Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Since the apartheid regime of Israel began its brutal carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip a month ago, people around the world have accused Israel and its international supporters of the crime of genocide. United States President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and many other world ‘leaders’ decry such language, and state that Israel is only ‘defending itself’.
We must note that these same worthies deny that Israel is an apartheid state, despite that very fact being documented in painful detail by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem and other human rights organizations.
But what of genocide, a term that many world leaders find most offensive. Is Israel guilty of the crime of genocide? If so, that would make the leaders of the U.S., Canada and many other nations complicit in this crime against humanity.
Let us bring the discussion to a close, once and for all, by looking at the definition as stated by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. That definition reads as follows:
“Definition: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
“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.”
Now we will look at each component and see what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and see if it fits the description. Remember please that, as stated above, we will look at these actions in the context of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
A: “Killing members of the group.” The military of a country that declared itself the nation-state of the Jewish people and only the Jewish people is slaughtering Arabs, most of them Muslim, by the thousands in Gaza and by the hundreds in the West Bank. Condition of genocide? Check.
B: “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” While over 10,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed by Israeli bombs, thousands more have been badly injured. And who can watch videos of terrified children, searching in vain for their now-dead parents and siblings, and not comprehend the mental harm that has been inflicted on them? The same is true for adults, tearfully collecting body parts of their children. And children in the West Bank being dragged from their homes in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers is certainly mentally damaging. Condition of genocide? Check.
C: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli government, which for sixteen years has strictly controlled everything that enters or exits Gaza, has imposed a complete blockade, forbidding food, water (the vast majority of water in the Gaza Strip is not potable) and medical supplies from entering the Strip, and depriving Palestinians there of electricity. Prior to this most recent onslaught, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were lucky if they had six hours of electricity a day. Now, there is none. Condition of genocide? Check.
D: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Pregnant women are deprived of much-needed medical attention, because Israel keeps bombing the hospitals where they would normally go for treatment. Slaughtering men, women and children, and forcing those that survive to live in an area with no economic opportunity certainly discourages procreation.
Also, IDF soldiers and their racist supports have access to clothing with a picture of a pregnant, Arab woman on it, with the caption: “One bullet, two hits’. Condition of genocide? Check.
E: “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” This mostly takes place in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, Israel simply kills the children. In the West Bank, children are often killed, but not to the same degree as is happening in Gaza today. But children as young as 11 will be arrested for such egregious crimes as throwing a stone at an Israeli tank, and then taken out of Palestine and placed in an Israeli jail. Incarcerating children in an occupied nation and removing them to a jail in the occupying nation is a violation of international law. Condition of genocide? Check.
And one must remember that not all these conditions need to be met to qualify as genocide.
“…[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group….”
One might think that ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden, and Prime Minister Trudeau, might want to consider these facts, and temper their repulsive eagerness to embrace all things Israeli. They talk about ‘shared values’ between the U.S., Canada and Israel. Really? Well, maybe so. All three nations are racist: the U.S. is blatantly racist against people of color, Canada against Indigenous people, and Israel against anyone not Jewish. They all support genocide. Not one of those three nations respects international law, and all of them hold human rights in contempt. None of those three nations respects the will of its own people. In the U.S., elected officials take their orders not from their constituents, but from the lobbies that support their election and re-election campaigns. In Canada, despite demands for the country to respect age-old treaties with Indigenous groups, the government spends millions of dollars in court battles to do the opposite. And while most Israelis seem content with their racist government’s ongoing genocide, they were more than a little upset at Prime Murder Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan, and made that quite obvious with weekly protests participated in by hundreds of thousands of people. Was the Prime Murderer moved? Hardly!
So as we hear Biden, Trudeau, Netanyahu and others deny Israeli apartheid and genocide, and their bloody role in both of them, let us remember the facts as outlined herein. We can all hope to see those three monsters, and many other world ‘leaders’ in the dock at the International Criminal Court. It can’t happen soon enough.
