Genocide is a concept that has been applied from time to time to Irish history, most notably to the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) of the 1840s. In general, academic historians have shied away from such a discourse, arguing that it is anachronistic. The word wasn’t coined until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin in relation to Nazi atrocities, and the Genocide Convention (from which I quote below) wasn’t adopted by the United Nations until 1948. While the British government was undoubtedly responsible for the catastrophe that enveloped Ireland in the 1840s, it would not have met the Convention’s definition of genocide as the ‘intent [my emphasis] to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. There was no ‘smoking gun’, no equivalent of the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, for which minutes survive, at which the Nazis agreed on the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’.
And what of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? While Israel continues to kill tens of thousands of Gazans and, judging by its indiscriminate military tactics, is ‘deliberately inflicting … conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part’—Gaza has been reduced to rubble and its infrastructure destroyed—Israel’s stated intent is to destroy Hamas, not the people of Gaza. From a narrow military perspective, however, that is an unachievable objective—not to mention the dragon’s teeth being sown for future conflict. In addition, ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have repeatedly engaged in ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide’ (also a crime under the Convention), including attendance at a recent conference calling for Israeli resettlement of Gaza and ‘voluntary migration’ of the Palestinian population elsewhere.
We await the ICJ’s decision, but the whole point of the Convention was not just to adjudicate after the event years later but to stop genocide from happening in the first place! Consequently, it is deeply disappointing that its interim judgement did not call for an immediate Israeli ceasefire. This is in marked contrast to the alacrity with which Western governments, including the United States and the UK, cut off funding to UNRWA, the UN’s relief organisation for Palestinian refugees, following revelations that thirteen of its employees (out of a total of c. 13,000 staff in Gaza) were implicated in the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. Since the vast majority of Gazans currently rely on UNRWA for food, shelter and medical care, its collapse will surely hasten their ‘physical destruction in whole or in part’. Complicity in genocide is also a crime under the Convention.
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