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.
“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 international community must take action to stop systematic and deliberate housing demolition and sealing, arbitrary displacement and forced evictions of Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, UN experts* said today.
… “The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, erection of illegal Israeli settlements and systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank amounts to “domicide”.
… “Direct attacks on the Palestinian people’s homes, schools, livelihoods and water sources are nothing but Israel’s attempts to curtail the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to threaten their very existence,” the experts said.
… The experts have repeatedly raised concerns with the Government of Israel on these issues. No response has been received to date.
While discussions on Israeli apartheid have become increasingly mainstream over the last three or more years, some aspects of Palestinians’ decades long mobilisation against Israeli apartheid remain absent or insufficiently addressed in the current discourse. For some, apartheid has materialised only recently due to what is perceived as increasingly repressive Israeli government practices or the entrenchment of Israel’s prolonged military occupation since 1967. What this approach misses is a more structural understanding of Israeli apartheid as an inevitable outcome of settler colonialism in Palestine and the Zionist movement’s policy to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian people through removal from the land. (p. 32)
… As of the time of writing, the year 2022 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2005, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since 1948, Israeli authorities have systematically resorted to lethal and other excessive force against Palestinians, targeting Palestinian lives, bodies, and livelihoods throughout historic Palestine. The denial to Palestinians of their right to life has been integral to the Zionist settler colonial project and is part and parcel of its ‘logic of elimination’ of Palestinians. Israel’s widespread and systematic violation of the right to life of Palestinians has been a pillar of its establishment and maintenance of an apartheid regime since 1948. Arbitrary deprivations of Palestinian life serve to create a repressive environment designed to undermine the exercise by the Palestinian people of their collective rights. (p. 122)
“During the British Mandate the purchase of land in Palestine and the Jewish migration in groups increased, and continued until the declaration of the Israeli state in 1948. It paved the way for many other detailed ideas, plans and implementation through different means, including extensive use of military power and violence. I will talk briefly about Jerusalem now. As you know, several planning schemes were proposed, starting with Mclean 1918 [plan], and then the 1919 Patrick Geddes [plan], and the 1922 [plan], the 1930 [plan], and ending by the Henry Kendal’s 1944 [plan]. Despite some differences, all have proposed the development and the proposals for networks of roads in the western side of the city, concentrated open spaces, public parks; and restricted areas in the eastern part of the city. Outside old city walls the urban patterns that developed were diverse and influenced by the the centralized planning approach. Lands were bought by Jewish organisations and urban ideas designed by architects influenced by the modern European movement rapidly developed. A trend clearly called for in the Hertzel pamphlet. For Geddes, Jerusalem was an integral part of Jewish heritage, and developing plans to protect this heritage was of ought most importance… Crookston emphasises that planners were Jewish immigrants- and most planning staff in district commissions- employees already were Jewish, not Arab. This again shows the binary of making the Zionist dream a reality while making Palestinian reality a nightmare towards elimination… And if we look at Jerusalem today, we see how these plans influenced planning with Israeli settlements.. the play with “ideal ideas” to achieve power, domination, and control within a colonial context, to use the urban dimension within the British and the Zionist spheres, until the British [retreated] and announced the Zionist state.” [59:45]
The fighting companion from Palestine, linked resistance against Israeli colonialism with resistance against militarisation, especially in southern Mexico. He asserted that “Palestine is our future here in Mexico too, because it combines neoliberalism, colonialism, apartheid, corruption, war, crime, all in the name of law and order for some people against others.” He emphasised common trends in both cases, such as the divisive policies that underlined violence against compatriots, genocide, land appropriation, dispossession, advancement of mega-projects that bring crime, drugs and prostitution, and the instalment of fear among the population to sustain militarisation.
Criticism of the zionist settler-colonial project, as well as the organizations on campus who have consistently demonstrated their support for it, is absolutely valid and necessary. The University of Wisconsin-Madison currently occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, an occupation only made possible through centuries of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The brutal history of the “United States” is similar to that of “Israel” in its subjugation, exploitation, dehumanization, and genocide of those who stand in their way of mass theft of land from indigenous peoples.
In a settler-colonial context and an apartheid regime, any display of collective identity and (re)claimed sovereignty from the subjugated people represents a threat to the regime itself. On 13 May 2022, Palestinian pallbearers were attacked by Israeli forces while also carrying their national flag during the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who had been killed two days earlier (see para. 58). In fact, Palestinian “symbols”, like the Palestinian flag, are systematically attacked and torn down, in public places, during public events, protests and even funerals, with the display of Palestinian national identity being de facto banned. In the occupied Palestinian territory, preventing the Palestinian people from expressing their collective identity in their own land has taken many forms.
This is part of a broader and deeper endeavour to “deconstruct and replace” Palestine from the collective imagination through a combination of cultural appropriation and the erasure of key cultural entities. [106] The Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, destroyed at the beginning of the occupation to make space for the Wailing Wall esplanade, is one of the first recorded cases of Palestinian venues destroyed or seized and converted to Israeli cultural sites soon after June 1967. Similarly, attempts to erase the Palestinian character of what is left of Palestinian ancestral land include: the elimination of Palestinian history in East Jerusalem schools, [107] the revocation of licences to Palestinian schools not adhering to Israeli curriculum policies [108] and the conversion or closure of sites representing Palestinian cultural, political and religious identity. [109]
Attacks on cultural objects of significance to eliminate all traces and expressions of Palestinian existence, and the incorporation of a revisionist view of history to assert (false) claims of sovereignty in the occupied Palestinian territory, demonstrate the occupier’s intention to permanently strip the land of its indigenous identity.
In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy. Rape, though still under-documented, played a role in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and after. Many families fled their homes, in part due to their concerns over their women being raped by Zionist forces. Indeed, it can be said that the conquest of land has gone hand in hand with sexual violence in the history of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Deep down, every Palestinian knows it’s not solely about the “occupation.”
Every day, Palestinians face the threat of being arrested and imprisoned indefinitely, killed or displaced from our land. Our experience tells us that our existence is a threat to Israel.
The only “solution” to this danger is to get rid of us.
During June, one of the young men from our community of al-Tuwani raised a Palestinian flag from a tree in our village. Days later, Israeli military forces launched a violent raid to take the flag down.
Israeli soldiers pointed their guns at me, my friends and my family members. Effectively granted immunity from prosecution by their state, they pointed death in our faces.
It can feel like only luck separates the living from the dead in those moments. After all, the sole purpose of the Israeli soldier is to eliminate the native people – by taking our freedom or our lives, through expulsion or forced integration into the settler-colonial system.
Canada is an example of British colonial settlerism that compares readily to the colonial settlerism in Palestine. The essay “Knowing and Not Knowing – Canada, Indigenous Peoples, Israel and Palestine” examines Canadian history of racism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide and its – mostly – similarities with Israel-Palestine. Contemporary events still uphold our “enacted values” which are “for the most part those of the corporate and security-state interests that have guided public policy.” Violence and dispossession are still elements of current Canadian society against its indigenous people.
