“Once you are accused of genocide, you are a Nazi.”

Why using the now-fashionable but still inaccurate term to describe Israel's actions in Gaza betrays a hidden agenda, and also how we can't take seriously the GOP's rush to protect Jewish students.

In 2012, as part of the celebration of its 375^th anniversary, Harvard University held a special event to welcome Henry Kissinger back to his old stomping grounds. Drew Faust, then the president of the university, said that as one of Harvard’s “most legendary graduates,” Kissinger was a natural choice for inclusion in the festivities. It was somewhat of a significant homecoming, since after stepping down as US Secretary of State in 1977, Kissinger had chosen not to come back to teach there. Nor was he ever offered an honorary degree by his alma mater; his children attended Yale and he donated his papers there, not to Harvard.

I happened to be a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School that spring, so I sat in the audience with hundreds of others at Sanders Theatre, one of the college’s largest venues, as two top professors, Graham Allison and Joseph Nye, verbally fellated the old war criminal and allowed him to lie blatantly about his role in greenlighting the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and to whitewash his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks, causing the unnecessary prolongation of the war. Indonesia, another place where he gave advance approval for a bloody massacre of hundreds of thousands, didn’t come up. Sustained applause from the audience when Faust welcomed Kissinger to the stage suggested that the audience didn’t really care about Kissinger’s actual record—or maybe they admired it.

As Spencer Ackerman wrote in his comprehensive obituary of Kissinger, who passed at the age of 100 at the end of November, “Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.” He also notes, “The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes ‘crimes of commission,’ he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.”

I mention Kissinger’s bloody legacy simply to suggest that the drama of the last week, as Republicans in Congress postured about the responsibility of Ivy League college presidents to suppress hate speech against Jews up to and including the advocacy of Jewish genocide, was not about preventing antisemitism or genocide in any serious way. And this isn’t only because places like Harvard celebrate the exercise of murderous state power when it is conducted by “statesmen” like Kissinger. I’ll believe Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who led the hearing skewering those college presidents, truly cares about fighting antisemitism when she holds hearings on Donald Trump’s relationships with Jew haters like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and his regular sharing of neo-Nazi content, or when she tackles Elon Musk’s platforming of antisemites and amplification of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Stefanik is fortunate that Rep. Jamie Raskin isn’t on her committee as he made this point quite effectively on MSNBC.

Unfortunately, we seem to be living in the post-genocide age. That is, the word has lost its meaning. Stefanik waved it in the face of those hapless university presidents, who were badly advised by their lawyers to avoid simple declarative statements of the obvious, that they don’t approve of calls for genocide against Jews. Shame on them. But who can complain, when much of the left has now decided the killing of 18,000 Palestinians and the displacement of another 1.8 million Gazans is already also genocide, when it is not.

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as a crime “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” As I’ve written here before, legal scholars have warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza, combined with statements made by several of its top leaders, could approach genocide—but that these were conditional statements, not conclusive ones. Do armies embarked on genocides send advance warnings to civilians? Do they open humanitarian corridors to allow them to cross the territory they are bombarding? Do they allow the delivery of aid? Do they round up civilians, disarm them, and then not shoot them in cold blood? (I hope the reports that have started circulating today of the shooting of unarmed civilians by IDF troops turn out to be false.)

Over the last two months, it’s become quite fashionable to casually refer to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as something that is happening, rather than something that might happen. I think it started the week after the October 7 attacks with groups like If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace demanding “No Genocide in Our Name” and insisting that their grief over the Israelis killed not be “weaponized” into calls for genocide against Gaza, but at least those were Jews choosing to use such hyper-charged language. They could have mobilized around a “Stop the War” slogan instead, but as Jews I’m sure they felt using the genocide word felt more resonant, and one can argue that Jews have some additional moral authority to do so.

Now, “you don’t have to be an expert to stand up against genocide,” Amanda Saich, an organizer with the Momentum community declared last week during a webinar on how pro-Palestine groups are taking advantage of the crisis as a “moment of the whirlwind” to build street protests across the country. A week earlier, on a previous Momentum webinar on powerbuilding, a DSA-NYC organizer named Lizzie Oh rattled on about how they were trying “to stop the genocide that is happening in Gaza” with all their might. (She skated past her organization’s controversial promotion of the October 8 “All Out for Palestine” rally in NYC that featured speakers praising the Hamas attack as a “kerfuffle.”)

During the Momentum session on organizing during whirlwind moments, all the speakers took for granted that their movement was winning because so many people were coming out in the streets. So I asked, “Since you adopted this polarization strategy, American public opinion has been growing me more sympathetic to Israel, not less. Could it be that aligning with Hamas, a conservative religious fundamentalist movement that has used mass rape as a tool of war, is a mistake for this movement? Saich replied, “Our assessment is that polarization happens inherently during a moment of the whirlwind, often driven by the mainstream media, but it’s a movement’s role to craft demands that are big-tent enough with moral polarization to center the humanity of Palestinian civilians. I’m not sure what you mean by aligning with Hamas, Momentum has not supported any organizations that are pro-Hamas. However, we are asking to refrain from asking questions that presume the alignment of us or folks in this group with Hamas, and center questions on the frameworks outlined rather than gotcha questions.”

I know my more left-wing readers are right now searching for the unsubscribe button (I hate to lose you but go if you must). But don’t get me wrong: I hate how Israel is conducting this war. The massive aerial bombing of civilian areas—even if Hamas hides its fighters among them—is not proportionate or just. Nor is collective punishment of civilians. The extent of destruction across the northern half of Gaza, which may now get inflicted on the south as well, is shocking and impossible to accept. But it is not genocide. It is quite likely that some of what Israel is doing will be judged as war crimes and crimes against humanity once human rights investigators can determine specifics. And it will be judged ethnic cleansing certainly if Gazans are not allowed to go back to their homes in northern Gaza or Israel refuses to let them rebuild. But this is still not genocide: the extermination of an entire people.

That is a word we should reserve only for the greatest of human crimes, like the Final Solution sought by Nazi Germany which took the lives of six million Jews (two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe); the Armenian genocide, when one million Armenians out of two million living in Anatolia were systematically killed by the Ottoman empire; the Rwandan genocide, when between a half million and 800,000 Tutsi were killed by Hutu militias; or the Cambodia genocide, when 1.5 million to 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, were killed by Pol Pot’s Communist Party, which took power after a massive US bombing campaign killed tens if not hundreds of thousands and impoverished and destabilized the country. (Oh hi there, Henry! Is it hot down there in hell?)

The sloppy and hasty rush to declare Israel’s tough military response to Hamas’s attack as “genocide” suggests to me that something else is going on. Speaking on the For Heaven’s Sake podcast last week, Donniel Hartman, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, put his finger on it. “To not just attack [Israel’s war in Gaza], but to associate what we are doing with complete disregard to what in fact is happening on the ground, as horrific as it is, and to use the genocide term, which once you are accused of genocide, you are now a Nazi…. When you’re accused of genocide, you are the worst of the universe, and your right to be is removed.”

Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli writer who has been doing a daily dialogue with Hartman on this podcast since the war began, added, “to find yourself accused of genocide after undergoing a kind of a mini-genocidal experience is so profoundly disorienting that I don’t know what world I’m living in anymore. I feel like I can’t take the most basic solidity of this reality for granted. It’s so outrageous that, you know, you can critique Israel, you can say that we’re not careful enough with civilian casualties. There’s room for that conversation. It’s an important conversation. But from there to go to genocide, this is something that I really did not see coming on October 8th.”

Indeed, it’s not something I saw either. And it seems to be justifying some terrible behavior by pro-Palestine activists, like this disruption of a Jewish community Hanukkah celebration in Berkeley yesterday. But while it has become fashionable to lob the word at Israel, it’s also worth noting that despite what I’m sure is intense pressure and internal debate, many liberal and progressive organizations that have called for a cease-fire have notably not chosen to invoke words like genocide. Those include:

-Dozens of labor locals including the AFT Oregon, Boston and Chicago Teachers Unions, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and several UAW regional unions;

-1000+ university and college scholars across New England;

-Artists4Ceasefire which includes more than 200 leading figures from the entertainment industry;

-More than 1300 political scientists, led by people including Wendy Brown, Steven Levitsky, Jane Mansbridge, James C. Scott and Stephen Walt;

-Hundreds of leading philanthropies and individual program officers of Funders for a Ceasefire;

-The Providence, RI, city council, the Detroit city council, the Madison, WI city council;

-The Carter Center;

-More than 1000 Black Christian faith leaders;

-And more than 800 staffers at more than 140 American Jewish organizations.

People don’t have to be stupid, it’s still a choice.

Room for Debate

Speaking of making choices and in case you think the whole global left has lost its mind over Gaza, this statement led by Ben Gidley, Daniel Mang and Daniel Randall, three young British leftists, and signed by dozens of others is a useful corrective. It’s somewhat turgidly written (hey, it’s the left!) but here are some exemplary snippets:

“Much that is said and believed on the left about imperialism and anti-imperialism, nationalism and internationalism, racism, Islamism, and many other topics, is, in our eyes, deeply flawed, and sometimes reactionary. Too many leftists have defended or even celebrated the 7 October massacre by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in southern Israel. This, in our view, is an expression of these flawed analyses and reactionary trends….We want a left that fights more effectively not only for Palestinian rights, but for democracy, equality, and freedom for all.

…apologism across much of the far left for Hamas violence against civilians reveals not only a lack of basic human compassion, but a mistaken assessment of Hamas as a political force. Hamas is not merely an abstract expression of “resistance” to Israel. It carries out its actions in pursuit of its own political aims — aims which are fundamentally reactionary. To elide these on the basis of an unqualified support for (any) “resistance” is to deny Palestinian agency, to reduce Palestinians to a merely reactive force, incapable of making political choices. To oppose Hamas is not a matter of “telling Palestinians how to resist”, but of siding with those Palestinians who also oppose Hamas and advocate actual resistance, on a different political basis.

…In fetishising Israel/Palestine, and romanticising and idealising Palestinian struggle, leftists mirror the mainstream’s dehumanisation of Palestinians. The effect of this leftist fetishisation of Israel/Palestine is to render both Palestinians and Israeli Jews transcendent avatars for political narratives, rather than flesh-and-blood humans, capable of a range of responses to their conditions and experience.

Much of the left has turned potentially useful concepts like “settler-colonialism” from tools of analysis into substitutes for analysis. Applying these labels in a simplistic way allows activists to avoid a confrontation with complexity. The historical internal diversity of Zionism, its ambivalent relationship with various imperialisms, and the different stories of displacements that drove Jewish migration to Israel from various countries are often little understood.

The process of Israeli Jewish national formation included settler colonisation that saw large numbers of existing inhabitants displaced, including via war crimes and expulsions. It was also a process of a desperate flight by people who had themselves been victims of racist violence and attempted extermination. The Palestinians are, in Edward Said’s phrase, ‘the victims of the victims and the refugees of the refugees.’ Israeli Jews are far from unique in having consolidated themselves as a nation, and founded a state, on a basis that included violent dispossession of a territory’s existing inhabitants.

The point of confronting this history in full, with all its complexity and tension, is not to minimise the injustices suffered by Palestinians in the process of Israel’s foundation, or since. But failing to confront history in full serves neither understanding nor efforts to develop and support struggles for equality. Greater historical literacy, as well as a more engaged reckoning with practicalities of the one-state, two-state and other possible ‘solutions’ to the conflict, would enable a renewed solidarity movement.”

Other reading

—Zack Beauchamp in Vox, “The return of liberal Zionism? For many Jews, the October 7 attacks discredited both the Zionist right and the anti-Zionist left — paving the way for the resurrection of a seemingly dead political tradition.”

—Jonathan Chait in New York, “Political Correctness for Jews Won’t End Campus Antisemitism.”

—Jay Michealson in the Forward, “The university presidents were right and American Jews’ moral panic is wrong.”

—Mari Cohen in Jewish Currents, “Progressive Zionists Choose a Side.” Actually, IMHO, they tried to hold a middle ground but Cohen’s reporting is solid; it’s just the polarization narrative that she doesn’t challenge.

—Data for Progress, December 5, 2023, “Voters Want the U.S. to Call for a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza and to Prioritize Diplomacy.”

End Times

Just how “normal” can ChatGPT get?