January
10, 2024
1948
was a year of tragic irony.
That
year saw the adoption of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
together promising a world in which human rights would be protected by the rule
of law. That same year, South Africa adopted apartheid and Israeli forces
carried out the Nakba, the violent mass dispossession of hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians. Both systems relied on western colonial support.
In
short, the modern international human rights movement was born into a world of
racialized colonial contradictions. Seventy-five years later, the world is
watching in horror as Israel has continued the Nakba through its months-long,
systematic ethnic purge of Gaza — again with the complicity of powerful western
governments led by the United States.
The
horrors of the original Nakba were met with decades of absolute impunity for
Israel, feeding further violence. But this time, three decades since the
overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, the post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation” is
taking the lead in challenging Israel’s genocidal assault.
On
December 29, South Africa became the first country to file an application to
the UN’s high judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, instituting
genocide proceedings against Israel for “acts threatened, adopted, condoned,
taken, and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel
against the Palestinian people.”
In
wrenching and horrifying detail, South Africa’s 84-page document describes a
litany of Israeli actions as “genocidal in character, as they are committed
with the requisite specific intent… to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part
of the broader Palestinian national, racial, and ethnical group.”
A
Horrifying Civilian Toll in Gaza and the West Bank
2023
was the bloodiest year in the Palestinian territories since the destruction of
historic Palestine and the founding of the state of Israel.
In
the first half of the year, Israeli assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank
had already reached a fever pitch, with successive waves of mass arrests,
settler pogroms, and military attacks against Palestinian towns and refugee
camps, including the ethnic cleansing of entire villages. At the same time,
millions of civilians in Gaza were suffering unbearable hardship under a
17-year-long Israel-imposed siege.
On
October 7, Gaza-based militants launched a devastating attack on Israeli
military and civilian targets and seized more than 200 military personnel and
civilian hostages. In an appalling act of mass collective punishment, Israel
immediately cut off all food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity to the 2.3
million Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza. Then it began a relentless
campaign of annihilation through massive bombing and missile strikes followed
by a ground-level invasion that brought shocking reports of massacres,
extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, and mass civilian detentions.
More
than 22,000 civilians and counting have since been killed in Gaza, the
overwhelming majority children and women — along with record numbers of
journalists and more UN aid workers than in any other conflict situation.
Thousands more are still trapped under the rubble, dead or dying from untreated
injuries, and now more are dying from rampant diseases caused by Israel’s
denial of clean water and medical care, even as the Israeli military assault
continues. Eighty-five percent of all Gazans have been forced from their homes.
And now Israeli-imposed starvation is taking hold.
The
Legal Standard for Genocide
Genocide
analysts and human rights lawyers, activists, specialists around the globe — no
strangers to human cruelty — have been shocked by both the savagery of Israel’s
acts and by the brazen public declarations of genocidal intent by Israeli
leaders. Hundreds of these experts have sounded the genocide alarm in Gaza,
noting the point-by-point alignment between Israel’s actions and its officials’
stated intent on the one hand, and the prohibitions enumerated in UN Genocide
Convention on the other.
The
South African application “unequivocally condemns all violations of
international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli
civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian
armed groups.” But it reminds the Court: “No armed attack on a State’s
territory, no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes —
can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defense to, breaches
of the [Genocide Convention] whether as a matter of law or morality.”
Unlike
many aspects of international law, the definition of genocide is quite
straightforward. To qualify as genocide or attempted genocide, two things are
required. First, the specific intent of the perpetrator to destroy all or part
of an identified national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Second,
commission of at least one of five specified acts designed to make that happen.
South
Africa’s petition to the ICJ is filled with clear and horrifically compelling
examples, identifying Israeli actions that match at least three of the five
acts that constitute genocide when linked to specific intent. Those include
killing members of the group, causing serious physical or mental harm to
members of the group, and, perhaps most indicative of genocidal purpose,
creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical
destruction.” As South Africa documents, Israel has shown the world, at levels
unprecedented in the 21st century, what those conditions look like.
For
specific intent, South Africa points to dozens of statements made by Israeli
leaders, including the President, Prime Minister, and other cabinet officials,
and as well as Knesset members, military commanders, and more.
Accustomed
to decades of U.S.-backed impunity, Israeli officials have been emboldened,
describing openly their intent to carry out “another Nakba,” to wipe out all of
Gaza, to deny any distinction between civilians and combatants, to raze Gaza to
the ground, to reduce it to rubble, and to bury Palestinians alive, among many
other similar statements.
Their
deliberately dehumanizing language includes descriptions of Palestinians as
animals, sub-human, Nazis, a cancer, insects, vermin — all language designed to
justify wiping out all or part of the group. Prime Minister Netanyahu went so
far as to invoke a Biblical verse on the Amalek, commanding that the “entire
population be wiped out, that none be spared, men, women, children, suckling
babies, and livestock.”
The
U.S. May Also Be Complicit in Israel’s Genocide
The
petition to the ICJ is sharply focused on Israel’s violations of the Genocide
Convention. It does not deal with the complicity of other governments, most
significantly of course the role of the United States in funding, arming, and
shielding Israel as it carries out its genocidal acts.
But
the active role of the United States in the Israeli onslaught, while hardly
surprising, has been especially shocking. As a State Party to the Genocide
Convention, the U.S. is obliged to act to prevent or stop genocide. Instead, we
have seen the United States not only failing in its obligations of prevention,
but instead actively providing economic, military, intelligence, and diplomatic
support to Israel while it is engaged in its mass atrocities in Gaza.
As
such, this is not merely a case of U.S. inaction in the face of genocide
(itself a breach of its legal obligations) but also a case of direct complicity
— which is a distinct crime under the Genocide Convention. The Center for
Constitutional Rights, on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations and
individual Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans, has filed a suit in U.S.
federal court in California focused on U.S. complicity in Israel’s acts of
genocide.
South
Africa’s Genocide Complaint is a Rallying Cry for Civil Society
In
a situation such as this, framed by shocking Western complicity on one side and
a massive failure of international institutions fed by U.S. pressure on the
other, South Africa’s initiative at the ICJ may hold significance beyond the
Court’s ultimate decision.
This
case comes in the context of the extraordinary mobilization of protests,
petitions, sit-ins, occupations, civil disobedience, boycotts, and so much more
by human rights defenders, Jewish activists, faith-based organizations, labor
unions, and broad-based movements across the United States and around the
world.
As
such, this move puts South Africa, and potentially the ICJ itself, on the side
of the global mobilization for a ceasefire, for human rights, and for
accountability. One of the most important values of this ICJ petition may
therefore be in its use as an instrument for escalating global civil society
mobilizations demanding their governments abide by the obligations imposed on
all parties to the Genocide Convention.
Predictably,
Israel has already rejected the legitimacy of the case before the Court.
Confident that the U.S. and its allies will not allow Israel to be held
accountable, the Israeli government is defiantly continuing its bloody assault
on Gaza (as well as the West Bank). If Israel and its Western collaborators are
once again successful in blocking justice, the first victims will be the
Palestinian people. Then the credibility of international law itself may be
lost as collateral damage.
But
South Africa’s ICJ action has opened a crack in a 75-year-old wall of impunity
through which a light of hope has begun to shine. If global protests can seize
the moment to turn that crack into a wider portal towards justice, we may just
see the beginnings of real accountability for perpetrators, redress for
victims, and attention to the long-neglected root causes of violence:
settler-colonialism, occupation, inequality, and apartheid.
Palestine:
The Greatest Moral Issue of Our Time
Long before
South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice
on 29 December 2023 over its genocidal war on Gaza, its iconic anti-apartheid
leader, Nelson Mandela, who came to embody the struggle for justice worldwide;
stated, “Palestine was the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Three decades
have passed since Mandela expressed those sentiments. They remain as relevant today as they were
then. Perhaps more so.
Mandela and
fellow Black South Africans finally won their fight against apartheid beginning
in the 1990s. Palestinians, however, have yet to be free from the shackles and
evils of settler-colonial apartheid.
Palestinians
have not lived free in their own country for over 75 years. On 7 October 2023, they refused to live
imprisoned for one more day. And for
three months now, in the rubble of bombed-out buildings in Gaza, they have
challenged the powerful U.S.-Israeli war machines.
American
politicians and U.S. media – themselves under a form of occupation through
intimidation and groupthink – have reluctantly begun to break their silence on
Palestine. They have yet to clearly
state that: Israel is not a democracy,
it is an apartheid entity; it is not a promised land, it is a settler-colonial
project; it is not a nation under siege, it is an aggressor; it is not
defending itself, it is conducting a genocidal war in Gaza.
The American
enablers of Israel continue to call the slaughter of civilians and destruction
of their homes in densely-populated Gaza a “war.” Dropping over 40,000 tons of high explosives,
some weighing 2,000 pounds, capable of killing and wounding people more than
1,198 feet away, must be described for what it truly is – Israel’s quest to
systematically annihilate an entire population.
Seizing a
people’s homeland is comparable to robbing them of their identity, history,
culture and future. All of which Israel has tried to do since it declared
statehood on Palestinian land in 1948.
Through their
ongoing resistance, Palestinians have denied the Zionists their dream of an
“Eretz” Greater Israel. Not on our land,
they say.
Palestinian
identity remained steadfast under Ottoman rule, during the British Mandate from
1922 to 1948 and has grown stronger under Israeli apartheid. They have a deep relationship with the land
of Filastin (Arabic for Palestine), in existence for over 3,000 years. With the introduction of Islam (in 7th
century AD), it has been the nucleus of the Islamic world, a sacred land with
Al-Quds (Jerusalem) its spiritual, geographical and political center.
Creating an
ethno-nationalist state on the ruins of Palestine, as we see in Gaza today, is
not new to the Zionist project.
Statehood at any cost was the primary objective of Israel’s founders,
regardless of the casualties.
The genocide we
are witnessing in Gaza is the culmination of over a century of European
imperialism, European Zionism and American collusion and deception. Expulsion and erasure are entrenched in
Zionist history and is a pervasive sentiment in Israeli society today.
Zionist
colonization and the roots of erasure began with the dissolution of the Ottoman
Empire following the First World War.
After the war, the newly-created League of Nations granted Britain and
France colonial authority (called mandates) over former Ottoman territories.
Under Article 22
of the 1920 Covenant of the League, the Fertile Crescent – present-day Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan (then Transjordan) and Palestine – were to be governed
until such time as they could become independent. All of the mandate countries achieved varying
degrees of independence, except for Palestine.
A small cadre of
influential European Zionists labored to make sure that Palestine remained
under British control, knowing that the British Mandate for Palestine
(officially adopted in 1922) incorporated the principles of the Balfour
Declaration – a 109-word letter, authored by British foreign minister, Arthur
James Balfour, declaring his government’s support for the establishment of a
“national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. From the start, and throughout, the people of
Palestine were never consulted.
The mandate
system specifically stated that the territory entrusted to the mandated power
be developed for the benefit of the native people. In Palestine, however, instead of working in
support of the Palestinians, the British, in collusion with European Zionists,
established the framework and institutions for the creation of an eventual
Jewish state on Palestinian land. For
example, Article 2 of the Mandate reads:
“The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such
political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the
establishment of the Jewish national home….”
Promotion of Jewish immigration into Palestine was also a mandate
provision.
Additionally,
Article 4 recognized the Zionist Jewish
Agency as the public body to advise and cooperate with them (the British) in
the administration of Palestine to affect the Jewish state.
No where in the
mandate’s 28 articles was there any reference to the Palestinians as a people
or to their national or political rights.
The British mandate essentially legalized their erasure.
After years of
conflict, Britain terminated its mandate on 14 May 1948. On that same day, Israel proclaimed its
“independence,” and set in motion its “Plan Dalet” expulsion policy – euphemism
for ethnic cleansing – to destroy Palestinian towns and villages and to
repopulate them with Jews.
Russian-born
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, influential Revisionist Zionist who provided the ideological
map for Israel’s future Likud Party, expressed those same sentiments. Aware of
the financial limitations of European Jewry, Jabotinsky wrote in November 1939 to a fellow party member: “We should instruct
American Jewry to mobilize half a billion dollars in order that Iraq and Saudi
Arabia will absorb the Palestinian Arabs….The Arabs must make room for the Jews
in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to
transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian
Arabs.”
Plan Dalet and
what Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, referred to in 1938 as
“compulsory transfer,” is clearly Israel’s scheme to depopulate Gaza.
Unlike the Nakba
of 1948 when 780,000 Palestinians were violently forced from their ancestral
land, the Israeli regime cannot furtively carry out mass expulsions of Gaza’s
population as it did then. It has,
therefore, resorted to making Gaza uninhabitable and unable to support
life. To destroy the collective memory
of the Palestinians, the Israeli military has obliterated entire neighborhoods,
so there will be nothing recognizable; nothing to return to.
By denying the
people of Gaza food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel, some Israeli
officials, like retired Major General Giora Eiland – who continues to advise
Israel’s defense minister – sees the spread of disease as a tool of war. Eiland callously remarked, “Severe epidemics
in the South of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”
Israel’s plan is
to make life so unbearable, that the people of Gaza will have no choice but to
leave or die. To effect its scheme, the
Israeli regime has been laying the groundwork and attempting to build international
support for permanent mass expulsions of Gaza’s civilians to neighboring Egypt
and Jordan; thus far rejected by both countries.
Although he
later changed course on Israel’s displacement plan, Biden had initially given
Tel Aviv the green light to conduct ethnic cleansing in Gaza. On 11 October, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken confirmed that the administration was working with Egypt and Israel to
create what he called a “humanitarian corridor” in the Sinai for Palestinians
fleeing Gaza. And on 20 October, an
official funding request was sent to Congress to “address potential needs of
Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”
President Biden
is one among many U.S. presidents who have shamelessly and brazenly embraced
Israel. The United States has been
deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes against humanity from the beginning. On 14 May 1948, President Harry S. Truman
hastily issued a statement officially recognizing the new state of Israel – the
first world leader to do so. He released
it to the press without first notifying his top ranking State Department
officials and U.S. delegates to the United Nations.
In the foreword
to Israel Shahak’s 1994 book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Gore Vidal
writes that “John F. Kennedy told me how in 1948 Harry S. Truman had been
pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an
American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard
his whistle-stop campaign train. That’s
why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.”
Since 1948,
influential pro-Israel lobby groups have spent millions of dollars to insure
that U.S. politicians never stray from supporting Israel. Their lobbying has
also come to define the American political landscape. Biden, for example, who prides himself on
being an honorary Zionist, has been the number one recipient of Israel lobby
money. For his implacable support, he
has, since 1990, received $4,346,264 from pro-Israel groups.
While publicly
stating that it has stressed to the Zionist regime the importance of minimizing
civilian casualties, the White House continues to provide the Israeli military
with the bombs it has been using to exterminate an imprisoned population. For the second time in December 2023, Blinken
has approved the “emergency” sale of weapons to Israel; once again bypassing
Congress. Despite civilian deaths
nearing 23,000, with over 57,000 wounded and 24,000-25,000 children made
orphans by Israeli bombs, Blinken approved another “emergency” sale of weapons
amounting to $147.5 million.
Contradicting
his promise to “restore the soul of America,” Biden has thrown the country’s
power and reputation behind the supremacist Israeli regime; a regime determined
to erase the Palestinian people. His
decisions to shield, finance and militarily involve the United States in
Israel’s war crimes are incomprehensible. It is unclear how America’s
short-term, long-term or moral interests are served by Biden’s policies.
Israel’s
barbarity has exposed its “might makes right” ethos, defined in the core
writings of Jabotinsky, who set in motion Israel’s ideology of force. Israel’s war on Gaza has also revealed the
callousness of the U.S. government, well disposed to finance Israel’s genocide.
In his 1923
essay, “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky argued that morality and conscience could
not dictate Zionist policy and that extremism and force were integral to
accomplishing Jewish statehood. His
directive read: “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or
falls by the question of armed force,” and that, “It is important to build, it is important to
speak Hebrew, but unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to
shoot….”
Israel’s birth
certificate has been stained with the blood of Palestinians. It has no place in the Middle East until it
puts down the gun and rejects the ideology of force and exclusion.
For over a
century, Palestinians have endured untold injustices orchestrated by Britain,
Israel and the United States. The
horrific crimes done to them can only be undone when the ongoing Nakba is ended
and their fight against apartheid leads to a free Palestine.
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