Israel’s massacres in Gaza for the last three months proved certain points. Even if you have been subjected to genocide, it doesn’t mean that you yourself would not attempt to destroy other people. The international system has not found a solution to the problem of genocide yet. The world, especially the West, still has a paranoid tendency to overlook the violence inflicted on noncombatant civilians.
These are general lessons we have. A. Dirk Moses, professor of international relations at the City College of New York, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and the author of "The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression," details other lessons from the universal problem of genocide: It is not only a problem of mass death but also of how it distorts thinking about civilian destruction.
As individuals, we think that there is such a normative universal attitude about civilian immunity from military attacks. Moses argues that international criminal law, “atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes,'” made it so difficult to persecute genocide.
“If there are to be future wars, we have got to win them. We can only win by being better killers, by killing more and killing more quickly than the enemy, by killing with less risk to ourselves,” were the words penned by the American jurist Robert Jackson, who was the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials and later became an associate justice at the U.S. Supreme Court. The piece was featured in The New York Times Magazine in September 1945, in an article explaining the trials to the American public.
Moses finds these words “brazen.”
At the Nurnberg, the Allies were going to try the representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries and atrocities against their citizens in World War II. The wounds of the war were so fresh that even a jurist, whose country had only a couple of months ago inflicted such a blatant crime against innocent Japanese civilians dropping two nuclear bombs on their cities and killing 105,000 people in a matter of a day (one year later the total number of casualties would exceed 226,000), could be that careless of what other people might think about them or their words.
But as Moses notes, Jackson, to his credit, also concluded that future wars with their main strategy “to kill and maim the enemy and to destroy all that shelters him and all that he lives by not only in the field but at home, until they surrendered” would have a major point that differentiates them from genocide. Wars, either as “self-defense” or for “permanent security,” are, by definition, fought for military purposes; “The Nazis, by contrast, had murdered civilians for no military purpose,” Jackson later said during the Nuremberg Trials.
A small reservation here: Not all “military” wars could be described as Justice Jackson does. We have to remember that some nations, for example, Türkiye, in their fight against terrorism, and their operations when they follow them beyond their national borders, have been conducting surgical maneuvers to uproot them. We’ll come back to this point, later.
As an American jurist, Jackson had to find a way to exonerate his country’s murder of mostly old retirees, (Nagasaki and Hiroshima were inhabited mostly by retired imperial and bureaucratic employees), totaling 100,000 “noncombatant civilians” overnight as “killing the enemy's civilians until they surrendered” was still serving a military purpose; it was not genocide.
Hence the almost impossibility of criminal conviction of genocide, and almost universal tolerance of “bombing enemies” to force them into submission. The “civilized” people of the West turned their heads the other way when the U.S. flattened North Korea in the early 1950s and later Vietnam, to the Russian shells of Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, to Bashar Assad regime's barrel bombs in Aleppo and Homs, and the Saudis destroying Yemen. Now they do the same thing when the Zionist murderer in Tel Aviv is destroying the whole civilian society in Gaza. Just because the "ZioNazis" are not transporting babies and women as well as old men to killing fields or to death camps in trains, you cannot say what they do is not genocide.
I strongly suggest Moses’s book titled “The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression” should be on a must-read list in all humanities courses. He opens the thesis that the Holocaust was not just another instance of civilian destruction but it brought “something entirely different” into the discussion, and seems to successfully win the argument: Killing masses of civilians cannot be acceptable because it was motivated by the military goal of victory but not the destruction of the people.
“The grotesque nature of the law of genocide, however, is that victim numbers are irrelevant. All that counts is intent. ... Awful but lawful, as the saying goes, even if so-called ‘civilized’ warfare is far more lethal than so-called ‘barbaric’ violence,” Moses writes.
Humanity can prove that this is not ethical; it is not right. He argues in his book that permanent security is an unobtainable goal, and it results in a paranoid tendency to indiscriminate violence. If the Holocaust and other instances of genocide were motivated by the destruction of the people, so was Israel’s war on the Gazan people. Military strategists and politicians are inclined to excuse “collateral damage” as unavoidable. Moses disputes the doctrine that permits the killing of innocents as a “side-effect of a moral end”: “What does it matter to civilians if they were killed by violence inflicted with genocidal or military intent?”
In three short months, Israel has murdered almost 30,000 civilian Palestinians and this barbaric violence is tantamount to a crime against humanity – whether it is called genocide or not. The blood is on each and every Israeli citizen’s hand.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the military coordinator in Gaza, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, and 40 other Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders have been responsible for planning, ordering and executing Israel's indiscriminate bombardment, wanton destruction and mass killing of civilians in Gaza; they all should be prime suspects in any ICC investigation.
If Israel has these people properly punished, then and only then can it again claim its proper place among the civilized nations of the world.
There is good news coming from Israel that Netanyahu seems to be terrified of an internal coup against him; apparently, the Israeli army is exhausted, and soldiers are asking for evacuation. Israel’s elite forces have been beaten; even U.S. President Joe Biden has asked for a formula to stop the war.
Gaza will win in the end despite all the pain. The “disaster” (nakba) Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians will hit Israel on the head, eventually. However, the Israeli people should make sure that they will not be convicted along with the perpetrators of the genocide that their country has been committing for the last 75 years.
