(Editor’s note: At press time came the announcement of the Jan. 15 ceasefire and prisoner/hostage exchange between Hamas and the Israeli government. This agreement is welcome, but it remains to be seen whether the terms of the agreement will be met. Either way, the situation on the ground in Gaza is horrible, the harm done is beyond imagination and the Palestinians still have not achieved self-determination.)
It’s 2025, and we are fast approaching the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials.
Held shortly after World War II, these military tribunals were intended to put an end to Nazism, to expose the depravity of the Nazi “Master Race” ideology, to document their war crimes and crimes against humanity, to condemn the Nazis’ “final solution” to “the Jewish problem” and to bring accountability to the worst of the worst Nazi perpetrators.
Nuremberg contributed to the evolution of international norms in restricting barbarity in warfare. These include the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the additional protocols of 1977 and 2005 aimed at preventing future genocides and punishing genocidal actors.
My family has a connection to the Nuremberg trials. My wife’s father served as a military police officer in the Nuremberg courtroom. My own father served in the army unit that liberated Dachau, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich, in late April 1945. Some of the infamous photos of starved and naked dead bodies stacked in railroad cars were taken by my father, supplying the kind of evidence used at Nuremberg.
A Little Matter of Genocide
The term genocide was coined by Polish-Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Since then, the meaning of the word genocide has been disputed. So what is genocide?
It’s a bit of a slippery term. Some assume that unless every last member of a group is exterminated or “disappeared,” it’s not genocide. That’s not true.
The Geneva Convention of 1948 defines genocide as “the commission of grave harm against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing, causing serious physical and mental harm, imposing measures to prevent births or forcibly taking away children”—with the intent of destroying the group as a group.
It’s not a “little” matter. But it is controversial because nobody wants their group to be accused of genocide. It just isn’t a good look.
Building Some Context
Which brings us to the current moment and a big question: Are the Israelis conducting genocide against the Palestinians?
To answer that question, we need to zoom out and acknowledge that the present situation did not begin with the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Let’s build some context.
The Jewish people have a long, tortured history in Europe. Antisemites (Jew haters) consistently spread vicious lies against Jewish people (the “Christ killers” lie, the “blood libel” lie, the lies about world domination perpetrated in the forgery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Periodically, pogroms would break out and whole Jewish communities would be massacred or driven off. Anti-Jewish hatred eventually culminated in the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
After World War II, to assuage European guilt over the Holocaust, the United Nations created space for a new independent nation-state in the Jews’ erstwhile-biblical homeland. The Israelis’ main patron in this effort, and the world hegemon at the end of World War II, was the United States.
The UN decision initially spoke of a two-state solution: an Arab/Palestinian state and a Jewish state. But fighting soon broke out. The murder and mayhem lasted two years, with Israel emerging as the victor. It devastated the Palestinians. They call it the Nakbah (“catastrophe” in Arabic)—530 Palestinian villages were burned to the ground or depopulated, resulting in more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza.
If we want to be truthful and fair, we need to acknowledge that Arabic-speaking Palestinians (majority Muslims, minority Christians) are the longstanding indigenous people of that land. Therefore, we cannot simply “erase” the Palestinians with clever-sounding slogans like “a land without a people for a people without a land.” That is a lie. Palestine was a flourishing, populated place before the Israelis took over.
Furthermore, the Jewish nationalists who founded the modern state of Israel never intended to live side by side in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The plan all along was to occupy as much of the land as possible, by means legal and extralegal, and to replace the original inhabitants with Jewish settlers. That is what the “Jewish settlements” are all about: making life difficult or impossible for Palestinians, grabbing land that was in Palestinian hands and parceling it out to Jewish settlers.
It is inaccurate to call the Israel-Palestinian conflict a “war.” The term war assumes some measure of balance between the combatants, of militaries confronting each other and duking it out on fields of battle.
Not a one-sided fight in which one side has an unlimited bank account that it can draw upon (the United States) and all the latest technology and advanced killing machines. Not when one side kills men, women, babies, children and old people indiscriminately and with utter impunity—while the other side has been forced into abject poverty by the oppressors and yet somehow still manages to resist complete subjugation.
But Is It Genocide?
By the numbers, Israel has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians in the present conflict. More than 109,000 have been wounded, and more than half of those were women and children. More than 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced.
The International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN organizations are saying that Israel actions in Gaza are plausibly “genocide” or are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” The Jewish Voice for Peace calls it “live-stream genocide.”
On the other hand, the conservative American Jewish Committee claims it is not genocide, places all the blame on Hamas and claims that Israeli actions reflect “the desire to spare Palestinian civilians, not deliberately harm [them].”
Moreover, pro-Israel bias is rife in our legacy media. At the New York Times, top editors ordered journalists to restrict the use of terms such as genocide and ethnic cleansing, in effect hiding from their readers the awful reality.
Meanwhile, Biden’s State Department gaslights us, asserting that the accusation of genocide is “certainly unfounded.”
All this while white American “evangelicals” say that no matter what the United States must support Israel as we tumble ever more chaotically toward the End of the World.
Let’s measure the Israeli government’s actions against the UN definition of genocide.
- Has there been grave harm committed against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group? Check.
- Has there been killing, causing serious physical and mental harm? Check.
- Have measures been imposed to prevent births or forcibly taking away children? Check.
- Have actions shown an intent to destroy the group as a group? Check.
To elaborate, in Gaza the Israeli Defense Forces have engaged in a campaign of cultural and physical elimination. They have
- ordered Palestinians by phone or text to leave their residences “temporarily,” then bombed those places to oblivion
- ordered Palestinians to evacuate to “safe zones” and then attacked those so-called safe zones
- flattened large sections of the territory
- drastically reduced food and water, subjecting the Palestinians to forced starvation
- restricted needed medicines from entering the territory
- destroyed water and sewer infrastructure
- destroyed electric infrastructure
- destroyed 80% of schools and 100% of the universities (all 12 of them)
- destroyed the last three functioning hospitals in North Gaza, stripping and detaining dozens of medical workers and arresting the head of the hospital, holding him in a secret location where torture is known to happen
- targeted and killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists and media workers who were clearly marked as journalists, attempting to cut off the information flow of what they are doing
- targeted children (with a proliferation of head wounds from bullets)
- used drones to assassinate suspected Hamas members, heedless of innocent civilians nearby
A Lamentation
We don’t have the space here to go into how Israel’s actions mirror U.S. history with regard to how we have treated the Indigenous people of this land.
But it brings me consternation and heartache to realize that Israel could not continue to practice its genocide of the Palestinians without the assistance and tacit approval of my own country.
We Americans take great pride in seeing our country as “the leader of the free world.” And yet somehow we are openly supporting genocide, the very thing we fought against in World War II, and the very thing the Nuremberg trials and subsequent humanitarian laws were explicitly designed to establish a bulwark against.
Shamefully, our political class (the majority of both Republicans and Democrats) has learned nothing from the Nuremberg trials.
