{"id":246435,"date":"2023-10-23T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=246435"},"modified":"2023-10-19T03:55:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T02:55:00","slug":"palestine-israel-a-textbook-case-of-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/palestine-israel-a-textbook-case-of-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestine\/Israel: A Textbook Case of Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Palestinians look for survivors after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on 12 Oct 2023.<\/p><\/div>\n

Israel has been explicit about what it\u2019s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn\u2019t the world\u00a0listening?<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

13 Oct 2023<\/em> – Today, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip\u2019s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing<\/a> airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote<\/a> today from Gaza, \u201crefugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we\u2019re running out of food, water, and power.\u201d The UN has warned<\/a> that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create \u201cdevastating humanitarian consequences\u201d and will \u201ctransform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.\u201d Over the last week, Israel\u2019s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised<\/a> today that what we have seen is \u201conly the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s campaign to displace Gazans\u2014and potentially expel them altogether<\/a> into Egypt\u2014is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel<\/a>, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry<\/a>, the weaponization<\/a> of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid<\/a>. Now, following Hamas\u2019s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.<\/p>\n

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by \u201cthe intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,\u201d as noted<\/a> in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared<\/a> it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: \u201cWe are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.\u201d Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas\u2019s mass murder of Israeli civilians\u2014a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world\u2014as \u201can act of sheer evil<\/a>,\u201d in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an \u201cancient evil<\/a>,\u201d in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of \u201cevil,\u201d in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.<\/p>\n

The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts<\/a> that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: \u201c1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.\u201d The Israeli Air Force, by its own account<\/a>, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world\u2014almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan<\/a> during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs<\/a>, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren\u2019t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by \u201cact accordingly\u201d: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza \u201cas such,\u201d in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza\u2014the longest<\/a> in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law<\/a>\u2014to a \u201ccomplete siege,\u201d in Gallant\u2019s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only Israel\u2019s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14<\/a> called for Israel to \u201cturn Gaza to Dresden.\u201d Channel 12, Israel\u2019s most-watched news station, published a report<\/a> about left-leaning Israelis calling to \u201cdance on what used to be Gaza.\u201d Meanwhile, genocidal verbs\u2014calls to \u201cerase<\/a>\u201d and \u201cflatten<\/a>\u201d Gaza\u2014have become omnipresent on Israeli social media<\/a>. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading \u201cZero Gazans<\/a>\u201d was seen hanging from a bridge.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Israel\u2019s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an \u201cextermination order,\u201d justified by the rationale of a \u201crace war.\u201d By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of \u201cdestroying the Herero,\u201d killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant\u2019s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel\u2019s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Correction:<\/strong> An earlier version of this piece said that Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza this week than the US dropped on Afghanistan in any single year of its war there. In fact, the US dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Afghanistan in both 2018 and 2019; at the time of publication, Israel had dropped an estimated 6,000 bombs on Gaza in less than a week.<\/em><\/p>\n

Raz Segal is an associate professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – jewishcurrents.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Oct 2023 – Israel\u2019s campaign to displace Gazans and expel them into Egypt is another chapter in the Nakba where 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes for the creation of the State of Israel. The assault on Gaza is a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":246436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[221],"tags":[928,532,101,100,2898,87,865,2414,2415,2416,3120,767,771,427,85,2897,880,99,92,1025,886],"class_list":["post-246435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indigenous-rights","tag-bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions","tag-colonialism","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ecocide","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israeli-apartheid","tag-israeli-army","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-jewish-settlers","tag-middle-east","tag-nakba","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-israel","tag-sociocide","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-violent-conflict","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246437,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246435\/revisions\/246437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}