When Hateful Intent Eclipses the Intended Meaning of “Genocide”

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, coined the term “genocide”. In so doing, he specifically detailed methods used to wreck the cultural, social and the very biological life of targeted populations. The essence of Lemkin’s work is that genocide is not a single event, but rather a systematic, deadly pattern of persecution inflicted upon a specific, targeted group based on a characteristic such as race, religion or other identity.

Lemkin created the term in the midst of the Holocaust, Hitler’s unambiguously intentional and barbaric design to eliminate the Jewish people. Lemkin would turn in his grave were he to see how the term has been trivialized today, tossed about with abandon to fit the whims of those who use it to support their immediate political agendas, and most recently hurled with great ferocity at Israel in relation to Gaza.

This is not to say that the Jewish world warrants special status or proprietary dominion over the word genocide. The word clearly applies to events beyond the Holocaust in Europe, and indeed has entered the lexicon. While often interpreted differently among scholars and laymen, no one can legitimately argue that the Holocaust was the first, last or only genocide. Indeed, Lemkin himself was deeply troubled by the Ottoman Genocide of the Armenian people during World War I. And had he lived long enough, he surely would easily have recognized the 1994 genocide in which the Tutsis were systematically killed by Hutu militias in the Rwandan Genocide. Indeed, the term itself has given us a better definitional framework for serious historical examination of mass murders that take place against specific groups and populations.

Now, however, we somehow find the word “genocide” being used to characterize a military operation such as Israel’s incursion into Gaza after October 7. They word is accordingly being utilized by those with anti-Zionist, perhaps anti-Semitic, agendas as an impetus. The Gaza attack is defined that way rather than as a reactive incursion into enemy territory in which, admittedly, far too many innocent Palestinian civilians were collaterally killed during an effort to kill the Hamas terrorists who perpetrated the attack on Israel, and to rescue the Israeli hostages taken in the process. And those who engage in this genocide-mislabeling do so even though so many supporters of the anti-Zionist rhetoric actually congratulated Hamas on October 8 – shockingly, even before the Gaza attack began.

It is also intriguing, indeed, that Israel’s detractors regarding Gaza never mention America’s A-bomb attack on Hiroshima as genocidal. This, even though that attack wasn’t directed at the Japanese military, and killed well over 100,000 Japanese, far more than the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza. The victims of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) were largely civilians who weren’t considered responsible for Pearl Harbor or World War II. Yet, albeit often condemned in many circles, the bombings are seen as legitimate acts of war intended to end the World War II conflict in the Pacific. In the thinking at that time, an enormous number of Japanese civilians were simply killed as “collateral damage” from the nuclear bombings. (Western racism may have played a role in the widespread international indifference).

And so, the ugliness of “genocide” lies in the eye, purpose and political agenda of the beholder. At day’s end, there is no universally accepted meaning for the word. Lemkin’s intent in creating it, as briefly outlined above, has simply become replaced by the purpose for which its current agenda-driven proponents, such as New York City’s mayor, strategically employ it. That is, to condemn Israel and its prime minister as genocidal, deftly inverting the Holocaust legacy and rendering the Jew as the evil predator.

Accordingly, we are somewhat foolish in rising to the bait, complaining about the use of “genocide” regarding Israel and Gaza, generally. Put simply, we can’t stop the word from being diluted and bastardized by the activist proponents who employ it while recklessly dispensing with its bedrock meaning; that is, a hateful intent to effectively destroy a people — something Israel could have easily accomplished had that been the nation’s goal. So, one might ask, why bother to object?

Why bother? Mayor Mamdani, a leader of the “genocide” cavalry – maybe even better called its pied piper – is distressingly unconcerned with the danger he foments in using it. Words have meaning, often with unintended dramatic consequence. I’m no fan of Israel’s Prime Minister, but if we, as a people, don’t stand up to the mayor’s blatantly purposeful commentary, e.g., calling the Prime Minister a “war criminal” and “an architect of horrific genocide”, we will eventually all be tarred with the same brush merely because we might support the State of Israel.

And even more disturbingly, merely because we’re Jews!