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Stunning Atrocities in Gaza Funded by US Taxpayers

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Original article by RALPH NADER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Children crying following the Israeli bombing of Khan Yunis, Gaza on October 15, 2023.  (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism—a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers—without public hearings. What can be done to stop this madness?

The unstoppable Israeli U.S. armed military juggernaut continues its genocidal destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians. The onslaught includes blocking the provision of “food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” openly genocidal orders decreed by Netanyahu and his extreme, blood-thirsty ministers.

The stunning atrocities going on day after day is being recorded by U.S. drones over Gaza and by brave Palestinian journalists directly targeted by the Israeli army. Over 66 journalists and larger numbers of their families have been slain. Israel has excluded foreign and Israeli journalists for years from Gaza.

This no-holds-barred ferocity came out of the Israeli government’s slumber on October 7th which allowed a few thousand Hamas and other fighters to take their smuggled hand-held weapons and attack soldiers and civilians before being destroyed or driven back to Gaza.

Seventy-five years of Israel military violence against defenseless Palestinians and fifty-six years of violently and illegally occupying their remaining slice of the original Palestine provides some background for Israel’s Founder, David Ben-Gurion’s candid statement: “We have taken their country.” (See, his full statement here).

The overwhelming military superiority of Israel – a nuclear armed nation – in the Middle East has produced a more aggressive Israeli government. Being more secure than ever before doesn’t seem to temper the expansionist missions of right-wing Israeli colonies in the West Bank.

Presently, the narrow Netanyahu majority in the Parliament believes that “nothing can stop us.” Presently, they are right.

Joe Biden and Congress are vigorously enabling the annihilations. The UN is frozen by the Joe Biden administration’s vetoes in the Security Council against ending the carnage in Gaza. The Arab nations either lay in ruins – Syria, Iraq – or are too weak to cause Israeli generals any worry. The rich Arab nations in the Gulf want to do business with prosperous Israel and, other than Qatar, care little about their Palestinian brethren.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are no obstacle. Israel, along with Russia and the U.S. do not belong to the International Criminal Court. The Palestinian Authority is a party, but the practical difficulties of investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza and apprehending the accused are insurmountable. The ICJ’s jurisdiction requires a country to bring Israel before the Court for war crimes or genocide. In any event, the Court’s lead-footed procedures trespass on eternity. So much for international law and the Geneva Conventions. Netanyahu rejects the moral authority of seventeen Israeli human rights groups, including Rabbis and reservist soldiers. Their open letter to President Biden in the December 13, 2023 issue of the New York Times on “The Humanitarian Catastrophe in the Gaza Strip” was ignored by the media despite the truth and courage it embodied.

In the U.S., protests and demonstrations are everywhere. Many are organized by Jewish human rights groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Standing Together, Veterans for Peace and various student organizations. Everywhere Biden travels there are people from all backgrounds protesting.

A few days ago, the first protests by labor union members occurred in Oakland, California. Union activists could turn their attention to why, for years, union leaders put billions of dollars into riskier lower-interest Israeli bonds rather than U.S. Treasuries or bond funds investing in America. Like U.S. weapon deliveries, purchases of Israeli bonds by states, cities and unions have surged since October 7th.

Pope Francis, informed of the Israeli attack on the only Catholic Church and Convent in Gaza, which housed people with disabilities, killing and injuring Christians sheltering there, sorrowfully said: “Some would say, ‘It is war. It is terrorism.’ Yes, it is war. It is terrorism.”

In 2015, over 400 Rabbis from Israel, the USA and Canada called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop the practice of demolishing hundreds of Palestinian homes as being contrary to international law and Jewish tradition. Their successors Rabbis for Human Rights are being ignored by the regime.

The Head of the U.S. Bishops Conference and the National Council of Churches, representing millions of parishioners, condemned the bombings but received little coverage.

There is only one institution that could stop Netanyahu’s mass military massacres of the Palestinian people. That is the U.S. Congress. As long as over 90% of the politicians there automatically support AIPAC, the Israeli Government Can Do No Wrong Lobby, even a peace-loving Joe Biden cannot deter Netanyahu. Bibi (his nickname) could simply say to a hypothetically transformed Biden “Joe, take it up with OUR Congress.”

How has AIPAC achieved such domination on Capitol Hill? By years of relentless lobbying and the smear of “anti-semitism” to anyone defying them. AIPAC and its chapters don’t bother with marches or demonstrations. They personally focus on the legislator – one by one. Carrots or sticks. Praise, PAC money and junkets are the Carrots. The Sticks are smears and money for selected primary challengers in their Districts or States. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) called AIPAC “a Hate Group.”

There are about 300,000 citizens spending significant time back in the states working Congress in AIPAC’s favor. They know the doctors, lawyers, accountants, clergy, local politicians, donors, golf champions and other friends of the Senators and Representatives, and forcefully promote Israeli expansionism backed to the hilt by the U.S. government.

AIPAC is proficient in part for lack of any organized opposition. It is also practicing state-of-the-art non-stop grassroots lobbying.

Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism—a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers—without public hearings. While growing public opinion in the U.S. is against unconditional backing of the Israeli regime, it has not changed a single vote in Congress. Someday, more organized support for America’s national interest will.

(For calls to your legislators, the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.)

Original article by RALPH NADER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingStunning Atrocities in Gaza Funded by US Taxpayers

Israeli Bombing of Gaza Ranks Among ‘Most Devastating’ in History

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A survivor of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza makes her way through the rubble of the al-Zahra neighborhood on October 19, 2023.  (Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said a U.S. military historian as Israel’s use of arms including 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.

As the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.

Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.

That’s more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have killed in Ukraine since February 2022.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.

“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.

https://twitter.com/adham922/status/1738076154030895440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1738076154030895440%7Ctwgr%5Ef99a1a1c031830102f156fb86559b8b0953b54b7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fbombing-gaza

Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, told The Associated Press that “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”

“It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever,” he added.

By comparison, the 2017 U.S.-led coalition battle for Mosul, Iraq during the war against the so-called Islamic State—widely viewed as among the most intense urban assaults in recent decades—killed approximately 10,000 civilians, around a third of them from aerial bombardment.

Pape said that by some measures, Israel’s bombing of Gaza is surpassing the Allied “terror bombing” of German cities during World War II.

He noted that U.S. and U.K. airstrikes obliterated about 40-50% of the urban areas of the 51 German cities bombed between 1942-45, and that around 10% of all buildings in Germany were destroyed. In Gaza, approximately 1 in 3 buildings have been destroyed. In northern Gaza, over two-thirds of all buildings have been leveled.

“Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” Corey Scher, who studies natural disasters and wars using satellite remote sensing at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, told the AP.

Experts point to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided “bunker-buster” bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas’ underground tunnels.

These massive bombs turn “earth to liquid,” Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and war crimes investigator for the United Nations, told the AP. “It pancakes entire buildings.”

Garlasco said that 2,000-pound bombs mean “instant death” for anyone within about 100 feet of the blast, with shrapnel posing a deadly danger for people up to 1,200 feet away.

In a separate interview with CNN, Gerlasco said that the intensity of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has “not been seen since Vietnam,” when U.S. airstrikes killed up to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The U.S. dropped more bombs on tiny, non-belligerent Laos than all sides combined unleashed during World War II.

“You’d have to go back to the Vietnam War to make a comparison,” Garlasco added. “Even in both Iraq wars, it was never that dense.”

The use of such heavy ordnance in close proximity to critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals has alarmed observers.

“What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned, it was a plan, definitely, to close down all the hospitals in the north,” Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders, told the Post.

Aided by AI-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.

Although the United States—which has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world—provides Israel with thousands of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs, its own military avoids using such massive ordnance in civilian areas due to the devastation they cause.

“It certainly appears that [Israel’s] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.,” Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, told CNN.

That includes the risk of killing Israel’s own citizens and others held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.

Lewis added that the Jabalia strike was “something we would never see the U.S. doing.”

That isn’t entirely true; during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S. dropped a pair of 2,000-pound Raytheon GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 408 Iraqi civilians in one of the deadliest single airstrikes in modern history. U.S. officials claimed they thought the shelter, which was used during the Iraq-Iran war, was no longer a civilian facility.

“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, told CNN.

Even more concerning for some experts is Israel’s use of unguided, or “dumb” bombs, against civilian targets in Gaza.

While IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that “we choose the right munition for each target so it doesn’t cause unnecessary damage,” the death and destruction in Gaza—and Israeli officials’ own words—tell an entirely different story.

Early in the war, Hagari declared that “Gaza will never return to what it was,” clarifying that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

Meanwhile, numerous Israeli officials advocated the complete destruction of Gaza, with more than a few government figures—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet members—making statements supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.

U.S. President Joe Biden—who has affirmed his “unwavering” support for Israel and is seeking $14.3 billion in additional military aid for the country, which already gets almost $4 billion annually from Washington—has implored Israeli leaders to stop the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza, even as his administration thwarts international cease-fire efforts and restocks the IDF’s arsenal.

Chappell stressed that “the devastation that we’ve seen for communities in Gaza is, unfortunately, co-signed by the United States.”

“Too much of it is carried out by bombs that were made in the United States,” he added.

Ahmed Abofoul—a Gaza-born, Netherlands-based attorney with ‎the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq who has lost 60 of his relatives to Israeli bombing— said in Friday interview with Democracy Now! that “the American government is complicit in this genocide.”

“There is blood of Palestinian children on their hands,” he added. [Biden] said Israel is engaged in indiscriminate bombing. This is a war crime. So, the question is: Why do you then send weapons to Israel? The position of the U.S. is quite hypocritical.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingIsraeli Bombing of Gaza Ranks Among ‘Most Devastating’ in History

Morning Star: Today ‘Peace on Earth’ must be a demand, not just a seasonal piety

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https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/today-peace-earth-must-be-demand-not-just-seasonal-piety

A Palestinian man carries the body of his grandson who was killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at the hospital Rafah, southern Gaza, December 22, 2023

NO EVENTUAL US green light to allow aid into Gaza — where a quarter of the population are starving — can disguise its wrecking role throughout the UN process.

The urgency of getting food, water and fuel to more than a million displaced Palestinians has not deterred Washington from delaying a UN resolution repeatedly, insisting on the removal of calls for a ceasefire, watering down the demand that Israel open air, land and sea routes for humanitarian assistance and blocking a proposal for the UN rather than the Israeli military to approve deliveries.

As with the security council ceasefire vote a fortnight ago — which the US alone opposed, with Britain alone abstaining — the mask has slipped.

Everyone in the world can see who facilitates Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza even while crying crocodile tears about civilian victims.

We know that Joe Biden’s reproaches to Benjamin Netanyahu for bombing hospitals and unleashing a wave of settler terror in the West Bank are accompanied by a steady flow of munitions to ensure the Israeli Defence Forces can keep killing.

We know too that the copycat expressions of regret from British leaders are meaningless while we permit the US to resupply Israel from the RAF’s Akrotiri airfield on Cyprus, which we can assume it is doing since ministers won’t answer questions on the flurry of US flights to Israel from that base.

Britain and the US stand isolated and exposed. There will be geopolitical consequences.

The brazen hypocrisy of supporting Israeli war crimes while condemning Russian ones in Ukraine has not gone unnoticed, and will further undermine efforts to convince the global South to abide by US and EU sanctions against Moscow, as European diplomats admit.

Normalisation of Israel’s relations with Arab states, a priority aim of US diplomacy in recent years, lies in tatters. Following the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement and the invitation to five Middle East and north African states to join the Brics bloc of developing countries in 2024, this war could be catastrophic for US power in the region, accelerating a shift to Beijing already under way.

We have little influence over such developments. Not so the domestic political fallout. The medics’ vigils for Gaza, the hundreds of local demonstrations and fundraisers, the gigantic national peace marches, have changed British politics.

The British and US governments are not just exposed in the eyes of the world, but before their own peoples. In Britain, the Palestine movement has thrown open doors our whole Establishment have spent the last four years nailing shut — it is again possible to question Britain’s role in the world, its uniquely close alliance with the United States and the sinister character of our military operations and armaments industry.

As we learned in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn pointed to the links between British foreign policy and terrorism and found a majority agreed with him, there is mass scepticism about our rulers’ claims about the world and an openness to building a different kind of Britain, one that promotes peace and co-operation instead of war and plunder.

The ruling-class response to Corbyn’s popularity was ferocious. The response on Palestine will be no less so.

Human Rights Watch has already pointed to Facebook parent company Meta’s complicity in a global censorship operation targeting Palestine solidarity work.

In Britain, we have seen off one home secretary trying to ban peace marches, but should the movement falter or the numbers dwindle the government will be tempted to revisit this.

Our movement must go on the offensive, ensuring politicians who will not back a ceasefire fear for their seats, and demanding a reversal of all the attacks on Palestine activism of recent years, including the bids to ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

This Christmas the traditional call for peace on Earth must be turned from an abstract seasonal aspiration to a practical mobilising demand.

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/today-peace-earth-must-be-demand-not-just-seasonal-piety

dizzy: I hope that Morning Star will excuse me reproducing this article fully.

Shine a light on Gaza’s suffering

More than half a million people in Gaza are starving, UN warns

Normalization with Israel has been ended by its brutal war on Gaza

HRW: Meta Adds ‘Insult to Injury’ by Censoring Pro-Palestinian Voices

NYC Workers March for Gaza: ‘Stop the Bombs! Cease-Fire Now!’

US Quietly Working to Prevent Conference on Geneva Convention Violations

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Today ‘Peace on Earth’ must be a demand, not just a seasonal piety

UK court to hear Assange’s final appeal against extradition in February

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Original article by Anish R M republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

In the hearing, two judges will review an earlier decision to reject Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the US

The High Court of Justice in London has decided to hear what could be Julian Assange’s final appeal against his extradition to the United States. A statement released by Wikileaks on Tuesday, December 19, announced that the High Court has confirmed a two-day hearing on February 20-21, 2024.

The two-day hearing will be held before a bench of two judges and review the decision by Justice Jonathan Swift of the High Court to reject Assange’s plea against his extradition. In this last ditch attempt by Assange’s defense, the two judges will decide whether the Wikileaks founder will have any further chance to appeal his case in a British court or prepare for the looming extradition.

The 3-page long decision by Justice Swift handed down on June 6 this year, rejected all eight grounds of appeal raised by Assange’s defense team. The appeal, if approved by the High Court, will challenge the extradition sanctioned by the UK Home Office in June 17, 2022

Immediately after the court announced the dates, supporters and press freedom advocates called for a protest demonstration to be held outside the courthouse in London and in cities around the world, on the first day of the hearing.

John Rees of the Free Assange Campaign said in the Wikileaks statement that if the US is allowed to “get away with [their attempts to prosecute Assange], they will have succeeded in redefining journalism as spying.”

Stating that the extradition and a federal trial will have an impact on all journalists and broadcasters, Rees said that “every journalist will be intimidated. Every newspaper and journalist will look at material critical of the government and feel significant pressure not to publish for fear of prosecution and imprisonment.”

“This is the most important press freedom case of the 21st century and we need to ensure we don’t lose any hard-won freedoms.”

If extradited, Assange will stand trial before a federal grand jury in the US on 18 charges that carry a combined prison sentence of 175 years. Of the 18 charges leveled against him, 17 are under the infamous US Espionage Act.

Stella Assange, advocate and Julian’s wife, raised concerns of his safety and the nature of the looming trial in the event the US does succeed in his extradition. She, along with other members of Assange’s family and his colleagues, have been campaigning for his release ever since he was arrested in April 2019.

“With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2019, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited,” she said. “The persecution of this innocent journalist and publisher must end.”

Read more: Julian Assange case: 4 things that the media doesn’t tell you

Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, also echoed these concerns. “There is no press without the protection to operate freely,” Hrafnsson said. “Julian’s case is a landmark moment; the UK needs to decide if it wishes to be a haven for free press or if it wishes to be complicit in the degradation of a core value of our democracy.”

The US indictment against Assange, initiated under the Donald Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden, is the first time ever a publisher has been charged under the Espionage Act.

In the meantime, Assange has remained imprisoned without charges since April 2019, in a high-security prison in Belmarsh on the outskirts of London, at the behest of the extradition request by the US.

His extradition was initially rejected by a district judge in London in January 2021 on grounds of Assange’s mental health and the risk of suicide and other bodily harm if he was extradited.

This decision was overturned by the High Court in London in December that year based on diplomatic assurances given by the US after the district court’s decision. In June 2022, the UK Home Office sanctioned the extradition based on the High Court’s decision.

US lawmakers call for Assange’s release

Even as the UK prepares for the court hearing in February, calls for Assange’s release have reached the US Congress.

A bipartisan resolution was introduced on December 16, in the US House of Representatives by Republican representative Paul Gosar, and co-sponsored by eight congress members seeking to drop all charges against Assange.

The draft resolution seeks to drop all charges against Assange and reinforce the fact that his journalistic activities, including the publication of classified government documents and diplomatic cables to expose US war crimes and other wrongdoings, were protected under the First Amendment rights of the US Constitution.

The resolution, co-sponsored by the likes of James McGovern, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ilhan Omar, also highlighted that the successful prosecution of Assange “would set a precedent allowing the United States to prosecute and imprison journalists for First Amendment protected activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, something that occurs on a regular basis.”

Similarly on November 14, another bipartisan group of members of Congress, led by McGovern and Massie, sent a letter to president Biden calling for the charges to be dropped. Aside from co-sponsors of the House draft resolution mentioned above, the signatories to the letter include the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Presley, and Rand Paul.

Original article by Anish R M republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

https://dontextraditeassange.com

Continue ReadingUK court to hear Assange’s final appeal against extradition in February

“It is clear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” UN-Panel concludes

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Original article by Pavan Kulkarni at peoples dispatch republished under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

While the ‘physical element’ of genocide is being documented and broadcast daily, the ‘mental element’ – i.e the intent behind the mass killing – which is more difficult to establish, has been repeatedly clarified by the leaders of Israeli government and military.

Israeli forces in Gaza. Photo: IDF

Amid the growing international consensus that the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza amount to genocide, a UN panel ahead has also concluded that “genocide is already happening” in Gaza.

The UN-mandated Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) convened this panel at UN headquarters in New York City on December 12, ahead of the vote in the General Assembly on the resolution calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

Tasked to “examine the legal implications of Israel’s military offensive against Gaza since 7 October and shed light on the applicability of key legal frameworks including those defining Genocide”, the panel was titled “2023 War on Gaza: The Responsibility to Prevent Genocide”.

“But sadly it is clear that genocide is already happening, so our question now is the responsibility to stop the ongoing genocide,” Hari Prabowo, Indonesia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN who chaired the panel discussion, said at its conclusion.

On the same day, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) also adopted a resolution recognizing that “Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people constitute an unfolding genocide.”

From November onwards UN experts, including several Special Rapporteurs and members of Working Groups on various issues, have been warning that there was “a genocide in the making” in Gaza.

Consensus on the genocidal nature of Israel’s war on Gaza has been consolidating since its early days. As early as October 15, just over a week after Israel started its bombardment, nearly 900 “scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies” from around the world had warned of a “potential genocide in Gaza.”

In the two months since this warning, the death toll has increased by over seven-fold, with over 19,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as of December 17. Thousands more remain buried under the rubble of the buildings Israel has bombed.

But the number of the killed is not the factor determining whether or not the mass killing amounted to genocide, Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, explained in her presentation at the UN panel discussion.

Pointing out that several Bosnian Serb political and military leaders were convicted of genocide for the “killing of over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica” in 1995, she added that it is the deliberate nature of the targeting of a group, “the intent, coupled with action”, that determines that a mass killing amounts to genocide.

By “killing” and “causing serious bodily or mental harm”, and “deliberately inflicting” on Palestinians in Gaza “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, Israel has committed three of the five acts listed under the Genocide Convention.

These acts, which constitute the “physical element” of the genocide, have been documented thoroughly, shared widely on social media and broadcast on television daily – even hourly. However, these acts qualify as genocide only when the “mental element” is also demonstrated – namely that they were “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

“The intent is the most difficult element to determine,” explains the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.

“But in this case, the intent” has been made “explicit” in the statements “by the Prime Minister, the President, by senior cabinet members and by the military leaders. These statements clearly constitute the mental element of the crime of genocide,” Hannah Bruinsma, a legal advisor at Law for Palestine, said at the panel discussion.

“We have collected so far 500 statements that demonstrate” the genocidal intent, “often of those in the chain of command,” she added. Such statements of genocidal intent have been made since the early days of the war on Gaza and systematically repeated time and again.

“Not mere rhetoric, but an admission of criminal intent”

Army’s spokesperson Daniel Hagari, who bragged of dropping “thousands of tons of munitions” on Gaza within the first couple of days of Israel’s campaign, had no qualms admitting that “we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”, rather than “accuracy”.

Referring to Palestinians as “human animals”, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who prided in having “released all the restraints” on the military, had said in the early days of the war that “we will eliminate everything” in Gaza.

Israeli tank in Gaza.

Doubling down that “human animals must be treated as such”, the army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian told Palestinians in Gaza that, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction.”

Legitimizing the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Israeli President Isaac Herzog had declared that “an entire nation out there is responsible” for the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, arguing that the “rhetoric” about innocent civilians is “absolutely not true.”

“This practice of casting an entire population as enemies, as legitimate military targets, is a common genocidal mechanism,” Raz Segal, a prominent Jewish Israeli scholar of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said in his remarks at the panel discussion.

Late in October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on to compare Palestinians with the biblical enemy of the Jews. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” he quoted from the Old Testament which prescribes, “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.”

These statements, which “have been given effect” must be understood to be “not mere rhetoric, but an admission of criminal intent”, Gallagher argued. “Israeli officials have done what they said they would do.”

Journalists guilty of inciting genocide

“These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October,” said a statement on December 9 by over 55 scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

From the calls to turn Gaza “into a slaughterhouse” and “violate all norms on the way to victory” to saying “let there be a million bodies” of dead Palestinians, there are “dozens and dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media”, said Segal, one of the signatories of the statement.

“It is worth reminding” that in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, journalists who had been encouraging the crime when it was unfolding were “put on trial and convicted.. of incitement to genocide, which is a separate crime under Article 3 of the UN Genocide Convention,” he added.

“US is complicit in Genocide”

Also listed as a separate crime in the same article is “complicity in genocide”, of which the US is guilty, argued Gallagher. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which she represented in the panel discussion, has filed a legal complaint in a California District Court against US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for their complicity in Israel’s genocide.

“This unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given” to Israel by the US in breach of its “responsibilities under customary international law…to prevent, and not further, genocide,” states the complaint.

The US, which is Israel’s “largest provider of military, economic and political assistance, and I would argue, political cover.. has the ability to use its considerable influence and unique position to take all measures to stop Israel’s unfolding genocide,” Gallagher argued.

“Instead”, she said, it “has done the opposite.” Biden, Blinken and Austin have “pledged and continue to pledge all support to Israel. They have rushed military support, ammunition, precision-guided munitions, 2,000-pound bunker bombs, and they’ve been flying drones overhead. The US military advisers have been in (Israel’s) war cabinet sessions.”

US is Israel’s biggest financial and military backer. Photo: IDF

In addition to the annual 3.8 billion dollars it hands out to Israel every year, it is now coughing up “an additional 14.5 billion dollars, without conditions.” US officials have reiterated in multiple press conferences that “there are no red lines or conditions for these weapons”, she said.

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Israel has dropped more than 22,000  US-supplied bombs on Gaza within the first month and a half of the war. This amounts to almost one US bomb per every 100 of the 2.3 million Palestinians who are practically imprisoned in the 365 sq. km strip of land that Israel has held under siege for 17 years, which itself has been described by Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as an “Incremental Genocide”.

“Forced displacement…has figured in genocidal processes”

Situating “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” in the “broader context of Israel’s violent settler colonialism and occupation of Palestinian land,” Jehad Abusalim, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund, said “this process began in 1948” with the establishment of Israel.

The Nakba, the Arabic word meaning catastrophe, refers to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land within a year of the establishment of this settler colonial state on 78% of Palestine. The process of the Nakba, he said at the panel discussion, never stopped.

“The Nakba was not just an event in the distant past”, but “continues to unfold in Gaza today. It is a process of continuous displacement and ethnic cleansing.”

“Forced displacement, what is commonly called ethnic cleansing, is not in itself an act of genocide, but we know that historically it has figured in genocidal processes,” added Segal, who describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide”.

“It took the Nazis two and a half years… of experimenting with various schemes of forced displacement of Jews” before implementing the “Final Solution”, he said.

Original article by peoples dispatch republished under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue Reading“It is clear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” UN-Panel concludes