Genocide Keeps Growing Despite Cries of ‘Never Again’ — Are We Normalising the Worst of Humanity?
By Heidi Kingstone

Genocide was once a term reserved for the darkest chapters of history. But as urban warfare ravages cities from Mosul to Aleppo to Rafah, and mass atrocities go unpunished in Africa and beyond, Heidi Kingstone explores what it means to confront ‘the crime of crimes’ — and why, despite all we’ve learned, we still allow it to happen.

When I began an article on Yazidi survivors of ISIS who had relocated to Toronto, Canada, in 2020, just as COVID-19 was breaking out, genocide was a dusty term. People’s eyes would glaze over when I began to talk about my project.

Now, for obvious reasons, it is the most important topic on the agenda, whether in the news or otherwise. After the Holocaust, the world said, Never again. And yet, here we go again and again and again.

“Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions” spiralled from an article into a book about 20th- and 21st-century genocides, of which there are more than a handful. And somehow, we have never learned the lessons or been able to stop “the crime of crimes.”

After Israel began its retaliation to Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack in Israel, and the present situation unfurled into unholy hell, people asked: How could the descendants of victims of genocide commit this kind of barbarity? It’s a reasonable question.

One way to understand the Israeli Prime Minister’s motivation is to examine his background. His prominent father, Benzion Netanyahu, an academic, believed in a Greater Israel, that peace was impossible with the Arabs, and that settlements were the answer. Benjamin Netanyahu now leads the most right-wing government in Israeli history, which sows chaos from Gaza to Syria to Iran, and believes that Hamas’s actions are a continuation of the Holocaust, from which Netanyahu’s Polish-born father escaped.

To quote W. H. Auden:

I and the public know,
What all school children learn.
Those to whom evil is done,
Do evil in return.

Appropriately, Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defence minister of Israel, have been charged by the ICC with the war crime of starving civilians. First and foremost, aid must flow into Gaza immediately. One of the people who was instrumental to me in writing my book, Professor Alan Whitehorn, compared the situation in Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

There are many lessons to learn from past genocides — the first of which in the 20th century was the 1904–1908 genocide of the Nama and Herero from Southwest Africa, now Namibia. The 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks was the highwater mark of killing until the Holocaust. Not least among these lessons is that it all begins with “othering,” dehumanisation and a belief that you are superior.

And that includes demonising Israel. The government, yes. But the country is no more evil than any other, and there are massive protests by Israelis to end the war from within. A large proportion of Israelis want to vote the government out.

My foray into writing about genocide took me to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term, which he first used in his 1944 book documenting Nazi atrocities, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He combined the Greek “genos” (race or tribe) with the Latin “cide” (to kill). Before that, the crime existed — but had no name. Churchill said it was “a crime with no name.” Lemkin’s life’s mission to coin the term took him decades. Then, it took fifty years for someone to be charged with the crime of genocide — that was Rwandan Jean-Paul Akayesu, a teacher-turned-mayor, who was implicated in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

Words have power, and the word genocide is now tossed around like a tomato in a salad, when it has a very narrow meaning based on intent — the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, religious, or racial group.

Kenneth Roth, the former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Israeli historian Omer Bartov — among many other prominent voices — believe that what is happening now in Gaza is genocide.

Menachem Rosensaft, adjunct professor of the law of genocide at both Cornell and Columbia universities, has rebutted Bartov’s critique as being one-sided, although he agrees with Bartov’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s policies and his repulsion at and empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians. However, Rosensaft contends that Netanyahu’s actions were a legitimate response to the Hamas attack on October 7th, with its intent to destroy the country and its Jewish population.

Proving genocide or crimes against humanity is always difficult during a conflict, especially when access to the war zone is so restricted. Definitive judgements need to be made when the conflict is over. Moreover, we are relying on Hamas (a terrorist organisation) figures regarding casualties.

Part of the post-WWII Geneva Conventions refers not only to casualties but to the destroying of civilian infrastructure — and we know from satellite images that the Israelis have utterly destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure.

Nowadays, the pillars of crime in international law are war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. They are not neat, separate categories, but overlap with each other. While the legal search for the term genocide — or its precursor, “barbarism and vandalism” — formally began when Lemkin turned to it in earnest in the 1930s, the history is more extensive, dating back to the Hague conferences in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Many people believe the time has come to update the terminology, as proving genocide, a legal term, is next to impossible. Whatever is happening in Gaza, it must stop. Legacies reverberate for generations and have long-reaching effects. Raphael Lemkin was correct in his belief that, as the Nazis stormed through the 1930s and 1940s, the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger pattern of injustice and violence stretching back through history and around the world.

That pattern continues.

While we should focus on Gaza and Israel, we should ask why other genocides don’t have traction. Rwanda is committing mass atrocities through the M-23 rebel group in eastern Congo, and the UAE is arming the RSF in Darfur as they commit genocide.

While writing my book, I was fortunate enough to interview American lawyer Ben Ferencz, the youngest prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, who died in 2023 at the age of 103. He famously said he had “peered into hell” doing research for the Einsatzgruppen trials between 1947 and 1948:

Many perpetrators believed that it was necessary to protect their vital interests — their religion, their country, patriotism or the economic conditions. They needed to get rid of the enemy. The enemy is characterised as somebody you don’t like and want to go out and kill. That has been prevailing in many countries for many years and is still there. So, we have to change the hearts and minds of people. Because until you change the heart, you’re never going to change the mind. They must realise that they have to treat other humans like human beings, not like animals.

The governments of Israel and Gaza were democratically elected, but they act like autocrats. As Somali-born writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali said, we are in a “crisis of civilisation.” This war is part of the wider collapse of the global liberal order.

If it’s genocide, the ICJ will decide — a judgment which could be years away. Until then, there is only one solution: for the violence to stop, and for a new leadership to implement a viable two-state solution.

“I promise you,” said Atlantic Council writer, analyst, and advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, “that a unified, consistent callout of Hamas by pro-Palestine voices will make a difference! I promise you: if Hamas senses a shift in the global public opinion among allies of Palestine, the group will realise that it has lost and must stop the war it started.”

Heidi Kingstone has spent her career covering events around the globe for prominent publications from the Financial Times to the Mail on Sunday. She has interviewed key international figures from Benjamin Netanyahu and HRH Princess Anne to Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Her interest in human rights and dictatorships led her to Iraq on four occasions, travelling to Baghdad, Irbil, and Basra before and after the invasion in 2003. She has also reported from Bangladesh, Africa and the Middle East. Arriving in an old Soviet helicopter and a C-130 military aircraft, she reported extensively from Afghanistan. She later wrote her first book: Dispatches from the Kabul Café (2014), a memoir of a country at a tipping point. War and genocide have fuelled Kingstone’s pursuits and informed her work. Like so much in her life, from moving to London from her native Toronto to ending up in Iraq and Afghanistan, serendipity played its part in writing her latest book, Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions.

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