But it must be stressed that it is no longer perverse to draw the Nazi-Zionist comparison.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While milking the memories of the Holocaust and crying eternal victimhood of the quintessentially European racism towards the Jews \u2013 alas, \u201cantisemitism\u201d \u2013 the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis today have, as evidenced by polls after polls, adopted what the genocide scholar Professor Martin Shaw called \u201cthe genocidal mindset\u201d towards native Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s bravest journalist Gideon Levy has repeatedly observed that his fellow Israeli Jews have internalized the widespread Pavlovian self-perception of themselves as \u201cGod\u2019s chosen people\u201d returning to or retaking the \u201cpromised land\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Israel\u2019s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settlement-born messianic Zionist who now leads National Religious Party- Religious Zionism, has openly dismissed international law based on his self-perception of God\u2019s Chosen People.<\/p>\n
Similarly, secular Zionists such as the late Golda Meir feel they are above the international law for a different but still warped reason.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As early as 2014, Levy told the Irish Times<\/em> journalist Lara Marlowe (see \u2018Holocaust makes Israelis think international law doesn\u2019t apply<\/a>\u2019,<\/em> 11 Sept. 2014), \u201c(t)he Holocaust makes Israelis think international law doesn’t apply to them, because they are the ultimate victims of history; the only victims.”<\/em><\/p>\n By all indications, ten years on, the Israeli society today \u2013 not simply the state and its organs \u2013 is Nazi Germany of 1940\u2019s.<\/p>\n In his authenticated post-WWII interviews (see The Devil\u2019s Confession: The Lost Eichmann\u2019s Tapes, BBC), SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann made it crystal clear to Willem Sassen, his fellow exile and the Dutch Nazi journalist, in Bueno Aris, that the Fuhrer ordered \u201cphysical destruction\u201d of an entire Jewish population whom the Nazi society viewed as Untermensch <\/em>(Subhumans) throughout the Nazi-occupied Europe.<\/p>\n Neither Israeli Jews on the streets of Tel Aviv, East and West Jerusalem, or Hebron nor the senior most leaders of Israel attach any worth or value to any Palestinian life.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, in a video-recorded meeting of former heads of Israeli security and military agencies, ex-Israeli Defence Minister and former commander of the Israeli Defence Forces general (rtd.) Moshe Yaalon characterized, chillingly, if disapprovingly, Israeli policies towards Palestinians in Gaza as \u201cMein Kampf<\/em> in reverse\u201d.<\/p>\n With impunity, the Zionist entity is pursuing this Hitlerite physical destruction of the Palestinian society in Gaza, and, alarmingly, also in the West Bank. \u00a0\u00a0Israel\u2019s continuing genocide in Gaza seriously undermines even the (recognizably colonial) \u201cGaza Peace Plan\u201d that came into effect on 10 October.\u00a0 This plan has been talked up by the unhinged US President Donald J. Trump who openly boasted about how \u201cvery well Bibi has used the American-supplied weapons<\/em>\u201d in Gaza genocide.<\/p>\n The images of Gaza in 2025 resemble more like those of the ruined Hiroshima in the aftermath of the 1st<\/sup> atomic bomb explosion in 1945 than a site of urban warfare in a densely populated cityscape.<\/p>\n The Jury\u2019s verdict noted that Israel\u2019s onslaught far exceeded the Israeli Defence Force\u2019s stated military objective of defeating the armed Palestinian resistance and destroying the latter\u2019s defensive physical infrastructure, which are miles of maze-like underground tunnels deep under the desert sands of Gaza.<\/p>\n The Tribunal offered panellists, journalists and attendees alike a very rich program of side educational events, in addition to the main panels of Palestinians\u2019 own accounts, international expert testimonies, empirical analyses \u2013 all designed to document, archive and establish empirical realities that confront perpetrators\u2019 official lies and media spins.<\/p>\n Among these events were a display of powerful political art work by an Israel-assassinated Palestinian cartoonist, participatory collective painting depicting Palestinian resistance over a century, political poetry reading, live acoustic music sessions, open conversations with the widely admired Global Sumud Flotilla activists, book signings and public talks by some of the iconic intellectuals on Palestine including a renowned founder of New History of Israel professor emeritus Avi Shlaim of Oxford University, the University of Colorado law professor Wadie Said whose father the late Edward Said was a renowned exilic intellectual and the author of the groundbreaking Orientalism, <\/em>and the Tribunal\u2019s Chair Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University.<\/p>\n Whether physically present inside the packed auditorium at Istanbul University, or watching the Final Session on YouTube LIVE, one could not have failed to feel inspired and charged as LSE Professor Christine Chinkin read out the 2,000-words Final Findings and Moral Judgement of the Jury of Conscience, on behalf of the 6-member Jury.<\/p>\n The Jury explained its mission as a \u201ccivil society\u2019s response\u201d to, effectively, the categorical failure of states to discharge their legal obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or the Genocide Convention) to prevent and intervene in the gravest atrocity crime, namely genocide.<\/p>\n In the Jury\u2019s words:<\/p>\n \u201c(t)he Jury, guided by conscience and informed by international law, does not speak with the authority of states, but when law is silenced by power, conscience must become the final tribunal.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe Tribunal is not a court of law so does not purport to determine guilt or liability of any person, organization or state. It is a civil society response to the continuing lack of accountability for the commission by Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. We believe that genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe. Genocide in Gaza is the concern of all humanity. When states are silent civil society can and must speak out.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Its main recommendations are radical in that the Jury reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people \u201cto choose their modes of resistance to achieve liberation, freedom, and independence<\/em>\u201d in the face of Zionist Israel\u2019s over half-a-century of brutal colonial occupation with an unmistakable genocidal dimension.\u00a0\u00a0 Significantly, while calling for the end to impunity, the Jury \u201cendorses a global, rights-based strategy to dismantle Zionist structures: identify and map the Zionist regime\u2019s sources of power and enabling pillars.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The Jury calls for building a worldwide movement that weakens, isolates, and dismantles each source through coordinated political, legal, economic, academic, cultural, technological, and social action.<\/p>\n As frail as he physically looked, walking to the podium with the help of a young assistant, the Tribunal\u2019s President Professor Richard Falk who will turn 95 soon, on his part, delivered his powerful call to further global action, against the perpetrating state of Israel until the genocide ends, the apartheid dismantled and accountability is realized.<\/p>\n Professor Falk rightly paid tribute to and drew inspiration from the very Palestinian people whose century-long repression at the hands of the European settler colonizer has awakened the collective conscience of the people all over the world.<\/p>\n It must be stressed, however, that the consciousness awakened and subsequently mobilized as global solidarity for a Free Palestine will need to be a truly revolutionary type.\u00a0 That is, the informed conscience anchored in the humanist value of anti-Capitalism.\u00a0 For this Capitalist world where profits come before people has been built around the mass murderous ideology of White Supremacy and the hierarchy of the worth of human populations including \u201craces\u201d and classes.<\/p>\n To its credit, the Jury perceptively observes, \u201cthe political economy of genocide is the highest form of hyper imperialism of the 21st century.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n UN Special Rapporteur would concur with the Gaza People\u2019s Tribunal\u2019s assessment of the system which has enabled Israel to perpetrate genocide in Palestine, with blanket impunity.<\/p>\n \u201cThe genocide in Gaza was not committed in isolation, but as part of a system of global complicity. Rather than ensuring that Israel respects the basic human rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, powerful Third States \u2013 perpetuating colonial and racial-capitalist practices that should have long been consigned to history \u2013 have allowed violent practices to become an everyday reality. Even as the genocidal violence became visible, States, mostly Western ones, have provided, and continue to provide, Israel with military, diplomatic, economic and ideological support, even as it weaponized famine and humanitarian aid.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For peace and humanity\u2019s sake, what needs dismantling is not simply the apartheid and Zionist structures but the White Supremacist-Capitalism, or \u201cracial capitalism\u201d, as the black Marxists have long named it.<\/p>\n ___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n The images of 2025 Gaza resemble more ruined Hiroshima after the 1945 atomic bombing than a site of urban warfare in a densely populated cityscape.\u00a0The Jury\u2019s verdict noted that Israel\u2019s onslaught exceeded the Israeli Defence Force\u2019s military objective of defeating the armed Palestinian resistance and destroying their physical infrastructure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3412,865,88,475,427,249,70],"class_list":["post-306495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-gaza-tribunal","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-netanyahu","tag-palestine","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306495","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=306495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306497,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306495\/revisions\/306497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/maung-zarni-1-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a> A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/em><\/a> Editorial Committee, of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center \u2013 Cambodia.\u00a0Zarni is the co-founder of <\/em>FORSEA<\/a>, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for <\/em>Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the <\/em>European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. <\/strong>Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the <\/em>New York Times, The Guardian and<\/em> the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are <\/em>The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), <\/em>An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and <\/em>Myanmar\u2019s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, <\/em>Essays on Myanmar Genocide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"