October
31, 2023
Gaza’s utter devastation and masses of civilians facing death
from bombardment and deliberate starvation already presents the world with a
spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions
Interior view of the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. (Aseel zm, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Israel’s
systematic and wanton destruction of Gaza has raised long-standing issues of
its political and legal culpability over the treatment of Palestinians to a new
level of seriousness.
It
obviously poses familiar issues of Israeli war crimes, and Amnesty
International had already clearly designated it as such after just the first
week. The human rights organization also asked the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court to “urgently expedite” its investigation of the
aims of all parties.
But
this Israeli campaign now poses the even graver issue of genocide of
Palestinians as a nation. The utter devastation of Gaza and the vast numbers of
civilians facing death from bombardment and from deliberately engineered
starvation and sickness already presents the world with a spectacle of mass
murder of unspeakable proportions.
The
Israelis should face accountability for its crimes.
A
panel of nine distinguished independent experts on human rights who
investigated the Gaza emergency for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council
has just warned that the Israeli campaign of destruction of Gaza poses “a risk
of genocide against the Palestinian people.”
And
there is a long history of genocidal thinking and action behind this “genocidal
moment”. It should be recalled that
during the previous Gaza crisis in 2014, an equally extremist Israeli
government openly threatened genocide against the Palestinians.
Israeli
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked declared on Facebook that “the entire
Palestinian people is the enemy” and
said:
“All
of them are enemy fighters and all of them are bleeding from the head. Now it
also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers
and kisses. They should follow in the footsteps of their sons, there is nothing
fair about that. They have to go, and so does the physical house where they
raised the snake. Otherwise, more small snakes will grow there.”
That
same year, the Likud deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Moshe Feiglin said:
“Gaza
is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Subsequent to the
elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and
will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in
Israel.”
The
present Israeli government — whose extremist right-wing politics resemble those
of the 2014 government — has made no effort to hide its political, genocidal
contempt for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.
Nor
has it hidden the proximate objective of the present campaign, which is to
eliminate Palestinians entirely from Gaza.
Al
Aqsa Flood
The
official reason for the murderous new Israeli campaign against Gaza
Palestinians was Hamas’s “Al Aqsa Flood” operation of Oct. 7, in which
Palestinian commandos invaded kibbutzim near Gaza for the first time, taking
the Israeli security system completely by surprise and inflicting a humiliating
defeat on the government in the eyes of its own citizens.
Hamas
said it was retaliating for hundreds of Israeli settlers who three days earlier
had stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem/al-Quds, the third holiest site in
Islam. Ultranationalist Jews want to
rebuild the Roman-era Jewish temple, destroyed around 70 AD, on the mosque’s site.
The
Hamas operation clearly resulted in the deliberate killing of innocent
civilians by Hamas. But surviving residents say it was the police — not the Hamas raiders — who destroyed many
houses to ensure that everyone inside, both Hamas gunmen and hostages, would be
killed, according to a standard Israeli procedure.
So
the Israeli claim that Hamas killed more than 1,400 civilians in the operation
must now be regarded with skepticism as part of the preparation for the massive
murder to be inflicted on innocent Palestinian civilians in the weeks that
followed.
The
Israeli initial strategy for accomplishing its objective in Gaza appeared to be
to carry out such heavy bombing on civilian targets throughout Gaza that the
Palestinian population would be forced to leave Gaza for Egypt through the
Rafah exit.
But
that plan quickly ran into a serious obstacle that the Israelis apparently had
not anticipated: the Egyptians have adamantly refused to open the exit for a
Palestinian exodus.
The
primary reason for this Egyptian resistance to the Israeli plan is that
appearing to collaborate with an Israeli policy of pushing the entire
Palestinian population out of Gaza would be extremely unpopular with the
Egyptian public, which passionately supports the Palestinian cause.
Egyptian
leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was extremely harsh in his denunciation of the
Israeli Gaza strategy in his joint press appearance with U.S. Secretary of
State Antony Blinken on Oct. 15, declaring that the Israeli air war “went
beyond the right to self-defence, turning into collective punishment for 2.3
million people in Gaza.”
Meanwhile,
el-Sisi was insisting that the Israelis allow the trucks containing
international assistance for displaced Palestinian families to enter the war
zone, while Israel continued to delayed approval for any humanitarian
assistance day after day and to allow only a trickle to enter Gaza.
At
the same time, the Israeli government took the position that Palestinian
civilians have no legal right to protection whatsoever, on the ground that
Hamas is a terrorist organization. That
was the import of remarks by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in
an interview with Britain’s Sky News Oct. 12.
When
asked by a journalist what Israel planned to do about the Palestinian civilians
in Gaza hospitals after it had cut off all fuel supplies on which the hospitals
depended for power, Bennet shouted angrily, “Are you seriously asking me about
Palestinian civilians? What is wrong
with you? Have you not seen what’s
happened? We’re fighting Nazis.”
No
Legal Limits
By
reducing the issue to Israel vs. “Nazis”, the Israeli government has sought to
reject its legal and moral responsibility for humane treatment of civilians, or
to abide by international law regarding its conduct of a war.
Seizing
on the Hamas raid on the kibbutzim, the Israelis hoped to convince their key
foreign allies — the United States and
the major European states — that the Palestinian civilian population has
forfeited all right to protection from Israeli bombing.
Thus
it has made no commitment whatever to any such legal or ethical limits on its
war in Gaza, which should have been recognized immediately as a threat to the
entire civilian population there.
The
Israeli government has not uttered the phrase “collective punishment” in this
phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Nevertheless Israel has carried out systematic punitive home demolitions
as a means of punishing entire communities because of individuals who were
involved in resistance activities.
That
has long been the central Israeli method for dealing with Palestinian
resistance activities, as Human Rights Watch concluded last February.
Israeli
leaders have presented their current war of destruction as a further
application of the same principle, aimed at punishing the Palestinian
population in Gaza for the military operation by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“It
is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric
about civilians not being aware, not involved. … They could have fought against
that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
When
a reporter asked Herzog if he was arguing that the failure of the civilian
population to overthrow the Hamas government made them “legitimate targets”, he
answered, “No, I didn’t say that.” But then he clearly contradicted the denial
by arguing, “When you have a missile in your goddam kitchen and you want to
shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”
There
has never been any evidence, of course, that Hamas missiles have been hidden in
civilian dwellings, nor would it make any military sense for Hamas to do so
under the present circumstances.
The
constant Israeli invocation of “the right to defend ourselves” is obviously
paired silently with the unspoken belief in the right to inflict suffering and
even genocide on the Palestinians. Israel has also been dropping leaflets in
the northern Gaza Strip warning the population.
“Whoever
chooses not to leave north Gaza to the south of Wadi Gaza might be identified
as an accomplice in a terrorist organization”
clearly implies that they are indeed being treated as legitimate targets
for bombing as punishment for the actions of Hamas.
No
less than the former attorney general of Israel has declared unequivocally that
in order to destroy Hamas, “you have to destroy Gaza, because almost every
building there, is a stronghold of Hamas.”
Targeting
hospitals in Gaza poses additional political risks of provoking media and even
potentially U.S. government censure, so Israel has turned to an obvious
disinformation operation to smooth the way.
When
a missile struck the parking lot of the al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, causing
casualties among some of the more than 3,000 people who had sought refuge in
that area, the IDF quickly blamed the explosion on a Hamas rocket that it
claimed had misfired.
The
IDF cited a video supposedly showing the misfired rocket exploding at the
Baptist hospital, as well as what it called an intercepted conversation between
a “former Hamas operative” and a Gaza resident that acknowledging that a
misfired Hamas rocket had landed on the hospital grounds.
Counting
on the US
The
U.S. National Security Council announced its official position that Israel was
innocent of the rocket attack, and the intelligence community obliged by
expressing “high confidence” that it was an errant Palestinian rocket that had
caused the blast.
But
then the Israeli case began to fall apart. BBC reported they could find no
cemetery anywhere near the location from which the IDF claimed the errant
rocket had been fired.
And
The New York Times reported that its own more thorough study of the relevant
videos did not support the U.S.-Israeli case.
Instead it showed that the Palestinian rocket that misfired was “most
likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital,” because it had “actually
detonated in the sky roughly two miles away.”
Nevertheless,
Israel could count on the backing of the Biden administration, which has
provided political-diplomatic cover for Israel to carry out its scorched earth
policy in Gaza since before the visit of President Joe Biden in mid-October.
Biden
and Blinken were reduced to the role of
virtual appendages to the Israel government mouthing the Israeli
propaganda slogan that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, while adding a
reference to the “laws of war” to which the visitors from Washington should
have known perfectly well the Israelis were not paying the least attention.
That
Biden administration’s craven support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza makes
the U.S. complicit not only in Israeli crimes in Gaza but in the crime of
genocide.
Although
the genocide issue has not surfaced yet in the international politics of the
Palestine issue, there is now good reason to expect that it will be raised both
by Arab governments and by human rights organizations in the coming months.
This
is certainly the historical moment to press the case against Israel genocide as
called for by the Genocide Convention itself. The legal requirement for such an
accusation is not proof of the mass murder of millions as was carried out by
Hitler.
It
is sufficient to prove that a state has the “intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” and that it is
“[d]eliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The
war imposed on the Gaza population by Israel obviously qualifies under those
two crucial provisions of the convention.
The
Genocide Convention also provides for finding that a state is guilty of the
crime of “complicity” in genocide, which accurately describes the behavior of
the U.S. government under the Biden administration.
Again
it is not necessary to show that the complicity was motivated by the desire for
the genocide in question but only that genocide could be a foreseeable result
of the actions in question.
The
legal question of genocide will ultimately be decided by the International
Criminal Court or a national court with universal jurisdiction, such as Spanish
courts have assumed in the past. The ICC would no doubt also investigate Hamas’
actions on Oct. 7. The Observer State of Palestine is a member of the ICC and
the prosecutor of that court has an open file on Israel and Palestine.
Both
the United States and Israel are parties to the Genocide Convention, which
makes a campaign to hold them accountable for their respective roles in the
present genocide even more of an urgent moral obligation for people and
organizations of good will.
Gareth Porter is an independent
investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security
policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran
Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
No comments:
Post a Comment