A. Dirk Moses’ The Problems of Genocide is “an authoritative account of how the concept of genocide came to exclude many forms of mass killing. Western governments were keen to develop a legal definition of the crime that absolved them of their own violent acts, such as the system of lynching and Jim Crow laws in the southern United States and the suppression of colonial rebellions in South Asia, Moses argued. The result was a law that exceptionalized genocide, affixing its threshold of transgression to the events of the Holocaust.”
And Israel is considered Western by these Western powers; it is their creation and ‘a democracy’ in a sea of autocracy needs supporting.
“‘As long as they can point to any other discernible goal — to subjugate, dispossess, or enslave, or even to lash out and take revenge [add ‘self-defence and ‘reprisal’]— states have a potential alibi against the charge of genocide’, wrote the legal scholar Darryl Li in Dissent, citing Moses. ‘Apologists for mass violence have long seized upon these infirmities in the legal definition to derail allegations.’
“Could international law, despite its limitations, play a role in the advancement of Palestinian liberation, or are international lawyers simply, as the law professor Shahd Hammouri put it, ‘merchants of phantoms’, pedaling the promise of freedom but unable to offer anything past the vagaries of morally cloudy legal doctrine?”
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