This morning I did something I seldom do, I looked at the Twitter newsfeed.
Normally I take the approach of something that I’m not sure is an American urban legend, or genuinely something kids do over there. The infamous bag of dog poo on the front porch, set it on fire then ring the doorbell so the occupier will answer and seeing the flaming bag stamp it out.
In doing so they obviously disrupt the contents of the bag, quite forcefully, distributing it’s contents to the surprise, and annoyance, of said stamper.
So that’s normally what I do. Deposit a tweet on that platform, then duck for cover. In the scenario above the kid doesn’t hang around afterwards to see what the resident made of their prank.
I’m the same with Twitter. Get in, do what you’ve got to do, then get the heck out of there and enjoy the carnage from a distance.
But this morning I clicked on the Home button and the first tweet that came up in my feed was about an article in The Daily Blog:
Surely not?
I know our government hasn’t exactly been outspoken in condemning the massacre of Palestinians that has been taking place since last October — but we’re not going to take part in training exercises with them, are we? Surely not.
A massacre — not a rescue
A couple of days ago I was thinking about the situation in Gaza, and the recent so-called rescue of hostages that is being celebrated.
Look, I get it that every life is precious, that to the families of those hostages all that matters is getting them back alive. But four hostages freed and 274 Palestinians killed in the process — that isn’t a rescue — that’s a massacre.
Another one.
It reminds me of the “rescues” of the 1970s where they got the bad guys, but all the good guys ended up dead as well. According to some sources, and there are no really reliable sources here, the rescue also resulted in the deaths of three hostages.
While looking at reports on this training exercise, one statistic jumped out at me:
Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza in eight months than were dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the full six years of the Second World War. Israel is dropping these bombs on one of the most densely populated communities in the world.
It’s beyond comprehension. Think of how the Blitz in London is seared into our consciousness as being a terrible time — and how much worse this is.
Firestorm of destruction
As for Dresden, what a beautiful city. I remember when Fi and I were there back in 2001, arriving at the train station, walking along the river. Such a fabulous funky place. Going to museums — there was an incredible exhibition on Papua New Guinea when we were there, it seemed so incongruous to be on the other side of the world looking at exhibits of a Pacific people.
Most of all though I remember the rebuilt cathedral and the historical information about the bombing of that city at the end of the war. A firestorm of utter destruction. Painstakingly rebuilt, over decades, to its former beauty. Although you can still see the scars.
The ruins of Dresden following the Allied bombing in February 1945 . . . about 25,000 people were killed. Image: www.military-history.org
Nobody will be rebuilding Gaza into a beautiful place when this is done.
The best case for the Palestinians at this point would be some sort of peacekeeping force on the ground and then decades of rebuilding. Everything. Schools, hospitals, their entire infrastructure has been destroyed — in scenes that we associate with the most destructive war in human history.
And we’re going to take part in training exercises with the people who are causing all of that destruction, who are massacring tens of thousands of civilians as if their lives don’t matter. Surely not.
It is outrageous in the extreme that the NZ Defence Force will train with the Israeli Defence Force on June 26th as part of the US-led (RIMPAC) naval drills!
Our military’s honour and mana is stained by rubbing shoulders with an Army that is currently accused of genocide and conducting a real time ethnic cleansing war crime.
It’s like playing paintball with the Russian Army while they are invading the Ukraine.
RIMPAC, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, is held in Hawai’i every second year. The name indicates a focus on the Pacific Rim, although many countries attend.
In 2024 there will be ships and personnel attending from 29 countries. The usual suspects you’d expect in the region — like the US, the Aussies, Canada, and some of our Pacific neighbours. But also countries from further abroad like France and Germany. As well of course as the Royal NZ Navy and the Israeli Navy.
Which is pretty weird. I know Israel have to pretend they’re in Europe for things like sporting competitions or Eurovision, with their neighbours unwilling to include them. But what on earth does Israel have to do with the Pacific Rim?
Needless to say those who oppose events in Gaza are not overly excited about us working together with the military force that’s doing almost all of the killing.
“We are calling on our government to withdraw from the exercise because of Israel’s ongoing industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza”, said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair, John Minto.
“Why would we want to join with a lawless, rogue state which has demonstrated the complete suite of war crimes over the past eight months?”
Whatever you might think of John Minto, he has a point.
Trade and travel embargo
Personally I think we, and others, should be undertaking a complete trade and travel embargo with Israel until the killing stops. The least we can do is not rub shoulders with them as allies. That’s pretty repugnant. I can’t imagine many young Kiwis signed up to serve their country like that.
The PSNA press release said, “Taking part in a military event alongside Israel will leave an indelible stain on this country. It will be a powerful symbol of New Zealand complicity with Israeli war crimes. It’s not on!”
Aotearoa is not the only country in which such participation is being questioned. In Malaysia, for example, a group of NGOs are urging the government there to withdraw:
“On May 24, the ICJ explicitly called for a halt in Israel’s Rafah onslaught. The Israeli government and opposition leaders, in line with the behaviour of a rogue lawless state, have scornfully dismissed the ICJ ruling,” it said.
“The world should stop treating it like a normal, law-abiding state if it wants Israeli criminality in Gaza and the West Bank to stop.
“We reiterate our call on the Malaysian government to immediately withdraw from Rimpac 2024 to drive home that message,” it said.
What do you think about our country taking part in this event, alongside Israel Military Forces, at this time?
Complicit as allies
To me it feels that in doing so we are in a small way complicit. By coming together as allies, in our region of the world, we’re condoning their actions with our own.
Valerie Morse of Peace Action Wellington had the following to say about New Zealand’s involvement in the military exercises:
“The depth and breadth of suffering in Palestine is beyond imagination. The brutality of the Israeli military knows no boundaries. This is who [Prime Minister] Christopher Luxon and Defence Minister Judith Collins have signed the NZ military up to train alongside.
“New Zealand must immediately halt its participation in RIMPAC. The HMNZS Aotearoa must be re-routed back home to Taranaki.
“This is not the first time that Israel has been a participant in RIMPAC so it would not have been a surprise to the NZ government. It would have been quite easy to take the decision to stay out of RIMPAC given what is happening in Palestine. That Luxon and Collins have not done so shows that they lack even a basic moral compass.”
The world desperately needs strong moral leadership at this time, it needs countries to take a stand against Israel and speak up for what is right.
There’s only so much that a small country like ours can do, but we can hold our heads high and refuse to have anything to do with Israel until they stop the killing.
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The UN food program has been forced to pause aid shipments through the U.S. military’s “humanitarian aid” pier in Gaza after its warehouses came under attack amid Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Nuseirat on Saturday, the agency announced as it warned that famine is looming in Gaza. UN World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Cindy McCain said on Sunday in a CBS interview that “two of our…
Israeli forces killed at least 274 Palestinians and injured 698 in a horrific surprise raid of Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday — one of the most deadly single assaults by Israel so far amid its genocide in Gaza. The Palestinian health ministry reports that Israeli troops killed 64 children and wounded 153 children during their daytime raid of the crowded civilian neighborhood…
Israel’s weekend attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp that freed four Israeli hostages and killed at least 274 Palestinians and wounded nearly 700 was reportedly supported by the Biden administration, which provided intelligence to Israel ahead of the raid. “There’s no question that what unfolded in that operation was a massacre,” says Palestinian American political analyst Omar Baddar.
Damage in Nuseirat refugee camp following an Israeli attack on 8 June 2024 (Omar AshtawyAPA images)
While Israelis celebrated the release of four captives secured by the military in Gaza on Saturday, Palestinians mourned hundreds of people killed during the daytime operation.
Palestinian officials said that more than 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 injured in central Gaza on Saturday, including in the area where the Israeli military says it rescued the four captives from two separate apartments blocks in a residential area of Nuseirat refugee camp.
The fresh horror in Nuseirat comes two days after Israel bombed a UN school in the refugee camp where thousands of displaced people were sheltering, killing at least 33.
As of 5 June, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza had recorded more than 36,500 fatalities and 83,000 injuries since 7 October.
The actual fatality count is likely much higher, with thousands of people missing under the rubble. An unknown number of Palestinians in Gaza have died in a secondary wave of mortality as Israel has destroyed water and sanitation facilities in the territory, giving rise to diseases, all while engineering a famine and destroying the healthcare system.
In Nuseirat refugee camp, “Gazan paramedics and residents said the assault killed scores of people and left mangled bodies of men, women and children strewn around a marketplace and a mosque,” Reuters reported on Saturday.
Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some captives were killed during the operation. Israel has not reported any fatalities among the captives during the raid.
“By committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation,” Abu Obeida said.
“This operation will constitute a major danger to the enemy’s prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions and their lives,” he added.
Perfidy
Footage from the raid indicated that Israeli forces infiltrated Nuseirat refugee camp disguised in civilian trucks:
Israeli occupation forces infiltrated the Nuseirat refugee camp today in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/4jcabCKDHu
— ??? ?????? Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) June 8, 2024
A wounded eyewitness described walking in the street and seeing what he thought was a truck carrying humanitarian aid before armed forces emerged from the vehicle and shot him in the chest and arm:
"They were in a truck carrying clothes and cooking pans"
A wounded Palestinian eyewitness describes the Israeli forces who snuck into Al-Nuseirat refugee camp today in a humanitarian aid truck coming from the American pier. pic.twitter.com/h3bkEBA2Qx
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of hiding among civilians to justify its targeting and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, in Gaza, while apparently using trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to carry out an operation that killed scores of civilians. Feigning civilian or non-combatant status, as Israeli forces appear to have done, and hardly for the first time, may constitute the war crime of perfidy under international humanitarian law.
#Israeli hostages held in #Gaza by Palestinian armed groups are held ultra vires and should all be released immediately. Today's rescue operation raises concerns with numerous civilians injured and killed, and – according to unconfirmed media reports – perfidious use of… pic.twitter.com/9q3MZcTOmz
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
The plan for the US pier on the Gaza shoreline was revealed in a surprise announcement by President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address in early March and was framed as an effort to increase humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, despite its limited capacity in comparison to the already established land crossings.
The pier took its first delivery on 17 May and only functioned at partial capacity, on and off, for a few days before a storm damaged the modular pier around a week later.
The controversial pier is part of a corridor that the Israeli military has cut through the center of the Gaza Strip, south of Gaza City, effectively splitting northern and southern Gaza and allowing Israeli forces to more easily carry out raids in the center of the Gaza Strip.
The US Department of Defense said on Friday that repairs to the pier had been completed with the assistance of the Israeli military, raising questions whether the Nuseirat operation was delayed until after the pier was rebuilt.
American role
Barak Ravid, the Axios writer who is frequently fed information by Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus, reported that Nuseirat operation “was supposed to happen a few weeks ago but was canceled for operational reasons,” citing unnamed Israeli officials.
Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that hundreds of soldiers were involved in the Nuseirat operation and a police officer was critically wounded during the raid; he was later reported to have died from his injuries.
Axios revealed that “the US hostage cell in Israel supported the effort to rescue the four hostages,” citing an unnamed US official.
Was the US “humanitarian” pier used as a launching point for the Al-Nuseirat massacre (which could not happen without US collaboration)? And what role did US forces play on the ground (besides arming and providing diplomatic cover for the IOF)? #complicityhttps://t.co/KGKij1QoEv
The White House released a statement from national security advisor Jake Sullivan in which he said that Washington “is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens.”
“This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means,” Sullivan added.
Sullivan’s statement on the “successful operation” commends “the work of the Israeli security services that conducted this daring operation” and makes no mention of the scores of Palestinians killed.
The White House statement was only one of many from Western leaders celebrating the rescue of the four Israeli captives without any mention of the Palestinians killed in the process.
Hamas condemned what it called a “horrific massacre against innocent civilians” in Nuseirat camp and other locations in central Gaza and the reported American involvement.
In a statement published on its Telegram channel, Hamas said that it “proves once again the complicity of the US administration” the complicity of the US in war crimes in Gaza.
“Doomsday” in central Gaza
Palestinians residing in the areas of central Gaza attacked on Saturday described “doomsday” scenes like those from a horror film, with quadcopters shooting at civilians in Deir al-Balah while Israel drops bombs from the sky.
Quadcopters get very low in the sky and shoot at civilians around people in Deir al-Balah.
Video recorded in Nuseirat refugee camp shows Israeli-fired missiles striking a residential area.
One graphic video shows around a dozen dead and injured people lying on a street in Nuseirat refugee camp, and other videos show people arriving with severe injuries to overcrowded medical facilities.
Yet another graphic video shows a man holding a young boy with a severe head wound standing among shrouded corpses outside a hospital. When the child suddenly moves, the surprised man runs with the boy in his arms towards the hospital entrance.
Videos and photos show that another boy was killed with his last meal still in his mouth and a man was shot dead while cooking on a stove.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the few still functioning in Gaza, was overwhelmed with casualties from Nuseirat and was being run by a sole generator on Saturday while Israeli bombing further threatened its ability to provide urgently needed medical care.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said that it was transporting injured people from hospitals in central Gaza to a field hospital due to the threat of Israeli bombing:
Palestine Red Crescent ambulance teams are transporting all the injured in the central Gaza Strip to the International Medical Corps field hospital after the area around Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was threatened with bombing. ?Filmed by PRCS volunteer: Mohammed Suleiman. pic.twitter.com/stThICSilW
The four rescued captives – Noa Argamani, 25, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40 – were all captured at the Supernova music festival during Hamas’ raid on 7 October last year.
During her captivity, Hamas released two videos showing signs of life from Argamani. The most recent video, published on 31 May, features Argamani’s voice imploring Israelis to put pressure on Netanyahu’s war cabinet, warning that “time is running out.”
The four former captives “were taken to hospital for medical checks and were in good health,” Reuters reported, citing the Israeli military.
This is in stark contrast to Palestinians from Gaza who have been arbitrarily detained by Israel in recent months and released with newly amputated limbs removed without anesthesia and their bodies bearing marks of torture.
Around 250 people were captured in Israel on 7 October and brought to Gaza. More than 100 were released by Hamas as part of a prisoner exchange deal in November.
Two Israeli-Argentinian men were rescued by Israeli forces in Rafah, southern Gaza, in February.
Some 75 Palestinians were killed during that operation as Israel pounded Rafah, where people displaced from other areas of Gaza had sought shelter, in order to create a diversion from the military raid.
A captured Israeli soldier was reportedly rescued by the military in late October.
With the rescue of the four captives on Saturday, a total of seven Israelis and foreign nationals held in Gaza since 7 October have been freed by the Israeli military. Far more regained their freedom through an agreement negotiated with Hamas.
Many families of the captives who remain in Gaza are urgently pressing the Israeli government to secure another exchange deal.
Of the 116 captives who are believed to remain in Gaza, Israeli authorities have declared around a third of them dead, without acknowledging that the most likely cause of death is Israeli bombing.
Analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa said that the lives of the children killed in Nuseirat on Saturday could have been spared.
“Israel could [have agreed] to a permanent ceasefire and hostage exchange at any time” during the past eight months, Kenney-Shawa stated, “but dead Palestinians are their main objective.”
100+ Palestinians massacred to rescue 4 Israelis who would have been released without bloodshed months ago had Israel’s primary objective been anything other than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
I shudder to think what the “success” of this morning’s rescue operation will embolden
Some observers said that Saturday’s rescue operation would endanger the captives who remain in Gaza, since Netanyahu’s government has signaled that Israel will not engage in another prisoner exchange and will only secure the captives’ release by force.
“For Hamas, this approach means the captives are becoming a net loss: they have to allocate great resources to keep them but with no potential upside,” according to the Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi.
“They know by now, as [does] everybody else, that the purpose of Israel’s operation is to exterminate and ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza’s population” before doing the same to Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.
Biden’s “Israeli” proposal
The US State Department announced on Friday that Antony Bliken, Washington’s top diplomat, would return to the region in the coming days to push Israel and Hamas to accept a three-phase ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposal put forward by President Joe Biden last week.
The US has also circulated a draft resolution backing Biden’s proposal at the UN Security Council, where it has vetoed multiple resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Hamas has not agreed to the plan outlined by Biden, saying that it required clear guarantees that the deal would result in a complete end of the war in Gaza and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territory.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters that while the group welcomed “Biden’s ideas,” the draft resolution circulated at the Security Council “has no mention of ending the aggression or the withdrawal.”
Reuters paraphrased Abu Zuhri as saying that “Hamas was committed to its 5 May proposal which was based on an end to the fighting and an Israeli withdrawal, a swap deal and a lifting of the blockade of the enclave” – demands consistently maintained by the group throughout the past several months.
Meanwhile, Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz postponed the anticipated announcement of his resignation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet on Saturday.
Gantz had given Netanyahu a deadline of 8 June to deliver a “day-after” strategy for Gaza, where Netanyahu vows to press on until it achieves “total victory” – a goal criticized as “unidentified” (he may have meant to say “undefined”) by Biden during the announcement of his proposal last week.
In an interview published by Time magazine on Tuesday, Biden said there was “every reason for people” to draw the conclusion that Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza for his own aims.
• Jon Elmer contributed background reporting on the US pier.
Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives.
Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighbourhood of Gaza.
For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, observed of the massacre that was actively assisted by the US: “The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”
Apparently, Israel’s decades of belligerent military occupation of the Palestinian territories, its 17-year blockade of Gaza denying its population the essentials of life, its intermittent destruction of the enclave by “mowing the lawn”, and now its carrying out of what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide” have nothing to do with the “sheer hell” the people of Gaza are suffering.
Those trying to win our consent to mass murder and the planned starvation of the people of Gaza by arguing that Hamas is using Palestinians in Gaza as human shields are engaged in the worst kind of bad-faith argument.
Let’s put back the context they are so keen to obscure:
1. Israel has been besieging the enclave of Gaza for decades. The tiny strip of land’s population comprises mostly Palestinian refugees who were long ago ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel and confined to Gaza. Their numbers have grown hugely since, to more than 2.3 million, within tightly-delimited “borders” policed – and blockaded – by Israel. Gaza is, in a true sense of the term, a giant concentration camp.
2. Gaza doesn’t have woods, mountains, caves in which Hamas fighters can hide or in which they can conceal their captives. It is not Afghanistan or Russia.
3. Gaza is almost entirely built-up – or it was until Israel destroyed most of its buildings over the past eight months. Small areas are open agricultural land or scrubland Israel will not allow Palestinians to develop – much of that has now been destroyed too. Watching over this tiny space 24/7 are armed Israeli drones. Move outside a building and you are being surveilled. You become a potential target for an assassination by Israel.
4. Hamas has two non-suicidal options for hiding the captives it seized in Israel on October 7. Either in a building, or underground in its tunnels, which were built precisely so parts of Gaza would be out of view of a hostile Israeli military. They are the nearest Hamas has to military bases. (Let us note here another hypocrisy: Israel’s military bases are often embedded in civilian communities inside Israel. Its defence ministry’s headquarters, the Kirya, is in the middle of built-up Tel Aviv.)
5. Hiding the captives above ground is the obviously more humanitarian option, as is clear from the images of those freed at the weekend. Given many months of captivity, they are reported to be in reasonable health.
6. After Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians at the weekend in Nuseirat camp, Hamas will now take all the hostages underground. That will be far worse for them, and it will make no difference to Israel’s wanton destruction of the buildings above. The overwhelming majority of the 70% of Gaza’s housing stock destroyed by Israel did not contain Israeli captives or Hamas fighters. It was targeted nonetheless because Israel’s military rampage has never been about getting the hostages back, or even about defeating Hamas, an impossible goal. It is about eradicating Gaza.
7. If Israel was really serious about bringing the captives home, it would be negotiating their release, not inducing a famine through an aid blockade that is starving everyone in Gaza: Hamas, Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages alike. The real human shields are the Israeli captives, pawns being sacrificed by Israel as it pursues its bigger war aims.
8. The truth is that Israel is waging a genocidal war on the Palestinian population to drive them out of Gaza. It needs to manufacture pretexts to avoid reaching a ceasefire deal that would bring the hostages home and bring the bloodshed to an end. The “rescue” of the Israeli captives by killing huge numbers of Palestinians provides ideal conditions for making negotiations impossible. That was the real success.
9. The jubilation – of Israelis, and western politicians and media – at the carnage of Palestinians in place of a ceasefire to end the bloodshed is the real problem. By continuing to treat Palestinians as sub-human, all are enabling the genocide to continue.
Nobody has stopped the 75 years of massacres of Palestinians or countered the acceleration of the massacres after Israel took advantage of a temporary high ground given by the October 7 attack. With the Palestinians awaiting the future from the present massacre in a deliberately destroyed Gaza, the New York Times solicited political pundits’ opinions of the future of Gaza. The pundits offered a variety of scenarios.
Israel should allow Palestinians to create a legitimate political leadership — which can take charge in the West Bank and Gaza — and empower Palestinians who pursue their freedom in ethical ways.
Israeli forces must withdraw all the way to the border of Gaza. As that campaign now continues, Israel, the United States and other allies in parallel must agree on the deployment of an international force drawn from NATO countries, with their deployment agreed on by Israel and the United States and operating under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council.
The most promising course of action, and one that has not been widely discussed, is a temporary international trusteeship under a U.N. Security Council mandate.
We envision a political framework of two states in a confederated association. The core concepts can be outlined as follows: two sovereign states, each with its own government but with joint mechanisms and institutions for critical shared concerns.
The future of Gaza — like that of the West Bank — is for Palestinians to decide. That is the essence of self-determination. The international community must not continue to place Israel first, as has been done for decades. It cannot try to seek convenient leaders as partners or try to enter yet another long-term arrangement.
All of the proposals contain wish fulfillment and thoughts that find acceptance in much of the peace-loving world. Each contains doubts of being accepted.
(1) There is no transition from a war in Gaza to a rehabilitation of Gaza. There never was a war in Gaza. Israel used the October 7 attack as an excuse to accelerate its ongoing destruction of the Palestinian community.
(2) The killing machine that destroyed housing, government, agriculture, medical facilities, educational institutions, cultural institutions, food distribution, transportation, entire families, and left trauma in a majority of the population has been rightfully termed genocide. Will those carrying out genocide for 75 years suddenly halt the aggression and wish everyone well? Won’t the genocide continue?
(3) The proposals are designed to separate the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not provide sufficient living space and resources for the Palestinians and do not prevent additional Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land.
(4) Israel has never listened to suggestions from others and always done what it wants, no matter the crime and no matter the reactions from the United Nations, United States, and any government. Why generate proposals for a “post-war” Gaza? For whom?
(5) The Israeli government may seem in disarray with conflicting “good guy” and “bad guy” approaches. Don’t be fooled; the Israeli government and its Jewish citizens agree on incorporating all of the West Bank and Gaza into the stolen land and cleansing the entire area of Palestinians, which includes genocide. They differ in how to accomplish their purposes and that discussion goes on behind the scenes. The contradictory public disclosures are only window dressing to give hope to the helpless.
(6) The same type of fraudulent “made for public” disputes between Israeli and US governments appear in the media. The US pretends to be able to keep Israel in check and Israel pretends to listen. If Israel agrees with a US suggestion, it is because Israel has a plan and they want to make it seem that the US offered it; making their “ally” look good.
An article started with, “What can we do for the Palestinians after the genocide is over?” Not wanting to embarrass a website, its name will not be disclosed. Do people expect Israel to stop its genocide of the Palestinians? This innocence recalls the innocents of those who believed in the 2-state solution and some still do. From the day a Zionist set foot on Ottoman Palestine and, as outlined in their proposal at the 1919 Paris peace conference, the Zionists claimed all of Palestine and other territory.
The Zionists show they will never stop adding more Palestinian lands to the already conquered and stolen lands and they test the atmosphere with murmurs of the word “annexation.” All of the two-state proposals have had confusions and contradictions that make acceptance by both sides to be impossible. What was the point of suggesting the trading of stolen land in Israel for allowing settlers to remain on stolen land in the West Bank? If Israel had available land for settlers, why send them to the West Bank and then give up land in Israel so the settlers could remain in the West Bank? Why didn’t they remain in Israel and settle there?
The principle reason the two-state solution never had legs is because no Israeli Prime Minister wanted to go down in history as being the leader who prevented the Zionists from achieving their agenda. Knowing that and realizing the two-state solution is dead, why are there proposals for federated states, one-state, and a confederation, all of which have less probability of being accepted by Israel than the separated two states, which had zero probability.
The reality is that the genocide persists and how to stop it is the primary issue. One scenario has Israel claiming rehabilitation of their damaged lands as first priority, for which they will assert the Gazans have responsibility, and preceding with installation of additional security, so that the remains of the massive Hamas army never again enters a few kilometers into Israel. Gazans will be herded into a smaller enclave, which will be completely surrounded by Israeli troops — probably no access to sea, no access to Egypt, and completely separated from touching Israel. Israeli military and administrative families will build communities on Gazan lands.
Israel will control all entrances and exits to and from Gaza. Agriculture and fishing will be limited, with food importation and distribution operated by Israel authorities. Rebuilding of all demolished civic, educational, religious, medical, and cultural will be delayed and slow in forming. Look for Gazans to be living in tents for a long time. Israel’s ultra-orthodox extremists are still intent on making their Israel “Arab free,” and Gaza may provide a solution for housing some of the Arab populations from Jaffa, Beersheba, Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, and Jerusalem.
Israeli troops are fortifying a strategic corridor that carves Gaza in two, building bases, taking over civilian structures and razing homes, according to satellite imagery and other visual evidence — an effort that military analysts and Israeli experts say is part of a large-scale project to reshape the Strip and entrench the Israeli military presence there.
This exposition on the situation in Gaza reflects an interpretation of the Zionist mind. However, the facts don’t add up to accomplishing a genocide that reduces Palestinian population to nil; demographic analysis shows that type of genocide is implausible. Unless mass extermination methods are used, diminishing a population proceeds by applying simple arithmetic ─ maintain the death and departure rate about 3-4 percent higher than the birth rate. If this is done, within twenty years, Gaza’s population will be halved. In forty years, Gaza will have less than three hundred thousand Palestinian inhabitants and hundreds of thousands of Israelis, who may not be all Jews. “If this is done” does not translate into, “This can be done.”
Statistics indicate that the Palestinians in Gaza are the most resilient, admirable, and hardy people in the world. Despite decades of oppression, induced traumas, and physical and psychological wounds, their death rate is among the lowest and their birth rate is among the highest in the universe. They know how to handle adversity and take care of themselves and one another. The statistics tell the story.
A surprising statistic; the Palestinians may have the highest growth rate in the world. Can Israel’s oppressive tactics reduce the Palestinian birth rate and increase the mortality rate sufficiently to cause a demographic genocide? By withholding necessary medical assistance the Palestinian birth rate might be reduced to 15/1000 population and the infant mortality rate increased to 24/1000 live births.
Lithuania, at 15.17/1000 population, has the highest mortality rate on the planet. Why does Lithuania have the highest death rate?
Lithuania has the highest death rate in the world mainly because of the high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and cancer. These diseases are linked to high smoking rates, unhealthy diet, and lack of physical activity. Other factors that contribute to the high death rate are alcoholism, depression, and suicide, which are influenced by the climatic, economic, and social conditions in the country.
The Palestinians don’t have the same conditions that caused an accelerated death rate in Lithuania, especially a lack of physical activity. They spend the entire day in back breaking work and moving around just to survive. Even if their birth rate is reduced to 1.5 percent and a higher infant mortality rate reduces the living births to 1.46 percent, and the mortality rate is multiplied by six, which will give them the highest death rate in the world, the Palestinian growth rate will be only a slightly negative 0.37 percent annually. At that rate, it will take 195 years to halve the present Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. They will be around for a long time.
What are the Zionist Jews attempting to accomplish with their deadly policies, a genocide that destroys lives, institutions, housing, government, agriculture, medical facilities, educational institutions, cultural institutions, food distribution, transportation, and entire families and never breaks the will of the Palestinians and does not reduce their numbers? Either the Israeli Jews cannot live without making the Palestinians suffer, which may be a way of translating their disturbed psyche into a mission that exalts their existence, or they have a plan, a final solution. The careless world will have to be careful. Spanish have a good expression for being careful, “ojo,” or “eye,” and pointing to an eye when saying it.
Conclusions
The statistics and mental ramblings lead to decisive conclusions.
(1) The genocide of the Palestinians is not told in numbers.
This genocide does not take life; it takes lives, preventing generations of Palestinians from satisfying their lives.
Causing physical deprivation, suffering from constant aggression, and mental anguish in others can be more disturbing than demographic genocide.
(2) The world portrays events and players upside down. Defending Hamas is depicted as being attached to terrorism and anti-Semitism. The facts indicate otherwise.
In finally responding to several unanswered Israeli provocations, Hamas can be blamed for the few verified atrocities committed during the October 7 attack, but these were much less than the hundreds of atrocities committed against the Palestinians and Hamas’ followers in the West Bank and Gaza. The reply to atrocities committed by US troops is usually, “During battles, atrocities often happen.” Why single out Hamas for what others are also guilty and listen to the constant harping of the October 7 attack as if it was worse and more significant than Hiroshima, September 11, and Pearl Harbor?
Hamas is portrayed as a corrupt, violent, terrorist, and manipulative organization that cannot administer and takes advantage of an innocent Gazan population. Reality shows the opposite. Despite constant violent attacks from Israel, Hamas has been able to sustain the morale of the Gazans, motivate them, and give them hope and life. Faced with inadequate food production, no airport or seaports, a lack of natural resources, interrupted energy, a barrier to financial markets, and limited access to the outside world, Hamas has created a society with educated, cultured, healthy, energetic, and endurable people. These are people with the highest growth rate in the world ─ they have the will to live and produce. With assistance from UNRWA, Hamas has built hospitals, schools, colleges, recreational facilities, sports arenas, and culture centers. Gazans are well housed (were well housed) with entire extended families inhabiting an apartment building. The organization has been remarkable, just the opposite from what propaganda wants us to believe.
The Israeli Jews are portrayed as compassionate and peace loving victims of terror. Reality shows a corrupt government that incites settler violence, engages in innumerable wars, terrorizes Palestinians, and deceives the world into accepting their destruction of the Palestinian people, just the opposite from what propaganda wants us to believe.
The “no holds” barred use of the anti-Semitism label to divert the public from learning the truth of the Zionist criminal actions has been clearly exposed during the last months. Seeing the success of the fraudulent anti-Semitism in gathering US domestic and government support, for Israel and intimidating college officials, leads to wondering if anti-Semitism is only a construct and was always a weapon used by the Zionists to shield the truth of irresponsible actions? Should we reevaluate the promoted anti-Semitic charges of the Zionist past?
For 75 years, the Israeli Jews have been oppressing Palestinians as their national sport. They wanted the land and have taken the land. They want to cleanse the land of Palestinians and have not been able to achieve that objective and there is no indication of how they can achieve it. Will Israel keep the Palestinians in captivity for eternity? Looks that way, unless the Israeli Jews, who can live well anywhere, decide to leave or decide, “Maybe we can live together with the Palestinians in a single state. Regard how obedient the Israeli Palestinian population have been.” Or, will Israel remain guided by its extremists who recite,
Are these words from human beings? They are capable of anything. “Ojo” is the word of the day.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now say they oppose Israel’s onslaught on Rafah, want a ceasefire in Gaza and that they are no longer offering permits for new arms shipments to Israel. But this rhetorical shift doesn’t reflect a commitment to peace and justice for Palestinians. If the Trudeau government truly believed in international law and fair treatment of Palestinians, here’s 45 easy moves Ottawa could make to stop enabling Israel’s holocaust in Gaza:
Use the word “slaughter”, “crime”, “massacre”, “butchery”, “carnage”, “ecocide”, “genocide” or “holocaust” to describe Israel’s operations in Gaza.
Announce that Ottawa will enforce its obligations as party to the International Criminal Court by arresting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yaov Gallant if a warrant is issued.
Task the Department of Justice and RCMP Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Program to investigate Canadians currently fighting in the Israeli military. Considering the wanton destruction in Gaza, it’s hard to imagine that someone fighting there hasn’t committed war crimes.
Issue a notice to exporters declarating that arm permits for Israel are paused.
Follow the recent recommendation of UN experts and over 140 countries — including Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and Norway recently — recognizing Palestine.
Add Israel to the list of countries investigated in the ongoing Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.
Stop providing millions of dollars in grants to Canada’s Jewish federations, which have formal ties to the para-statal Jewish Agency for Israel and sponsor the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
Direct the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to investigate registered Canadian charities that may be contravening CRA regulations by supporting illegal West Bank settlements.
Announce that Canada won’t buy any arms “field tested” on Palestinians.
Pause all direct arm sales to Israel irrespective if the permits were requested before January.
Denounce Israel’s killing of 140 journalists over the past eight months.
Restrict Canadian firms that sell components or full weapons systems to the US from subsequently being sent on to the Israeli military.
Announce that the Israeli military is no longer welcome to train in Cold Lake Alberta or elsewhere in Canada.
Criticize any US vetoing of UN Security Council resolutions defending Palestians.
Denounce Israel’s poisoning of the air and water in Gaza.
End the Department of National Defence’s Defence Research and Development Canada financing and collaboration with Israeli partners and initiatives.
Direct the CRA to investigate registered charities contravening the CRA rule against “supporting the armed forces of another country” by assisting Israel’s military.
Join Spain, Ireland, Mexico, Chile, Egypt, Turkey and other countries that have announced that they will participate in South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel’s genocide.
End the military’s Operation Proteus training and assistance initiative of the Palestinian force overseeing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Pause Canadian military intelligence sharing with Israel.
Ask the CRA to conduct enhanced reviews of all foreign income for property or businesses owned in Israel and its occupied territories.
Announce a finance committee hearing into taxpayers subsidizing over a quarter billion dollars a year in donations to Israel. Is it right for all Canadians to pay a share of some individuals’ donations to a country with a GDP equal to Canada’s?
Bar Israeli military suppliers from Canadian military testing exercises.
Impose sanctions on Israel’s settlement economy through Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act, particularly on individuals and entities involved in Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
Instruct the Canadian Border Services Agency to deny entry to any foreign national owning property in an illegal Israeli settlement or outpost.
Direct the CRA to investigate registered Canadian charities that may be contravening existing CRA regulations by supporting explicitly racist Israeli organizations.
Mention Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’tselem conclusion that Israel has long committed the crime of apartheid.
Remove the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine from Canada’s list of terrorist entities.
Denounce Israel’s destruction of nearly half of Gaza’s agricultural land and tree crops.
Remove from the terrorist list the Canadian-based International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy, which was listed because it supported orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official (Hamas controlled) channels.
Launch a review of Canada’s criminalization of Palestinian political life, particularly why over 10 percent of Canada’s terrorism list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population.
Denounce Israel’s killing of 190 UN workers over the past eight months.
Apologize to Palestinians for Canada’s sizeable contribution to the unjust UN Partition Plan, which called for the division of Palestine into ethnically segregated states and gave most of the land to the newly arrived minority. As Global Affairs officials warned privately in 1947, the Canadian-shaped roadmap would lead to decades of conflict.
Rescind adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is designed to undermine free speech and legitimate expressions of opposition to Israeli colonial violence.
Apologize for supporting the colonial Balfour Declaration and sending Canadians to help the British conquer Palestine.
Allow the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to accurately label wines produced in the occupied West Bank.
Eliminate the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, which was created to deflect criticism from Israeli apartheid and is acting as a tool to promote genocide.
Support all UN resolutions backed by most nations that uphold Palestinian rights.
Most of the above demands are not radical. They aren’t, for instance, as bold as Türkiye’s recent ban on trade with Israel, Colombia cutting off coal exports or the Maldives blocking Israeli passport holders from entering their country. In many cases it’s simply a matter of upholding Canadian and international law.
With likely findings of war crimes and genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel; and arrest warrants against two members of the Israeli war cabinet by the International Criminal Court (ICC), it may be time to consider the possible liabilities of the state and individual parties that have aided and abetted Israel in its war on Gaza. What are the governing laws? How have the international legal institutions addressed complicity in other cases of genocide? Could the complicity provisions apply to the United States and its leaders for assisting Israel in a war on Gaza that has cost so many thousands of civilian lives?
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as including the killing (“with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”) members of a “national, ethnical…or religious group.” The crime includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The ICJ’s interim judgment of last January in South Africa’s case against Israel held that the claim of genocide in Gaza was “plausible.” While the genocide law rests on “intent,” complicity in genocide has no such requirement. Article IV of the Genocide Convention provides that “persons committing genocide’ (or complicity in genocide) shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”
The ICC prosecutor is now seeking arrest warrants for two members of the Israel war cabinet who have allegedly committed war crimes in the Gaza war. Both the ICC and the ICJ make complicity in genocide a crime under international law. The ICC has jurisdiction over individuals, while the ICJ can accept cases against both individuals and states.
U.S. law also condemns genocide. In U.S. Code Section 1091 (“Basic Offense”) there is language similar to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Although there is no reference to “complicity,” the law contains a section entitled “Incitement Offence.” It provides that “whoever directly and publicly incites another” to commit a genocide offense “shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
The Genocide Convention, Article V requires the Contracting Parties to “provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide.” Article VIII allows “Any contracting party” to “call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action” against states under the UN Charter “as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide….”
How has the issue of complicity been dealt with in other genocide cases? The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted many individuals for complicity in the 1994 genocide, including government officials and military officers. Following the Bosnian genocide of 1992-1995, a number of senior political and military leaders were convicted of complicity in genocide. The ICJ held Serbia responsible for failure to prevent the Bosnian genocide. The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 resulted in the conviction of senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Individuals convicted of complicity in genocide or related cases have included top leaders. For example, former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not specifically genocide. Genocide requires proof of a specific discriminatory intent, while crimes against humanity require only proof of a general intent to attack a civilian population.
In the ICJ case of The Gambia v. Myanmar,a state-to-state claim, the Court dismissed all of Myanmar’s defenses, allowing the case to proceed to the merits stage. The question now is whether Myanmar violated the Genocide Convention in its treatment of the Rohingya people. While the case is still ongoing, the Court has reaffirmed the principle that all states have a common interest in the prevention and punishment of genocide and that any state can bring a case against another state for alleged violations of the Genocide Convention.
In March 2024, Nicaragua instituted ICJ proceedings for provisional measures against Germany for complicity in genocide through its arms sales to Israel for its war in Gaza. A month later the Court ruled against Nicaragua, finding that the legal conditions for such measures were not met. Nevertheless, the case shows the state parties that are not directly affected by the alleged harm can institute cases before the Court. The ability of such parties to stand before the Court is based on their right to act in the common interest.
In the United States, President Biden and other administration officials are named in an ongoing domestic lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights for their alleged complicity in the Israeli-led genocide in Gaza. A federal district court in California dismissed the suit on technical grounds but did not rule on the merits. The case is now being appealed to a federal court of appeals. As Dr. William A. Schabas, a leading scholar of human rights law pointed out, U.S. complicity in the war on Gaza “has many parallels” with the Serbian government’s complicity in the Srebrenica massacre.
In the days and months following the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden (in close collaboration with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin) pledged ongoing arms aid for Israel’s war effort. The IDF has used the regular provision of U.S. bombs and missiles to level buildings and kill Palestinian civilians (mostly women and children). Although Biden has often called for more humanitarian aid and urged Israel to reduce the intensity of its attacks on population centers, he has continued to supply Israel with lethal weapons.
When the time comes for accountability, Biden, Blinken and Austin could find themselves charged with complicity to genocide under the ICC, the ICJ and/or U.S. federal jurisdiction.
Today, activists from around the country are mobilizing in Washington, D.C. to surround the White House to demand an end to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and President Joe Biden’s support for it. Palestinians are paying an incalculable price for U.S. policy. But there is a set of costs of a different nature that the U.S. is incurring by supporting the genocide — and a strategy aimed at raising those…
Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.
Here’s what happened:
1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.
3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.
5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”
7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).
If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.
University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.
The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.
Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.
Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.
In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.
There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.
We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.
For some time, President Joe Biden has claimed that there are limits to US support for Israel, that he cares about the loss of Palestinian life and that certain Israeli conduct (e.g., an invasion of Rafah, an Israeli-designated “safe zone”) would result in the loss of US backing. The events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.
The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day. A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration. Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents. As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving. What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.
One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.” Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.
Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.
And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction. In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children. As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school. After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children. In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault. No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.
If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily. For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.
As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.” Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”
Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’” And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.
All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people. And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it. For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people. And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror. In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.
The history of the Holocaust was an important part of my childhood in Holland. One of my best friends was a Jewish-Dutch boy who lived in the house behind mine. I knew that I couldn’t play with him on Saturdays, because he had to go to Hebrew school. I also remember that he had certificates on his bedroom wall indicating how many trees he had funded in Israel. A few years later, when I studied the Holocaust in school and read books on the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, I knew that as a “bystander” my sympathies were with Jewish “victims” and my antipathies with Nazi “perpetrators.”
This moral clarity gave me a sense of comfort: I knew I didn’t want to be friends with the German classmate down the street and got mad at my Mom when she brought my bike to the local bike shop, because its owner was supposed to have been a Nazi sympathizer. I also hoped that, if I had lived during the Holocaust, I would have been the kind of person to actively support persecuted Jewish families, and that I would have joined the Dutch resistance against Nazi occupation instead of being a passive bystander.
Imagine my shock when, as a teenager in high school, I realized that the tables had turned. Watching and reading the news on the First Intifada in 1987, I couldn’t believe that the Jewish people I had admired for so long now waged war against persecuted Palestinians, who obviously lacked the military might of Israel. I was confused and didn’t know how to respond to this reversal in roles. My sense of moral clarity was shattered: How could victims become killers? How could the persecuted become persecutors?
I believe that this question of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders remains crucial for thinking about today’s Israel-Palestine catastrophe. While Jewish people claim essential victim status based on a long history antisemitism, pogroms, and most recently the Holocaust, does this mean that they can’t be perpetrators of genocide today? How do we, as bystanders in the US empire, enable Israel to claim victimhood after October 7 and to justify its crimes against humanity in the name of self-defense since then? Aren’t Palestinian civilians in Gaza and other occupied territories the victims now? Or are they all accomplices and potential recruits of Hamas perpetrators of terrorism, forcing Israel to protect its population from this existential threat? And can we really be innocent bystanders to what is happening in Gaza, especially after the recent invasion in Rafah? Or are we all, as funders and participants in the US-led imperial war machine, inevitably implicated in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and therefore collectively responsible for its perpetuation?
Instead of treating victim, perpetrator, and bystander as separate categories, I want to emphasize the complex relationships and entanglements among these categories. One the one hand, it is important to recognize Palestinians as current victims, hold Israel accountable for perpetrating genocide, and reflect carefully on our responsibility as implicated bystanders. On the other hand, we also need to think beyond recent events and consider wider systems of settler colonialism to better understand the catastrophic cycles of violence in Palestine and know how to make humane coexistence in social relationships, community life, and political decision-making possible.
This raises more urgent questions: What would it take to think and imagine beyond the victim-perpetrator divide? How could we envision livable co-existence among Jews and Palestinians based on careful judgment rather than on perpetual revenge driven by mutual victimhood?
First of all, we need to recognize that the dichotomy between “victim” and “perpetrator” can be used by political authorities to serve their own interests and continue the cycle of violence in Palestine. We also need to consider our role as “implicated bystanders” in perpetuating the victim-perpetrator binary. So, the fact that Israel is currently a perpetrator of genocide does not make the Jewish people any less a victim of the Holocaust or ongoing antisemitism. And the fact that Palestinians have a right to armed resistance as victims of colonial occupation and extermination does not condone the brutality of Hamas perpetrators against Israeli civilians on October 7. In addition, as bystanders, we in the U.S. must take responsibility for avoiding conformity with our government’s and mass media’s complicity with genocide in Gaza. Only careful thinking and judgment by human beings around the world can produce action toward ending the cycle of violence and victimhood.
Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt’s ideas about thinking and judgment are especially relevant here. For Arendt, thinking is a dangerous activity because it allows all of us to critically examine dominant ideologies and popular opinions in society. It pushes us to engage in inner dialogue with ourselves on urgent political issues, and to question widely-accepted concepts like victim, perpetrator, bystander, security, free speech, self-defense, and terrorism. Thinking also shapes our moral conscience concerning what is right or wrong and our political perspective on how to act. It prepares us for moral and political judgment based on independent reflection, and for collective action that opens up new possibilities—what Arendt calls new beginnings.
Second, we should admit that legal justice and abstract fairness are not enough to resolve conflicts like that between Israel and Palestine. The Nuremberg Trials after World War II, for example, provided concrete evidence of Nazi crimes, convicted 22 prominent Holocaust perpetrators, and legitimized the use of international criminal law against future perpetrators of crimes against humanity. But they have done little to prevent or stop genocides and war crimes by nation-states since then. Similarly, calls for fairness promise to repair past wrongs and reconcile present conflicts. Truth commissions, for instance, invite both victims and perpetrators to share stories of suffering and transgression in the hope that forgiveness can restore humane relationships and discourage bloody revenge. The case of South Africa shows, however, that truth commissions often reinforce victim and perpetrator identities, while lacking the power for enduring structural transformation. And if international institutions and laws can’t even force Israel to accept a ceasefire, why would fairness be able to do so?
Finally, as implicated bystanders in the United States, we need to create ways to act against the US empire’s support for Israel’s genocidal colonialism and to act for new beginnings—for new initiatives toward co-existence among Jewish and Palestinian people, as well as among other nationalities, social groups, and struggles for liberation. While it is crucial to provide humanitarian aid to all victims, we also need to highlight how Jewish rulers and settlers have pursued Israel’s settler-colonial project to displace and erase Palestinians from their land, and how Palestinian people have never given up their right of return and have always resisted colonization with unarmed as well as armed strategies—like other colonized and indigenous populations around the world. Instead of avoiding conflict by staying silent, we need to use our moral imagination and political capacity to resist conformity with mainstream media’s manufacturing of consent and complicity with support for genocide among political, economic, and academic elites. And as Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said insisted, we also need to create and inhabit social spaces for learning and meeting across differences, and for risky experiments with co-existence among unique human beings and communities confronting common existential conditions and political challenges.
This brings us to the question: What can we learn from promising experiments with coexistence among Jewish and Palestinian people in occupied territories known as Israel?
One promising initiative is The Parents Circle—Family Forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinians organization with over 700 families that have lost an immediate family member in the colonial conflict. This organization originated in 1995 and hosts dialogue meetings where Israeli and Palestinian parents tell personal stories of bereavement in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, promoting interpersonal reconciliation and sustainable peace instead of hatred and revenge in relationships across families, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on governments or leaders for solutions, they focus on listening, mutual understanding, and joint action guided by the kind of moral-political thinking and judgment favored by Hannah Arendt. These bereaved families show how capacities for co-existence can emerge from sharing experience and stories of common suffering as unique human beings, not as opponents identified as “victim” or “perpetrator.” Although interpersonal empathy still needs to be translated into political decolonization, it is not surprising that Israel’s Education Ministry banned the Parents Circle from schools last year, despite protest of principals at these schools.
Another inspiring association is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), which was founded in 1997 and involves critical Jews in Israel, US, UK, Finland, and Germany seeking to end Israel’s apartheid policies and settler-colonial project by mobilizing against Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and engaging in anti-colonial political education. While confronting Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology for ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the ICAHD also calls for the creation of a single, decolonized democratic state with equal rights and dignity for Jewish, Palestinian, Christian, and other inhabitants. The ICAHD demonstrates how common struggles against colonial systems and for political co-existence can spark new beginnings toward peace and justice in Palestine.
And most importantly: What can we learn from student encampments in the US and around the world about how co-existence can start at the grassroots level and grow translocally?
The Gaza solidarity encampments that started at Columbia University and continue spreading across the globe highlight yet again how the victim-perpetrator dichotomy has been weaponized by ruling institutions and elites. For example, university administrations claim that Pro-Israel Jewish students who feel unsafe are “victims,” while anti-Zionist Jewish students resisting peacefully—and facing violent assaults by pro-Israel activists—are “perpetrators.” Politicians and mainstream media portray Palestinian students and faculty as “perpetrators” of speaking up about inhumane conditions in Gaza and standing up to heavily-armed police forces, while wealthy Jewish alumni withdraw donations as “victims” of antisemitism. Initially, these attempts at distortion and intimidation kept many audiences on the sidelines, but increasingly people throughout the world are waking up to calls for ending genocide in Gaza and Palestine.
Thankfully, the lived experiences and realities of student encampments are very different from the mainstream media’s delusional images and commentaries! Student encampments have become common spaces for political education and co-existence among Jewish, Palestinian, and other students—as well as among faculty and other activists—in solidarity with families and communities in Gaza. They are places where participants push university administrators to disclose and divest from corporations associated with Israeli genocide; perform new ways of living together across violent binaries; and put bodies on the line to dismantle the US empire’s war machine in Palestine, in the US, and around the world. Students in solidarity with Palestinian struggles for liberation are showing all of us how open-minded thinking, moral judgment, and political will can guide mass movements that eventually end military atrocities like the Vietnam War and racist governments like South Africa’s apartheid regime.
I believe that as university students and faculty members—and as human beings in our shared world—we are responsible for using our intellectual and ethical capacities to make courageous choices about how we respond to urgent situations that confront us. In my view, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the most urgent situation in the world since the Holocaust. We cannot afford to blindly obey our rulers and end up on the wrong side of history. Passivity or silence in times like these is betrayal—as both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Audre Lorde demonstrated. Trapping ourselves in fixed identities as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is not a viable option. And there are no guarantees that our ideas and actions will produce the solutions we want. Our only choice is to draw on common suffering to create common struggles and common spaces for coexistence with former enemies, other communities, and ecosystems. As a child, I hoped that I would become the kind of person who feels and enacts solidarity with Jewish people facing death in concentration camps. Today, I know that empathy with victims in Gaza is not enough. Our future depends on how I, how you, how everyone responds to one question: Coannihilation or Coexistence?
Israel bombed yet another UN school in Gaza on Friday, just a day after Israeli forces massacred dozens of Palestinians in a UN school-turned-shelter in an attack that has been widely condemned as a likely war crime. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombed a UN school-turned-evacuation center in Al-Shati refugee camp, near Gaza City, as they carried out an intense series of bombardments on Friday.
The world’s two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.
A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.
On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly “safe zone” crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months.
The air strike set fire to an area crammed with tents, killing dozens of Palestinians, many of whom burnt alive. A video shows a man holding aloft a baby beheaded by the Israeli blast.
Hundreds more, many of them women and children, suffered serious injuries, including horrifying burns.
Israel has destroyed almost all of the medical facilities that could treat Rafah’s wounded, as well as denying entry to basic medical supplies such as painkillers that could ease their torment.
This was precisely the outcome US President Joe Biden warned of months ago when he suggested that an Israeli attack on Rafah would constitute a “red line”.
But the US red line evaporated the moment Israel crossed it. The best Biden’s officials could manage was a mealy-mouthed statement calling the images from Rafah “heart-breaking”.
Such images were soon to be repeated, however. Israel attacked the same area again on Tuesday, killing at least 21 Palestinians, mostly women and children, as its tanks entered the centre of Rafah.
‘A mechanism with teeth’
The World Court’s demand that Israel halt its attack on Rafah came in the wake of its decision in January to put Israel effectively on trial for genocide, a judicial process that could take years to complete.
In the meantime, the ICJ insisted, Israel had to refrain from any actions that risked a genocide of Palestinians. In last week’s ruling, the court strongly implied that the current attack on Rafah might advance just such an agenda.
Israel presumably dared to defy the court only because it was sure it had the Biden administration’s backing.
UN officials, admitting that they had run out of negatives to describe the ever-worsening catastrophe in Gaza, called it “hell on earth”.
Days before the ICJ’s ruling, the wheels of its sister court, the ICC, finally began to turn.
Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, announced last week that he would be seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
Both Israeli leaders are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attempts to exterminate the population of Gaza through planned starvation.
Israel has been blocking aid deliveries for many months, creating famine, a situation only exacerbated by its recent seizure of a crossing between Egypt and Rafah through which aid was being delivered.
The ICC is a potentially more dangerous judicial mechanism for Israel than the ICJ.
The World Court is likely to take years to reach a judgment on whether Israel has definitively committed a genocide in Gaza – possibly too late to save much of its population.
The ICC, on the other hand, could potentially issue arrest warrants within days or weeks.
And while the World Court has no real enforcement mechanisms, given that the US is certain to veto any UN Security Council resolution seeking to hold Israel to account, an ICC ruling would place an obligation on more than 120 states that have ratified its founding document, the Rome Statute, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should either step on their soil.
That would make Europe and much of the world – though not the US – off-limits to both.
And there is no reason for Israeli officials to assume that the ICC’s investigations will finish with Netanyahu and Gallant. Over time, it could issue warrants for many more Israelis.
As one Israeli official has noted: “The ICC is a mechanism with teeth”.
‘Antisemitic’ court
For that reason, Israel responded by going on the warpath, accusing the court of being “antisemitic” and threatening to harm its officials.
Washington appeared ready to add its muscle too.
Asked at a Senate committee hearing whether he would support a Republican proposal to impose sanctions on the ICC, Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, replied: “We want to work with you on a bipartisan basis to find an appropriate response.”
Administration officials, speaking to the Financial Times, suggested the measures under consideration “would target prosecutor Karim Khan and others involved in the investigation”.
US reprisals, according to the paper, would most likely be modelled on the sanctions imposed in 2020 by Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s predecessor, after the ICC threatened to investigate both Israel and the US over war crimes, in the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan respectively.
Then, the Trump administration accused the ICC of “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels” – allegations it never substantiated.
Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, was denied entry to the US, and Trump officials threatened to confiscate her and the ICC judges’ assets and put them on trial. The administration also vowed to use force to liberate any Americans or Israelis who were arrested.
Mike Pompeo, the then US secretary of state, averred that Washington was “determined to prevent having Americans and our friends and allies in Israel and elsewhere hauled in by this corrupt ICC”.
Covert war on ICC
In fact, a joint investigation by the Israeli website 972 and the British Guardian newspaper revealed this week that Israel – apparently with US support – has been running a covert war against the ICC for the best part of a decade.
Its offensive began after Palestine became a contracting party to the ICC in 2015, and intensified after Bensouda, Khan’s predecessor, started a preliminary investigation into Israeli war crimes – both Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza and its building of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their lands.
Bensouda found herself and her family threatened, and her husband blackmailed. The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, became personally involved in the campaign of intimidation. An official briefed on Cohen’s behaviour likened it to “stalking”. The Mossad chief ambushed Bensouda on at least one occasion in an attempt to recruit her to Israel’s side.
Cohen, who is known to be close to Netanyahu, reportedly told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
Israel has also been running a sophisticated spying operation on the court, hacking its database to read emails and documents. It has tried to recruit ICC staff to spy on the court from within. There are suspicions at the ICC that Israel has been successful.
Because Israel oversees access to the occupied territories, it has been able to ban ICC officials from investigating its war crimes directly. That has meant, given its control of the telecommunications systems in the territories, that it has been able to monitor all conversations between the ICC and Palestinians reporting atrocities.
As a result, Israel has sought to close down Palestinian legal and human rights groups by designating them as “terrorist organisations”.
The surveillance of the ICC has continued during Khan’s tenure – and it is the reason Israel knew the arrest warrants were coming. According to sources that spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, the court came under “tremendous pressure from the United States” not to proceed with the warrants.
Khan has pointed out that interference in the court’s activities is a criminal offence. More publicly, a group of senior US Republican senators sent a threatening letter to Khan: “Target Israel and we will target you.”
Khan himself has noted that he has faced a campaign of intimidation and has warned that, if the interference continues, “my office will not hesitate to act”.
The question is how much of this is bravado, and how much is it affecting Khan and the ICC’s judges, making them wary of pursuing their investigation, expediting it or expanding it to more Israeli war crimes suspects.
Legal noose
Despite the intimidation, the legal noose is quickly tightening around Israel’s neck. It has become impossible for the world’s highest judicial authorities to ignore Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza and near-complete destruction of its infrastructure, from schools and hospitals to aid compounds and bakeries.
Many tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, maimed and orphaned in the rampage, and hundreds of thousands more are being gradually starved to death by Israel’s aid blockade.
The role of the World Court and the War Crimes Court are precisely to halt atrocities and genocides before it is too late.
There is an obligation on the world’s most powerful states – especially the world’s superpower-in-chief, the United States, which so often claims the status of “global policeman” – to help enforce such rulings.
Should Israel continue to ignore the ICJ’s demand that it end its attack on Rafah, as seems certain, the UN Security Council would be expected to pass a resolution to enforce the decision.
That could range from, at a minimum, an arms embargo and economic sanctions on Israel to imposing no-fly zones over Gaza or even sending in a UN peacekeeping force.
Washington has shown it can act when it wishes to. Even though the US is one of a minority of states not a party to the Rome Statute, it has vigorously supported the arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2023.
The US and its allies have imposed economic sanctions on Moscow, and supplied Ukraine with endless weapons to fight off the Russian invasion. There is evidence, too, that the US has been waging covert military operations targeting Russia, most likely including blowing up the Nordstream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.
The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming.
Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
The Biden administration has orchestrated the seizing of Russian state assets, as well as those of wealthy Russians, and it has encouraged a cultural and sporting boycott.
It is proposing to do none of that in the case of Israel.
Divisions in Europe
It is not just that the US is missing in action as Israel advances its genocidal goals in Gaza. Washington is actively aiding and abetting the genocide, by supplying Israel with bombs, by cutting funding to UN aid agencies that are the main lifeline for Gaza’s population, by sharing intelligence with Israel and by refusing to use its plentiful leverage over Israel to stop the slaughter.
And the widespread assumption is that the US will veto any Security Council resolution against Israel.
According to two former ICC officials who spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, senior Israeli officials have expressly stated that Israel and the US are working together to stymie the court’s work.
Washington’s contempt for the world’s highest judicial authorities is so flagrant that it is even starting to fray relations with Europe.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has thrown his weight behind the ICC and called for any ruling against Netanyahu and Gallant to be respected.
Meanwhile, on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his outrage over Israel’s attacks on Rafah and called for them to stop immediately.
Three European states – Spain, Ireland and Norway – announced last week that they were joining more than 140 other countries, including eight from the 27-member European Union, in recognising Palestine as a state.
The coordination between Spain, Ireland and Norway was presumably designed to attenuate the inevitable backlash provoked by defying Washington’s wishes.
Among the falsehoods promoted by the US and Israel is the claim that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel’s military actions in Gaza because neither of them have recognised Palestine as a state.
But Palestine became a state party to the ICC way back in 2015. And, as Spain, Ireland and Norway have highlighted, it is now recognised even by western states usually submissive to the US-imposed “rules-based order”.
Another deception promoted by Israel and the US – a more revealing one – is the claim that the ICC lacks jurisdiction because Israel, like the US, has not ratified the Rome Statute.
Neither believes international law – the legal foundation constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War to stop future Holocausts – applies to them. Which is yet more reason to discount their assurances that there is no genocide in Gaza.
But in any case, the argument is entirely hollow: Palestine is a party to the ICC, and the Rome Statute is there to protect its signatories from attack. It is only violent bullies like the US and Israel who have no need for the ICC.
Might makes right
Both the ICJ and the ICC are fully aware of the dangers of taking on Israel – which is why, despite the dissembling complaints from the US and Israel, each court is treading so slowly and cautiously in dealing with Israeli atrocities.
Pick at the Israeli thread of war crimes in Gaza, and the entire cloth of atrocities around the world committed and promoted by the US and its closest allies starts to unravel.
The unspoken truth is that the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and years of brutal occupation of Iraq by US and British troops, and the even lengthier and equally bloody occupation of Afghanistan, eviscerated the legal constraints that would have made it harder for Putin to invade Ukraine and for Israel to put into practice the erasure of the Palestinian people it has dreamed of for so long.
It is Washington that tore up the rulebook of international law and elevated above it a self-serving “rules-based order” in which the only meaningful rule is might makes right.
Faced with that stark axiom, Moscow had good reason both to take advantage of Washington’s acts of vandalism against international law to advance its own strategic regional aims and to suspect that the relentless military expansion of a US-led Nato towards its borders did not have Russia’s best interests at heart.
Now, as Netanyahu and Gallant risk being put in the dock at The Hague, Washington is finally finding its resolve to act. Not to stop genocide. But to offer Israel protection to carry on.
War crimes overlooked
For that reason, Khan did everything he could last week to insulate himself from criticism as he announced that he wants Netanyahu and Gallant arrested.
First, he made sure to weigh the accusations more heavily against Hamas than Israel. He is seeking three Hamas leaders against two Israelis.
In his indictment, he implicated both the Hamas political and military wings in war crimes and crimes against humanity over their one-day attack on Israel on 7 October and their hostage-taking.
By contrast, Khan completely ignored the Israeli military’s role over the past eight months, even though it has been carrying out Netanyahu and Gallant’s wishes to the letter.
Notably too, Khan charged the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, not Gaza. All the evidence, however, is that he had no foreknowledge of the attack on 7 October and certainly no operational involvement.
Further presenting Hamas in a worse light, Khan levelled more indictments against its leaders than Israel’s.
That included a charge rooted in a prominent western establishment narrative: that Israeli hostages held in Gaza have faced systematic sexual assault and torture. There appears to be little persuasive evidence for this allegation at this stage, unless Khan has access to facts no one else appears to know about.
By contrast, there is plenty of objective evidence of Palestinians being kidnapped off the streets of Gaza and the occupied West Bank and subjected to sexual assault and torture in Israeli prisons.
The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians. ‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile.
That, however, is not on the charge sheet against Netanyahu or Gallant.
Khan also ignored plenty of other Israeli war crimes that would be easy to prove, such as the destruction of hospitals and United Nations facilities, the targeted killing of large numbers of aid workers and journalists, and the fact that 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock has been made uninhabitable by Israel’s US-supplied bombs.
Taking on Goliath
In making the case against Israel, Khan clearly knew he was taking on a Goliath, given Israel’s stalwart backing from the US. He had even recruited a panel of legal experts to give its blessing, in the hope that might offer some protection from reprisal.
The panel, which unanimously endorsed the indictments against Israel and Hamas, included legal experts like Amal Clooney, the nearest the human rights community has to a legal superstar. But it also included Theodor Meron, a former legal authority in the Israeli government’s foreign ministry.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, explaining his reasoning, Khan seemed keen to preempt the coming attacks. He noted that an unnamed senior US politician had already tried to deter him from indicting Israeli leaders. The prosecutor suggested that other threats were being made behind the scenes.
The ICC, he was told, was “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” – a criticism of the court that echoed complaints long levelled against it by the Global South.
In Washington, the ICC is expected to serve as nothing more than another institutional tool of US imperialism. It is not there to uphold international law dispassionately. It is there to enforce a US “rules-based order” in which the US and its allies can do no wrong, even when they are committing atrocities or a genocide.
The predictably skewed framing of the interview by Amanpour – that Khan needed to explain and justify at length each of the charges he laid against Netanyahu and Gallant but that the charges against the Hamas leaders were self-evident – was one clue as to what the court is up against.
The ICC prosecutor made clear that he understands all too well what is at stake if the ICC and ICJ turn a blind eye to the Gaza genocide, as Israel and the US want. He told Amanpour: “If we don’t apply the law equally, we’re going to disintegrate as a species.”
The uncomfortable truth is that such disintegration, in a nuclear age, may be further advanced than any of us cares to acknowledge.
The US and its favourite client state give no sign of being willing to submit to international law. Like Samson, they would prefer to bring the house down than respect the long-established rules of war.
The initial victims are the people of Gaza. But in a world without laws, where might alone makes right, all of us will ultimately be the losers.
Israel’s illegal control over the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza has for decades prevented the Palestinian people from exercising their right of self-determination and full and effective self-governance. UN Resolution 3246 calls for all States to recognise that that right applies to all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination, including the Palestinians.
The warning signs of genocide in Gaza had been there for all to see. But the lack of will on the part of UN members to implement 3246 not only let it happen but then failed to stop it even when its ferocity passed all comprehension.
When October 7 erupted the West attempted to airbrush the pre-existing conditions Israel had imposed on Gaza and pretended Hamas started the ‘war’. But 1,000 lawyers, scholars, and practitioners immediately sounded the alarm about “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and issued an open letter as early as 15 October.
For a start they reminded everyone that in 1982 the UN General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”.
Pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had prompted discussion on genocide before, with warnings given over the years that the siege of Gaza (from 2006 onwards) might amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”.
And since 2007, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel had defined the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity”.
Earlier in 2023 Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, and “disgusting” and proposed “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.
• In the short space of time between 7 October and 15 October (when the open letter was written), 2,329 Palestinians were killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighborhoods, and entire families across Gaza were obliterated.
• Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other necessities. This intensifies an already illegal and potentially genocidal siege turning it into an outright destructive assault.
• The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) stated that orders to evacuate, coupled with the complete siege, are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) multiple times.
• The World Health Organisation published a warning that “forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.
• In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, since 7 October, Israeli settlers backed by the IDF and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), invaded their homes, and assaulted residents. Several Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property.
• Between 7 and 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by the Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank with 1,200 injured there.
• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”, and afterward announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, also stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”
• On 10 October, the head of the Israeli Army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.
• Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
• On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters and asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive that will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble”.
• Israel’s President emphasized that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”
• Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
• On 12 October UN Special Rapporteurs condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”.
• UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at an inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”.
• On 14 October the UN Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned against “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel is carrying out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.
• The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements that evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.
• Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as # 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.”
• The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.
• The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harboring specific intent (dolus specialist), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”. (The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – readily applied to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favored-nation privileges, trade deals, and scientific collaboration).
• Competent elements of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, are required to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Emphasis is on the General Assembly given that the Security Council is compromised by the US and UK (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.
• All relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, are called on to immediately intervene, carry out necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.
Chock-full of hate
All this was quickly followed by the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023, which contained important warnings regarding international law — for example:
⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.
⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.
So, within 3 weeks it was clear to everyone paying attention that the Israeli leadership, chock-full of hate, were set on a course of vicious and brutal genocide. Yet the following month John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, dismissed claims that Israel was committing genocide and told everybody that “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”
Yes, and let’s use the term “right of self-defence” appropriately. In Gaza and the West Bank it only applies to the Palestinian resistance, not the belligerent illegal occupier.
Incredibly, we’re now entering the 9th month of the genocide in Gaza and it has gone from bad to much, much worse. And there is still no let-up. People worldwide have been watching day after day mainstream and alternative media reports, seeing for themselves the horrors endured even by children, and aghast at the wholesale and wanton destruction of the Palestinians’ homeland. They cannot believe how depraved, immoral and spineless the international community has become, and how paralysed the UN in allowing the slaughter to continue. They are especially sickened by the conduct of the so-called ‘major powers’ and by the lunatic Netanyahu whom their own politicians call ‘friend and ally’ who thinks he can still dictate what happens in Gaza after he eventually condescends to end the butchery.
If he thinks Israel can now grab Gaza by conquest he may be disappointed. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter expressly prohibits aggressive war and Article 5(3) of General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 1975 (which includes the definition of Acts of Aggression) nullifies any legal title acquired in this way. And 5(3) says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations“.
In carrying through its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilians and their homes, infrastructure and livelihoods Israel cannot possibly claim to abide by international law or honour their obligations under the Charter. And by encouraging Israel — and supplying the weaponry — neither can the US and UK.
And now we have Biden, Israel’s loony protector, setting ‘red lines’ which Israel must not cross while merrily carrying on with their genocide. But they are so elastic that, with US permission, the hateful maniacs can almost do as they please to satisfy their genocidal lust. Biden arrogantly overrules the red lines on war crimes and crimes against humanity that are already set out by international law.
International law―the recognized rules of behavior among nations based on customary practices and treaties, among them the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights―has been agreed upon by large and small nations alike. To implement this law, the nations of the world have established a UN Security Council (to maintain international peace and security) and a variety of international courts, including the UN’s International Court of Justice (which adjudicates disputes between nations and gives advisory opinions on international legal issues) and the International Criminal Court (which prosecutes individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression).
Yet nations continue to defy international law.
In the ongoing Gaza crisis, the Israeli government has failed to uphold international law by rebuffing the calls of international organizations to end its massive slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The U.S. government has facilitated this behavior by vetoing three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, while the Israeli government has ignored an International Court of Justice ruling that it should head off genocide in Gaza by ensuring sufficient humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population. The Israeli government has also refused to honor an order by the International Court of Justice to halt its offensive in Rafah and denounced the International Criminal Court’s request for arrest warrants for its top officials.
Russia’s military assault upon Ukraine provides another example of flouting international law. Given the UN Charter’s prohibition of the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” when Russian military forces seized and annexed Crimea and commenced military operations to gobble up eastern Ukraine in early 2014, the issue came before the UN Security Council, where condemnation of Russia’s action was promptly vetoed by Russia. Similarly, in February 2022, when the Russian government commenced a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia again vetoed Security Council action. That March, the International Court of Justice, by an overwhelming vote, ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine—but, as usual, to no avail.
Unfortunately, these violations of international law are not unusual for, over many decades, numerous nations have ignored the recognized rules of international conduct.
What is lacking is not international law but, rather, its consistent and universal enforcement. For decades, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) have repeatedly used their veto power in that entity to block UN action to maintain international peace and security. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations do not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, while more than a third of the world’s nations (including some of the largest, such as Russia, the United States, China, and India) have resisted becoming parties to the International Criminal Court.
Despite such obstacles, these organizations have sometimes played very useful roles in resolving international disputes. The UN Security Council has dispatched numerous peacekeeping missions around the world―including 60 alone in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union―that have helped defuse crises in conflict-ridden regions.
For its part, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) paved the way for the Central American Peace Accords during the 1980s through its ruling in Nicaragua v United States, while its ruling in the Nuclear Tests case helped bring an end to nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. In addition, the ICJ’s ruling in Chad v Libya resolved a territorial dispute between these two nations and ended their military conflict.
Although the International Criminal Court has only been in operation since 2002, it has thus far convicted ten individuals of heinous crimes, issued or requested warrants for the arrest of prominent figures charged with war crimes (including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the leaders of Hamas), and conducted or begun investigations of yet other notorious individuals.
But, of course, as demonstrated by the persistence of wars of aggression and massive violations of human rights, enforcing international law remains a major problem in the contemporary world.
Therefore, if the world is to move beyond national impunity―if it is finally to scrap the long and disgraceful tradition among nations of might makes right―it is necessary to empower the world’s major international organizations to enforce the international law that nations have agreed to respect.
This strengthening of global governance is certainly possible.
Although provisions in the UN Charter make outright abolition of the UN Security Council veto very difficult, other means are available for reducing the veto’s baneful effects. In many cases ―including those of the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts―simply invoking Article 27(3) of the UN Charter would be sufficient, for it states that a party to a dispute before the Security Council shall abstain from voting in connection with that dispute. Furthermore, 124 UN nations have already endorsed a proposal for renunciation of the veto when taking action against genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities. Moreover, the UN General Assembly has occasionally employed “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to take action when the Security Council has failed to do so.
Improving the effectiveness of the international judicial system has also generated attention in recent years. The LAW Not War campaign, championed by organizations dedicated to improving global governance, advocates strengthening the International Court of Justice, principally by increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court. Similarly, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, representing numerous organizations, calls on all nations to ratify the Court’s founding statute and, thereby, “expand the Court’s reach and reduce the impunity gap.”
National impunity is not inevitable, at least if people and governments of the world are willing to take the necessary actions. Are they? Or will they continue talking of a “rules-based international order” while they avoid enforcing the rules?
The NAACP is calling on President Joe Biden to “draw the red line” and immediately halt weapons shipments to Israel in a statement showing the widening gulf between Biden and groups influential to his voter base. In a statement released this week, the NAACP, which says it is the U.S.’s largest civil rights organization, said that the “unspeakable” violence being committed against Palestinians in…
Spain’s foreign minister announced Thursday that the country had applied to join the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, just over a week after formally recognizing a Palestinian state alongside other European countries. South Africa brought the case and has led it through its early stages, which culminated on May 24 with the ICJ, the United Nations’ highest court…
Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.
Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.
At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.
In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.
Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.
Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.
The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.
The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.
Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.
Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.
Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.
Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.
By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.
Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, TheGuardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.
Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.
As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:
Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ
But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally
Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?
Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.
Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.
Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.
Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!
In a move that human rights groups are warning could have negative effects on the enforcement of human rights standards across the globe, the House passed a bill on Tuesday sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for their genocidal assault of Gaza. Republicans and 42 Democrats…
Tens of thousands of Palestinians who are in dire need of medical evacuation or care that is no longer available in Gaza are trapped in the strip, aid groups are reporting, with Gaza’s last pedestrian border crossing having been closed for a month and Israel blocking cancer and other patients from leaving the region. Since May 7, Israel has been blocking all medical evacuations from Gaza while…
The vast majority of children under the age of 5 in Gaza are regularly forced to go at least one full day without eating as Israel’s manufactured famine has intensified in recent weeks, aid groups have reported. According to a food survey conducted by humanitarian aid groups in May, 85 percent of children under 5 were deprived of food at least one day over a three day period.
Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine has been enthusiastically welcomed at home and (mostly) abroad as a positive contribution to the future of Palestine. Needless to say, this development did not take place in a vacuum though, for the most part, it is being presented as if it did.
The scale and endurance of the pro-Palestinian campaigns in Ireland both historically, and specifically in response to the Israeli/US barbarism in Gaza, is probably not given the recognition it deserves. However, the result was dramatic: the Irish government was forced to take a position – a position that successive Irish governments had resolutely refused to entertain.
That is one side of the story. The problem for pro-Palestinian campaigners and supporters is that Ireland is a perfect example of a term not often used these days – Ireland is a banana republic. So much so, that the Irish government does not get out of bed in the morning without first checking with its major ‘partner’ – the United States of America.
This is where internal political considerations clashed with Ireland’s unswerving allegiance to the US. There now was a problem and it had to be solved. So, for our brave leaders in the Irish government, it then became a matter of how to manage this particular problem.
Enter the US State Department. From then on, Ireland stayed firmly within the boundaries allowed – as it always does. And that is what it came down to: what would Ireland be allowed to say or do. The statement provided by the Irish government, here if read carefully, clearly shows what those boundaries are.
It did not stop there: on 28 May, the day the Palestinian flag flew outside Leinster House (Irish Parliament) the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris stated “And Europe could be doing a hell of a lot more, Europe needs to do a lot more in relation to this.” Europe but not the United States of America! Know your boundaries and stick to them – or else.
As reported by Politico:
Dublin was determined to take this step without damaging its typically strong relations with U.S. politicians — particularly Biden’s White House.
Consequently, Irish Department of Foreign Affairs diplomats ensured that their U.S. counterparts in the State Department were speedily briefed on every conversation the Irish had with like-minded European governments — Belgium, Malta, Norway, Slovenia and above all Spain — as they pursued a joint plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, the official said.
This included face-to-face discussions with senior National Security Council officials at the White House in March as part of St. Patrick’s Day-related diplomacy; multiple phone calls between Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, who led the Irish initiative, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and final calls to Washington following the Irish Cabinet’s formal signoff on its decision Tuesday night.
“We couldn’t have been clearer in spelling out our intentions weeks, months in advance to make sure there were no surprises or needless suspicions raised in Washington,” said the Irish official, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Apparently, the US side was quite chuffed with the outcome: “They tried to make enough of a group so that it would make a splash, but in our view, it’s more like a ripple.”
In the end, the Irish statement announcing its intentions quite clearly shows that the Irish position soon emerged as an Irish government/US State Department position or, in short, a US State Department position.
Let’s start with the “hostages”:
“It is long past time for a ceasefire, for the unconditional release of hostages and for unhindered access for humanitarian aid.”
and,
“Let me be clear that Ireland condemns the barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7th last. Civilians attacked and murdered. Hostages taken in the most brutal and terrifying of circumstances, including a young Israeli-Irish child.
We call again for all hostages to be immediately returned to the arms of their loved ones.”
Harris is referring here to more than one hundred Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Nowhere in his statement does he even refer to the 5,200 Palestinians hostages, including at least 170 children held up to October 6, 2023, nor to the 7,350 more hostages taken by Israel since that date.
Move on to “children”:
“Children are innocent. The children of Israel. The children of Palestine. They deserve peace.”
Look at the order. Yet, the killings are in a different order – 10,651 Palestinians were slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to 7 October 2023, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.
The figures since 7 October are so horrific that they cannot even be accurately counted – on the Palestinian side. That is before we even start to think about starvation and denial of medical and other essential requirements, the destruction of medical facilities, injuries and the unrelenting terror.
Now we get to the “two state solution”:
“It is a statement of unequivocal support for a two-State solution – the only credible path to peace and security for Israel, for Palestine and for their peoples.” (note the order again)
“A two-state solution is the only way out of the generational cycles of violence, retaliation and resentment, where so many wrongs can never make a right.”
It is not for me to determine what is best for the Palestinian people but when the chief enablers of the barbarism against the Palestinian people tell you that there is only one solution – a two state solution – it is legitimate to constructively analyse that position. However, when the Irish government – in unison with the chief enablers of the barbarism – insists that this is the only solution, it becomes an imperative.
The fact is that large numbers of Palestinians have always, and still, oppose the Oslo Accords and the concept of a two state solution. Indeed, a large part of the reason for the successful election of Hamas in Gaza was its opposition to those concepts. Yet, the Irish government and the US government insist this is the ONLY way forward.
However, Ulster says NO! Ooops, I have strayed into that other unresolved statehood issue – the little matter of the British-occupied six counties in the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland.
Sorry, Israel says NO! NEVER! to a two state solution with Netanyahu boasting that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”
Despite the clearly stated and unequivocal refusal of Israel to even consider a two state solution, the Irish and US governments insist that it is the ONLY option. So, Ireland has now recognised the state of Palestine but retains the right to tell them what to do in step with the US government telling them what to do: the-two-state-no-other-option option is the only option.
The real irony is that in fighting so hard for Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, the Irish government – as usual – entirely sacrificed its own statehood and sovereignty as it crawled on its belly to the US State Department begging for some understanding for the little pickle it found itself in. The fact is that the Irish government would not dare step one inch outside the well-established boundaries that have been set for it by the US authorities.
Yet, the Irish government is successfully strutting its stuff – virtually unchallenged – about how brave it is, what a wonderful defender of the oppressed it is, what a promoter of peace it is as it crawls back from its ‘consultations’ with the worst offender of all those concepts the world has ever known.
Now that Palestine is sorted, perhaps we could look to seeking statehood and sovereignty for Ireland? The farcical position of the Irish government leading a charge on Palestinian statehood while simultaneously begging forgiveness and understanding from the despots who rule the US (and who think they rule the world) and with an on-going British occupation of part of our country, has not entirely gone unnoticed. One thing is certain, the Irish government will not lead that charge.
More than 1 million Palestinians have fled Rafah as the city comes under a continued Israeli assault, forcing many to shelter in badly damaged buildings in the nearby city of Khan Younis, according to the United Nations. The assault on Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, has left the displaced in “unspeakable” conditions, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in…
