We Called It Genocide in Guatemala. Why Not in Gaza Too? [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

We Called It Genocide in Guatemala. Why Not in Gaza Too?

Even some critics of Israel bristled when its recent attacks on Gaza were called "genocidal." But a closer look reveals disturbing parallels with genocides past.

By Patricia Davis, October 7, 2014.

In Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, 70 percent of those killed were civilians.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of genocide. And he has company. The National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Jurists Association, and other legal organizations have asked an International Criminal Court prosecutor to investigate Israel for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Buenos Aires also accuses Israel of genocide.

The accusation has outraged many. As historian Deborah Lipstadt puts it, “People might totally disagree with all aspects of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians—including those in Gaza—but to call this a genocide is to distort both what was done to Jews during World War II and what is being done to Palestinians today.” According to Lipstadt, “Calling what was done in Gaza a genocide is to use the Holocaust memory, symbolism, and imagery for political purposes.”

Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, is no proponent of the “g” word either. “What Israel is doing is bad enough,” he wrote, “without trying to fit it into a category which brings up memories of real genocides—the attempt of the Nazis to wipe out every Jew and every gay person and every gypsy, the attempt of American settlers to wipe out every Native American, etc.” But genocide does not require an attempt to eliminate an entire people. It requires an intent to destroy a population “in whole or in part.” And mass annihilations of the kind Lerner mentions are not the only genocides on record.

A more relevant comparison is the Guatemalan army’s genocide of Mayan indigenous people. For decades, Guatemala was engaged in a long, asymmetric war against a small guerrilla army that, like Hamas, never presented a serious threat to the ultimate power structure and emerged in response to inequality and dispossession. Last year a court in Guatemala ruled that former Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt was responsible for genocide when the army he commanded killed 1,771 Ixil Mayans, wiping out 5.5 percent of the Ixil Maya population in 17 months.

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