July 8, 2024
Given the recent
pro-Palestinian protests around the world and on many university campuses, it
seems strange if not surprising that neither genocide nor the continuing flow
of U.S. weapons to Israel were mentioned during the first (and maybe only) 2024
presidential debate. Nor did the New York Times Editorial Board see fit to cite
complicity in genocide while calling for Biden to step down after his poor
debate performance.
Instead, it declared that Biden has been “an admirable
president.”
Clearly, the
major media and the American public are discounting the possibility that Joe
Biden and his White House enablers could ever be prosecuted for complicity in
genocide. They should think again.
The United
States is a member of the Genocide Convention of 1948. Article III includes
among punishable acts, “Complicity in Genocide.” Article IV makes clear that
persons punished for genocide shall include “responsible rulers, public
officials or private individuals.”
Article V requires the contracting parties to enact legislation that
provides “effective penalties for persons “guilty of genocide or any of the
other acts enumerated in article III.” Accordingly, 18 U.S. Code 1091 mirrors
the Convention’s definition of genocide and provides that “any person who
attempts or conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be punished
in the same manner as the person who completes the offense.”
Whether or not
charges of genocide complicity are ever brought against American individuals,
it is important to identify those officials and non-officials who fall into the
category of complicit in genocide. They should be called out for their role in
the deaths of almost 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
Here are the
major offenders:
White
House. In the wake of Hamas’ brutal
massacre on October 7, President Joe Biden embraced Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and promised to supply him with unlimited arms. Despite ignored and never-enforced Biden
“redlines” and pleas for Israel to limit its attacks on civilians,
U.S.-provided bombs have continued to fall on civilian centers while the use of
starvation as a war tactic has brought famine to the suffering Gazans. In a rare show of restraint following major
IDF raids on hospitals and refugee centers, Biden announced a one-time pause in
the delivery of 2,000 pounds. When
Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant raced off to Washington to complain,
American officials took pains to rebut Netanyahu’s claims that the Biden
administration was delaying military assistance. They showed Gallant records of
hundreds of weapons shipments to Israel for its Gaza campaign. By doing so, they also acknowledged U.S. complicity
in Israel’s continuing genocide. Biden
and aides who assisted in the arms transfers are all subject to charges of
complicity.
State
Department. In its much-delayed May report on the war, the State Department
denied that war crimes were being committed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken,
the face of American diplomacy, gave only lip service to its calls for military
restraint. From the beginning Blinken
and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called for a two-state solution
while conveying strong support for an Israeli war cabinet that firmly rejected
two- states. Meanwhile, Israel expanded its war campaign to Rafah and refused
calls for a ceasefire. Fully committed to Biden’s pro-Israel war policy, both
Blinken and Sullivan are now vulnerable to complicity charges.
Defense
Department. The Defense Department has
provided important intelligence, strategic advice, and aerial reconnaissance to
the IDF. It has delivered an estimated
$6.5 billion worth of U.S.-made bombs
and missiles that have destroyed so much of the Gaza Strip and killed or
wounded so many of its citizens. From
what we see in the media, Austin is a close advisor to Gallant. Moreover, the
Defense Department has been responsible for the regular hands-on transfer of
weapons from U.S. stockpiles to Israel for its war on Gaza. Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin and his aides have made themselves subject to charges of
complicity of genocide.
Military
Suppliers and Contractors. Boeing has been a major arms supplier to Israel both
before and during the Gaza war.
According to Amnesty International, Israel used Boeing supplied bombs in
at least five strikes on Gaza in 2023, causing the deaths of over 100
civilians. Other reported U.S. suppliers of lethal weapons to the IDF in its
Gaza campaign include General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Agilite and BAE Systems, among several
others. Under the Genocide Convention,
such companies are subject to complicity charges. The ICJ in April denied
Nicaragua’s request for provisional measures against Germany to stop its arms
shipments to Israel. Noting that Germany substantially reduced the value of
weapons for which licenses were granted for export to Israel, the Court
declined the Nicaraguan request.
However, the Court reminded all States of their international
obligations to avoid the risk that arms transfers “might be used to violate”
the Genocide Convention.
Whether or not
any U.S. entities and individuals are ever held criminally accountable for
complicity in genocide, the visible evidence of United States complicity has
been amply displayed on television, in the press and in the social media for
the whole world to see.
Oren
Ziv
In
early June, Al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it
described as “summary executions”: Israeli soldiers shooting dead several
Palestinians walking near the coastal road in the Gaza Strip, on three separate
occasions. In each case, the Palestinians appeared unarmed and did not pose any
imminent threat to the soldiers.
Such
footage is rare, due to the severe constraints faced by journalists in the
besieged enclave and the constant danger to their lives. But these executions,
which did not appear to have any security rationale, are consistent with the
testimonies of six Israeli soldiers who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call
following their release from active duty in Gaza in recent months.
Corroborating the testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses and doctors
throughout the war, the soldiers described being authorized to open fire on
Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians.
The
six sources — all except one of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity —
recounted how Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply
because they entered an area that the military defined as a “no-go zone.” The
testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses,
which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals; the army only hides them
from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys, so that “images of
people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out.” Two of the soldiers also
testified to a systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after
occupying them.
Several
sources described how the ability to shoot without restrictions gave soldiers a
way to blow off steam or relieve the dullness of their daily routine. “People
want to experience the event [fully],” S., a reservist who served in northern
Gaza, recalled. “I personally fired a few bullets for no reason, into the sea
or at the sidewalk or an abandoned building. They report it as ‘normal fire,’
which is a codename for ‘I’m bored, so I shoot.'”
Since
the 1980s, the Israeli military has refused to disclose its open-fire
regulations, despite various petitions to the High Court of Justice. According
to political sociologist Yagil Levy, since the Second Intifada, “the army has
not given soldiers written rules of engagement,” leaving much open to the
interpretation of soldiers in the field and their commanders. As well as
contributing to the killing of over 38,000 Palestinians, sources testified that
these lax directives were also partly responsible for the high number of
soldiers killed by friendly fire in recent months.
“There
was total freedom of action,” said B., another soldier who served in the
regular forces in Gaza for months, including in his battalion’s command center.
“If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain — you just
shoot.” When soldiers see someone approaching, “it is permissible to shoot at
their center of mass [their body], not into the air,” B. continued. “It’s
permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”
B.
went on to describe an incident in November when soldiers killed several
civilians during the evacuation of a school close to the Zeitoun neighborhood
of Gaza City, which had served as a shelter for displaced Palestinians. The
army ordered the evacuees to exit to the left, toward the sea, rather than to
the right, where the soldiers were stationed. When a gunfight erupted inside
the school, those who veered the wrong way in the ensuing chaos were
immediately fired at.
“There
was intelligence that Hamas wanted to create panic,” B. said. “A battle started
inside; people ran away. Some fled left toward the sea, [but] some ran to the
right, including children. Everyone who went to the right was killed — 15 to 20
people. There was a pile of bodies.”
‘People
shot as they pleased, with all their might’
B.
said that it was difficult to distinguish civilians from combatants in Gaza,
claiming that members of Hamas often “walk around without their weapons.” But
as a result, “every man between the ages of 16 and 50 is suspected of being a
terrorist.”
“It
is forbidden to walk around, and everyone who is outside is suspicious,” B.
continued. “If we see someone in a window looking at us, he is a suspect. You
shoot. The [army’s] perception is that any contact [with the population]
endangers the forces, and a situation must be created in which it is forbidden
to approach [the soldiers] under any circumstances. [The Palestinians] learned
that when we enter, they run away.”
Even
in seemingly unpopulated or abandoned areas of Gaza, soldiers engaged in
extensive shooting in a procedure known as “demonstrating presence.” S.
testified that his fellow soldiers would “shoot a lot, even for no reason —
anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots.” In some cases,
he noted, this was “intended to … remove people [from their hiding places] or
to demonstrate presence.”
M.,
another reservist who served in the Gaza Strip, explained that such orders
would come directly from the commanders of the company or battalion in the
field. “When there are no [other] IDF forces [in the area] … the shooting is
very unrestricted, like crazy. And not just small arms: machine guns, tanks,
and mortars.”
Even
in the absence of orders from above, M. testified that soldiers in the field
regularly take the law into their own hands. “Regular soldiers, junior
officers, battalion commanders — the junior ranks who want to shoot, they get
permission.”
S.
remembered hearing over the radio about a soldier stationed in a protective
compound who shot a Palestinian family walking around nearby. “At first, they
say ‘four people.’ It turns into two children plus two adults, and by the end
it’s a man, a woman, and two children. You can assemble the picture yourself.”
Only
one of the soldiers interviewed for this investigation was willing to be
identified by name: Yuval Green, a 26-year-old reservist from Jerusalem who
served in the 55th Paratroopers Brigade in November and December last year
(Green recently signed a letter by 41 reservists declaring their refusal to
continue serving in Gaza, following the army’s invasion of Rafah). “There were
no restrictions on ammunition,” Green told +972 and Local Call. “People were
shooting just to relieve the boredom.”
Green
described an incident that occurred one night during the Jewish festival of
Hanukkah in December, when “the whole battalion opened fire together like
fireworks, including tracer ammunition [which generates a bright light]. It
made a crazy color, illuminating the sky, and because [Hannukah] is the
‘festival of lights,’ it became symbolic.”
C.,
another soldier who served in Gaza, explained that when soldiers heard
gunshots, they radioed in to clarify whether there was another Israeli military
unit in the area, and if not, they opened fire. “People shot as they pleased,
with all their might.” But as C. noted, unrestricted shooting meant that
soldiers are often exposed to the huge risk of friendly fire — which he
described as “more dangerous than Hamas.” “On multiple occasions, IDF forces
fired in our direction. We didn’t respond, we checked on the radio, and no one
was hurt.”
At
the time of writing, 324 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the
ground invasion began, at least 28 of them by friendly fire according to the
army. In Green’s experience, such incidents were the “main issue” endangering
soldiers’ lives. “There was quite a bit [of friendly fire]; it drove me crazy,”
he said.
For
Green, the rules of engagement also demonstrated a deep indifference to the
fate of the hostages. “They told me about a practice of blowing up tunnels, and
I thought to myself that if there were hostages [in them], it would kill them.”
After Israeli soldiers in Shuja’iyya killed three hostages waving white flags
in December, thinking they were Palestinians, Green said he was angry, but was
told “there’s nothing we can do.” “[The commanders] sharpened procedures,
saying ‘You have to pay attention and be sensitive, but we are in a combat
zone, and we have to be alert.’”
B.
confirmed that even after the mishap in Shuja’iyya, which was said to be
“contrary to the orders” of the military, the open-fire regulations did not
change. “As for the hostages, we didn’t have a specific directive,” he
recalled. “[The army’s top brass] said that after the shooting of the hostages,
they briefed [soldiers in the field]. [But] they didn’t talk to us.” He and the
soldiers who were with him heard about the shooting of the hostages only two
and a half weeks after the incident, after they left Gaza.
“I’ve
heard statements [from other soldiers] that the hostages are dead, they don’t
stand a chance, they have to be abandoned,” Green noted. “[This] bothered me
the most … that they kept saying, ‘We’re here for the hostages,’ but it is
clear that the war harms the hostages. That was my thought then; today it
turned out to be true.”
‘A
building comes down, and the feeling is, “Wow, what fun”’
A.,
an officer who served in the army’s Operations Directorate, testified that his
brigade’s operations room — which coordinates the fighting from outside Gaza,
approving targets and preventing friendly fire — did not receive clear
open-fire orders to transmit to soldiers on the ground. “From the moment you
enter, at no point is there a briefing,” he said. “We didn’t receive
instructions from higher up to pass on to the soldiers and battalion
commanders.”
He
noted that there were instructions not to shoot along humanitarian routes, but
elsewhere, “you fill in the blanks, in the absence of any other directive. This
is the approach: ‘If it is forbidden there, then it is permitted here.’”
A.
explained that shooting at “hospitals, clinics, schools, religious
institutions, [and] buildings of international organizations” required higher
authorization. But in practice, “I can count on one hand the cases where we
were told not to shoot. Even with sensitive things like schools, [approval]
feels like only a formality.”
In
general, A. continued, “the spirit in the operations room was ‘Shoot first, ask
questions later.’ That was the consensus … No one will shed a tear if we
flatten a house when there was no need, or if we shoot someone who we didn’t
have to.”
A.
said he was aware of cases in which Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian civilians
who entered their area of operation, consistent with a Haaretz investigation
into “kill zones” in areas of Gaza under the army’s occupation. “This is the
default. No civilians are supposed to be in the area, that’s the perspective.
We spotted someone in a window, so they fired and killed him.” A. added that it
often was not clear from the reports whether soldiers had shot militants or
unarmed civilians — and “many times, it sounded like someone was caught up in a
situation, and we opened fire.”
But
this ambiguity about the identity of victims meant that, for A., military
reports about the numbers of Hamas members killed could not be trusted. “The
feeling in the war room, and this is a softened version, was that every person
we killed, we counted him as a terrorist,” he testified.
“The
aim was to count how many [terrorists] we killed today,” A. continued. “Every
[soldier] wants to show that he’s the big guy. The perception was that all the
men were terrorists. Sometimes a commander would suddenly ask for numbers, and
then the officer of the division would run from brigade to brigade going
through the list in the military’s computer system and count.”
A.’s
testimony is consistent with a recent report from the Israeli outlet Mako,
about a drone strike by one brigade that killed Palestinians in another
brigade’s area of operation. Officers from both brigades consulted on which one
should register the assassinations. “What difference does it make? Register it
to both of us,” one of them told the other, according to the publication.
During
the first weeks after the Hamas-led October 7 attack, A. recalled, “people were
feeling very guilty that this happened on our watch,” a feeling that was shared
among the Israeli public writ large — and quickly transformed into a desire for
retribution. “There was no direct order to take revenge,” A. said, “but when
you reach decision junctures, the instructions, orders, and protocols
[regarding ‘sensitive’ cases] only have so much influence.”
When
drones would livestream footage of attacks in Gaza, “there were cheers of joy
in the war room,” A. said. “Every once in a while, a building comes down … and
the feeling is, ‘Wow, how crazy, what fun.’”
A.
noted the irony that part of what motivated Israelis’ calls for revenge was the
belief that Palestinians in Gaza rejoiced in the death and destruction of
October 7. To justify abandoning the distinction between civilians and
combatants, people would resort to such statements as “‘They handed out
sweets,’ ‘They danced after October 7,’ or ‘They elected Hamas’ … Not everyone,
but also quite a few, thought that today’s child [is] tomorrow’s terrorist.
“I,
too, a rather left-wing soldier, forget very quickly that these are real homes
[in Gaza],” A. said of his experience in the operations room. “It felt like a
computer game. Only after two weeks did I realize that these are [actual]
buildings that are falling: if there are inhabitants [inside], then [the
buildings are collapsing] on their heads, and even if not, then with everything
inside them.”
‘A
horrific smell of death’
Multiple
soldiers testified that the permissive shooting policy has enabled Israeli
units to kill Palestinian civilians even when they are identified as such
beforehand. D., a reservist, said that his brigade was stationed next to two
so-called “humanitarian” travel corridors, one for aid organizations and one
for civilians fleeing from the north to the south of the Strip. Within his
brigade’s area of operation, they instituted a “red line, green line” policy,
delineating zones where it was forbidden for civilians to enter.
According
to D., aid organizations were permitted to travel into these zones with prior
coordination (our interview was conducted before a series of Israeli precision
strikes killed seven World Central Kitchen employees), but for Palestinians it
was different. “Anyone who crossed into the green area would become a potential
target,” D. said, claiming that these areas were signposted to civilians. “If
they cross the red line, you report it on the radio and you don’t need to wait
for permission, you can shoot.”
Yet
D. said that civilians often came into areas where aid convoys passed through
in order to look for scraps that might fall from the trucks; nonetheless, the
policy was to shoot anyone who tried to enter. “The civilians are clearly
refugees, they are desperate, they have nothing,” he said. Yet in the early
months of the war, “every day there were two or three incidents with innocent
people or [people] who were suspected of being sent by Hamas as spotters,” whom
soldiers in his battalion shot.
The
soldiers testified that throughout Gaza, corpses of Palestinians in civilian
clothes remained scattered along roads and open ground. “The whole area was
full of bodies,” said S., a reservist. “There are also dogs, cows, and horses
that survived the bombings and have nowhere to go. We can’t feed them, and we
don’t want them to get too close either. So, you occasionally see dogs walking
around with rotting body parts. There is a horrific smell of death.”
But
before the humanitarian convoys arrive, S. noted, the bodies are removed. “A
D-9 [Caterpillar bulldozer] goes down, with a tank, and clears the area of
corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the
convoys don’t see it — [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay
don’t come out,” he described.
“I
saw a lot of [Palestinian] civilians – families, women, children,” S.
continued. “There are more fatalities than are reported. We were in a small
area. Every day, at least one or two [civilians] are killed [because] they
walked in a no-go area. I don’t know who is a terrorist and who is not, but
most of them did not carry weapons.”
Green
said that when he arrived in Khan Younis at the end of December, “We saw some
indistinct mass outside a house. We realized it was a body; we saw a leg. At
night, cats ate it. Then someone came and moved it.”
A
non-military source who spoke to +972 and Local Call after visiting northern
Gaza also reported seeing bodies strewn around the area. “Near the army
compound between the northern and southern Gaza Strip, we saw about 10 bodies
shot in the head, apparently by a sniper, [seemingly while] trying to return to
the north,” he said. “The bodies were decomposing; there were dogs and cats
around them.”
“They
don’t deal with the bodies,” B. said of the Israeli soldiers in Gaza. “If
they’re in the way, they get moved to the side. There’s no burial of the dead.
Soldiers stepped on bodies by mistake.”
Last
month, Guy Zaken, a soldier who operated D-9 bulldozers in Gaza, testified
before a Knesset committee that he and his crew “ran over hundreds of
terrorists, dead and alive.” Another soldier he served with subsequently
committed suicide.
‘Before
you leave, you burn down the house’
Two
of the soldiers interviewed for this article also described how burning
Palestinian homes has become a common practice among Israeli soldiers, as first
reported in depth by Haaretz in January. Green personally witnessed two such
cases — the first an independent initiative by a soldier, and the second by
commanders’ orders — and his frustration with this policy is part of what
eventually led him to refuse further military service.
When
soldiers occupied homes, he testified, the policy was “if you move, you have to
burn down the house.” Yet for Green, this made no sense: in “no scenario” could
the middle of the refugee camp be part of any Israeli security zone that might
justify such destruction. “We are in these houses not because they belong to
Hamas operatives, but because they serve us operationally,” he noted. “It is a
house of two or three families — to destroy it means they will be homeless.
“I
asked the company commander, who said that no military equipment [could be]
left behind, and that we did not want the enemy to see our fighting methods,”
Green continued. “I said I would do a search [to make sure] there was no
[evidence of] combat methods left behind. [The company commander] gave me
explanations from the world of revenge. He said they were burning them because
there were no D-9s or IEDs from an engineering corp [that could destroy the
house by other means]. He received an order and it didn’t bother him.”
“Before
you leave, you burn down the house — every house,” B. reiterated. “This is
backed up at the battalion commander level. It’s so that [Palestinians] won’t
be able to return, and if we left behind any ammunition or food, the terrorists
won’t be able to use it.”
Before
leaving, soldiers would pile up mattresses, furniture, and blankets, and “with
some fuel or gas cylinders,” B. noted, “the house burns down easily, it’s like
a furnace.” At the beginning of the ground invasion, his company would occupy
houses for a few days and then move on; according to B., they “burned hundreds
of houses. There were cases where soldiers set a floor alight, and other
soldiers were on a higher floor and had to flee through the flames on the
stairs or choked on smoke.”
Green
said the destruction the military has left in Gaza is “unimaginable.” At the
beginning of the fighting, he recounted, they were advancing between houses 50
meters from each other, and many soldiers “treated the houses [like] a souvenir
shop,” looting whatever their residents hadn’t managed to take with them.
“In
the end you die of boredom, [after] days of waiting there,” Green said. “You
draw on the walls, rude things. Playing with clothes, finding passport photos
they left, hanging a picture of someone because it’s funny. We used everything
we found: mattresses, food, one found a NIS 100 bill [around $27] and took it.”
“We
destroyed everything we wanted to,” Green testified. “This is not out of a
desire to destroy, but out of total indifference to everything that belongs to
[Palestinians]. Every day, a D-9 demolishes houses. I haven’t taken
before-and-after photos, but I’ll never forget how a neighborhood that was
really beautiful … is reduced to sand.”
The
Israeli army did not respond to a request for comment by the time of
publication.
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