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.
Sarah Ihmoud: “BDS is one such opportunity for feminist praxis. As Israel’s ongoing settler project remains an enactment of genocidal violence against an indigenous people, through technologies of war, capture, and militarized dispossession… Feminist organizing in Palestine has been deeply invested in dismantling structures of settler colonialism and apartheid that place women and queer folk disproportionately in marginal positions. Like in other colonial and genocidal contexts, Israel has targeted the bodies and sexualities of Palestinian women, as symbolic peripheries of the Palestinian nation.”
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.”
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
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.
Xavier prides itself on its Jesuit values. One of those values is solidarity and kinship. How can we as a university remain committed to solidarity and kinship if we don’t stand in solidarity with Occupied Palestine? Whether it’s through buying and using products made in the Occupied Palestine, sending students to Israel on study abroad programs, or through investing in Israeli companies, Xavier University is actively invested in the Israeli government.
..Many refer to the genocide as a “conflict,” which is rather inaccurate.
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union [NEHAWU] strongly condemns the continued violent attacks on Gaza by the Apartheid Israel military. The continued repression and genocide of innocent Palestinians must stop.
…Even though a truce was agreed upon on, the world can no longer be silent about the continued genocide of Palestinians by the Apartheid Israeli government. The people of Gaza live in constant fear. We have to stop Israel by boycotting all that the Israeli government uses to fund these inhumane attacks on the Palestinian people. We call on all trade unionists, all friendly countries to Boycott, Divestment and Sanction apartheid Israel.
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.
For us Indigenous Palestinians, the growing impact of the BDS movement is one of our main beacons of hope. A former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Richard Falk, described the siege of Gaza as “prelude to genocide.” While UN reports predicted that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, over two million Palestinians in Gaza continue to live under inhumane conditions of immense suffering and deprivation.
Law school faculty at a major university in New York has joined the ranks of educational and professional organizations supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and recognition of Palestinian rights… The resolution calls for a boycott of Israeli apartheid government and Israeli companies that take advantage of and support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, thereby systematically ending long standing relationships between major U.S. colleges like CUNY and those occupation entities. In doing so, the resolution calls out CUNY’s complicity “in the ongoing apartheid, genocide, and war crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people through its investments in and contracts with companies profiting off of Israeli war crimes.”
