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.
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.”
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.
On December 28th, 2022 Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria,” making its new government priority an explicit and total Jewish supremacy over historical Palestine at the expense of any Palestinian land claims. In light of Netanyahu’s profoundly disturbing statement, as well as the recent provocations by Israeli political leaders in an increasingly extremist political context, the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide is issuing a genocide red flag alert for Israel.
Both politicians seek to force the Palestinians to kneel by giving them two options: either a complete surrender and the acceptance of Jewish supremacy throughout Greater Israel, or emigration. Smotrich’s detailed plan for Palestinian surrender, published in 2017, includes a clause for Israeli security forces to treat anyone who opposes those two options “with greater force than we use today and under more favorable conditions for us.” In short, a new Nakba.
Israeli Human Rights Groups Call on U.S. to Sanction Ben-Gvir, Smotrich Over Human Rights Violations The letter, signed by more than 200 Israeli activists and human-rights organizations, accused incoming coalition lawmakers and their far-right allies as, among other things, inciting genocide against the Palestinian people and advocating for racial segregation.
I’m not talking to you, anti-Zionists, terror supporters, enemies. You’re here by accident because Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job.
Netanyahu ally Bezalel Smotrich to Arab Knesset members: "You're only here by mistake, because Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job, didn't throw you out in '48. I have no dialogue with you at all," the self-described proud homophobe said, calling them enemies and terror supporters. pic.twitter.com/KLc4GHMfOM
It gives me no pleasure to write this, but it must be clearly stated for the record: of late, top Israeli political and religious leaders have even incited genocide against the Palestinian people. Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef ruled in March that non-Jewish people, including Palestinians, have no right to live in the country.
… Most worrisome, this racist rhetoric is increasingly influencing the Israeli public, shifting it further and further to the far right. What human rights horrors could this lead to, if left unchecked?
