How the White House’s John Kirby is taking on the word ‘genocide’
John Kirby, the story goes, once used the military discipline that helped propel him to admiral rank in the US navy to launch a rhetorical war on behalf of the English language.
As the navy’s chief information officer, Kirby bluntly advised underlings in his department to kick their supposed addiction to technical jargon and “learn a second language: English”, according to a 2014 profile in Politico.
Mocking a navy description detailing what the Zumwalt-class destroyer, a missile, could “provide”, the then uniformed spokesperson fired off a semantic fusillade in a scathing essay, writing: “Warships don’t ‘provide’. They Fight. They destroy … My doctor provides. My mother provides.”
The urge to lecture on appropriate language resurfaced last week as the 60-year-old Kirby – now the public face of White House foreign policy in his role of communications coordinator for the National Security Council – tackled an infinitely more emotive word: genocide.
The term, defined in an international treaty that was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been used by critics to describe Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attack on 7 October, which killed than 1,200 Israelis.
The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion has so far killed approximately 15,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 1.7 million people, forcing them into increasingly precarious conditions. Joe Biden has voiced unequivocal support for Israel and so far has resisted calls to press the country to accept a permanent ceasefire, opting instead to focus on humanitarian pauses and sending aid to Gaza.
Now with polls showing Biden haemorrhaging support among Arab, young and ethnic minority voters over his support for Israel in Gaza, questions are growing over whether Kirby,arguably the most visible spokesperson for Biden’s approach to the war, presents a liability for the president’s 2024 re-election bid.
Challenged at a White House briefing to confront the term “Genocide Joe” by some protesters to described Biden, Kirby, who had previously ruled out “drawing red lines” for Israel’s actions in Gaza, embarked on an animated exposition.
“People can say what they want on the sidewalk and we respect that. That’s what the first amendment’s about,” he said. “But this word genocide’s getting thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way by lots of different folks. What Hamas wants, make no mistake about it, is genocide. They want to wipe Israel off the map.
“And they’ve said that they’re not going to stop. What happened on the 7th of October is going to happen again and again and again. And what happened on the 7th of October? Murder; slaughter of innocent people in their homes or at a music festival. That’s genocidal intentions.
“Yes, there are too many civilian casualties in Gaza … And yes, we continue to urge the Israelis to be as careful and cautious as possible. But Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel’s not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. If we’re going to start using that word – fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”
For left-leaning Democrats already critical of Biden’s unconditional proIsrael stance, Kirby’s remarks embody what they see as a telling difference between the administration’s attitude towards civilians killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Palestinians killed in Israel’s military onslaught.
While the response to Kirby’s past linguistic homilies were unrecorded, his latest foray provoked a significant backlash.
Writing on X, the MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan pointed out that among those Kirby was accusing of using the word inappropriately were renowned Jewish Holocaust scholars.
“… multiple Jewish and Israeli scholars of the Holocaust have raised the issue of genocide,” Hasan tweeted. “Not sure Kirby is more of an expert than Omer Bartov or Raz Segal.”
Bartov and Segal, both Israeli citizens, each have argued cases that flatly contradict Kirby’s understanding.
Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, has accused Israel of a “quite explicit, open and unashamed” genocidal assault on Gaza. Writing in Jewish Currents days after Israel launched its military retaliation against the Hamas attack, Segal said the country was already committing three of the five acts stipulated in the UN genocide convention.
He defined these as: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, said multiple Israeli ministers and senior figures, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had made “genocidal statements” and “terrifying pronouncements” that have never been revoked. Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked the Old Testament fate of Amalek, whose followers were condemned to annihilation after attacking the ancient Hebrews during their exodus from Egypt.
In commentary for the Council for Global Cooperation, a version of which was published in the Guardian,Bartov singled out comments by Maj Gen Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli national security council. Eiland told Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on 10 October that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist” before expanding on the theme in a 19 November article for the same publication.
“The way to win this war faster and at a lower cost to us necessitates the collapse of the systems on the other side, not the killing of more Hamas fighters,” wrote Eiland, who expanded his enemy definition to include the Gaza population whom he said cheered Hamas’s atrocities.
“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not be deterred by that … severe epidemics in the southern strip will bring victory closer and diminish the number of IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] casualties.”
Summing up, Bartov wrote: “Israeli rhetoric and actions are preparing the ground for what may well become mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, followed by annexation and settlement