BLACK AGENDA REPORT
“We, the people, charge genocide.”
The two years that have passed since October 7, 2023 have awakened the world to the plight of Palestinians since 1948: to the fact that the indigenous people of Palestine have been living through a 77-year genocide, sanctioned by the white west, and conducted with methodological brutality and astonishing cruelty by the zionists. Now, because of Al-Aqsa flood, it is impossible to deny or doubt the fact of this genocide. It is also impossible to ignore the terrible irony that this genocide is being carried out in the name of those people, “the Jewish people of Nazi Germany,” to use Paul Robeson’s phrase, for whom the United Nations Conventions on Genocide were first enacted back in 1946.
Robeson’s essay “Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.,” published in New World Review in 1952, is worth returning to. He does not write about Palestine. Instead, the essay focuses on the efforts by William Lorenzo Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress to present the United Nations with a petition charging the United States with committing genocide against African Americans. However, Robeson offers us two things that help us understand the question of Palestine: a reminder, and a methodology.
In the first instance, Robeson reminds us of the definition of genocide according to the United Nations. He reminds us that the opening articles of the UN Convention on Genocide do not only classify the crime of genocide as the “mass extermination of a people” as so often associated with Nazi Germany. Instead, the crime of genocide can involve: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” It was based on these clauses that the US was charged with genocide against its Black population. These clauses also remind us that genocide has long been deployed against the Palestinians.
In the second instance, Robeson offers us a methodology for not only understanding genocide, but also for researching how the state aligns with capital to commit genocide. In the United States, the repression of Black people occurred in the name of white supremacy, and of profits. A similar thing can be said of Palestine. While the genocide of the Palestinians is being justified through a set of racist pronouncements by zionists and their allies, zionist-aligned corporations and complicit states are reaping super-profits from land dispossession, military contracts, and, increasingly monopoly control of mass media and digital platforms. Who profits from the genocide of African Americans, Robeson asks? We must also ask: who profits from the genocide of the Palestinian people?
We reprint Paul Robeson’s essay “Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.” below.
Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.
by PAUL ROBESON
Out of the lessons of the barbarities of Nazi Germany, the voice of outraged mankind caused the General Assembly of the United Nations to adopt a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The opening statement of this historic petition dispels the generally held misconception that the crime of genocide can be charged only when there is mass extermination of a people.
As defined in the United Nations Convention, genocide includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.”
It is not difficult to understand why this Convention has never been ratified by the Senate of the United States. This book [We Charge Genocide], in fact, reveals that a determined effort has been made by white supremacy to block U.S. signature. From the openly terrorist Ku Klux Klan to the more suave spokesmen of the American Bar Association, there has been a brazenly open recognition of the applicability of the convention to the treatment of the Negro people in the United States.
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