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Genocide in Gaza
John Mearsheimer
I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.
Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.[1] It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic… group in the Gaza Strip.” (1) That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.[2]
The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. The application has three main components.
First, it describes in detail the horrors that the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians since 7 October 2023 and explains why much more death and destruction is in store for them.
Second, the application provides a substantial body of evidence showing that Israeli leaders have genocidal intent toward the Palestinians. (59-69) Indeed, the comments of Israeli leaders—all scrupulously documented—are shocking. One is reminded of how the Nazis talked about dealing with Jews when reading how Israelis in “positions of the highest responsibility” talk about dealing with the Palestinians. (59) In essence, the document argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza, combined with its leaders’ statements of intent, make it clear that Israeli policy is “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.” (39)
Third, the document goes to considerable lengths to put the Gaza war in a broader historical context, making it clear that Israel has treated the Palestinians in Gaza like caged animals for many years. It quotes from numerous UN reports detailing Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. In short, the application makes clear that what the Israelis have done in Gaza since 7 October is a more extreme version of what they were doing well before 7 October.
There is no question that many of the facts described in the South African document have previously been reported in the media. What makes the application so important, however, is that it brings all those facts together in one place and provides an overarching and thoroughly supported description of the Israeli genocide. In other words, it provides the big picture while not neglecting the details.
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government has labelled the charges a “blood libel” that “has no factual and judicial basis.” Moreover, Israel claims that “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.”[3] A close reading of the document, however, makes it clear that there is no basis for these assertions. In fact, it is hard to see how Israel will be able to defend itself in a rational-legal way when the proceedings begin. After all, brute facts are hard to dispute.
Let me offer a few additional observations regarding the South African charges.
First, the document emphasizes that genocide Is distinct from other war crimes and crimes against humanity, although “there is often a close connection between all such acts.” (1) For example, targeting a civilian population to help win a war—as occurred when Britain and the United States bombed German and Japanese cities in World War II—is a war crime, but not genocide. Britain and the United States were not trying to destroy “a substantial part” of, or all the people in those targeted states. Ethnic cleansing underpinned by selective violence is also a war crime, although it is also not genocide, an action that Omer Bartov, the Israeli-born Holocaust expert, calls “the crime of all crimes.”[4]
For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes—but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders.[5] But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Second, even though the South African application focuses on Israel, it has huge implications for the United States, especially President Biden and his principal lieutenants. Why? Because there is little doubt that the Biden administration is complicitous in Israel’s genocide, which is also a punishable act according to the Genocide Convention. Despite his admission that Israel is engaged in “indiscriminate bombing,” President Biden has also stated that “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel. Not a single thing.”[6] He has been true to his word, going so far as to bypass Congress twice to quickly get additional armaments to Israel. Leaving aside the legal implications of his behavior, Biden’s name—and America’s name—will be forever associated with what is likely to become one of the textbook cases of attempted genocide.
Third, I never imagined I would see the day when Israel, a country filled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, would face a serious charge of genocide. Regardless of how this case plays out in the ICJ—and here I am fully aware of the maneuvers that the United States and Israel will employ to avoid a fair trial—in the future Israel will be widely regarded as principally responsible for one of the canonical cases of genocide.
Fourth, the South African document emphasizes that there is no reason to think this genocide is going to end soon, unless the ICJ successfully intervenes. It twice quotes the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 December 2023 to drive that point home: “We are not stopping, we are continuing to fight, and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.” (8, 82) Let us hope South Africa and the IJC bring a halt to the fighting, but in the final analysis the power of international courts to coerce countries like Israel and the United States is extremely limited.
Finally, the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
Notes:
- 192-20231228-app-01-00-en
- Doc.1_Convention-on-the-Prevention-and-Punishment-of-the-Crime-of-Genocide
- www.timesofisrael.com/blood-libel-israel-slams-south-africa-for-filing-icj-genocide-motion-over-gaza-war/
- www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html
- mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza
- www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/how-joe-biden-became-americas-top-israel-hawk/
(John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. Courtesy: ScheerPost, an independent (US-based) daily news site covering issues of human rights, international conflict, criminal justice and world peace, founded and published by Robert Scheer.)
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International Court of Justice Hears Devastating Presentation of Israeli Genocide in Gaza
Tom Carter
On Thursday, lawyers representing the government of South Africa gave extraordinary arguments before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, arguing that Israel is guilty of perpetrating genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The factual material that was contained in the presentations, followed throughout the world, has a significance that goes beyond the character and motives of the governments and institutions involved in the proceedings. It gathered into one place a catalogue of systematic atrocities and war crimes perpetrated by Israel since October 7, which the whole world has followed to varying degrees on social media.
As Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh stated in her presentation, Gaza represents “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate—so far vain—hope that the world might do something.”
This objective catalogue of atrocities and war crimes was tied together with the genocidal rhetoric coming directly out of the mouths of Israeli state officials, military leaders, and other leading personalities.
The presentations described callous and systematic brutality reminiscent of the Nazis, on the one hand, and bloodthirsty racist incitement reminiscent of the Nazis, on the other hand. On this basis, the attorneys invoked the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was introduced and ratified in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Adila Hassim, a South African High Court advocate, made the first of the substantive presentations on Thursday. “For the past 96 days,” she said, “Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare.”
“Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go,” she argued, pointing to evidence that they are “killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate, in the places to which they have fled and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli declared safe routes.”
“The level of killing is so extensive that those whose bodies are found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified,” she continued. “More than 1,800 Palestinian families in Gaza have lost multiple family members and hundreds of multigenerational families have been wiped out, with no remaining survivors — mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins — often all killed together. This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared, not even newborn babies.”
Alongside the tens of thousands killed, she pointed to tens of thousands more maimed, disfigured and traumatized. Meanwhile, large numbers of Palestinian civilians, including children, are being “arrested, blindfolded, forced to undress and loaded onto trucks, taken to unknown locations.”
Referring to Israel’s “evacuation” order from northern Gaza in the opening stages of the military onslaught, Hassim argued, “The order itself was genocidal. It required immediate movement, taking only what could be carried, while no humanitarian assistance was permitted, and fuel, water and food and other necessities of life had deliberately been cut off. It was clearly calculated to bring about the destruction of the population.”
A key feature of Israel’s genocidal operation was, Hassim argued, its deliberate “assault on Gaza’s healthcare system.”
As a deliberate consequence of the Israeli blockade, out of all the people currently suffering from acute hunger in the world, 80 percent are in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people are now more at risk of death from hunger, thirst and disease than from bombs.
The arguments by the assembled team of lawyers and jurists were delivered with factual and legal precision. Refuting the efforts of the Biden and Netanyahu regimes to cast doubt on Palestinian casualty figures as having come from “Hamas sources,” Hassim pointed out that all of the statistics in her presentation were from the UN itself, and were “up to date as of 9 January 2024.”
While the charge of genocide was formally presented against Israel, it is well understood that the US government also stands accused, as Israel’s chief imperialist patron and supplier of war materials. When Hassim made a subtle reference to Israel’s armed forces as “one of the world’s most resourced armies,” everybody in the courtroom understood that she meant the United States.
Referring to the long list of genocidal statements by Israeli officials that were included in South Africa’s December 27 complaint, South African High Court advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued that “Israel’s political leaders, military commanders and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent; and these statements are then repeated by soldiers on the ground in Gaza as they engage in the destruction of Palestinians and the physical infrastructure of Gaza.”
This includes repeated references to Palestinians as “human animals” who represent “Amalek.” These references are characteristic of a specifically fascistic ideology and theology. In the biblical story of Amalek, God commands Saul to destroy an entire group of people known as the Amalekites: “Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”
“These statements,” Ngcukaitobi continued, “are not open to neutral interpretations, or after-the-fact rationalizations and reinterpretations by Israel. The statements were made by persons in command of the state. They communicated state policy. It is simple. If the statements were not intended, they would not have been made.”
Ngcukaitobi, in his presentation, connected these incitements to genocide with the genocidal actions of Israeli soldiers, who have been filmed chanting that they will “wipe off the seed of Amalek” in Gaza. “There is now a trend among the soldiers to film themselves committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, in a form of ‘snuff’ video,” Ngcukaitobi said. “One recorded himself detonating over 50 houses in Shujaiya.”
“Soldiers obviously believe that this language and their actions are acceptable because the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza is articulated state policy,” Ngcukaitobi said.
One particular episode described by Ngcukaitobi bears recounting in full: “Senior political and military officials encouraged without censure the 95-year-old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre against the Palestinians in 1948 — to speak to the soldiers ahead of the ground invasion in Gaza,” Ngcukaitobi said. In this tour, Yachin was “driven around in an official Israeli army vehicle, dressed in Israeli army fatigues.”
“Be triumphant and finish them off,” Yachin said in his speech, “and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”
South African law professor and attorney Max du Plessis, in his presentation, argued that what is happening “in Gaza now is not correctly framed as a simple conflict between two parties.” It entails, he said, “destructive acts perpetrated by an occupying power” against a subjugated and “oppressed” population. For years, he said, Israel “has regarded itself as beyond and above the law.”
Du Plessis presented reports of “field executions,” “torture,” and “images of decomposing bodies of Palestinian men, women and children, left unburied where they were killed — some being picked upon by animals.” “It is becoming ever clearer,” he continued, “that huge swathes of Gaza — entire towns, villages, refugee camps — are being wiped from the map.”
The factual material that has been presented is more than sufficient to warrant the immediate arrest, indictment and prosecution of the entire Israeli government.
But it is also, and even more importantly, an indictment of the United States government and US-NATO imperialism. Among those who must be prosecuted for the horrific crimes carried out by the Netanyahu government are the leaders of the imperialist powers who have supported, financed, justified and directed the genocide: Sunak in the UK, Scholz in Germany, Macron in France, Meloni in Italy, and, above all, “Genocide Joe” Biden in the US.
In the minds of hundreds of millions of people, the ongoing genocide in Gaza will more and more come to be seen as an indictment of imperialism and the global capitalist system, together with all of its politicians, parties and institutions.
The ICJ proceedings themselves will likely drag on for years. The proceedings this week relate to South Africa’s request for “preliminary measures,” or an unenforceable “order” for Israel to cease hostilities. The Israeli government, for its part, has been ignoring UN resolutions by the dozen for years, and is expected to give a full-throated defense of its operations in its own presentation today.
It is necessary to draw the opposite conclusion from Thursday’s proceedings than those who are now encouraging illusions that they herald some rebirth of democratic, humane and rational sentiments in the halls of the United Nations, or that well-prepared lawsuits can in themselves serve as a reliable vehicle for halting the genocide.
To express any such illusions in the institutions of the United Nations—a “thieves’ kitchen,” as Lenin called its predecessor the League of Nations—would only be, at best, wishful thinking.
“Millions of people around the world support South Africa’s efforts to hold Israel to account,” Jeremy Corbyn wrote on Monday, referring to the ICJ proceedings, asking, “Why can’t our government?” To pose the question is to answer it: The UK government, along with the Biden administration, will never do that because to do so would be to invite war crimes prosecutions for all of its leading figures.
Even as the proceedings at the ICJ were being held, the US and UK launched a major escalation in the Middle East with the bombing of Yemen. The support of the imperialist powers for the genocide in Gaza is bound up with an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the preparations for war against China.
The Gaza genocide has been a significant factor in an ongoing, massive radicalization of the world’s population, together with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, escalating global war, widening social inequality, runaway climate change, the abrogation of democratic rights, and rise of far-right and fascistic movements and governments.
The material presented at the ICJ deserves to be studied and shared widely. It is proof that the most horrific forms of imperialist barbarism of the last century are being normalized again. And it is a warning: behind their phrases about “human rights” and “democracy,” this is what the imperialist governments are capable of doing, both in Gaza and within their own borders.
The Gaza genocide can be halted, future genocides can be prevented, imperialist war can be opposed, and all of the butchers and war criminals can be be held to account only by mobilizing the independent power of the international working class; the only class which has common interests objectively opposed to imperialist war and capitalist oppression, which is coming into sharper and sharper conflict with the capitalist system in struggles breaking out around the world, and which must urgently be armed with a historically conscious and socialist strategy.
(Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.)
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Here is an extract from an article by Nicky Reid, “Revenge of the Renegades of the Red Sea”, that brings out very powerfully the genocide going on in Gaza:
There is something just absolutely soul crushing about watching a war on live television, especially when all the networks seem to be rooting for the bad guys. However, despite what those jackals on cable news might tell you, what’s going on right now in Gaza is not a war, it is a goddamn holocaust and even in an age when forever wars seem to grow on trees, this bloodbath is downright unprecedented in its almost casual cruelty. While the unblinking cameras roll, one of the most powerful modern armies on earth is laying into a glorified concentration camp with the full weight of its hi-tech arsenal while pretending to be the victim because a few sadistic orphans they used to sponsor managed to get in a shot between massacres.
Shall we pour over the grotesque statistics one more time? In less than 3 months, the state of Israel has slaughtered over 22,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including nearly 10,000 children. Another 50,000+ have been wounded and everyone on the ground with a functioning calculator seems to agree that this estimate is likely extremely low. Another 7,000 people are missing, including about 5,000 women and children, most of whom are presumed to be dead or dying, crushed beneath the rubble of a crowded urban graveyard decimated by million-dollar murder machines. 85% of a population of 2.3 million is now homeless with 70% of all homes in Gaza and half of all buildings damaged or destroyed. At least a quarter of this population is now on the brink of famine and infectious disease, with public health experts predicting nearly 500,000 to drop dead where they cower within the next year.
Genocide is the word for this, and we all know it, but we all just sit by every day and watch it happen as if it were some kind of sick new reality TV show about blowing up brown children. It’s sickening and the western media’s posture of detached objectivity is the worst kind of complicity money can buy. That’s because this genocide isn’t simply an Israeli genocide, it is an Israeli facilitated proxy genocide and American tax dollars pay for every bomb dropped on another hospital. While the Biden Administration gasps like a soap opera debutante at the deeds of their increasingly unhinged Zionist golem, they hand that sick thing another blank check to keep the bodies rolling. We arm these cannibals with $3.8 billion dollars in aid a year and Genocide Joe still has to circumvent Congress to hand them another $106 million bucks in tank shells so they can shoot orphaned teenage amputees in the ICU.
(Courtesy: CounterPunch.)
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Why We Have to Make the Jewish Ghetto Comparison
Michelle Weinroth
Comparisons are not about exact identities. One can always level criticism at a comparison and claim that it is imperfect. But such a judgement is inherently flawed, since comparisons are not intended to mark identity, but to underscore some shared features–critical features, to be sure, not incidental or ancillary ones.
To compare the Jewish Ghetto under Nazism with the Gaza ghetto may be profoundly disturbing; but should we look away from that similitude to avert our gaze from the horror that is unfolding now, and which, according to several expert commentators, is unprecedented in modern history? Consider the enormity and the speed with which the slaughter of innocent civilians is now taking place. Beyond the horrendous killings achieved through relentless airstrikes there is the premeditated act of depriving a besieged population of its basic necessities: food, fuel, medicine and water. There is the humiliation of both old and young men, stripped virtually naked and executed extra-judicially. Are these intentional acts of genocide not reminiscent of Nazism? Gaza, as some have called it, is not a concentration camp anymore; it is an extermination camp.
A comparison of the Gaza ghetto with the Jewish ghetto under Nazism may well spawn a debate about distinct genocidal agendas. But that discussion digresses from the central point. Differences and variations aside, what unites all manner of genocides is their unfathomable cruelty, their dizzying inhumanity. So aberrant are these acts of annihilation that they defy language. Speech and reason are stymied, disabled, and paralyzed by the apocalyptic character of this mass erasure of humankind.
It is natural to want to avert one’s eyes from all this—(and by “this” I mean all that is too obscene and repugnant to ponder for more than a fleeting moment.) But the discomfiture in this “sacrilegious” comparison pales beside the agony of the current victims—the besieged Palestinians. Their agony won’t disappear just because we turn our gaze away and refuse to confront the comparison. Might the discomfort arising from the comparison be lessened if it meant that articulating it publicly and forcefully could yield hope, could help stop the carnage and pre-empt a full-blown genocide?
I would argue that there is significant political and moral value in reinforcing the comparison, for the visceral pang that such an analogy provokes can become a salutary form of self-questioning in the otherwise conflicted, complacent, or indifferent public. The shock effect resulting from this comparison has the power to jolt that public out of its complacency, denial, and sheer sense of hopelessness. Indeed, to recall the threshold of “the unspeakable,” which marked the Holocaust of the Jews, and to draw a line from that 20th-century episode to the present is to remind the world that the war on today’s Gazans (and, indeed, on Palestinians in the West Bank) has reached that awful threshold of victimhood precipitated by Nazi violence. For years, this threshold has conjured an idea of absolute victimhood exclusive to Jews. No longer. The horror of the past has returned in a new guise; the Ur victim is not the Jew, but the Palestinian.
If we are to underscore the gravity of the current crisis, we have to invest it with urgency. The disturbing comparison, which I have articulated in the above, can potentially galvanize the general public into action, into political speech and effective protest. Not to make the comparison is to allow the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza and the slaughter to worsen. For some (notably Israel’s apologists) might say: it’s not as bad as Auschwitz so we can afford (at least morally) to continue bombing the hell out of the strip.
Political value is not the only merit in underscoring this disturbing comparison. The unsettling analogy is also a crucial means of exploding long-held myths: in other words, that Jewish victimhood is beyond compare, exalted and singular in its gravity. Indeed, it is precisely the exceptionalism with which Israel envelops itself that has allowed the Zionist political elite (wherever it may be—in the U.S., UK, Europe, or Israel) to flout international law repeatedly for more than 75 years. It is this cultivated sense of transcendent sublimity (arising from the weaponization of the Holocaust and the manipulative use of the Bible) that elevates Israel’s status to an arrogant actor on the world stage, one that is indifferent to all red lines (that is, to virtually all Geneva conventions and UN resolutions).
With this self-assigned supra-human identity, Israel’s expansionism and its slaughter of innocent Palestinians are buttressed by a sense of God-given limitless power. The death of more than 21,000 Palestinians does not sate Israel’s vindictive appetite for revenge in response to October 7. For Israel, UN resolutions belong to “mere” world affairs; and so it spurns these as paltry, couching its claims in the language of divine authority. With this supercilious rhetorical posture, it scoffs at the moral judgment and criticism leveled at it by others. It repudiates international law with brazen insouciance because it knows that, with U.S. backing, it can transgress reason and law with infinite impunity. Once pitied as the collective victim of genocide, Israel is now the perpetrator, the state that, paradoxically, wields victimhood as its quintessential raison d’être.
If we are to hold Israel to account for its crimes, we must exercise the democratic right to say openly and unabashedly that Jews have no monopoly over genocide-driven victimhood. Jews are not the eternal victims of history. Conversely, progressive Jews have a moral duty to help loosen the Zionist grip over that sense of singular victimhood. The latter is a self-assigned prerogative that enables Israel (together with its supporters) to exploit such a privilege with disastrous–genocidal–consequences. It is imperative that we help bring that carnage to a full stop.
The comparison of the Jewish ghetto under Nazism with the Gaza ghetto under Israel’s (current) fascistic authority must cease to be sacrilegious. In fact, it is essential that the comparison, however uncomfortable, be voiced openly, if only to force Israel and its apologists to see the “Jewish” state’s reflection in the mirror of the Nazi past, and, hopefully, to ponder with revulsion its own fascistic reality. If this could happen, it would mark a significant turning point in history.
(Michelle Weinroth is a member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada. Courtesy: Mondoweiss, an independent website devoted to informing readers about developments in Israel/Palestine and related US foreign policy.)
