Genocide Isn't About Mass Killing - It's More Identity Politics

Norman Finkelstein is all over the media recently; he even got a solo appearance on Piers Morgan. While it's wonderful to see him get the attention his brilliant 40-year investigation of Israel-Palestine deserves, he nearly always does something irritating as well . . . Yesterday he was interviewed by Krystal Ball on Breaking Points, and he dismissed with contempt the line we've been hearing the past six weeks, i.e., "The October 7 attacks were the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust." Finkelstein snorted and replied, "What the hell do 1400 deaths have to do with the Holocaust?" He accused Israel of always "dragging in" the Holocaust as moral backing for its endless outrages against the Palestinians, but if that disproportion (1400 to 6 million) is absurd, can't a similar argument be made that 15,000 Gazans killed, less than one percent of the Gazan population, cannot constitute genocide, whatever Israel's intentions? 

Too much of the legal definition of genocide hangs on intent, which is not likely of much concern to the victims of - take your pick - massacre, ethnic cleansing, extermination, genocide, slaughter, etc. If Israeli attacks in Gaza today constitute a genocide, whereas European colonizers' wiping out of 97%-99% if the indigenous populations of the Americas is NOT genocide, as few talking heads think it is, then massive killing is really not the central issue defining "genocide," and we need to start saying so. 

By the way, if Israel were to agree to a permanent cease-fire in return for the sterilization of all Palestinian women of child-bearing age, would that be a peace proposal or more genocide?

In any event, it does not appear that Israel's intent in the current massacre has anything to do with genocide, if that word is taken to mean utter annihilation. It's ethnic cleansing, which is not a synonym for genocide, though it's often treated as though it were. Jewish supremacists want to keep killing Gazans until international horror forces open the Rafa crossing so the despised Gazans can be dispersed throughout Egypt and the Gulf States. "Transfer," it's called in Zionist commentary, and that goal has been a constant from the beginning. Every time there's a "war," Israel takes more land and drives more Arabs off it. A land without a people for a people without shame.

Finkelstein also dropped into his conversation with Krystal Ball the claim that "10,000 Jews a week were gassed at Auschwitz," which, if true, likewise makes the charge of genocide in Gaza seem pretty absurd by comparison. In case you're wondering, here's the current genocide scorecard, according to various experts in the topic:

Gaza 2023: under 1% killed, definitely genocide.

Indians 1500-1900 98% killed, NOT genocide

European Jews 1933-1945 - 66% killed, the worst genocide ever, don't even try to compare it to anything else.

One wishes that there were some sense in this, but alas, it appears there is not. And Finkelstein always plays into the idea that his being the son of Holocaust survivors is what makes his voice relevant, even as he stresses that the only thing that matters is the facts and a logical accounting of them. Consistency, please, could we please just have some consistency, once in a while, even just as a holiday treat?

Remember also that genocide experts claimed a generation ago that Slobodan Milosevic was guilty of it in the war over the break-up of Yugoslavia, though that was a three-way ethnic fight with massacres on all sides. Furthermore, Germany was said to be redeeming its guilt for the Holocaust by bombing Belgrade, just as the Nazis had done!

So let's abstain from easy conclusions that "genocide scholars" are an intellectual fire department come to deliver us from evil. More likely, they're capitalism's latest branding exercise to keep us forever at each other's throats.