The Crime of Genocide

In 1949 the wounds of the Holocaust were still quite raw. Despite that there was a reluctance by many in the United States to support United Nations legislation to outlaw genocide. My father introduces the term genocide to his congregation and urges support for U. S. Senate approval of the U.N. convention on genocide.

We have indeed advanced a step on the path of moral progress when we refuse to turn our backs on the slaughter of human beings simply because they live on the other side of a line which divides us into nations. The age old cry, "Am I my brother's keeper?" is answered here with a strong affirmative….[1]
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PROBABLY VERY FEW JEWS THESE DAYS ARE AWARE OF IT, but today was traditionally a fast day of a minor nature on our religious calendar.[2]  And the rabbinate of Israel and the Synagogue Council of America have taken this fast and proclaimed it as an international day of mourning for the recent victims of European atrocities.[3]  And the Synagogue Council of America has further suggested that this occasion would be an appropriate one to call to the attention of our congregations that awaiting action by the U.S. Senate, when it convenes, is the matter of ratification of the U.N. convention on genocide, and it is the hope of the Synagogue Council that our people will be moved to express themselves to their senators in favor of Senate approval of this convention to help bring this ratification about.[4]
 
Genocide is a new word in the English language. It was coined after the war to describe the crime of attempting to annihilate entire peoples or groups of people because of race, nationality, religion, or culture. [5] It is a new name but it is an old crime. It goes back to the days of the Bible where we read that Pharaoh ordered all the male children of the Hebrew people to be destroyed.[6] It has been attempted many times since. The Romans committed genocide against Carthage.[7] It was committed against various Christian sects. The Turks tried to do away with the Armenians[8]. The Jews in particular have suffered from it, and were the victims of the most flagrant case of genocide attempted in all history in the last war when over six million Jews were lost. Never, however, has it been a specified crime under international law, until the U.N. in 1946 declared it so and called for a convention — a law — to be drawn up which would define it and provide for its prevention and punishment. In December 1948 the U.N. finally, after almost 3 more years, passed a resolution accepting the convention which had been drawn up, but since the Senate must pass on every international agreement entered into, it must come before them in order to be officially accepted by the United States.
 
The crime of genocide is something like sin. Everybody is against it. Yet the adopting of a law against genocide has met with considerable opposition, and its ratification by the U.S. Senate is opposed by many. Although it was February 1946 when the U.N. called for the drafting of the genocide convention, it was not until December 1948 that such a convention was finally accepted. It might have possibly died altogether were it not for the fact that an intergovernmental committee was formed by a number of people who wanted the convention, who went back to leaders of public opinions in various nations, and who managed to get a petition signed by 166 organizations in 28 countries representing 250 million people, and thus, with the help of such pressure, was able to put the convention through the United Nations and obtain a unanimous vote in the General Assembly in spite of a great deal of legal quibbling that was going on.
 
Russia, for example, had argued that since genocide had been committed in the last war only by the Nazis, and since Germany was destroyed, there was no longer any need for genocide [legislation]. And yet, strictly speaking, the Russians also are guilty of genocide against the Jews. Although they do not kill them physically, the suppression of Judaism and of Hebrew culture, has the effect of obliterating Jewish identity and this too comes under the definition of genocide. The American Bar Association opposed not only the law concerning genocide, but the entire international Bill of Rights, and is opposing U.S. ratification very strongly. Human rights, they claimed, were a domestic matter, and the U.N. should concern itself with international matters and not the internal affairs of any nation. The law against genocide, they said, was an invasion of national and state sovereignty, and they are afraid of legal complications. There seems to be reflected here on an international scale the internal argument we have within the United States as to States’ Rights versus Federal law.

There was a hesitancy with regard to definition of genocide. As finally set down, the definition included not only the outright physical killing of members of a group simply because they belong to that group, but also the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and also imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. And so it was pointed out that perhaps segregation as practiced in the United States might also come under the heading of genocide since it might be said to cause mental harm to the members of the segregated group. And giving out birth control information might technically be called genocide since that would tend to diminish the group. Senate ratification of the genocide convention means that the U.S. not only recognizes the law internationally, but that it also becomes the law of the land, and any local or state law that is contrary to the convention is superseded, and there could be quite a legal problem developed because of ratification. It would be very interesting to see segregation challenged on this basis.
 
Regardless, however, of the legal technicalities on which opposition to the law has been based, it would seem that the placing of a law against genocide in the books of international law could do little harm, may do some good, and is certainly an indication of a broadening moral sense among the nations of the world. We have indeed advanced a step on the path of moral progress when we refuse to turn our backs on the slaughter of human beings simply because they live on the other side of a line which divides us into nations. The age old cry, "Am I my brother's keeper?" is answered here with a strong affirmative and not the closing of our eyes.[9] Think back on what happened to the Jews in Germany. How little protest there was from the world, and how much damage the Nazis were permitted to do because of that lack of protest. Not all of this [lack of] protest was due to indifference. To a great extent there was, before war actually broke out, the fear on the part of other governments of interfering in the internal affairs of another nation. But with genocide declared by the U.N. and accepted by its member states as an international crime, there would be much less hesitancy in speaking up should such a situation occur again, and there would be a much greater moral compulsion in speaking up.
 
There are some who idealistically feel that the new law will prevent genocide all together or make certain the punishment of those who attempted. In the magazine The United Nations World the editor states that,
Had such a convention outlawing genocide been in existence and ratified by most of the governments of the earth, many of the unspeakable acts of torture and mass murder committed by the Nazis and fascists would never have taken place…. Anyone participating would have known that he was committing a crime against humanity and that he would be punished for it by an international court.
I am inclined to agree with those who challenge this statement and think it questionable that such a law would have deterred Hitler from his abominable path. No law prevents a crime altogether, but I do think, on the other hand, that the United States might have been much more active in its protest against Hitler's actions had there been an established principle in international law giving it, in common with other nations, the legal right to interfere in the affairs of a foreign power because of the horrors that this power was perpetrating upon a segment of its citizenry. Not because of his own conscience, but because of world protest, Hitler might have been stopped and millions of lives saved. But Hitler gambled on the world not doing much about the Jews, and he was right. State departments are much more concerned with protocol than they are with morals, and if we can give them the legal technicalities they feel they must have perhaps we shall save many future lives by so doing. The United States Senate should therefore by all means ratify the convention with regard to prevention and punishment of genocide, and we should urge our senators to assist in this ratification.
 
I would like to add to this just one more thought which is only indirectly concerned with the subject. I think we will all agree with regard to the horror of genocide, and we were considerably disturbed in the days when our people was undergoing the horrors of Hitlerism. We are ready to cry out when the world hurts us, but we ought also to give some consideration to our own possible complicity in the crime of Jewish genocide. There are more ways than one of killing Jews and Judaism. And I refer to our own neglect of our cultural life, our institutions, our synagogues, and our Jewish responsibilities. When we think of the losses we have so recently suffered it ought to hurt the conscience of any Jew in this country who by his indifference in a land of peace and plenty adds to those losses already suffered because of bigotry and brutality. It would be all too easy to add spiritual disaster here to physical disaster abroad. Let us therefore, be opposed to genocide and write our senators, and let us also be opposed to sui-genocide, if I may coin still another term, and tend our own vineyards.


[1] Genesis 4:9 And the LORD said unto Cain: 'Where is Abel thy brother?' And he said: 'I know not; am I my brother's keeper?'
 
[2] The tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, is a fast day in Judaism. It is one of the minor fasts observed from before dawn to nightfall. The fasting commemorates the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia—an event that began on that date and ultimately culminated in the destruction of Solomon's Temple (the First Temple) and the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah.

[3] The Synagogue Council of America was an American Jewish organization of synagogue and rabbinical associations, founded in 1926. The Council was the umbrella body bridging the three primary religious movements within Judaism in the United States. The organization dissolved in 1994, facing financial difficulties and fractiousness among its members.

[4] The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. The convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of years of campaigning by lawyer Raphael Lemkin. All participating countries are advised to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. The number of states that have ratified the convention is currently 147. [2015]

[5] Genocide (n.), apparently coined by Polish-born U.S. jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [1944, p.19], in reference to Nazi extermination of Jews, literally "killing a tribe," from Greek genos "race, kind" + -cide. According to Lemkin, genocide was defined as “a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure.”

[6] Genesis 1:15-16 And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives … and he said: 'When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, ye shall look upon the birthstool: if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.'

[7] The Roman genocide against Carthage during the Third Punic War (149 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E.) constituted a remasculating effort following the humiliating losses suffered during the Second Punic War (218 B.C.E. to 202 B.C.E.)
 
[8] The Armenian Genocide was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland, which lies within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 800,000 and 1.5 million. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested, subsequently executing, some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
 
[9] Genesis 4:9 "And the LORD said unto Cain: 'Where is Abel thy brother?' And he said: 'I know not; am I my brother's keeper?'"