By Any Other Name

We are not fanatics. We deplore the genocide the Nazis visited on the Hebrew people. But there is no event in history that parallels it as much as the genocide practiced by imperialism and Zionism on the heroic Palestinian people. --Fidel Castro

WHEN FIDEL CASTRO spoke last week before the United Nations General Assembly, his condemnation of Israel rolled out easily. His attack marked the high point of the savagery levelled at Israel from the rest of the General Assembly. When he bound Zionism to Nazism, Castro mocked two concepts dear to the Jewish people--the integrity of history and the integrity of language. As Castro brandished the term "genocide" he trivialized, for the sake of immediate political gain, the past suffering of the Jews. But far more dangerously, this reckless misuse of the term bodes ill for oppressed all over the world. For as he toyed with the language of mass murder, Castro made the crime less horrible, more familiar; if he eventually succeeds in bringing the word into common political discourse, he will bring the crime into realm of the possible.

With historical irony of which he must have been aware, Castro chose to brand Israel and the Jewish people with the same crime whose name was created in 1944 to distinguish their suffering from simple murder. The Jewish state that rose in 1948, did so in large measure because genocide was so horrific as to mandate the most comprehensive safeguard that it might happen never again. The genocidal attack upon the Jews of Europe have given Jews and Israel a moral justification for existence so strong that those who would attack the Jews or Israel have had to somehow destroy this special moral basis of the Jewish state. Since the '40s, when the crime of genocide was conceived, those attackers have tried to impute to Israel the same villainy that gave it the right to exist.

But in accusing the Israelis of genocide, they have stamped practices with labels that simply don't apply. As events take their logical course, and speeches wind their way up to new pitches of frenzy, terms like racism, imperialism, and above all, genocide will cease to have meaning, the crime each describes will seem commonplace, just the latest in a long line of such atrocities.

The original U.N. Convention on Genocide, passed on December 9, 1948, states the issue clearly, Genocide, "an odious scourge," is a crime committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group..." This convention was the direct response to Nazi mass murder. At the time, the 1946 resolution against genocide and the convention were viewed as vital components of an international prevention of this crime. As Allen Barth noted in 1948, this concrete stance against evil was necessary because the Holocaust was an event that "the human mind finds it difficult to remember, as it found it difficult to grasp." The resolution and convention were supposed to overcome this awe-inspired inertia by giving all nations "the legal right to intervene in any country where genocide is committed."

The creation of this new legal right was almost an act of contrition by states ashamed of their complacency in the face of genocide. The U.N. was declaring dramatically that it must never happen again. And in taking such unprecedented measures it implicitly acknowledged the special place that had to be accorded to Jews after the war; war; not accidentally, in the period between the resolution and the convention, the U.N. passed the resolution mandating the creation of a Jewish state in partitioned Palestine.

It seems a long way from Auschwitz to the speaker's rostrum at the General Assembly. Before Castro could equate the Jews with their murderers of a generation before, the moral force of those murders had to be laid to rest. The easiest method was to pretend the Holocaust did not happen. Many have done this. One British historian alleges that the entire event was a fiction. But of far more impact have been attempts to destroy the cachet of uniqueness, the special horror that the U.N. documents accorded to this newly named crime. The 1976 U.N. resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, was tha most visible effort to accomplish this.

The '76 resolution constituted a conscious attempt to equate Zionism with obvious examples of racism. Tiamiou Adjibade, the U.N. delegate from Dahomey, admitted that "in essence Zionism was not related to apartheid", yet in the same breath he linked the two. American publications made the same spurious connection. One letter drew an explicit analogy between South Africa and Israel, terming Jewish fear of anti-semitism a 'red herring.'

Israel's destruction is in the interests of a large number of groups. To achieve it, any special claims Israel can make on the conscience of the world have to be obliterated. So Israel and the Jews are smeared with racism--the impulse that lay at the roots of the Holocaust--even though those doing the smearing are well aware that the charge of racism is completely unfounded.

On the General Assembly floor in '76, some noticed the dangers of this situation. David Wilson, the delegate from Liberia, noted that in the debate on Zionism as racism, "in all those brilliant and eloquent statements not one word had been said about the Programme for the Decade designed to help our brothers and sisters some of whom were languishing in the prisions in Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa."

Ivor Richard, Britain's representative to the U.N., stated at the time that to "stigmatize Zionism with racism was to confuse racism and racial discrimination with nationalism". For Castro, to stigmatize Israel with Genocide is to confuse a continuing political struggle with the organized mass murder of the Palestinian people.

The danger inherent in Castro's statements is the same Wilson described. As the Cuban and his anti-Israel allies use ever more excessive hyperbole to subtlely undermine Israel's moral right to exist, they render real genocide commonplace. At first glance, statements such as Castro's and those of the U.N. anti-Zionist resolution seem trivial. Though their claims are patently false--the Israeli's have not herded Palestinian Arabs into a Dachau or a Treblinka, nor have they set up their own apartheid system based on the idea that Jews and Arabs are different species of humanity--Israel's attackers seem merely to rewrite history for parochial ends, to falsify terms as part of an easily-recognized scheme. Although they seem trivial, such statements secrete a different, more lethal poison.

It is hard, as Barth noted, to grasp the scale and meaning of the murder of millions of human beings. After statements like Castro's it is harder still. Extraordinary acts of murder slip by us, easing past our dulled sensibilities. Millions have died in Cambodia, as, it seems, will millions more. Persistent reports confirm that the Brazilian government is massacring the Amazon Indians to permit exploitation of the Brazilian hinterland. How can we describe these atrocities, how can we summon up the will to intervene, as the U.N. says we have the right to do, if "genocide" is just another lame figure in international parlance?

That is the ultimate import of Castro's words. The situation is the Middle East may be tragic, violent and marked by individual atrocities on both sides. But it is not genocide. If we define it as such, and begin to believe our own words, then we will tolerate ever larger crimes, crimes which might accurately be labeled "genocide," even as, on a smaller scale, we tolerate them now.