colonial genocide.

The Convention both prohibits acts of genocide, which it labels a ‘crime under international law’, and commits signatories to take steps ‘to prevent and to punish’ the commission of that crime. It defines the term ‘genocide’ as meaning any one of five identified acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. These five acts being (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The main feature that distinguishes the criminal offence of genocide from those of crimes against humanity, war crimes, or other offences such as unlawful killing is the requirement to prove that the perpetrators possessed ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have called this requirement genocide’s special intent or dolus specialis. The ICTR, in the case of Rwanda, found that Mayor Joseph ‘Kanyabashi’s spoken words encouraging the population to search for the “enemy” and “clear bushes”, being references to killing Tutsis, evidences Kanyabashi had the requisite intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Tutsi ethnic group’. Similarly, in the case of Goran Jelisić, the Bosnian Serb war criminal who was found guilty of having committed crimes against humanity, the Appeals Chamber held that evidence that the defendant ‘referred to a “plan” for eradicating (prominent Muslims)’ and expressed a desire to ‘cleanse... the extremist Muslims and balijas like one cleans the head of lice’ provided a basis for a finding ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ of intent to destroy the Muslim group in the town of Brčko.

The acts thus described are of such obvious abhorrence that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has suggested that, even without the Genocide Convention, their prohibition would form part of the customary law of nations. They are universally and rightly considered one of the most – if not the most – heinous and unjustifiable acts that might be perpetrated by one group against another. Insofar as there is a hierarchy of crimes against humanity, genocide sits at its apex.

Politicisation

This classification of genocide as the worst of all crimes gives it a singular rhetorical force. An allegation of genocide is an allegation of a total departure from the norms that all of us, states and individuals, purport to value; it is an allegation of the abandonment of civilisation for barbarism. It is no wonder then that the decades since 1948 have seen accusations and rejections of genocide fall largely along political lines. States find it in their interests to highlight some incidents of mass violence as genocide, whilst minimising others.When military intervention wants justification, use of the term is encouraged; where there is no willingness to intervene, the term is discouraged.

Hence, the United Nations, conscious of the politicisation of the term, instructs its staff: ‘it is extremely important that United Nations officials adhere to the correct usage of the term, for several reasons: (i) its frequent misuse in referring to large scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations; (ii) the emotive nature of the term and political sensitivity surrounding its use; and (iii) the potential legal implications associated with a determination of genocide. This note aims to provide guidance on the correct usage of the term “genocide” based primarily on legal rather than historical or factual considerations’. No legal term has caused more controversy.

Strive as the UN might, it is not possible to employ the term genocide without affording ‘historical or factual considerations’ a central role. Genocide is not a legal construct existing independently of fact and place; it is the label we give to describe real conduct, occurring inevitably in a particular historical and cultural context. Responsible use of the term can only be grounded in factual and historical awareness.

The UN’s drive for a neutral and independent use of the term, though subject to its own faults, is nonetheless a welcome counterweight to the nakedly political way in which states use and misuse the term genocide. Before 1990, the Cold War’s geopolitical dynamics (1945-1989) revealed the stark cynicism with which states approached allegations of genocide. As human rights scholars Paul Bartrop and Samuel Totten observe,‘the USA and USSR seemingly turned a blind eye when their allies committed genocide, and each was largely restrained from intervening in genocides outside their sphere of influence by the unstated but very real threat of retaliation from their superpower rival’. As a result, ‘genocide was perpetrated almost with complete impunity during the Cold War period’. The United Nations, shackled by the prevailing realpolitik, proved largely ineffective in preventing genocide during this time.

Since then, the politicisation of genocide has only deepened, particularly as Gulf States and emerging industrial powers assert their growing geopolitical influence. The mass killing of around 300,000 Black Africans in Darfur by the Sudanese government during the 2000s was for years considered by many countries to be a ‘conflict’ rather than a ‘genocide’, despite the one-sided nature of this ‘conflict’ in terms of casualties and resources. In recent months, as the hostilities have reignited the UN Special Advisor of the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, said that in Darfur there are ‘circumstances in which a genocide could be occurring or has occurred’. Arms sales continue to flow into Sudan from around the world to support Sudan’s genocidal conduct, despite a UN embargo. To deny a genocide is taking place can be profitable for those who benefit from trade with its perpetrators.

Similarly, when the UN Human Rights Council voted not to debate China’s treatment of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, China became emboldened, declaring it a ‘victory’. Shamefully, many of the dissenting votes came from majority Muslim countries. Some states continue to maintain that China’s treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority does not amount to genocide – despite the mass arbitrary imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of members of the Uyghur ethnic minority in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, the demolition of half of the region’s mosques and many important sacred sites, the sending of detained parents’ children to orphanages, and intrusive mass surveillance.

An assessment by the United Nations OHCHR suggests that the Chinese regional authorities are explicitly committed to a policy of ‘de-extremification’, where ‘primary expressions of extremification’ include ‘spreading religious fanaticism through irregular beards and name selection’ – in other words, visible signs of Muslim religious identity. Human RightsWatch have given examples of China’s stated policy goals of ‘sinicising’ Islam, which include ensuring that Uyghurs ‘have correct views ... on ethnicity, history and religion’, forced sterilisations of Uyghur women, and their policy of detaining Uyghurs on a massive scale for arbitrary reasons including being born between certain years, having too many children or wearing a veil. This is clearly aimed at the forced assimilation and eventual extinction of the ethnic minority. It is difficult to see any justification, beyond political cynicism or wilful blindness, for attempts to defend this conduct as anything but genocide.

The second half of the twentieth century saw more clear incidences of genocides – in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda – each raising questions both about the definition and the response of the international community.

Cambodia

The massacre of Cambodian citizens conducted by the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) provides a striking example of the difficulties posed by the definition of genocide. While the Convention applies to acts of destruction targeted against ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious groups’, it does not per se cover politically motivated mass violence. For that reason, the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia were argued by some to constitute systematic political slaughter rather than a genocide. Although ethnic groups were targeted, there were also killings of Cambodians by other Cambodians, based on a perception of social class, who were deemed to be a threat to the incumbent Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. It took until 2018 for this debate to be settled, when the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC, or more commonly called the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) began to make findings not just of war crimes, but of genocide, against the key perpetrators of the mass killings in Cambodia.

Despite attempts to avoid the label of ‘genocide’, the regime systematically exterminated up to three million people, specifically targeting intellectuals, the educated, ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cham Muslims — 70 to 80 percent of whom were annihilated.While some might question why it matters what precise legal term we apply to these atrocities — whether ‘genocide’, ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘war crimes’, or violations of the Geneva Conventions—this labelling does matter. The defendants have persistently sought to deny the genocide charge, offering legal arguments to differentiate it from other crimes against humanity. For the victims, however, it is crucial that their suffering be recognised for what it truly was: not mere cruelty, but genocide—the deliberate targeting of a group deemed inferior.

Whatever the resolution of that debate, the example of Cambodia shows how far the international community’s rhetoric and condemnation of genocide is so rarely matched by action. It took the international community almost thirty years to act despite reports of the massacres reaching the outside world. As early as 1973, the US consul in Cambodia reported villages being wiped out, information that reachedWashington in 1974. In that report, Kenneth Quinn, a US foreign service officer, likened the Khmer Rouge’s programs to those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Cambodian refugees inVietnam reported genocidal acts to Charles Twining of the US embassy in Thailand, detailing mass executions by teenage boys using garden tools, starvation of children, and asphyxiation of Buddhist monks.

Having failed to take steps to prevent, or even limit, the genocide, the UN belatedly stepped in to assist its punishment, supporting the Cambodian government in creating the ECCC to investigate the mass murders. Although Pol Pot himself escaped conviction by the expedient of dying before he could be charged (a popular routine of dictators, followed also by Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet in 2006), nine individuals ultimately faced indictment, with only five of those cases then reaching the ECCC, and just three leading to convictions. Even in what we might today call a quintessential image of genocide, conceptual complexities, legal difficulties, and the snail pace of international action have all collaborated to frustrate recognition and punishment of the perpetrators.

It is easy to become entangled in legal intricacies and overlook the profound human realities that these legal frameworks are designed to protect. Just 17 kilometres from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, lies Choeung Ek, once a tranquil longan orchard. Before 1975, this orchard must have been a peaceful expanse of greenery and fruit-bearing trees.The site still exudes a certain serenity, with its lush trees still bearing longan fruit. But this calm is tainted by the chilling truth that in 1975, this orchard was transformed into the infamous ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge, where thousands were buried in mass graves. An orchard one day, a graveyard the next. From 1975 onwards, over 17,000 people — men, women, and children — were executed or buried here, their lives brutally cut short by the Khmer Rouge’s merciless pursuit of ideological purity. When I visited in 2017, I stood before the towering stupa filled with the skulls of the victims. The earth itself continues to yield bones as it shifts.

Bosnia

A little over a decade after the Cambodian genocide, the world saw in the early 1990s ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, another grim chapter in human history. The path to genocide (1992-1995) began with restrictions on employment, free assembly, and communication for ethnic groups. This escalated into a systematic, state-sanctioned and driven campaign to eliminate the targeted populations. Croats and Muslims were interned in concentration camps and starved, with 100,000 Bosnians murdered within a year. Those expelled from the territory commonly faced rape and murder; some victims were dismembered with chain saws.The atrocities in Bosnia received extensive and graphic coverage in theWest but despite the global awareness, international intervention was sorely lacking.

A feeble UN Protection Force was eventually positioned in Bosnia to protect non-Serbian Bosnians. They failed spectacularly in their mission. The height of the atrocities was the massacre in Srebrenica, where around 8,000 Bosnian Muslims (mainly boys and men) were murdered by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić. They were ‘raped and bayoneted, throats cut and shot. The killings were systematic, men were separated from women: the women were raped then killed’.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established in 1993 to prosecute war crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars, determined in 2001 that the Srebrenica killings, compounded by the mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians, constituted genocide. The same conclusion was reached by the International Court of Justice in 2007. Senior officers in the Bosnian Serb army bore the brunt of the responsibility. However, the UN and its Western allies also shouldered some blame for failing to protect the Bosniak population in Srebrenica, designated a ‘safe area’ by the UN Security Council in 1993. In a critical review in 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted, ‘through error, misjudgement and an inability to recognise the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the (Bosnian) Serb campaign of mass murder’.

Once again, the international community moves itself to condemn genocide only long after the atrocities have unfolded yet stands idle while the horrors are being committed. The UN’s retrospective on its own failures serves as a grim postmortem not only of its actions but also of those who perished as a consequence.

In Sarajevo, a little north of the Latin Bridge there is in an old warehouse, a Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, established in 2016. I visited recently, during a trip to the city. The first room provides an overview of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, laying the groundwork for the horror that followed. Deeper into the museum, the exhibits became personal: a worn jacket, a guitar, a little girl’s shoes — each item a silent witness to the lives that were abruptly shattered. The implements of torture, firsthand journals recording the descent into brutality; all are testament here of what passed in Bosnia in the early 1990s. But this genocide is not lost to the depths of time, surviving only in the archaeologist’s perspective, of tales teased out of stationary objects. The museum is not only a host of objects, but shows videos of the bombing of Mostar, recording forever the motion of human destruction.

The museum’s latest addition, Footsteps of Those Who Did (Not) Cross displays personal belongings of those who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, alongside items from survivors. It holds hundreds of pieces of footwear found along the treacherous route from Srebrenica to Nezuk, also known as the ‘march of death’. These shoes were worn by boys and men, walking towards what they hoped was safety, only to be met with massacre. It is the story of the Bosnian genocide, but also of countless other slaughters perpetrated by one race against another.

These vigils are critical, offering a moment for people to pause, reflect, and honour the dead. In Bosnia, remembering serves not just to preserve the past, but as a defence against those who would manipulate history for their own ends. As I wandered through Sarajevo, I saw signs declaring,‘we must not forget’ plastered across a city still physically and emotionally scarred by the trauma of genocide. The city’s cry, a desperate plea from a community abandoned by the world, is a powerful reminder that their suffering must never be erased. As Elif Shafak poignantly expressed, ‘not to be able to tell your story, to be silenced and shut out, therefore is to be dehumanised’. Bosnia, like Germany, bans the denial of its genocide. Certain strains of humanity, if allowed to prosper, will not flinch from the horrors of the past, but embrace them as their own.

Rwanda

When Belgium withdrew from Rwanda in 1962, it left behind two rival tribes: the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi. In April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwanda’s president, a Hutu, was shot down in the air. The president – Juvénal Habyarimana – died, along with every other passenger. From this spark blazed what we today call the Rwandan genocide (7 April – 19 July 1994), with 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus brutally killed: ‘raped, mutilated, and slaughtered with grenades and machetes. In many cases, they were herded into churches and hacked to death’. Of these deaths, around 500,000 were Tutsi – about 77 percent of their total population.

In the early days, reporting of the events in Rwanda dismissed the genocide as fighting between rival tribal factions. The warning signs were there. Both Rwandan and international human rights organisations forewarned of the upcoming genocide, as did state diplomats. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN peacekeeping force, sent daily warnings of the genocide to the UN, but they were ignored. France, Belgium, and the US evacuated their citizens but refused to help theTutsi survivors.

Early and decisive international intervention could have stopped the genocide, but global leaders rejected this option. Archives released by Human RightsWatch depict how international leaders for weeks declined to use their political and moral authority to challenge the legitimacy of the genocidal government in Rwanda. No action was taken to limit the radio programmes used to incite Hutu to slaughter.

In stark contrast to the Cambodian genocide, where the US freely made accusations of genocide, in the case of Rwanda, as Eric A. Heinze explained in a 2007 article in Political Science Quarterly, ‘US officials went to great lengths in the semantical charade to avoid the rhetoric of genocide’. And, as an American official wrote in a 1994 briefing on Rwanda: ‘be careful. ... Genocide finding could commit USG [the United States Government] to “do something’’’. Admit that a genocide is ongoing, and you must surely act to do something about it – if not military intervention, then at least an embargo or trade sanctions – both as a matter of law and basic humanity. In international law, where the principal actors are not individuals, but national governments with obligations to their own people (and sometimes their own pockets), justice takes a back seat to self-interest.

Eventually, once the genocide was committed and hundreds of thousands already dead, the UN Security Council in 1994 created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which indicted ninety-three people. The first conviction issued by the Tribunal came on 2 September 1998. Among those eventually convicted were Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor, and Jean Kambanda, the former Rwandan Prime Minister. The conviction of Akayesu marked ‘the first in which an international tribunal was called upon to interpret the definition of genocide as defined in the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’. This was a hollow victory for a society that was already left devastated and traumatised by genocide.

Gaza

And now, against this horrific background, we must ask: is Israel’s conduct in Gaza a ‘war’ or genocide?

At the very least, it is uncontroversial to say that since October 2023 the world has witnessed unimaginable scenes of horror taking place in Gaza. Parents clinging onto their headless children’s bodies. Dusty grey corpses pulled out of rubble. Generations of families wiped out instantly. Children with sniper wounds to their head and hearts. Charred and limbless corpses. Mass graves. As Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), put it: this war ‘broke all the superlatives’.

The official estimate of the Palestinian health authorities by 10 September 2024 was that more than 41,000 people had been killed, with another 10,000 missing and more than 95,000 injured. About 40 percent of all those killed have been children. Those not killed by air strikes face famine and starvation.Taking account of these second order effects of war, medical professionals have estimated that the true death toll is likely to be orders of magnitude above the current official figures. The authoritative journal The Lancet estimates that if we include unidentified deaths, deaths by starvation, and ‘slow deaths’, the total figure could be 186,000. Not only life has been rendered terrifyingly fragile, so has infrastructure. More than 70 percent of Gaza’s houses have been destroyed, along with every one of its universities and the majority of its schools and hospitals.

Israel has, in the course of proceedings against it in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), acknowledged what it calls ‘humanitarian suffering’ in Gaza, and ‘tragic and agonizing civilian casualties’. The ICJ, when ordering interim measures to protect the population in Gaza on 26 January 2024, described the situation as ‘catastrophic’, noting that ‘many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have no access to the most basic foodstuffs, potable water, electricity, essential medicines or heating’. It reiterated that message again on 28 March 2024 and 24 May 2024, each time indicating further interim measures, and observing ‘the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation’. Israel’s case in the interim relief proceedings has been that these are the regrettable and inevitable consequences of ‘urban warfare against a genocidal terrorist organization’, and it has done everything it can realistically do to mitigate it. It is not, therefore, difficult to say that the result of Israel’s war in Gaza has generated conditions antithetical to human life.

The controversy is over the ‘intent’ component of the genocide definition, that is whether Israel is carrying out its war with the intent of achieving the total destruction of Gaza’s population. For Israel and its supporters, it is both absurd, offensive even, to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of genocide. The former UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, suggested that there was a ‘horrific irony’ in the ICJ ruling against Israel on interim measures to prevent genocide. The implication was that it was unthinkable even to suggest that Israel’s conduct might be characterised in this way. For this outrage in its purest form, one need look no further than Israel’s submissions to the court in the ICJ’s proceedings. South Africa’s case is not only, in Israel’s pleading, unjustified and wrong, but is ‘outrageous’, ‘bellicose and offensive’ and a ‘morally untenable attempt to prevent Israel from exercising its inherent right to defend itself’, by a state seeking to support ‘its ally Hamas’ via ‘shrill’ submissions.

Outside the proceedings, Israel openly accuses the court of antisemitism for daring to entertain, let alone agree with, South Africa’s submissions. In response to the ICJ’s recent decision, in separate proceedings to the genocide case, that Israeli policies and conduct in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amount to systemic discrimination and apartheid, the chairman of Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee decried the court was ‘hijacked by Islamists and their supporters’ and ‘turned from a court of justice into a court of empowering and encouraging terrorism’.

There is ample evidence to support South Africa’s case that what Israel is carrying out is not a programme of legitimate self-defence in response to the atrocities of 7 October 2023 but a campaign of genocide. As it was put by Irfan Galaria, an American doctor who worked in Gaza delivering aid in January 2024, what is happening in Gaza is ‘not war – it was annihilation’. When a state makes impossible demands of civilians to evacuate from northern to southern Gaza on foot within twenty-four hours, only to then proceed anyway to bomb the areas to which evacuees were sent and were told were safe; when a state cuts off all but token access to aid and resources, even in defiance of ICJ orders; when a state destroys the infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of society, in schools, hospitals, universities, government buildings, water facilities; when a state targets NGO aid deliveries; when soldiers film themselves shooting children playing football and roaming houses to destroy possessions of civilians; when all of this is what Israel and its soldiers are doing, the simplest explanation is that its war is driven by the singular intent to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza.

But the accusation of genocidal intent does not need to rest just on inference.There is example after example of Israeli officials, soldiers and prominent civilians making clear their attitude towards the Palestinian people in Gaza. On 4 November 2023, an Israeli army general stated in a public video that whoever ‘returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future’. Israeli army soldiers have been filmed in December 2023 chanting may ‘their village burn, may Gaza be erased’, that ‘there are no uninvolved civilians’, and that they were there to ‘wipe off the seed of Amalek’. That last chant followed from Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements, both publicly and in letters sent to members of the armed forces, likening the conflict to that between the Biblical Israelites and the Amaleks, where the Israelites set out to ‘spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses’.

This rhetoric of total eradication does not arise in isolation but must be seen in the context of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people over the past hundred years, rightly recognised by Amnesty International in 2022, and by the ICJ in 2024, as apartheid. Israel’s protestation that its leaders and soldiers’ words are taken out of context, or that it is doing everything it can to minimise civilian casualties and suffering, would be absurd in any event, in the face of the mounting evidence. In the context of apartheid and decades of illegal settlements seeking to drive the Palestinians out of their land, they represent a perverse distortion of reality.

Israel’s attempt to paint the accusations against it as antisemitic notwithstanding, many human rights experts have used the word genocide without hesitation. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, asserted that there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met’. The director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, who resigned in protest at the inadequacy of the UN’s response to events in Gaza, termed the Gaza crisis as a ‘textbook genocide’. On 14 January 2024, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, characterised Israel’s occupation as ‘genocidal’. On 27 February 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, declared that Israel is ‘intentionally’ starving Palestinians, describing it as ‘a situation of genocide’.

A comprehensive legal analysis was recently published by the University Network for Human Rights, a coalition of universities and academics who examined Israel’s actions since 7 October 2023 in their historical context. The report unequivocally concludes that ‘Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people’.

Israel of course still has its defenders. American President Joe Biden has refused to acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide. Germany likewise remains steadfast in its support of Israel, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock proclaiming ‘in these days we are all Israelis’. Rishi Sunak did not elaborate on why he considered it a ‘horrific irony’ for Israel to be accused of genocide. Presumably he had in mind the misplaced notion that, the term genocide having been coined to describe the treatment of the Jewish people, it is inconceivable that the Jewish state (as Israel describes itself in its Declaration of Independence) could itself ever be guilty of that crime. The sinned against, it is suggested, do not sin themselves. But, as the British journalist James Butler observes ‘it is a sad but abundant historical irony that past oppression can be invoked as a guarantor of moral righteousness, a permanent exculpation, once power is finally attained’. If there is any irony here, it is in the perpetration of genocide, not its accusation.

Notable and respected legal personalities in the UK have spoken out repeatedly to defend Israel’s actions as legitimate self-defence. However, the evidence for genocide is overwhelming. But the defence of Israel, and turning a blind eye to genocide, is an ideological stance. Nothing will persuade an ideologue to acknowledge what is unfolding in front of their eyes. As the Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi asks:

Similar conclusions have been expressed in op ed pieces in the respectable Israeli left-wing newspaper Haaretz, or in the reports and documents by B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights. In a recent opinion piece in Haaretz, Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy laments that ‘Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood.The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged.We are in a genocidal reality; the blood of tens of thousands of people has flowed’. He concludes, ‘this is genocide, even if it does not meet the legal definition’. The spirit of ‘Jewish supremacy’, notes another Haaretz opinion piece, is alive in ‘mainstream Israel’; ‘Israeli’s Dehumanization of the Palestinians has reached a new height’, says another.

‘Social death’

Dehumanisation is the keyword here. The genesis of genocide is often dehumanisation—the systematic stripping away of the human qualities of a person or group. This process is not just a harbinger but a crucial instrument in the execution of genocide. By denying the humanity of the targeted group, perpetrators create a moral and psychological framework that justifies and facilitates extreme acts of violence and brutality.

Historically, both propaganda and discriminatory policies have been central in dehumanising those marked for extermination. During the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda grotesquely portrayed Jews as ‘vermin’ and ‘subhuman’, cultivating widespread hatred that paved the way for their systematic annihilation. In Rwanda, the Hutu extremist radio station RTLM referred to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’, inciting ordinary citizens to partake in the mass slaughter. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in its judgment against Kayishema and Ruzindana, for example, considered derogatory language in its assessment of intent: utterances by the Defendant that referred to Tutsis as inyenzi (‘cockroach’),‘dirt . . . to be removed’, and ‘Tutsi dogs’, constituted evidence of specific intent to commit genocide. In contemporary times, troubling echoes of this dehumanisation are heard in Israel, where the Defence Minister describes Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and the Heritage Minister, mooting the possibility of using nuclear weaponry in Gaza, talks of the ‘monsters in Gaza’.

This attitude of dehumanisation does not spring up out of nowhere. It is the result of decades, sometimes centuries, of ‘othering’, from the levels of high policy to everyday cultural content. Where Hollywood presents Arabs as consistently villainous, often a threat to society or connected to terrorism, this is both a symptom of, and cyclically contributes to, the dehumanisation of the group. Nor are these attitudes limited to fiction. One need only compare the reporting of many western media outlets on the war in Ukraine with their reporting on Afghanistan, both the capture of the country by the Taliban and the plight of the refugees thus engendered. The attempt of some journalists to justify this by explaining that Ukrainians, unlike Afghans, are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’, was grossly offensive but unsurprising. So, when Israeli officials call for ‘total annihilation’ of Gaza, talking of a battle of ‘civilisation against barbarism’, dehumanisation rings in every word.

Dehumanisation strips individuals of their humanity, making it easier for perpetrators to justify and carry out mass killings. Often it is most immediately apparent in the rhetoric used by one group about another. But dehumanisation can also manifest through bureaucratic and systematic measures that reduce individuals to mere statistics or objects, eventually banished to a ‘social death’. The theory of ‘social death,’ coined by sociologist Orlando Patterson, provides a profound perspective through which to understand the mechanisms and consequences of genocide. ‘Social death’ refers to the condition in which a group of people is systematically excluded from the social fabric of society and deprived of their identity, community, and humanity. It is the idea that someone can be identified and treated as if they are ontologically deficient; they are not seen as being ‘fully human’.

Thus, a genocidal society cannot be understood through the lens of rational self-interest. The Chinese state is not meaningfully threatened by Uyghur groups, even from the small terrorist organisations responsible for some attacks in the first years of the twenty-first century. Rather, the presence of bearded, visibly Muslim men who are still Chinese citizens threatens the highly curated psychic space of Chinese political discourse, the idea of a unified national society. In the same way, the population of Gaza seems to represent a threat to the psychic space of Israeli public discourse, at least in terms of the pronouncements and anxieties of its government. As the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh states, ‘the very high human and material cost of the war in Gaza proves that what Israel fears from Palestine is Palestine’s very existence’. The destruction of Palestinian life serves to demonstrate the power of the Israeli state, enforcing ‘social death’ as a means to reinforce the stability of a threatened social structure.

All of this is nothing new. In 1290, when Edward I published a decree requiring the expulsion of all Jews from the Kingdom of England, he did so in a society which demonised and dehumanised Jews as ritualistic child murderers, as an ‘alien, evil, antisocial, and anti-human creature, essentially subhuman’. The Atlantic slave trade justified itself via its conception of African slaves as a mentally inferior variety of humanity. The Nazis portrayed Jews as rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, and vultures, incapable of ordinary human feeling. US soldiers in Abu Ghraib tortured, raped, and desecrated Iraqi prisoners, treated them like dogs, dragging them about on leashes or piling them naked together, and then posing behind them with a beaming grin.

The capacity to reduce the perceived ‘other’ to object or animal – less than animal even – seems a constant feature of human nature.

Coda

Reflecting on the current situation in Gaza, I was struck by a poignant line from Alex Garland’s recent film Civil War, where Lee Smith, a war photographer, laments: ‘every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home, “Don’t do this”, but here we are’. This sentiment mirrors the grim reality of the genocide in Gaza. Despite the harrowing lessons of history, the world continues to witness the systematic persecution and mass murder of populations. The only ‘lessons learnt’ from what has come before seems to be the ease with which states can dissemble and distort reality to avoid confronting what is happening before their eyes.

Genocide stands at the very pinnacle of crimes against humanity. There is no more heinous act, in the international plane, than the targeted and systematic destruction of a people. But the moral righteousness that western states wear so easily when (rightly) condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, to the point of accusing Russia of genocide (Ukraine’s case against Russia in the ICJ is supported by the US and UK among others), becomes unthinkable when the perpetrator of genocide is their ally. The events of Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and many others are a stark reminder of the catastrophic consequences of delayed international intervention. We must not stand by idly as passive observers. We cannot complain that we did not know what was happening; each day brings a relentless stream of horror and destruction, instantly broadcasted through social media reels. Genocide is being live streamed before our eyes.

The warning signs have long been there, echoing through the rhetoric of Israel’s leadership. This ideological drive to erase Palestinian life is a tragic manifestation of the use of the ‘socially dead’ to bolster the stability of a threatened social structure. The idea that the wholesale destruction of Palestinian lives, as nothing more than state power acting in self-defence, is a chilling reflection of this genocidal intent.

The international community is rising. Mass protests in support of Palestine continue to take place; students are protesting on university campuses demanding disinvestment from Israel; people are boycotting brands that support Israel; there is mounting evidence and a growing chorus of respected international human rights lawyers, academics, and experts who have labelled the atrocities in Gaza as genocide. Even the editors of Wikipedia voted in favour of renaming an entry ‘Gaza genocide’ removing the words‘allegations of’. But the wheels of international justice turn slowly. We await the final determination of South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, a process that could take years. Meanwhile, the suffering continues, unabated.

Those speaking out against Israel’s actions do so at their own peril. In an era where dissent is often met with vilification, smear campaigns, and, in some cases, legal repercussions, the courage required to speak truth to power has never been more evident. Activists, journalists, lawyers, and even politicians who dare to condemn the atrocities are frequently labelled as antisemitic or accused of undermining national security. This alarming effect is not only a barrier to free speech but also a dangerous obstacle to justice. The voices of those who bear witness to the suffering and call out the injustice are vital in breaking through the narrative that seeks to justify or obscure the realities on the ground. Yet, these voices are often drowned out by a campaign to delegitimise their concerns. Despite this, the rising global outcry, seen in mass protests, campus movements, and legal challenges, serves as a testament to the growing recognition that what is happening in Gaza cannot be ignored or excused.

The tragedy in Gaza is not just a moment in time but a devastating chapter in the ongoing story of human cruelty. The international community’s failure to act decisively would be a betrayal of what are meant to be its fundamental and universal principles. The haunting images and stories from Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar (and many more) should serve as a dire warning: genocide is not a relic of the past to be reflected upon in a museum or memorial after the fact. From the times of the Romans, it has been a continuous present and urgent danger.

It is time we write a different human story.

References

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ can be accessed at: un.org. See also: Paola Gaeta, The UN Genocide Convention, A Commentary, edited by (OUP, 2009); International Court of Justice, Reservation to the Convention on Genocide, ICJ Report (1951);Tatiana E. Sainati,‘Toward a Comparative Approach to the Crime of Genocide’, Duke Law Journal, 62, 161 (2012), 161-202.

Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide is from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,Washington, 1944); it can be downloaded from: http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ POLS/5450/Yavuz/Lemkin.pdf.

Winston Churchill quote is from his 24 August 1941 broadcast following a meeting with President Roosevelt.Text available online at https://www. ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/410824awp.html.

On the politicisation of genocide, see K E Smith, ‘Avoiding an emotions- action gap? The EU and genocide designations’ in the Journal of European Integration 46(5) (2024), 615-634, discussing the EU’s caution in designating atrocities as genocide, motivated by a fear of its rhetoric outstripping its willingness to act.

The quotations are from: Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, “The United Nations and Genocide: Prevention, Intervention, and Prosecution,” Human Rights Review 5,4 (2004): 8–31, p 9; Donald G Dutton et al, Extreme mass homicide: From military massacre to genocide (Elsevier 2004), quotes from p.445-446, p448, p446-447; James Butler, ‘Trivialised to Death’, London Review of Books 46(16) (15 August 2024); Raja Shehadeh, What does Israel Fear from Palestine (Profile Books, 2024) p. 105; Elif Shafak, How to stay sane in an age of division (Profile Books, 2020) p. 9; Eric Heinze, ‘The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared’, Political Science Quarterly, 122, 3 (2007), 359-383, p366; Hanin Majadil, ‘Kahane’s spirit of Jewish supremacy lives on – in mainstream Israel’. Haaretz 5 September 2024; Gideon Levy,‘In Gaza, Israeli’s Dehumanization of the Palestinians has reached a new height’. Haaretz 14 August 2024; Arwa Mahdawi, ‘Israeli podcasters are laughing about genocide. What would it take to stop?’, The Guardian 6 September 2024; N Sultany, ‘A threshold crossed: on genocidal intent and the duty to prevent genocide in Palestine’ in the Journal of Genocide Research (2024).

On Rwanda, see the March 1999 Human RightsWatch report Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, and the discussion in G H Stanton, ‘Could the Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented?’ (2004) 6(2) Journal of Genocide Research 211; and Rwanda: Genocide Archives Released’ Human Rights Watch (2 April 2024). https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/02/ rwanda-genocide-archives-released

On the Uyghurs, see: Human Rights Watch, “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots”: China’s Crimes against Humanity Targeting Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims’, 19 April 2021 and 21 August 2023. https://www. hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-break-their-roots/ chinas-crimes-against-humanity-targeting United Nations OHCHR, ‘Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China’, 31 August 2022, 7. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/ countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf

On Ukraine, see: Ukraine’s proceedings alleging genocide against Russia in the ICJ, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/182, supported by many states including the USA, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case- related/182/182-20220907-WRI-01-00-EN.pdf.

On Cambodia, see:Tatiana E. Sainati,‘Toward a Comparative Approach to the Crime of Genocide’, Duke Law Journal, 62, 161 (2012), 161-202; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46217896 (16 November 2018); and Donald G Dutton et al, Extreme mass homicide: From military massacre to genocide (Elsevier 2204) p.445-446

On Bosnia, see ICTY press release, ‘Radislav Krstic becomes the First Person to be Convicted of Genocide at the ICTY and is Sentenced to 46 Years Imprisonment’ (2 August 2001), https://www.icty.org/en/ sid/7964; Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/91; https://www. nytimes.com/1999/11/16/world/un-details-its-failure-to-stop-95- bosnia-massacre.html

On Rwanda, see: https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/ assets/pdf/exhibits/Panel-Set2.pdf Dutton p. 446-447; the March 1999 Human Rights Watch report Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, and the discussion in G H Stanton,‘Could the Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented?’ (2004) 6(2) Journal of Genocide Research 211; Rwanda: Genocide Archives Released’ Human Rights Watch (2 April 2024). https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/02/rwanda-genocide- archives-released; and Eric Heinze, ‘The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared’, Political Science Quarterly, 122, 3 (2007), 359-383, 366.

On the death toll in Gaza, see reports by Reuters (https://www.reuters. com/world/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-how-many-palestinians-has- israels-campaign-killed-2024-07-25/) and Al Jazeera (https://www. aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps- and-charts-live-tracker), and analysis published in the Lancet journal (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140- 6736(24)01169-3/fulltext). On famine, see reporting by the OHCHR (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/un-experts- declare-famine-has-spread-throughout-gaza-strip), and on destruction of property, homes and schools see AP News (https://apnews.com/article/ un-report-gaza-destruction-housing-economy-recovery-4f61dcca7db3fd5 eb3da5c6a25001e12), reporting by the OHCHR (https://www.ohchr. org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over- scholasticide-gaza), the European Commission (https://civil-protection- humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/news-stories/news/ palestine-statement-attacks-medical-and-civilian-infrastructure-gaza-and- west-bank-2024-05-20_en), the UN (https://news.un.org/en/ story/2024/03/1147272), Al Jazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/ news/2023/12/31/israeli-bombardment-destroyed-over-70-of-gaza- homes-media-office) and theWall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/ world/middle-east/ gaza-destruction-bombing-israel-aa528542?mod=hp_lead_pos7).

On Israel’s and international responses to the ICJ ruling, see https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/01/26/israel-gaza-genocide-case-icj-stops-short-calling-end-war/, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2024/jan/26/israeli-officials-accuse-international-court-of- justice-of-antisemitic-bias, and https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/ article-811060.The ICJ decision in question, published 19 July 2024, can be accessed online: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case- related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf.

On Israel’s impossible evacuation demands, see https://news.sky.com/ story/gaza-evacuation-why-getting-people-out-in-less-than-24-hours-is- impossible-12983748. On bombing of evacuation routes and safe zones, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/gaza-civilians- afraid-to-leave-home-after-bombing-of-safe-routes, https://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/urgent-need-ceasefire-israeli-forces- attack-safe-zones-rafah; and https://www.aljazeera.com/ gallery/2024/5/27/photos-israel-bombs-yet-another-gaza-camp-it-had- declared-a-safe-zone. On the targeting of aid deliveries, see https://www. reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-is-choked-off-aid-since-crossing- closures-un-agencies-say-2024-05-07/, and https://www.amnesty.org/ en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-defying-icj-ruling-to-prevent-genocide- by-failing-to-allow-adequate-humanitarian-aid-to-reach-gaza/. On the targeting of hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, see https://fxb. harvard.edu/2024/04/09/press-release-new-study-of-satellite-data- shows-israels-assault-on-hospitals-schools-and-water-infrastructure-in- the-gaza-strip-was-not-random/, https://www.ohchr.org/en/ press-releases/2024/02/widespread-destruction-israeli-defence-forces- civilian-infrastructure-gaza, and https://www.hrw.org/ news/2024/05/14/gaza-israelis-attacking-known-aid-worker-locations. On destruction of civilians’ possessions, see https://edition.cnn. com/2023/12/15/middleeast/israeli-soldiers-burningfood-gaza-intl/ index.html. On starvation in Palestine, see https://www.theguardian. com/world/2024/feb/27/ un-israel-food-starvation-palestinians-war-crime-genocide.

On recognition of apartheid in Israel, see https://www.amnesty.org/en/ documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ and https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/ default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf.

For a full analysis of genocide in Gaza, see https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/genocide-in-gaza.

All the legal documents on the case for genocide in Gaza can be found in the International Court of Justice website: icj-cij.org. Some reports in the press: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/15/ israel-kills-more-than-40000-palestinians-in-gaza-16456-of-them-children https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/ un-experts-declare-famine-has-spread-throughout-gaza-strip https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140- 6736(24)01169-3/fulltext https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/ un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza. https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/news-stories/ news/palestine-statement-attacks-medical-and-civilian-infrastructure- gaza-and-west-bank-2024-05-20_en#:~:text=%22Since%20the%20 start%20of%20the,today%20completely%20out%20of%20service Emma Farge,‘UN expert says Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, calls for arms embargo’, Reuters, 26 March 2024. https://www.reuters.com/ world/middle-east/un-expert-says-israel-has-committed-genocide -gaza-calls-arms-embargo-2024-03-26/

Ed Pilkington,‘Top UN official in NewYork steps down citing “genocide” of Palestinian civilians’, The Guardian, 31 October 2023. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/un-official -resigns-israel-hamas-war-palestine-new-york https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/ un-israel-food-starvation-palestinians-war-crime-genocide

On the portrayal of Arabs as terrorists, see Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Open University, 1999), the Sut Jhally documentary ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’, 2006, and on the contrast with portrayal of Ukrainians in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, see https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/ civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine

On the expulsion of Jews from medieval England, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews:The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Jewish Publication Society 2002, reprint of original edition of 1943).

See also Jean Paul Sartre, On Genocide (Beacon Books, 1968); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Harvard University Press, 1982).