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.
We are familiar with white supremacy—would you consider actions by militant Zionists as an expression of religious supremacy?
Rachel Ida Buff: Religious supremacy and white supremacy—witness attitudes in Israel towards Jews from the Middle East and North Africa—the attitudes towards Palestinian are genocidal and racist.
A few weeks ago, Intel’s Israeli VP Tzahi Weisfeld admitted convincing managers of huge multinationals to invest in Israel “because I’m a Zionist and a proud Israeli.” Many of those conglomerates had questioned, for obvious reasons, the wisdom of investing heavily in Israel. Intel has invested billions in Israel’s economy despite the exceptional risks involved. Its main factory is in Kiryat Gat, a settlement built on top of the Palestinian village of Iraq al Manshiya, ethnically cleansed by Israel after the 1948 Nakba. By doing so, Intel has exposed itself to possible lawsuits from Palestinian survivors of the Nakba on whose stolen land the company has built its factory. Kiryat Gat is also very close to the occupied Gaza Strip, where over 2 million Palestinians have suffered under Israel’s brutal siege conditions that constitute “incremental genocide,” in the words of progressive Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. A fund manager is obliged to “put personal interests or ideological commitments aside.”
Palestinians are losing their lives, their homes, their land and livelihoods to make way for Israel’s sprawling settlements that the ICJ has already concluded are in breach of international law. Israel is growing increasingly ruthless in its attempts to maintain the apartheid system, gaining more and more momentum by the day. But the world remains conspicuously silent, as though powerless to stop this from happening. The signs were there all along-now, a genocide is really underway.
“The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era,” declared the late Ghassan Kanafani. It is fitting that this quote introduces NDN Collective’s position paper “The Right of Return is Land Back.” There is a tendency, even among pro-Palestinian activists, to conclude that the current Israeli government is an aberration rather than the logical conclusion of 75 years of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their lands. As NDN explains, the current problems that all Indigenous face stem from “settler colonialism, genocide and apartheid.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, @FranceskAlbs tells me that the European Union's words of condemnation following remarks made by Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in France are not enough. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/LpyRlWjqax
“I think that that statement was shocking for many reasons, but let me point to two. First of all, it’s shocking that someone known for genocidal statements, and someone who’s also known for the jubilant response to the recent violence unleashed against the occupied Palestinian population is allowed to deliver such a message in France, at the heart of the European Union, basically, without real consequences other than words of condemnation. European Union has a legal framework that prohibits and demands states to punish racist and xenophobic public incitement. And in other cases, like in the case of Russian propagandists’ attacks against the identity of the Ukrainian people, political leaders, including US president Biden, have promptly warned against the risk of genocide. And without getting into the material commission of genocide, international law enshrines- triggers the state’s responsibility to make the best efforts to prevent the incitement to the commission of atrocity. But also, the other element that I find shocking is that this statement is not just yet another slip of the tongue of an extravagant minister. This statement has been heard before, meaning the denial of the Palestinians as a people, and responds to something we are seeing in practice- happening and consolidating- meaning the occupation is a denial of the existents of the Palestinians as a people. And therefore the apartheid is a tool to manage the problem: an occupied people who shouldn’t be there, to be displaced and replaced.”
Israel’s weaponisation of water for the benefit of settlers and de facto annexation can be regarded as a long-standing practice of settler colonialism. But how can one explain Israel’s water policies in the Gaza Strip – one of the most densely populated places on earth – where Israel evacuated its 21 settlements in 2005? Since then, Gazans have no longer experienced Israel’s military occupation as the steady takeover of land. Instead, they have confronted an existential threat to their health and lives that Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, among others, has called “incremental genocide”. Some Israeli human rights lawyers firmly reject this application of the term. But water is life, and the impact of Israel’s nearly 16-year-long blockade and five major military offensives on the severely limited clean water supply available for a rapidly growing population, half of them children, has raised questions about whether the Gaza Strip remains a “livable place” (to use the UN’s phrase)… Rather than pressuring Israel as the occupier to respect the human rights of Palestinians including the right to water, the international community has thrown money and technical expertise at a problem which calls for a political solution. In so doing, it is attempting to forestall calamity while acquiescing in Israel’s violations of international law.
… Genocide, wrote Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term, “refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight”. If that blight is to be averted in the Gaza Strip, the international community must immediately end its complicity in the collective punishment of the Palestinian people and pressure Israel to lift its blockade.
“For them, our very existence intimidates them and our artwork humanizes us- Palestinians- and this does not serve their purposes. They want us to be portrayed as we are in the media- terrorists, people throwing rocks- this is the picture that they have in mind, and that’s why they didn’t like this piece of artwork. And I also think it comes as part of the genocide that Israel is committing against Palestinians, which comes at all levels. So we have the daily killings, demolitions, evictions, land theft, burning of trees, and all of that. And then we have a different level which is a cultural genocide, where they steal our food and they attack our art. They don’t want the word ‘Palestinian’ to be heard in the western world.”
Today when I hear “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” I can’t help but think that if we swapped “Ireland” and “Irish” with “Palestine” and “Palestinian” that it would reveal as much truth as the original… Palestinians endure humiliating military checkpoints, extrajudicial killings, land theft, political disenfranchisement, an apartheid legal system and genocide.
I hesitated to use, for all these dark chapters, the term ‘genocide’. I used it only once when, describing the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip since 2006, I framed it as an incremental genocide. The recent sprees of killing, since the beginning of this year and the benefit of yet another commemorative moment of recollection, probably justify expanding the term beyond Israel’s atrocious assaults and siege on the Gaza Strip.
Connecting the dots of killings between a period of a few months when ‘only’ a small number of people are being shot daily and massacres that spread over more than 70 years is something that is not easily accepted as proof of genocidal policies.
And yet, that history is the genealogy of genocide according to article 2 of the United Nation’s “convention of the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide”, which stipulates that the following acts, enlisted below, are genocide if they were done “with the intent to destroy, a whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Yet the shortsighted attempt to compartmentalize Israeli extremists — to treat them as inherently more repugnant than “mainstream” hawks and nationalists — is not simply doomed to fail. It will, in fact, only enable more violence. Israeli society refused to recognize that Kahanism drew from the rivers of Zionism, rather than the other way around, only to find that it would return to dominate public life. American Jewish organizations are now making the same mistake. They hope that somehow, with just enough petitions or strongly-worded condemnations, they will defeat the scourge of Smotrich — without addressing the ideology and state structures that both encourage his call for genocide, and give him and his successors the power to fulfill it. They are dangerously wrong.
