UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, International Court of Justice President: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Indigenous Palestinian People.
“What we’re experiencing now is the attempted end of the long game of the Zionist project. And by that I mean: Netanyahu’s government is, I think, not something that he would like to have be more moderate. He has these extremists given strategic positions that are necessary to do in order to sustain his coalition, so that they could do the dirty work. He could stand by and puroport to be trying to moderate what was happening and keep good relations with the US and so on. It’s a little bit hard for him to do it and be with the genocidal kinds of settler violence that has been encouraged by members of the Netanyahu government. But what we’re seeing, I think, is this last phase of a settler colonial project… I agree with Michael [Lynk] that the UN is crucial in establishing what the proper contours of behavior are in a situation of this sort. It cannot change the behavior, but it can create symbolic understanding that is extremely important for civil socioety. Because it relies on this more objective presentation of the relevance of international law, the responsibility of civil society, the need for global solidarity that imposes real cost on Israel for continuing on this path of apartheid with its genocidal implicanions.“ (40:17)
“So when we talk about anti-normalization, it’s not an intellectual exercise. People-families, children, parents- with lives, dreams, hopes, and aspirations- just like each and every one of you- their lives are at the end of every action we take when Israel is in question. There is no way to disentangle a colonized people from the regime that has propped itself on top of them. Any policy, any action, any transaction that Israel makes- economic, cultural, academic- is at the expense of Palestinian lives and existence as a people. Because the colonial goal is the elimination of the indigenous identity so that the colonists may claim the place and its history. And by erasing the people, erasing the the sin of their erasure. This, of course is an oxymoron. But logic never stopped a genocide, sanctions do. “ (40:17)
“I have not said anything about the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting the government and the number of times they use ‘fascsist’… in the last couple of months, I’ve never seen the F-word being used so much in the Israaeli media, it’s unbelievable. Of course it’ll be an extremely difficult period for Palestinians, as we’re seeing from Huwara onwards. It’s the first time that Israeli ministers openly support genocide. I mean all of them do. From the most liberal, who have committed acts that can qualify as possibly genocide- Rabin and Peres, you know, the Peaceniks. (Ben Gvir is much better than them, he has not yet committed any acts of massive ethnic cleansing; Rabin and Peres have.) So all of them agree, but now we have ministers openly saying things that everyone had hidden before.” (1:28:32)
Continue watching at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFl5abYmjOk&t=9s
PALESTINIAN rights activists crashed an engineering awards ceremony in London to protest the event’s role at “celebrating the worst of Britain’s military-industrial-colonial complex.”
Members of the Palestine Action group snuck into the event, hosted by engineering body Make UK at the opulent East Wintergarden in Canary Wharf, London, on Thursday night.
The action came after Israel launched its deadliest raid on the West Bank in years, killing 10 Palestinians.
One stormed onto the stage and grabbed the mic, telling attendees: “This morning, 10 Palestinians were murdered by the occupation forces, the zionist forces, using Elbit’s weapons.
“The engineering industry is guilty of genocide.
“Arms companies are responsible for millions dead around the world — are you happy to profit from murder?”
After 74 years, Israel’s gradual ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues, through the continuous “Judaization” operations in the Galilee and the Negev, and settlement operations and annexation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, especially in Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, which confirms that the Nakba continues. …Zionism, which arose in the context of European imperialist and colonial expansion, is the intellectual and ideological basis of settler-colonialism in Palestine. It is a racist, genocidal ideology that encourages terrorism and fascism, as our people has witnessed for 74 years.
While discussions on Israeli apartheid have become increasingly mainstream over the last three or more years, some aspects of Palestinians’ decades long mobilisation against Israeli apartheid remain absent or insufficiently addressed in the current discourse. For some, apartheid has materialised only recently due to what is perceived as increasingly repressive Israeli government practices or the entrenchment of Israel’s prolonged military occupation since 1967. What this approach misses is a more structural understanding of Israeli apartheid as an inevitable outcome of settler colonialism in Palestine and the Zionist movement’s policy to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian people through removal from the land. (p. 32)
… As of the time of writing, the year 2022 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2005, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since 1948, Israeli authorities have systematically resorted to lethal and other excessive force against Palestinians, targeting Palestinian lives, bodies, and livelihoods throughout historic Palestine. The denial to Palestinians of their right to life has been integral to the Zionist settler colonial project and is part and parcel of its ‘logic of elimination’ of Palestinians. Israel’s widespread and systematic violation of the right to life of Palestinians has been a pillar of its establishment and maintenance of an apartheid regime since 1948. Arbitrary deprivations of Palestinian life serve to create a repressive environment designed to undermine the exercise by the Palestinian people of their collective rights. (p. 122)
Our understanding of the crisis within the region has been shaped by the words of journalists, allowing for the strategic filtering of the violent nature of the ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide committed against the Palestinian people for the past 73 years.
Criticism of the zionist settler-colonial project, as well as the organizations on campus who have consistently demonstrated their support for it, is absolutely valid and necessary. The University of Wisconsin-Madison currently occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, an occupation only made possible through centuries of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The brutal history of the “United States” is similar to that of “Israel” in its subjugation, exploitation, dehumanization, and genocide of those who stand in their way of mass theft of land from indigenous peoples.
…activist Sarah Wilkinson also had her Twitter account suspended on 10 August for 12 hours for calling the Israeli massacre of 47 adults and 16 children in two days of bombing in Gaza that month “genocidal.” “So now we have another word that we are not allowed to equate the Israeli regime with,” Wilkinson told The Electronic Intifada, “despite that incremental genocide for example is exactly what it is.”
It is crucial to remember that Israel’s latest massacre took place in the context of the criminal siege of Gaza. Already in its 15th year, the siege is older than most of the children murdered in Israel’s repeated massacres there since 2008. The siege deprives over two million Palestinians, the majority of them children, of basic necessities, including clean water, jobs, reliable electric power, as well as adequate housing, healthcare, and education. As a result, morbidity, mortality (especially infant mortality), stunted growth, and poverty rates have risen sharply, reducing the lives of people there to hell. Israel’s siege of Gaza is condemned by human rights experts as a crime against humanity, while activists and some historians have termed it, “incremental genocide”… The utter failure of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations, including the General Assembly, to hold Israel accountable for its prolonged and continued crimes against humanity makes them also key culprits in Israel’s recent massacre in Gaza.
