Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and all other major international human rights groups have concluded that Israel is committing genocide.
The main Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) have both called Israel’s actions a genocide, citing the “deliberate and systemic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems” and the “clear, intentional attack on civilians.”
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry has found that four of the five acts in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention amount to genocide, their report citing “statements by Israeli leaders and patterns of conduct by Israeli forces as evidence of genocidal intent.”
The esteemed International Association of Genocide Scholars have also concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.
“The headline figure doesn’t include the bodies vaporised by bombs, the bodies decomposing under rubble, the bodies eaten by feral dogs, the bodies that were so disfigured as to be unrecognisable. Or those who have died of pre-existing medical conditions that could not be treated because Israel destroyed all the hospitals and killed and jailed Gaza’s medical personnel. Or those who have starved to death, or who have succumbed to infections because of weakened immunity and a lack of shelter and sanitation. Israel is responsible for all those deaths. It killed all those people. That number is unknown but is likely to be in the 100,000s. As a proportion, it is likely to be 10 or 20 or even 30 per cent of Gaza’s population.”
As Cook shows, we have been duped into a “debate […] entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by [Israel’s] bombs and gunfire”:
“The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods. These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on. Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.”
Yet, whatever the ultimate level of horror killing, there is actually no legal requirement to show any such numbers. Genocide, as defined by the Convention, doesn’t depend solely on numerical scale. It’s a question of deliberate intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
This presents the deniers with their next central problem: how to hide or mitigate the key issue of genocidal intent. They cannot deny that intent is a key component of Convention conditions. And they can plainly see the whole body of examples laid out by the UN, Amnesty and genocide scholars confirming the serial intent to genocide by Israel’s leaders. So they have to mask all that evidence by trying to manufacture an alternative narrative of ‘intent’.
The leads to a secondary line of spurious defence, which collapses into the familiar deceit: ‘we were only attacking Hamas’.
In this line of ‘intent’, Israel supposedly had ‘no intention’ of killing all those Palestinians in the ‘just going after Hamas’ process, or had intended to murder over 20,000 children, or had any intention of wiping out schools, mosques, churches and every other bit of Gaza’s physical landscape, or intended the wholesale extermination of Gaza’s healthcare system, or had any intention of starving the population en masse, or intended their mass displacement, or their ultimate removal. Nor, according to this line, and contrary to more stark evidence by the UN, has Israel intentionally run a state policy of systematic torture, another part of genocidal activity.
As intended by this narrative, no explanation for the collective punishment, displacement and extermination of all Palestinians is, or can be, offered. For the deniers, and their necessary line of denial, this is ‘part of the unavoidable war’, all presented as the ‘intended removing of Hamas’.
Again, it takes some level of calculated deception, desperate mitigation, or a combination of both, to mount such a brazen version of ‘intent’ against the wealth of legal confirmation showing Israel’s actual deliberate and systematic intent to carry out a genocide.
One of the most despicable and intentionally repeated aspects of that narrative has been the claim that ‘responsible’ Israeli forces have ‘given due warnings’, offering ‘safe exit corridors’ and ‘evacuation zones’ to the people of Gaza.
The intentional peddling of such lies has given complicit cover to Netanyahu, Herzog, Ben-Givr, Smotrich and all the other leading genocide inciters.
The dark extent of that genocide enabling can also be seen in the levels of intent and denial across Israeli society itself. The expansive support for mass killing and removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank speaks to that very same indoctrinating narrative.
No leadership could get away with an actual genocide, and open intent to genocide, without the substantive approval of its own people.
No leadership could survive the fallout from its continuing genocidal violations of the ‘ceasefire’ without that same level of civil support.
Nor, given the sheer scale of those recorded violations, could the leadership in Israel carry on the genocide without the affirmative nod to Netanyahu and his fascist cohort from their Western allies – and denial of their own culpability.
That enabling process, of course, encompasses much wider crimes of denial across the complicit West.
The clear truth of the Gaza genocide, including the very use of that vital word, has been routinely avoided by many of the Western capitals, and much of the Western media, most notably the BBC.
Indeed, it’s entire staff are currently being trained in Orwellian BBC-speak to avoid the term ‘Zionism’, as terminology supposedly deemed ‘disrespectful’ to Jewish people.
Yet, such establishment protections and false framing cannot ultimately hide the now well-documented truth of the genocide. The standard defence of ‘we didn’t know’, or ‘we couldn’t see’ offers no convincing plea or mitigation here. This is still the most immediately recorded and known about genocide in history.
As all the accumulated statements of its leaders show, there is incontrovertible proof of regime intent to carry out a genocide.
And just as clearly, there has been deliberate intent by the regime’s lobby backers and proxy organisations to deny the execution of that genocide.
All those Friends of Israel groups and followers who have endorsed and approved the regime in its industrial slaughter stand as enabling agents of the genocide. Their deceptions in support of the regime, from street stalls to media platforms, are now looking as untenable and exposed as the pariah entity itself. How perverse, also, that they claim to speak for all Jewish people while openly denying a present-day holocaust.
As the bombed and abandoned people of Gaza are left to struggle for survival in makeshift tents against terrible floods and the harsh excesses of winter, what kind of ‘peace’ entity could deny that this, too, is an ongoing part of the regime’s genocidal calculus?
The relentless efforts of Israel advocates to deny the true purpose, full extent and final aim of the killing, against a mass weight of credible evidence, will go down as one of the most egregious acts of complicity in modern times.
History will record not just the direct perpetrators of the genocide, but all those who have spoken and acted in flagrant denial of it.
Discussion about this post