Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
Alice Wairimu Nderitu has served as the United Nations Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide since 2020. During that period, Nderitu has urged caution regarding the use of the term, telling the UN to only apply it when genocidal intent is both manifest and the only legitimate explanation, lest “genocide” get watered down into mere political fashion. That is especially true in clear counter-terrorism operations, Nderitu warned, specifically resisting the application of the term “genocide” in the war Hamas started.
You probably figured out what happened next on the first guess … right?
Her paper explains that the term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe massacres of entire ethnic groups with the intention of eliminating them. That definition, Ms. Nderitu has said, includes the Holocaust, the Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, and may include the ethnic killings now unfolding in Sudan.
As a legal matter, establishing a pattern of violence as a genocide requires demonstrating intent. Israel’s campaign of self-defense doesn’t qualify. The war against Hamas has had many deaths, but Israel’s strategy is intended to dismantle a terrorist regime, not eliminate an ethnic group. The Jewish state has gone to great lengths to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, even as Hamas uses civilians as shields so their deaths can be used as propaganda.
That’s not what the anti-Israel cabal at the U.N. want to hear.
No, indeed. The Wall Street Journal editorial board lays out how the UN’s accusation of genocide in Gaza and its conflict with Nderitu’s established definition, written in 2022 before the war in Gaza began. Officially, the UN claims that Nderitu’s contract has expired, but the WSJ’s editors note that the UN routinely extends such contracts. They want Nderitu out because her presence belies their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias.
To call this a genocide is absurd. The Israelis are taking far more care about protecting civilian populations than any of the belligerents in World War II did, the conflict that birthed the UN. They are the only army in history that is expected to feed the population that started a war with them while the war still rages, in population centers where belligerents still attack the Israelis from civilian infrastructure.
Moreover, Hamas has made its genocidal intentions against the Israelis and Jews in general explicitly known and declared ever since its founding. After October 7, their representatives announced that Hamas would keep conducting such massacres and atrocities until they destroyed Israel and enslaved the Jews that managed to survive. IDF operations uncovered Hamas’ specific plans for the enslavement of the remnants.
There’s a genocide going on, all right. And the UN is siding with it.
“Can anyone with integrity survive at the UN?” the WSJ editors wonder. Not for long, it seems. If they want to side with genocidal terrorism, what value is there in the United Nations, even as a debating society?
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