How To Make Genocide Meaningless, In One Easy Lesson!
1944: The term was coined by Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin in reaction to the Jewish and Armenian exterminations, in each case an expression by a state to systemically eradicate a population. Whatever the later UN convention did to further ensconce it, that is the origin.
What's now missing is rather important.
The attempts to systemically eradicate the Jewish and Armenian populations within Germany (Middle East and wherever the Reich could find them) and the Ottoman Empire, is nothing like the defensive and security action by Israel. Did the German Jews and Armenians attack those governing bodies and force a defense and security action against them?
Where we do find commonality is governing bodies who did and do platform on the extinction of a "group", and makes the Nazi, Turk, and Hamas regimes kinfolk. Hamas gets a
BOFCM on items 1, 2, 3, and 5. Erasing Jews, the raison d'être of Hamas, would certainly fulfill 4, too. Since we've turned the term into nothing more than a checklist of twitching biases, why not?
But using that indiscrete logic, we can certainly make the charge of genocide against Hamas. As Huff implies, there is no quantitative qualification for genocide; we simply have to have some group to some degree commit some acts resulting in death, to be 'genocide'.
The logical conclusion is that all conflicts are genocide and the term is meaningless. Or that genocide is subjective and again therefore, meaningless.
If it is to have meaning, its purpose must observe its origin; to declare criminal the unprovoked attacking and attempted eradication of a non-military population by a government. It is not to turn mutual military engagements into genocide discussions because there are civilian casualties.
To some, everyone but Jews may submit their attackers and stake their security future; they're always been forbidden when it comes to those who've sought their eradication.