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.
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.”
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.
“We are delighted to report that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has removed a display of artwork designed by children from Gaza.” That was the summary of a news report published on the homepage of the pro-Israel group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The group is credited for being the party that managed to successfully persuade the administration of a hospital in West London to take down a few pieces of artwork created by refugee children from Gaza.
… As ridiculous as this story sounds, it is, in fact, the very essence of the anti-Palestinian campaign launched by Israel and its allies worldwide. While Palestinians are fighting for basic human rights, freedom and sovereignty as enshrined in international law, the pro-Israel camp is fighting for a total and complete erasure of everything Palestinian. Some call this cultural genocide or ethnocide.
“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)
Supporting the recent pogrom by fascist Jewish-Israeli militias against Palestinians in Huwara near Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territory and overtly inciting state terrorism, senior Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist,” said, “I think Huwara needs to be erased. The state should be the one to do that.” Smotrich, however, is not the first Israeli leader to publicly embrace or threaten genocidal acts against Indigenous Palestinians. Labor Party leader Matan Vilnai in 2008 threatened Palestinians with “a bigger shoah [Holocaust]” if resistance groups did not stop their armed retaliation to Israel’s criminal siege and violent attacks on Gaza. A recent error by Israel’s censors accidentally has revealed secret documents exposing David Ben Gurion’s support for “wiping out” Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, with a minister in his first government admitting, “Let us say that instances of rape occurred in [the ethnically cleansed Palestinian city] Ramle. I can forgive instances of rape, but I will not forgive other acts,” such as forcibly removing “jewelry from women.”
“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
The effectiveness of policies of elimination requires two conditions: mass killings and varying degrees of violence on the one hand, and a supportive or complicit public on the other. Israel has both.
The phenomenon known as “settler violence” is a daily and endless sequence of assaults, of which only the tip of the iceberg ever reaches the Israeli media. Under the banner of a “war on terror,” soldiers can commit intolerable crimes, many of which, too, are rarely reported. The mass of the crimes, their frequency, their pervasiveness, and the explicit endorsement of them by Israel’s leadership and public opinion, are all designed to produce a reality in which the law of elimination becomes a law of nature.
Smotrich has also possibly committed the act of incitement to genocide, which also would prevent him from acquiring a U.S. visa under the statute, “Any alien who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in genocide, as defined in section 1091(a) of title 18, is inadmissible” (E)(ii). 18 U.S. Code § 1091(a) defines genocide as: “Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such,” including “kills members of that group;” (a)(1); “causes serious bodily injury to members of that group (a)(2); and “subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part” (a)(4).
Israeli scholars have suggested in the past that Smotrich’s violent rhetoric and detailed policy plans to expel Palestinians from the occupied territories could amount to genocide.
The effectiveness of policies of elimination requires two conditions: mass killings and varying degrees of violence on the one hand, and a supportive or complicit public on the other. Israel has both.
The phenomenon known as “settler violence” is a daily and endless sequence of assaults, of which only the tip of the iceberg ever reaches the Israeli media. Under the banner of a “war on terror,” soldiers can commit intolerable crimes, many of which, too, are rarely reported. The mass of the crimes, their frequency, their pervasiveness, and the explicit endorsement of them by Israel’s leadership and public opinion, are all designed to produce a reality in which the law of elimination becomes a law of nature.
