When can we call it genocide?

As reported by Juan Cole, planning for Israel’s attack on Hizbollah and Lebanon had been in the works for at least a year. The Israelis were only looking for an incident, any incident, to justify their attack. Hizbollah provided the excuse for an assault when it kidnapped 2 Israel soldiers in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Instead of the limited response from Israel that typically follows such incidents, Hizbollah’s own leadership was surprised by the extent of Israel’s aerial, naval and ground assault. An assault, not only against Hizbollah forces, but also against many civilian targets in Lebanon that seemingly have little if anything to do with Hizbollah. Attacks which have “officially” killed well over 300 Lebanese civilians (we don’t really know the true death toll at this point) and maimed countless others. Attacks which have caused billions of dollars of damage to buildings, factories, offices, bridges and other infrastructure destroyed by Israel’s missile, bomb and artillery campaign.

When similar attacks were implemented by Serbia’s armed forces and militias against Muslims in Bosnia, the world community was quick to condemn those actions as atrocities. Indeed, the euphemism employed by Serbian news media, “ethnic cleansing” to describe the Serbs’ murderous actions in Bosnia soon acquired a connotation essentially equivalent to that of genocide. Yet, to date, similar actions perpetrated by Israel in it’s attacks on the Lebanese civilian population, including the bombing of ambulances and other vehicles filled with civilians trying to escape the war zone, and it’s use of terror weapons like white phosphorus (which I wrote about here, yesterday) have been defended by the likes of Alan Dershowitz as morally justified acts because the civilians in Lebanon may be guilty of supporting Hizbollah, and thus need not be granted any consideration for their safety to which “normal” civilians are entitled. In short, we are seeing a defense of Israel’s slaughter of the Lebanese which assumes that the Arabs who live there are something less than fully human.

Doesn’t that argument strike you as obscene on its face? Isn’t that the same justification Osama bin Laden gave for attacking American civilians on 9/11? What makes it wrong for Osama to use that excuse, but not Israel or the United States (remember Fallujah)? Killing people based on their ethnicity or supposed sympathy with your enemies smells like genocide to me, no matter what rhetorical perfume you use to cover up the stench.

(cont.)

According to Steve Clemons at The Washington Note, at least one former National Security Advisor, and senior American foreign policy strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, believes that what Israel is doing in Lebanon is not only poor strategy but also amounts to an atrocity:

I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect–maybe not in intent–the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You’ll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

Brzezinski is right. Israeli indifference to the scale of destruction and human misery it is causing is tantamount to a crime. He employs the metaphor of “killing the hostages” because he doesn’t wish to be anymore frank, I imagine, and run the risk of being accused of anti-Semitism. But I’m more than happy to provide the word he left out when describing this indifference to the fate of the Lebanese people. That word is Genocide, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use it in this instance. Let’s look at the definition of the term set forth in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, shall we?

The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I’d argue that clauses (a), (b) and (c) currently apply to Israel’s actions in Lebanon (and in Gaza, as well). Remember, this action was planned long ago by Israel, and they only waited for an opportune moment in which to implement their “strategy.” They knew what the consequences for civilians would be once they started bombing, but disregarded them, or found them not relevant to their purpose. Is what Israel is doing equivalent to the Holocaust or Rwanda? No, but their actions meet the definition of genocide: they are killing members of a national group (the Lebanese), they are causing members of that group serious bodily and mental harm, and they are imposing conditions on Lebanon that are designed to bring about Lebanon’s and the Lebanese people’s destruction, at least in part. No matter what you think of Hizbollah (and I believe them to be the moral equivalent of the IRA) Israel’s actions have not been limited to responding to Hizbollah’s terrorist attacks, but have expanded to include the demolition of Lebanon as a nation state.

Does Israel have the right to defend it’s borders and it’s people? Certainly. However, that right does not extend to a reckless indifference to the murder of innocent civilians, whether in Gaza, the West Bank or in Lebanon. That isn’t a policy for eliminating terrorism, it’s a policy for breeding more terrorists. So, even from a strictly pragmatic standpoint it is a senseless, misguided approach. But without question, from a moral standpoint it is indefensible, regardless of how Mr. Dershowitz and other apologists twist and turn in their ludicrous and mean spirited attempts to justify the killing of Arab men, women and (most horrifically) children.

That’s genocide in my book.