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By Abubaker Abed

Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza Wael al-Dahdouh was live on air when he heard the worst possible news: His family had been attacked by Israel.

His wife Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam were all killed.

It has been almost a month since the massacre yet Wael has not had any space to grieve. He has continued reporting with great courage on the genocide being inflicted on his people.

“The pain of loss can never be described,” he said in an interview. “It was unbearable but I am a different person because of the profession I hold. I fully believe that God has pearls of wisdom and he is the one who provides a man with patience and strength.”

Wael believes that by documenting Israel’s crimes, he is fulfilling a duty to his family.

“I was determined to return to work and appear on the screen out of loyalty to their blood and the blood of all the martyrs. I refused to let the occupation achieve its goal of shattering this voice. So I overcame my pain to appear to the world again and convey my message and the message of every Palestinian suffering in Gaza.”

“Absolute horror”

Wael has witnessed all five of the previous major Israeli attacks on Gaza since December 2008.

“The 2023 war on Gaza is an absolute horror,” he said. “It is totally different and undoubtedly the bloodiest, the most destructive and the most monstrous. Throughout all the wars we have seen violence, destruction and injuries. But none comes close to this level of brutality and bloodshed.”

While Israel has bombed residential buildings without warning on many occasions, it is doing so far more frequently this time.

“It’s the first war when electricity was fully cut off, water was wholly cut off, and when crossings were completely closed for more than 25 days, preventing aid from entering the Strip,” he said.

I asked Wael when there will be peace and liberty in Gaza.

“When the occupation ends,” he said. “The occupation means aggression and the continuation of these painful images of destruction, horror and hardship. Its end will mean the return of Gaza, Palestine, and the Arab region to the hugs of peace, freedom, love, calm, security and every beautiful thing.”

Aged 53, Wael has no retirement plans despite everything that he has endured. He vows to keep working “no matter the cost.”

Journalists have paid a heavy price during this current war. More than 50 have been killed.

“We are all journalists in these circumstances,” said Wael. “We are not a party to this war. All we do is report events and what is happening around us.”

The bravery of Wael and other Palestinian journalists is at odds with how Western media outlets generally refuse to hold Israel accountable.

“As a human being and a Palestinian, I have a message to people all over the world,” Wael said. “We want you to listen to the narrative of the Palestinians, not just the Israelis. Please do not let the world apply any double standards. We have our narrative and we only ask for justice. Justice must prevail in the world.”

Abubaker Abed is a journalist and translator based in Gaza.

26 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

We, the Rohingya have been chased from our homelands through a series of massacres and Burmese military campaigns since 1978. Our villages have been exterminated and wiped out of all maps. The Palestinian situation is just the same, if not, even worse.

By Raïss Tinmaung

The Palestinian situation is just the same, if not, even worse. They were evicted from their homes through non-stop eviction campaigns by the Israeli government ever since the formation of Israel which resulted in the Nakba of 1948. Their houses have constantly been bulldozed and their entire neighbourhoods have been demolished to make way for new Israeli settlements. The vast majority of Palestinians are now forced to live in pockets of “Bantustans” in the West Bank, in refugee camps within Israel and neighbouring states, and in the open air prison of Gaza.

Just like the Rohingya, the Palestinians cannot move freely within their own ancestral lands. Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians need to go through check points and pay hefty sums to the authorities to be able to simply go from one village/township to another. The Rohingya can never get official jobs or work without fear of their land and produce getting confiscated overnight; the Palestinians live through the same. The Rohingya are not allowed to vote or run for office in federal elections, the Palestinians in Israel are the same. The Rohingya are discriminated in Burmese schools and educational institutions, just like Palestinian children are treated inferior in Israeli education systems. The Rohingya are constantly abducted, detained, and imprisoned without trial; the Palestinians have an unparalleled record of unlawful detentions in Israeli prisons. In essence, just like the Rohingya live under severe discrimination in Myanmar, the Palestinians live in apartheid under systemic discrimination and oppression from Israeli authorities.

Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians are looked down upon and denigrated by the Israelis as objects of extreme hate. Throughout social media, Israeli citizens are often heard saying out loud in public “we will kill you all”, “we will bomb all hospitals, all the tunnels, everything”, ”Gaza nakba 2023” . Similarly, prior to the Rohingya massacre of 2017, hate speech on social media was widespread with statements such as “kill them all so that they can meet Allah faster”, or “stuff pig into their mouths and throw them into the river”. At the government level, Israeli Ministers have referred to Palestinians as “snakes”, “beasts on two legs” and “human animals”, just like the Rohingyas were referred to as “insects” and “half humans” by government officials and the clergy. Scholars of genocide stress that hate speech and dehumanization of a population are integral to any genocide, an international and organized process of physical destruction of any identity-based population or human group. There is no doubt that the Israeli regime, from its “moderate” president to Far-Right prime minister and cabinet ministers, as well as the society at large, have openly and crudely expressed vile and hate-filled speech towards the Palestinians, just as Myanmar’s flagship political party of Aung San Suu Kyi, state officials, and the military, as well as multi-ethnic civil society had towards the Rohingya while committing genocide.

However revolting the Hamas acts of violence against the Southern settler communities might have been, a just military retaliation can never include the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps. Genocide is no “self-defence”: Period. For an armed force as sophisticated as the IDF, there is no reason why they should ever resort to the bombing of a civilian population, starving them for weeks, and destroying their healthcare facilities where the crippled and elderly are housed. The only reason is their sheer intent to eliminate the Palestinians as much as they can.

Last month I was at Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh as part of my yearly visits to the Rohingya children’s education & vocational training programs that I run through a registered charity. During my visit I saw many kids playing and running around in narrow unkempt alleys between densely crowded shelters. I got to know a few kids by their names: Kulsum, 6, Jannatara, 7, and Nurhashim, 6. Their smiles were innocent and their laughter simply oblivious. I can still see them when I close my eyes.

But what if I closed my eyes and I saw them bombed to death all of a sudden? Alas, such unspeakable horror was the eventuality of many Palestinian children in Jabalia and many other refugee camps…

We, the Rohingya have been chased from our homelands through a series of massacres and Burmese military campaigns since 1978. Our villages have been exterminated and wiped out of all maps. People who lived in my parents’ and grandparents’ villages were forced out by government authorities to make space for settler colonies called “Nga ta la”. Those of us who owned lands for generations became homeless overnight. Many had no choice but to resort to Internally Displaced Persons camps a few kilometers from their own villages inside Arakan. We became refugees in our own homelands.

The Palestinian situation is just the same, if not, even worse. They were evicted from their homes through non-stop eviction campaigns by the Israeli government ever since the formation of Israel which resulted in the Nakba of 1948. Their houses have constantly been bulldozed and their entire neighbourhoods have been demolished to make way for new Israeli settlements. The vast majority of Palestinians are now forced to live in pockets of “Bantustans” in the West Bank, in refugee camps within Israel and neighbouring states, and in the open air prison of Gaza.

Just like the Rohingya, the Palestinians cannot move freely within their own ancestral lands. Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians need to go through check points and pay hefty sums to the authorities to be able to simply go from one village/township to another. The Rohingya can never get official jobs or work without fear of their land and produce getting confiscated overnight; the Palestinians live through the same. The Rohingya are not allowed to vote or run for office in federal elections, the Palestinians in Israel are the same. The Rohingya are discriminated in Burmese schools and educational institutions, just like Palestinian children are treated inferior in Israeli education systems. The Rohingya are constantly abducted, detained, and imprisoned without trial; the Palestinians have an unparalleled record of unlawful detentions in Israeli prisons. In essence, just like the Rohingya live under severe discrimination in Myanmar, the Palestinians live in apartheid under systemic discrimination and oppression from Israeli authorities.

Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians are looked down upon and denigrated by the Israelis as objects of extreme hate. Throughout social media, Israeli citizens are often heard saying out loud in public “we will kill you all”, “we will bomb all hospitals, all the tunnels, everything”, ”Gaza nakba 2023” . Similarly, prior to the Rohingya massacre of 2017, hate speech on social media was widespread with statements such as “kill them all so that they can meet Allah faster”, or “stuff pig into their mouths and throw them into the river”. At the government level, Israeli Ministers have referred to Palestinians as “snakes”, “beasts on two legs” and “human animals”, just like the Rohingyas were referred to as “insects” and “half humans” by government officials and the clergy. Scholars of genocide stress that hate speech and dehumanization of a population are integral to any genocide, an international and organized process of physical destruction of any identity-based population or human group. There is no doubt that the Israeli regime, from its “moderate” president to Far-Right prime minister and cabinet ministers, as well as the society at large, have openly and crudely expressed vile and hate-filled speech towards the Palestinians, just as Myanmar’s flagship political party of Aung San Suu Kyi, state officials, and the military, as well as multi-ethnic civil society had towards the Rohingya while committing genocide.

However revolting the Hamas acts of violence against the Southern settler communities might have been, a just military retaliation can never include the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps. Genocide is no “self-defence”: Period. For an armed force as sophisticated as the IDF, there is no reason why they should ever resort to the bombing of a civilian population, starving them for weeks, and destroying their healthcare facilities where the crippled and elderly are housed. The only reason is their sheer intent to eliminate the Palestinians as much as they can.

When I close my eyes and see Kulsum, Jannatara and Nurhashim playing in the alleys of Kutupalong refugee camps, I pray that they aren’t bombed to death by some Burmese military artillery falling over their heads. Their only crime: they were born Rohingya and are therefore considered less human by the ruling regime. And I hope my prayers are answered. But for Alaa, Momen, Hazem, Yousef, Yazan and dozens of other children in Jabalia refugee camp, that prayer cannot be made. They are already bombed to death, along with approximately 6000 other innocent children, who were clearly considered less human by the Israeli government and its allies.

Raïss Tinmaung is the country coordinator for Canada at Free Rohingya Coalition.

28 November 2023

Source: forsea.co

By The Chris Hedges Report

20 Nov 2023 – Israel is carrying out a campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable. This campaign includes destroying all of Gaza’s hospitals. The message Israel is sending is clear – Nowhere is safe. If you stay you die.

Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt where they will never return.

Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building, killing twelve people.

The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint.

This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.

Israel has shut down 21 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, including Gaza’s only cancer hospital. The hospitals still operating have severe shortages of basic medicine and supplies. One by one the hospitals are being picked off. Soon there will be no health facilities left. This is by design.

Tens of thousands of terrified Palestinians, forced to evacuate by Israel, their homes blasted into rubble, seek refuge from the relentless bombing by camping out in and around Gaza’s hospitals. They hope the medical centers will not be targeted by Israel. If Israel abided by the Geneva Conventions they would be correct. But Israel is not carrying out a war. It is carrying out a genocide. And in a genocide, a population, and all that sustains a population, is obliterated.

In an ominous sign that Israel will turn on the Palestinians in the West Bank once it is done flattening Gaza, armored vehicles have surrounded at least four West Bank hospitals. The Ibn Sina Hospital has been raided by Israeli soldiers along with the East Jerusalem Hospital.

Israel’s settler colonial state was founded on lies. It is sustained by lies. And now, when it is grimly determined to carry out the worst slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that saw 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed and some 50 massacres by Jewish militias, it spits out one grotesque absurdity after another. It speaks of Palestinians as a dehumanized mass. There are no mothers, fathers, children, teachers, doctors, lawyers, cooks, poets, taxi drivers or shopkeepers. Palestinians, in the Israeli lexicon, are a single contagion that must be eradicated.

Watch this video of Israeli school children singing, “We Will Annihilate Everyone” in Gaza.

Hitler Youth used to sing songs like this about Jews.

Those who embark upon projects of mass killing lie to avoid demoralizing their own populations, lull the victims into believing they will not all be exterminated and stop outside forces from intervening. The Nazis claimed that Jews packed on trains and sent to extermination camps were on work details and had good medical care and adequate food. As for the infirm and elderly, they were cared for in rest centers. The Nazis even created a mock camp for the “resettlement” of Jews “to the East,” – Theresienstadt – where international bodies such as the Red Cross could see how humanely the Jews were treated, even as millions were being exterminated.

At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern day Türkiye of Armenians.

The Ottoman government, in an attempt to hide the genocide, banned foreigners from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses that lined the roads. Israel too has blocked the foreign press from Gaza, carrying out only a handful of brief and carefully staged visits arranged by the Israeli military. Israel periodically cuts off internet and phone services. At least 43 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, many undoubtedly targeted by Israeli forces.

Armenians, like Palestinians, were forced from their homes, gunned down and denied food and water. Armenian deportees were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert where tens of thousands were shot or died from starvation, cholera, malaria, dysentery and influenza. Israel is forcing 1.1 million Palestinians into the southern tip of Gaza and bombing them as they flee. These refugees, like the Armenians, lack food, water, fuel and sanitation. They too will soon succumb to epidemics of infectious diseases.

Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr., in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, “that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.”

The longer the genocide continues the more absurd the lies become.

There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” An Israeli actor dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon, “terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding “we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC, shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.

The lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.

In wartime people believe what they want to believe. The lies fill a hunger within the Israeli public that sees the conflict as a binary struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness.” The lies are a defense against accountability, for if Israel refuses to acknowledge reality, it is not forced to respond to reality. The lies create cognitive dissonance, where fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide, or reconciliation, impossible.

Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past genocides, it never happened.

The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel’s genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes. The killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be banished. Israel, a monster to the Palestinians, will be a monster to itself.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

By Shola Lawal

The grouping, which has previously focused on economic issues, called for an end to ‘war crimes’ in the Gaza conflict.

21 Nov 2023 – Leaders of major emerging economies called for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza today and for a cessation of hostilities on both sides to ease the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

By Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster

New Estimates Based on U.S. National Accounts

November 2023 – For decades, it has been recognized by independent researchers that actual U.S. military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level.¹ In 2022, actual U.S. military spending reached $1.537 trillion—more than twice the officially acknowledged level of $765.8 billion. Data on U.S. military spending reported by the U.S. government, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, generally considered the definitive source on international military expenditures), and NATO all primarily rely on the figures of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).² These data, however, are subject to two major shortcomings.First, the numbers provided by the OMB with respect to “defense spending” are substantially lower than those provided in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), the most complete and definitive source on U.S. national income and expenditures as a whole, constituting an input-output approach to the whole economy, and the basis of all analysis of the U.S. economy.

Second, as is well-known, key areas of U.S. military spending are included in other parts of federal expenditures and do not fall under the OMB’s “defense spending” category. Although SIPRI and NATO adopt wider definitions of “defense spending” than the U.S. government and claim to increase their estimates using the OMB figures as a base, in practice, they do so only marginally and in ways that are not entirely transparent, with the result that their figures are only slightly above those of the officially acknowledged U.S. figures.3

If the reality is that actual U.S. military spending has been consistently around twice the acknowledged amounts—something demonstrated repeatedly in independent studies—the methodology for approaching the question of actual military spending on a consistent, statistically conservative, and incontestable basis has only developed over time. Most attempts have sought simply to add components of actual military spending appearing in other parts of federal spending and not included under OMB figures for “national defense.” Although these studies helped to set the stage, they often appeared to have a scattered and arbitrary character, rather than employing a truly consistent methodology.

A breakthrough in this respect was first achieved by Jurgen M. Brauer at Augusta State University’s College of Business Administration in 2007. Brauer introduced an approach that took the NIPA data on U.S. military consumption and investment expenditures as the base for U.S. military spending, and then added in other military expenditures outside of official defense using the NIPA accounts, creating a methodology for detailing U.S. military expenditures that not only surmounted the limitations of the OMB data with respect to accounting for “defense spending” itself, but adopted an entirely consistent approach, based on NIPA data, to adding in unacknowledged expenditures.4 Brauer’s approach was then developed further by Hannah Holleman, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney in an article in Monthly Review in 2008 that provided detailed estimates of actual U.S. military expenditures, as opposed to those officially acknowledged by the OMB, for 2007.5

Although the estimates of military spending here rely on the 2008 study by Holleman, Foster, and McChesney (building on Brauer’s 2007 methodological breakthrough) as its original basis, the method and results differ somewhat from that earlier study, adopting more conservative assumptions, while incorporating some refinements that Brauer introduced in 2019. Thus, the percentages attributed to the military in federal space expenditures and in grants to foreign countries are lower in the present estimates, in accord with widely accepted mainstream assumptions. Military medical insurance (consisting of payments for medical services for dependents of active duty military personnel at nonmilitary facilities) is also added, which was not included in the earlier study by Holleman, Foster, and McChesney. (It should be noted that military spending in the Department of Energy associated with nuclear weapons is included in both OMB and NIPA, as recognized in the earlier study.)

In addition to the NIPA data for total defense consumption and gross investment expenditures, our figures for actual U.S. military expenditures include seven further categories: veterans’ benefits, veterans’ life insurance, other veterans’ costs, military medical insurance, the military portions of space spending, grants in aid to other governments, and the share of net interest attributed to actual federal military expenditures. (Net interest here includes only “on-budget” net interest, excluding the “off-budget” net interest associated with Social Security and other transfer payments, as well as the Post Office.)

Veterans’ benefits and net interest both constitute what are known as so-called legacy costs of militarism and war, and thus are part of overall military spending, but are not included in the official “defense budget.” Euroconsult has attributed 42.4 percent of federal space consumption and investment expenditure to the military.6 The Council of Foreign Relations conservatively classified 33 percent of all U.S. grants in foreign aid as for military purposes.7

All of these categories, taken together, thus constitute the components of actual military spending as shown in Table 1. The table shows that actual U.S. military spending in 2022 came to $1.537 trillion, as opposed to the $765.8 billion in acknowledged (OMB) defense spending (and the $876 billion estimated by SIPRI and $821 billion by NATO). This means that actual U.S. military spending in 2022 was more than double the acknowledged “defense spending” provided by OMB.

By Vanessa Beeley

23 Nov 2023 – In-Depth Analysis of Syrian Military Developments Since 7 October

October 7th has sent shock waves throughout the world. The invincible Israel with, allegedly, the most powerful military and intelligence capability was proven to be a paper tiger by a weaker and less well equipped Palestinian Resistance coalition.

The effect has been dramatic on regional Resistance factions – triggering a regional wide engagement with Israel or with the illegal US military bases in Syria and Iraq. As a result, there has been an unprecedented military escalation in the region that has largely gone unreported with all eyes on Gaza and the ongoing Zionist ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and West Bank.

Israel is in disarray with internal divisions threatening the Netanyahu extremist coalition government. Netanyahu is unable to acknowledge the military and intelligence failings despite pressure to do so, even from within his own military.

Instead Israel has resorted to the familiar sadistic war against women, children and innocent civilians for almost two months. The ongoing brutal massacre on an hourly basis, the targeting of hospitals, UNRWA refugee centers and schools, humanitarian convoys, ambulances, paramedics, civil defence headquarters are a litany of war crimes.

Of course any admission by Netanyahu would signal the end of his political career and bring him to trial for corruption. Despite the knowledge that his military would suffer horrendous losses in a ground operation in the sprawling urban landscape of the Gaza enclave, Netanyahu gave the green light to invade. He relied on the daily horrific civilian death toll to break the Resistance resolve.

The message was “to resist is futile” but just as the entire globalist axis led by the US and UK failed to factor in the determination of the Syrian people to prevent regime change in Syria – the world has underestimated the strength of the Palestinian Resistance against decades of apartheid, oppression and trickle expansionist ethnic cleansing by the Zionist entity.

Hezbollah in northern Palestine has skillfully and tactically occupied the Zionist forces in the north preventing their involvement in the Gaza operations and ongoing stealth ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Yemen has directly engaged by targeting sites in southern occupied Palestine. Iraqi Resistance factions have increased their attacks against US illegal military bases in Iraq and Syria resulting in the death of at least forty US military personnel. Most recently Yemeni forces have seized an Israeli owned vessel in the Red Sea holding the crew hostage.

Palestinian factions inside Syria have launched several missile attacks on Israeli occupation sites in the illegally annexed Golan territories and even attacked Eilat from Syrian territory.

In response, the US and Israel have mobilised their ISIS agents in Syria to attack Syrian Arab Army positions in the central desert areas.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), an Al Qaeda offshoot, have escalated attacks on the northern Lattakia countryside axis and intensified drone attacks in Western Aleppo, northern Lattakia and northern Hama.

Israel aggression particularly south of Damascus has increased with the latest attack on the Sayeda Zainab district of south-east Damascus yesterday afternoon (22/11). Aleppo and Damascus civilian airports are still closed, not because of the previous damage from Israeli aggression, due to the high risk of Israeli bombardment.

The US has directly engaged with the Syrian Arab Army in Deir Ezzor in north-east Syria. Syria has responded by directly engaging with the US occupation forces, targeting US military bases and shooting down US drones. Syria has expanded the operational area in Syria for all Resistance factions to enable the targeting of Israel from multiple and mobile fronts.

In this article the focus will be on the military situation in Syria. Syria has endured a 12 year Western-orchestrated regime change war that has decimated Syrian infrastructure, depleted the military capability, imposed unprecedented sanctions unilaterally on the Syrian people. The US occupies oil and agricultural resources in the north-east, their assets occupy the agricultural resources in the north-west. Their Kurdish proxies and Al Qaeda assets benefit from the trade of Syrian resources under the protection of US political and military endorsement and collaboration.

Syria’s refusal to abandon Palestine and willingness to expand the ability of Resistance factions to target Israeli facilities and installations has triggered serious recriminations from the US/Israeli axis.

ISIS aggression on behalf of Israel and US

On the 8th of November ISIS groups attacked Syrian Arab Army positions in the vicinity of the Homs, Hama and Raqqa triangle. The attack led to the deaths of 21 SAA soldiers and several injured. Military reinforcements were dispatched to comb the area and to eliminate the ISIS fighters.

Since the double earthquake tragedy that struck Syria and Turkey on the 6th February there have been a number of ISIS attacks on Syrian military and civilians. This attack of the 8th November and the one that preceded it are the most intense.

On 18th October, ISIS launched a wide-scale assault on the SAA and allies in the Al Sukhnah area of the eastern Homs desert. ISIS took control of SAA positions along the main road and the Dubayyat gas field. This from a Carnegie Middle East Center report in 2015 when ISIS was gaining ground in Syria (before Russian intervention in September 2015):

Faced with dense regime defenses around Shaer, the Islamic State shifted its focus to Palmyra, which has been the site of the most development in Syria’s gas sector since the mid-1990s. Fields in the area were expected to eventually produce 9 million cubic meters of crude gas per day. These included the Arak, Dubayat, Hail, Hayan, Jihar, al-Mahr, Najib, Sukhneh, and Abi Rabah fields, which according to a former industry insider have collectively been producing half of Syria’s output of natural raw and liquid petroleum gas. Palmyra is also the transit point for pipelines carrying gas from important fields in Hasakah and Deir Ezzor provinces in northeastern and eastern Syria respectively.

The US appears to be recycling their strategy of pre-Russian intervention to control the ‘hub between the extraction or transfer of virtually all of Syrian gas production and the processing and power plants further west that supply electricity and gas for domestic and industrial use’ to the most populated areas of Syria that are under the control of the Syrian government and military.

The SAA was forced to withdraw and to await reinforcements from the 18th Division and allied forces.

The ISIS terrorists were counter-attacked and the Syrian positions were recaptured in the southern outskirts of Al Sukhna. ISIS forces were routed with a high casualty rate.

Units of the SAA pursued the remnants of ISIS terrorists targeting them heavily with artillery to force their retreat to the 55 km exclusion zone established by the US occupation forces around the US allied Al Tanf military base on the borders of Iraq and Jordan.

ISIS terrorists were also besieged in small pockets around Al Dubayyat gas field. Russian and Syrian warplanes concurrently bombed ISIS groups emanating from the area of Al Tanf that were trying to reach Al Dubbayat to break the SAA siege on their militants.

On November 16th, Deputy Head of the Russian Reconciliation Center, Vadim Collet, gave a statement that:

“Armed groups trained at Al-Tanf base are planning to carry out sabotage acts in southern Syria against Syrian forces on main roads and fuel and energy facilities” adding that “the leadership of both Russian and Syrian forces will take preemptive measures to prevent armed provocations”

On the 13th November, at night, the SAA again repelled an ISIS attack on Point 10 in the Ja’ideen area in the eastern desert of Raqqa, on the administrative border with Homs province.

The joint Russian-Syrian warplanes targeted ISIS terrorists, forcing them to withdraw again to the open desert within the US controlled Al Tanf 55 km exclusion zone.

The Syrian Arab Army secured the area between the Al-Rasafa Castle and Al-Zamla village less than an hour after the failed infiltration operation, which demonstrates a significant improvement in the Syrian Arab Army’s ability to respond and deal with these attacks.

Later on November 14, an ISIS cell attacked a Russian patrol with an RPG on Al-Shaer gas field road in the desert. Three Russian soldiers were injured in the attack.

The level of attacks being carried out by the ISIS terrorists is indicative of both their presence in the areas occupied by US allied forces and of the control that the US alliance has over this terrorist faction operating in Syria and Iraq.

The ISIS attacks must be seen in conjunction with the US and Israeli direct attacks on SAA and allied military positions.

Israeli aggression against Syria since October 7th

After five Israeli attacks in October, four of which targeted civilian airports in Damascus and Aleppo, putting them out of service, Israel has attacked more than three times in November.

On November 8th at 22.50 Israel launched an attack on the positions of allied forces in the farmland extending from Sayeda Zainab and Aqraba, south-west of Damascus. They also targeted radar systems and air defence positions in Tal Qalib and Tal Al Massih in the Sweida district, southern Syria – scene of the most recent separatist protests backed and instigated by the US and Israel. Three civilians were injured in the Sweida attack.

In the early dawn hours of November 10th, Israel bombed two positions of the Syrian allies in the vicinity of Shanshar, south-west of Homs. This led to the deaths of seven Hezbollah soldiers and significant material damage.

Vanessa Beeley is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

27 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

21 Nov 2023 – Revised version of an interview by Mohaddeseh Pakravan of Mehr News Agency published in the Tehran Times on 16 Nov 2023.

1-How do you assess the international developments taking place around the Gaza war? Can the support of the United States and some European countries to the Israeli regime be justified?

There are two broad responses to this question. The first distinguishes between the Global West, including several EU countries, especially the US that are supportive enablers of Israel and the Global South in which there is present on every continent widespread opposition to the genocidal violence of the Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attack.

The second line of response is to distinguish between the people in the countries supporting Israel and their governments. Even in the United States and Western Europe, street protests and demonstrations, as confirmed by public opinion polls, suggest that the people are calling for, even demanding, a Gaza ceasefire while governments continues to abstain or even continue to endorse Israel’s military operations despite its daily atrocities, although the support for Israel is expressed in a less unqualified way verbally as the Hamas attacks recedes from consciousness and as Palestinian bodies pile up, especially those of infant children.

The Israeli justification for unleashing this tsunami of violence against an entrapped civilian population was initially expressed in the vengeful language of its leaders in response to the Hamas attack. Such an outrageous embrace of violence failed to produce any dissenting comments from official circles in the Global West. Later Israel and supporters put forward somewhat more standard justifications based on its claimed right to defend itself, which seems to imply that Israel is exercising its international law right of self-defense, but the vague language used may be a deliberate attempt to gain greater latitude than is associated with the scope of self-defense under international law. Israel seems to be issuing itself a license for an unlimited recourse to punitive violence which is not permissible under international law. In any event, Israel’s disproportionate, indiscriminate, and grossly excessive violence that is further aggravated by the targeting of such protected sites as hospitals, mosques and churches, crowded refugee camps, UN buildings, and schools throughout Gaza. Such behavior discredits any Israeli defensive security justifications both legally and morally.

There are additional problems with Israel’s onslaught being carried out against the civilian population of Gaza under the glare of journalistic coverage and TV cameras. Because Israel remains the Occupying Power in Gaza it is subject to the legal framework set forth in the 4^th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation, and possesses a primary duty that is spelled out in the provisions of the treaty to protect the wellbeing and rights of the occupied population. It has no right of self-defense as the concept is understood in international law, or set forth in the constraining language of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which presupposes a prior sustained armed attack across an international border by a foreign actor, and not just a single incident of the sort caused by  Hamas, an actor internal to Israel’s de facto domain of sovereign authority, although limited by its duties in relation to the administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has been Israel’s responsibility since the end of the 1967 War.

In 2005 for a variety of reasons associated with a pragmatic approach to national interests, Israel implemented a ‘disengagement’ plan in Gaza, which included withdrawing its troops and security forces from occupied Palestinian territories to Israel proper and dismantling the unlawful settlements that had been established in Gaza between 1967 and 2005. Israel contended that these moves of disengagement ended its responsibilities under international humanitarian law as the Occupying Power. This view was rejected by the UN and the weight of assessment by international jurists because Israel retained effective control over the borders, including the entry and exit of persons and traded goods, as well as exerting its authority to impose continuing control of Gaza’s air space and coastal waters, including a highly restrictive blockade since 2007, confining the identity of Hamas to that of ‘terrorists’ despite its success in internationally monitored election in 2006. Israel made no secret of its policy of keeping the population on what governmental officials called ‘a subsistence diet’ as periodically reinforced by major military incursions luridly described by Tel Aviv as ‘mowing the lawn.’ Such genocidal tropes anticipate the behavior and language relied upon in the ongoing all out attack on Gaza.

From 1967 until the present there have been resistance initiatives undertaken by the Palestinians in Gaza, including the Intifada of 1987, the Great March of Return in 2018, and rocket launches that did minimal damage and always were either in response to Israeli provocations or followed by disproportionate Israel air strikes. Even after its disengagement plan was put in operation the people of Gaza were subjected to a variety of serious forms of collective punishment as prohibited by Ariticle 33 of Geneva IV. The overall conditions of Gaza led prominent international observers to describe  Gaza ‘the world’s largest open air prison,’ a damning indictment of Israel’s dereliction of its duties as Occupying Power.

By way of open diplomacy and by concerted recourse to back channel efforts Hamas from the time of its election victory in 2006 put forward a variety of proposals for an extended ceasefire for as long as 50 years, but Israel showed no interest in exploring such a prospect.

During this period UN Special Rapporteurs chosen by the Human Rights Commission in Geneva reported on Israeli violations of human rights, making various policy recommendations that were never carried out due to geopolitical leverage exerted to insulate Israel from legal accountability.

2-Although the Israeli regime is clearly violating international law, international organizations including the United Nations have failed to take a decisive practical measure against Tel Aviv. Why cannot such organizations take serious measures to stop Israeli crimes?

In the last years i=of World War II the founders designed the UN to be weak regarding the management of power and strategic rivalry, giving a veto power in the Security Council to the winners in the war, presumed then to be the most powerful and dangerous countries in the world. This view seemed to reflect accurately power hierarchies as of 1945. In one respect it was confirm by the fact of the first five nuclear powers were the same five countries given this privileged status in the UN System.

Such an arrangement was also expressed by making the General Assembly’s authority expressly limited to making recommendations and specific fact-finding initiatives despite it being the UN political organ most representative of the peoples of the world. It is made clear in numerous provisions of the Charter that the Organization formally defers to the primacy of geopolitics in a large variety of situations that occur within the UN, including the selection of the Secretary-General, the amendment of the Charter and reform of the UN, the enforcement of International Court of Justice decisions, and the implementation of policy recommendations from the various entities comprising the UN System. This means in practice, the UN can only be effective when P5 reach agreement, and paralyzed when disagreement is fundamental as it is with respect to the present unfolding genocide victimizing the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, and less directly the whole of the Palestinian presence in both the entire occupied territories and Israel itself.

Even if the Security Council reaches an agreement, the UN does not. possess the capabilities to implement its decisions without the voluntary provision of funds and personnel for peacekeeping and humanitarian undertakings, which presupposes the presence of a supportive political will. The UN can be effective, perhaps too effective, if a Security Council resolution as was the case in 2011, which authorized a limited intervention in Libya. The use of force was implemented by NATO capabilities in a manner that greatly exceeded what the Security Council, producing a regime-changing intervention, angering countries that had abstained and undermining trust among the P5, as well as causing chaos in the country that has lasted up to the present. In the Libyan case the UN allowed itself to be geopolitically manipulated by NATO seeking to legitimize its regime-changing mission that violated Libya’s sovereign rights.

3- How successful do you see the Zionist-affiliated world stream media in justifying the Israeli regime’s brutal attacks on civilians in Gaza?

The global media, by and large, did provide credibility for the initial phases of the Israeli response. It became harder to do this as the narrative about the Hamas attack of October 7 receded in time and the Israeli attack took on such visibly vicious characteristics of disproportionate violence and genocide, given an explicit transparency by the statements of numerous Israeli leaders including Netanyahu and the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. Gallant issued a notorious decree denying the people of Gaza food, fuel, and electricity and comparing the beleaguered Palestinian civilians to ‘human animals’ who deserved to be treated “accordingly”, a dehumanizing language confirming genocidal intent. Such intent was manifest in the repeated attacks on prohibited targets, producing high casualties including among children, sick and disabled Palestinians, health and aid workers, and those sheltering in UN buildings and hospitals. Israel completely abandoned the canons of responsible statecraft and made no effort to uphold the duties of an Occupying Power. Even before this eruption the UN was seeking guidance from the ICJ and a specially constituted Commission of Inquiry as to whether the UN should formally terminate Israel’s status as Occupying Power and call for Israel’s withdrawal to its former borders from the three Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. It should be remembered that an unanimous Security Council Resolution, 242, anticipating a temporary occupation followed by such a withdrawal. Such thinking was shaped by the view that international law prohibited the acquisition of foreign territory by forcible means. It should also be appreciated that Israel was deemed an apartheid by a wide range of respected civil society human rights civil society non-governmental organizations, which is a serious crime that is continuous as embedded in the structure of Israel’s system of oppressive control of the Palestinian people in their distinct circumstances.

4-What Should Muslim leading countries do to stop Israeli crimes?

This is the most important challenge faced by Muslim majority countries since the end of the Cold War. In essence, the governments of Muslim countries should feel obligated to do more than call for a ceasefire, but they should certainly at least do this, and have yet to do. More is needed by way of punitive and substantive action in the form of boycotts and sanctions, censure for genocide to halt and oppose the Israeli war machine. More is also needed as to the future, ideally accountability for Israel, major reconstruction aid and pressure for a just peace that realizes the Palestinian right of self-determination. This is a. moment of truth for the entire world, and it could become a turning point for a better future for humanity, but only if actions taken are done to oppose Israel’s genocidal campaign in a spirit of urgency, sacrifice, sufficiency, and a re-humanizing solidarity. We cannot let ourselves, wherever located, become resigned to a toxic fate for the Palestinians imposed by Israeli criminality. Better to heed the words and slogans of the enraged masses in the streets of cities throughout the world than resign ourselves to the rhetoric of governmental leaders that condemns but stays on the sidelines. Of course, worse than a failure of commitment to take action in opposition to genocide and Palestinian victimization, is the continuing unwillingness of leading Western countries to show concern for acute and massive patterns of victimization except with respect to the hostages seized by Hamas in the course of their attack that combined armed resistance with terrifying criminal acts of violence inflicted on innocent Jewish civilians as well as on Israeli military forces.

From a Western perspective it may be relevant to reconsider the Huntington contention that after the Cold War the West would face a challenge from the Islamic world, what he labeled ‘a clash of civilizations’ along the faultlines where Muslim majority countries are in direct contact with Western states. It is notable that the Hamas allies in Gaza are all Muslim, and the allies of Israel are European or whit settler colonial countries.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

27 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Craig Murray

There is no room to doubt that Israel’s bombing of Palestinian civilians and depriving them of food, water and other necessities of life are grounds to invoke the 1948 Genocide Convention. 

19 Nov 2023 – There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations.

In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide — and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party — then the International Court of Justice is required to adjudicate on “the responsibility of a State for genocide.”

These are the relevant articles of the genocide convention:

“Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”

Note that here “parties to the dispute” means the states disputing the facts of genocide, not the parties to the genocide/conflict. Any single state party is able to invoke the convention.

There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.

Definition of Genocide

This is the definition of genocide in international law, from the Genocide Convention:

“Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”

I can see no room to doubt whatsoever that Israel’s current campaign of bombing of civilians and of the deprivation of food, water and other necessities of life to Palestinians amounts to genocide under articles II a), b) and c).

It is also worth considering Articles III and IV:

“Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.

Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

There is, at the very least, a strong prima facie case that the actions of the United States and United Kingdom and others, in openly providing direct military support to be used in genocide, are complicit in genocide.

The point of Article IV is that individuals are responsible, not just states. So Israel’s Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak bear individual responsibility. So, indeed, do all those who have been calling for the destruction of the Palestinians.

27 November 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud & Romana Rubeo

For decades, the struggle for national liberation in Palestine was rightly understood to be part and parcel of a global struggle for liberation, mainly in the Global South.

And since national liberation movements were, per definition, the struggle for indigenous people to assert their collective rights for freedom, equality and justice, the Palestinian struggle was positioned as part of this global indigenous movement.

Alas, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growing dominance of the United States and its allies, the return of Western colonialism in the form of neocolonialism to Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, have localized many of the indigenous movements’ struggles.

This proved costly, as it allowed France, the US, Britain and others to, once more, sectionalize the Global South into regions of influence, controlling them through whatever military, political and economic strategies they had in mind. Similar to the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, recent decades wrought a new kind of colonial scramble for the Global South.

In the Palestinian context, in particular, the struggle was multi-faceted: the demise of global powers, like the USSR, which created some kind of geopolitical balance, isolated Palestinian Resistance movements. This forced these movements, namely those involved in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),  to seek political ‘compromises’, without achieving anything tangible in return.

For Washington, these concessions on the part of a once national liberation movement in Palestine, were consistent with the US’s regional agenda and the quest for a ‘New Middle East’.

Ultimately, this resulted in the wrongly termed ‘Palestinian division’, factional clashes in 2007, and a state of political paralysis which defined the so-called Palestinian leadership.

And, while Palestinians were busy sorting out their political and leadership crisis, Israel’s settler-colonial process accelerated, at the expense of whatever remained of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Of course, this does not, from an intellectual and historical point of view, alter the essential nature of the Palestinian struggle, which remained that of an indigenous nation fighting for its rights. However, it did confuse the political definitions and discourses surrounding the so-called Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This confusion was a direct outcome of the misrepresentation of the Palestinian struggle through Israeli propaganda and US-Western media, which remained committed to elevating the Israeli line. Israel invested in presenting Palestinians as a divided people, who have no vision of peace, and their Resistance movements as essentially terrorist groups, hellbent on the destruction of Israel and so on.

But things began to change in recent years, with the revival of indigenous movements around the world, from the Black struggle in the US to the indigenous people resurgence in North and South America, to the ultimate rise of an actual global movement, centered around landless societies and indigenous rights – which heavily invested in global solidarity and intersectionality, allowing it to multiply its powers several times over.

The common element of “decolonization” – in all its manifestations – has created intersectional links among various struggles around the world, which allowed the Palestinian struggle for liberation to fit perfectly into the new global narrative.

“Black Australians and Palestinians share a history and reality of erasure that has lasted far beyond the anticolonial era of the early last century, when most colonized peoples gained independence from colonial powers,” Eugenia Flynn and Tasnim Sammak wrote in their article ‘Black Australia to Palestine: solidarity in decolonial struggle’.

The Black Lives Matter Movement also played a central role in recentering Palestine around urgent and revived struggles in the United States and even beyond US political geography.

“Palestinians played a crucial role in the (2014) Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown,”  Russell Rickford wrote in an article in Vox.

“Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar,” Rickford added.

This was only the beginning, however, as, over the years, Palestine began featuring as a staple in the Black struggle discourse in the US. Both movements fed on each other’s popularity, conceiving new networks and connecting other global struggles together in a most harmonious fashion.

All of this has been propelled forward by the growing connectivity of activists and their struggles around the world, thanks to the utilization of social media, along with independent indigenous media as critical components in organization and mobilization.

While the credibility of mainstream media is being greatly questioned by Western societies, social media is now appearing to be a reliable source of information of news about popular mobilization and direct action.

The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has demonstrated the power of social media in terms of its ability to overcome the intentional lies and deception of corporate media, thus greatly diminishing its traditional role in shaping public opinion around Palestine, the Middle East, the US’ self-serving ‘war on terror’ and many other issues.

It would not be an exaggeration to state that there is a parallel war to the one happening in Gaza now, one that engages millions of people around the world, working diligently to defeat Israeli-US-Western propaganda and to demand accountability for those carrying out war crimes in Gaza.

It would be inaccurate to say that Western governments have been ‘silent’ in the face of Israeli atrocities in Gaza. As indigenous struggles around the world ally with the struggle of the Palestinians, colonial and neocolonial powers have no other option but to ally with colonial Israel.

This means that Western powers are active participants in the Israeli war on Gaza, through their generous military support of Israel, the sharing of intelligence information and through political and financial backing.

Whether the war lasts for another week, another month or a year, the consequences of this war will certainly be felt for many years to come, not only in Palestine or even the Middle East, but worldwide as well.

The war in Gaza has galvanized global solidarity movements, especially those who are invested in indigenous rights. All of this is reminiscent of the height of the anticolonial national liberation movements of decades ago.

Thus, this historic moment must be seized, not only for the sake of Gaza and the Palestinian people but also for the sake of freedom and justice everywhere else in the world.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the Managing Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

24 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui

On 8 November 2023  three Palestinian human rights organizations filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request arrest warrants against Israeli leaders—including Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu—for genocide.

The file submitted to the ICC strongly urges the Office of the Prosecutor to:

1. Consider the inclusion of crimes against humanity, notably apartheid, and the crime of genocide, in the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine.
2. Issue arrest warrants expeditiously for those suspected of these crimes within the Israeli political, military, and administrative apparatus, especially President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant and others.

“There is no place for double standards in International Justice,” said attorney Emmanuel Daoud, who also filed a lawsuit with the ICC against Russian leaders for their war crimes against Ukrainians and obtained the issuance of an arrest warrant against President Putin. “Whether war crimes are committed in Ukraine or Palestine, the culprits should be held to account.” “We implore the ICC to acknowledge its moral and judicial responsibilities and act decisively upon our communication,” said Daoud.

Is the State of Israel committing genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza? Before we try to answer the question, let us try to understand what does the loaded term mean.

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, is credited for coining the term genocide and for campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention. The term was included in the 1944 research-work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”, wherein Lemkin documented mass-killings of ethnic groups deemed “untermenschen“ (lit. subhuman or underman) or inferior by Nazi Germany.

On December 9, 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, with many of its clauses based on Lemkin’s proposals.

The Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) provides the definition of the term. It says: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 1 of CPPCG says: The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish.

Article 3 says: The following acts shall be punished: a) Genocide; b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; d) Attempt to commit genocide; e) Complicity in genocide.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998 to end impunity of those responsible or accountable for four core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Those crimes “shall not be subject to any statute of limitations”. It provides that “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It is obvious from both the CPPCG and the Rome Statute that the phrase ‘intent to destroy’ is the key element in genocidal crimes. “One has to prove that the perpetrator not only committed the actions, but they committed the actions with a very specific intention of destroying the group,” says Ernesto Verdeja, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in genocide. “That can be a high bar because very often people contribute to genocidal policies, even if that’s not their direct intention.”

On this main issue, Israeli leaders’ speeches, esp. after the Hamas’ reprisal attack on October 7, 2023, are quite revealing.

“The IDF will immediately use all its power to destroy the capabilities of Hamas. We will beat them to the point of destruction and take revenge with force for this black day they have inflicted on the State of Israel and its citizens,” prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address. “We will turn all the places where Hamas is organized, of this evil city, all the places where Hamas is hiding, operating from, into cities of ruins. I say to the residents of Gaza, get out of there now because we will act everywhere and with all the strength.” [Google translation into English from Hebrew]

Two days later, on October 9, Netanyahu declared, “We have only started striking Hamas.” He said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

Netanyahu has long proven to be a pathological liar and a psychotic mass murderer. But his threat against the Palestinian people was no exaggeration.

Netanyahu is not the only Israeli leader who has made what critics have called genocidal statement in recent weeks. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has set the tone. He asserted early on October that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. He said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up; they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there. On October 9, following an assessment at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Southern Command in Beersheba, Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

“Human animals must be treated as such,” IDF Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian said on Oct. 10. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the reprisal actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,000 Israelis and abduction of 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.

In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza and so are many morally bankrupt lawmakers in the Capitol Hill that see no evil with Israel’s genocidal crimes.

Ariel Kallner, a member of parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud party, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the apartheid state of Israel in 1947-48.

Tally Gotliv, another Likud lawmaker, demanded ”not flattening a neighborhood,” but “crushing and flattening Gaza without mercy.”

More problematically, declaring the start of a “second stage” of Israel’s war on Gaza—which he described as a “holy mission”—Netanyahu said that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”

It is worth mentioning here that according to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose extermination was commanded by God to Saul via the prophet Samuel.

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass,” states the Hebrew Bible in 1 Samuel 15:3.

The holy text further states that Saul infuriates God by sparing some of the Amalekites and their livestock.

“If it was not obvious from the carpet bombing, use of white phosphorus, and indiscriminate killing that the Zionist government of Israel [has] clear genocidal intentions, then the… reference to Palestinians as Amalek in Netanyahu’s speech describing his plans for Gaza should be enough to convince you,” British religious scholar Hamza Andreas Tzortzis wrote on social media.

“The biblical reference to Amalek is genocidal. The Bible commands to wipe out Amalek, including women, babies, children, and animals,” Tzortzis added.

Lest we forget, Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Masjid Ibrahim in Hebron in 1994, likely influenced by Amalekite language employed by the racist Kahane movement of which he was a part. Notably, Israel’s current minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal, is also associated with this hate movement.

A prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, David Mizrahy Verthaim, has called for wholesale bloodletting. “We need a disproportionate response … If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” he wrote on X.

As I have noted elsewhere, it is easy to carry out genocide when the enemy is dehumanized. It is no exaggeration to state that while the Nazis used this strategy the Israeli Zionists have mastered this evil art in depicting their enemies as untermenschen or subhuman. Tutsis were debased as “cockroaches” in Rwanda, a word also invoked by Rafael Eitan, then chief of the Israeli defense forces to describe Palestinians. On April 14, 1983, Eitan said, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” A day earlier, on April 13, 1983, he declared, “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel…Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”

It is worth recalling that Eitan (and his boss – then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon) allowed the massacre by Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militiamen of thousands of Palestinian refugees residing in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

Some four decades later, the native Palestinians would once again be portrayed as untermenschen  or subhuman by another former Israeli general. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Yoav Gallant declared on October 9, 2023.

Is it any surprise that the IDF  has been committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza? Nothing has been off-limits to these ‘foreign-cultured’ Israeli settlers.

Other Israeli political, military, and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”. They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country.

The dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society started well before October 7, 2023. Shirts printed by Israeli army units have depicted pregnant Palestinian women and children as military targets; calls of “death to the Arabs” have characterized the annual settler Flag March through the Old City in Jerusalem; and students as young as 13 in Israel sing anti-Palestinian songs, “hoping that your village burns down”, “Muhammad is dead”, “A good Arab is a dead Arab”, and “The second Nakba is coming.”

For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called “transfer”, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the (occupied) territories”.

Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.

A 2003 study of Israeli textbooks by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed Arabs are principally depicted “with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress”.

“They describe Arabs as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop. The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers, and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer,” the study said.

In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren.

As duly noted by Chris McGreal of the Guardian, some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some are engaged in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Israeli politics, society and media are now awash with exterminatory language against Palestinians in Gaza.

An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.

Raz Segal, a leading Israeli Holocaust scholar who is currently associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey, has said, “Israeli state leaders, ministers in the war cabinet and senior army officers — people with command authority — have used such language dozens of times since Oct. 7 in a way that constitutes clear “intent to destroy,” according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

U.S. academic and Informed Comment publisher Professor Juan Cole has accused Netanyahu of declaring “a holy war of annihilation of civilians of Gaza.”

“Netanyahu may have gestured to, and defiled, the Bible by excusing his genocide against the civilians of Gaza with reference to 1 Samuel. But his real bible is Revisionist Zionism with its fascist and explicitly colonial ideology,” Cole wrote on Informed Comment, referring to a form of Zionism—the movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—that seeks to conquer not only all of Palestine but also Jordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria.

“The Iron Wall is now advancing into Gaza, doing to small children and pregnant women what the authors of 1 Samuel in prosaic Babylon probably only dreamed of doing to the mythical Amalekites,” Cole added.

Beyond the rhetoric, now let’s look at the numbers to prove the intent of genocide of the settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel.

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More than 14,500 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF since October 7. Of these, nearly 70% (i.e., more than 9,000) are children and women, and more than 30,000 others have been injured by relentless bombing campaign and missile attacks by Israel. A whopping 1.6 million people, representing 70% of the Palestinian people living in Gaza, have been forcibly displaced from their homes by the IDF. More than 10,000 buildings and 43,000 housing units (i.e., nearly 50% of housing units) have been completely destroyed. Another 225,000 housing units have sustained partial damages. Over 51% of education facilities have also been hit. While most of the destruction has been centered in northern Gaza, even its south, which Israel had declared a safe zone, has not been spared.

According to the UN OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), significant damage has been inflicted upon critical infrastructure and essential services, affecting people’s ability to maintain their dignity and basic living standards. As of November 18, more than 300 educational facilities have been destroyed, 135 health facilities attacked, 25 hospitals and 52 health care centers are out of service, 55 ambulances damaged, at least 3 churches and 83 mosques damaged. At least 1330 families have sustained multiple fatalities. At least 6,120 fatalities were from 825 families.

Without power or fuel to pump water or run desalination plants, Gazans face a dire water shortage and are down to three liters per day as of Monday (Nov. 18), according to the UN. It is important to note that this amount is only 3% of basic need. The UNRWA waste removal facility has also been forced to shut down. Students have no access to schools. The food security has been described as catastrophic. The last functioning bakery was forced to shut down weeks ago. The UNRWA lost 102 of its own staff members who were killed by the IDF. At least 201 health workers, 62 journalists and 22 civil defense personnel were also killed by the IDF. The UNRWA schools, which provided shelter to fleeing and displaced residents, were repeatedly bombed by the IDF killing dozens of people – mostly women and children.

All the hospitals in northern Gaza are now dysfunctional because of IDF attacks on those facilities. The IDF soldiers have deliberately damaged medical equipment and devices so that necessary services could be disrupted fully. On November 23, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, and several other doctors have been arrested by Israeli forces. Meanwhile, about 450 patients and staff have been forced to evacuate the enclave’s Indonesian Hospital. More remain trapped inside.

The World Health Organization warned that health services in Gaza had suffered “catastrophic” damage, with most hospitals no longer functioning. “We now have 1.7 million people displaced so we have twice or three times the population (in the south of Gaza), using one third of the hospital beds in less than a third of the hospitals available,” Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said.

The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there.

Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the Israel weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention.

Since October 7, Israel intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words.

The ongoing Israeli attacks inside Gaza continue to show that all the Palestinians have been effectively transformed into ‘enemies’ of the settler-colonial state, thus, justifying their mass extermination.

Succinctly put, the leaders of the State of Israel not only harbored the intention to commit genocide but have put to practice their evil intention in Gaza.

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How about the views of genocide experts?

“A Genocide in plain sight, for everyone to see, merciless and cold blooded and the West with all its human rights talk, with all its hubris is in full support—maybe give the Palestinians a coffee break before continue killing them, but that’s about the maximum the West is willing to concede to the victims.” These words are the somber assessment of the former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman in a YouTube interview.

Within the very first week, Professor Raz Segal has called his country’s (Israel’s) assault on Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” He believes that Israeli forces are completing three genocidal acts, including, “killing, causing serious bodily harm, and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.” He points to the mass levels of destruction and total siege of basic necessities. He noted, “This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.”

The situation meanwhile has deteriorated considerably. Arguably, with the bombing campaigns against all the hospitals, and stopping all the supplies that has contributed to the death of hundreds of newly born infants, including those in the incubators, Israeli forces are completing all the five genocidal acts. Killing is far worse than transferring children.

Craig Mokhiber, who was the director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in his October 28 resignation letter that Israel’s military actions in Gaza were “textbook genocide” and accused the UN of again “failing” to act, referring to previous genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar. “The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial-settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt,” Mokhiber said in his letter to the UN human rights chief, Volker Turk.

In her interview with the host Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now, international criminal law Professor Chantal Meloni of the University of Milan, Italy, says, “I think that what we have witnessed in the past weeks, it’s literally the commission on each and every international crime that you may find listed under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.” She is author of the book: Is there a court for Gaza?

Ernesto Verdeja, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in genocide, says Israel’s actions in Gaza are moving toward a “genocidal campaign.”

City University of New York professor Victoria Sanford has compared what’s happening in Gaza to the killing or disappearance of more than 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala from 1960-1996, known as the Guatemalan genocide, which is the subject of her book Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. Mayans and Palestinians have both been subject to genocidal acts, she implies. “When we match them to the lived experience of people, there are similar circumstances…if we look at contemporary conflicts like the Israeli invasion of Palestine.”

Professors Sanford and Segal are two of more than a 100 scholars and organizations that signed a letter urging the ICC to take action given the “Israeli intention to commit genocide visibly materializing on the ground.”

Sanford is also one of three scholars who signed a declaration in support of a federal lawsuit announced on November 13 that is filed by the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The case was filed on behalf of a group of Palestinians living in Gaza and the U.S., as well as human rights organizations. They have sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, accusing them of “failure to prevent and complicity in the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide”.

It is important to note that the 1948 international convention against genocide requires the US and other countries to use their power and influence to stop the killing.

“Numerous Israeli government leaders have expressed clear genocidal intentions and deployed dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians, including ‘human animals’,” the CCR wrote in the introduction to its complaint.

It said those “statements of intent”, when combined with the “mass killing” of Palestinians, reveal “evidence of an unfolding crime of genocide”.

Numerous legal scholars, rights groups and humanitarians have also called Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.

“As Israel’s closest ally and strongest supporter, being its biggest provider of military assistance by a large margin and with Israel being the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II, the United States has the means available to have a deterrent effect on Israeli officials now pursuing genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” the complaint argued.

Instead, the group said, Biden, Blinken, and Austin “have helped advance the gravest of crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with unconditional military and diplomatic support while undermining efforts by the international community to stop Israel’s bombardment.

Professors Barry Trachtenberg of Wake Forest University and John Cox of the University of North Carolina have published widely on the Holocaust. They stress in their report that the “levels of destruction and killings in just over one month, together with the annihilatory language expressed by Israeli state leaders and senior army officers, point not to targeting of individual Hamas militants or Hamas military targets, but to the unleashing of deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza ‘as such,’ in the language of the UN Genocide Convention.”

In a Los Angeles Times Op/Ed column (Nov. 19), commenting on the above case, Professor Segal writes, “The assessment of the three senior Holocaust and genocide studies scholars is accurate. Gaza now resembles Ukrainian cities after Russian bombings and invasions, but with levels of destruction and killings that have surpassed in less than a month what we have seen in Ukraine in nearly two years: Official U.N. figures from early September note that Russian attacks killed slightly fewer than 10,000 civilians since February 2022, and injured just above 17,500. It is important that Biden described Russia’s attack on Ukraine as “genocide” on April 12, 2022, commenting that “we’ll let the lawyers decide, internationally, whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.” In the same way, Gallant’s “total siege” policy, together with the forced displacement of more than 1.5 million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, has created what sure seems like genocide.”

Professor Raz Segal continues, “Palestinians in Gaza are facing a “slow death” of hunger and thirst.  “The lack of clean water and the severe overcrowding in the southern part of Gaza — where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the northern part have fled — have markedly increased the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases. The lack of fuel and medical supplies, coupled with Israeli bombings of hospitals and the Israeli army operation inside Shifa Hospital, has turned hospitals into sites of mass death. And all along, Israel continues bombing the southern part of Gaza. No place in Gaza is safe from Israel’s assault, which is, in the language of Article 2 (c) of the U.N. Genocide Convention, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Writing for the Jewish Currents, dated October 13, 2023, Professor Segal, states, “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.”

Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly. But not so with Israeli leaders who, thanks to the immoral and material support from the leaders of the USA and the Holocaust-guilt ridden Europe, feel emboldened, empowered, untouchable, above any international law.

“The fact that there was no accountability for the last decades of [Israeli] occupation and crimes related to the occupation has created a sense of impunity,” says Reed Brody, a war crimes prosecutor, who is son of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.

Remember the UN fact-finding mission, the so-called Gladstone report in 2009? It found the closure of the Gaza Strip that had been imposed continuously since 2007 unlawful, collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza and a possible crime against humanity.

Sadly, we have not seen any warrant of arrest nor any concrete action from the ICC. Will the ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan confront Israel this time? Will all those Israeli leaders and their western sponsors who aided the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza be prosecuted for their horrendous crimes?

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The leaders of Israel and their western backers have tried to portray their genocidal war crimes against the Palestinian people as an inalienable right of self-defense. Can they invoke such a right?

U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, recently answered the question in an address to the Australian Press Club. She said categorically that Israel cannot “claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from the territory that it occupies, from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation.”  “The right to self-defense can be invoked when the state is threatened by another state, which is not the case,” she said.

Albanese was referring to a 2004 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which said the construction of Israel’s separation wall in the occupied West Bank was illegal. The ICJ rejected the Israeli argument to build the wall, saying it could not invoke the right to self-defense in an occupied territory.

“The death of a reported 4,710 children, attacks on healthcare, the withholding of water and electricity – these cannot be merely justified as a ‘right to self-defense’,” said Iain Overton, executive director of the London-based Action on Armed Violence, which conducts research and advocacy on armed violence against civilians.

He added that for Israel to claim this right without being challenged “would be a mockery of the international humanitarian law”.

Armed conflicts are governed by international humanitarian law (IHL), a set of rules contained in international agreements like the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 as well as other agreements and conventions meant to ensure that all member nations subscribe to a list of fundamental rules during conflicts.

In the current conflict, though, experts said Israel’s actions violated all of the four main principles of IHL: distinction between civilians and combatants, proportionality between anticipated loss of civilian life and damage and the strategic military advantage of an attack, legitimate military purposes and the humane treatment of all individuals from civilians to detainees and hostages.

Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, said, “It is also obvious that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza since October 7.”

As a matter of fact, Israel has been committing such war crimes since its existence.

International humanitarian law insists that medical units must be protected. Similarly, international law also disallows attacks against places that are indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water installations and farmland.

Attacking schools and hospitals during the conflict, as Israel has done, is “one of the six grave violations”, according to the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.

Yet Israel has been unrelenting in these attacks despite facing heavy criticism. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gaza a “graveyard for children” on November 7.

One in every 5p people living in the Gaza strip has been killed or wounded in the past six weeks. The killing of so many civilians cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. “Not in a refugee camp. And not in a hospital,” the UN human rights chief said.

He further said, “And never in my career of working in many crisis situations around the world have I met such an outpouring of fear, anger, and despair. The people of Gaza, who for years have been profoundly impoverished behind barbed wire fences, are enduring bombardment by the Israeli Security Forces of an intensity rarely experienced in this century.”

The utter destruction since October 7 of the northern and central parts of Gaza, including its entire infrastructure, once again unmasks the evil intent of the barbarous settler colonial state of Israel. Its genocidal acts have thus far resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from the half of Gaza. Even the southern Gaza is not immune from Israeli attacks.

No one should be surprised either with the escalation of latest genocidal violence when we recall that Netanyahu brandished a map of the Middle East in his UNGA speech in September that showed the West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel.

Truly, the Israeli leaders since its unholy birth in 1948 have never been sincere about the establishment of a Palestinian state, living side by side. Its border remains non-demarcated, and its occupied territories always growing. Mass deportation and periodic mass-slaughters have been the key means to ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories of its indigenous people, who are culturally different.

Thus, it is no surprise that as the negotiation for a temporary ceasefire, perhaps starting on Friday (Nov. 24), is reached in Doha, Israel has bombed 300 places, including refugee shelters in southern Gaza, on Thursday alone, killing at least 200 Palestinians. Another 90 Palestinians have been taken as hostages – euphemistically called ‘detained’ – by Israel within just 24 hours, while their homes are damaged. Even the picture of the Ka’ba hung on the wall of residential homes are smashed by the intruding Israeli soldiers who want to maximize their pains by every possible means. In a two-tiered apartheid system, justice is denied to the Palestinian victims. They are reminded 24/7/365 to live with such a discriminatory system or leave unless they want to be killed or evicted by force.

In violation of international law, ‘mass detention’ has long been used by Israel as a weapon of war and occupation. It should be mentioned that around 8,300 Palestinian prisoners are currently held in Israeli jails, according to Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs. Thousands of these are under ‘administrative detention’, i.e., they can be held indefinitely without any charges. Some 300 of these prisoners are children, aged between 8 and 18; their crime – throwing stones at the settler occupation forces. Some 85 prisoners are women. Up to 2,070 arrests were documented in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in the month of October alone. It is important to note here that more than a million cases have been launched since 1967 by the settler colonial state as part of unceasing harassment of the Palestinian people.

While the people’s eyes were glued to the TV screens watching IDF’s war crimes inside Gaza, some 3,100 Palestinian civilians have lately been arrested and more than 200 Palestinians killed  by the Israeli forces across the West Bank since October 7.

It is obvious that as a settler colonial entity, Israel has no qualms about arresting and killing Palestinians while they promise to release a small fraction as a result of the latest truce. Those Palestinians who would be released in the latest truce may soon end up in the prison cells again. That is the nature of cruel Israeli justice meted out against the Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told Reuters last week that Israel had been ramping up arrests ahead of a hostage deal. “Israel is preparing for an exchange of prisoners, and they are arresting as many people as they can simply because they are preparing for such a deal,” Shtayyeh said.

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Last words

As I see it, the Hamas attack was a reprisal attack by freedom-loving Palestinian youths that revolted against their murderous occupiers. They were partly motivated by their desire to free their loved ones rotting in Israeli prisons. Most of them – children and grand-children of the uprooted Palestinian in the ‘First Nakba of 1948’ – growing up in Gaza, have seen nothing but barbed wires and apartheid walls in a concentration camp that felt worse than an ‘open air’ prison, which could be bombed any time by a savage colonial-settler entity that has no respect for human lives and dignity.

Their case is no less noble than the Jewish uprising in Warsaw that began on April 19, 1943. About 700 young Jewish fighters participated in that uprising. This was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe.

The Warsaw ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe. Established by the Germans in October 1940, and sealed that November, the ghetto housed approximately 400,000 Jews. During what was described as the “Great Action,” the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka. They killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during this operation. By early 1943, the surviving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto numbered approximately 70,000 to 80,000 individuals.

The “Great Action” had been disguised as a “resettlement operation.” However, by late summer 1942 it was clear to many ghetto inhabitants that deportations from the ghetto meant almost certain death.

In response to these deportations, several Jewish underground organizations banded together on July 28, 1942. They created an armed self-defense unit known as the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB). It is estimated that ŻOB had roughly 200 members at the time of its formation.

In the end, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground. They burned and demolished this part of Warsaw, block by block, in order to smoke out their prey.

Police Commander Jürgen Stroop’s internal SS daily report for Friedrich Krüger, written on 16 May 1943, stated: “180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 20:15 hours by blowing up the Warsaw Synagogue. … Apart from 8 buildings (police barracks, hospital, and accommodations for housing working-parties) the former Ghetto is completely destroyed. Only the dividing walls are left standing where no explosions were carried out.”

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising was “one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people.

In 1968, the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the Jewish survivors, was asked what military lessons could be learned from the uprising. He replied: “I don’t think there’s any real need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn’t a subject for study in military school. (…) If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.”

Truly, what prospect do the Palestinians have in the Occupied Territories, inside and outside Gaza? Can one blame the Hamas militants if they dared to challenge the might of a settler colonial state that epitomizes racism, bigotry, and apartheid character in post-Nazi era? As Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu would have said, I understand why they attacked on October 7. In their books, an oppressed and colonized people have every right to free themselves by any means possible.

Today, Days of Remembrance ceremonies to commemorate the victims and survivors of the Holocaust are linked to the dates of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

On 7 December 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt spontaneously knelt while visiting the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes memorial in the People’s Republic of Poland.

I don’t know if we shall ever see a remorseful Israeli ‘Willy Brandt’ kneeling down in front of the mass graves in Gaza for the horrendous genocidal crimes, past and present, of the Zionist state. But that is truly needed for healing the wounds.

Dr. Habib Siddiqui has over four decades of experience in peaceful activism, especially in defense of the rights of displaced people.

24 November 2023

Source: countercurrents.org