اندیشمند بزرگترین احساسش عشق است و هر عملش با خرد

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Complicit in Genocide: Where Israel Gets Its Weapons From

March 28, 2024
Over 9,000 Palestinian women have been killed since the start of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip. Mothers have been the largest share of Israeli killings, at an average of 37 mothers per day since October 7.
 
The numbers above, from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza and the Red Crescent Society respectively, only convey part of the suffering experienced by 2.3 million Palestinians in the Strip.
There is not a single section in Palestinian society that has not paid a heavy price for the war, although women and children are the ones who have suffered most, constituting over 70 percent of all victims of the ongoing Israeli genocide.
True, these women and their children are killed at the hands of Israeli soldiers, but they are murdered with US-western supplied weapons.
Now, however, we are told that the world is finally turning against Israel, and that the west’s nod of approval to Tel Aviv to carry on with its daily massacres may soon turn into a collective snub.
This claim was expressed best in the March 23 cover of the Economist magazine. It showed a tattered Israeli flag, attached to a stick, and planted in an arid, dusty land. It was accompanied by the headline “Israel Alone”.
The image, undoubtedly expressive, was meant to serve as a sign of the times. Its profundity becomes even more obvious if compared to another cover, from the same publication soon after the Israeli military conquered massive Arab territories in the war of June 1967. “They did it,” the headline, back then, read. In the background, an Israeli military tank was pictured, illustrating the west-funded Israeli triumph.
Between the two headlines much, in the world and in the Middle East, has changed. But to claim that Israel now stands alone is not entirely accurate, at least not yet.
Though many of Israel’s traditional allies in the west are openly disowning its behavior in Gaza, weapons from various western and non-western countries continue to flow, feeding the war machine as it, in turn, continues to harvest more Palestinian lives.
This compels the question: Does Israel truly stand alone when its airports and seaports are busier than ever receiving massive shipments of weapons coming from all directions? Not in the least.
Almost every time a western country announces that it has suspended arms exports to Israel, a news headline appears shortly afterwards, indicating the opposite. Indeed, this has happened repeatedly.
Last year, Rome had declared that it was blocking all arms sales to Israel, giving false hope that some western countries are finally experiencing some kind of moral awakening.
Alas, on March 14, Reuters quoted the Italian Defense Minister, Guido Crosetto as saying that shipments of weapons to Israel are continuing, based on the flimsy logic that previously signed deals would have to be ‘honored’.
Another country that is also ‘honoring’ its previous commitments is Canada, which announced on May 19, following a parliamentary motion that it had suspended arms exports.
The celebration among those advocating an end to the genocide in Gaza were just getting started when, a day later, Ottawa practically reversed the decision by announcing that it, too, will honor previous commitments.
This illustrates that some western countries, which continue to impart their unsolicited wisdom about human rights, women’s rights and democracy on the rest of the world, have no genuine respect for any of these values.
Canada and Italy are not the largest military supporters of Israel. The US and Germany are.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the decade between 2013 and 2022, Israel has received 68 percent of its weapons from the US and 28 percent from Germany.
The Germans remain unperturbed, even though five percent of the total population of Gaza has been killed, wounded or are missing due to the Israeli war.
Yet, the American support for Israel is far greater, although the Biden Administration is still sending messages to its constituency – majority of whom want the war to stop – that the president is doing his best to pressure Israel to end the war.
Though only two approved military sales to Israel have been announced publicly since October 7, the two shipments represent only 2 percent from the total US arms sent to Israel.
The news was revealed by the Washington Post on March 6. It was published at a time when US media was reporting on a widening rift between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time,” a former senior Biden Administration official told the Post. Jeremy Konyndyk reached the obvious conclusion that the “Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support”.
For decades, the US military support to Israel has been the highest anywhere in the world. Starting 2016, this unconditional support exponentially increased during the Obama Administration to reach $3.8 billion per year.
Immediately after October 7, however, the weapons shipments to Israel reached unprecedented levels. They included a 2,000-pound bomb known as 5,000 MK-84 munitions. Israel has used this bomb to kill hundreds of innocent Palestinians.
Though Washington frequently alleges to be looking into Israel’s use of its weapons, it turned out, according to the Washington Post, that Biden knew too well that “Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets”.
In some ways, Israel ‘stands alone’, but only because its behavior is rejected by most countries and peoples around the world. However, it is hardly alone when its war crimes are being executed with western support and arms.
For the Israeli genocide in Gaza to end, those who continue to sustain the ongoing bloodbath must also be held accountable.
Does the Destruction of Homes in Gaza constitute Genocide?

(The Conversation) – The intentional destruction of homes — by a government or private entity, during war or peacetime, on an individual or communal basis — is referred to as “domicide” by scholars and by Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
Domicide can constitute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It has been used in armed conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Myanmar and now in Gaza, where Israel has destroyed more than 60 per cent of homes. The bombings of Gazan homes have also killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In the wake of Russia’s demolition of homes in Ukraine in 2022, Rajagopal argued that domicide goes beyond collateral damage and deserves stand-alone prohibition and punishment in international law.
Cutting homeland ties
Homes are more than physical dwellings or property. Widespread domicide extinguishes individual and collective identity, memory and ties to homeland.
The deep connection of homes in Gaza to Palestinian land, territory and nationhood renders Israel’s destruction of them a genocidal tactic. Israel’s long history of intentional and arbitrary destruction of Palestinian homes, and the subsequent displacement of Palestinians, have been accompanied by the legalized annexation of Palestinian land.
This history reveals a strategy of deliberately targeting homes to harm Palestinians as a national, racial and ethnic group.
The home is a crucial site of Palestinian group identity and national belonging.
In the words of social work scholar Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer: “Palestinians see the home as a symbol of existence and as a means that connects them to the land.” The UN Commission on Human Rights further makes note of the deep attachment of Palestinians to their homes and agricultural land, including olive and citrus trees.
Home is critical to Palestinians as a group
While the home is central to many communities, it holds a particular significance to the continued existence of Palestinians as a national group. The home is where identities, localities, social relations, cultures and nationhood are produced, as feminist historian Rosemary Sayigh has argued.
In a volume of studies into the 1948 Nakba — the mass dispossession and displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel — by political scientist Ahmad Sa’di and anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, ethnographic accounts document how the Palestinian home is a site of individual and collective memory passed on generationally. In the face of the ongoing erasure of Palestinian experiences, culture and places, that memory is also political.
Memories of the Nakba continue to infuse present-day Palestinian life. Subsequent displacements are being collectively experienced as a continuation of Nakba.
Under constant threat and attack by Israel, the security and meaning of the home have become central to Palestinian national existence and identity. As Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, the Palestinian home is “responsible for the preservation of psychological and social life and the prevention of social death.”
As a site of collective memory-making, the home is also essential to the preservation of Palestine as a national homeland with territorial sovereignty and the continuation of Palestinians as a distinct national group protected by the United Nations Genocide Convention.
Domicide as genocide
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” acts causing serious bodily or mental harm or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a protected group’s physical destruction constitute genocide.
Both of these prohibited acts are implicated by the destruction of Palestinian homes in Gaza. As South Africa argued at the International Court of Justice in November 2023 — in reference to crimes committed by Hamas and militants from other armed groups on Oct. 7, 2023 and the continued holding of Israeli hostages — “no matter how outrageous or appalling an attack or provocation, genocide is never a permissible response.”
Domicide inflicts deep emotional trauma that is passed on to future generations. In Gaza, the tragic last public words of journalists, poets, academics, doctors and medical personnel, residents and international aid workers bear witness to Israel’s widespread destruction of homes, forcible displacement and the mental and physical suffering in the ensuing long journeys to the southern Gaza Strip.
Israel has displaced 75 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people at a staggering pace.
Approximately 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza are concentrated under abominable conditions in Rafah, forced to sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook while being subjected to frequent bombings.
Domicide and mass displacement have also created conditions for greater suffering and loss of life due to inadequate shelter, disease, starvation and lack of medical care.
It has exacerbated the vulnerability of children, disabled people, the elderly, LGBTQ2A+ people and women, exposing them to severe physical and mental harm.
Doctors have described the horrors of Gazan children losing limbs and being operated on without supplies or anesthesia and losing their entire families — now referred to by the acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family).
The dehumanizing statements by senior Israeli officials about Palestinians along with the staggering violence in Gaza — sometimes graphically celebrated by Israeli soldiers — suggests an intention to bring about the total or partial destruction of Palestinian life.
Recognizing domicide in Gaza
The illegality of disproportionate destruction of civilian property and dwellings is currently recognized under international law. However, the significance of the destruction of the home warrants further attention. Whether through its existing role in international crimes or additionally as a separate crime, the atrocities in Gaza highlight the need to recognize domicide as deliberately furthering the destruction of a group.
When Israel attacks Palestinian homes in Gaza, it is doing more than destroying property — it is demonstrating a genocidal intention to destroy Palestinians as a group.
Given the widespread current destruction, the indications of an intent to destroy Palestinians as a group and the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the plausibility of genocide in Gaza, there are compelling reasons to assess Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes as genocide.

No comments:

Post a Comment