AILSA CHANG, HOST:
So what are the stakes of calling an armed conflict a genocide? Even as a ceasefire agreement takes hold, the term continues to come up in relation to the war in Gaza. Last month, a U.N. commission released a report accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Leah Donnella of NPR's Code Switch podcast has spent some time dissecting what this word means and why it matters. She's here to help us break it down. Hi, Leah.
LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so first, we do have to note that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as other representatives of the Israeli government, do strongly deny any charges of genocide. But can we just talk about what the term genocide actually means?
DONNELLA: It's important to understand that the term genocide has a very specific legal definition. It refers to intentionally destroying a group of people, in whole or in part. And that intent is what makes the term different from a crime against humanity or mass killing or other types of crimes. Committing genocide doesn't just have to involve killing members of a group. There are lots of elements that can lead to that outcome. Here's Omer Bartov, a genocide scholar at Brown University.
OMER BARTOV: If you take that group, if you destroy its museums, its archives, its universities, its schools, its mosques, what you're doing, you make it impossible for the group, even if it can stay where it lived, to reconstitute itself.
DONNELLA: So it's not just about bloodshed, but also about destroying an identity.
CHANG: Obliterating a collective memory. Well, you know, going back to that U.N. commission report that we mentioned at the beginning of this interview, what happens when countries or international bodies deem a situation a genocide?
DONNELLA: So the international community is obligated to intervene when something is deemed a genocide. That was something that countries agreed on in 1948 when they signed a treaty called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Today, more than 150 countries have signed on to that treaty, and both the U.S. and Israel are signatories.
Now, that U.N. commission report has called on the rest of the world to intervene, but the U.S. State Department has denounced the report and rejected its findings. I spoke with Mohammed el-Kurd, who's a Palestinian author and has written a lot about how the world perceives violence against Palestinians. He talked about his frustration at how that violence often goes unchecked.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: The convention of genocide was not created to help historians feel confident about their assessments long after genocide has ceased. It was created to compel people to act in the moment to stop it.
CHANG: But to be clear, it's not only the U.N. commission making calls on this front, right?
DONNELLA: Right. So individual countries can make allegations of genocide. South Africa and about two dozen other signatories, for example, have brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice. And then many people and groups around the world have been calling on the United States specifically to put pressure on Israel or stop arming Israel as a way of intervening.
CHANG: But Leah, has that ever happened? Like, has a country like the U.S. or some international body ever actually intervened during a genocide while it is happening and made a difference?
DONNELLA: So in the past, by the time something is being prosecuted by the International Court of Justice, or even just referred to as genocide by the most powerful countries in the world, it has been years after the killing has ended. And that's one of the biggest criticisms around what's happening in Gaza right now.
CHANG: Yeah. Look, I get that language matters, but I can also imagine that for some people out there, the violence, the killing, all of that just needs to stop, whether or not it's formally deemed a genocide or not because something terrible is happening. Is that what you're hearing as well during this whole debate on whether or not what's happening in Gaza is a genocide?
DONNELLA: You know, the thing I've actually heard from a lot of people is that language has meaning. Mohammed el-Kurd, who you heard from earlier, says that what many of these conversations about language miss is that behind the words there is a human toll that all of this violence has on real people.
EL-KURD: I am talking about lovers and friends and families who have been separated from each other. I think about the people who have died without getting the opportunity to say sorry to one another or to say to each other that I love you or to have a food that they wanted to eat. You know, we're talking about our people and our neighbors and our friends.
DONNELLA: So in thinking about big, official legal definitions, it can be easy to gloss over the fact that we are discussing real violence that is happening to real people.
CHANG: Indeed. That is Leah Donnella of NPR's Code Switch podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your reporting.
DONNELLA: Thank you.
CHANG: And for more reporting, analysis and different views on the conflict, go to npr.org/mideastupdates. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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