I couldn’t participate in the March for Humanity protest last Sunday but I am proud that 90,000 Sydney people mustered for the pro-Palestinian event despite the bad weather. This is my protest.
Behind the march there is a war of words occurring—the word at the centre of this Gaza tragedy is “genocide”. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been accused of pursuing genocide against the people of Gaza in retaliation for the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack (that killed 1200 Israelis).
Under Netanyahu’s leadership:
- 60,000 Palestinian have died—mostly civilians, many women and children
- 418 aid workers, including 295 United Nations personnel, have been killed
- 82 adults have died from hunger in Gaza over the last five weeks
- 93 children have also died of malnutrition as food aid is blocked.
Netanyahu has condemned the criticism: “The anti-Israeli circus known as the UN Human Rights Council has long been exposed as an anti-Semitic, corrupt, terror-supporting, and irrelevant body”.
Netanyahu is currently serving his sixth term as PM of Israel, having been elected in December 2022. He is currently on trial for corruption, facing allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust which he has denied. The coalition government he leads is considered the most right-wing and religious government in Israel’s history.
We see our Australian politicians attempting to shut down protests and deflect the moral outrage in our communities. They follow Netanyahu’s lead in portraying Pro-Palestinian protests as anti-semitic. But many Australians want our politicians to do more—to take a moral stand against Netanyahu’s inhumane campaign against the people of Palestine. That means acknowledging that Netanyahu is guilty of genocide.
Meaning of genocide
The word “genocide” combines the Greek “genos” for race, tribe or nation and the Latin “cide” for killing. It was coined in 1943 by a Jewish-Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. He had suffered the horror of The Holocaust. Every member of his family except his brother was killed by the Nazi genocide.
Dr Lemkin began a successful campaign to have genocide recognised as a crime under international law. Part of his definition: “… a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”.
Definition of genocide?
We now recognise genocide as an international crime. The accepted definition states that any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group constitute genocide:
- Killing its members
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm
- Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction (in whole or in part)
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births
- Forcibly transferring children
Some human rights experts have criticised this for not including the destruction of housing and infrastructure (as Lemkin had included).
Is Netanyahu’s war on Gaza genocide?
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant (and also for the Hamas military commander, Mohammed Deif). They found that there were reasonable grounds that actions between October 2023 and May 2024 were:
- The war crime of starvation as a method of warfare
- Crimes against humanity, including murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts
- Intentionally directing attacks against Gaza’s civilian population.
The ICC emphasised that these allegations are not about Israel’s right to self-defence. The allegations are about how the defence was conducted, particularly regarding the humanitarian impact on civilians.
Under international law
Ironically, it may be that having genocide recognised as a crime under international law that holds us back from pointing the finger at Netanyahu. When the law gets involved the argument gets clouded in definition.
For instance in 2001, Gen Radislav Krstic, a former Bosnian Serb general, during his appeal of his conviction for genocide for his part of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide argued that the 8,000 people killed constituted “too insignificant” a number to be a genocide. The court rejected this.
On the other hand “genocide” has been used to exaggerate crimes. They may be crimes against humanity but are not racially, ethnically or religiously motivated. Michael Ignatieff, Canadian academic and former politician, has suggested it is used as a “validation of every kind of victimhood”.
Passing the pub test
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Under this definition what Netanyahu is doing in Gaza is “genocide”. He is deliberately and unequivocably targeting Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu has:
- destroyed their housing and infrastructure
- targeted schools and hospitals with missiles
- restricted their access to food (even attacking queues for food)
- blockaded their routes to safety.
He has targeted witnesses including journalists and humanitarian aid workers, including Australians, in what has been portrayed by the IDF (the Israeli military) as a series of unfortunate accidents.
I want our Government to acknowledge that Netanyahu’s treatment of the Palestinians is genocide by all definitions and to make a moral stance against it.