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Gaza, genocide and the world’s most heinous crime

The words of the Jewish lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’ still hold lessons for us today.

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History Illustrated: Gaza ,genocide and the world's most heinous crime
By Danylo Hawaleshka
Published On 19 Apr 2024

History Illustrated is a weekly series of insightful perspectives that puts news events and current affairs into historical context using graphics generated with artificial intelligence.

History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
Historically, mass killings seem to be an inexorable part of mankind, and yet it wasn’t until Hitler that Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, combined the Greek word for race, 'genos', with the Latin for killing, 'cide', to coin the term, 'genocide'.
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History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
Lemkin had been outraged by the mass killings of Armenians in 1915-16, and by the fact that one man could be charged for killing another, while there was no actual law with which to charge the perpetrators in Armenia. Today, Armenia calls what happened under the Ottoman Empire a genocide, a charge Turkey disputes to this day, saying Armenians and Turks were both killed in the final days of the empire.
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
Lemkin, who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, would go on to become the prime force behind the creation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — unanimously adopted by the UN in Paris on December 9, 1948.
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
The convention defines genocide as any act that has as its intent the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
Over the decades, the convention has been applied in several successful prosecutions, including in cases involving the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the killings committed during the 1990s in the Balkans. Individuals have also been indicted for genocide in cases related to events in Darfur and Myanmar.
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
But the Israeli government’s war on Gaza suggests mankind still has a long way to go in curbing its tendency to resort to violence.
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History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
In a recent report on Gaza by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese accuses Israel of committing an act of genocide with roots going back to well before the attack by Hamas on October 7. 'Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,' said Albanese, 'is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure.'
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
The horrible irony, of course, is that the genocide convention arose out of the ashes of the Holocaust, while today the Israeli government stands accused of doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.
History Illustrated: Gaza, genocide and the world's most heinous crime
During World War II, Lemkin escaped to the US, where he was shocked to find the media uninterested in the persecution of Jews. 'Would this blind world only then see [what was happening] when it would be too late?' Lemkin asked. Many observers today argue that the late Lemkin's words should be equally applied to the Palestinians in Gaza.