Liberation, terrorism, or genocide?

The companion to this essay, Heat of war, or genocidal intent?, asked why annihilationist wartime rhetoric so rarely produces a genocide finding. This one asks a harder version of the same question about insurgency, "terrorism," and anti-colonial violence — the arena where the word genocide is thrown hardest in both directions, and sticks least often.

Rebellions against empire, settler-colonial conquest, and the terror campaigns on either side generate language that reads, in isolation, like a blueprint for extermination. Settlers are told to choose "the suitcase or the coffin." A governor predicts "a war of extermination… until the Indian race becomes extinct." A crowd chants "kill the Boer." And yet — with a few stark exceptions — courts, commissions, and historians decline to call these events genocide.

Quotations are for the record. Inclusion does not mean we label the speaker a genocidaire or the event genocide.

The line the law draws

Genocide has a narrow legal definition (1948 Convention, Article II): acts committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Two words in that sentence do most of the work in this essay. (UN — Genocide Convention, Article II)

"As such" means the group must be targeted because of its group identity, not because it is an army, a regime, a class, or a political faction. This is the hinge that separates genocide from a war or an insurgency.

The protected groups are exhaustive — and political groups were deliberately left out. During the 1948 drafting, the Soviet Union and others insisted that political and social groups be excluded; the compromise was their omission, and the UN's own guidance confirms the definition "does not include political groups." The practical consequence for this essay is large: killing "settlers," "colonizers," "counter-revolutionaries," or "the bourgeoisie" as a class is not genocide under the Convention, however systematic. It may be crimes against humanity (extermination, persecution, deportation are listed there) or war crimes or terrorism — but the genocide door is legally hard to open. (UN OSAPG — definition, UN factsheet)

And intent — dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy the group — is the highest bar in international criminal law. Courts have refused the label even amid horror:

• Goran Jelisić called himself "the Serbian Adolf," boasted of killing Muslims, and was still acquitted of genocide by the ICTY (1999) — the tribunal found his killings were not proven to carry the specific intent to destroy the group. (ICTY — Jelisić)
• The ICJ held twice — Bosnia v. Serbia (2007) and Croatia v. Serbia (2015) — that ethnic cleansing and forced displacement are not in themselves genocide absent proof of destructive intent. (ICJ — Bosnia v. Serbia, ICJ — Croatia v. Serbia)

Hold that frame — protected group + specific intent, not brutality — against the cases below.

Anti-colonial insurgency — when the target is the settler

The intellectual case for revolutionary violence was made most famously by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961):

At the level of the individual, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.

Even this canonical line is a lesson in reading carefully: Fanon's French — la violence désintoxique — is clinical ("disintoxicates," shakes off a colonial stupor), not the redemptive "cleansing" the English implies. Translators sharpened it. (Wikiquote — The Wretched of the Earth)

In the Algerian War (1954–62), the FLN turned theory into a campaign that included terror against European settlers (pieds-noirs). At the El-Halia / Philippeville mine on 20 August 1955, FLN-led attackers killed dozens of European civilians, women and children among them; French reprisals then killed far more Algerians. (Battle of Philippeville) The slogan that captured settler fear —

For the Europeans and Algerian Jews, the moment to choose has come: the suitcase or the coffin.

— is itself contested: each side claimed the other coined it. (La valise ou le cercueil) After independence roughly a million settlers fled — an exodus historians describe as flight or ethnic cleansing of a settler population, not genocide. Algeria is the archetypal successful armed decolonization, and "settlers" are not a protected group.

Terror as strategy — making the colony ungovernable

Most of this essay so far is about words. But insurgency is mostly about acts — and the signature act of anti-colonial warfare is terrorism as a deliberate strategy: a movement that cannot beat a colonial army in the field attacks civilians to make the territory ungovernable, push the cost of occupation past what the home country will pay, and force a political withdrawal. The aim is coercive, not exterminatory — and that distinction is exactly where the genocide question turns.

The FLN's Battle of Algiers (1956–57) is the textbook case. The strategist Abane Ramdane moved the war from the mountains into the city and ordered bombings of European civilian targets — the Milk Bar and the Cafétéria among them — on the reasoning that one attack in central Algiers, with the UN watching, was worth more than dozens of rural ambushes. The goal was to provoke a heavy-handed French response, internationalize the war, and make Algérie française untenable. It worked politically even after French paratroopers crushed the FLN's urban network. (Battle of Algiers · Congress of Soummam)

The same logic — and the same "terrorist or freedom fighter?" problem — runs through the Zionist revolt against British rule. From 1944 to 1948 the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister) and Lehi (the "Stern Gang") waged a campaign to drive Britain out of Palestine: the King David Hotel bombing of 22 July 1946 killed 91 people at the Mandate's administrative nerve-center, and Lehi assassinated the British minister Lord Moyne (1944) and the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte (1948). Its leaders openly defended terror as a legitimate means of combat. Historians still argue how much it hastened Britain's 1947 decision to hand Palestine to the UN — but the strategy was the one the FLN used, and one of its practitioners went on to lead a state. (King David Hotel bombing)

And the strategy is judged by its method, not its cause. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission held both that apartheid was a crime against humanity and that the ANC and PAC fought a "just war" — and that their armed wings (MK, APLA) committed "gross violations of human rights" in attacks like the 1983 Church Street bombing, because "a just cause does not exempt an organisation from pursuing its goals through just means." (TRC Final Report, Vol. 5)

None of these campaigns is genocide, and the reason is structural, not moral. Terrorism's logic is to make a population's rulers leave; genocide's logic is to make a people cease to exist. You can achieve the first by killing relatively few and frightening many; the second requires destroying the group as such. The targeting tracks a political role — occupier, settler, collaborator — not ethnicity or religion in itself. That is why these acts are prosecuted (when they are) as terrorism, war crimes, or crimes against humanity, and why the genocide label slides off them even when civilians are deliberately chosen and the death toll is high.

The line is crossed only when the goal mutates from "make them leave" to "make them gone," and the target shifts from a political category to a protected group as such. That hinge is what turns Haiti 1804, or ISIS against the Yazidis, into genocide — and leaves the Battle of Algiers, the King David Hotel, and Church Street on the other side of it.

Liberation that was genocide — Haiti, 1804

The exception that breaks the comfortable assumption that liberation and genocide are opposites.

After defeating Napoleon's army and declaring independence, Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the killing of the remaining French population. His 22 February 1804 instructions specified silent weapons so victims could not be warned; an estimated 3,000–7,000 were killed. He then proclaimed (8 April 1804):

We have given these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America.

His secretary, Boisrond-Tonnerre, had set the tone for the independence declaration:

For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!

(1804 Haitian massacre)

Mainstream reference works and many historians call this a genocide — a population targeted by race/national origin and largely destroyed. It was also an act of anti-colonial liberation and a defense against re-enslavement. Both descriptions are true at once. Motive (security, vengeance, freedom) did not erase the genocidal character of the act — which is exactly why motive cannot excuse it elsewhere either.

"Kill the Boer" — when the court read the context

The opposite outcome: language that sounds eliminationist, ruled lawful because of what it actually does.

The struggle song "Dubul' ibhunu" ("shoot the Boer / the farmer") was popularized by ANC Youth League leader Peter Mokaba in 1993 and later sung by Julius Malema. AfriForum, an Afrikaner group, sued to have it banned as hate speech and incitement. South Africa's courts refused. The Supreme Court of Appeal (2024) held:

The reasonably well-informed person would appreciate that when Mr Malema sang Dubula ibhunu… he was not actually calling for farmers, or white South Africans of Afrikaans descent to be shot… he was using an historic struggle song… as a provocative means of advancing his party's political agenda.

The Constitutional Court declined to hear AfriForum's appeal in 2025, ending the case. (SCA judgment) The PAC's armed wing had used a blunter slogan — "one settler, one bullet" — during the transition. Both are treated by South African law as protected, historically situated political expression, not incitement to genocide.

Across the border, Robert Mugabe racialized Zimbabwe's farm seizures —

The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans, Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.

— and told a rally his party must "continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy." (CBC, 2000 · Robert Mugabe) Dozens of white farmers were killed; the campaign is called racialized expropriation and ethnic-nationalist politics — not genocide. The grim irony: the killing Mugabe is widely accused of approaching genocide, the Gukurahundi of 1982–87, targeted an estimated ~20,000 fellow Black Zimbabweans (Ndebele), not whites. (Gukurahundi)

Colonizers who said "exterminate"

If insurgent rhetoric rarely meets the legal bar, the clearest genocidal intent in the colonial record usually came from the colonizers — and even here the label only sometimes attaches.

Recognized genocide

General Lothar von Trotha, German South-West Africa, the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) of 2 October 1904:

The Hereros are German subjects no longer… Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children.

Roughly 65,000 of 80,000 Herero and over half the Nama died. In 2021 Germany formally acknowledged it as genocide ("Völkermord") — the clearest "yes" in the colonial record. (Lothar von Trotha · dossier)

Recognized late — and only by some

Governor Peter H. Burnett, in his official message to the California Legislature, 7 January 1851:

That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.

California's Native population collapsed under state-sponsored killing; Governor Newsom formally apologized and used the word "genocide" in 2019. (California State Library — Burnett) In Tasmania, the settler press (Colonial Times, 1 December 1826) called for Aboriginal people to be "hunted down like wild beasts, and destroyed." Whether the near-destruction of the Palawa was genocide is the core of Australia's "History Wars" — asserted by historians like Madley and Ryan, disputed by Windschuttle. These are scholarly and political designations, not the verdict of any court. (Black War)

Atrocity — but generally not called genocide

• Congo Free State (Leopold II): forced-labor terror, severed hands, population collapse often estimated near 50%. Yet Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) is explicit: "What happened in the Congo… was not genocide," but "one of the most appalling slaughters known." The intent was extraction and profit, not destruction of a group as such — crimes against humanity, a "hecatomb," not genocide. (Atrocities in the Congo Free State)
• Mau Mau / Kenya Emergency: systematic British torture in detention camps, the Hola massacre (1959), and a cover-up. In 2013 the UK expressed "sincere regret" and paid £19.9m to survivors — acknowledged as torture and ill-treatment, never designated genocide. (UK statement, 2013)
• Sétif and Guelma (1945): French forces and settler militias killed somewhere between ~1,500 and tens of thousands of Algerians (the range itself is a battleground). France now calls it an "inexcusable tragedy" / "tragic events" — colonial repression, not genocide. (Sétif and Guelma massacre)
• Amritsar (1919): Brigadier-General Dyer ordered troops to fire on an unarmed crowd to produce "a sufficient moral effect… throughout the Punjab." Universally condemned as colonial "frightfulness" and collective punishment — terror to suppress a population, not intent to destroy a group as such. (Reginald Dyer)

Insurgents and terror groups — when the label sticks, and when it doesn't

Brutality is constant across these cases. The genocide finding is not — and it tracks the target, not the body count.

When it stuck

ISIS against the Yazidis is the modern proof that a non-state "terror" group can commit genocide. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded (2016):

ISIS has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement… the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born… and the transfer of Yazidi children… thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community.

ISIS supplied its own proof of intent in its magazine Dabiq, framing the enslavement and destruction of Yazidis — as "polytheists" — in explicitly theological, eliminationist terms. (OHCHR — They Came to Destroy · dossier) The Interahamwe militias and RTLM radio in Rwanda — "cut down the tall trees," inyenzi ("cockroaches") — are the other clear case of non-state actors convicted in connection with genocide.

When it didn't

• Boko Haram: the ICC Prosecutor concluded (2020) there was a reasonable basis to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity — murder and persecution — not genocide, despite mass killing of Christians and Muslims. (ICC — Nigeria)
• Shining Path (Peru): responsible for the majority of deaths in the conflict; Peru's Truth Commission found crimes against humanity, and explicitly noted only a "potential for genocide" in its rhetoric — withholding the label because the target was political and societal, not a protected group. (Peru CVR — Conclusions)
• GIA (Algeria, 1990s): village massacres treated universally as terrorism; victims were fellow Algerian Muslims branded "apostates." (Authorship of several massacres is itself disputed, with false-flag allegations.) (Armed Islamic Group)
• Sri Lanka (2009): the UN found war crimes and crimes against humanity by both the insurgent LTTE and the state. "Genocide" was asserted against the state by Tamil political bodies and an unofficial people's tribunal — and rejected by the government and never found by any court. The label flew in both directions; neither use was a legal finding. (UN Panel of Experts, 2011)

The pattern is the asymmetry itself: states and insurgents both reach for "genocide" as a weapon, long before — and often instead of — any court reaching for it as a finding.

The live case — "from the river to the sea"

Every principle above collides in the present dispute over Palestinian and Israeli rhetoric, the contested heart of the whole project.

Two caveats frame everything below. First, this section is about rhetoric and insurgent strategy — not a verdict on the Gaza war, which is state conduct and the subject of the companion essay. Second, and more fundamental: whether this is even a colonial or settler-colonial situation at all — Zionism as a European settler project, or Jews as an indigenous people returning to an ancestral homeland — is itself one of the most contested questions in the entire debate, and the answer decides whether the "anti-colonial" frame of this essay applies here in the first place. We bracket that question rather than pretending to settle it; it deserves its own essay, and the labels "occupation," "apartheid," and "settler-colonialism" are each fought over on their own terms.

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is read by the ADL and others as a call to eliminate Israel — "incitement to genocide." Rep. Rashida Tlaib, censured by the U.S. House in 2023 for using it, called it "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate." Courts and governments have split on whether it is protected expression. (From the river to the sea)

The translation matters — and which Arabic version you treat as canonical changes the meaning. The line defenders usually cite is min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin satataharrar (من النهر إلى البحر، فلسطين ستتحرر) — literally "Palestine will be liberated," from the verb taharrara, "to be freed," not "free of Jews." But that rhyming couplet is mainly the version that won out in English-language solidarity culture from the 1990s on.

In Arabic, scholars note, the historically more common chants used "from the water to the water" (min el-mayyeh lel-mayyeh) and often ended differently — Filastin ʿarabiyya ("Palestine is Arab") or Filastin islamiyya ("Palestine is Islamic"), recorded in First-Intifada graffiti. Elliott Colla, a professor of Arabic at Georgetown, says plainly: "Maybe a more common version is, 'Palestine is Arab.'" And Likud's own 1977 platform used the mirror image — between the sea and the Jordan "there will be only Israeli sovereignty." (From the river to the sea, Vox)

So the phrase is a Rorschach test. The most-defended translation is liberation. The older Arabic was more nationalist. A mirror version is Israeli. The seven words stay the same; the meaning is supplied entirely by the reader. Whose liberation, and at whose expense — that is the whole dispute, and the slogan does not settle it. It never did.

The same movement supplies both the strongest "plain-text" exhibit and its own walk-back. The 1988 Hamas charter quotes a hadith about killing Jews (not only Zionists) hiding behind rocks and trees. The 2017 "Document of General Principles" drops that language and reframes the struggle as against "the Zionist project," not Jews as such — without formally revoking the 1988 text. (1988 charter · 2017 charter)

And the most famous "proof" of eliminationist intent is largely an artifact of misquotation:

"Drive the Jews into the sea" — almost always presented without its source. Ahmad Shukeiri's actual 1967 words were about Jews "departing by sea to their countries of origin"; the pithy version is an Israeli-government paraphrase. Azzam Pasha's "war of extermination" line (1947) is real but routinely stripped of its conditional caveat and misdated. (Azzam Pasha quotation)

"Drive them into the sea" is, in other words, a perfect specimen of the thing this site warns against: the decontextualized, often-misattributed quote, doing the work that evidence and intent are supposed to do.

But the opposite error is just as lazy. The Palestinian national movement is not one thing — it spans everyone from people who simply want freedom, equal rights, and a state, to secular leftists, to Islamists, to outright antisemites with genuinely eliminationist aims. Reading the worst actor as the whole, or the most benign as the whole, both fail. The movement's darkest strand is real and documented:

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the most prominent Palestinian Arab leader of the 1930s–40s, met Adolf Hitler in Berlin on 28 November 1941, broadcast Nazi antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world, lobbied to block Jewish emigration to Palestine, and helped the SS recruit Bosnian Muslims into the 13th Waffen-SS "Handschar" Division. (USHMM — Hajj Amin al-Husayni)

That is not a smear; it is the record. And it is also true that historians — including the USHMM — reject the inflated claim (made by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015) that the Mufti gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust; his actual influence on the genocide was marginal. (USHMM — Wartime Propagandist) Both moves — inflating one collaborator into the origin of the Shoah, and erasing a documented Nazi ally to keep a movement pristine — are the same sin this essay is about: letting the conclusion you want pick the facts you cite.

The live case is also not only words. Palestinian armed strategy has long run the terror-as-strategy playbook above — the Second Intifada's suicide bombings of buses and restaurants, Hamas rocket fire, and the 7 October 2023 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people, the large majority of them civilians. As acts, those are terrorism, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the same standard this essay applied to the FLN and the Irgun. Whether 7 October also crosses into genocide is precisely the live, contested question: Israel and many scholars argue the 1988 charter and the targeting of civilians as Jews evidence genocidal intent, while others classify it as atrocious but politically-aimed violence against a state and its citizens. Run the hinge — destroy a people as such, or coerce a state and its population — and you arrive at the same unresolved fault line as the slogan. (October 7 dossier)

The charge runs in the other direction too, but that belongs to a different essay. South Africa's ICJ genocide case against Israel over Gaza — where the Court found "at least some" claims "plausible" in January 2024 but made no finding that genocide occurred — turns on state wartime conduct, the subject of the companion essay and the Gaza dossier. This essay's lens is the rhetoric of liberation movements, so it stays there: not whether the war is genocide, but whether the slogans are incitement to it. (ICJ Order, 26 Jan 2024)

What these cases share

The pattern: the genocide label tracks who is targeted and why — not how brutal the act, how revolutionary the cause, or how chilling the quote.

How to read a label without fooling yourself

When someone calls an insurgency, a colonial war, or a terror campaign "genocide" — or insists it cannot be — ask:

1. Who is the target? A protected group as such (national, ethnic, racial, religious) — or a political category like "settlers," "colonizers," or "counter-revolutionaries"? The second is legally hard to call genocide no matter the death toll.

2. Intent or method? Was the aim to destroy the group's existence — or to win independence, hold territory, extract wealth, or terrorize into submission? Congo's millions of dead were a by-product of greed; that is why historians say crimes against humanity, not genocide.

3. Who applied the label? A court or UN commission with jurisdiction (von Trotha, ISIS, Rwanda) — or an advocacy tribunal, a parliament, or the speaker's enemy (much of the Sri Lanka and "river to the sea" debate)?

4. Does the framing flip the verb? "Freedom fighter" vs. "terrorist" is a fight about legitimacy and method. It changes none of the legal facts. Haiti was liberation and genocide; an act does not become innocent because the cause is just, nor genocidal because the actor is hated.

When liberation and insurgency were genocide (for contrast)

The exceptions that prove why the rest are hard:

• Herero & Nama: a written extermination order, acted upon — dossier.
• ISIS / Yazidis: a religious minority targeted for erasure, with the perpetrators' own theology as proof of intent — dossier.
• Rwanda: non-state militias and broadcasters destroying a protected group, found by an international tribunal — dossier.

In each, the target was a protected group as such, and the intent was provable. Strip either element away and you are left with war, repression, or terror — terrible, often criminal, but not the specific crime of genocide.

Further reading

• Heat of war, or genocidal intent? — the wartime companion
• What is Genocide — the two-element test
• Methodology — how quotes are tagged
• Case dossiers — acts, intent, recognition per conflict

Sources: ICJ · ICTY · ICC · OHCHR · UN OSAPG · USHMM · California State Library · GOV.UK · Peru CVR · UN