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.”
Israel’s weaponisation of water for the benefit of settlers and de facto annexation can be regarded as a long-standing practice of settler colonialism. But how can one explain Israel’s water policies in the Gaza Strip – one of the most densely populated places on earth – where Israel evacuated its 21 settlements in 2005? Since then, Gazans have no longer experienced Israel’s military occupation as the steady takeover of land. Instead, they have confronted an existential threat to their health and lives that Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, among others, has called “incremental genocide”. Some Israeli human rights lawyers firmly reject this application of the term. But water is life, and the impact of Israel’s nearly 16-year-long blockade and five major military offensives on the severely limited clean water supply available for a rapidly growing population, half of them children, has raised questions about whether the Gaza Strip remains a “livable place” (to use the UN’s phrase)… Rather than pressuring Israel as the occupier to respect the human rights of Palestinians including the right to water, the international community has thrown money and technical expertise at a problem which calls for a political solution. In so doing, it is attempting to forestall calamity while acquiescing in Israel’s violations of international law.
… Genocide, wrote Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term, “refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight”. If that blight is to be averted in the Gaza Strip, the international community must immediately end its complicity in the collective punishment of the Palestinian people and pressure Israel to lift its blockade.
“For them, our very existence intimidates them and our artwork humanizes us- Palestinians- and this does not serve their purposes. They want us to be portrayed as we are in the media- terrorists, people throwing rocks- this is the picture that they have in mind, and that’s why they didn’t like this piece of artwork. And I also think it comes as part of the genocide that Israel is committing against Palestinians, which comes at all levels. So we have the daily killings, demolitions, evictions, land theft, burning of trees, and all of that. And then we have a different level which is a cultural genocide, where they steal our food and they attack our art. They don’t want the word ‘Palestinian’ to be heard in the western world.”
I hesitated to use, for all these dark chapters, the term ‘genocide’. I used it only once when, describing the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip since 2006, I framed it as an incremental genocide. The recent sprees of killing, since the beginning of this year and the benefit of yet another commemorative moment of recollection, probably justify expanding the term beyond Israel’s atrocious assaults and siege on the Gaza Strip.
Connecting the dots of killings between a period of a few months when ‘only’ a small number of people are being shot daily and massacres that spread over more than 70 years is something that is not easily accepted as proof of genocidal policies.
And yet, that history is the genealogy of genocide according to article 2 of the United Nation’s “convention of the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide”, which stipulates that the following acts, enlisted below, are genocide if they were done “with the intent to destroy, a whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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.
