Image: Qassem, a Palestinian shepherd from Umm al Fugara, is being investigated by Israeli military police and army for land ownership, after a settler wrongfully accused him of assault. Philippe Pernot.
Whether within the lexicon of international law or the parlance of everyday conversation, invoking ‘genocide’ is pregnant with explosive and abrasive intent. Lawyers and activists alike employ the word’s singular expressive power to condemn and to galvanise. We have seen this in the case of Israel’s assault on the Gazan population over the last year. Initially, genocide was uttered in a number of circles in slightly faltering tones, but it is now used with increasing confidence and conviction in diverse circles even in the face of trenchant opposition. While practices of indescribable pain have become normalised, speakers of the law have tried to resist this trend through creative and abundant genocide anachronisms and neologisms. We understand ‘genocide anachronisms’ as adjacent terms and approaches that were either subsumed or overlooked in the drafting of the 1948 genocide definition. While these broad conceptualisations were capable of capturing the variegated elements of collective annihilation, we suggest that ‘genocide neologisms’ speaks to more recent efforts to reinvigorate the potentiality of genocide, whether as a non-legal scholarly mode of analysis or as an attempt at norm creation. Thus, when trying to characterise the carnage that is Gaza today, for many, it is no longer enough to speak of genocide. Instead, we can see a proliferation of killing (‘cide’) words to try to capture the variegated contours of genocide. Well-worn terms sit alongside newer variants, all jostling to articulate the nature of Israeli criminality. We identify these ‘cides’ as: spacioicide, domicide, ecocide, politicide, economicide, sociocide, scholasticide, memoricide, medicide, Gazacide and related terms such as ‘unchilding’, and Nakba.
Part of the reason for resorting to this cacophony of criminalisation is to undercut anxieties around the purported limitations and rigidities of genocide, especially in relation to intent and its focus on physical destruction. Rather than rejecting the law or the notion of genocide then, we understand these efforts as ways to build on traditional renderings of genocide and make these resonate with the situation in Gaza today. Such efforts perhaps speak to a widespread need by legal and non-legal scholars alike to have their respective fields be seen as relevant in the face of such suffering. It is striking that genocide and its related ‘cides’ often crowds out other paradigms, especially focused on the situation in Gaza as one of numerous crimes against humanity.
