Yes, it is Genocide

Imagine a minority population, in the midst of a land surrounded by people of a different religion and ethnicity, where there has been violence against the minority by the majority in authority, and where the minority is treated, both by law and custom, as second-class citizens – not afforded the full rights of citizenship despite having lived on the land for countless centuries.

Imagine that this minority is then subject to the worst atrocities by the majority – a majority that has all of the advanced weaponry.  Death and destruction ensue, with most of this poor minority population displaced, and many of them killed.  Men, woman, children, combatant or not – all subject to the same devastation.

Imagine that the justification for this heinous act is that a small handful of individuals from this minority population have committed what is considered some form of terrorist action against the majority population.  Not justifiable, perhaps, but very much understandable given the harsh treatment for as long as any of the minority population (as well as parents and grandparents) has been alive.

Imagine further justification for this devastation was the fear that the minority population would side with the enemy in any instance of war.  Again, maybe true for a handful of this minority population, but not for any meaningful percentage.

There once was such a genocide:

The first non-colonial genocide of the twentieth-century was the Armenian catastrophe in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It started in early 1915, when the Young Turk regime rounded up hundreds of Armenians and hanged many of them in the streets of Istanbul, before beginning the genocidal deportation of most of the Armenian population to the desert, in which up to a million died or were murdered en route.

The Armenian minority in Ottoman Turkey had been subject to sporadic persecutions over the centuries. … From 1915, inspired by rabid nationalism and secret government orders, Turks drove the Armenians from their homes and massacred them in such numbers that outside observers at the time described what was happening as ‘a massacre like none other,’ or ‘a massacre that changes the meaning of massacre.’

In this genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, all of those imaginings were realized.  Every single one.  Of course, they are all just as true of Israel’s current actions against the Palestinians.

From a video of Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, with Aaron Mate; Finkelstein succinctly lists statements made by senior Israeli officials on October 8, one day after the incursion by Hamas:

1)      Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: We are not letting in any water, food, fuel, or electricity. 

2)      Israeli President Isaac Herzog: We don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in Gaza; they’re all Hamas.

3)      Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: This is going to be a very long war, much longer than any before

On this last point, per Finkelstein, the longest recent massacre-style war was in July-August 2014, that lasted 51 days.

Finkelstein then summarizes what this means:

What you get is no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, for 51 plus days, to the entire population of Gaza.  That was stated on October 8.  That is a murder plan, that is a genocide plan.  And since that day, everything Israel has done has been in accordance with that genocidal plan.

Article II of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (PDF)” states:

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:

(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;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

There is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical group.  On the five considerations, the answers to the first three are a simple “yes.”  To the last two, given the completely indiscriminate killing by Israel today, if births were merely being prevented and children were merely being transferred, it would be a blessed mercy.

Genocide is genocide.  What’s happening in Gaza is genocide, but this one, unlike the one against the Armenians more than a century ago, is being witnessed live by billions around the world. 

Like the one against the Armenians, there is plenty of talk, but those who could actually do something to put a stop to it aren’t.