COMMENTARY Israel's brutal, indiscriminate counter-offensive in Gaza is indeed deplorable — but by equating it with genuine genocide like Guatemala's, protesters risk rendering genocide less meaningful.
Even at age 62, I remember the healthy, almost hormonal urge to protest injustice at age 22.
I also recall the undergraduate mission to learn the difference between kinds and degrees of injustices — so our protests would sound reasoned and credible and not petulant and gratuitous.
So on the one hand — although I denounce the demonstration lawlessness we’re seeing on campuses like Columbia — I understand the collegiate urge to protest the brutal Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza and Israel’s apartheid treatment of Palestinians.
But on the other hand, I’m dismayed by the students’ impulsive insistence that what they’re protesting is … genocide.
Which is why I think they’d do well to go back to class and discern the difference between Gaza and Guatemala.
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The latter is one of the injustice abysses my generation protested in the 1980s — a place where genocide did occur, as we’re reminded by a trial now underway in Guatemala City.
To be clear: I’m as disgusted as any Columbia freshman by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Gaza war campaign, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m an anti-Semite — it means I’m distressed by how unfairly Netanyahu’s brutish conduct reflects on the humane Jewish faith and community I revere.
Then again, I’m as appalled as any Jewish sophomore at Columbia by the Hamas leaders and militants who on Oct. 7 massacred more than a thousand Israeli civilians and took about 250 hostages, sparking the war. That terrorist atrocity just as unfairly reflects on the humane Muslim faith and friends I esteem — and we hear too little or nothing about that from the American kids in keffiyehs.
Their tent-camp condemnations would sound, well, more reasoned and credible if they included Hamas along with the Israeli Defense Forces.
And, just as important, they’d sound less petulant and gratuitous if they didn’t accuse the IDF of genocide.
Because what’s happening in Gaza today, for all its horrific excess, is not genocide.
Guatemala had a plan to erase the Maya's very identity and presence on earth. For all its horrible excess, Israel hasn't met that diabolical bar in Gaza.
Genocide is the intentional, targeted extermination of an entire ethnic group. The Holocaust. Rwanda. Bosnia. It’s a crime that eclipses even war crime. And it’s what Guatemalan prosecutors and witnesses are describing now in the genocide trial of former Army General Benedicto Lucas García.
In the 1980s, Lucas García and Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military carried out a campaign that decimated the country’s indigenous Maya.
The civil war raging then, and the right-wing government’s fight against left-wing guerrillas, were merely a pretext. Genocidal attacks on Guatemala’s Maya had been a sinister custom ever since the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado descended on the country 500 years ago. The Cold War simply spawned a 20th-century iteration of his barbarity.
Apocalyptic designs
I watched forensic experts exhume Maya remains in the 1990s. I heard their explanations that these were not battle casualties but homicide victims — executed every bit as routinely and programmatically in their villages as Jews were murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto.
What’s more, as an exiled Ixil Maya leader here in South Florida reminded me, there’s copious evidence that Lucas García’s mission had more apocalyptic designs than counterinsurgency. Many remember him stepping out of military helicopters at the scenes of massacres and bawling at survivors to never again wear their indigenous garments.
That to me is compelling proof of genocidal intent — slaughtering or removing people not just to deny a guerrilla army potential recruits, but to erase their very identity and presence on earth.
What Netanyahu and Israel’s military are doing in Gaza doesn’t meet that diabolical bar.
Yes, Netanyahu and the IDF have proven criminally indiscriminate in their attacks on Hamas forces in Gaza. Hamas has also proven criminally reprehensible, by using Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians as human shields. But we wouldn’t see more than 34,500 dead in Gaza today if the Israeli government weren’t so blind to, even contemptuous of, the Palestinian innocents caught in the crossfire — blind thanks to Netanyahu’s obsession with wiping Hamas off the map.
Still, that doesn’t mean Israel is following a premeditated plan to wipe Palestinians off the map.
U.S. college protesters need to understand that — because petulantly and gratuitously declaring genocide in Gaza makes the reasoned and credible identification of genocide in places like Guatemala less meaningful.
