I’ve been using the word a lot these past five hundred and ninety-six days. Maybe you have too. But what does it mean?
Here’s the UN General Assembly definition, coming into force on January 12 1951.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
On October 9 2023, two days after the Gaza break out of October 7, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – later sacked by Netanyahu for insufficient hawkishness, and later still named alongside the same in an ICJ arrest warrant for war crimes – told the world:
We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.
Glad we got that settled. There’s been such a lot of gaslighting, wouldn’t you say?
* * *