I very much doubt that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who campaigned to set up the Genocide Convention, would agree with
Camilla Cavendish about the recent humanitarian crimes committed in Israel and Gaza (“Labour’s hard-won unity is fracturing over Gaza”, Opinion, FT Weekend, October 28). Lemkin argued that sovereignty “cannot be conceived as the right to end millions of innocent people”.
Cavendish writes: “The desire for an immediate end to bloodshed is totally understandable; the situation is unbearable to witness.” Few would disagree. However, in the next sentence she rejects the call for a ceasefire in Gaza because it would give Hamas a licence to continue to follow its aim of eradicating Israel. This argument doesn’t bear much scrutiny. The Palestinian people are collectively no more guilty of a crime than are Israeli Jews. No ethnic group should ever be collectively punished — no matter the strategic advantage gained by doing so.
Otherwise we return to a pre-second world war reality where only the victor decides on justice for the defeated. Which is just the kind of injustice Lemkin and many Holocaust survivors challenged so vigorously.
Anthony Viney
Penzance, Cornwall, UK
