With airstrikes, controlled explosions and bulldozers Gaza is being razed to the ground. What still remains of it in the ever-shrinking "humanitarian zone" is now a shooting gallery, where starvation and disease rule the day. The Israeli military does not distinguish between military and civilian targets. The real death toll won't be known for years to come – if ever. And in the background, Israeli settlers seize their opportunity to grab more land in the West Bank. There is no doubt about it: Palestinians in the Levant are reduced to a dispossessed mass, facing extermination and displacement.

As Netanyahu's regime prepares yet another escalation, it appears that nothing will stand in his way to create a "Greater Israel", no matter the human cost. Warnings from non-governmental and intergovernmental organisations about the dire situation on the ground have simply been ignored. Protests, not just in Israel and Palestine but all over the world, have been met with repressions. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts have failed to undermine the military and economic siege. Having the green light from the world's still dominant superpower – the US – counts for more than all of that. It is in this context, in the hope of putting an end to the slaughter, that many have invoked the Genocide Convention, a product of the so-called rules-based order which came into existence after the Second World War.

International law ... is usually defined as the totality of norms regulating the relationships between states. ... But absent from this formal, technical definition, of course, is any indication of the historical, i.e. the class character of international law. It is extremely clear that bourgeois jurisprudence consciously or unconsciously strives to conceal this element of class. ... [E]ven those agreements between capitalist states which appear to be directed to the general interest are, in fact, for each of the participants a means for jealously protecting their particular interests, preventing the expansion of their rivals’ influence, thwarting unilateral conquest, i.e. in another form continuing the same struggle which will exist for as long as capitalist competition exists.

Evgeny Pashukanis, International Law, 1925

The first modern attempt to draw up rules of war actually go back all the way to the end of the Thirty Years' War (the bloodiest in European history to that point) and it is no accident that they were written by the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, a citizen of the one (advanced) mercantile capitalist state that had most to gain from it. But Grotius was not taken seriously until we had reached the imperialist epoch. The "cabinet" wars of previous centuries were now about to take an altogether more violent turn and thus some amongst the juridically minded were intent on creating frameworks for fighting “humanely”. In 1901, Winston Churchill predicted that “wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings” (accordingly, he later declared himself in favour of using chemical weapons against “uncivilised tribes” like the Afghans in the British Raj or the Kurds in Iraq). Imperialist war now meant the mobilisation of one population against another and the utilisation of the most deadly technologies available – murder on an industrial scale. In the context of the emergence, restoration or unification of various nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, this often took the form of carrying out massacres in order to induce other nationalities to depart the territory, establishing more ethnically homogeneous societies as a result. The Hague and Geneva Conventions sought to define a code of “laws of war” for this new era. Many of these laws were subsequently broken during the First and Second World Wars, but they laid the grounds for prohibiting certain acts classified as “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity”, “crimes of aggression” and "genocide" – a term coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who lost almost all his family during the Holocaust – which became the "crime of crimes".

The Genocide Convention, on the surface designed to prevent and punish "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group", inevitably itself become a source of imperialist competition. Drafted in a way to help the victorious Allies prosecute the defeated Axis powers without implicating themselves (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Katyn, etc.), the principles behind it were from the beginning meant to be applied selectively. Today they are used by rival capitalist factions to denounce the "crimes" of the other and by doing so justify their own atrocities. In this manner, Russian propaganda presented the invasion of Ukraine as a preventive measure against the "genocide of Russian speakers" in the Donbas region, while Israeli propaganda presented the invasion of Gaza as self-defence against the "act of genocide" of 7 October.

Even within the bourgeois legal world, questions have been raised about whether the Genocide Convention in its current state is fit for purpose. In 2018, on the 70th anniversary of the treaty, United Nations officials themselves pointed out how "never again" has become "time and again" and how the international community has "failed to heed the warning signs and take early and decisive action". Some states have never ratified the treaty, but even some of those that have are also contravening it. If the treaty has historically failed to stop the very acts it defined as genocide from happening, the legal, political and moral battles to classify the horrors in Gaza as genocide is likely to prove a Pyrrhic victory. The only "remedies" known to capitalist states are economic sanctions or military intervention. We have seen that for states with enough resources the former don't pose an unsolvable problem (they can always shift the bill onto the working class). And with the latter, which states would be prepared to intervene against a nuclear power like Israel, which has the backing of the US, and what would be the consequences? Post-hoc legal proceedings against those deemed responsible for the worst of the violence is the most likely scenario (but as of today, the likes of the US, Russia, China, Israel, Libya and Qatar have all refused to ratify the treaty which set up the International Criminal Court). And in any case, it won't bring back the dead or prevent the same happening with different characters.

Why has the Genocide Convention been so ineffective at preventing mass killings? The framework intends to demarcate what is and isn't allowed during conflict. However, in the imperialist era there is a tendency for conflicts to become total wars, in which both constant capital (means of production) and variable capital (labour-power) become "legitimate" targets. In the context of pre-existing ethnic and national tensions – some of which predate modern capitalism to tribal and colonial times – the result is increased likelihood of atrocities taking place, an ever present possibility of genocidal acts being perpetrated, both by state and non-state actors. Furthermore, imperialist wars are hardly ever conflicts between evenly matched combatants, where the fighting follows the rules and regulations of international law. Capitalism is a predatory system, it has not developed evenly across the globe, and as a result there exist imperialist centres and capitalist peripheries. The latter often make up the battlefields for the interests of the former, meaning conflicts are often asymmetrical. No surprise then that, apart from Palestine, and depending which international bodies you ask, genocidal acts are also being perpetrated in Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, China, Ethiopia, and Congo. One might imagine the advent of mass media would have made the exposure of atrocities to the public eye an easier task than ever. The Vietnam War was the first and in some ways the last televised war as since then states have found various workarounds. Embedded journalism was practised during the wars in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq, where journalists were attached to military units and faced restrictions on what they could report. Today in Gaza the only embedded journalists are those Netanyahu's regime approves, the rest are simply another target for the Israeli military. Meanwhile, social media has become flooded with disinformation of all kinds, with states spending millions on generating online propaganda.

In the face of imperialist self-interest, the real dynamic which fuels the capitalist world order, appeals to international law are a cry in the wilderness. Whether one calls it genocide, ethnic cleansing, massacre, slaughter, or whatever else, doesn't change the reality that extermination and displacement is taking place on the ground. For internationalists, all imperialist wars, whether they are deemed "legal" or "illegal" by international law, are a "crime against humanity". The alternative facing humanity remains the same. Either the current conflicts will be again temporarily suspended by an imperialist peace, as a prelude to yet more destructive and bloody wars of the future – or – by working class revolution, as a prelude to the transformation of a world divided into warring nation-states into a global commonwealth, in which war becomes a thing of the past.

The sight of a defenceless population being gradually slaughtered, without ramification, by a regime armed to the teeth has rightly caused moral indignation across the world. But the only way to truly end genocide is to put an end to a system and the social relations which naturally breed it. As workers we remain powerless in the face of this descent into capitalist barbarism until there is a real class movement able to impose its interests on the warmongers, exploiters and oppressors of the world.

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Images: Jaber Jehad Badwan (CC BY-SA 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org