Words:
I have spent my life suffused by them, overwhelmed, undergirded, awash in them. My adolescence was ruined by my inability to control the torrent of words that rushed up out of me into conversations with girls I wanted to date and guys I wanted to be friends with. They gaped at me like I was a maniac.
But then I learned enough about them to gain control and know: Words have meaning and when meaning is undermined, then communication is difficult and when societies no longer agree on words’ meanings they begin to disintegrate.
Genocide is a critical word whose meaning since the Israel-Hamas War began October 7th is now open to question.
My daughter who has just started university called the other day to ask, “Is what’s happening in Gaza genocide?”
It is what she hears on campus from pro-Palestinian demonstrators and from her friends in social media.
She is confused because to her, genocide is what happened in the Holocaust. I explained to her the word comes from Latin: gens, meaning a tribe or group and cide, meaning killer. The word is a new construction, it was invented during World War 2 by a Jewish lawyer, Rafael Lemkin, from Lemberg, today L’viv, near where my grandmother, her great-grandmother was born.
I don’t think what is happening is genocide, she says
It isn’t, I say. I think genocide is a very specific and rare thing. What happened in Rwanda in 1994 was genocide. Hutus killed about 800,000 Tutsis in three months. What happened in Cambodia was a kind of self-genocide in which people of a certain class were murdered by their own regime. Millions of them.
As I explained this to my daughter I wondered if she knew about Rwanda and Cambodia. It is one of the oddities of becoming a parent late in life that events which had a huge impact on your own intellectual and professional development are specks of dust on the historical record your child learns about in school.
I continued my explanation to the kid. What Israel’s intentions are, beyond destroying Hamas and just getting revenge, have more to do with a different crime against humanity: ethnic cleansing.
She knows about my time covering Bosnia, so I didn’t have to explain what the term meant. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ethno-nationalists who prop up his government have long wanted to force Palestinians out of the West Bank and are using the Hamas atrocity to speed up that process.
But ethnic cleansing is not genocide. And it is important to keep that distinction in mind.
Not sure my kid will be taking that distinction into conversation though. Instagram, twitter, tik-tok are not places for discussions of the taxonomy of man’s inhumanity to man. She told me she was deleting her social media accounts for awhile.
Unfortunately, I can’t delete Twitter. As a journalist I do, still, get real information there and it is the best place to take the temperature of the mob. Genocide is the label that seems to be sticking for what is happening in Israel-Hamas 2023. And so now I’m thinking about words and their meaning and wondering if I explained the word to my daughter correctly.
The story of how the word genocide came into being, along with the concept of Crimes Against Humanity is told in East-West Street by Philippe Sands. Immediately after the war, at the foundation of the UN, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) was signed. It defined genocide legally and that legal definition is different than the one I gave my child.
If I understand Article II correctly then according to parts (a) (b) (c) all wars are by definition genocidal because (a) armies are representative of national groups and wars involve soldiers on both sides trying to kill members of the opposing group; (b) in addition to soldier to soldier combat, invading armies use terror and inflict bodily AND mental harm on civilian members of a group (c) armies lay siege to cities, towns and villages calculated to destroy the opposing group or nation.
So, most of this legal definition is very unclear because no distinction has been made between civilians and soldiers. Isn’t there a difference? Killing a group of civilians because of their religion or ethnicity is a more specific idea. Ethnic cleansing is alluded to without being named in (d) and (e), although, obviously, there is more to it.
The legal definition of genocide is not satisfactory. Words need to have specific meanings. Fragments from my undergraduate days as a philosophy major float to the surface. Perhaps there is a philosophical path to a clear explanation of genocide in the Israel-Hamas case.
“Every thing is what it is and not another thing.” Bishop Joseph Butler, 1729
I read those words at the start of Principia Ethica by G.E. Moore. It was the first time I encountered Butler’s famous formulation and I use it out of context all the time. Every “thing”, in this case, “genocide”, is what it is and not another thing, in this case “ethnic cleansing".
“The meaning of a word is its use in the language”. §43, Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
For a long time, I understood this proposition through knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life. He was a man who lived inside a series of secret boxes: Jewish, although his family, one of the richest in Europe, had converted to Catholicism in his grandparents’ generation. Wittgenstein was gay, at a time when closeted life was standard. Suicide ran in his family. Three of his four older brothers killed themselves.
And the world into which he was born disappeared on the battlefields of World War I, in which he served on the Russian front. After the war, he worked on a philosophy that was obsessed with words and their relationship to mental states and meaning. At the same time he was writing, in the wider world new forms of mass media: cinema and broadcasting, became the birthplace for modern propaganda, where words’ meanings are twisted from truth to untruth in an attempt to advance political power.
No wonder Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical work to language and meaning. No word in his world was fixed in its use.
If as, Wittgenstein writes, the meaning of the word is its use in the language then words must ultimately have no relationship to an idea that is clear, and exists in and of itself. A word like genocide, for example. Instead words can change meaning based on how one uses them, or who is using them.
French philosopher, Michel Foucault, saw in this relativism of words a reflection of power relationships. What are words, who defines them? Foucault was trained as a psychologist and worked with people who had mental illness. The experience shaped his philosophical writings. Some of his ideas are not a million miles away from the anti-psychiatry practice of his contemporary, R. D. Laing, especially the idea that medicine imposes a world view on the mad. Foucault (and Laing) view this as an exercise of institutional power. Part of this power is denying the validity of the experience of people with schizophrenia, for example, and the words they use to describe that experience.
Foucault burst into prominence after I had graduated college and so I only know his thinking from the fragmentary discourse of twitter and identity politics, where references to having the power to shape the language—from pronouns to what is genocide—is a constant theme.
Perhaps an artifical intelligence chatbot could help me understand the idea that words/language are a battleground for power. I asked Pi, a chatbot described by its creators as “a Kind and Supportive Companion That’s on Your Side”, about words and power. Here is part of our conversation (nb: the answers to my question took a little less than five seconds to appear on screen!):
I never got around to asking Pi about the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing and which is the more correct term to describe events in Gaza and the West Bank because the chatbot then flashed a screen asking what social media I used and for my email address. I was not prepared to give up that personal information.
Legal definition of words, Philosophical explorations of words and their meanings and their relation to truth, only complicate the search for a specific understanding of what is happening in the Middle East. If words only have meanings as individuals define and use them how do societies function?
Among people at demonstrations waving Palestinian flags and holding placards reading From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, the word for what is happening in Israel’s war on Hamas is genocide. If someone points out, no, it is closer to ethnic cleansing, the response from the crowd is, we have the power to say what we think it is, to give it a name, you don’t!
And while this debate goes on, real ethnic cleansing is taking place in the West Bank, and people who come from a group that actually endured the catastrophe which inspired the creation of the word genocide, and who might join in the fight to stop ethnic cleansing because they know the difference, stay on the sideline.
Words, words, words. Maybe they are best left to poets
You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
Osip Mandelstam, 1937
Not to be Talmudic about it....Clearly what Israel's extremist government has been doing in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. Can we apply the same definition to what's happening today in Gaza? Is it ethnic cleansing when those being "cleansed" have nowhere to go? (Attempting to) compress the entire population into half the territory, with no possible exit hatch for them. What is the real intention? A multi-square mile concentration camp? Wait for them to die of starvation and/or disease? We don't know what the endgame is, as Bibi is not saying. It most likely will be far from "humane"
Very important distinction you make there, thank you. Two comments:
- ethnic cleansing is still pretty horrible (I'm not claiming you said otherwise, you didn't).
- sadly, many people would use that silly retort: "Distinction without a difference". Nuance is beyond some, perhaps forever.