Colonialism, Genocide, & The Racist Color Line that Prevents Calls for Justice.
The vile scourge of racism in all its ugliness can be witnessed on every street corner & in every parliament house, & can be seen historically in the laws that underpin genocide legislation.
‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color* line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, and America and the islands of the sea.’
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Of the Dawn of Freedom (1). An essay that tells the tale of the dawn of freedom that is an account of the government of men called ‘the Freedman’s Bureau’ — ‘one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with the vast problems of race and social condition.’
But first…events that have taken place in the last few days that I could not, in good conscience, ignore…
As we pass a grim milestone of 200 days of war, and the ghastly work of excavating the growing number of mass graves discovered at Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals in Gaza following the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, continues. More and more bodies are uncovered every hour, many bound and blindfolded, apparently executed; others thrown in like sacks of garbage, possibly still alive when buried, wearing hospital gowns, the tubes and catheters that mark them out as patients in the hospital, still in place, meaning quite rightly, that questions are once again being asked as to the morality and methods of the IDF in prosecuting this ongoing war.
Senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, said this morning (25 April, 11.20AM, ECT) on Al Jazeera, that he could not bring himself to follow all the ghastly details of what was being uncovered. He said, he thought the Israelis were ‘too smart’ to get involved with such dreadful things, but such is the degree of impunity provided by the U.S., stupidity and the execution of crimes against humanity is no longer a concern for Israel. Basically, anything goes!
This, as yet another report (you can download it here), this time from Amnesty, reveals that American made munitions are definitively being used to commit war crimes in Gaza, the passage of the latest American funding bill passes the Senate, and another $15bn of military aid is winging its way to Israel.
In a statement about the report Amnesty slammed the West for its hypocrisy, saying “evidence of war crimes continues to mount as the Israeli government makes a mockery of international law in Gaza.”
The report points to, “the USA’s brazen use of its veto to paralyze the UN Security Council for months on a much-needed resolution for a ceasefire, as it continues to arm Israel with munitions that have been used to commit what likely amounts to war crimes.”
“(The report) also highlights the grotesque double standards of European countries such as the UK and Germany, given their well-founded protestations about war crimes by Russia and Hamas, while they simultaneously bolster the actions of Israeli and US authorities in this conflict.”
Bernie Sanders, who earlier took Netanyahu to task, telling him, “…it is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions,” spoke out once again, calling the continued financial and military support for Israel, ‘a dark day,’ for the U.S. Senate, as the list of organisations across America that condemned the decision became too many to mention. Some examples you can read here.
And yet, even as Biden doubles down on his own hypocrisy, admitting that the Palestinian people are ‘innocent’ in a White House statement following the signing of the bill into law, an event he amazingly called ‘a good day for world peace;’ words that are quite frankly stunning for their ignorance with respect to Gaza, and illustrate once again, and show just how morally adrift Biden has become. This, as the storm of student protests across America grows, and amazingly, has even resulted in the arrest of a Presidential candidate; events that Charles Blow, in the NYT, has likened to the anti-war protests of 1968, that ended the Democratic Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and led to the election of a right-wing, illiberal President in the form of Richard Nixon.
The lessons of history once again ring loud…
Yet, despite all verbal and active protestations, Biden’s complicit administration and their grizzly policy of genocidal support remains stubbornly illiberal, and blindly unchanging.
Onward…
“I don’t know another country that would work like Israel is working to get humanitarian aid into Gaza. So, no preaching morality to us. The residents of Gaza are suffering, but Israel’s not to blame for what’s happening — Hamas and Iran are to blame.”
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, denying Israel is starving Gazans, deliberately ‘unaware’ that the whole world knows it is Israel who controls all crossings into the besieged enclave and is preventing AID from entering.
In the week that the likelihood of arrest warrants being issued against senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, by the ICC on suspicion of war crimes in Gaza grows, and Antony Blinken arrives in Saudi Arabia for ‘peace talks’, the Americans are still seemingly set on a course of Israeli-Arab normalisation as the basis for a more peaceful Middle East, with the continuation of the Israelis war on Gaza becoming relegated to the role of a pre-election sideshow to their main event of presenting Biden as the saviour of the Middle East, ready to ride in and save the day with a blockbuster peace deal centred on Saudi-Israeli normalisation and a roadway to a Palestinian state, whilst simultaneously slaying the electoral dragon and trumping Trump at the polls.
Whilst some reports have said an announcement on normalisation is just days away, any deal would be contingent on an irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state, that would, in the current situation still seem to be light years off. The truth is, both these unlikely outcomes would seem to be as far away as ever.
It is, by any measure, a marvellously unimaginative strategy, that strongly pro-Israel NYT journalist, Thomas Friedman, waters down to a single uninspiring trope, ‘Rafah or Riyadh,’ and would have us believe a ground-breaking deal is just a single exhalation of baited breath away. But, the facts are that “the price for normalization, especially on the Palestinian front, (have) certainly gone up,” with vague American promises of a Palestinian deal no longer sufficient, with Saudi analyst Hesham Alghannam saying, “Saudi Arabia is genuine in its condition that normalization is linked to the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”
In the week that Riyadh has accused Israel of ‘unchecked heinous war crimes,’ Friedman’s highly truncated, blindly imperialistic opinion, that Biden’s super Saudi deal is just a hop and a skip away, is surely fantasy and little more.
Such a deal would, even if it could be pulled off, in effect just freeze the conflict in time — again — give the hopeful, yet dismally misleading illusion that we’re back in 1993 at Oslo, again; and that a viable two state solution is back on the menu, again.
This poorly considered strategy provides no workable solutions for the problems it seeks to address; such as on what land would a viable Palestinian state be made? The pretend solution is one based on pre-1967 borders, but this blindly ignores the 700,000 armed, and highly motivated settlers who will not take kindly to being asked to leave.
It blindly ignores popular Israeli opinion that all Palestinians are guilty and that violence is the best way to deal with them.
It blindly ignores the growing Kahanist— extreme, anti-democratic, right-wing, racist, religious Jewish supremacism in the spirit of Ben Gvir’s teacher and rabbi, Meir Kahane — influence at the heart of the Knesset that sees the destruction of the rule of law, the destruction of the Al Aqsa mosque, and Israeli maximalism with Jewish domination over all the land of greater Israel (Eretz Israel) and will never countenance the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It blindly ignores popular Arab and Middle East opinions that are highly pro-Palestinian and often run counter to the wishes of their monarchist/authoritarian leaders who prioritise staying in power above all else, but beyond that, favour economic advancement and U.S. backing over Palestinian statehood, in large part because of Hamas’ origins as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood**.
It blindly ignores the complex political web of Middle Eastern dynamics that attempts to balance difficult relations, not least with Iran, and the motivations of both internal and external forces that often work counter to U.S. and Israeli desires for greater cooperation on a range of issues, especially those addressing regional security.
And perhaps most pertinently of all, it blindly ignores the fact Israeli normalisation is merely another U.S. attempt bring Israel into the wider Middle East community that benefits Israel, the U.S., and a narrow demographic quota of the nations of the signatories, but does nothing for Palestinians at all except sideline them, and that is what brought us to October 7 in the first place.
Suffice to say it is a strategy that Natan Sachs accurately terms an “anti-solutionist” one, that will leave the Palestinians dangling, again; stateless, right-less, poverty-stricken still; basically nowhere, just as they always have been, and quite frankly, nowhere new or positive at all. And it would leave Israel with a kind of temporary security hiatus, the need to constantly ‘mow the lawn,’ and, what might be called an acceptably low level of chronic violence as a bed-partner. But as Aluf Benn wrote in Foreign Affairs recently, “This strategy might appear to be the least risky option, at least for an Israeli public scarred by the horrors of October 7 and deaf to new suggestions of peace. But it will only lead to more catastrophe.”
Hear, hear!
And whilst such sentiments and strategies might not raise any eyebrows of discontent on the Biden administration or ruffle any authoritarian Arab leaders feathers, centred as the plan is on the economic benefits that all but the Palestinian people would reap, you can be sure, as mentioned above, the wider Arab public will have taken note, and the effect of that cannot just be dismissed as much as all concerned may wish things to be different.
Pankaj Mishra, writing in the LRB, reminds us that for most non-Western people, and that includes those of the Middle East, their formative experiences, collective memories, and family histories passed down from one generation to the next, were of the West as their colonial masters; they were on different sides of DuBois’ ‘Color Line,’ that he called the great problem of the twentieth century, and one is very possibly the problem of the twenty-first century too.
As Mishra suggests, DuBois’ great racial divide still exists today, and is hardening once again, like ‘a new Maginot Line,’ the most visible and current manifestation of which is the divide we see today being fought over in the UN and the media, concerning the appalling suffering of the Palestinians.
Today, we might see the two sides of the Color Line as the West and the Global South, or perhaps more pertinently, more accurately, as the nations of the post-colonial South, or the ‘dark nations,’ and those of the post-Colonial powers themselves; the white nations.
Thus, the ‘darker peoples’ have always been at pains to understand why the Palestinians should be punished for a crime that was wholly European, wholly ‘white’ in its commission. The white, Christian, European guilt over the Shoah has never been a part of the psyche of the non-European world.
Furthermore, the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the Shoah, of the ‘crime of crimes’ as first documented by Lemkin, and committed by the Nazis against the Jews was, for the ‘dark,’ post-colonial subjects of the Global South, not unprecedented at all, but wholly recognisable, a fact borne out of their own histories, their own suffering, their own ancestries.
Indeed, the recognition of the nature of the Shoah has been ably recorded by some imperial subjects, exemplary’s such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among others, who called out Nazism as being none other than the radical ‘twin’ of imperialism, and as such, was known to the post colonial subjects of the non-European world all too well.
And the disastrous blood letting, racial and tribal violence, the socio-political anarchy that invariably followed the end of a colonial venture — think the partitions of India, and of Palestine. The poorly considered, colonial carve up of Africa, where subsequent wars of independence have birthed innumerous civil wars, famines, as well as woeful and long lasting socio-economic strife, much of which has been direct consequences of post-colonial interference, and has one way or another given rise to the Rwandan genocide, the Algerian civil war, the endless troubles in the Congo. And in Asia the end of French Indochina that led step by bloody step to the Vietnam War, and so on and on.
The heavy cost of the legacy of imperialism in the Global South has left many post-colonial nations still in socio-economic and political recovery decades after their release from subjugation and the advent of their independence.
And in this fragile state, their tragic histories, the legacy of exploitation, of the have’s and the have not’s, of the tear stained family histories, that has left many in the South unable to sympathise or fully comprehend the depth of the tragedy visited upon the Jews by the ‘radical twin,’ simply because the guilt carried by the West for their damning complicity in the Shoah and the virulent history of antisemitism across the continent, is uniquely European and American, and is not borne by the Global South in any way.
Thus, for the nations of the Global South the making of the state of Israel was not a guilt-laden priority like it was for those of the West. The absolution sought by the West with this last great colonial venture was sought solely on behalf of the West, to salve the wounds wrought by their own actions and inactions, their own racist history; was, and is still, a heavy moral weight of their own creation, perpetrated by one of their own, using the familiar tactics of their very own radical twin.
This is why the Global South ‘can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter (more than) 13,800 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.’
Writing back in 2006, on the 58th birthday of the State of Israel, Tony Judt accurately quantified the victimhood that underpins much of the Israeli aggression, sensitivity, and the apparent need to lash out against anyone, or any institution, that questions its actions or behaviour.
The ‘State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature,’ wrote Judt. ‘The social transformations of the country — and its many economic achievements — have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one “understands” it and everyone is “against” it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced — and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting — that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal.’
While acknowledging that many Israelis may not see it that way, and might posit that Israel is simply doing what state’s do, and looking out for its own interests. Why should the views of outsiders be taken into account when they — ‘gentiles, Muslims, leftists — have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They — Europeans, Arabs, fascists — have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven’t changed. Why should Israel change?’
But, Judt asserts, things have changed, and largely because of the actions of Israel. Pre-1967 the West was largely pro-Israel; the plight of the Palestinians was, for the most part, overshadowed by the larger picture of peace in the Middle East. But the Six Day War, or the Third Arab-Israeli War, as you wish, saw the beginnings of a momentum shift, following the Israeli occupations of the West Bank, Gaza (from Egypt) and the Golan Heights (from Syria), and the brutality of the continuing occupation that has led, through growing media exposure, to a mounting awareness that the traditional view of a peace-loving, agrarian society hacking a living out of the desert, has given way to one that is highly militarised, characterised by the ‘Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.’
This momentum shift has seen post-war, post-Holocaust Jewish sympathies replaced by an ever-growing awareness that today it is the Palestinians, and not the Israelis, who are the victims of unconscionable, unending aggression. Today, perhaps pre-October 7, Israeli deaths due to terrorism were seen abroad to be largely a direct consequence of their own governments repressive policies; Israel’s much touted military morality was being not so much tarnished, as blood-soaked.
And perhaps, awareness of this within governmental and media circles, has seen them double down on their own victimhood, with the ‘everyone’s out to get us’ mentality starting to look like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized — but then responds to its critics with loud cries of “anti-Semitism” — it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don’t like these things it is because you don’t like Jews.’ And although Judt wrote these words in 2006, the resonance today rings loud and clear.
‘Israel’s reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia,’ leading Jews everywhere to feel far less safe and secure because of what the IDF is doing in Gaza and the OPT.
‘Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness,’ warned repeatedly in the 1980’s that such indiscriminate use of the ‘antisemitism’ weapon by ruthless right-wing politicians like Begin, and his mimi-me, Netanyahu, was, in effect, securing ‘a post-mortem triumph for Hitler, who dreamed of creating conflict between Jews and the whole world’ and ‘preventing Jews from ever having peaceful coexistence with others.’
Yet for all this Netanyahu is no Hitler; Israel is not Nazi-Germany. Though the comparison may be a valid one, it remains flawed in the ultimate outcome.
As Sa’id’s Arab headmaster explains, in Emile Habiby’s tragicomic novel, to a confused, impressionable young Sa’id, after he had returned to school in the Summer of 1948, ‘Sa’id, the ill-fated pessoptimist (referenced in 2.);’
‘Conqueror’s, my son, consider as true history only what they themselves have fabricated…/…It is true they (the Israelis) did demolish those villages…and did evict their inhabitants. But my son, they are far more merciful than the conquerors our forefathers had years before.’
And what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank today is incomparable with the unimaginable horrors of Auschwitz; but because the comparison may fall short on that score, and certainly in terms of numbers, it shouldn’t render the investigation of the process invalid or the outcome illegitimate.
Yes, the Holocaust is unprecedented, and we all hope and pray that it will never be repeated.
But for me, genocide is genocide is genocide!
The fact remains that each genocide is unique. Each genocide is unprecedented in the time, location and space in which it occurs. And legally, and morally, each should be weighed as such, and not fail, or fall flat just because one unprecedented act pales next to the unprecedented nature of Holocaust.
“From the first days of the medical facility’s operation until today, I have faced serious ethical dilemmas. More than that, I am writing [this letter] to warn you that the facilities’ operations do not comply with a single section among those dealing with health in the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law…”
“Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.”
A doctor at the field hospital set up at the start of the war at the Sde Teiman detention center, and built to hold arrested Gazans, described conditions that he said could compromise the inmates health and put the government at risk of violating the law. In a letter — part of which is quoted above — sent to Israel’s defense minister, health minister, and attorney general in the first week of April, the doctor described systematic abuse, poor treatment and a lack of suitable medication.
Genocide…legally speaking
Israel’s stated aims of the destruction of Hamas and the release of all hostages has set an impossible winning task for the IDF. Since the brief humanitarian pause in December, the Israeli onslaught has failed to dismantle Hamas’ ability to resist, and only two hostages have been freed by the IDF. In fact, more hostages have been killed by friendly fire than have been rescued by military means.
Now, having withdrawn troops from Southern Gaza, Netanyahu insists that his planned invasion of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, will still go ahead despite the more than 1.3 million people sheltering in the small, horribly overcrowded town, and repeated warnings from allies and foes alike not to go through this for fear of even greater civilian deaths.
Recent developments have, however, complicated the situation vis-a-vis the impending Rafah invasion. Following Israel’s shattering of all diplomatic norms as agreed in the Vienna Convention (1961) with its reckless attack on Iran’s Damascus Consulate, and the complicit silence of its Western backers to this diplomatic breach, and the inevitable, though nonetheless, surprisingly muted response from Iran, and the wholly predictable, yet one-sided Western of Iran for doing far less than most self-righteous Western nations would have done, has effectively given Israel free rein to break international diplomatic norms with impunity in the future.
And, even the midst of potential escalation, U.S. policy of unwavering support for Israel, is creating new problems for itself on a regular basis. Their uneven support for their colonial partners in Israel has raised questions and doubts among other so-called allies in the region.
Following the initial Iranian response on April 13, Kurd’s near Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, noticed how a U.S. Patriot missile battery had brought down Iranian cruise missiles, only one of which was headed for Israel. Yet just weeks before those same batteries had stayed silent when Iran attacked the Kurds, killing four civilians in an attack on a villa mistakenly thought to be a Mossad base.
In response Pentagon press secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said weakly, with words hardly likely to inspire confidence in allies, supposedly vital to the fight against ISIS, that the during the Erbil attack, “none of these strikes were targeting U.S. personnel or U.S. facilities,” and that the priority for the U.S. military is protecting military sites, and as such the attack on the villa fell outside of their remit; cold comfort indeed for the friends and relatives of those killed, and has left many in Kurdistan questioning their worth as allies in comparison to Israel.
Days later reports that Israel’s, admittedly tepid response to that unprecedented (that word again!) Iranian attack on Israeli soil, derisively called ‘lame’ by Itamar Ben-Gvir, was toned down as part of a practical, yet grim, unfeeling deal made with Joe Biden who traded a toned down response against Iran in exchange for U.S. backing of the Rafah invasion; a deal that not only risks the Camp David peace accords with Egypt — which states that no Israeli troops can enter Rafah; a fact Egyptian President El- Sisi confirmed when speaking with the Dutch PM recently — but will almost certainly sentence many thousands, if not tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians to a violent death, and is balanced by the need to limit the chances for further escalation and a full blown war with Iran.
Biden’s trade off, of yet more Palestinian lives against the growing likelihood of a wider Middle Eastern war is perhaps an understandable (from his perspective), if not a cold, unfeeling one, and yet, the fact that we got here at all, is arguably a direct result of his own stubborn refusal to adhere uniformly to international law and any semblance of ‘equal’ human rights with respect to the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Biden’s fending off of a wider war may well be lauded by many in the corporate media, who are only too happy to positively report calls from duplicitous Western leaders for restraint from Iran, but rarely from Israel.
The West’s blind complicity in continuing to supply arms and weapons to Israel to continue its’ genocidal war, and its blanket refusal to condemn Israel’s actions beyond weak, insipid calls for a ceasefire and access to more aid for the beleaguered Palestinians, are little more than PR stunts aimed at their home audiences in what is election year for the vast majority of Western leaders.
On the ground, the putative Rafah invasion and the inflamed tensions with Iran are distinct events, but Biden’s deal has effectively enmeshed the two, in an unequal equation that will only be balanced by yet more Gazan destruction and lives, an act that was given further impetus by yet another self-serving veto at the UN when America shot its own enfeebled pursuit of a two-state solution in the chest by refusing to back a permanent seat for Palestinians at the table of nation states.
The two state ‘patient,’ that was already in intensive care, is now on full life support, a fact glossed over by U.S. UN representative, Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s shameful words, when she said, “We do not see that doing a resolution in the Security Council will necessarily get us to a place where we can find a two-state solution moving forward."
Whilst that vote may have placed another nail in the two-state coffin, there is no acknowledgement that it is their consistently hypocritical application of double standards with respect to Israel that is not only undermining their own own rules based order, but is also shielding Israel and its genocidal campaign in Gaza, as well as the rapidly growing pace of illegal settlements in the West Bank — the cover of war has been used by Israel to illegally expropriate a record amount of Palestinian land this year already— from all attempts to apply any legal accountability for its actions.
And this without the additional complications provided by Netanyahu’s anti-democratic, judicial overhaul, that, with continued passage of the 2018 Nation State Law alone, would effectively enshrine Israel as a legalised apartheid state and end any hope of a two state solution altogether, with legislation that has been compared, in substance, to Hitler’s 1933 Nuremberg Laws that legally side-lined German Jews and paved the way for the Shoah.
It beggars belief…really it does!
And yet again, Thomas-Greenfield’s words are merely the latest illustration of U.S. attempts to present a wholly, illiberal U.S. foreign policy as a liberal solution, that belies its’ cold, inhuman calculus. But they can’t hide the truth; that it is purely a rhetorical campaign tool — one settler colonial nation supporting another, yet lacking all substance, humanity, fact and viability — that is designed solely for the home audience alone, at the expense of the lives of tens of thousands of brown faced Muslims on the other side of the world.
Netanyahu maintains that ‘total victory,’ as envisioned with his Rafah invasion, is the only way to ensure Israel’s long-term or ‘permanent security’ as a pre-emptive measure, but history is against him, not only given the century long story of this conflict, but even through a much wider lens.
The use of pre-emptive force as a means to obtain future security was first postulated by Einsatzgruppe D commander Otto Ohlendorf, who coined the term ‘permanent security’ in 1939 to justify his soldiers’ mass killings of Jews in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
Defending the notion at the Nuremberg Trials years later Ohlendorf’s defence team called the slaughter ‘putative self-defence,’ which was dismissed by the U.S. led prosecution team, because as, genocide researcher Zoe Samudzi explains:
‘To accept the rationale as valid would be to entertain blatant Nazi flouting of the international rules of war; but outright rejecting it would accidentally incriminate the Allied powers. U.S. military strategy, for example, would deploy this permanent security logic in its anti-communist campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and elsewhere during the Cold War.’
‘Imperialism as a civilizing mission was a humanitarian iteration of permanent security: good subjects were governable, and ungovernable subjects were cast as terrorists or dissidents or otherwise tainting elements that compromised the integrity of the white (or white-approved) sovereign. The willingness to enact racialized violence that blurs the boundary between the civilian and armed resister is an example of an always already genocidal impulse of states whose maintenance necessitates the racecrafting — an othering — foundational to permanent security.’
And the political, social and psychological need for permanent security for Israelis is a now merely a political pastiche of their enduring collective trauma, reawakened, so violently on October 7, and the victimhood (discussed in detail in two recent posts here: One and Two) that pervades Jewish narratives and actively enables the denigration and dehumanisation of the Palestinians, and by extension, their slaughter as a necessity to achieve peace of mind through ‘permanent security,’ a term coined by genocide scholar Dirk Moses (3), and taken to mean a states ability to make themselves invulnerable to threats.
The fact that such actions do not form part of the Genocide Convention, when plainly they should be, is down in large part to the shortcomings of Raphael Lemkin’s views on the actions of colonial nations, which were still, even at the end of WWII, seen as favourable to most alternative outcomes.
As Samudzi explains, ‘not only was Hitlerism made possible by the complicity of attempted European appeasement, its machinations were made entirely possible and even conceivable by the Eurocolonial systems that had preceded it by and for centuries.’
Furthermore, legally speaking, ‘how does one prove (genocidal) intent when both written and unwritten social contracts exist to altogether preclude entire groups of people from citizenship — i.e. from recognition, deservingness of safety and protection, rights, and access to legitimate victimhood — while deliberately privileging others? Further, how can one prove intent or even decry the violences of genocide when the actor itself is a settler or colonial state whose very foundations constituted and necessitated racial dispossession, widespread theft, and collective punishment on native or other populations?’
As Patrick Wolfe points out, and I spoke about in detail in my last post, ‘the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism (4), an idea given almost poetic licence by Aimé Césaire who said that the Christian bourgeois, Euro-colonial mindset of the twentieth century imperialist was Hitler-like; ‘he has a Hitler inside, Hitler inhabits him, Hitler is his demon (5),’ and that the reason Hitler has been so reviled and denounced was ‘not for the crime in itself, not for the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, it is the humiliation of the white man, and the fact he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa (5).’
(Please forgive the language and use of derogatory terms — I am quoting accurately for effect, and to hopefully make both mine and Césaire’s point. Apologies if anyone has been upset by this.)
The crime of genocide was never meant to apply to all; it was never written or discussed with colonial crimes, past, present or future, in mind. The reasons for a genocide are multi-causal, and so to then should be the criminal act, and yet the near synonymity of genocide with the Nazi Holocaust has rendered many likely examples mute and wan by comparison, in particular with respect to the alleged ‘intent’ which remains key to any eventual prosecution.
Samudzi again: One of the most glaring examples to explicitly conjoin the act or event of genocide with the processes of global imperialism is the US response to the We Charge Genocide petition. Delivered to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress in December 1951, nearly a year after the Genocide Convention went into legal effect, the petition held that “the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, and unified policies of every branch of government.” Not only was this allegation placed within the longué durée of anti-Black statecraft from slavery to Reconstruction-era brutality to the Jim Crow present, but the petitioners internationalized genocide. They noted that just as the Nazi campaign and its attendant racial ideologies demonstrated how “genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, […] domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war.” They deliberately globalized W.E.B. Du Bois’s analytic of the Black/white color line to connect “the racial terror of the lynch mob directly to more organized campaigns of colonial warfare,” according to global politics scholar Benjamin Meiches.’
The Civil Rights Congress attempts to translate genocide legislation into the language of anti-Imperialism at a time when colonial empires everywhere were reeling, and as perceived through the state lens of ‘permanent security’ was unsuccessful, meaning that a states ‘need’ to corral, dominate, subjugate and destroy certain racialised sections of its population in order to maintain its security, including the use of violence and extra-judicial measures at borders for example, does not fit into the conceptualised genocidal package as something rare, unprecedented and/or preventable.
Such an outcome effectively renders state sovereignty and the need to ‘maintain’ security over its territory, by whatever means, an acceptable and governable genocidal imperative. What then is point of the crime of genocide at all if these classes of people, these brown ‘others’ who are not the white ‘us,’ as labelled by state officials, are not meant to survive, simply because their mass elimination is deemed to be a necessary part of the governing geopolitical maintenance of the state?
That the international genocide legislation needs to be updated for a post-colonial world should be an international legislative priority.
However, whether a legislative consensus could be gained to ensure the renovation of genocide laws that are now seen as ambiguous, contestable and vague in the light of today’s conflicts, is another matter altogether. It is that very ambiguity that provides the legal folds in the cloth to hide the crimes of ruthless regimes and brutal dictators.
At the end of the day the laws are only ever going to be as effective and functional as the people who make them.
Thanks for reading.
*For consistency I have used DuBois’ American spelling of the word Color when referencing his work.
**The Muslim Brotherhood’s complex and diverse history is fractured and disputed across the region, with most Arab leaders and politicians suggesting they have moved away from the broad social democratic ideology of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, to embrace the more extreme ideas of contemporary, jihadist progenitor, Sayyid Qutb, and represent a desire to re-Islamise Middle Eastern societies that these extremist Brother’s see as corrupted by Western influences, and as such are widely condemned as terrorist organisations. However, there are many others who see the intellectual underpinnings of the Brotherhood as more traditional, and far less radical, and as such their rise would threaten not only the leadership of many Middle Eastern states, but also U.S. regional hegemony.
- The Souls of Black Folks: The Dawn of Freedom; W.E.B. DuBois, W.E.B. DuBois Collection, Published 2019.
- The Debate about 1948; Avi Shlaim (1995), International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.27, no.3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/176252
- The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression; Dirk A. Moses, 2021.
- Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native; Patrick Wolfe (2006), Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4, 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240
- Discourse on Colonialism; Aimé Césaire, 1955 (1972 translation).
