Weaponizing the crime of genocide

All too often the murder of people begins with the murder of language. The evil process that led to the Nazi Holocaust began with an assault on words. Deportations to concentration camps were described as resettlement, gas chambers as showers and the diabolical project to annihilate an entire people was branded as the final solution. The emptying of language of its simple meaning was critical to making the unthinkable possible.

It was in response to this deliberate attempt to neuter language that a young Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, suggested that a new legal term was required to unflinchingly describe the most severe atrocity that could be imagined, one which, in the language of the United Nations, shocks the conscience of mankind. The term he proposed, which was adopted by the international community, was the crime of genocide.

It is all the more shocking therefore that, in living memory of the atrocities that gave birth to the term genocide, we are witness to a cynical attempt to pervert the meaning of the word itself.

The recent application to the International Court of Justice alleging genocide on the part of Israel is precisely such an effort. The term ‘genocide’ is in fact relevant to the current conflict. The unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, including the murder, torture, rape and mutilation of 1,200 Israelis, and the taking hostage of 240 more, were indeed acts in pursuit of a genocidal agenda.

Hamas, whose charter calls for the murder of Jews everywhere, not only celebrated the murder of every victim, exultantly filming and circulating the atrocities, but their plan was to advance still further into Israeli territory, murdering everyone in their path. Since then, Hamas leaders have proudly insisted that their intention and hope is to commit the atrocities of Oct. 7 again and again and again.

No state would stay passive in the face of such barbaric attacks and a declared intent to repeat them. No state would remain idle as 130 hostages, including infants, the sick and the elderly, are still held captive by terrorists. Yet in the current proceedings it is not Hamas that is charged with genocide for its massacres but Israel for defending itself.

Confronting the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza is fraught with excruciating dilemmas. Over the past 16 years, since it seized control, Hamas has created an unimaginably horrific reality. Not only language been divested of meaning, but nothing sacred has been spared. Hospitals are not hospitals, schools not schools and mosques not mosques. Rather, they are camouflage and cover for missile launchers and weapons depots. Terrorists emerge from tunnels below children’s beds and shelter in hospitals, gunmen fire from within schools, recordings of babies crying are played to lure Israeli forces into death traps. To be continued

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Daniel Taub is an international lawyer and former Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom