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Friday, January 26, 2024

ICJ Finds It’s “Plausible” That Israel Is Committing Genocide in Initial Ruling

January 26, 2024
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in a highly anticipated initial ruling on Friday, ordering Israel to take steps to avoid going even further in its violence in Gaza but stopping short of calling for a ceasefire.
 
In its decision, the ICJ ordered Israel to abide by its obligations under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention, especially with regard to four of the five convention’s criteria that define a genocide: killing members of the group, causing bodily or mental harm to the group, inflicting conditions meant to cause harm to the group, and preventing births within the group.
The ruling orders Israel to ensure that its military does not commit actions within the criteria, to take immediate action to enable humanitarian aid within Gaza, and to prevent the destruction of evidence that could be incriminating.
The court also orders Israeli officials to punish those who have been inciting genocide against Palestinians and to prevent similar incitements in the future.
The ruling highlighted several statements in October from Israeli officials, like President Isaac Herzog’s pledge for Israel to “fight until we’ll break their backbone” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s speech to Israeli troops in which he called Palestinians “human animals.” The court then cites a November press release by the UN Human Rights Council calling attention to “discernibly genocidal and dehumanizing rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials.”
Many Palestinians have been disheartened by the order, as Al Jazeera reports, with many hoping that the ICJ would bring an end to Israel’s relentless bombing, disease and starvation campaign in Gaza; indeed, even as the ICJ was delivering its decision on Friday, Israeli forces were dropping bombs in Khan Yunis in Southern Gaza.
“The ICJ forg[ot] to tell Israel in [its] decision today to cease fire against Palestinians in Gaza. We are under fire and under killing; we are under genocide,” said Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda in a video posted on Instagram from Gaza on Friday, with the sound of sirens clearly in the background.
“There is no justice in the International Court of Justice,” Owda continued. “There is no justice in this world. ICJ is a lie…. We’re continuing this alone, as we started this alone, with our own [cell phones] to tell you the truth, to seek for justice. Now, there’s no truth or justice. I’m just stuck out of my home and can’t get back, and no one can get me back to my home, or to stop killing us day after day, for 112 days.”
South African officials celebrated the decision as a “decisive victory for the international rule of law and a significant milestone in the search for justice for the Palestinian people” in a statement. However, they said that the implication of the ruling is that there must be a ceasefire.
Israeli officials have rejected the ruling, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that the court is denying Israel the opportunity to defend itself — an action that apparently involves depriving Palestinians of nearly all humanitarian aid — and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir outright mocking the ruling in a post on social media, saying “Hague shmague.”
Advocates for Palestinian rights say that the ruling is a historic step toward holding Israel responsible for its horror on the world stage. But they are discouraged by the lack of a ceasefire order, which they, like the South African officials, say is the only way to guarantee that Israel follows through on the court’s provisional measures, especially considering experts’ concerns that Israel may not abide by them.
Though the court’s decisions are binding, countries like Serbia and Russia have refused to abide by rulings from the ICJ in the past. And, indeed, Israeli officials have already pledged to defy the orders, saying that no one will stop them, not even the Hague.
“Everything [the ICJ] ordered in terms of preventive measures leads to only one conclusion, which is ceasefire,” said Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor with a specialization in colonialism, in an interview with Democracy Now!. “How do you stop killing people? Ceasefire. How do you ensure that supplies for human life get in? Ceasefire.”
Human rights attorney and Rutgers professor Noura Erakat said that she was “relieved” when the ICJ’s decision came down because, while it didn’t go far enough, it still provided “vindication” in regards to recognition of the suffering that Israel and the global community have forced on Palestinians. “This court was never going to save us,” and rather could have been “a great source of harm,” Erakat said in a video posted on social media.
Erakat added that the court’s decision should serve as a further call to action for advocates. The court “ordered all of the provisional measures requested by South Africa, stopping short of issuing an order for a cessation of military hostilities, which was already a longshot — and in all cases, even had they provided that order, it wouldn’t have been sufficient to do anything. It would still be in our hands to now take this ruling and to agitate globally,” Erakat continued.
Groups that advocate for Palestinian rights said that the ruling was a crucial first step in ensuring that Israel’s massacre is documented on the world stage, and have said that global leaders’ next moves will be crucial in showing whether or not they are willing to shirk a decision from the ICJ in order to assist Israel in its genocide.
“For over 100 days, the Israeli and the U.S. governments have gaslit and smeared the Palestinian people, denying what the entire world was witnessing: a genocide,” said Jewish Voice for Peace political director Beth Miller in a press release. “Now, the highest court in the world has found these claims plausible. President Biden has a choice to make: he can reject the entire system of international law and continue complicity in Israeli genocide, or he can stop arming a genocidal regime and stop attacking the people and movements struggling to build a more just and peaceful future.”
 
The International Court of Justice delivers its Order
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivers its Order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa versus Israel.
U.N. Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide, but Does Not Demand Stop to War
“History Will Hold The US Accountable…” Strong Condemnation From Smaller States On Gaza War At UN
The United Nations Security Council held a two-day debate, during which representatives from various countries expressed their concerns and perspectives on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The representative of Mauritania, speaking on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), strongly condemned Israel’s actions, describing them as atrocities comparable to genocide. Emphasizing the urgency of intervention on humanitarian, legal, and political fronts, he called on the Security Council to enforce its resolutions, prevent further aggression, and ensure Israel’s compliance with international law.
Syria’s representative criticized the attempts by the United States and certain European countries to legitimize Israel’s aggression by framing it as self-defense. Highlighting South Africa’s actions against Israel at the International Court of Justice, he urged the Council to take decisive measures to stop Israel’s actions, which he claimed were destabilizing the entire region. The representative of Sri Lanka, taking a more contemplative stance, expressed a silent wish for sanity to prevail, avoiding further tragedy in the region. Other representatives, including those from Cuba, Brazil, Iraq, Bangladesh, and Maldives, also voiced their concerns and proposed various solutions. The representative of Cuba accused the United States of impeding Security Council actions and called for an end to double standards, emphasizing the need for a UN peace conference and recognizing Palestine as a full member.
Brazil urged an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and supported South Africa’s initiative at the International Court of Justice. Iraq emphasized the Council’s responsibility to address the root causes of the conflict and adopt resolutions to stop Israeli aggression. Bangladesh stressed the humanitarian toll in Gaza and called for accountability for Israel’s violations of international law, while Maldives criticized the Council’s refusal to call for a ceasefire, warning that it could undermine faith in the UN system. Tunisia condemned Israel’s war crimes and called for increased international efforts to end the conflict. In a more reflective tone, Sri Lanka’s representative shared verses on Middle East peace and recognized the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to statehood based on a two-state solution. Sri Lanka reaffirmed its solidarity with the Palestinian cause and chaired the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories.
 
ICJ Lands Major Blow to Israel—And Now the United States Must Act
The double standards of U.S. foreign policy will hit a new low if, in this case, Biden not only argues against the ICJ, but actively acts to prevent and block the implementation of its ruling.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) just ruled against Israel and determined that South Africa successfully argued that Israel’s conduct plausibly could constitute genocide. The Court imposes several injunctions against Israel and reminds Israel that its rulings are binding, according to international law.
In its order, the court fell short of South Africa's request for a ceasefire, but this ruling, however, is overwhelmingly in favor of South Africa's case and will likely increase international pressure for a ceasefire as a result.
On the question of whether Israel's war in Gaza is genocide, that will still take more time, but today's news will have significant political repercussions. Here are a few thoughts.
This is a devastating blow to Israel’s global standing. To put it in context, Israel has worked ferociously for the last two decades to defeat the BDS movement — Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions — not because it will have a significant economic impact on Israel, but because of how it could delegitimize Israel internationally. However, the ruling of the ICJ that Israel is plausibly engaged in genocide is far more devastating to Israel's legitimacy than anything BDS could have achieved.
Just as much as Israel's political system has been increasingly — and publicly — associated with apartheid in the past few years, Israel will now be similarly associated with the charge of genocide. As a result, those countries that have supported Israel and its military campaign in Gaza, such as the U.S. under President Biden, will be associated with that charge, too.
The implications for the United States are significant. First because the court does not have the ability to implement its ruling. Instead, the matter will go to the United Nations Security Council, where the Biden administration will once again face the choice of protecting Israel politically by casting a veto, and by that, further isolate the United States, or allowing the Security Council to act and pay a domestic political cost for “not standing by Israel.”
So far, the Biden administration has refused to say if it will respect ICJ's decision. Of course, in previous cases in front of the ICJ, such as Myanmar, Ukraine and Syria, the U.S. and Western states stressed that ICJ provisional measures are binding and must be fully implemented.
The double standards of U.S. foreign policy will hit a new low if, in this case, Biden not only argues against the ICJ, but actively acts to prevent and block the implementation of its ruling. It is perhaps not surprising that senior Biden administration officials have largely ceased using the term “rules-based order” since October 7.
It also raises questions about how Biden’s policy of bear-hugging Israel may have contributed to Israel’s conduct. Biden could have offered more measured support and pushed back hard against Israeli excesses — and by that, prevented Israel from engaging in actions that could potentially fall under the category of genocide. But he didn’t.
Instead, Biden offered unconditional support combined with zero public criticism of Israel's conduct and only limited push-back behind the scenes. A different American approach could have shaped Israel’s war efforts in a manner that arguably would not have been preliminarily ruled by the ICJ as plausibly meeting the standards of genocide.
This shows that America undermines its own interest as well as that of its partners when it offers them blank checks and complete and unquestionable protection. The absence of checks and balances that such protection offers fuels reckless behavior all around.
As such, Biden’s unconditional support may have undermined Israel, in the final analysis.
This ruling may also boost those arguing that all states that are party to the Genocide Convention have a positive obligation to prevent genocide. The Houthis, for instance, have justified their attacks against ships heading to Israeli ports in the Red Sea, citing this positive obligation. What legal implications will the court’s ruling have as a result on the U.S. and UK’s military action against the Houthis?
The implications for Europe will also be considerable. The U.S. is rather accustomed to and comfortable with setting aside international law and ignoring international institutions. Europe is not.
International law and institutions play a much more central role in European security thinking. The decision will continue to split Europe. But the fact that some key EU states will reject the ICJ’s ruling will profoundly contradict and undermine Europe’s broader security paradigm.
One final point: The mere existence of South Africa’s application to the ICJ appears to have moderated Israel’s war conduct. Any plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and send its residents to third countries appear to have been somewhat paused, presumably because of how such actions would boost South Africa’s application. If so, it shows that the Court, in an era where the force of international law is increasingly questioned, has had a greater impact in terms of deterring unlawful Israeli actions than anything the Biden administration has done.
 
US and UK also committing genocide crimes in Gaza: Former UN official
The International Court of Justice has just issued preliminary measures against Israel for the crime of genocide in Gaza. The ruling follows weeks of anticipation and months of international outcry for Israel to face accountability from the UN. While much remains undetermined, this is a critical development in a time when the integrity of international institutions has been thrown into crisis by their ineffectiveness in the face of Israel’s slaughter. Former director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his position last fall in protest of what he called the UN’s “failure” to protect Palestinians, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on the weaknesses of the UN in the face of US and Israeli impunity.
Chris Hedges:  Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned on Oct. 31, stating that, “Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He noted that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, Yazidi in Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Rohingya in Myanmar.
He wrote the high commissioner, “We are failing again. The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethnonationalist, colonial, settler ideology and continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging based entirely upon their status as Arabs, leaves us no room for doubt.” Mokhiber added, “This is a textbook case of genocide,” and said the US, UK, and much of Europe were not only refusing to meet their treaty obligations under the Geneva conventions, but were also arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic cover for it.
“We must support the establishment of a single democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” he wrote, adding, “and therefore the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler colonial project, and an end to apartheid across the land.”
Mokhiber, a lawyer who specializes in international human rights law, had worked for the UN since 1992. He led the high commissioner’s work on devising a human rights-based approach to development, and acted as a senior human rights adviser in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Sudan. In the 1990s, he lived in Gaza.
Indifference to genocide, however, is the norm, not the exception. The international community did little to halt the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. It is watching passively as hundreds of Palestinians are being killed and wounded a day while Israel blocks food, medicine, fuel, and other basic supplies from entering Gaza, where up to 85% of the 2.3 million inhabitants are now homeless.
The very few voices that denounce genocide pay with their careers. Josh Paul, who worked in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in the State Department for more than 11 years, resigned due, as he wrote, to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel. Tariq Habash, a top advisory at the Education Department, resigned in January, saying he could no longer serve an administration that had put millions of innocent lives in danger.
But despite protest letters within government agencies, including the State Department and AID, there is no mass exodus. Why do we decry genocide as the crime of crimes, teach class after class on the Holocaust, and yet do nothing to halt it when it occurs? Why are there so few people willing to stand up and call out the institutions and governments for their silence or complicity? Did we learn nothing from history?
Joining me to discuss the historical indifference to genocide and what is taking place in Gaza is Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
So let’s begin with that question, Craig. It isn’t new. Rwanda. I was in Bosnia. Why? Why? And then we can go back to the lessons of the Holocaust, which have been a staple in university curricula, and yet here we are witnessing, undeniably, a holocaust. And as you wrote in your resignation letter, the United States is not only not moving to stop it, but is arming those who are carrying out the genocide itself.
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, that’s right, and that is the difference, Chris. Because if you look at what the United States and the United Kingdom did when the genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, we know from leaked diplomatic cables that they actually instructed their diplomats not to use the term “genocide” because they knew, as a matter of international law, that if it were genocide they would be compelled to act, to prevent it, to stop it, and to punish it. And so their crime at that time was a failure of their obligation of prevention under international law.
What we’re seeing in Gaza now is much worse because the United States and the United Kingdom and some other Western powers have actually been complicit in the genocide. That’s a separate crime under the Genocide Convention, the crime of complicity. And that’s because the United States, as you know, during this genocide, has been actively providing economic, military intelligence, diplomatic support. It’s been using its veto at the Security Council to stop a ceasefire. And after each veto, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of more Palestinians lose their lives in the genocide.
We’ve seen the US even use its podiums in official institutions of the State Department and the Defense Department and the White House and the National Security Council to disseminate Israeli propaganda for genocide, including justification of war crimes like bombings on hospitals and so on.
So that is actually a higher level of accountability. It is the crime of complicity, and it is a step up from the failures of the West, of the United States during past genocides. And my big fear is that the position taken by powerful Western states has begun to corrupt international institutions and to cow them into a fearful silence.
Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about what happens internally within these institutions. And as I have noted before, I was in Sarajevo during the war, so that was 300 to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day. I only do that by comparison. In Gaza, we’re talking about hundreds of dead and wounded a day. So the savagery of the Israeli carpet bombing is unlike what we have seen.
I think you’d have to go back to maybe Bosnia. I don’t know where you would go back to, but it is at such a horrific level. I think 60, 65% now of the housing in Gaza has been destroyed. It’s an undeniable, at the very least, a war crime, but I think it’s undeniably genocide.
Let’s start with the UN. You worked for many years in the UN. What’s happening internally? The secretary general has made statements calling quite forcefully for a ceasefire, but talk about institutionally, what we don’t see.
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, that’s right. And that was what struck me most when I penned my final letter to the United Nations on departing in October, is that if you had such a clear case, such a clear case on its face of genocidal intent spoken by Israeli leaders, and genocidal action implemented on the ground, and the UN was afraid to even use the word “genocide”, then the very norms and standards upon which that organization were founded were very much at risk.
And this is because Israel had already, in October, abandoned its decades-long strategy of incremental genocide, which I think was designed to preserve Western sponsorship, and they moved in 2023 to an expedited destruction of the final remnants of Palestine, as they say, from the river to the sea. And Gaza was experiencing that most of all, but we had seen it throughout the year already in the West Bank with attacks by the Israeli military, mass arrests, pogrom in Hawara Village, wholesale ethnic cleansing of West Bank villages.
And this was all being brought to our desks every single day, and yet I saw this very trepidatious, almost silent approach on the part of the political corridors and the political leadership of the UN.
And the way it really manifests itself, and you’ll see it even now, more than 100 days in with this mass annihilation of a civilian population, you’ll hear from senior UN leaders these pat phrases about a two-state solution somewhere down the road and calls for humanitarian assistance. In other words, the safe language of genocide.
But what you won’t hear from them is any talk at all about the root causes, about the actual crimes, about the realities of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, persecution, apartheid, occupation, dispossession, inequality, ethnonationalism, these things that are at the root of the Palestinian experience and all of historic Palestine, and now genocide itself. That is not a part of what you’re hearing from the secretary general and the senior leadership of the organization.
You’re also not hearing any condemnation of Israel. You’ll hear appeals for more humanitarian aid, as I said, but you won’t hear a condemnation in the way you have heard direct condemnations of Russia in Ukraine, condemnations of Hamas’s activities using every adjective that one can conjure up, and yet no condemnation of Israel’s crimes, because Israel is sponsored by powerful governments of the West, and because senior UN leaders are afraid.
What we also see is an abandonment of the specifics of international law in favor of more amorphous political references. The two-state solution is a part of this. Don’t hold Israel and its partners to account under the specific requirements of international law.
And that really has led to, I think, an abdication of responsibility by key institutions. You wouldn’t even know at this moment that there is a genocide prevention office in the United Nations because it’s been completely silent during this genocide happening on their watch.
Similarly, the special adviser on Children in Armed Conflict — Before we even get to the International criminal court, which is not a UN institution but has a politically corrupted prosecutor in Karim Khan, who has refused to take seriously his mandate and to prosecute crimes committed by the Israelis.
So this is… I have pointed out the irony of the fact that this past year was the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, but it was also the 75th anniversary of the adoption of apartheid in South Africa, and the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in Palestine. And what you see already at the birth of these institutions and these norms is a double standard that was born, that was birthed, really, into a colonial contradiction that has continued to influence their implementation up until today.
But if you can have an actual genocide with clear genocidal intent declared, not by peripheral actors, but by Israel’s president, prime minister, seven of its cabinet ministers at least, the senior military leadership. And then what the acts that they promise being carried out with genocidal fury on the ground and repeated by Israeli soldiers, and then perpetrated as they are described, and still not have the courage to call it genocide, then there’s no such thing as genocide. There never was any such thing as genocide, and there never will be again, and we will have lost a vital international legal protection for the worst crimes.
Chris Hedges:  You talk about fear. So let’s say they did stand up, the Genocide Office, the secretary general, and named this genocide for what it is, named the apartheid state for what it is. What would happen to them?
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, their fear is that they will then suffer the slings and arrows of a very abusive network of Israeli lobby groups that will do their very best to slur individual UN officials as antisemites, supporters of terrorism, and so on. And I’ve been through that several times in my own career.
Chris Hedges:  Just to interrupt, they’ve already done that to the secretary general. They’ve already accused him of being an antisemite and called for his removal.
Craig Mokhiber:  For the mildest of critiques, in which he said that this happened in a particular context. So you can imagine what happens if you actually speak out against the crimes as they’re occurring on the ground. And people in the UN are used to this. So that piece of it is very real.
And of course, you’re a busy UN official who’s trying to implement programs and get a job done, and you have to invest, then, a lot of time in pushing back against these attacks by these Israel lobby groups — Which, when I started in the UN, had zero influence. But today, much like in Western governments, have grown in influence and have adopted tactics that can be quite effective in intimidating senior UN officials into silence.
But at the same time, you have to worry about suffering consequences from powerful UN member states, especially the United States, the United Kingdom, states of the European Union, who will démarche the leadership, who will bring a lot of pressure to bear, and will say to you, look, when the time comes for the budget committee to meet on the resources you want to fight against racism, to provide protection in a particular area, we’re going to remember this in the budget committee. And so there is no firewall between the normative mandates of UN agencies on the one hand and the budget committees, which are entirely political, on the other hand.
And then, of course, there are personal career considerations. There is a sense, in some parts of the UN, and here the political corridors of the UN, that not offending powerful political actors is a form of political acumen, that that actually shows a certain wisdom, and that speaking up on behalf of the norms and standards of the organization in a way that irritates some of these powerful actors shows that you are not a sophisticated player in international diplomacy.
When, in fact, the charter, the universal declarations, the main treaties of the organization mandate the organization to defend these principles and to defend the peoples of the United Nations that, in a world of realpolitik, is not always what you are seeing in those cases.
And those who do it will be left out to hang, to swing. If you’re suddenly attacked by the Israelis, the Americans, Israel lobby groups and others, you will not be defended by the organization, and you may well be in jeopardy of your job as well. So it’s quite an effective technique.
Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about the United States, it’s a little different from the United Nations. Careerism plays, of course, as much an element in this. Samantha Power, who wrote A Problem From Hell on genocide and excoriated those US officials and bureaucrats who didn’t stand up, whether during the Holocaust or Rwanda or anywhere else, of course has now remained silent, she’s out of AID.
But you also have, as you noted, an active participation by the United States in furthering the genocide, especially in terms of bypassing Congress twice to sell munitions to Israel. Cutting off of that supply chain would instantly make Israel’s assault extremely difficult, if not impossible. Let’s talk about what happens internally within the US government.
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, I don’t have a window into what happens internally. What I see is the face that they bring into the United Nations, which is often a face which is quite stern when the organization seeks to speak out against Israeli abuses.
When I criticize the UN, I have to say I’m criticizing the political leadership of the UN, some of the intergovernmental bodies like the failed Security Council, which has been rendered completely impotent by the use of the US veto, the leadership in the Secretary General’s Office, heads of agencies, and others.
What I’m not criticizing are those people inside the organization who are there for ideological reasons, who are there because they hate poverty, they hate war, they hate human rights abuses and inequality, and so they’re working day in and day out to try to defend those norms and standards and working in solidarity with human rights movements and peace activists all around the world. But they have been abandoned by the political leadership in cases such as this.
And I’m certainly not critiquing the more than 150 UNRWA workers in Gaza who have been annihilated by Israeli bombs in just about 100 days, many of them murdered with their families, who, in my eyes, are heroes who are doing their very best to serve the community and lost their lives by staying and suffering those slings and arrows.
But the United States, when it deals with us, it comes carrying a stick. And that stick is not just about the budget. It is about a very aggressive… And I’ve always said that to be a diplomat in the State Department, you don’t have to have any diplomatic skills because you come with power, you come with carrots and sticks.
And those same carrots and sticks that are used to affect the voting in the General Assembly, for example, amongst states, including small developing states that need foreign assistance or are politically challenged, those same kinds of carrots and sticks are used inside the UN by the United States to pressure UN officials to either be quiet on a particular issue or speak out on a particular issue.
For the US government, human rights are a political tool to wield against its adversaries, but always there to defend the impunity of its perceived allies and friends. And there’s an irony in it, Chris, too, because for all the talk about US leadership on human rights in the International Human Rights Program, the US is an outlier because of its opposition to most of the international Human Rights Program.
They’re opposed to economic and social rights as rights. They’re opposed to the right to development. They’re opposed to the abolition of capital punishment. They are the one state on the planet that is not a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the only international treaty protecting the human rights of children. Only the United States, out of 193 countries, has not ratified that. They have a generally weak ratification record.
And they oppose the International Criminal Court, and have even passed legislation, the Hague Invasion Act, it has been nicknamed, that, if any of their people or their allies are indicted and arrested, that they will invade the Netherlands in order to liberate them.
So the US leadership on human rights is not what I would call “leadership”. And I’ve said in the past, that if that’s leadership, we wish they’d follow for a while. So they’re not great friends of the human rights part of the United Nations.
And we know from leaked diplomatic cables that when the Goldstone Commission, [inaudible] inquiry was investigating human rights abuses some years ago, they deployed their entire global diplomatic mechanism with a massive investment in order to obstruct the investigation, and then to discredit it when it was completed. And so it is, with protection in the occupied territories across the board, always opposed by the government of the United States, as well, as I said, the United Kingdom and some other European allies.
Chris Hedges:  You’re referring to the Goldstone report by the South African judge, which was quite courageous in investigating and documenting Israeli war crimes. But finally, Goldstone himself was forced to repudiate his own work. The pressure was intense.
Craig Mokhiber:  Intense and personal, and smears and slanders, and threats of not allowing him to visit relatives inside Israel. And this is a prominent Jewish South African lawyer, self-declared Zionist, supporter of Israel, with family members in Israel, and they went after him.
He’s been criticized for giving in to the pressure, but I think a lot of those criticisms come from people who have not been subjected to that pressure, which can be extremely nasty, and even dangerous. We’ve all been subjected to these armies of online trolls and the threats that come along with that once the lobby unleashes its fury on you for daring to speak out about Israeli atrocities. And so I have no criticism for Justice Goldstone, only sympathy that he was beaten into submission, figuratively, in that way.
Chris Hedges:  Consequences. What are the consequences? This is the genocide of our time. Israel is talking about months more of pulverizing Gaza using starvation as a weapon. All of Gaza’s hungry. I think the last UN figure I read, 500,000 Palestinians and Gaza were classified as being starving. I guess one, where do you think it’s going? And two, what are the consequences of not intervening? All the US does is speak about what they’re going to set up once it’s over.
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, I think the consequences are already being realized. I think Israel is already realizing its genocidal objectives. It has effectively destroyed Gaza. It moved systematically from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip. It has destroyed most housing, most civilian infrastructure: hospitals, schools, mosques, clinics, ambulances, graveyards, courthouses, monuments.
The purpose is very clear by the action, even if you didn’t listen to their genocidal statements, that they’re trying to erase Palestinian civilian life in Gaza to make it impossible for the survivors to have a normal, dignified life there, a process that started more than 15 years ago with the siege already, but has now been, as I say, expedited into all out genocide there.
And there’s very little left of the Gaza Strip that would allow… You mention starvation. This is actual starvation in a piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea, something that we have not seen before, imposed starvation, imposed disease. The numbers of those who have died, who have been annihilated here, are going to grow very significantly.
The military attacks are continuing. We’ve received notice today of moves now toward Rafah, the southernmost town in all of Gaza, where virtually the entire population has now been concentrated in an area that can really only sustain a few thousand.
And now, we see the move to finish the job. I think Israel is expediting its action toward that end because it knows it cannot continue forever. But I think they’ve already succeeded in destroying Gaza and destroying life in Gaza.
And now what they will look is to manage the aftermath, which they hope will result in keeping the situation bad enough that those who do survive will voluntarily leave through the Rafah border, and either die in tents in the Sinai or be absorbed in the diaspora elsewhere in just the latest, as the South African case points out, just the latest in a series of ethnic purges that started in 1947. And it’s really continued, punctuated throughout history up until this moment.
Consequences is the open question. We’ve seen a failure of international institutions. We’ve seen the political corruption of the International Criminal Court, which has been delaying the bringing of consequences for Israel for years, and that situation has only gotten worse under Karim Khan. We have seen a failure of the United Nations to deal with this for what it is, which is a genocide, as opposed to just a humanitarian challenge caused by an earthquake or another war between two warring powers.
But we see also a glimmer of hope in what South Africa has done in bringing the case to the International Court of Justice, the World Court. And there, there could be consequences. We expect any day now, really, to receive an order by the Court on the provisional measures that have been brought by South Africa.
Those provisional measures could make a difference. They call for cessation of military activities, an end to the siege, bringing in the humanitarian relief and aid that is needed, preservation of evidence, allowing fact-finding missions in. That could make a huge difference for the survivors and bring hope of reconstruction.
Now, of course, I fully expect that if the court delivers those provisional measures, Israel will refuse to implement them. The case is then supposed to go to the Security Council for enforcement, where the US will veto it because this is, after all, the US-Israeli genocide because of the degree of complicity.
The case then would go to the General Assembly for an emergency special session. General Assembly, of course, is a democratic body, one country, one vote, where measures could be adopted in a resolution that could either just be a resolution that condemns what Israel has done and encourages everybody to implement the decision of the court, or it could be something more concrete.
It could include calls for diplomatic measures, consular measures, economic measures, political measures, removal of Israel from international organizations, non-recognition of passports. It could set up mechanisms, as they did for apartheid South Africa, to bring more pressure to bear. It could call on individual courts, because this is a crime of universal jurisdiction, to bring criminal action against Israelis. It could set up a tribunal itself.
So there’s a lot that the General Assembly could do, but you can be sure that the US and others will be working very hard to compromise that process to make sure that the GA doesn’t do anything meaningful by pressuring individual delegations not to support anything meaningful.
In the end, Chris, accountability is going to come from us. I have lost confidence in national institutions and international institutions in cases like this, but my confidence has grown in movements in civil society, in people, in boycotts and organized divestments and sanctions, in the anti-apartheid movement which is growing by leaps and bounds, and the courageous efforts of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, and If Not Now, who took over Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty, of the millions who are marching in capitals around the world, including in places where those marches are banned. And they do it at risk of arrest and beatings by police because they refuse to go along.
This is what changed things in the struggle against apartheid when South African apartheid was supported by the United States right through the 1980s. It was people in churches, in synagogues, in mosques, in movements, in labor unions that made the difference. I expect that’s where, to answer your question, the consequences will come from, and that’s where all of my hope rests now.
Chris Hedges:  Well, and of course, Israel was a strong supporter of the apartheid state right up until the end in an exchange for oil, which South Africa had. They armed the apartheid state, even when everyone else was walking away.
I just want to close by talking about placing this within the long nightmare the Palestinians have endured. You referenced the Nakba in 1948, ’49 when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Thousands were killed in massacres by Zionist terrorist groups. It seems to have accelerated, I think you used the term slow motion genocide, if I remember, slow motion ethnic cleansing, yes. But in terms of scale, I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like this.
Talk a little bit about what this means for the Palestinians. And then of course, we can’t leave out the West Bank because 300 Palestinians have been killed, thousands upon thousands arrested. Settlers, Jewish settlers are seizing Palestinian villages and driving the inhabitants out in the West Bank. But just give us a picture from the Palestinian viewpoint.
Craig Mokhiber:  Well, and that’s what’s so important about the South African case, because it points out that what’s happening here is happening in a broader context, and that genocide is a continuum. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who invented the term “genocide” and lobbied for the adoption of the convention, pointed out that it is always a continuum of genocide. It’s not an event that occurs.
And I’ve been arguing the genocide started long ago in Palestine, indeed in 1947 and 1948 with the Nakba, where you saw the wholesale purging, the massacres that you talked about of Palestinian villages, and then just erasing those villages, renaming them, and building Israeli realities on top of them. That never stopped. That continued in the 1950s. It continued then inside the Green Line. It continued then with 1967 in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and now it’s continuing in an expedited way in Gaza as well. All a part of the same ethnic purge.
You cannot have an ethnonationalist state that wants to pretend to be democratic if you don’t have an overwhelming majority of those in your ethnonationalist group. And that means, by definition, it means ethnic purges. It means genocide. There’s no other way to achieve that, and Israel has been doing that now for 75 years.
And there’s no doubt that just the sheer scale of what they’re doing in Gaza is unprecedented even in the Palestinian experience. It has eclipsed what happened in the original Nakba in 1948.
What’s different is that for 75 years, Israel enjoyed absolute impunity for these crimes, and it also was able to dominate the narrative in the West that effectively erased the Palestinians, or gave a description of them as some sort of external force that came in from outer space because it wanted to kill Jews or something like this, not that you had these indigenous people in a place called Palestine who were invaded by settlers from another continent who effectively erased them and has been executing and massacring them ever since. That narrative is finally coming through.
You finally see, even in the West, a greater understanding of the plight of the Palestinian people, of the legitimate cause of the Palestinian people, of the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people. So I think that Israel has overplayed its genocidal hand in this case, and that we’re going to see a lot of push for accountability that we didn’t with previous mass atrocities committed by the Israelis.
It’s not going to come from the official institutions of government or international institutions. And whatever happens in the course, in the case before the International Court of Justice or the domestic case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in domestic courts in the US for US complicity in this genocide, Palestinian people will benefit from this growing movement around the world.
And that solidarity, I think, is where the best hope is of a change in the future, and of abandoning these old, tired slogans about a two-state solution and really looking at something rooted in human rights and equality like a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
Chris Hedges:  And just in terms of on the ground for the Palestinians in Gaza, I have friends who have family in Khan Yunis and Gaza City, and they were talking about, along with everything else that Israel was obliterating, they were actually blowing up wells that people use to get… That just shows you at what level they were creating an uninhabitable, virtually uninhabitable environment. What does this mean for the Palestinians in Gaza?
Craig Mokhiber:  Wells, farmland, bakeries, water sources, everything that is necessary for civilian life, which is further evidence that this was a genocidal onslaught designed to make survival in Gaza impossible. What it means for the Palestinian people remains to be seen. What it means for the people of Gaza is that most of Gaza will be unlivable for a long time to come, and this was exactly the Israeli plan.
Gaza can be rebuilt. The environmental degradation can be reversed. Gaza can be rebuilt with massive investment. Israel will resist that with everything that it has. And with the backing of the US, the UK, and others, they will want the world to ratify the ethnic cleansing that they carried out in Gaza, just as the world ratified the ethnic cleansing that it carried out inside the Green Line in 1948. That’s what we have to push back against.
But the movement for Palestinian rights and for Palestinian justice and freedom, that’s going to grow, and it’s going to continue as the anti-apartheid movement did.
And so what that means is that the tens of thousands of civilians martyred in Gaza will have been martyred for the cause of Palestinian freedom, and that they will not have died in vain. I do not think in the long term that Israel can continue to use force to maintain its ethnonationalist project in the middle of the Middle East. And I think that the only hope is the hope that comes from people all around the world fighting for this cause of equality, this cause of justice.
Chris Hedges:  Great. That was Craig Mokhiber, longtime international human rights lawyer, who resigned in October as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
I would like to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
 
Israel’s Victory in Gaza turns Pyrrhic as a Majority of Youths and Democrats brand it Genocidal
Israel is losing its campaign against Gaza not so much on the battlefield — though it is unclear that very many of its military goals have been accomplished — but in the court of public opinion. The Israeli far right has long ignored such PR setbacks, convinced that as long as the US government protects it at the United Nations, it retains impunity.
The Biden administration cannot, however, veto public opinion. A new You.gov opinion poll finds that 34% of Americans believe Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. I can’t tell you what an incredible statistic this is. In previous decades polling generally found that most Americans had no sympathy whatsoever for the Palestinians, who might as well have been gum stuck to the soles of the boots of Israeli troops.
These Americans are not just saying that the Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians (which most of them wouldn’t even have admitted 20 years ago). They’re saying that they think the Israelis are trying to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza.
Moreover, it isn’t just that a third of Americans believe there is an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. An absolute majority — 55% — of Americans aged 18 to 30 see it as a genocide. That isn’t a good sign for Israel’s future.
Moreover, a simple majority of Democrats believe the Israeli Gaza campaign is a genocide, some 51%. Again, Israel’s impunity has resulted from bipartisan support in the US, which is now shifting.
It is also true that 39% of Americans believe that Hamas tried to genocide the Israelis on October 7. The Israeli government should not, however, take it as a compliment that so many Americans view its tactics and goals as identical to those of Hamas.
It is also significant that 20% of Republicans think Israel is committing a genocide. The tone in the Republican Party is set by the evangelical Christian Zionists who generally think Israel can do no wrong and that its brutality against the Palestinians is necessary to usher in Christ’s second coming. (I worry a little that typing that sentence made me stupider.) Accusing Tel Aviv of genocide isn’t just a criticism, it is a severe condemnation.
These numbers spell at least some trouble for the deeply unpopular Joe Biden, whose enthusiastic embrace of the Israeli campaign and denial of Palestinian deaths is deeply alienating for youths and progressives. While it is true that they won’t vote for Trump, they could just stay home next November out of apathy, which would not be good news for the Biden campaign.
King Pyrrhus of Epirus (northern Greece and Albania) bestowed his name on a military campaign where you win at such a devastating cost that the triumph turns to dust in your mouth and becomes a kind of defeat. Pyrrhus, fighting on the Italian coast, proved the victor in two initial battles with the Romans, but so depleted his army of 25,000 men than he lost the third, decisive, encounter.
The extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, chock full of full-on fascists and unabashed racists, waged war against the Hamas terrorist organization by targeting its known middle and lower management in their apartment buildings, blowing up the entire complexes and killing everyone living there — women, children, non-combatant men. They couldn’t do the same to the top leadership because of the hostages or because the latter were better hidden. The Israeli government also designated civil society institutions such as schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, municipal administrative centers and Non-Governmental Organizations as what they called “power centers” and subjected them to intensive aerial bombardment and shelling, oblivious to the well-being of innocent civilians. Apparently the theory was that university presidents, provosts, faculty, staff and students were all Hamas operatives with blood on their hands and so all universities had to be destroyed. The theory, of course, was monstrous and did not differ from Usama Bin Laden’s declaration that no Americans were civilians. Israel’s +972 Mag called this tactic a “mass assassination factory.” These acts of savagery have so far racked up over 25,000 deaths and over 60,000 woundings of Palestinians some 70% of them women and children and most of the rest non-combatant men. Of 25,000 Hamas fighters, it isn’t clear that any significant number have been killed.
In addition to razing entire residential blocs with 2,000-pound bombs, the rules of engagement set for Israeli ground troops apparently directed them to shoot to kill any person moving in the streets, regardless of whether they were waving a white flag.
A video caught such a war crime and was replayed on Britain’s ITV on Wednesday, provoking widespread public revulsion and condemnations in Parliament.
Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in recent years have increasingly ended up being recorded on smartphone video, and were only covered up by the neglect of the major European and American “news” organizations, which largely declined to broadcast them. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has intentionally used algorithms to shadowban news about Palestinians (and, increasingly, news in general).
The situation is so horrible now, however, that even mainstream outlets like Britain’s Sky TV are beginning to report when Israel fires tank rounds into a UN training center being used as a refugee shelter, killing 9 and wounding 75.
ITV and Sky TV are playing catch up, however. TikTok, run by a Chinese company, freely allows video from Gaza to be shared and to go viral, and Americans thirty and under have therefore seen the war unfold before their eyes. Old people glued to CNN or Fox might not even know that a war is going on, and they certainly would have no sense of the magnitude of Israel’s atrocities. Not so for the under-30 population, which is why 55% of them have decided this is a genocide.
 
Biden Must Choose Between a Ceasefire in Gaza and a Regional War
In the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.
In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.
We are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.
A near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children.
Israel has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”
People throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.
In response,  the Biden administration, without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international coalition.”
President Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces.
Yemenis naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.
The Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.
The United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
On January 20th, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Iran has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.
The targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.
Iran launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.
At the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”
After its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.
Since then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground.
In Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens.
Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance.
Biden can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.

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