Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Dec. 13, 2024
“It seems Ireland wants to ‘liberate’ the ICJ from its quaint attachment to the morally reasoned belief that genocide requires genocidal intent.”
It’s not often I feel ashamed to be Irish. But today I do. For the Irish government is plotting something so slippery it boggles the mind. It says it will intervene in South Africa’s cranky, failing legal case against Israel and call for a ‘broader’ definition of genocide. It is worried that a ‘narrow interpretation of what constitutes genocide’ is letting Israel get away with murder. Strip away the legalese, prick the Dublin elite’s outsized view of itself as the plucky saviour of Palestine, and what we have here is a government calling for the laws of war to be tweaked in order that the world’s only Jewish nation might finally get its comeuppance.
It was Micheál Martin, Ireland’s Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), who unveiled the ruse to stitch up Israel by redefining the word ‘genocide’. Ireland, he said, will file an intervention at the International Court of Justice in the Hague later this month to shake up South Africa’s ‘case against Israel under the Genocide Convention’. We will ask, he said, that the ICJ ‘broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of a genocide’. Right now, he moaned, a ‘very narrow interpretation’ holds sway and this is effectively granting ‘immunity’ to murderous states like Israel. Shorter version: Can’t prove Israel is committing genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide!
The brazenness of Ireland’s meddling, the cynicism of it, is astonishing. Under the Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as acts of mass killing or destruction that are committed with the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The reason South Africa’s case against Israel is stalling is because there is no proof of ‘genocidal intent’ on Israel’s part. The only thing Israel is ‘intent’ on destroying is Hamas – not a ‘racial group’ but an army of anti-Semites that raped and murdered more than a thousand Jews on 7 October and which longs to rape and murder more. Those of us who have not partaken of the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia know this – that Israel’s ‘intent’ is to defeat a foe, not erase a people.
Intent is central to the crime of genocide. As Chatham House reminds us, even ‘a particularly bloody war, in which many war crimes are being committed and many civilians killed’, does not amount to ‘the crime of genocide if there is no genocidal intent’. This is obvious to all but the most ferociously Israelophobic, those folk who spend every waking minute wailing ‘Genocide!’ at the Jewish State. The Vietnam War, the Congo wars of the 1990s, the Syrian civil war – these were wars in which hundreds of thousands perished, whose horrors dwarf those of Gaza’s, whose crimes are almost unimaginable. But they were not genocides because none of the parties intended to destroy a people. Genocide is not war – it’s genocide. …SOURCE