The weight of a word

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MYNRA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 18th of September.

This is WORLD Radio and we’re glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up on The World and Everything in It: the United Nations says Israel is committing genocide.

On Tuesday, the UN released a report saying Israel is trying to eradicate at least part of the Palestinian population.

But what does “genocide” mean, and does the UN have the power to declare it? WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

ABRAHAM: We still do have more than 20 members of our families, her families, sheltering at the two churches there…

MARY MUNCY: Fares Abraham is a Palestinian American businessman from Bethlehem. He and his wife lead a Christian discipleship program in the Middle East called Levant Ministries. His wife and her family are from Gaza.

ABRAHAM: How many people have to die to atone for the sins of Hamas to say, you know, enough is enough?

Abraham says Israel’s recent military campaign in Gaza appears to be focused more on removing Palestinians from their land than freeing hostages.

ABRAHAM: And we don't have to second guess it, because it's being aired, it's being documented. The highest level of the Israeli government are saying it flat out, and they're declaring their intention of emptying Gaza of its residents and relocating them somewhere else.

For two years now, the United Nations has been investigating accusations that Israel is committing genocide.

CHANNEL 4 NEWS, NAVI PILLAY: We heard from live witnesses, we got a lot of live testimony, we held oral hearings here in Geneva.

Navi Pillay was the Chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory during the investigation. She spoke to Great Britain’s Channel 4 News after the reports’ release on Tuesday.

PILLAY: We were extra careful about ensuring that we personally investigate and verify everything. You know that’s the best we could do because we were not allowed into the country.

Israel, for its part, says the UN took officials’ quotes out of context and used unverifiable evidence.

The UN used at least some casualty numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, an organization run by Hamas and its evidence standard is lower than what is used in a court case investigating genocide.

Still, Pillay says the investigation is a first step for government action, because many governments, including the U.S., are under an obligation to intervene in cases of genocide under the Genocide Convention—an international treaty that criminalizes it.

So what is the Genocide Convention and how does it work?

EYEL MAYROZ: We're going back to the 1930s.

Eyal Mayroz is a senior lecturer in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

MAYROZ: A Jewish-Polish legal expert by the name of Raphael Lamkin… noticed that there were a lot of mass killings of a particular kind that didn't have a name...

So he worked on a definition, and in 1948, the United Nations adopted a shorter version.

It says “genocide” means any “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”

The five categories for acts considered genocide include killing members of the group, inflicting bodily or mental harm, imposing life-threatening conditions, preventing birth, and forcibly relocating children.

The UN says Israel is committing four of those.

Under the Genocide Convention, signatories, like the United States and other governments have a duty to provide effective penalties for anyone meeting that definition.

EYEL MAYROZ: Genocide is predominantly a legal term. Therefore, only a qualified court, for example, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, is allowed to rule legitimately that something that is taking place is either genocide or not.

But Mayroz says proving intent to commit genocide can take years, and by then it may be too late to do anything about it.

In 2023, South Africa brought a case accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice. The court says there likely won’t be a ruling until 2027.

Mayroz says the real impact of a “genocide” declaration by anything other than a court of law is changing public discourse.

MAYROZ: We saw in Gaza, when the genocide label was started to be used on daily basis by advocates, by the media, then the attention of both international publics and the media grew.

Mayroz thinks this early declaration by the UN is a good way to address what he thinks is genocide in Gaza. But others disagree.

DAVID HIRSH: I think that it's very important in terms of antisemitism.

David Hirsh is the academic director and CEO of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

HIRSH: If people are repeatedly told that Israel is committing genocide like Nazis, which is what people associate with genocide, especially when they're talking about Jews. Then I think that is an encouragement to relate to Jews in general as though they were evil.

Hirsh believes that so far Israel’s actions have been within the bounds of war… and that Hamas should be blamed for committing genocide, both of Israelis and Palestinians. He says Israel has been trying to protect civilians.

HIRSH: I don't know of any other conflict, military conflict, in which one side has been providing food and medicines and fuel to the civilians of the other side.

Hirsh says Israel should be held accountable for any bad actions during the war. But loaded terms like genocide should be used with great caution.

On the ground in Israel, one resident told WORLD that he sees the war as self-defense, not genocide.

ISRAELI: It is not us in this scenario that we're looking for a war. We gain nothing from it, and there's no reason for us to want to do it. We're just trying to protect ourselves.

Now, Israelis are facing a tough question. What does it mean to be protected?

Palestinian Christian Fares Abraham thinks that safety on both sides of the border will take more than court orders or weapons of war.

ABRAHAM: Palestinians are not going to drive the Jewish population out, and the Jewish population are not going obviously, drive the Palestinian out. They have to figure out a way to live between the river and the sea…in peace.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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