The power of words

Emotionally charged images, crafty slogans and catchy hashtags

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish-born lawyer who had fled the persecution of the Holocaust and moved to the United States in 1941. Lemkin, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, understood that the problem of mass murder was not new, but he believed that his contemporaries lacked both law and language to help them prevent future atrocities. He came up with the word genocide - defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and several other Palestinian groups launched coordinated and violent armed incursion into Southern Israel, the first invasion of Israeli territory since 1948. There was a Ceasefire in place. In total the attackers killed 1,139- 695 Israeli civilians (including 38 children), 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the security forces. 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, including 30 children. This was the biggest loss of Jewish life in a single attack since the Holocaust. Israel, as is their right both morally and inline with International law, retaliated against the perpetrators with two goals in mind, dismantle Hamas, and retrieve the hostages.

Since Israels retaliation, the word genocide has adorned banners, placards, t-shirts and thousands of social media posts - accusing Israel of genocide. But is it really? It is important to preface any numbers by remembering that information regarding Palestinian casualties has come from the Palestinian Health Ministry (Hamas). No press is allowed inside Gaza without Hamas approval. So it’s impossible to know the real casualty numbers of this conflict. Worst case scenario, based on Hamas number, the casualties including combatants is around 35,000. Assuming 10,000 are combatants, leaves us with a non-combatants at 25,000.

Let’s look at some other regions numbers:

Darfur genocide: 500,000

Rwandan genocide: 800,000

Cambodian genocide: 3,000,000

Bangladesh genocide: 3,000,000

The Nazi Holocaust: 7,000,000

There is no doubt that war is awful. Death is an undeniable consequence of war. However to throw around the word genocide like a weapon, against a group of people who have suffered the most unimaginable horrors, through an extermination that was so horrific, so unlike anything we had witnessed before, that a new word had to be coined, because nothing in the English language came close to describing. Accusing Israel of genocide is a perverse moral inversion. If there is a genocidal force in this war, it must be Hamas. Incorrect use of the term will harm the cause of peace

When you look past the emotionally charged images, crafty slogans and catchy hashtags, the facts and numbers tell a different story. In a region crammed with over 2 million people, in one of the worlds most densely populated areas, a casualty rate of around 25,000 is remarkably small. During the six years of World War 2 it is estimated that up to 70,000,000 million people lost their lives. When the Allies were bombing Dresden or bombing Berlin, imagine telling them “Stop! Too many German lives will be lost!” During World War 2 more than 7 million Germans lost their lives. Catastrophic no doubt, but essential in destroying the Axis of Evil and bringing Hitler and Mussolini down. The greater evil in the bigger picture was destroying the Nazis who planned on continuing their genocidal purge. But lets not forget that 70 million people died for the cause. So what should we have done? Let the Germans and the Japanese take over the world? Allow the Nazis to ethically cleanse the world of Jews, then Blacks, then Asians, then Mexicans - where would it stop? Many millions of men and women gave their lives for the freedom and humanity - for generations they would never meet.

This brings us back to the word genocide. Screamed from College campuses in the West, splashed across social media posts and reels. ‘Stop the Genocide - Globalise the Intifada’ on banner filling our streets, blocking our bridges, spray painted on Holocaust memorial sites. The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” To call the loss of 25,000 non-combatants, during a war in a densly populated geographical location genocide, seems like more than a stretch. To legally prove genocide, you have the additional burden of proving ‘genocidal intent’. The kind of intent that Hamas showed on October 7. The kind of intent that creates a “Charter” stating that ‘Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it’. The genocidal intent displayed by Hamas on October 7 was clear - to obliterate as many Israelis as they could. The dead were slaughtered indiscriminately - women, children, men, civilians, dogs and the elderly. Despite social media’s best attempts to convince us otherwise, Israel has shown great restraint and precision in a retaliation to the invasion of their borders on October 7. Israel isn’t staging a coup or fighting a civil war. It was perfectly content — indeed, in retrospect, much too content — to live with a Gaza controlled by Hamas until it was subjected to a heinous attack that no other society today or in any other period in history would tolerate. Israel while not perfect (no Country is) seeks to honour the rules of war while operating in a dense urban environment against a merciless enemy that wants as many civilians to be killed as possible.

For Hamas, there are no rules.

So why is Israel held to a different standard than the rest of the world? Why aren’t people protesting in the streets to demand the ‘Janjaweed’ in Darfur end the genocide? Nearly 500,000 people have been killed, women have been systematically raped and millions of people have been displaced. Their intent is clear as the Arab militia groups target the ethnic African groups. Half a million dead – and I’ve yet to see one single protest calling the for end of that genocide. Not one of my ‘friends’ on social media has posted a single meme or fact in support of the ethnic cleansing of the Sudanese. Not one.

Israel is not seeking to destroy the Palestinian people or the Palestinian population of Gaza. If they are indeed intent on a genocide, why then have they consistently alerted Palestinian civilians to leave locations they are going to target? Why have they allowed 531,160 tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza? Why are they still providing water and electricity? If genocide is the goal of Israel, they are doing a terrible job.

Darfur, Sudan