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Rights Action
January 29, 2024
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“Real and imminent risk of genocide”
International Court of Justice ruling against Israel’s war in Gaza is a game-changer. U.S., E.U., Canada & Australia are probably complicit with genocide
https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/real-and-imminent-risk-of-genocide
Rights Action supports calls being made across the U.S., Canada, the E.U. and Australia, for more and more and more people to get directly involved in any and all efforts to stop our governments, companies and militaries from supporting, “justifying” and/or benefitting from Israel’s ethnic cleansing slaughter and destruction in Palestine.
“With the ICJ ruling that Israel’s attack on Gaza is plausibly genocidal, every university, company and state around the world will now need to consider very carefully its engagement with Israel and its institutions. Such ties may constitute complicity with genocide.”
We do not lightly or casually denounce Israel’s policies and actions in Palestine. We do not lightly or casually denounce U.S. and Canadian, E.U. and Australian complicity and harmful “justifications”.
“The judgment pointed to dozens of explicit statements of “intent to destroy” by Israeli state leaders, wartime Cabinet ministers and senior army officers as well as the unprecedented levels of killing and destruction. The court also issued provisional measures, recognizing the dire situation: more than 26,000 Palestinians killed and more than 64,000 wounded in Israel’s bombardment, as well as almost 2 million people forcibly displaced now facing famine and the spread of infectious diseases.”
We remember all too well the U.S.-backed scorched earth massacres and genocides carried out by Guatemalan military regimes in the 1970s- 80s, targeting, attacking and killing hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan civilians, the majority being Mayan indigenous people.
Similar to how the U.S., E.U., Canada and Australia back and “justifying” what Israel is doing in Gaza, the E.U. and Canada acquiesced to and/or directly backed and “justified” the U.S. in its military policies and interventions across Latin America.
During the worst years (1978-1983) of scorched earth massacres and genocides in Guatemala, Israel, Chile’s Pinochet regime, and the Argentinean Generals provided, as U.S. allies or “proxy states”, military aid, weapons and training to the genocidal Guatemalan regimes. Sectors of the Guatemalan Army receiving training from Israel began to refer to what they were doing as the “palestinization” of the Mayan peoples. (Here: Links to information 1, 2, 3 documenting Israel’s role in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s supporting U.S.-backed military regimes.)
- At bottom: What to do? Media sources
Consider following the work of the organizations listed below. Perhaps you are already connected to other groups.
Get involved locally. Take the struggle to hold the U.S., Canada, the E.U. and Australia fully accountable for complicity with ethnic cleansing slaughter and destruction to your elected government officials, to your media, to your places of worship and local governments.
Everyone has a role, everyone has a voice. These are our policies and actions. The death and suffering being inflicted on Palestinians are our problems.
Rights Action
[email protected]
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Why International Court of Justice ruling against Israel’s war in Gaza is a game-changer
By Raz Segal, Jan. 27, 2024
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-27/icj-israel-south-africa-gaza-genocide-court-ruling
On Friday, the International Court of Justice issued an interim ruling against Israel and its war in Gaza. In the case, brought by South Africa last month, the court ruled that it is plausible that Israel is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This ruling marks an end to the era of Israeli impunity in the international legal system.
The judgment pointed to dozens of explicit statements of “intent to destroy” by Israeli state leaders, wartime Cabinet ministers and senior army officers as well as the unprecedented levels of killing and destruction.
The court also issued provisional measures, recognizing the dire situation: more than 26,000 Palestinians killed and more than 64,000 wounded in Israel’s bombardment, as well as almost 2 million people forcibly displaced now facing famine and the spread of infectious diseases.
The provisional measures did not include an order for a cease-fire, which South Africa had requested, but they did instruct Israel — by an overwhelming majority vote of the ICJ judges of 15 to 2 — to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza and ensure that its military does not perpetrate such acts.
As part of the court’s provisional measures, Israel must also prevent and punish incitement to genocide; ensure the provision of urgent aid to Gaza; prevent the destruction of evidence and ensure its preservation; and provide the court with a report on these measures within a month.
In effect, these orders do require a cease-fire, for there is no other way to carry them out.
The International Court of Justice ruling stems from the United Nations’ genocide convention, which was created in December 1948 and based on the view that Nazism and what we now call the Holocaust were exceptional.
This served a purpose: It separated the Holocaust from the piles of bodies and destroyed cultures that European imperialism and colonialism — still very much ongoing at the time — had left around the world in the preceding few centuries.
The exceptional status of the Holocaust rendered the new Jewish state that was established in May 1948 also exceptional, especially in view of the many Holocaust survivors who chose to try to rebuild their lives there.
Israel’s exceptional status led to a willful blurring of its foundational crime, the Nakba: the mass expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns in the 1948 war.
That Israel could commit any crime under international law immediately became, in this exceptional framework, almost unimaginable. Impunity for Israel was thus baked into the international legal system after World War II.
The urgent need to obscure the Nakba also emerged from the broader impetus to deny the nature of the Israeli state as a settler-colonial project. Paradoxically, Israel’s creation reproduced the racism and white supremacy that had targeted Jews for exclusion and, ultimately, destruction in Europe.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed this white supremacy and colonial mind-set quite explicitly in an interview on MSNBC on Dec. 5: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas,” he said in response to a question about the mass killing of Palestinians in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. “It’s a war,” he continued, “that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization.… We are attacked by a jihadist network, an empire of evil.” This empire, he said, “wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.”
The concept of genocide functioned to protect the exceptional status of the Holocaust and Israel in the international legal system and to enable rather than challenge this long-held view. Until now.
With the ICJ ruling that Israel’s attack on Gaza is plausibly genocidal, every university, company and state around the world will now need to consider very carefully its engagement with Israel and its institutions. Such ties may now constitute complicity with genocide.
A few hours after the International Court of Justice ruling, another court heard a related case: In San Francisco, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Palestinian organizations and individuals, against President Biden and other U.S. officials for failure to abide by U.N. legal obligations to prevent genocide in Gaza and for complicity with genocide, because of the continued U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel.
One after the other, Palestinian plaintiffs testified Friday about their family histories during the Nakba; their own experiences of Israeli mass violence; relatives they have lost since Oct. 8; neighborhoods in which they grew up that are no more; schools that Israeli bombings and invasion have turned to rubble; and cafes where they will never be able to drink tea again.
As it happens, these accounts came just before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks Jan. 27, 1945, when Soviet forces liberated the Nazi annihilation camp at Auschwitz.
We are entering a new era of international law. For the first time, we have seen courts consider the crime of genocide as a legal framework to describe what Palestinians are enduring. Through these cases, the voices of Palestinians point to a new era of Holocaust memory, beyond the denial of the Nakba, to a world that will finally put the voices, knowledge, histories and perspectives of all people who face state violence front and center.
(Raz Segal is an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey.)
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Rights Action echoes these demands
- Immediate and permanent ceasefire.
- Massive delivery of comprehensive humanitarian relief.
- Then, release of all hostages, political prisoners and illegally detained people in Palestine and Israel.
- Then support, for as long as it takes, comprehensive negotiations (including truth and justice processes) that deal with the extreme death, suffering and destruction happening right now (beginning on October 7), and that addresses the historic root causes, going back to 1948 and establishment of Israel, the establishment of Israel’s apartheid system, the illegal occupation and illegal settler expansionism.
Urgent need to diversify media sources
Rights Action urges everyone to diversify their news sources. We suggest the daily news coverage provided by Al Jazeera news (https://www.aljazeera.com; @AJEnglish) and Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org; @democracynow).
These are not the only other sources, and it is not a question of agreeing with every story they cover, but they provide serious media reporting on the Israel/Palestine situation, and are a necessary antidote to the oftentimes misleading and actually harmful reporting coming from much of the government and corporate media in the U.S., E.U., and Canada.
Learn more / Take action in U.S. and Canada
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