Genocide

This article is about the topic of genocide in general. For the specific issue and classification of the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, see Palestinian Genocide.

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. In 1948, the Genocide Convention, as unanimously adopted by the United Nations, defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". The five acts listed are the killing members of such a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Internationally Recognized Genocides

Due to the geopolitical complications involved with the admission or recognition of a genocide, there is always some controversy over the recognition or declaration of any systemic killing, targeting, or ethnic cleansing of a group as genocide. Additionally, most countries have avoided the retrospective classification of events taking place prior to World War II, largely to avoid implication themselves in the genocide of indigenous populations.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, often known simply as the Genocide Convention, was ratified in 1948 and enforced beginning in 1951, largely in response to the atrocities of World War II.

State-perpetrated genocides subject to the Genocide Convention (i.e. in the modern era, roughly from World War II onward) for which there is significant recognition by international governments as qualifying as a genocide:

• The Holocaust (1941-1945), in which an estimated 4.5 to 6 million Jews were systematically imprisoned in concentration camps and killed as part of Nazi Germany's incarceration, sterilization, or euthanasia that included up to 17 million members of various minority groups. While other ethnic or racial groups were also targeted for ethnic cleansing by the Third Reich, the worldwide recognition of the Holocaust as a genocide is chiefly limited to people of Jewish origin.

• Rwandan Genocide (1994), in which 500,000-800,000 ethnic minority Tutsis were killed by militias associated with the Hutu ethnic majority. This is generally accepted to have been the first genocide that happened "with the world watching," with UN UNAMIR peacekeeping troops on the ground from the year before and both Belgian and French military presences that were in a position to prevent or mitigate the genocide choosing to leave the country instead. The United States was internally aware of the ongoing genocide – and even using that very word to describe the situation in internal meetings and reports – but with both US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright intentionally refusing to acknowledge the situation in order to side-step their obligation as signatories to the UN Genocide Convention to intervene and prevent it from taking place. Bill Clinton has since apologized for not taking action and avoiding acknowledging the ongoing genocide.

• Srebrenica Genocide (1995), the targeted killing of 8,000 Muslim Bosniak boys and men by the Bosnian Serb Army, the military of the ethnically Serbian secessionist Republika Srpska, with participation from paramilitary units from Serbia. The Bosnian genocide is the only one where high-ranking participants have been successfully prosecuted by the UN in the International Criminal Court. Many individuals and organizations calling for a genocide investigation to be opened against the state of Israel consider the legal proceedings subsequent to the Bosnian genocide to be a realistic or promising model to pursue.

• Uyghur genocide (2014-present)

• Rohingya genocide (2016-present)

Genocide of the Palestinian People

Numerous experts, human rights organization, and world political bodies have expressed their opinion and concern that the past and current actions of Israel with regards to the Palestinian people, including their forced displacement, collective punishment, targeted extermination, racial/ethnic/religious-rooted discrimination, attempts at the erasure of Palestinian culture and history, and above all, mass and indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians constitute a "textbook case of genocide". For more information on this topic, refer to the Palepedia article on the Palestinian Genocide.

In August 2024, Wikipedia's top editors voted to acknowledge the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and change the name of a page documenting the year-long massacre in Gaza from "Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza" to "Gaza Genocide", to the chagrin of Israeli supporters that vehemently denied the charge.