January 16, 2024
As the human
catastrophe in Gaza deepens, Israel and its allies are mobilizing evidence of
sexual violence committed by members of Hamas and other Palestinian militant
groups on October 7 to justify continued military action. When the Security
Council failed to pass a resolution demanding a ceasefire on December 8, Israel
government spokesperson Eylon Levy tweeted: “Thank you to the United States of
America for vetoing a UN Security Council resolution designed to keep Hamas’
rapist regime in power.” In the wake of its case at the International Criminal
Court accusing Israel of genocide Levy accused South Africa of complicity with
a “rapist regime.”
Israeli
politicians are attempting to equate ending the war with support for rape, a
position that appears to be supported, at least implicitly, by many liberal
feminists in Israel and the West. Mobilizing hashtags such as
#MeTooUnlessUrAJew and #BelieveIsraeliWomen, Israel and liberal feminists have
accused the international community, and particularly the United Nations, of
silence in the face of sexual violence. This accusation was formalized on
December 4, when Israel’s mission to the United Nations teamed up with the
World Zionist Organization, Sheryl Sandberg, and others to host an event titled
“Hear Our Voices”. The campaign has continued, using the hashtag
#UnitedAgainstRape, to declare that “all humans everywhere” should “agree on
one thing,” namely, that “rape is never ok.”
Our
understanding of the extent of the violence, sexual and otherwise, committed on
October 7 remains partial and incomplete. While there have been important
questions raised about the evidence presented by Israeli advocates, and
particularly by journalists from the New York Times, that is not a discussion
we directly engage in here. Instead, we intervene in the logic that equates
believing Israeli women and opposing sexual violence with justifying and
supporting Israel’s disproportionate war in Gaza and increasing violence in the
West Bank and East Jerusalem. This logic does nothing to reduce sexual violence
or to provide justice and accountability to victims of that violence. Instead,
it mobilizes sex exceptionalism and selective outrage to further colonial and
racist political systems designed to dispossess and destroy the Palestinian
people.
‘Believe women’:
Ventriloquising Victims
The
#MeTooUnlessUrAJew campaign claims that UN Women is ‘actively and knowingly
working to create a false and insidious narrative’ and ignoring the voices of
Israeli and Jewish women due to antisemitic bias. However, it is not the case
that the United Nations and UN Women ignored the violence of October 7. UN
Women first issued a statement on October 13 condemning attacks on Israeli
civilians and noting its alarm at the ‘devastating impact on civilians
including women and girls’. United Nations bodies collectively have continued
to issue numerous statements warning all parties to adhere to international law
and particularly to avoid violence against civilians, including sexual
violence.
More
significantly, while campaigners decry the alleged failure of the United
Nations to respond to the violence, Israel is refusing to cooperate with United
Nations bodies established to do this. While the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court has met with the families of Israeli hostages held
by Hamas, Israel has declined to cooperate with the Court’s ongoing
investigation into alleged international crimes committed by both Israel and
Hamas since 13 June 2014, including allegations of sexual violence. It has also
refused to cooperate with the Independent International Commission of Inquiry
mandated to investigate all alleged violations of international humanitarian
law and abuses of international human rights law in the occupied Palestinian
territory and Israel ‘leading up to and since 13 April 2021’. While these
investigations pre-date the events of October 7, they provide an
internationally accepted path for the investigation of events on and after that
date.
The charge that
the United Nations is failing to listen to Israeli women elides the fact that,
to date, no women have testified publicly about experiencing sexual violence.
As Israeli advocates have correctly insisted, this doesn’t mean sexual violence
did not occur. Many of the victims of violence on October 7 are dead and will
never be able to tell their stories in their own voices, and others may not
speak publicly for years, if ever. However, we do not honor the voices of those
who may have experienced sexual violence by ventriloquizing them or claiming to
speak on their behalf. This is especially true in a context where independent
investigations are being intentionally frustrated, and where it is not at all
obvious that victims of violence on Oct 7 desire a war of vengeance. As Israeli
hostages being held in Gaza continue to die from violence there, many of their
families are calling for a ceasefire.
Historically,
women have not only been silenced or disbelieved about sexual violence. They
have also been spoken for and instrumentalized, particularly in conflict
situations. For example, in 2011, claims that Viagra had been distributed to
Mohammar Gaddafi’s soldiers to encourage mass rape were widely circulated,
including by the then-United States Ambassador to the United Nations and ICC
Prosecutor, despite an acknowledged lack of victim testimony verifying the
claims. These rumours provided essential context within which Security Council
support for military intervention was generated. They were subsequently
debunked, with an International Commission of Inquiry finding claims of an
overall policy of sexual violence against civilians unsubstantiated, but only
after the war was complete.
‘Believe Women’
does not, and cannot, mean ‘Believe the IDF’, the Israeli police or security
force, or even those who claim to be feminist advocates. As Judith Levine has
suggested, the actual victims of violence on October 7 ‘are disappearing into
propaganda, becoming talking points to legitimize the pain of other women,
children, and men in the killing field on the other side of the fence.’ The
dangers of propaganda are particularly pressing in a conflict that has already
seen eyewitness testimony of atrocities, such as the beheading of over forty
babies, being withdrawn only after being widely circulated and even repeated by
United States President Joe Biden.
In contrast to
calls for swift condemnation and authoritative statements of what happened,
proper investigations that allow victims time and space to speak with adequate
material support and protections take time and are almost impossible in
conditions of active conflict. In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, the
investigation conducted by a Commission of Experts took years and could only
begin once peace was established. By refusing to cease hostilities and allow an
independent investigation conducted in accordance with international standards
of fairness, Israel is prioritising shielding itself from accountability for
its own actions in Gaza. As a result, Israel is deferring and potentially
denying its opportunity for justice and accountability as well as the
opportunity for victims’ voices to be heard on the international stage.
‘Rape is Rape’:
Colonial Logics of Outrage
In contrast to
the work of investigation, advocates such as Hillary Clinton and Sheryl
Sandberg infer that there are only two alternatives: denial or outrage. The
modern history of Western responses to rape in conflict suggests otherwise.
Denials and indifference have co-existed with selective outrage and moral
panic, where allegations of rape have been used to justify military aggression.
During World War II, Nazi propaganda stoked fear of rape by Soviet forces
through racist rhetoric that portrayed Soviet soldiers as ‘barbaric hordes of
Asiatics and their officers Jewish-Bolshevik rapists.’
In colonial
contexts, sexual violence is a frequent trope in ‘atrocity stories’ which
justify the consolidation of colonial power by mobilizing oppositions between
civilized Europeans and barbaric racialized others. For example, British media
covering the 1857 anti-colonial rebellion in India repeatedly reported false,
exaggerated, and sensationalized accounts of sexual violence against English
women. These stories were used to justify widespread retributive violence
against the Indian population generally. As Jenny Sharpe has explained, ‘[w]hen
articulated through images of violence against women, a resistance to British
rule does not look like the struggle for emancipation but rather an uncivilized
eruption that must be contained.’
Similar
narratives have appeared in Western representations of conflict in Africa. As
in India, these representations frequently rely on spectacular narratives of
extreme violence including sexual mutilation. Critical feminist scholars have
critiqued this process, for example, in relation to dominant representations of
the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as overly reliant on
tropes of ‘barbarity, sexual mutilation and cannibalism.’
Israeli
officials have repeatedly cast themselves as defending Western civilisation
from barbaric Palestinians, as documented in South Africa’s genocide case.
Addressing the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the war as
“a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between
humanity and the law of the jungle.” As in the above examples, these depictions
are buttressed through the repetition of spectacular stories, such as the
unsubstantiated account of one eyewitness that a militant cut off a woman’s
breast while raping her, and other militants played with it. Were this
allegation to be proved to the criminal standard, it would undoubtedly
constitute a war crime. But as United Nations experts have recently pointed out,
more investigation is needed to determine whether the contextual requirements
for crimes against humanity were present on October 7. Rather than functioning
as clear evidence of systemic violence, these stories both work within and
reinforce the trope of civilization versus barbarism.
This
civilizational discourse proceeds from a long history of Orientalist Western
imaginings of Arab men as sexually perverted and rapacious, and contemporary
tropes of Arabs and Muslims as sexually violent ‘terrorists’ preoccupied with
white or Western women. Yohai Hakak describes how these stereotypes fuel an
ongoing moral panic within Israel about sexual contact between Palestinian,
especially Muslim, men and Jewish women. The far-right anti-miscegenation
group, Lehava, has organized highly publicized semi-military rescue operations
designed to extract Jewish women living in occupied Palestinian territory, and
has successfully lobbied the National Service Administration to institute a
policy forbidding Jewish women from volunteering during hospital night shifts,
lest they develop relationships with Arab doctors.
The latest step
in this campaign came in July 2023, following a high-profile case in which a
Jewish Israeli woman was raped by a Palestinian man. In response, the Knesset
passed a new law creating a special category of sexual violence: sexual assault
and sexual harassment committed with ‘nationalistic motivations’. These crimes
are now considered ‘sexual terrorism’, prosecutable under the 2016 terrorism
law, making the maximum sentence life imprisonment. These racially targeted
laws were introduced despite vocal opposition from the survivor herself and
from feminist groups who declared that the Parliament was in effect stating
that Israeli survivors of rape by Jewish Israeli men were less deserving of
justice and sympathy. As Dana Frank has argued in Haaretz, the current
mobilization of sexual violence allegations in Israel co-opts feminist language
to advance the Israeli state’s militarist and racist agendas.
‘Just One
Thing’: Sex Exceptionalism and Israeli Exceptionalism
Sheryl Sandberg
has declared in relation to this conflict: ‘No matter what you believe should
happen in the Middle East, what marches you’re attending, or what flag you’re
flying, there’s one thing we can all agree on: rape should never be used as an
act of war’. In making these statements, she is mobilizing an increasingly
common-sense position: that concerns about sexual violence in war should trump
concerns about the wider politics or justice of conflict.
This is a
militarized version of sex exceptionalism – ‘the idea that sex and sexualities
are inherently different from all other human activities and topics of study’.
It is why we treat sexual offences as different and worse than other crimes,
justifying intensely punitive responses. In the context of war, sexual violence
allegations are used to bolster public support for hostility. Karen Engle notes
that since the 1990s, ‘rape has come to be one of the most commonly invoked
reasons for use of force’.
Sex
exceptionalism facilitates Israeli exceptionalism, justifying Israel’s right to
violently avenge attacks on Israeli women and girls without being limited by
international law. Each reiteration that sexual violence by Hamas was
‘unprecedented in its cruelty’ encourages the world to accept the scenes of
devastation in Gaza. Sex exceptionalism insists that we agree on ‘just one
thing’ while we agree to disagree on collective punishment, starvation, and the
annihilation of the inhabitants of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Ironically, far
from working to reduce sexual violence, this logic supports the production of
more violence which disproportionately affects women and girls. As Janet Halley
has warned, ‘the intensive and specific prohibition of rape can weaponise it…
its special legality could power up another rape-driven, rape-repeating war.”
The fact that Israel’s siege on Gaza increases the already-heightened
vulnerability of Palestinian women and girls to sexual violence was a key
feature of the UN Women reports that Israeli advocates found so objectionable.
The focus on
spectacular sexual violence also backgrounds the widespread sexual violence
committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the everyday functioning of
the occupation. Rather than occurring in battle, this violence takes place in
“less visible spaces, such as prisons, courtrooms, and investigation rooms”
making it easier to ignore and erase. The case of an IDF Civil Administration
officer convicted of repeatedly exploiting his position of power to rape and
coerce sexual acts from Palestinians, made public in 2021, is only one example
among many.
Even when these
stories reach mainstream media, they almost never become the subject of
international outrage. On December 4, Josh Paul, a US State Department employee
who resigned over US arms sales to Israel spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
He revealed that the State Department had received credible evidence from a
Palestinian charity of the rape of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy in Israeli
detention. According to Paul, when the State Department reported the allegation
to Israel, the IDF declared the charity a terrorist organization, raided its
offices, and seized its computers. Even in an environment of intense media
attention on Israel/Palestine and the question of sexual violence, Paul’s
account has not generated condemnation, or even much attention.
The failure to
condemn or even register sexual violence against Palestinians persists despite
extensive evidence, including numerous first-person testimonies of sexual
violence in Israeli detention. The Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights reports that between October 7 and December 27,
2023 the Internal Security Force carried out mass arrests involving sexual and
gender-based violence such as genital beatings, forced nudity captured on
video, sexual slurs, and threats of rape. Reports such as this are now
accompanied by an extensive photo and video archive circulated by Israeli
forces of Palestinian men and boys tied up, blindfolded, and semi-naked. In
some cases, the IDF has confirmed that the majority of these men are civilians.
As Israel stands
formally accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, we cannot
allow select and spectacular allegations of wartime rape to be the ‘only thing’
we all agree on. Any feminism worth its name must refuse to accept the bombing of
civilians, forcible transfer and denial of food, water and medicine to be
justified as avenging sexual violence. Even more, we must seek to prevent
further violence, sexual and otherwise, and this must mean reckoning with the
everyday violence of occupation that preceded October 7.
Food as a Weapon of
War: The Crime of Starvation in Gaza
On October 7, 2023, the day after
Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians, the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant,
announced a “complete siege” on already besieged Gaza that often described as
the “largest open-air prison” with 2.2 million people squeezed into a small
tract of land that had been under a cripplint blockade since 2007. All life
support of the Gaza Strip, such as, electricity, food, fuel, clean water, and
medicine that was coming from outside before the war, were cut off by
government decree. Gallant did not hesitate to use genocidal language,
dehumanizing Gazans, calling them “human animals.” Then he added: “No
humanitarian aid will be allowed into Gaza.” Since then several of high level
governmental officials did not hesitate using similar statements reminding
Gazans live suports will not be restored unless Hamas is compilitily
eliminated, the aim that has no realistic end result.
This collective punishment of Gazans
is itself constitutes a war crime. They were utterly unprotected, squeezed in a
small, crowded place with nowhere to go, no safe place to shelter, no food, no
clean water, bakeries, hospitals, UN Buildings and schools were being
constantly bombed.
The death toll is over 24,000,
and about half of Gaza’s 2.2 million
people are children. As of early January 11, 2024 over 10,000 Palestinian
children have been killed in Gaza, thousands remain missing, and more are are
injured. It is estimated that one Palestinian child is killed every 15 minutes.
Young children that are still alive, between 0 to 2 unable to survive lengthy
periods of hunger are suffering the most.
Since October 7, more than 85% of
the population in Gaza have been
forcefully removed from the North to the South, further back and forth.
The massive distraction of every basic necessities created irreversible humanitarian
catastrophe. The Secretary General of
the UN, Antonio Guterres calls it: “humanities’ catastrophe, not humanitarian
catastrophe” making a point that international community failed gravely failed
to stop the Israeli atrocity. Gazans
live on tents, partly destroyed school
buildings, or on streets without any shelter in the cold and wet weather. When
rain arrived, broken sewage canals spilled over streets and floors of
buildings. A life threatening water borne infectious diseaases started taking
toll on children and elderly. Even before the war, Access to water was very limited in Gaza, now
it severely constranied, as only one aquifer is functioning. Peoples are
surviving less than 2 liters per person per day, falling short by 15 liters of
the basic survival level water requirement as per the Sphere Standards.
One of the Gaza residents explaining
their conditions as: “If we don’t die from bombing, for sure, we will die from
starvation, or diseases.” In late November, a spokesperson for the World Health
Organization, repeated the same dire conditions: “Without urgent action to
repair the Gaza Strip’s rapidly collapsing health system, more people would
soon die from diseases than from Israel’s bombings. There are no medicines, no
vaccination activities, no access to safe water and hygiene and no food. The
United Nations World Food Program (WFP) reported on December 6 that 9 out of 10
households in Northern Gaza and 2 out of 3 households in Southern Gaza had
spent at least one full day and night without food.
”The most recent report of the WHO
show that humanitarian crisis unfolds in Gaza an umprecendented 93 % population
is now grappling with crisis level hunger characterized by insufficient food
and alarming rates of malnutrition and dire consequences predicted for the
health of the population, especially among vulnerable groups such as children,
pregnant and breatsfeeding women, and the elderly. The recent estimates from
the Integrated Food Security Face Classification (IPC) reveals that the risk of
famine loom larger each day, underscoring the urgent need for immeditae
intervention. The WHO staff reports a heartbreaking scenario that people come
to hospital not for the medicine but hoping for food. Ironically in the digital age, we are
watching daily the horrors of the war in real-time in our living rooms.
Crime of Starvation
There are sufficient international
law norms to prosecute Israel’s action in Gaza including war crimes, crimes
against humanity, crimes of starvation and specifically the widely ratified
Genocide Convention of 1948 are available to hold individuals accountable for
the indiscriminately attacking civilians, bombing hospitals, and schools.
More specifically, Israel’e action
clearly and squerlly constitutes a “crime of starvation,” by way of blocking
access to food and clean water as a weapon of war, denying and blocking
humanitarian aid, bombing bakeries, food distribution places, depriving the
civilan population of objects indispensable to their survival, and even
destroying Gaza’s agricultural land to dirt, proven by the Human Rights Watch
satellite images.
In conflict zones, more civilians
were killed because of hunger and diseases than by weapons in battle
ground. In Gaza, there is no battle
ground, everywhere is battle ground, and as one of the Israeli military leaders
said: “There is no innocent civilians in Gaza!” This statement itself carries
an ‘intent’ to eliminate entire Gazans that consitutes crime of genocide
conducted against entire population.
Starvation kills people slowly.
Besides immediate impact of the war on civilians while the hot war is still
going on, there is also, deeper and longer impact of starvation on young
children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people that already sick or have
underlying conditions. It is a crime that its damages has a traumatizing impact
on the generation to come. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) report shows
that the impact of a short period of severe hunger (two or three weeks) on
children between 0 to 2 years old have a long-lasting effect on physical,
emotional and intellectual development. Even war ends today, the impact of
destruction of Gaza’s food systems on current and generation to come will have
a devastating impact on young generation. We might not to see immediately the
importance of such a longer and deeper impact of severe malnutrition on
vulnerable groups in Gaza War now, because current situation is dire and
bloody. Therefore, there is an urgent need for immediate seize fire. it seems helpful
to articulate the Israeli crime of starvation against Gaza people while it is
happening now, with the hope of changing Israeli behavior, which could stop the
devastation of this grave violation of human rights, and threat to life with
lasting effect. Documenting of the starvation during the war is also vitally
important to collect proof for the post conflict judication.
Plenty of crime, but no remedy
Although since the begining of the
war, international law principles were mentioned by all parties, it is rather
confusing for non-legal experts to grasp it, and evaluate effectiveness. There
are various legal remedies to account the perpetretors in case of severe human
righst violations, and protection of civialns during the war. In ideal world, international humanitarian
law is designed to regulate war, protect civilians, stop war crimes.
International human righst law obliges states protect peoples livelihood, such
as right to food, housing, health and education, in times of peace and war. As
an occupying power, Israel is obligated to respect, protect, and fulfill all
peoples’ rights who live under the occupation. International criminal law
prosecute and punish perpetrators of war crimes, and grave violations of human
rights through the judicial institutions. Nevertheless we are not living in a
world that all these rules properly and indiscriminately implemented, and
perpetretors were punished.
As Palestinian legal scholar, and
human righst activist Noura Erakat said in an inerview that: “there is plenty of crimes is unfording in
Palestine, especially the crime of apartheid: a sustained 75 years of settler
colonial removal, 56 years of occupation, and 16 years of siege. Apartheit is
and will continue to be, the geratest crime against humanity.” But the reality
is these criminal allegations in the absence of the political will not allow
pursue the remedy. Since the Gaza conflict started, the UN Security Council was
not able to have a resolution of seize fire to avoid humanitarian catastrophe
this one-sided, disproportionate, illegal reoccupation and unfolding genocide
of the 21st century because of the US veto power. Moreover, the US and the UK should
be accountable along the Israel in these crimes by providing weapons,
intelligence, and funding around $3.6 billion a year. However, all these international law remedies
just a distant dream not a remedy, despite majority of the world is sided with
Palestine.
In concluding, starvation and famine
are large-scale violations of the right to food that can adversely affect
entire societies while at the same time severely harming individuals and their
families. Considering the current condition to slash toward to famine in Gaza,
there is a need for a global binding convention that gives States and
international community clear legal mandates to prevent famine. Formal
recognition of famine as a crime will impede the tendency of Governments “to
hide behind the curtain of necessity of military operation, self-defense, or
state sovereignty to use hunger as a genocidal weapon.”
We Must Apply MLK’s
Fierce Critique of Apartheid to Israel’s War on Palestine
In September, 1963, Ku Klux Klan
terrorists hid dynamite in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The explosion killed
four Black girls and wounded 20 more. Windows were blown. People dug through
the rubble. Later, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the eulogy: “They died
nobly. They are the modern heroines of a Holy Crusade for freedom and human
dignity.”
Sixty-one years later, the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) bomb Gaza as collective punishment for the Hamas-led
attacks of October 7. Children are found dead in the debris, many horribly
dismembered, just like the Black girls killed by the KKK’s bombing in 1963. Men
are shot in front of their families. At night, Gaza descends into blackness lit
by IDF missile strikes. Fires blaze. Innocents die.
This year, as we honor King’s legacy
of struggle on the anniversary of his birth, it’s impossible to witness the
genocide in Gaza without drawing on King’s insights to recommit to confronting
the violence of ethnonationalism. In order to follow King’s footsteps, we must
now intensify civil disobedience to force a ceasefire in Gaza, dismantle the
Israeli occupation of Palestine and defund the extreme right Israeli government
in pursuit of Palestinian liberation and equal rights for all.
Beyond the Mountaintop
“Oppressed people cannot remain
oppressed forever,” King wrote in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “The
yearning for freedom manifests itself.” In it, he cites St. Thomas Aquinas,
Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and Socrates. It isn’t name dropping. King is
telling the reader these ideas guide the civil rights movement because they
transcend it. Justice based not on power or violence but on human
interconnectedness creates the most powerful change. Yet how do we critically
engage with King’s legacy, today? How does it help up navigate the Israeli
genocide of Gaza?
At first, it seems a dead end. King
did not put Palestine at the center of his sermons or writings or protests.
Even when he gave the controversial “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the
Silence” speech in April 1967, which blasted the United States’s “madness” as
“our bombs now pummel [their] land,” he did not mention the Nakba, the ethnic
cleansing of roughly 750,000 Palestinians when Israel declared statehood in
1948. To be sure, in 1968, 10 days before his murder, King told a rabbinical
gathering, “I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great
outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be
done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood
and democracy.” So, there’s that.
A few reasons are given for King’s
inconsistency. The cynical one was that some U.S. Jews who espoused Zionism
supported the civil rights movement, and he courted them. A less cynical one is
the crisis in Palestine seemed farther away and not directly caused by the
U.S., unlike the Vietnam War. King focused on his duty as a citizen. Maybe the
open wound of the Holocaust obscured his view of the full picture, pushing
toward the illusion of Israel as a safe haven for a long persecuted people. We
can never truly know.
In the end, King’s principles are what
can truly guide us. They formed early. As a boy in 1930s Atlanta, “white only”
signs stung his eyes. White friends he played with cut him off. As a teen, he
was forced to stand so white people could sit for a 90-minute bus ride to
Atlanta. Later he wrote, “I was tired, but that wasn’t the point. It was the
humiliation.” Day-in and day-out, King felt countless cuts to the soul. The
“boy” this. The “n*****” that. Lynching haunted the South. Terror was as close
as a wrong turn on a dirt road.
Just as important as the racism he
endured were ideas that transformed it into a larger vision. King traveled from
Morehouse, to Crozer Theological Seminary, to Boston University. He devoured
books. He dove into ancient Greece, especially Socrates. He read philosophers
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. He studied theology. King saw we
are deeply split and forever flawed. Each one of us has a seed of evil and a
seed of grace. Forgiveness gives what is good in us a chance to take root —
hopefully to blossom into something beautiful, something human.
King’s turn to nonviolence was
grudging. The man packed a gun! Pacifist organizer Bayard Rustin introduced him
to nonviolence. On a 1959 trip to India, King learned of Mahatma Gandhi’s
Satyagraha or “hold to truth” and the use of nonviolent civil disobedience to
end British colonization. The core truth was that means and ends are
inseparable. No matter how just a fight, violence begets violence. Satyagraha
or as King called it, “Soul Force” was the renunciation of force to peacefully
resist oppression, even if it meant suffering. The goal was to purify victim
and victimizer of hatred.
King testified to this transformation
in a 1958 essay, “My Pilgrimage to Non-Violence.” He wrote, “As I delved deeper
into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love
gradually diminished.… I discovered the method for social reform that I had
been seeking.”
Footprints in the Sand
“Free! Free Palestine,” I chanted on
the Brooklyn Bridge this October, shouting in unison with thousands of mostly
young protesters. Queer and straight, Jewish and Arab, all united. The march
was a swiftly moving river. The air shook. We carried the name of Palestine
loudly into Manhattan. Cars honked in solidarity. Strangers cheered.
Protests have roiled cities across the
world. In Ireland, pro-Palestinian marches filled Belfast. At the Eiffel Tower
in Paris and the Sydney Opera House in Australia, crowds unfurled Palestinian
flags in solidarity and called for a ceasefire. After a holiday lull, the
protests picked up steam. The IDF’s genocide in Gaza has left 23,357 dead,
which is 1 percent of the total population — 1 out of every 100 people. By time
you read this, it will be higher.
As the bodies pile, so does global
outrage. South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel in the International
Court of Justice. Also fueling the outrage are extreme right cabinet members in
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government who call for Palestinians in
Gaza to be expelled to Egypt and Israelis to take their land. One even proposed
to nuke Gaza. Israelis support the current bombing campaign by a ratio of two
to one, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. The outnumbered objectors
are left-wing and Palestinian citizens of Israel. This means the slaughter of
innocent civilians, whether through explosives, disease or starvation, can go
on for a long, long time.
Walking in King’s footsteps means
going beyond his limits. To choose nonviolent, civil disobedience means
accepting the truth in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that, “Oppressed people
cannot remain oppressed forever” and, “If his repressed emotions do not come
out in these non-violent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of
violence. That is not a threat; it is a fact of history.” First, we must accept
that the Hamas attacks of October 7 were part of a larger history of violence
that began in Europe. The Holocaust led to the Nakba, which led to the
Intifadas. The centuries-long hatred visited upon Jews made them swear to never
again be victims, even if that meant stealing land from Palestinians and
turning them into a permanent underclass.
I believe choosing Satyagraha would
mean condemning all attacks on civilians — including Israel’s ongoing rapid
genocide against Palestinians and 75-year history of colonial violence, which
has included horrific gender-based violence and rape. It includes the
bulldozing of homes. It includes the checkpoints, the humiliations, the open
racism.
I believe choosing Satyagraha would
mean condemning Hamas’s shooting, kidnapping of civilians and alleged rapes. I
take seriously King’s 1967’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community. He
wrote, “I could imagine nothing more impractical and disastrous than for any of
us, through misguided judgment, to precipitate a violent confrontation…We had
neither the resources or techniques to win.” Which was true then for Black
America is true now for Hamas. A deeper reason than battlefield tactics exist.
In King’s “My Pilgrimage to Non-Violence,” wrote, “It is better to be the
recipient of violence than the inflictor of it, since the latter only
multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the
former…bring about a transformation and change of heart.”
We face a question. Is Satyagraha even
possible? Palestinian are being slaughtered. Are they just supposed to die to
create possible shame in right-wing Israelis, when prominent officials like
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls them “human animals”? The Israeli right
will exterminate or expel them. In the face of genocide, it is not our place to
admonish Palestinians.
For those us in the U.S., choosing
Satyagraha means defining Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as genocide.
It means escalating civil disobedience, putting on pressure to stop the flow of
money and weapons from the U.S. to Israel. It means recommitting wholeheartedly
to the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. It means using media to
relentlessly share testimony from Palestinians in Gaza. It means using our
position in the U.S. empire, of which Israel is a satellite, to build public
solidarity with Palestinians, and much more.
In King’s “A Time to Break Silence”
speech, he described war as a “demonic, destructive suction tube,” sucking
money and men into death. Today, Israel’s genocide of Gaza threatens to ignite
a regional war that will sweep Iran, Hezbollah and the U.S. into a tornado of
violence. Add to that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Add to that
the many other conflicts already blazing across the globe.
Think of our military technology.
Think of the thousands of nuclear missiles in their silos. Think of the bombs
ready to be dropped. Think of the endless bullets and the endless guns, waiting
to be deployed against oppressed populations.
What path can save us from ourselves?
What path can save Gaza?
From MLK Jr. and Bull
Connor to Gaza and Indiana University
We are in very familiar waters when
authorities hide behind claims of "public safety" to punish human
rights defenders or criminalize dissent.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is
always a time to reflect on the man himself—a great man, and a very human
one—on his colleagues, and on their accomplishments.
It is also a time to reflect on the
violence and injustice that he and his colleagues faced as they sought to bring
down a violent and unjust form of racial segregation and White supremacy.
This year my thoughts have turned to
a man who once stood tall and proud as a symbol of the social order King
challenged. History has not treated him kindly. But his story is nonetheless
central to the story of civil rights.
Theophilis Eugene Connor was for
over two decades the Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama. Better
known by his nickname, “Bull,” he enforced law and order throughout his city
with an iron fist. During the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1963
Birmingham campaign, named “Project C” for “Confrontation,” he distinguished
himself by patrolling the city in his tank, turning water hoses and police
attack dogs on crowds of peaceful protesters that included children, filling
his jail cells far beyond capacity, and doing it all as a proud defender of law
and order.
He is justly remembered for his
racism, his violence, and his hostility to King.
But it is worth recalling that he
was a respected man in his community who was returned to office many times, an
upstanding White citizen committed to public service and to the
Constitution—which he saw as an instrument of Jim Crow racism and “state’s rights.”
The most extraordinary thing Bull
Connor ever did was to arrest Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is tempting to imagine that he
arrested King for speaking out or protesting against racial segregation. But
that would be mistaken. He arrested King for leading a public march without a
proper permit, and for disobeying a court injunction that his organization
cease gathering in public without a proper permit.
Connor was protecting public safety
as he understood it, in the face of a group determined to assemble on and march
down public streets even if those in authority refused to recognize their right
to do this and sought to prevent them from doing so.
The official rationale was not
“Black people do not have the right to protest.”
The official rationale was “no group
has the right to protest without a properly authorized permit, and it just so
happens that these Black people have never quite managed to properly obtain the
proper permit.”
The attack dogs, the water hoses,
the manifest cruelty—these things rightly shocked the conscience of the nation
(though not so much the conscience of White Southern society). These are the
things we remember today. But we must also remember that, however cruel and
bombastic was Connor, he was doing his job as the rules required him to do.
This must never be forgotten.
Ever since the French Revolution’s
infamous Committee on Public Safety, authorities acting in the name of the
common good have all too invoked “public safety” to justify the violent
repression and imprisonment, and more commonly the harassment and firing, of
dissenters. Under Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it was
common for activists critical of the regime to be arrested for illegal public
gatherings that supposedly posed a threat to the safety of the community. In
1953, the South African apartheid regime passed its infamous “Public Safety
Act” designed to tamp down on public gatherings and peaceful protests by the
African National Congress.
While “the right of the people
peaceably to assemble” is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment,
even here, under a supposed “constitutional democracy,” it has been
exceptionally difficult for dissenters to actually secure unhindered access to
public space. The reason: because it has been exceptionally easy for those in
power to exploit common-sense procedures, like obtaining a simple permit, in
order to prevent “troublesome” or “radical” public gatherings from taking
place. All in the name of public safety.
King, in his rightly celebrated
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” understood this well:
“Sometimes a law is just on its face
and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge
of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an
ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes
unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the
First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”
Now, even as we celebrate King,
those in authority all too often fail to heed his admonitions. Instead they
follow the script of his critics, adversaries, and attackers. Like those
criticized in his powerful “Letter,” they preach abject submission to the rules
as those in power understand them, and stand ready to punish those who refuse.
On campuses across the country, the
technical procedures for obtaining proper event permits, combined with appeals
to “public safety,” are being used by higher university administrators to crack
down on pro-Palestinian advocacy. In recent weeks my university, Indiana
University, has twice done this. First it suspended a tenured professor,
Abdulkader Sinno, because the Palestine Solidarity Committee he advises, when
denied space authorization on flimsy and obstructive grounds, went forward with
a public talk that proceeded without incident—except for the suspension. Then
it canceled a long-planned arts exhibit featuring the work of world-famous
artist Samia Halaby, a Palestinian woman who speaks out on behalf of
Palestinian rights. For both the suspension and the cancellation, the rationale
was the same: the university’s commitment to “public safety” left it no choice.
The Oxford English Dictionary
defines “prevarication” as “avoidance of straightforward statement of the
truth; equivocation, evasiveness, misrepresentation; deceit; an instance of
this.”
There is no better word to describe
what is going on right now at Indiana University, Columbia University, and
other universities and colleges across the country, where administrators in
love with their own power invoke procedural technicalities and logistical
concerns to restrict public criticism of Zionism and pro-Palestinian advocacy.
They claim to be protecting campus safety and public tranquility. But, as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed centuries ago in his classic, On the Social
Contract: “Tranquility is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make
them desirable places to live in?”
From Gaza to Congo: On Zionism and the Unlearned History of
Genocide
Thousands
of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are
connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses would
fail to explain.
On
January 3, it was revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin
Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to
African countries, in exchange for a fixed price.
The
discussion on expelling millions of Gazans has supposedly entered the
mainstream thinking in Israel starting on October 7. But the fact that this
discussion remains active over three months since the start of the Israeli war
on Gaza indicates that the Israeli proposals are not an outcome of a specific
historical moment, for example, Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
Even
a quick glance at Israeli historical records point to the fact that the mass
expulsion of Palestinians – known in Israel as ‘Transfer’ – was, and remains, a
major Israeli strategy which aims at fixing Israel’s so-called ‘demographic
problem’.
Long
before fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian movements
stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on October 7, Israeli
politicians discussed, in fact on many occasions, how to reduce the overall
Palestinian population to maintain the demographic Jewish majority in historic
Palestine.
The
idea was not only confined to Israel’s extremists, but was discussed even by
the likes of former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman when he
suggested in 2014 a proposal for ‘population exchange plan’.
Even
supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this idea, both
in principle and practice.
A
top Israeli historian, Benny Morris, has regretted in an interview with the
liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2004, that Israel’s first Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba –
the catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation
of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages.
Another
proof that the idea of ‘Transfer’ was not concocted on the spur of the moment
is the fact that comprehensive plans were immediately produced after October 7.
They include a position paper published by the Israeli think tank the ‘Misgav
Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy’ on October 17 and a
report released three days later by the Israeli news outlet, Calcalist, which
outlined a document proposing the same strategy.
The
fact that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately
declared their total rejection of expelling Palestinians indicates the degree
of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals.
“Our
problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are
working on it,” Netanyahu said on January 2.
These
comments were followed by others, including a statement by Israeli Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich when he said “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip
is to encourage emigration.”
It
was then that the Israeli official discourse adopted the term ‘voluntary
migration’. But there is nothing voluntary about the starvation of 2.3 million
Palestinians, who continue to face an ongoing genocide, and are being pushed
systematically toward the border region between Gaza and Egypt.
In
its legal case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the government of
South Africa included the planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Tel Aviv as one
of the main points listed by Pretoria, accusing Israel of genocide.
Due
to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel Western countries, Israeli
diplomats are circumventing the globe looking for governments which are willing
to accept ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
Imagine
if this behavior stemmed from any other country in the world; a country that
murders people en masse, yet shops around looking for other states to accept
the expelled survivors in exchange for cash.
Not
only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but they have also set
whole new standards of despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in the world,
in any time in history, ancient or modern.
And
yet, the world continues to watch, support, as in the case of the US, or gently
or vehemently protest, but without taking a single meaningful action to stop
the bloodbath in Gaza, or to block the terrifying scenarios that could truly
follow if the war does not end.
But
there is one thing that many people might not know, the Zionist movement, the
very ideological institution that established Israel had attempted to move the
world’s Jewery to Africa, to establish a state, prior to the choice of
Palestine as the ‘Jewish homeland’.
This
was called the ‘Uganda Scheme’ of 1903. It was raised by Theodor Hertzl, the
founder of Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist Congress. It was based on a proposal
put forth by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.
The
Uganda Scheme eventually fell through, but the Zionists continued to shop for
some other place, finally, to the misfortune of the Palestinians, settling on
Palestine.
If
one is to compare the genocidal language of Israeli leaders of today, study
their racist references to Palestinians, one is to locate a major overlap
between their collective perception and the way that Jewish communities were
perceived by Europeans for hundreds of years.
The
sudden Zionist interest in Congo as a potential ‘homeland’ for Palestinians
further illustrates the point that the Zionist movement continues to live in
the shadow of its own history, projecting the racism practiced against Jews in
Israel’s own racism against innocent Palestinians.
On
January 5, Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu proposed that Israelis
“must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” One does not need
to struggle to find historical references of similar language, used by German
Nazis in their depiction of Jews in the early half of the 20th century.
If
history does repeat itself, it has an odd, and unkind way of doing so.
We
have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of previous
wars, including the Holocaust and other WWII atrocities. Yet, it seems that the
lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is Israel now assuming the role
of the mass killer but the rest of the Western world continues to play the role
assigned to them in this historical tragedia. They are either cheering,
politely protesting, or doing nothing at all.
Judging Genocide
U.S.
allies’ fear of backing the genocide charge against Israel reaches all the way
to Australia, reports Kellie Tranter.
Australia
has finally made clear its official position on the genocide case brought by
South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The
Hague.
Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese during a radio interview on Monday ruled out
Australia as a participant in the ICJ process, saying: “We need to have a
pathway to security and peace…Not any court case.”
While
the government may nominally support a peace in Gaza, it’s not so far been
backed by substantial actions. And statements from the leadership provide
little confidence in their stance.
Infamously,
in October, Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined to condemn from afar Israel’s
order for a “total siege” and to cut food and water supplies from Gaza. Wong
said: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here, to make judgements
about what security approach other countries take.”
The
government of South Africa’s 84-page application to the World Court — titled,
“Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)” — includes nine pages of
evidence of genocidal intent, including statements from Israeli decision makers
and military officials.
The
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) previously said that,
“it was aware of the proceedings but that it was not appropriate to comment on
matters before the court.”
This
stands in stark contrast to another recent analogous Australian government
stance. In September 2023, Australia joined with 31 other countries intervening
before the ICJ in support of Ukraine’s case alleging Russia had violated the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
At
this point, however, the Australian government hasn’t taken its usual course to
join in the statements of the United Kingdom and United States about the lack
of merit of the proceedings. But the pressure on Australia has been
considerable.
Israel’s
Urgent Cable
A
recently leaked “urgent” cable from the Israeli Foreign Ministry has confirmed
it has instructed its embassies worldwide, including the Israeli Embassy in
Canberra, to press diplomats and politicians in their host countries to issue
statements against South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice.
The
Jan. 4 cable states that Israel’s “strategic goal” is for the ICJ to reject the
request for an injunction, refrain from determining that Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza, and recognize that the Israeli military is operating in the
Strip according to international law.
The
Foreign Ministry instructed the Israeli embassy in Canberra, and other
capitals, to ask diplomats and politicians at the highest level “to publicly
acknowledge that Israel is working to increase the humanitarian aid to Gaza, as
well as to minimize damage to civilians, while acting in self defense after the
horrible October 7th attack by a genocidal terrorist organization.”
The
embassy cable even dictates the possible words for a public statement from the
Canberra government:
“We ask for an immediate and
unequivocal public statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly
state that YOUR COUNTRY rejects the outrageous, absurd and baseless allegations
made against Israel.”
Declassified
Australia has attempted to clarify Australia’s position by specifically asking
the Department of Foreign Affairs for the government’s position in relation to
rulings of the ICJ being binding.
On
Saturday, a Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade spokesperson responded
that,
“As the principal judicial organ of
the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) plays a critical
role in upholding international law and the rules-based order. Australia respects the independence of the
ICJ and the judicial process. Judgments of the ICJ are binding on the
parties to a case.” [Emphasis added]
If
that is the case and the ICJ, as expected, makes interim orders in the
proceedings directing Israel to desist in its military activities in Gaza, then
a necessary corollary of the Australian government’s stated position must be
that it immediately cease any activity that provides material or other support
for the prohibited activity.
To
do otherwise would contradict its stated position of respect for ICJ
determinations.
The
Australian government has been put into a difficult position by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has made a public declaration that he will
ignore any interim measures imposed by the ICJ that interfere with Israel’s
planned operations.
In
televised remarks Netanyahu said, “No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the
axis of evil and not anyone else.”
Australia,
which professes to support an international rules-based order, has at least
acknowledged the gravity of the destruction, maiming and mass murder occurring
in Gaza.
How
it can now express its respect for the decisions of the ICJ, while maintaining
its support for Israel, without a gross contradiction and hypocrisy, is not
certain.
The
signs by Australia are not entirely positive. Australia has already shown close
support militarily for the Israeli assault and bombardment of the Palestinians
in Gaza.
Supporting
Israel’s Assault
Declassified
Australia has documented the provision of essential components of the F-35 jet
fighter being used to bomb civilians in Gaza. The government has supported more
than 70 Australian companies being awarded “over $4.13 billion in global
production and sustainment contracts through the F-35 program to date.”
In
November, just a month into the conflict, Declassified Australia exclusively
revealed the vital intelligence and targeting role being played by the Pine Gap
U.S.-Australian surveillance base (JDFPG) in collecting an enormous range of
communications and electronic intelligence from the battlefield and providing
this to the Israel Defence Forces.
Foreign
Minister Visiting Gaza Region
Over
the coming days, Wong, the foreign affairs minister, is visiting Jordan,
Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the United Arab Emirates
(U.A.E.). The minister confirmed in her press release on Monday that in her
engagement with Israel’s officials,
“[I will] convey Australia’s support
for Israel’s security and its right to defend itself in the face of terrorism,
while stressing that the way it does so matters.
“I will reaffirm Australia’s call for
the immediate and unconditional release of hostages and meet with the families
of hostages and survivors of the terror attacks on Oct 7. I will be joined by
Australia’s Humanitarian Coordinator and will discuss practical ways to support
an increased and more effective flow of humanitarian assistance.
“I will make clear Australia’s support
for Palestinians’ right to self-determination and commitment to meeting
humanitarian need in Gaza and the West Bank with officials in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. I will meet with representatives of communities
affected by settler violence and reaffirm our view that settlements are illegal
under international law. I will also emphasise Australia’s opposition to the
forcible displacement of Palestinians and our view that Gaza must no longer be
used as a platform for terrorism.”
Given
that the foreign minister speaks for the country, she also needs to make clear
that supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza is causing division in, and
consequently a diminution of, Australia’s civil society.
She
ought to also warn Israel that in the absence of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza
or non-compliance with any findings of the ICJ, Australia’s support is
politically unsustainable and will be withdrawn.
Support
for Bombing Yemen
It
is unfortunate that Minister Wong arrives in the Middle East without any moral
authority, particularly on the back of Australia’s ill-advised support for the
bombing of Yemen and Australia’s long-standing involvement in the U.S.-led
Saudi-U.A.E. coalition war against Yemen.
Australia’s
military has close links with the military of U.A.E., which is fighting the war
in Yemen that has seen the deaths of over 377,000 people. It’s been previously
revealed Australia has approved dozens of Australian ex-soldiers joining the
U.A.E. military and its special forces commander heading the U.A.E.’s elite
Presidential Guard.
Many
Member States, including Switzerland, made it clear during last Friday’s United
Nations Security Council briefing that U.N. Resolution 2722 did not authorise
the use of force against Yemen, may potentially undermine the peace process in
the impoverished nation of Yemen, risks destabilising the entire region, and
fails to acknowledge the root cause of the problem, namely the Israel/Palestine
crisis.
Australia’s
support for and involvement in its AUKUS partners’ actions was concealed from
the Australian public until after the first round of bombings on Jan. 12.
No
details were provided about the precise role of the Australians deployed to the
U.S. operational headquarters in Doha.
The
secrecy and suspect legality of the U.N.-unauthorised bombings raises serious
questions about what Australians can expect from its AUKUS partnership itself
and what they might be roped into as a result of that quasi-alliance.
Genocide
Convention Obligations
Hanging
over the Australian government too is the fact that it is a party to the
Genocide Convention and has an obligation to take affirmative action to prevent
genocide.
If
the ICJ finds a prima facie case that it has jurisdiction to hear the case,
government lawyers will need to consider the legality of its political support
and defence exports — both direct and indirect — to Israel.
It
is worth noting that the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a suit
against the U.S. president, secretary of state and secretary of defense on
behalf of Palestinian organisations and civilians in the United States and
Palestine, to challenge the U.S. government’s aiding and abetting of genocide
and demand that it work to prevent genocide.
A
hearing on the preliminary injunction motion is scheduled for Jan. 26.
Contemporaneously
a group of about 40 lawyers from South Africa led by the law firm Wikus Van
Rensburg Attorneys gave formal notice to the United States on Jan. 2 that it
intends to bring legal proceedings against the United States based on
overwhelming evidence that the U.S. Government has, and is, aiding, abetting
and supporting, encouraging or providing material assistance to genocide.
The
genocide it refers to is the enabling and perpetuating international crimes
against the Palestinian people, by the State of Israel and the Israel Defence
Forces.
Australia’s
other AUKUS partner, the United Kingdom, received a similar notification.
Perhaps, though less likely, Australia might get one too. It is naïve at best
for the Australian government not to anticipate that firstly the world and
second Australians in general, and lawyers in particular, will be watching
closely as events unfold.
Australians
may have no choice but to suffer the fate of its elected government in putting
them on the wrong side of history. If the government is to continue to support
any party to any existing war, or proposed warlike activity, then it ought to
provide Australians more openness.
At
the very least the Australian government owes both Parliament and the citizens
a detailed legal and moral explanation and justification of the position it
takes, and a clear statement, in advance, of its immediate objectives and its
intentions for the future.
In
Gaza, Israel has turned water into a weapon of mass destruction
By denying
Palestinians safe water since the war began, Israel has created an unparalleled
health crisis and risks causing irreversible ecological damage.
In November,
only a month into Israel’s assault on Gaza that has now surpassed 100 days,
Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water
and sanitation, warned that Israel “must stop using water as a weapon of war.”
“Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking
water in the Gaza Strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at
risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking
water,” he implored. The death toll resulting from the lack of water and its
impact on public health, Arrojo-Agudo added, could surpass that of the Israeli
bombardment itself.
Denying water to
Gaza has been a key tactic of the war from the very beginning, with Israel
shutting off the pipes supplying the enclave on October 7. Israeli Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on
Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are
fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
The
weaponization of water is recognized in South Africa’s accusation — heard last
week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — that Israel’s assault on
Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide. This allegation has also been made by
other scholars and human rights figures including Craig Mokhiber, the former
director of the New York office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, in
his resignation letter in October.
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As South
Africa’s petition points out, what has unfolded in Gaza is an intensification
of longstanding policies of violence against the Palestinian people. The
deprivation of water and the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure
have long been part of the Israeli effort, in both the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank, “to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more
difficult for the civilian population,” as a UN Fact Finding Mission stated in
2009.
Past Israeli
military operations in both of these occupied territories have also led to the
destruction of water resources. And for decades, Israel has used water grabbing
to dispossess Palestinians of their land and ways of life — impeding
Palestinian agriculture in the West Bank and for Palestinians inside Israel.
But Israel’s weaponization of water within the framework of its current
offensive on the Gaza Strip is on an entirely different scale, with the
capacity to cause an unparalleled public health crisis and irreversible
ecological damage.
A health and
ecological catastrophe
Gaza’s
near-total dependence on Israel for water and energy renders it particularly
vulnerable to the weaponization of basic resources. About 30% of Gaza’s water
supply is typically purchased from Israel, and the rest is reliant on
electricity and fuel — the entry of which Israel also controls — for
purification.
Since the start
of the war, Israel’s tightened siege and bombardment have caused a massive
shortage in the water supply. On Oct. 14, the World Health Organization (WHO)
stated that the cutting off of electricity meant there was not enough power to
operate water wells, desalination and purification plants, and sanitation
services. It further reported that strikes had damaged six water wells, three
water pumping stations, a water reservoir, and a desalination plant serving
over 1.1 million people.
UNICEF, which
had opened that desalination plant in 2017, stated that people were forced to
drink highly salinated water from the sea, which was further contaminated by
vast amounts of untreated wastewater being discharged into the sea every day.
Within two weeks of the war starting, OCHA estimated water consumption per
person in Gaza — for drinking, cooking and hygiene — at just 3 liters per day,
while those cramming into UN shelters had access to only 1 liter per day;
International standards recommend at least 15 liters per person each day.
And with bottled
water unavailable and large desalination plants not functioning, OCHA wrote:
“People have resorted to consuming water extracted from agricultural wells,
increasing exposure to pesticides and other chemicals, placing the population
at risk of death or infectious disease outbreak.”
Even during the
seven-day “humanitarian pause” in hostilities at the end of November, when 200
aid trucks per day — less than half the number that entered daily before the
war — were permitted into Gaza, bottles of clean water were still in lamentably
short supply. “Despite the pause, there was almost no improvement in the access
of residents in the north to water for drinking and domestic purposes, as most
of the main water production facilities remained shut, due to the lack of fuel
and some also due to damage,” OCHA noted.
The
ramifications soon became clear. At the end of October, an internal U.S. State
Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000
babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink a potentially
lethal mix of water polluted with sewage and salt from the sea. Since then,
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been severely weakened by rampant hunger
and disease, as well as the physical wounds inflicted on nearly 60,000 people
and the mental stress of ceaseless bombardment that has taken more than 23,500
lives. All of this renders Palestinians in Gaza even more vulnerable to
water-borne illnesses.
By the end of
December, as WHO reported, the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians
sheltering in the southern city of Rafah had access to, on average, one toilet
for every 486 people, while across Gaza one shower served an average of 4,500
people. Sewage flows through the streets and contaminates the hastily erected
tents in which hundreds of thousands of people now live throughout southern and
central Gaza. Those who are menstruating face intense hardship, with menstrual
products, toilets, and water all in direly short supply.
Another
disturbing — and potentially long-lasting — tactic that Israel has deployed in
recent weeks is pumping sea water into Gaza tunnels. The ostensible goal is to
destroy the tunnels and flush out Hamas operatives, but The Wall Street Journal
reported that the action could “also threaten Gaza’s water supply.”
Although the
extent of the pumping operation remains unclear, South Africa’s submission to
the ICJ expresses “extreme concern” about this particular use of water as an
offensive weapon, stating: “Environmental experts have warned that the strategy
‘risks causing an ecological catastrophe’ that would leave Gaza with no
drinkable water, devastate what little agriculture is possible and ‘ruin the
conditions of life of everyone in Gaza.’”
The South
African submission also noted that the UN Special Rapporteur for the right to
water reportedly compared this Israeli plan to the mythical Roman “salting” of
the fields of Carthage, which aimed to prevent the growth of crops and render
the territory uninhabitable.
Access to clean
water is integral to staving off famine and disease, and with the massive
destruction of water infrastructure in Gaza — including drinking supply lines,
pumping stations, and wells — a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe is at hand.
In the words of the South African petition to the ICJ: “These conditions —
deliberately inflicted by Israel — are calculated to bring about the
destruction of the Palestinian group in Gaza.” Indeed, public health experts
are warning that half a million people — a quarter of Gaza’s population — could
die from disease within a year.
Upholding water
as a human right
Human rights
activists and organizations must unequivocally oppose Israel’s weaponization of
water. As activists with the US-based Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
and 1for3.org, we have seen how Israel’s discriminatory water policies have
long been used to control Palestinians and drive them from their land. Yet we
have also seen how activism around water can mobilize people across many
continents to campaign for justice.
Take the example
of Aida refugee camp, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem,
where during some summers water has only flowed through its pipes every two
weeks. As in so many parts of the West Bank, people store water in tanks on
their roofs. When it runs out, costs skyrocket and indignities pile up, while
settlers in sight of the refugees’ homes never experience such water scarcity.
Recognizing this
problem on a community level has led to the creation of a community hydroponic
garden, heightened awareness about environmental justice, and community
initiatives of water testing in which water experts from Boston have
participated. Activists in the Boston area have also organized around water
justice to stop a water partnership between Massachusetts and Israel.
As the ICJ
considers the charges of genocide against Israel, we call on water scholars and
activists to consider signing this open letter, which outlines Israel’s
discriminatory water policies over the decades and calls for an end to the
weaponization of water in the Gaza Strip.
We recognize
that water is but one tool in Israel’s genocidal war, but it is a vital one.
Integral to public health and life itself, the human right to water is grounded
in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
International law is invigorated when people strive together to end Israeli
apartheid – including by promoting environmental justice and upholding the
human right to water.
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