‘Genocide’ is a word whose meaning should matter

Words matter. Their meanings matter. If words have no meaning, then the ideas we construct from those words have no meaning, either. This is why Webster’s Dictionary records the definitions and uses for approximately 470,000 words.

Today, the word that should hold precious meaning but is often dangerously bandied about is “genocide.”

Genocide is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part.” Article II of the convention lays out five acts, any one of which can constitute genocide when undertaken to that end. The convention offers a clear definition with little ambiguity.

Sadly, ambiguity over what is or what is not considered genocide is what we see on protestors’ placards throughout U.S. cities. It’s what we hear from Members of Congress, and it’s what we read on social media. 

In World War II, 15 million military personnel and more than 38 million civilians died, yet only two genocides took place. The Nazi genocides against the Jews and the Roma (the Gypsies) involved displacement, ghettoization and mass murder of peoples for their ethnic and religious affiliations.

The result was the murder of 6 million Jews, and upwards of 500,000 Roma.

Jews accounted for 17 percent of the total civilian death toll, and more than 60 percent of the European Jewish population was eradicated. Twenty-five percent of Europe’s Roma population is estimated to have been murdered. These are genocides.

Decades earlier, the Ottomans had murdered or expelled more than 90 percent of Armenians in Turkey and left few traces of Armenian culture behind. Years later, the rather homogenous nation-state of Turkey was founded, free of Armenians. That’s genocide. 

Where the intentions are not stated explicitly, a simple measure of genocide is the size of the remaining population after the alleged crime. In the genocides mentioned above, surviving Jews, Roma and Armenians represented but a small percentage of the original populations. 

Words have meaning. Genocide has meaning, and if we are to ensure nothing again happens like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide or the Darfur genocide, which killed more than 2 million people and displaced another 2.5 million, we must not trivialize the definition of genocide to conform to a political narrative. 

Assertions that Israel is committing genocide are thus not only demonstrably contrary to genocide’s definition, but they also trivialize the magnitude of brutality that the term should convey. 

In 1950, the total Palestinian population was 945,000, infant mortality was 142.3 per thousand live births and life expectancy was just under 46 years. By 2021, the total Palestinian population had grown 400 percent, to 5 million. Infant mortality was down 90 percent, to 13.8 per thousand. Palestinian life expectancy had increased to 62 percent, to 73.5 years. To point out the obvious, these marked improvements have occurred in spite of the many wars between Israel and the Palestinians. There is no genocide taking place by Israel.

It has become fashionable in some quarters to claim that deaths resulting from any war between Israel and the Palestinians, or any action pursued by the Israeli government, amount to genocide. Such claims reflect either ignorance of what genocide actually is or a willful lie for ignoble purposes. 

The misuse of the word “genocide” does nothing to help Palestinians who want a better life, free from the sclerotic leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, who is in the eighteenth year of his four-year term, or the authoritarian rule of the Iranian terrorist proxy group Hamas. 

By no definition of “genocide” is Israel committing that crime. Even at the exaggerated and dubious levels reported by Hamas’s Ministry of Health, the civilian death toll in Gaza would stand at only 0.75 percent of the population. Moreover, Israel has no intention of purging Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, which would be another method of genocide. 

George Orwell once wrote that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Genocide is a horrific, devastating crime that should be easily recognizable and condemned. But the more this word is used for political purposes, the less capable society will be of calling upon the better angels of its nature to distinguish between the real and the politically advantageous lie. 

If genocide no longer has meaning, then the slippery slope becomes a cliff. 

Mark Sachs is the founder of Orwell Grey Strategic Communications, LLC and the co-author of the book “The Cancel Culture Curse.“