“Saint Augustine argued that the goal of war is not more war, but peace,” writes Aryeh Neier in the Review’s June 6 issue. “Therefore conducting war in a manner that contributes to the restoration of peace is essential.” By tracing the history of international law from Xerxes and the Spartans to Augustine and finally to the establishment of the Geneva Conventions and, most recently, the International Criminal Court, Neier defines the principles and laws that are supposed to govern the treatment of civilians and combatants. Under those definitions, he writes:

I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.

Below, alongside Neier’s article, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about genocide and justice.

Aryeh Neier
Is Israel Committing Genocide?

I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which endeavors to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?

Alex de Waal
The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War

“For over 150 years, the world’s paramount maritime powers—first Britain and then the US—have been more accustomed to enforcing blockades than trying to lift them, more interested in preserving the belligerents’ privilege to wage wars of hunger than in protecting the rights of the civilians those wars starve.”

—September 11, 2022

David Rieff
Rwanda: The Big Risk

“Almost all the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the legal system had been murdered, while those loyal to the old regime…had fled the country. There were very few courthouses (most of them had been looted and burned); nor, until a legal statute covering the prosecution of genocide was passed by the Rwandan parliament in early August of 1996, was there any procedure under Rwandan law to deal with crimes of the sort of which Narcisse was suspected.”

—October 31, 1996

Susan Sontag
Godot Comes to Sarajevo

“No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Plenty of excellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as am I) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism.”

—October 21, 1993

Aryeh Neier
Putting Saddam Hussein on Trial

“A finding of genocide by the World Court would almost certainly ensure that the funds will be produced, the UN guards kept in place, and Kurdish self-rule and a degree of safety maintained. It would also call attention to the Kurds’ urgent needs for economic assistance.”

—September 23, 1993

A. J. P. Taylor
Crimes Beyond Punishment

“As a safe rule-of-thumb, if one wishes to discover who are in training as the next batch of war criminals, one need only look for those governments which maintain armed forces outside their own country. First you get war. Then come reprisals and after that extermination. All in the name of some wonderful cause, such as German racialism or international justice.”

—February 23, 1967

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