The term Genocide was first used in 1945 to describe the deliberate, targeted killing of Jews by the German Nazi regime. It was a very specific term coined to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder during the Holocaust combining the Greek word for race or tribe (geno) with the Latin word for killing (cide).
The word was first used in a legal setting during the Nuremberg Trials by a young lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz who was a chief prosecutor at those trials. A fresh faced young lawyer, just 27 years old, a small man, 5ft 2inches or just short of 1.6metres tall had to stand on a pile of books when he addressed the court so he could look over the lectern. Apart from using the word genocide, the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ was used to place the actions of 22 men who oversaw and commandeered the Holocaust were seen to be tried not just as war criminals but criminals in a far deeper sense. War crimes happen in war, soldiers kill soldiers and bomb places where there may be ‘collateral damage’, but the Holocaust was an action aimed at eliminating people based on their race, their religion and their ideologies.
The German military, including the SS under the control of the Nazis were thorough in documenting their activities and reporting to the various government agencies including the ‘elimination of Jews, Gypsies and enemies of the Reich’, and these records were carefully archived and then used as evidence in prosecuting the case against those senior figures who were still alive and able to face the court.
As a result of the Second World War and the exposure of the inhumanity, the organised slaughter of about 13million people who were not soldiers fighting a war, as evidenced in the aftermath of the war, the opening of the death camps, the written records of those who reported their work to their superiors and the conducting of the Nuremberg Trial, a criminal trial, not a war crimes trial before impartial judges, the newly formed United Nations Organisation commissioned the Declaration of Human Rights which was presented to the General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948.
A further flow on from the Nuremberg Trials and the work of Ben Ferencz was the International Criminal Court in The Hague which recently heard charges against the State of Israel from South Africa over the devastation of Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinians who live in that enclave.
Unfortunately, crimes against humanity have continued despite the Declaration of Human Rights that all nations have signed up to. We witnessed the horrors of the Vietnam war with indiscriminate poisoning using Agent Orange, a defoliant and poison that caused birth defects spina bifida, cleft palate, limb deformities, structural heart disease and hypothyroidism, the murderous Pol Pot regime in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China with its re-education camps, Biafra, and so many more post-colonial wars, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. and on and on goes the list.
And most recently, the ongoing conflict in Israel.
The catalyst for the devastation being wrought on Gaza and the Palestinian people was a brutal attack on a Kibbutz and Music Festival which saw about 1200 Israelis killed and 240 taken as hostages by the armed militia, Hamas. An unspeakable act of terrorism.
Rarely however is there mention of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government, the virtual imprisonment of two and a half million people in the most densely populated area in the world, the Gaza Strip, an area of 365 square kilometres. (The Perth Metropolitan area of over 6,300 square kilometres has a similar population.) Nor of the treatment of Palestinians who live on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and the intimidation they are subjected to from settler communities who are building new settlements as the Palestinians are forced or bullied off their lands. Nor the intimidation of multiple security checks, sometimes a matter of a few metres apart, the constant sense of surveillance with soldiers, fully armed in battle fatigues patrolling the streets of positioned on rooftops. The buildup of frustration in both areas have since the Nakbah, or ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 which saw over 700,000 people displaced, and the taking of the West Bank in 1967’s Six day War led to various skirmishes and attacks on Israel people, like the suicide bombers who were active in 1989 and from 2002 to 2005, the First and Second Intifada.
Both attacks, the Hamas attack that was the catalyst for the current conflict and the suicide bombings which targeted Israeli civilians are illegal under international law and are rightly condemned. That said, the frustration of living in such oppressive conditions as in Gaza where all services, water, food, sewerage, electricity are imported from Israel and can be cut off at the drop of a hat, or the frustration of the constant harassment the people on the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subjected to leads to retaliatory actions.
As we get the news flow from Israel and Gaza we are told that it is mainly women and children who are dying. Supplies of food and drinking water are in short supply and apart from people dying because the building they lived in are being blown to smithereens, they are dying of starvation and diseases that come from unsanitary living as over a million people are camping out in a cramped area without sanitation.
Women and children featured in the evidence and defence of the Nuremberg criminals. where the justification for killing children was that they would grow up to be enemies. And women give birth to children.
The Declaration of Human Rights was written as a response to the inhumanity of the Holocaust which saw the killing of 13 million people because of their race, their religion, their ideologies were not acceptable to the Nazi regime in Germany. The races targeted were Jews and Gypsies, two marginalised groups, marginalised not just in Germany, but in much of Europe, and marginalised for centuries, Jews for their religious beliefs, Gypsies were ‘the wandering spirits of the earth’. On ideologies, these included homosexuals and people with disabilities.
Palestinians are marginalised in Israel, but not just in Israel, also in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Egypt where they are placed in Refugee camps, denied employment, treated as second class people and have really nowhere to go.
It seems those who ignore history are likely to repeat it while those who know history can only look on in wondrous amazement.
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