Is Gaza Really Genocide?

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Usrael is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” So says the woman who reports on civil rights for the United Nations. You can also go to this website and join one of the 44 anti-genocide protests scheduled in various locations throughout the Unted States today.

That’s all fine and well, and I certainly support all the efforts being made to shut down the IDF war machine in Gaza and find some peaceful means to settle the dispute.

But I can’t stop thinking at the same time that the word ‘genocide’ is being misused and because it is being applied to what’s going on in Gaza, the word as it was meant to be understood is being cheapened to the point that it won’t have any meaning or historical perspective at all.

The word ‘genocide’ first appeared in 1944, coined by a Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to describe what happened during the Nazi Holocaust. Lemkin created the word by combining the Greek word geno — for race or tribe with the Lain word cide — which means killing.

In 1948, the United Nations approved an international agreement known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention was released for signing on December 11, 1948, and the United States became a signatory on that same day.