Probing Cultural Genocide
On the misuse of Lemkin.
It is certainly true that Raphael Lemkin, who formulated the Genocide Convention and first coined the term “genocide” in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944, had for a long time shown concern with a broader concept of genocide—one that did not involve only the mass murder of entire groups, but a wider conception of group “destruction,” including cultural genocide and forcible assimilation.
But Lemkin never abandoned the centrality of agency, intent, and responsibility. How could he, as a criminal lawyer? Indeed, to abandon such foundational concepts would be to abandon even the concept of the civilian itself, since a civilian is defined through the concept of innocence: one whom one should not target. Once intent is removed, the principle of distinction collapses. And it is precisely this principle that today’s antizionist genocide scholars abandon—without acknowledging that in doing so they are abandoning the very legal structure that makes genocide intelligible as a crime.
At the 1933 Madrid conference of the International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, Lemkin developed the concepts of “barbarism” and “vandalism,” which correspond roughly to what would later be called physical and cultural genocide. He understood these not as separable categories but as processes that often worked together in actual genocidal situations—whether in the Armenian case, which involved the forced conversion of women and children to Islam, or in the Soviet Union, where he would later describe the Holodomor as a Ukrainian genocide in his 1953 speech, pointing to the purge and execution of bishops, intellectuals, and other cultural figures tasked with reproducing a distinct Ukrainian identity.
Yet despite this broader conception, Lemkin never abandoned the notion of intent. As Douglas Irvin-Erickson has shown, drawing on Lemkin’s unpublished writings and letters, Lemkin was careful not to conflate cultural genocide with cultural diffusion—the gradual disintegration of a culture through unintentional social processes. If the disappearance of every culture from history were a genocide, the term would lose all meaning.
Far from recovering the original spirit of Lemkin’s thinking prior to the legal formulation of the Genocide Convention, today’s antizionist genocide scholars—in service of a hate movement—have abandoned its deeper sources of inspiration altogether. What remains is a language of accusation detached from responsibility, and a concept of genocide stripped of the very principles that once gave it force.
I often feel that one of the most effective ways to combat anti-Zionist hate is simply to insist, no matter how firmly or how often anti-Zionists claim otherwise, that words have meanings. Genocide isn't a vibe; it's a specific crime with a definition that requires, as Adam points out, intent to destroy a people as such. No such intent has been present in Israel's military operations in Gaza, and to claim otherwise is not only to distort who is actually responsible for the current war but to cheapen the meaning of the term genocide itself.
The Anti-Zionist Industrial Complex is like the Red Queen in "Alice in Wonderland": "Sentence first—verdict afterwards!"
They've already made up their minds long ago and are impervious to evidence and allergic to nuance. Claims of "genocide"—along with the fake famine and the old standbys "apartheid" "settler-colonial" etc—aren't truth claims, but are rhetorical weapons meant to smear shit on every Jew and every supporter of Israel. Their goal is and has always been to make Israel a pariah state, before dissolving it.
All these same people devote their entire lives and careers to ginning up hatred for the world's only Jewish state, yet if you told them they might just be Jew haters, they respond with fake shock and tantrums. They are all deluded liars, maybe most especially to themselves.