Category: Genocide

Why Does Genocide Happen Again and Again?

9 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

The genocide scholar Raz Segal has written an insightful article for the Guardian (“The genocide in Gaza is far from over,” 20 November, 2025) which I am flagging because it addresses a question that is almost never asked in public discourse: Why do genocides happen?

Segal asks this question because it is clear that the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and education programs designed to instil the idea of “never again”, have failed. For, in this post-Holocaust world, the slogan “never again” is belied by the reality of “again and again.”

The common understanding of genocides is that they are caused by bad people with evil in their hearts. This is The Christmas Carol version of the expunction of groups. Bob Cratchet was overworked and underpaid because his boss, Ebenezeer Scrooge, was a miser with a heart of adamant, not because he was a capitalist operating in a world of cut-throat competition. Scrooge had two choices: pay his employees as little as possible and work them as long as possible, or go under. It’s no surprise he chose the former.

How many progressives attribute the problems of the working class to the greed of corporations, as if greed can be disappeared in a poof of moral suasion, or a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future? Where does greed come from?  Scrooge’s greed came, not from his heart, but from bourgeois society and the capitalist imperatives which enslaved him. “We shouldn’t despise human nature,” counseled the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot, “but the despicable conventions that pervert it.” Scrooge’s perversion was the despicable convention of capitalism, not a lonely childhood and a love affair gone sour, as Dickens told the tale.

 What are the despicable conventions that pervert human nature to produce genocides? For Segal, and others, it is a political project—one of building ethnically homogenous societies.

British settlers in Turtle Island (North America), Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), carried out genocides against the indigenous peoples of these territories, not so much with the conscious intention of building societies of, by, and for White people, but of integrating the land and resources of the indigenous people into a growing world bourgeois system of capitalist production. Inasmuch as the indigenous peoples couldn’t be, and didn’t want to be, forcibly integrated into this system, they were eliminated as obstacles. Thus, the creation of ethnically homogeneous White Christian societies in these lands was a consequence of a capitalist driven process.

Nazi Germany carried out a genocide in Eastern Europe against people it deemed Untermenschen (sub-humans)—Slavs, Jews, Romani, Blacks, and mixed-race people. Of 18 million non-combatants killed by bullets, gas, exposure, exhaustion, and disease in the German war in the European East from 1939 to 1945, 12 million were Slavs and six million Jews. Ninety-six percent of the victims were claimed by Nazi imperialist violence—that is, violence used by the Third Reich to conquer and depopulate Slav territory in order to repopulate it with German settlers.  

Significantly, most of the world’s Jews lived within the territory that was the object of the Nazis’ settler colonial ambitions. The Holocaust, in the view of Carrol P. Kakel III, a US historian who has written on the American and German genocides, cannot be separated from Nazi settler colonialism. Six million Jews were killed, not for the sole reason that Nazis hated Jews—a view ingrained in the ideological zeitgeist—but as a consequence of a political project, namely, 1) clearing the European East (where the majority of the world’s Jews lived) of non-Germans to make room for an expanded ethnically homogeneous Teutonic empire and 2) eliminating an ethnic group the Nazis believed was, through the instruments of international finance capitalism and Marxist internationalism, seeking to destroy the German people as a nation.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who introduced the concept of genocide in his 1944 study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, attributed the Nazi genocide of the Slavs to the German settler colonial project, but insisted that the genocide of the Jews, the Holocaust, originated in psychopathological Judeophobia, unconnected to any Nazi political aim. Lemkin’s insistence that Nazi violence toward Jews was driven by psychopathology (thus, bad people with evil in their hearts) likely originated in his Zionism. A core belief of political Zionism is that non-Jews can’t help but hate Jews. As a consequence, Jews can never safely live among non-Jews, and must therefore have their own state if they are to be safe and survive as a people. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued vigorously against the view that the Holocaust was the consequence of apolitical hatred, rooting the Judeocide instead, along with other genocides, in political projects. He criticizes the Genocide Convention for depoliticizing genocide—that is, for failing to recognize that genocides are carried out by ethnic groups against other ethnic groups they see as economic or political competitors. Often, but not always, the competition is over land. Or one ethnic group sees another as a threat to its survival.

Certainly, the origins of the genocide of the Palestinians can be found in a political project—clearing Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish settlers and the creation of a Jewish ethnic state. Zionist settler colonialism has obvious connections to the British-settler colonial genocides of the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the Nazi political project of creating an expanded German empire in the European East comprised solely of Aryan Germans.

Segal argues that the reason we live in a post-Holocaust world of again and again is because the political project that has regularly given rise to genocide—one of creating ethnically homogeneous states—continues to be seen as legitimate. One of the reasons (though not the only or even most important reason) the United States, Britian, Canada, and the Soviet Union backed the creation of an ethnic Jewish state in Palestine, was because they believed that ethnic states were legitimate, necessary, and desirable. Self-determination, the notion that every ethnic group should have its own state, enjoys considerable esteem. Thus, the idea of a single democratic state in Palestine, from the river to the sea, where everyone is equal, is frequently dismissed in preference to the creation of two ethnically homogeneous states existing side-by-side—one Jewish, the other Palestinian. This is the two-state solution. Zionists prefer one Jewish state in all of Palestine (today’s reality) and some Palestinians would like to see a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, cleansed of its Jewish inhabitants, save for the descendants of Jews who lived in the country prior to the political Zionist waves of European immigration.

Abolishing genocide and getting to a world of never again means abolishing the idea that the ethnic state is either necessary or desirable.  We don’t need ethnic states; we need civic states, where all people are equal and gender, sexual-orientation, ethnicity, national origin, religion, color, language, and all other ascriptive markers of identity have no political significance.  

However, ideas are not abolished by fiat; conduct is not deduced from principle. The fact that the land of the indigenous peoples of North America and Oceania offered attractive possibilities to metropolitan Europe, and the proletarians it disgorged to the colonies, created the idea of the desirability of settler colonialism. The idea of political Zionism arose in the anti-Semitism of Europe, which in turn arose in the need of Europe’s rulers to diffuse threats to their rule by turning their subjects’ anger against a scapegoat. The war against the Jews became a substitute for the class war against Tsarist oppression and capitalist exploitation.  A. Dirk Moses makes a compelling point that genocide is pursued as a solution to a political problem, but political problems arise not in the world of ideas, but in social and economic intercourse.

One of the surest ways of solving the political problem of two groups vying for political and economic resources within the same territory is for one or both of them to try to expel or physically destroy the other. So long as humanity is divided by ascriptive identity will identity groups vie for political and economic resources, and so long as identity groups vie for political and economic resources, the possibility of genocide will be ever present.  

Capitalism, the US Senate, and the Zionist Genocide of the Palestinians

By Stephen Gowans

19 September 2025

What does this say about the US Senate?

Bernie Sanders is the only US senator to acknowledge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and even he does so post festum, and grudgingly. Only after a mountain of evidence had been amassed by multiple organizations and experts—from the ICJ to human rights groups and genocide scholars (including Israeli ones) and finally from the United Nations Human Rights Council (to say nothing of what was evident for anyone to see in the overt expressions of genocidal intent and conduct of the Israeli leadership and its revenge-ravening military)—did Senator Sanders, the soi-disant democratic socialist from Vermont, get around to acknowledging that indeed a genocide is in progress. This, after months of being pressed by his supporters to concede the obvious. Having acquiesced to both political pressure and reality, he conciliated the genocidaire by blaming Hamas for the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinians, al-Nakba al-Mustimira. On top of that, he continued to endorse arms shipments to Israel in the form of “defensive arms”, thus drawing a misleading distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.

But forget Sanders for the moment. What about the 99 other senators who haven’t even grudgingly acknowledged the genocide?

Most senators are millionaires or multimillionaires, who are intimately interconnected familialy, socially, politically, and professionally with the top investors and leading CEOs of the most profitable US companies, on whom they rely for campaign contributions and lucrative post-political-career opportunities. Accordingly, they are devoted to upholding the systems of capitalist exploitation and US imperialist competition—the foundation of their wealth and privilege, and more broadly, the wealth and privilege of their class.

West Asia is important to the senators’ class, and largely for one reason: petroleum. While the United States, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, draws the bulk of its oil and natural gas from the Americas, the price of energy depends on the unhindered flow of petroleum resources worldwide. Hence, West Asia—and Washington’s outpost in the region, Israel—is vital to the smooth functioning of capital accumulation at home, and therefore to the senators’ core personal and class interests.

Additionally, China depends on access to West Asian oil to fuel its military and keep its economy running. Controlling the region gives Washington considerable strategic leverage over its leading rival. What’s more, Japan and Western Europe—key US subordinates and potential strategic competitors—are also dependent on West Asian petroleum. Controlling the Arab world’s oil and natural gas helps Washington keep these states in line.

Hence, US capitalism has an interest in dominating West Asia and suppressing West Asian expressions of national assertiveness and local sovereignty. Arab and Iranian nationalists, were they allowed to thrive, would seek to turn the region’s petroleum resources to the benefit of local populations at the expense of US capitalist class imperatives. They’ve done it before, and would, if they could, do it again.

A Canadian diplomat once described Israel as an outpost “in the Eastern Mediterranean with close economic and cultural ties with the West generally and in particular with the United States.” Owing to these ties, it is the ideal candidate to assert US strategic interests in its region. As the late US Senator Jesse Helms, Chairman from 1995 to 2001 of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, remarked: “The United States has vital strategic interests in the Middle East, and it is imperative that we have a reliable ally whom we can trust, one who shares our goals and values. Israel is the only state in the Middle East that fits that bill.” What Helms meant by “vital US strategic goals,” is goals that comport with the interests of his class, not the interests of the larger subordinate class of which most US citizens are members.

Now, some would argue that Washington’s foreign policy is controlled by “the Israel lobby,” a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists who advance Israeli goals at the expense of US interests. To be sure, the Israel lobby has enormous influence in Washington, but key parts of this argument—articulated by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—are often left unexamined.

  • When we say “US interests”, whose interests do we mean? Those of the bulk of the US population, or those of the approximately one percent of the population that owns and controls the economy and dominates the state (including the Senate)? (Mearsheimer and Walt see only one undifferentiated US interest, unmediated by class.)
  • Are the interests of the bulk of the US population at odds with the Zionist interests of Israel?
  • Do the interests of the US plutocracy mesh with the Zionist aims of the Jewish settler colonial state?

I would argue that US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel is at variance with the interests of the vast majority of US citizens (and therefore would agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, so far as they define “US interests” as the class interests of most US citizens—those of the employee class—as distinct from those of the US economic elite.) At the same time, I would argue that the interests of the US capitalist class mesh well with Zionist interests.

Significantly, the “Israel lobby” is largely made up of major US investors and the top CEOs of the United States’ leading companies. The group of Israel-zealots that Mearsheimer and Walt argue have highjacked US foreign policy, happen to be the elite of US capitalism, according to research by Laurence H. Shoup, whose has specialized in examining the contours of the US ruling class. If the Israel lobby has hijacked US foreign policy, then so too have the leaders of corporate America taken control of the levers of the US Departments of State, National Defense, and Treasury, along with the posts of National Intelligence Director and Ambassador to the UN. Shoup and others have shown that these key posts have long been dominated by the US capitalist elite. The Israel lobby exists, but it is a subset of the corporate lobby, a fact that points to a commonality of interest between the US capitalist class and its outpost in West Asia.

How are US capitalist and Israeli interests alike?

First, it should be noted that Israel is completely dependent on the United States. It could not survive without:

  • US military and economic subsidies, and US guarantees that the Israeli military will be equipped with a qualitative military edge over every other state in its region.
  • Unwavering diplomatic support, that allows Israel to act unconstrained by international law and over the objections of international public opinion and the expostulations of the states of the world, including US subordinates, without fear of penalty. (There are two roque states in the world: Israel and the United States. The former acts under the aegis of the latter and the latter under the aegis of its immense power.)

These supports are necessary because Israel is a tiny country, both geographically and demographically, which cannot survive on its own in the middle of a much larger Arab nation, whose enmity is directly traceable to Zionist settler colonialism. Israel’s founding fathers, and “its first leaders worried greatly that without alliances with stronger regional and global powers, the Zionist project would fail.” Today, Israelis acknowledge that the backing of the United States is one reason Israel has survived.

As a consequence of its dependence on the United States, the embattled Zionist state has no option but to pursue US goals as a condition of continuing to receive US support. The US goals it pursues include suppressing any force that might attempt to bring the region’s energy resources under local control for the purpose of uplifting the local population at the expense of aggrandizing the interests of US investors and oil companies and denying Washington control of West Asia, thereby negating US strategic leverage over China, Japan, and Western Europe. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, is reputed to have said that Israel’s mission is “to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” Echoing Dayan, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote in 1998 that Israel acts as “the West’s policeman in the Middle East.” Referring to states in West Asia that are keen to assert their independence as “militant regimes”, Netanyahu declared that Israel’s role is to “safeguard the broader interests of peace” since no other state in the region can be relied on by Washington to check either the militant states’ “ambitions or obsessive plans for armament.” Safeguarding the broader interests of peace means safeguarding the status quo of US power in West Asia.

This is the fundamental quid-pro-quo of the US-Israeli relationship: Israel helps Washington stop the emergence of another Mohammad Mosaddegh, Gamal-Abdel Nasser, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Hafez or Bashar al-Assad—nationalist leaders who sought to put the interests of their own people above US capitalist class strategic interests and those of US oil companies and investors—and Washington provides Israel with the resources it needs to remain a viable state in West Asia.

It should be added, however, that Washington hardly needs to compel Israel to vigorously oppose West Asia’s nationalists. Whether expressed overtly, as a secular movement under an national liberationist label, or whether it lurks inside Islamist states or movements, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah, West Asian national liberation is irreconcilable with Zionism. The two movements are mutually antagonistic. Israel and the US capitalist elite, thus, share a common enemy. Both parties seek to despoil the peoples of West Asia of their land, labor, and resources, and West Asian nationalist forces seek to overcome the despoliation. To secure both Zionist and US capitalist class goals, West Asian nationalist movements must be crushed or at the very least contained. This makes US plutocrats and Israeli Zionists natural allies.

Adam Hanief, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah make this point well in their pamphlet Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine. They write:

[S]ettler colonies are … typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support in order to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment. … For this reason, settler colonies are much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than ‘normal’ client states. In the Middle East, for instance, Arab governments supported by the US (such as today’s Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco) face repeated challenges from political movements within their own borders and are always forced to accommodate and respond to pressures coming from below. This is different from Israel, where the majority of the population views their interests and privileges as dependent upon continued outside support.

In upholding the interests of their class, US senators, then, naturally defend Israel, because it is a US instrument for the fulfillment of a common US capitalist class – Zionist project of dominating West Asia.  Israel’s character as a settler colony — from which flows its: multifarious familial, social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States; it’s violent, militaristic character; its complete dependence on US aid and support to survive; and its shared opposition with the US capitalist elite to West Asian national liberation — makes it the ideal candidate to represent US imperialist interests in West Asia.

Given who senators are, and their position at the apex—and as the beneficiaries—of the US capitalist system, it is unthinkable that they would exhibit even the slightest degree of solidarity with the enemies of their class and the targets of their exploitation. We can express outrage that only one senator has even acknowledged the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, but to do so would fail to recognize the capitalist reality of the United States and its governing class. Expecting senators to concede that a genocide is underway, to say nothing of condemning it and acting to stop it, is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians.

As for Bernie Sanders, his reluctantly conceding that his beloved Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians confirms what is already obvious: he is no socialist. Socialists do not defend settler colonialism, apologize for apartheid, or tolerate Zionism. Nor do they uphold the status quo of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself. (Israeli Zionists have no more right to defend themselves than slave-owners have the right to defend themselves against the uprising of their slaves.) And socialists certainly don’t vote for the continued delivery of arms to genocidaires, in the form of “defensive” weaponry,  a sophism that obfuscates the reality that “defensive” weapons have a utility equal to offensive weapons in maintaining Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy. Would a socialist advocate the provisioning of “defensive” weapons to slave-owners to defend themselves from the uprisings of their slaves? As a socialist Bernie is a fraud. As a senator, committed—with the rest of the Senate—to defending the interests of the US capitalist class and its overseas outposts, he’s more believable.

Another victim of the war on the Palestinians: The crumbling of the myths of free speech and the West’s moral leadership

By Stephen Gowans

May 6, 2024

Paris is trying to shut down the anti-genocide campaign of the French political party, la France insoumise, by criminalizing it as antisemitic, pro-terrorist, and pro-Hamas. Prosecutors are investigating a number of the statements made by party leaders, including this blandly factual description: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” The alleged crime in the party’s statement is its description of the October 7 attacks as an armed offensive rather than presumably, as a vile, reprehensible act of terror; description in lieu of denunciation has become verboten; failure to endorse the moral evaluations of established authority will be punished.

France’s tradition of resistance to occupation lives on, it seems, only in la France insoumise, and not in the current government. The orientation of bien pensant France appears to be more faithful to the Vichy tradition of complicity with an occupier. Inasmuch as France deplores the right of the occupied to use violence to resist their occupation (as the French did against Nazi occupiers in World War II), it condones the Israeli occupation and apartheid of which the armed offensive of Hamas is but the response. Describing the Hamas attack as an armed offensive in no way condones the killing of unarmed civilians, or their abduction, or even points to the right of the occupied to use violence to end their occupation. All the same, the right does exist. In my opinion, the right is not an unlimited one; the oppressed haven’t the right to use violence in any way they please. But the use of violence by the oppressed against those who oppress them is just. Whoever acts to pacify the slave, or impedes those who arouse him against his oppression, aids the slave-master.

France, as well as Germany, claim that their respective roles in the Holocaust obligate their support for Israel as atonement for past sins. This rests on an invalid idea: That because the Germans visited a holocaust on the Jews who were living on land in Eastern Europe that Germany coveted, that Zionists should be supported in visiting a holocaust on the Palestinians who live on land Zionists covet.  In other words, we will atone for our own crimes, say Paris and Bonn, by supporting the self-appointed leaders of the people we harmed to inflict the same harm upon another people. This isn’t atonement for a crime; it is the universalization of it; its redux.

French and German efforts to shut down support in their own countries for protests against Israeli apartheid and genocide, and efforts in the United States to punish students for participating in campus protests, as well as to produce legislation to gag critics of Israel by defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism, reveal a truth about free speech: it’s a myth. Free speech is tolerated, indeed, welcomed and boasted about, but only when it doesn’t challenge the established order, or does, but has limited reach. Speech which threatens to mobilize people against an order that favors those in power is almost always, and everywhere, prohibited, energetically discouraged, and punished. Often, verboten subjects are presented as that part of free speech that isn’t absolute, or as an abuse, where abuse, not expressed as such but implied all the same, means saying something that threatens to mobilize people against those who oppress and exploit. So it is that criticism of Zionism must be squelched by the enablers of Zionist crimes because too many people are rallying to oppose them; so it is that this speech must be calumniated as criminal and an abuse of the norms of free expression.    

“One of Brown University’s major donors, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht” has “sharply criticized the school’s agreement to hold a board vote on cutting investments tied to Israel.” The decision is “unconscionable” he says, and he has “paused” donations to the school, as a means of discouraging further outbreaks of advocacy he and his fellow Zionists despise. Sternlicht has invoked a tu quoque (you, as well) defense of Israel’s genocidal conduct. The moneybag’s argument takes the following form: The United States has slaughtered many more people in war than Israel has. If the United States can engage in wanton slaughter, then so too can Israel. Moreover, he asks, where were the protests against the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Tu quoque arguments are logically invalid, and so I will address this aspect of Sternlicht’s argument no further. There were indeed protests against the wars he cites; perhaps the real-estate mogul was too busy accumulating his billions to notice. However, it must be conceded that protests against the wars that the United States visibly and directly led were not generally as large or sustained as the current broad grassroots campaign against Israel’s genocide. This might be because US officials in recent US wars, unlike Israeli officials, soldiers, and citizens in their current war on Gaza, never expressed the intention or desire to exterminate a people. But there may be another reason, too. Radicals can generally be expected to be as fervent in their opposition to US wars as those of Israel, but is this true of non-radicals? Are they more likely to see their own country than others as, au fond, morally decent?

The idea that the United States, Germany, France and other US allies are not themselves directly implicated in the horrors perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians is another myth. The Wall Street Journal recently warned that an Israeli attack on Rafah could further impair Tel Aviv’s relationship with the United States government. Further impair? In what way has it been impaired at all? Washington recently approved $26 billion in Israeli military aid (on top of regular annual contributions of $3.8 billion), and remains indefatigable in pledging ironclad support, despite Israel’s enforcement of apartheid in Palestine and pursuit of genocide against the Palestinians, despite settler pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, and despite a policy of starvation, destruction, and extermination in Gaza. The idea that the US-Israeli relationship has been impaired by Israeli atrocities is a myth, conjured, it would seem, to shield US citizens from the reality that their government is as much implicated in apartheid and genocide as is its Zionist protege. To paraphrase the iconic Palestinian revolutionary, Leila Khaled, the United States is Israel, and Israel is the United States in Palestine. The notion that the Zionist State is tarnishing the moral standing of its US patron, and that the malignant conduct of Tel Aviv is trying Joe Biden’s patience, is a fairy-tale manufactured to exculpate Washington for its contribution to efforts to erase the Palestinians.

Washington stands behind the war on Palestinians as much as it stood behind wars on Iraqis, Afghans, and Syrians. It ought to be opposed, criticized, and demonstrated against in measures equal to the opposition and criticism of Israel. Genocide Joe is as apt an epithet as Genocide Bibi, just as much as Genocide USA (and Genocide Germany, France, Britain, Canada, etc.) is as apt an epithet as Genocide Israel.