The remarks trivialising Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza from the British Foreign Secretary are part of the wider aim to deny the reality of imperialism’s closest ally in the Middle East, says Kevin Crane 

On Monday this week, an opposition Tory MP made a speech in Parliament attacking the use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s violence against Palestinians. He called the people who use this term ‘lawbreakers’ – we don’t know if that’s quite what he’d call multiple United Nations experts and the government of South Africa directly – but it prompted the serving Labour Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, to get up and respond. Spontaneously and under no direct pressure whatsoever, he agreed with the Tory entirely.

‘I do agree with the honourable gentleman, those terms were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

‘The way they are now used undermines the seriousness of that term.’ 

And with that, not only has he made one of the most ignorant and offensive statements in British political history but has put the British government in the absurd position of redefining the word genocide. This would be bad enough in any context, but what Lammy has done is exceptionally egregious given a few specifics.

Definition Matters

Genocide is not a word that simply means ‘a very serious war crime’ it is a legal term that depends on the perpetrator’s intent. The word was coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who was motivated initially by the atrocities inflicted on Armenian people after the First World War, and he said it as the intent to cause ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’. This has never included any hard numeric limit on the number of victims that such a crime has, it’s the motive that defines a defines a genocide.

David Lammy can remember that the Rwanda genocide of 1994 happened, but he clearly doesn’t remember the details. In that terrible event, fanatical members of the Hutu ethnic group are estimated to have mass slaughtered in the region of 800,000 people, overwhelmingly members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group. This falls short of any definition requires ‘millions’ to die before the charge of genocide can be made, but that didn’t matter once prosecutors caught up to the large number of attackers. There was no shortage of evidence that they had been committing attacks with specific intent to rid the state of Rwanda of Tutsi people.

A mere year after the horrors of Rwanda, genocide officially returned Europe during the chaos of the Yugoslavian wars. In July of 1995, in a small town on the eastern edge of the country of Bosnia, a far-right ethnically Serbian military unit rounded up and slaughtered men and boys from the Bosniak Muslim ethnic group. Genocide indictments followed soon after alongside years of trials and manhunts, culminating notably in the conviction of military leader Ratko Mladić and politician Radovan Karadžić. The after-effects of this massacre still impact the people of the Balkans 29 years, which is why in May of this year the Unite Nations declares that  11^th July would become the first ‘International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica’. Now, extensive research means we know exactly how many victims this genocide had… which, unfortunately for the Foreign Secretary, is 8,372 people.

Undermining the seriousness

This is not a trivial matter of point scoring. Lammy’s words have exposed him as pretty stupid, since he has placed himself in the situation of delegitimising a genocide commemoration barely three months after he endorsed it on behalf of the country but we have to ask why this absolute clown is even permitted to make light-minded comments like this from high government office.

The reason is that the British state’s top priority in foreign policy currently is to protect Israel from criticism over the Palestinian genocide. Pro-establishment politicians, of either main party, are positively encouraged to make any argument they can to cover for Israel. Outside of Britain, there was renewed global panic regarding Gaza, as the parliament of Israel had just taken the shocking unilateral decision to permanently ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in any territory that Israel controls. Since Gazans rely on UNRWA for the most basic requirements of life, this is effectively an open decision to simply kill Palestinians through starvation, thirst and neglect. All this while Israel is still bombing and attacking the territory, extending its wars against Lebanon, Iran and Yemen and deepening apartheid at home by disenfranchising Arab Israeli citizens from the political process.

In order to make continued British support for Israel – via both arms shipments and direct military means – anything other than participation in the worst crimes imaginable, it is necessary to have a political system that denies reality. And this is what the usefulness of an idiot like David Lammy is. He is a man who can perform all the stupidity that ambition requires him to. He can cheerfully ignore lessons of history, fail to understand what words mean, and reject obvious facts before the eyes of the world. His job is to trivialise genocide on behalf of a system of imperialism that requires it to happen.