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.
Between September 16th and 18th, 1982, a campaign of killing took place at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. What happened was described by the UN as an “act of genocide”. With the backing of invading Israeli forces, a right-winged Lebanese Christain armed group, called the Phalange attacked the Palestinian camps in Beirut. According to multiple reports up to 3500 men, women, and children were killed.
Halima Abu Haneya, a doctor of social sciences who wrote her PhD dissertation on Jerusalem and how Palestinian residents have been forced out… Abu Haneya said this was all part of a deliberate Israeli land-grab policy to favour a higher Jewish demography, which forced Palestinians to keep their addresses inside Israel so as not to lose their Jerusalem IDs as Israel requires Palestinians to repeatedly prove the city is the centre of their life. She said this policy prevented most West Bank residents from praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, from taking advantage of superior medical facilities and business opportunities and meeting with family and friends. “It’s a kind of cultural genocide.”
Despite all the evidence, they reject recognising that this is an occupation, launched by a settler-colonial power that seeks to ethnically cleanse an entire indigenous population in order to solidify and legitimise its colony. What is happening in Gaza is incremental genocide, not a “security operation”. And yet Palestinians are being asked to give in to a slow death, die aimlessly, showing no form of rebellion, and accept that if they die resisting, then it would be their own fault.
“I am taking a stand against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in our country. We will do whatever it takes to free our country… Since we can’t be there in person, we are here at this protest today… I am very angry, very heartbroken by what is happening,” Reem Alghoul, a Palestinian living in Doha, told Al Jazeera.
In Madrid, some 2,500 people, many of them young people wrapped in Palestinian flags, marched to the Puerta del Sol plaza in the city centre. “This is not a war, it’s genocide,” they chanted.
Such absurdities expose the contradictions of the “non-profit industrial complex”: which, like the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, serves to enforce deeply-rooted structures of domination. The difference is that the non-profit version operates under the mantle of benevolence and love – “love” being the literal translation of the Latin term caritas, from which the word “charity” is derived.
… Political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously analysed the “banality of evil”. Here, we have the “benevolence” of evil. Violence is rationalised not simply as mundane, but morally imperative.
Against this colonial caritas, communities and movements are demonstrating their own forms of decolonial love: building up interfaith and intercommunal solidarity against the politics of genocidal nationalism and fascism, from Myanmar to India to Israel to the US.
The Zionist “left” is an integral part of the oppressive Zionist propaganda apparatus, whether those involved in the endeavour are aware of it or not. The supposed left, “liberal” wing of Zionism, comprising Israeli political parties, non-profit organisations and media organs in Israel and outside it, serves to promote Zionist propaganda, which renders occupation, apartheid and the genocide of the Indigenous Palestinian people palatable to audiences in Israel and worldwide.
There is an implicit parity, you see? All fear is the same, all violence is the same, all insecurity is the same. The Oglala Sioux father tells the writer how he was able to see white humanity for the first time through this friendship. The white man tells him the same about Indigenous humanity.
And just like that, the genocidal engine of American colonialism, which, together with slavery, propelled its entire economy, becomes just a big misunderstanding, a problem to be solved by dialogue, empathy, and the simple understanding that, as McCann quotes his Palestinian protagonist’s epiphany: “They have families, too.”
Substitute Palestinian for Oglala Lakota, Palestine for Pine Ridge Reservation, and Israelis for white settlers (although that does not need changing), and you have, in a nutshell, Colum McCann’s much-touted, highly anticipated novel, which may well become a blockbuster film.
Sanders has a unique opportunity to powerfully inspire a real grassroots “political revolution” by confronting his own complicity with Zionist criminality and the bi-partisan consensus on Israel/Palestine. The courage to recognise Israel’s crimes and support Palestinians in their struggle for freedom are morally consistent, left-wing, anti-establishment, anti-imperialist positions, which do not come at the expense of Israelis or Jews. Opposition to ongoing apartheid and genocide in Israel/Palestine and support for peaceful tactics such as BDS are key galvanising themes, which would set Sanders apart from other candidates.
We do not deny that Jews have the right to live in safety, but why should the solution to a tragedy they faced produce a tragedy for another people? The establishing of this “safe haven”, the way it was done in 1948 and ever since, has resulted in mass ethnic cleansing and incremental genocide of Palestinians. The Palestinian people have faced one massacre after another over the past seven decades and as a result, they have no “safe haven” of their own.
