Efraim Zurof, a leading Holocaust expert and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated that the upcoming UN General Assembly vote on the Srebrenica resolution should definitely not be supported, as labeling the Srebrenica massacre as genocide would further weaken and erode the significance of a term that still serves as an important warning to humanity about the dangers of wars and conflicts.
Zurof explained that not every war crime is genocide, highlighting that the Serbs spared all women and children. “If the Serbs had intended to commit genocide, they would have killed all the Bosnian Muslims gathered in Srebrenica,” Zurof said.
He referenced an article by Menachem Rosensaft from April 24 of this year in the Times of Israel, where Rosensaft insists from the first paragraph that the UN General Assembly must recognize the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in July 1995 in Srebrenica as “a case of genocide,” noting that the author reveals the main flaws in his complaint.
“To support his case, Rosensaft, a former General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, argues that since he wants to believe that Hamas’s massacre of at least 1,200 Israeli citizens and residents on October 7 was an ‘act of genocide,’ we have an absolute obligation to recognize and commemorate genocide and other crimes against humanity,” Zurof stated in his article for the Times of Israel.
Zurof stressed that while it is easy to sympathize with initiatives to commemorate true cases of genocide, neither the Hamas massacre on October 7 nor the killings committed in Srebrenica qualify as cases of genocide.
“Each of these tragedies is another unique brief episode in military conflicts that lasted much longer, which in the case of Gaza, continues to this day,” Zurof added, noting that this is one of the main reasons why Professor Yehuda Bauer, a dean of Holocaust historians, has insisted for years that what happened in Srebrenica should not be classified as genocide.
Zurof explained that if these and similar events were classified as cases of genocide, the term would be completely emptied of its current weight and significance, and lose any impact it still has today.
“Thus, for example, September 11 could be classified as a case of genocide, as could the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or for that matter the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, along with hundreds of other tragic incidents,” Zurof emphasized.
Source: RTRS
