Genocide: An Idea for our Times

Eighty years ago this month, as the final winter of the Second World War began, the exiled Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin published his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in which he proposed the idea of genocide.

Remarkably, only four years later it was codified in the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which remains one of the foundations of international law. 

Today, Lemkin’s idea is invoked on the streets wherever people protest against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and the Convention is at the heart of the case that South Africa has brought against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Yet politicians, even those trained as lawyers, are turning their backs on “genocide”: last month Keir Starmer, while claiming to uphold international law, was at pains to deny that genocide is in any way relevant to Gaza.

Lemkin’s idea, which he had in fact spelled out a decade before he coined the new word, was quite simple: we can’t just look at the individual atrocities that states and armies commit against civilians – which could be one type of “war crime” or another – we have also to look at their overall purpose. If they are not merely harming civilians in order to destroy their armed enemies, but also because they aim to destroy a civilian population as such, this is a “general” crime, genocide, which includes all the individual war crimes.

As the title of Lemkin’s book suggested, he initially identified the problem of genocide in Nazi Germany’s occupation of continental Europe.

He believed that genocide was being committed through a battery of techniques, attacking the social, economic, cultural and political life of populations as well as killing them.

Lemkin showed that societies were “crippled” – for example by being deprived of food and through occupation laws which denied the existence of nations – as well as directly exterminated.

The UN’s great powers narrowed down Lemkin’s idea a bit when they agreed the Convention, but they still created a powerful legal tool.

At first it appeared stillborn, because after the Cold War developed, neither the Soviet nor the Western bloc wanted their own atrocities examined by international courts.

But after the Cold War ended, it was used by Bosnia to get recognition of the Serbian campaign to “ethnically cleanse” its country: the ICJ ruled that one episode, the Srebrenica massacre, was genocide, and the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia convicted Serbian leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Rwandan leaders were convicted for the 1994 genocide in a similar tribunal.

In any case, the idea had caught the public imagination as a way of encapsulating the enormity of powerful states targeting civilian populations or minorities.

But while both Lemkin and the Convention had defined genocide as a multifaceted process involving many methods, public discussion often simplified the idea, boiling it down simply to mass killing.

This simplification tied in with a tendency to equate genocide with the Holocaust, often in order to dismiss other cases as not being quite like the extermination of the Jews – although the whole point of defining a general concept is to be able to include cases that differ in important respects, as long as they conform to the basic notion.

A recent example of how this simplification is misused was when David Lammy said, about Gaza, that terms like genocide were “largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term”.

This is how a man who commemorated the Srebrenica genocide, in which 8,000 died, now declines to recognise Israel’s which has killed well over 40,000.

The truth is that genocide is such a powerful idea, and the obligations that the Convention places on all signatory states to “prevent and punish” it so serious, that official denial has become the norm – even when the deliberate destruction of a group is live-streamed across the internet and everyone can read Israel’s leaders incitements and watch its soldiers and settlers celebrating the destruction of other people’s lives. 

Prosecutors and judges are a difficult position when powerful states are so obviously unenthusiastic about enforcing the law of genocide. The international lawyer Philippe Sands has complained that while the Convention sets a high threshold for proving genocide, the ICJ has “pushed the threshold even higher”.

He is so frustrated at not being able to persuade them to lower it that he even wonders if it was even a useful thing for Lemkin to invent the idea of genocide.

We cannot give into such pessimism. It is certainly possible that the judges of the ICJ – despite giving Israel instructions to obey the law of genocide which it has duly ignored – will use the unreasonably high threshold from previous cases to balk at finding that it has committed genocide in Gaza. But it is also possible that they will grasp the nettle, recognising that with this case, legal equivocation must come to an end.

We know that denial of genocide is as old as the phenomenon itself. Tame media will ban the very word from the airwaves so as not to offend politicians. Political leaders themselves will avoid talking about genocide, to protect themselves not only from demands to stop it, but also from scrutiny of their complicity – Israel has been helped by RAF surveillance, British-made weapons and parts for its bombers, and diplomatic support, all of which the Starmer Government has continued. 

“Genocide” is not only an idea for lawyers or even academics, who are now building a formidable body of genocide history. It is an idea that deserves to be at the centre of our public discourse wherever powerful states and armed actors seek to destroy groups of people – whether in Gaza, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar or anywhere else in our war-torn world.