A year ago, it was highly controversial to claim – even for a genocide scholar, and an Israeli one at that – that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Today, it is becoming controversial to deny it.
Terms such as “genocide”, foreign secretary David Lammy said in the Commons on Monday, in response to a question from Theresa May’s former aide and now Tory MP Nick Timothy, “are quite properly, legal terms that must be determined by international courts”.
That didn’t prevent Lammy, a former barrister, from making an off-the-cuff assessment about the applicability of the term to Israel: “Those terms were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the second world war and the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term.” By this logic, Lammy may himself have undermined the seriousness of the term when he used it in reference to the Uyghurs, Rohinghas and Bosnian Muslims (Lammy attended a parliamentary reception to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide in 2022). On Wednesday, Keir Starmer backed up Lammy, boasting that “I have never described what is going on in Gaza as genocide”……more
