Responding to Yehuda Kurtzer's essay "Genocide and the Burden of History"

For the record, this is not the criteria for determining genocide according to the genocide convention. Article II of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Ironically, the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. This was while the genocide against the Jews was still ongoing. He did not have hard data on the number of people who had already been killed. He did not know the ratio of civilians to combatants, he did not ask Nazi Germany why so many people were dying of starvation and disease, and he did not ask the Nazis to justify the military rationale for any of their actions. And yet Lemkin had no hesitation in naming the Holocaust a genocide.

Crossposted from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10603581

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    22 hours ago

    I want to consider the world that Kurtzer is building. It is a world where it is easier for governments to commit genocide because genocide is now unpreventable. If you cannot name a genocide until after it is over, that makes it much easier for the perpetrators of genocide to succeed in their crimes. At first I couldn’t understand how a Jew, let along someone who fashions themselves a Jewish “thought leader” could be so callous as to dismiss the post World War II rules-based order, which understands genocide prevention as a foreign policy goal. But then I realized that illuminated a key difference between Kurtzer and me. I believe that Jewish safety post-Holocaust, is a result of a liberal international order which takes international human rights seriously. Kurtzer does not.

    …

    Now, Kurtzer isn’t always opposed to activism. In fact, he encouraged people to attend the “March for Israel” in November of 2023. He did not waste time worrying whether or not offering Benjamin Netanyahu the full support of the American pocketbook was a wise decision. He did not question the ramifications that manufacturing the American Jewish community’s consent for the Gaza war might have long-term. He just took action. He didn’t try to be careful, he didn’t worry that some dishonest actors (like John Hagee) were participating in this rally. He didn’t do a power analysis to determine the likely outcomes of his activism.

    I write this essay in between coordinating my neighborhood’s response to the federal government’s military occupation of Washington, DC. I am one of those people who Kurtzer truly seems not to trust: an activist, more preoccupied with saving my neighbors from deportation than in analyzing the morality of illegal immigration, who uses “rhetorical tools” to try and save people’s lives.

    great article