Genocide: words, threats and historical context

Genocide.

Anyone can say the word and anyone can write it. Many peoples have had to deal with it. The word has also been attached to the Jewish people for decades: first unmistakably as victims of the Holocaust, and in the current debate increasingly often in accusations directed at Israel.

Precisely with such a charged concept, evidence, source criticism and legal precision are indispensable. Demonstrations, slogans or messages on social media do not in themselves prove genocide. According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, it concerns specific acts, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. Context note: the convention therefore requires both prohibited acts and the specific intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part.

Statements about the destruction or disappearance of the State of Israel are also not automatically the same as a call to destroy Jews as a people. They can be serious, threatening and historically relevant, but must be assessed according to source, translation and context.

Azzam Pasha, then secretary-general of the Arab League, is attributed with a statement that a war over Palestine would become a “war of extermination” and a “momentous massacre,” comparable to the Mongol conquests and the Crusades. The public reconstruction of the source transmission traces this back to Akhbar al-Yom of 11 October 1947. Context note: a directly verifiable scan of the original Arabic newspaper page is not available in the consulted public sources. We therefore present this quotation as attributed and disputed, not as independent evidence of legally established genocidal intent.

On 24 October 2023, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said in an interview on the Lebanese channel LBC that, in his view, Israel had no place on the land and that the 7 October attack would be repeated. The original broadcast is available at LBC; an English-language transcript with video excerpt was published by MEMRI. Context note: MEMRI is the translation source and has a pronounced institutional perspective. The broadcast itself confirms the speaker and context; for the precise English wording, the translation is transparently referenced. Hamad placed his words within Hamas’s portrayal of struggle against occupation. That context does not make the repeated threat any less serious, but it does belong to the full factual picture.

On 26 October 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that the regime occupying Jerusalem had to vanish “from the page of time.” The BBC explains its translation choice and the Persian original; a contemporaneous report by The New York Times shows how the statement was rendered at the time. Context note: the widely used wording “wipe Israel off the map” is not a literal translation; the Persian does not contain the word “map.” The statement was hostile toward the State of Israel, but careful reporting must keep visible the difference between the literal text and the common translation.

On 22 May 2020, during Al-Quds Day, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei described Israel as a “cancerous tumor” that, in his view, would be “uprooted and destroyed,” as Associated Press reported. His official Al-Quds Day message also uses destructive rhetoric about Zionism in the English version. Context note: the exact English wording differs between the official translation and international reporting. The statement is therefore attributed to Ali Khamenei and not, without a specific source, to Ruhollah Khomeini.

The examples show how long destructive rhetoric about Israel has already been part of the political conflict. They do not automatically prove that every speaker had legally demonstrable genocidal intent. For that, the precise words, the context, the target and possible acts must each be examined separately.

It is up to you to form an opinion, on the basis of verifiable sources, about such statements and about the threat that Jewish and Israeli communities experience in them. In doing so, imagine what it would be like if leaders of surrounding countries openly advocated the end of your state or the repetition of deadly violence.