After reading what Varadkar said about genocide yesterday (“Varadkar rules out joining South African genocide case”), there are many things you could say. I’m going to gloss over whether a man who contradicts himself in mid argument is fit to be in government, and focus on a bigger issue.
Genocide is where somebody selectively kills part of a population because of their race, religion, ethnicity, creed, etc.
It is not necessary to kill every member of of the target group, to commit a genocide.
Genocide is a two part process. The target population is first isolated in a certain place, then massacred. If non-target people are first given the opportunity to leave, before the massacre starts, then that is further evidence of genocide.
Common definitions of genocide (and there are several) focus on intent. Intent is difficult to prove. Definitions of crimes only make sense when they focus on the actual act, not on speculation about actor’s intent.
A bombing is not a genocide, nor is a massacre. Isolating a certain population inside a walled off region, and then bombing it, is a genocide. Isolating a people in a certain region, then withdrawing the supply of water, or blocking the importation of medicine, is also genocide. Driving into a town and shooting everyone, is not genocide.
It’s no great mystery what genocide is in the context of the UN’s International Criminal Court.
Article II
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; © 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.
I’d say Israel is unquestionably doing a, b, and c. There’s a strong argument to be made that the utter destruction and targeting of hospitals for bombing constitutes D. AFAIK they’re not doing E. But here’s the thing: only one of those points needs to be true to qualify as a genocide.
Well the UN has a definition, it’s really narrow (they did it on purpose to let a lot of their members who did genocide off the hook) but it’s at least a starting point. Generally speaking, it’s when your intent is to wipe out a people, either through outright murder or cultural erasure.
