Beyond Palestine: Current Genocides and Mass Atrocities the World Is Forgetting

Beyond Palestine: The Current Genocides and Mass Atrocities the World Is Forgetting

Palestine has taught millions of ordinary people a vocabulary that, until very recently, largely belonged to historians, international lawyers and human-rights organisations. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Forced displacement. Collective punishment. Starvation as a weapon. Humanitarian corridors. Genocidal intent. Crimes against humanity. International courts. The destruction of the conditions necessary for civilian life.

For more than two years, people across the world have watched events in Gaza and learned to ask questions that many had never previously considered. What happens when civilians cannot safely leave a war zone? What happens when hospitals cease functioning? What happens when food, water and medicine become part of the battlefield? What constitutes genocidal intent? At what point does military action become an attack on the continued existence of a people?

Those are important questions. But they should not end at the borders of Palestine.

If Palestine has helped us understand what it means for an entire civilian population to become profoundly unsafe, then perhaps the greatest thing we can do with that understanding is extend it. We should be able to recognise that insecurity when the victims are Yazidi. When they are Rohingya. When they are Uyghur. When they are Tigrayan. When they are Masalit, Fur or Zaghawa. When they are Congolese. When they are Ukrainian. When they are Armenian.

This does not mean pretending that all of these conflicts are identical. They are not. Their histories, perpetrators, legal classifications, political structures, numbers of victims and methods of violence differ profoundly.

Nor does it mean calling every terrible war a genocide.

Some of the atrocities discussed below have been formally investigated and identified as genocide. Some are the subject of continuing genocide proceedings or official determinations by individual governments or international commissions. Some have been established as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or war crimes but have not been legally determined to constitute genocide. Others represent situations in which populations remain at an exceptionally high risk of future mass killing.

That distinction matters.

But there is another distinction that matters just as much: human beings should not have to wait for an international tribunal to decide which legal noun describes their suffering before the rest of us decide it matters.

The lesson of Palestine cannot simply be that Palestinians matter.

It must be that people matter before the world learns their names.

Gaza: The Point From Which We Look Beyond Palestine

Gaza is the obvious place to begin precisely because it is the atrocity through which millions of people have encountered the contemporary genocide debate.

The present catastrophe followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and around 250 hostages were taken. Israel responded with a vast military campaign in Gaza that has produced extraordinary civilian death, repeated displacement and destruction across the territory.

South Africa subsequently brought proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention. The Court has imposed provisional measures intended to protect rights claimed under the Convention, but as of September 2026 it has not issued a final judgment deciding whether Israel is legally responsible for genocide.

A separate UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry reached a stronger conclusion. In September 2025 it found that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocidal acts with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part. In June 2026, the Commission reiterated its conclusion and said genocidal conduct was continuing.

Israel rejects the genocide allegation and maintains that its military campaign is directed against Hamas rather than Palestinians as a group.

That distinction between a UN investigative finding and a final ICJ judgment is important, particularly in an article intended to help readers understand what genocide actually means.

But this article is not primarily about resolving the argument over Gaza.

It is about what happens after we have learned to see it.

If watching Palestine has taught us to understand forced displacement, deprivation, civilian protection, hunger, international humanitarian law and the vulnerability of children in war, then we have acquired a vocabulary.

The question is whether we are prepared to use it elsewhere.

The Yazidis: A Genocide Designed Around Men, Women and Children

On 3 August 2014, fighters belonging to the Islamic State group, or ISIS, swept into the Sinjar region of northern Iraq.

The people they encountered were Yazidis, members of an ancient religious minority whose beliefs had been repeatedly misunderstood and demonised over centuries. ISIS transformed those old prejudices into an exterminatory ideology.

What happened next is one of the clearest recognised genocides of the twenty-first century.

ISIS did not simply massacre indiscriminately. Its treatment of Yazidis was organised according to age and sex.

Men and older boys were separated from their families and executed. Women and girls were abducted, transported between ISIS-controlled areas, bought and sold, subjected to rape and sexual slavery and forced into repeated captivity. Younger boys were removed from their families, indoctrinated and trained for military use. Religious sites were destroyed. Whole communities disappeared.

Thousands of Yazidis fled towards Mount Sinjar, where civilians became trapped without adequate food, water or shelter.

The United Nations investigative mechanism UNITAD ultimately concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe ISIS had committed genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidi community. Its investigators assembled documentary, testimonial, digital and forensic evidence, including evidence gathered from mass graves.

This is an important case because the intention behind the violence was unusually visible. Yazidis were not merely civilians who happened to be living in territory ISIS wanted to control. Their identity itself made them targets.

Yet the fall of ISIS’s territorial “caliphate” did not end the Yazidi story.

Some Yazidis abducted during the genocide remain missing. Survivors of sexual enslavement continue to live with profound physical and psychological consequences. Families remain fragmented. Sinjar has struggled with political instability, insecurity and reconstruction.

A genocide does not end when the perpetrator loses the battlefield.

For survivors, the event can continue for decades.

The Rohingya: How a People Can Be Erased Before They Are Expelled

The history of the Rohingya demonstrates something particularly important about genocide and mass atrocity: sometimes physical violence is preceded by administrative disappearance.

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim minority whose historic home lies in Rakhine State in western Myanmar.

Their persecution predates the events for which Myanmar is now internationally notorious. One of the most consequential developments was Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law and the wider citizenship regime around it, which contributed to generations of Rohingya being effectively rendered stateless.

Citizenship is not simply a passport.

It determines whether a state recognises you as fully belonging.

Once a population’s membership of the political community has been undermined, restrictions that would appear intolerable if imposed upon recognised citizens can become easier to normalise. Rohingya communities experienced restrictions affecting movement, education, livelihoods, family life and access to public services.

Then came the violence.

Following attacks by Rohingya militants on security posts, Myanmar’s military conducted so-called “clearance operations” in 2016 and, on a vastly greater scale, in 2017. Rohingya villages were burned. Civilians were killed. Women and girls experienced extensive sexual violence. Hundreds of thousands fled across the border into Bangladesh.

UN investigators subsequently documented evidence of genocidal intent and extensive sexual and gender-based violence, while The Gambia brought proceedings against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention.

In 2020, the Court ordered Myanmar to take provisional measures to protect Rohingya people from acts prohibited under the Convention. The case remains before the Court and no final determination of Myanmar’s responsibility for genocide has yet been delivered.

Meanwhile, the people themselves remain in extraordinary insecurity.

Around 1.2 million Rohingya refugees are registered in Bangladesh, overwhelmingly concentrated around Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, according to UNHCR’s Rohingya emergency reporting.

And conditions inside Myanmar have deteriorated again.

The collapse produced by Myanmar’s post-coup civil war has left Rohingya civilians caught between the Myanmar military and the increasingly powerful Arakan Army. UN human-rights reporting in 2026 continued to document killings, detention, displacement, forced recruitment and restrictions affecting humanitarian assistance.

The Rohingya history therefore provides one of the clearest warning signs in this entire article.

Before a people can become physically disposable, they can first be made politically disposable.

Sometimes the road to mass atrocity begins at the citizenship office.

The Uyghurs: What Group Persecution Looks Like in a Surveillance State

The Uyghur case looks very different from Sinjar, Rwanda or Srebrenica, and that difference is exactly why it deserves attention.

Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people concentrated in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Beginning particularly around 2017, Chinese authorities dramatically expanded a system of detention and political re-education justified publicly through the language of counter-terrorism, vocational training and counter-extremism.

Evidence gathered by journalists, researchers, survivors, governments and the United Nations has described mass arbitrary detention, imprisonment, intense surveillance, restrictions on religious practice, pressure on language and cultural identity, family separation, allegations of forced labour and serious concerns regarding coercive reproductive policies.

The Chinese government rejects accusations of genocide and describes its policies in Xinjiang as legitimate counter-terrorism, anti-extremism, development and vocational programmes.

The legal position requires careful wording.

The United States and some other governmental and parliamentary bodies have characterised China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights assessment of Xinjiang did not make that determination. It concluded instead that the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention and accompanying violations may constitute international crimes, particularly crimes against humanity.

That distinction should not be blurred.

But neither should we assume that the issue disappeared when the detention-camp story became less prominent in Western news.

Human Rights Watch reported in August 2026 that severe repression remained in place, including arbitrary imprisonment, extensive surveillance, cultural and religious suppression, restrictions on movement and communication and pressure on Uyghurs living overseas.

The Uyghur case therefore raises a distinctly twenty-first-century question.

What does the machinery of potential group destruction look like when the state possesses facial recognition, massive databases, digital communications monitoring and unprecedented technological capacity to observe a population?

The twentieth century taught us to recognise barbed wire.

The twenty-first may require us to recognise an algorithm.

Tigray: What Happens When Mass Atrocity Is Followed by an Unstable Peace?

The war in Tigray began in November 2020 after a prolonged political confrontation between Ethiopia’s federal government, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which had previously exercised enormous influence within Ethiopia’s governing system.

The resulting conflict was not a simple two-sided war.

Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean troops, Amhara regional forces and associated militias participated in fighting against Tigrayan forces. Tigrayan forces themselves later operated in neighbouring Amhara and Afar, where international investigators also documented serious abuses.

For civilians, however, the scale of the catastrophe was enormous.

UN investigations documented unlawful killing, torture, mass displacement, destruction, deprivation and extraordinary levels of sexual violence, while also examining evidence concerning the use of starvation as a method of warfare.

Western Tigray developed an additional and particularly disturbing pattern.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented what they described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayan civilians, involving killings, arbitrary detention, forced displacement, sexual violence, property seizure and restrictions on humanitarian assistance.

Hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were driven from the area.

The November 2022 Pretoria agreement ended much of the full-scale warfare, but peace did not restore what had been destroyed.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Tigrayans have been unable to return safely. In April 2026, Human Rights Watch reported continuing persecution of Tigrayans in Western Tigray, including arbitrary detention and discriminatory restrictions.

Meanwhile, the security situation has again become unstable.

In January 2026, the UN Secretary-General publicly warned about renewed tensions and clashes in Tigray and expressed concern over the possibility of wider conflict returning.

This is precisely the type of situation in which the language of prevention becomes important.

It would be inaccurate to present “the Tigray genocide” as an internationally settled legal fact. War crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing have been documented. Genocide allegations have been made. But there has been no comparable international judicial determination establishing genocide.

That should not make Tigray less urgent.

The purpose of recognising genocidal risk is not to wait patiently until a population has suffered enough for the terminology to become indisputable.

Tigray asks us whether we are capable of caring during the warning.

Sudan and Darfur: When “Never Again” Happens Again

Sudan may provide the most devastating example of historical memory failing to protect the living.

Darfur entered international consciousness more than twenty years ago.

Beginning in 2003, Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed militias responded to rebellion in Darfur with a campaign characterised by mass killing, village destruction, sexual violence, forced displacement and attacks disproportionately directed against non-Arab communities.

The words “Save Darfur” became part of an international human-rights movement.

Then much of the world moved on.

The militia structures did not simply disappear.

The modern Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, emerged in significant part from the Janjaweed system. When Sudan’s fragile political transition collapsed into war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF in April 2023, Darfur once again became a site of extraordinary ethnic violence.

Both sides in Sudan’s wider war have been accused by UN investigators of serious violations and deliberate attacks on civilians.

But particular RSF campaigns in Darfur have acquired an additional genocidal dimension.

In West Darfur in 2023, RSF fighters and allied militias carried out devastating attacks against the predominantly non-Arab Masalit community around El Geneina. In January 2025, the United States formally determined that members of the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan.

Then the focus of atrocity moved towards El Fasher in North Darfur.

After approximately eighteen months of siege, the RSF captured El Fasher in October 2025. A UN investigation into the capture of El Fasher subsequently documented more than 6,000 killings during the first three days of the final offensive and along escape routes, while warning that the true death toll was likely considerably higher.

The evidence included summary executions, sexual violence, abductions, torture and identity-based attacks.

In February 2026, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan went further. Its report, Sudan: Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher, described a cumulative pattern of mass killing, serious physical and mental harm, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, deliberately destructive conditions and dehumanising rhetoric.

The Mission concluded that the evidence revealed an intention by RSF forces to destroy the Zaghawa and Fur communities, in whole or in part, and described the violence as indicative of a genocidal path.

Consider what that means.

Communities in Darfur are confronting genocidal violence little more than two decades after Darfur became one of the world’s most recognisable “never again” campaigns.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about forgotten genocide is therefore not simply that we forget the dead.

It is that forgetting how people became vulnerable can leave survivors vulnerable to the same machinery being activated again.

Congo: When Mass Atrocity Becomes an Ecosystem

The Democratic Republic of Congo requires particular care because the phrase “the Congolese genocide” can obscure rather than illuminate what has happened.

There has been extraordinary mass death in Congo. There have been massacres, ethnic persecution, sexual violence, forced displacement, child recruitment and systematic atrocities over several decades.

But there is no single internationally established genocide encompassing the entire Congolese conflict, no single perpetrator and no single victim population.

The reality is more complicated.

And in some ways, that makes it even more disturbing.

The contemporary catastrophe in eastern Congo is inseparable from the aftermath of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. After the genocide, huge numbers of refugees crossed into what was then Zaire. Among them were members of the former Rwandan armed forces and Interahamwe militias responsible for participating in the genocide.

Armed groups reorganised in eastern Zaire. Rwanda and Uganda subsequently intervened alongside Congolese rebels. The First Congo War began in 1996. A second war followed in 1998, eventually drawing in numerous African states and armed groups.

The formal wars ended.

The violence did not.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s overview of instability and conflict in the DRC traces how the aftermath of Rwanda helped transform eastern Congo into a regional battleground.

North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri have experienced massacres, sexual violence, village destruction and repeated population movements. Particular communities, including Hema and Banyamulenge populations, have at times faced acute identity-based threats and inflammatory rhetoric.

The resurgence of the Rwanda-backed M23 movement brought another major escalation. M23 captured Goma and Bukavu in 2025, while international human-rights organisations documented killings, detention, forced recruitment and displacement. Congolese armed forces and allied Wazalendo groups have themselves been implicated in serious abuses.

Human Rights Watch’s 2026 assessment of the Democratic Republic of Congo documents abuses committed by multiple armed actors, while the US Holocaust Memorial Museum continues to identify the DRC as an acute mass-atrocity risk.

Congo is therefore not useful because it gives us a neat genocide label.

It is useful because it shows us what happens when atrocity becomes structural.

Children can be born into conflicts that began before their parents reached adulthood. Women can experience sexual violence not as an aberration within a brief war but as part of an enduring security landscape. Families can be displaced several times. Armed groups can disappear, rename themselves, fragment and re-emerge.

At a certain point, violence stops looking like an event.

It becomes an ecosystem.

That does not make Congo less deserving of international attention because it is difficult to summarise.

It makes the world’s willingness to forget it more disturbing.

Ukraine: Why the Removal of Children Matters

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, eight years after Russia annexed Crimea and conflict began in the Donbas.

International investigations have documented extensive alleged and established violations arising from the war, including unlawful killings, torture, sexual violence, attacks affecting civilians and forced displacement.

But there is one part of Ukraine’s experience that is particularly important to understanding genocide law.

Children.

The Genocide Convention specifically identifies forcibly transferring children of a protected group to another group as one of the acts capable of constituting genocide, provided the necessary intention to destroy the protected group in whole or in part can also be established.

That final qualification matters. Forced child transfer does not automatically equal genocide.

But the inclusion of children in the Convention reveals something profound about what genocide means.

Destroying a people is not only about killing those alive today. It can involve taking control of who raises the next generation and what identity those children inherit.

In March 2026, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian authorities’ deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, together with their enforced disappearance, amounted to crimes against humanity.

The Commission had verified the deportation or transfer of more than 1,200 children from five Ukrainian regions while noting that thousands had reportedly been transferred overall.

Russia has described transfers of children from conflict areas as evacuations and rejects accusations that it has pursued a policy of unlawful deportation.

The broader allegation that Russia is committing genocide against Ukrainians remains contested and has not been established by a final international judicial finding.

Ukraine should therefore not simply be dropped onto a list labelled “current genocides”.

But its children belong in this discussion.

Because their story connects contemporary Europe to much older histories of forced assimilation, residential schools, Indigenous child removal and the idea that controlling children can alter the future existence of a people.

Different histories should never be collapsed into one another.

But sometimes different histories expose the same vulnerability.

Nagorno-Karabakh: What Does It Mean to Empty a Homeland?

The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh provides another case in which legal terminology remains contested but the destruction of a community’s ability to remain in its historic home is undeniable.

Nagorno-Karabakh was internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but had a predominantly ethnic Armenian population. The conflict over the territory accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and produced war, mass displacement and atrocities affecting both Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Armenian forces eventually controlled Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding Azerbaijani territories, while hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were themselves displaced from their homes.

Azerbaijan regained substantial territory during the 2020 war.

Conditions then deteriorated dramatically for the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.

From late 2022, restrictions affecting the Lachin Corridor — the principal route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia — contributed to serious shortages of essential goods. Armenia brought proceedings before the International Court of Justice concerning treatment of ethnic Armenians and access through the Lachin Corridor.

Then, on 19 September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military operation and rapidly regained complete control over Nagorno-Karabakh.

What followed was extraordinary.

Within days, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled to Armenia, effectively emptying the territory of almost its entire Armenian population. UNHCR documented the refugee emergency and subsequent humanitarian needs.

There have subsequently been legal and scholarly arguments that the blockade and displacement should be understood through the framework of genocide. Other institutions and observers have used the language of ethnic cleansing or forced displacement.

There is no international judicial judgment establishing that Azerbaijan committed genocide.

That distinction should remain clear.

But Nagorno-Karabakh nevertheless poses a profound question.

What does destruction of a community look like if most members survive, but virtually all are removed from the place in which the community historically existed?

A territory does not have to be covered in mass graves to be emptied of a people.

Why These Cases Should Not Be Treated as Equivalent

Comparative atrocity writing carries a danger.

Once we place these stories beside one another, it becomes tempting to create a hierarchy of suffering or to treat them as interchangeable examples of the same phenomenon.

That would be a mistake.

A Yazidi woman enslaved by ISIS did not experience the same historical process as a Rohingya family driven into Bangladesh. The surveillance of a Uyghur community cannot simply be equated with the siege of a Darfuri city. Tigray is not Congo. Congo is not Ukraine. Ukraine is not Nagorno-Karabakh. Gaza is not any of them.

Each population deserves its own history.

But comparison does not require equivalence.

Comparison allows us to recognise mechanisms.

Again and again, people become more vulnerable when their identity becomes politically dangerous. Citizenship is removed or weakened. Movement is restricted. Communities are described as security threats. Civilians become associated collectively with armed enemies. Food becomes scarce. Homes are destroyed. Women experience sexual violence. Children become targets of removal, recruitment or assimilation. Populations are displaced from strategically important territory. Dehumanising rhetoric lowers the moral cost of violence. Institutions that should restrain abuse become weak, captured or irrelevant.

These are not proof that genocide must follow.

They are warning signs that human beings are becoming unsafe.

The Warning Signs Matter Before Genocide Is Certain

The United Nations does not treat genocide prevention as a matter of waiting until genocide is legally proven.

Its Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes examines conditions including armed conflict or instability, previous serious human-rights violations, weak state structures, motives or incentives to commit violence, the capacity to commit atrocity crimes, enabling circumstances, preparatory action and triggering events.

For genocide specifically, the framework asks analysts to examine patterns of discrimination against protected groups and signs of an intention to destroy such a group in whole or in part.

Importantly, the UN framework explicitly warns that the presence of risk factors does not mean atrocity is inevitable.

That is precisely the point.

A warning sign is valuable only before we know how the story ends.

This matters particularly when discussing places such as Tigray and the Democratic Republic of Congo. If the only time the public becomes interested in a community is after a court has formally confirmed genocide, then genocide prevention has already failed.

The objective should not be to become extraordinarily good at naming mass graves.

It should be to become better at noticing the road towards them.

Palestine Should Expand Our Empathy, Not Contain It

There is a tendency for public compassion to follow visibility.

A conflict enters social media. A photograph circulates. A journalist becomes widely followed. A flag becomes recognisable. People learn the historical vocabulary. A cause becomes part of the cultural conversation.

Then another population suffers elsewhere, but without the same visibility.

Their villages have unfamiliar names. Their political history is complicated. Their perpetrators do not fit easily into Western ideological categories. Their victims speak languages most of us do not understand. Their country may already have been associated with war for so many years that suffering there no longer feels like news.

This is how human beings disappear in plain sight.

The answer is not to care less about Palestine.

It is to refuse to ration empathy.

If Gaza taught us how to recognise the insecurity of a people living beneath the possibility of destruction, then we should be capable of recognising that insecurity when the people are Yazidi, Rohingya, Uyghur, Tigrayan, Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa, Congolese, Ukrainian, Armenian — or members of another community whose name has not yet entered our vocabulary.

Human rights cannot depend upon which atrocity happens to be occupying our newsfeed.

Nor should solidarity depend upon whether the perpetrator belongs to the political camp we already distrust.

Consistency is the test.

A civilian does not become more deserving of protection because the government killing them is our enemy, or less deserving because the perpetrator is our ally.

A child does not experience displacement differently because Western audiences understand the geopolitics.

A woman does not experience rape as less catastrophic because the conflict in which it happens receives little television coverage.

A community does not become safer because international lawyers have not yet agreed which term will eventually appear in the history books.

Beyond Palestine Means Seeing People Before They Become History

There is another reason these contemporary atrocities belong beside the forgotten genocides of history.

We already know what happens next.

Eventually there will be memorials.

There will be anniversaries. Museums. Books. Documentary films. Excavated graves. Survivor testimonies. Courtrooms. Political arguments about terminology. State apologies. Campaigns for reparations. Arguments about who knew what and when.

People will ask how the world allowed it to happen.

Future generations may shake their heads at photographs and wonder how anyone could possibly have failed to understand what they were looking at.

But we are looking now.

That is the uncomfortable difference between contemporary atrocity and historical atrocity.

We do not have the protection of hindsight.

The Yazidi genocide shows us what happens when a religious minority is explicitly marked for destruction.

The Rohingya show us what can happen when citizenship and belonging are stripped away before mass displacement begins.

The Uyghur experience shows us how group repression can operate through surveillance, detention and assimilation rather than spectacular battlefield killing.

Tigray demonstrates the danger of unresolved atrocity and unstable peace.

Darfur demonstrates that genocide can recur when the structures and impunity that enabled earlier violence survive.

Congo demonstrates what happens when mass atrocity becomes chronic enough for the outside world to accept it as background noise.

Ukraine reminds us why children and cultural continuity appear in genocide law.

Nagorno-Karabakh forces us to ask what happens when a homeland survives geographically while the people who gave it its cultural life largely disappear from it.

And Palestine has taught millions of us to recognise the vocabulary connecting all these questions.

We should not put that vocabulary away.

What Can We Actually Do?

The first responsibility is deceptively simple: learn the names.

Follow Sudan when Sudan is not trending. Read about eastern Congo even when explaining its politics requires more than thirty seconds. Learn who the Rohingya are. Know where Sinjar is. Understand the difference between Tigray and Ethiopia as a whole. Ask why a million people can live for years in refugee camps without a durable political solution.

Secondly, follow organisations that document atrocities before the story reaches mainstream news. The UN Office on Genocide Prevention, UNHCR, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s genocide-prevention programme, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and credible local organisations provide information that is often far more detailed than the fleeting attention given to these crises in general news coverage.

Most importantly, listen to survivors and people from the communities themselves.

The purpose of widening our attention should never be to turn human suffering into a collection of fascinating atrocities. The people described here had lives before they became victims. They have families, histories, religions, politics, languages, disagreements, humour, art, ambitions and communities.

They are not case studies.

They are people whose insecurity has become our case study.

There is an important difference.

The Lesson Must Be Bigger Than Palestine

Palestine has changed the way millions of people understand mass atrocity.

That matters.

But perhaps the deeper test of that awakening is what happens when the people suffering are no longer Palestinian.

Can we recognise the same terrible vulnerability in Darfur?

Can we recognise it in Tigray before another war begins?

Can we recognise it among Rohingya refugees after the cameras have left?

Can we remember Yazidi women who remain separated from children taken during a genocide more than a decade ago?

Can we understand that the continuing insecurity of eastern Congo deserves attention even though its conflict refuses to fit into a simple narrative?

Can we care about Uyghur families while remaining precise about what international investigators have and have not legally established?

Can we see a Ukrainian child removed from their family and understand why the Genocide Convention treats the forced transfer of children as potentially relevant to the destruction of a people?

Can we look at an Armenian family from Nagorno-Karabakh and understand that survival does not automatically mean that something irreplaceable has not been destroyed?

This is what “Beyond Palestine” should mean.

Not beyond caring about Palestine.

Beyond limiting what Palestine taught us to Palestinians.

The history of genocide is filled with populations whom the rest of the world noticed too late, remembered selectively or eventually reduced to a sentence in a history book.

The purpose of studying that history cannot simply be to become better at mourning people after they have been destroyed.

It must teach us to recognise human beings becoming unsafe while there is still something left to protect.

The lesson of Palestine cannot simply be that Palestinians matter.

It must be that people matter before the world learns their names.

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Frequently Asked Questions

The presence of warning signs does not mean genocide is inevitable.

Their purpose is to make prevention possible before violence reaches its worst stage.

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