We Need to Talk About Genocide

[Guy S Goodwin-Gill is Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and Honorary Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney]

Few if any of us will ever meet Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, or others of that ilk who have organised the aberrant architecture of genocide and encouraged the climate of death, maiming, starvation and destruction that is Gaza today.

No independent inquiries look into the daily killing of countless children and other Palestinians as they search for food. All we ever get from the Israel Defense Forces are weasel words. They just fired ‘warning shots’ which somehow killed dozens. They question the accuracy of the casualty count. Or claim that those killed were proportionately collateral to an attack on a Hamas militant. They insist that plenty of food is there for the starving, or they claim it has been stolen, or they blame non-delivery on the United Nations.

‘Genocide’ is a hard word to use – and can be harder to apply in practice. It requires proof of intent, among others, to kill or harm ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Some 800,000 Tutsi were killed in Rwanda in 1994, untold numbers of Rohingya were killed in Myanmar in 2017, triggering a major refugee exodus to Bangladesh. Between 2003 and 2005, an estimated 200,000 Darfuri men, women and children were killed in Sudan, with further massacres of Masalit people in 2023 and since.

Although some were successfully prosecuted for their actions in Rwanda, the use of the veto by UN Security Council members China and Russia shows how difficult it is to get positive international action in Myanmar and Sudan.

In Gaza, Israel’s campaign is supported by the United States, which has also used its veto to stop concerted action. Until its recent conditional promise to recognise Palestine, the United Kingdom government has seemed more intent on prosecuting those who protest the policy and practice of genocide rather than in actually doing anything other than uttering occasional words of mild reproof. 

Writing in the New York Review of Books recently, American historian Christopher R. Browning recalled the words of genocide scholar, the late Helen Fein, who noted in her 1979 study that genocide is enabled by placing its victims ‘outside the universe of obligation’. He also cited German historian Thomas Kühne who, in his 2010 work on the crimes of Nazi Germany, writes of the coercive power of the ‘morality of immorality’ where traditions of universalism, humanity and individual responsibility are replaced by a ‘moral inversion’, in which ‘killing a population outside the community of obligation’ became a duty.

The facts today speak for themselves, loud and clear. The acts of killing and maiming go on, not committed by Netanyahu and his class, but by ordinary soldiers and pilots. Ordinary people who, if they think about what they do at all, know that they will face no consequences for any ‘errors’ or ‘misjudgements’ they may make. Operating within the aberrant architecture, constructed and now reinforced pillar by pillar, brick by brick, they know subconsciously or otherwise that they act with impunity under local law. They know that, no matter the numbers killed, they the killers are immune from inquiry, from prosecution, from punishment – even from shame.

The latest report merely confirms what has long been known in the West Bank and Gaza – that Israel rarely, if ever, takes seriously the killing and violence against Palestinians committed by its forces or by settlers whom it arms but refuses to control.

As former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently remarked, no order to commit war crimes or genocide is ever given. Instead, the military – individual soldiers and pilots – just know that they act with impunity. They know that their killing of children will be dismissed as a ‘technical error’, or that it was unfortunately ‘necessary’. That deaths were collateral to some greater military necessity, some objective that may or may not have been achieved.

But why should this be – and should we put up with it?

An End to Impunity

Conscription is more or less universal in Israel and, apart from limited exceptions, every Israeli must do military service on reaching 18 years of age and is liable to be called up until he or she reaches 40. This means that many Israelis, if not themselves suspected of criminal acts, are potential sources of information regarding events in Gaza and the West Bank – whether a bomb dropped on a café, or tank and rifle fire directed at Palestinians seeking food or medical assistance.

Israelis, understandably, want and like to travel – whether to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Africa, Europe or Latin America.

If governments were serious about sanctions and about their international duty to prevent and to punish genocide and to bring an end to years of impunity, they would actively consider imposing a visa requirement on every Israeli of military age. Its issue should be conditional on a full and frank response to the question: ‘Where were you and what did you do during the war on Gaza?’ Without a frank, credible response, entry would be denied. The information gathered would, in turn, be cross-checked with news sources, including verification sites and governments’ own resources. Then there should be appropriate follow-up under local law – Australian, Canadian, British, European, among others – that provides for the prosecution of those, hopefully few, who have engaged in war crimes and acts of genocide, and against the architects of genocide.

Such a visa system or control over entry, though appealing, is unlikely, and political and legal obstacles still stand in the way of prosecutions. But still we the people – ordinary people – have the right to know with whom we are sharing our common space. We certainly do not need to wait for a court to pronounce on whether genocide is being or has been committed.

This, by definition, always comes too late in the day.

The People’s Judgement

Every act of the military must be judged, every time they pull a trigger, fire a shell, or drop a bomb. And if we, the community of the people of the world, cannot rely on our leaders to condemn the architects or to investigate and prosecute, then we must inquire ourselves – asking every Israeli citizen we meet: ‘What have you done, and what are you doing in this war?’ But politely – after all, we are not prosecutors.

And by not accepting ‘nothing’ as an answer, we must then inquire further. We must make it known that we do not want and will not share our space with war criminals or génocidaires.

We need to talk about war crimes, about crimes against humanity. We need, we really need, to talk about genocide.