The Cultural Genocide of Palestine

In 1948, following the horrors of World War Two and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against millions of people across Europe, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide  to ensure that no such actions would ever take place or go unpunished again.

However, in a strange twist of fate, the very people who the framers of the Convention had in mind, namely the primarily Jewish victims of the Holocaust, find themselves currently represented by a state, Israel, that claims to speak on their behalf and which is now the perpetrator of similar crimes against another group of innocent people, namely the Palestinians.

But what is genocide? Derived from the Greek word “genos” which means a race or tribe and the Latin word “cide” which means killing, the term “genocide” therefore literally means the killing of a group of people united by tribal, racial or ethnic ties.