Genocide supporters should not feel safe

Why should people who support genocide ever be entitled to be able to go about their lives without being publicly called out for their stance?

Genocide is where a nation attempts to erase the existence of an ethnic group within its borders. That may be by preventing them identifying themselves as part of that group, preventing them doing activities usually performed by just that group, expelling them from the nation, or killing them. Genocide as a legal term has a high bar of proof, so cases before the ICJ can take years to come to a decision. However, that does not mean that we should not apply the term when we clearly see very visible examples of one or more of these facets of genocide.

The genocide for which the term was defined is that of the Nazis exterminating the Jews, Roma, Russian POWs, the disabled, and those with non-normative sexual preferences within the territory occupied by them. There was international consensus that such mass extermination attempts were the worst that a nation could do, and so needed a means of stopping them, with a venue where nations could be tried for such crimes. That is the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the auspices of the United Nations (UN).

There are currently only two cases before the ICJ, being Myanmar regarding Rohingya Muslims, and Israel regarding Palestinians in Gaza. However, there are credible genocides ongoing in China (Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang), Ethiopia (Tigray Conflict), Sudan (Darfur, renewed violence in 2023–2024), and Afghanistan (Hazara persecution). The most publicised one, though not so much by the media in the nations supporting them, is of Palestinians being repeatedly bombed by Israel.

The focus will be on Israel here because they have extensive support from Western nations that treat it as an exception due to its support for those nations' Middle East hegemony. This support is due to the extensive efforts by its myriad lobby groups funding those nations' politicians to exempt Israel's actions from scrutiny, targeting journalists and activists that publicise the plight of the Palestinians, and promulgating blatant lies and propaganda though media interviews, press releases and internet influencers to swamp out those few pro-Palestinian voices able to get through.

Part of Israel's opinion-forming efforts are to promote definitions of anti-Semitism that include criticism of Israel as an example, and some nations have enacted legislation to include it, despite still allowing criticism of those nations themselves. Such is the utter hypocrisy around the treatment of Israel. Another of their efforts is to claim that criticism of the racist ideology of Zionism that was used as the basis for taking over Palestine is also anti-Semitic.

This has been given as the reason for many Jews to claim that they do not feel safe around peaceful pro-Palestinian groups protesting Israel's actions, despite those groups having large numbers of Jews among them. A person who does not support the wholesale slaughtering of another ethnic group should not have to be subject to such feelings of being threatened, but those who do support Israel's action must be made to feel unsafe because they are an enemy to humanity. After all, the Allied powers really wanted to make Germany and Japan feel unsafe to get them to stop their warmongering.

Trying to make out that a person's feelings are more important than their support for mass murder is disingenuous, and should not be given any credence. It may be uncomfortable to go against other Jews that wholeheartedly support Israel in whatever genocidal actions it does, but neutrality or claiming feeling unsafe is not an option when those actions are supposedly being done for one's benefit. The actual lives of thousands of Palestinians are being sacrificed for Jews to supposedly feel safe. The feelings of each group are vastly mismatched here.

It is not just genocides that perpetrators or their supporters must be made to not feel safe about promoting. Fossil fuels kill an estimated 5.3 million per year, and are willingly promoted by the executives of the companies producing them, yet they feel unsafe when peaceful protesters highlight their key role in a worldwide mass murder. Unfortunately, both those executives and the Israel lobby groups have successfully strongarmed politicians to get police to harass the peaceful demonstrators rather than arrest them as perpetrators and supporters of mass murder.

Hitler's cronies were executed for their role in the mass murder, yet these executives and genocide perpetrators are lauded just because our societies rely upon them to prop up the national hegemonies, exploitative neoliberal economic system and stressed-out lifestyles that they promote as all supposedly for our benefit. It is time to get back to a proper perspective on who we give credence to and who we remove from undue negative influence over our lives.