I“Ma Genocide Scholar. I know it when I see it”, On Tuesday was the head of a much shared article out The New York Times. Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, described why the endless bombing, shooting, flat-rolling and chasing away in Gaza, according to him, meets the characteristics of genocide. He also signaled a gap between genocide scientists and holocaust experts. The first group is increasingly calling ‘Gaza’ a genocide, the second not. That is not necessarily surprising: genocide scientists are trained to look for patterns, Holocaust experts emphasize the uniqueness of that one terrible areas of popular murder.
I thought it was an interesting and convincing article, and at the same time I wondered if the emphasis on the genocide issue does not distract attention too much. Whether you call Gaza a genocide has since become a test to show which side you are on. What you would almost forget is that genocide is only one of the terms in international law. The French-British lawyer Philippe Sands, who in his book East West Street wrote about the origin of the term in 1944, is therefore critical of the concept. The fact that countries can be prosecuted for genocide in the International Court of Justice, but not for other crimes, the signal issues that genocide is worse. Unjustly, say Sands: “Crimes against humanity and war crimes are just as terrible.”
What remains underexposed by the genocade discussion: if the concept of genocide did not exist, Israel still violated international law. The attacks on Gaza clearly do not meet the requirement of proportionality. With the permanent fire from civilians and the expulsion of the population, Israel commits war crimes and crimes against humanity. The really relevant question is why it can continue to do this virtually unpunished. This week it turned out that the EU could not reach an agreement on sanctions. The second question is what the consequences are – not only for Gaza, but also for international law and the moral function of the Holocaust.
I will reject the great book this week Thinking the Twentieth Centuryin which historian Tony Judt was interviewed for a long time just before his death by his companion Timothy Snyder twenty years younger. Judt, himself Jewish and as a teenager convinced Zionist, was in 2009, when Snyder spoke to him, now very critical of Israel. “Israel loots out the fears, memories and responsibilities of other states. But while doing it, it risks to consume moral capital that made this possible,” said Judt. And: “In the coming years, Israel will destroy the meaning and usability of the Holocaust, by reducing it to what he is already, according to many people: Israel’s excuse for misconduct.”
That is also what Bartov is concerned about it New York Times-article: that the Holocaust loses moral expressiveness by Gaza. “What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide it will no longer be possible to teach and investigate the Holocaust in the way we used to do it. Because the Holocaust has been so constantly called by the Israeli state and its supporters as a cover-up for the holoca-losing the study and heathering of the study and heathering of the study and hurrieding with heathering with her justice. ” The latter is an important point. The Holocaust is, in the words of cultural historian David Wertheim last year De Groene Amsterdammer“The moral foundation of our society.” In the post-religious world, “Auschwitz” became “the source on which liberal democracy could fall back again and again.” The Holocaust as a moral benchmark, a way to teach people what civilization is.
But a moral benchmark is only useful if you can calibrate things about it. Otherwise, the lesson is only literally: “Never again, millions of Jews are allowed to be taken to Poland, put in concentration camps and gassed.” That is not a lesson, because history never repeats the same. That is why terms such as genocide, war crime and crime were devised against humanity: to abstract the historical event and to ensure that we also mind, and intervene, if non-Jews are killed in a country other than Poland in a different way.
You cannot want the Holocaust to remain a moral benchmark at the same time, and start to prance if people, by protesting against the forced moving, starving and unnecessary killing of large groups of people, actually use as a benchmark. By demanding an exception for Israel, defenders of the Israeli government make the Holocaust unusable and the international law, which also arose in response, meaningless.
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC