Hands off the world: A call for an end to genocide

By Zyheim Bell

How do we define genocide? The term, coined in 1944 by Raphel Lemkin, combines “genos” the Greek term for race or tribe and “cide” the Latin word for killing. From its basic definition, genocide is the death of another group because of the identity that they hold, the gravest act against humanity­ — mass extermination of a people.

Sarah Lakin, a specialist in comparative genocide, critiques the modern landscape of how we view the term genocide, questioning both the sociological and legal definition of the term. Lakin makes the claim that, “violent crises do not have to be referred to as ‘genocide’ for them to deserve our attention” in a 2024 article published on the United Nation’s website.

For the past two years the world has been subjected to viewing a genocide in Gaza when on Oct. 27, 2023, Israel began its full invasion in the Gaza strip.

Two years of invasion for Palestinian people, two years of images of mutilated child-bodies and cities reduced to rubble, two years of blocked aid and a forced famine — yet the genocide in Gaza started well beyond two years ago and has not been the only genocide to play out on our social media feeds. 

Al Jazeera reporter Somdeep Sen put it best in an article published on June 17, “The world has a dismal record when it comes to recognising – and acting against – crimes against humanity while they are being committed.”

Time and time again, we watch as leaders apologize for the atrocities committed in the world – for not speaking up sooner because somehow the response is always too late. After the damage has been done and the dust is settled.

 Apologizing does not bring back the dead. Apologies do not wash the eyes of society to the sight of children targeted by snipers, the sight of burned corpses and the trauma endured by survivors. 

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the U.N. examines genocide through these set of lenses: the killing or causing of serious bodily harm or mental duress to a group of people, deliberately inflicting negative conditions intended to physical destroy a part or whole of a group, forceful transfer of children between groups and imposing measures that restrict birth.

By looking at how the U.N. defines genocide and opening that lens to the larger world around us, we become aware of the silent genocides in the world and targeted assaults here in our own nation.

The first steps to committing a genocide against people is social death. By reducing the capacity of the world to care for a group of people you prime them for killing, taking away their humanity and reducing the empathetic response from others. Social death is carried out in multiple ways and in the genocide against the Palestinian people it has been situated around Hamas, the great boogeyman extremist group.

To reduce Palestinian people as a whole to an extremist group, Israeli officials and Zionists have created conversations centered around Hamas as a recognized militia force for the people in the Gaza Strip. However, that is not the truth, and when lies of Hamas brutally harming innocent civilians, using headlines such as “40 beheaded babies” were made by an Israeli spokesperson, it spread across social media like wildfire reaching the White House. A false crime committed by Hamas, became the badge of depravity worn by all Palestinian people.

When asked to clarify or even correct the accusations, Israeli officials did nothing and even attempted to play into the lie. Fake headlines and deaths meant more to the world, meant more to actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and leaders like Joe Biden, that they became dissenters of a lie. 

The real violence in Gaza however, was overlooked, “Hamas started it” became the justification for slaughter. As if every single Palestinian was a member of Hamas, as if they called for their own genocide.

In Haiti, the world is made to ignore the genocide by creating the narrative that the nation is plagued solely by gang violence and infighting. Ignore the years of purposeful involvement from the United States, the strategic impoverishment of the French forcing a nation to pay for its independence and the occupation of foreign military troops in the nation. “The crimes of Haiti are its own to bear.” For Sudan the civil war is only examined as a national issue of the people despite the United Arab Emirates supplying the Rapid Support Forces with the finances and arsenal to carry out a famine and genocide in Darfur and being called out for enabling genocide.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we see the cost of comfort come into play, another form of social death. Why care for a group of people across seas when it costs you comfort at home? If we rally and protest against the genocide in Congo, we have to recognize how the slave labor and destabilization of the nation contribute to our phone batteries, laptops and electric cars as cobalt mining is one of the driving forces for the ongoing conflict in the DRC.

Over 1 million people have been displaced from the DRC, as the nation succumbs to a femicide, the strategic targeting of women in the nation, with an almost 300% increase in gender-based violence over the years according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In the western sphere, it has become “too much” to ask for one to give up their own comfort. To ask for people to look beyond the headlines and investigate what information is being told to them and why it is being spread.

As Lakin made us aware, the term genocide is trapped between its societal and its legal definitions. It is easier for us to view the intentional violence against groups than it is to legally prove that fact in the courts, the groups for protection within the laws of genocide are also too narrow since the 1948 recognition by the U.N.

And as expected, people have sat and waited to speak up against the genocide in Gaza. Until leaders that had once refused, finally started to recognize the ongoing genocide — two years of death, war-crimes and a famine for the before acknowledgement.

Sudan, Haiti and Congo cannot wait for the world to recognize their genocides, our nation cannot wait for the recognition of genocide.

Lakin and Sen’s words are a warning to us — the atrocities committed in Gaza are a warning to us. When I can open a book from 2016 “Black Radical Tradition” and find a section analyzing the genocide in Palestine using texts and references from 1915, the words of Malcolm X and Kwame Ture — both gone almost 60 years ago, I open my eyes to that same warning they are sending out, and I urge we all do the same. Genocides don’t happen overnight or even within a few years, and we are made to stop caring about people in far less noticeable ways than we think.

Gaza had been primed for genocide since its occupation in 1948, Sudan has silently withstood a genocide since conflicts began in 2003, the DRC has been unstable since 1994 and Haiti since its 1804 independence. These genocides have been committed and carried out long before their recognition. Failed by all people, and this same priming has long since started in our own nation.

This includes the dehumanization of immigrants and deployment of The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Think of the metaphorical targets placed on the back of trans and queer individuals. The use of excessive force and the emotional fractured relationship between Black people and the police force. Now examine them against the lenses through which the previously mentioned article II defines genocide.

If you have been silent before, now is the time to scream, to protest and call for nations to take their “hands off!”despite a cease-fire deal, despite the discomfort, despite what you are asked to give up and, most of all, despite what the world is or is not saying.

Zyheim Bell is a senior journalism major