Last week, the Times published an opinion piece by the historian Omer Bartov, which raised the question of whether Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening,” Bartov wrote. “That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse.” (More than eleven thousand Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. A State Department official testified before Congress that it is “very possible” that the figure is even higher than reported.)
Bartov, who was born in Israel and currently teaches at Brown University, is one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust, as well as German policy during the Third Reich. In numerous books and essays, he has sought to explain how Nazi ideology manifested throughout Hitler’s regime–and especially in its military. Bartov ended this latest piece by writing, “There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer.” I recently spoke by phone with Bartov. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how precisely to define genocide, the importance of establishing intent when labelling something a genocide, and why a focus on terminology can be important in preventing mass atrocities.
What distinguishes genocide from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing?
There are clear differences in international law. War crimes were defined in 1949 in the Geneva Conventions and other protocols. They are serious violations of the laws and customs of war and international armed conflict, and they can be committed against either combatants or civilians. One aspect of this is the use of disproportionate force—that the extent of the harm done to civilians should be proportionate to your military goals. It could also be other things, such as the maltreatment of prisoners of war.
Crimes against humanity do not have a U.N. resolution, but they were defined by the Rome Statute, which is now the basis for the International Criminal Court. That talks about extermination or other crimes against civilian populations, and it does not have to happen in war, whereas war crimes obviously have to happen in the context of war.
Genocide is a bit of a strange animal because the Genocide Convention of 1948, on which it’s based, defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” And this “as such” matters because what it means is that genocide is really the attempt to destroy the group and not the individuals in that group. It can be accomplished by killing members of the group. It can also be accomplished by other means such as starving them or taking away their children, or something that will bring about the extinction of the group rather than killing its individuals.
Yes, I was going to ask about the word “destroy,” and whether it is very clear that that means “kill.”
No, it doesn’t. Now, usually, not just in the popular imagination but also in law, often the association is with killing. When Raphael Lemkin was coming up with this term—he was a Polish Jewish lawyer who came to the United States during the Holocaust—he spoke specifically about a cultural genocide, which is when you really just destroy the group as a group. So let’s say there may be Jewish people around, but they don’t know that they’re Jews anymore, or you take all their children away and therefore there won’t be a continuation of that group. It doesn’t necessarily mean killing. In Australia or Canada, where there was removal of children from Indigenous groups, that has been defined as genocide.
The current example that people often use is what’s happening to the Uyghur population in China, even though as far as we know there are no mass killing campaigns.
Yes, destroying their culture.
Is the term “ethnic cleansing” used more to talk about removing people from a certain territory?
Yeah, so the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing is roughly that in ethnic cleansing you want to move people from a territory that you want, and then they can go wherever they want. In a genocide, you target the group never mind where they are. But it should be said that ethnic cleansing actually does not have a clear definition in international law, and it comes under various other categories of crimes against humanity. There’s no convention on ethnic cleansing. And the last very important thing about it is that ethnic cleansing usually or often has preceded genocide. That actually happened in the genocide of the Herero, starting in 1904, and the genocide of the Armenians, starting in 1915. The Holocaust arguably began as ethnic cleansing, as removing Jews from territories controlled by Germany, and then when there’s no place to move them to, the Germans said, “Well, we might as well kill them.” So there is a connection between them.
The Herero were people in what is modern-day Namibia, and you are referring to the German behavior toward them, correct?