Kurtzer writes that before defining what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, the following information would need to be gathered: “Death counts, precisely; the differentiation among the dead between civilians and combatants; the military calculations that are actually going into the choices to attack targets that also result in the killing of civilians, so that you could determine whether those choices were being done responsibly or not. You would need to understand the obstacles to the distribution of aid on both the Israeli side, on the Gaza side, and on the Egyptian side.”
According to Kurtzer those are the criteria needed to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place: accurate data, the ability to distinguish definitively between civilians and combatants, the opportunity for the military to justify their decisions, an opportunity for governments to explain why starvation took place. Estimates based on eyewitness accounts cannot be trusted.
These requirements lead me to believe that had Kurtzer been alive on November 26, 1944, and reading the Auschwitz Protocols, he would have been reticent to claim that there was a genocide taking place. In fact, given Kurtzer’s standards, it seems like scholars will never be able to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place until years after the genocide has been completed. The United Nations office of Genocide Prevention would have no purpose because no one would ever be able to claim that a genocide was taking place. According to Kurtzer, genocide can only be accounted for with the benefit of hindsight.
For the record, this is not the criteria for determining genocide according to the genocide convention. Article II of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Ironically, the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. This was while the genocide against the Jews was still ongoing. He did not have hard data on the number of people who had already been killed. He did not know the ratio of civilians to combatants, he did not ask Nazi Germany why so many people were dying of starvation and disease, and he did not ask the Nazis to justify the military rationale for any of their actions. And yet Lemkin had no hesitation in naming the Holocaust a genocide.
