Those with eyes to see and ears to hear – including this author, as it happens – have known it for a very long time already.
Yet the findings of the United Nation’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (hereafter: the UN Commission) that have just been published and detailed in a long report are still of great importance: Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinians.
To any unbiased, intellectually honest and morally normal reader – no matter his or her politics – the report, the product of two years of “painstaking” fact-gathering and legal analysis, leaves no doubt that Israel’s actions in Gaza have matched four of the five ways of committing genocide listed in the foundational and binding 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as well as the 1998 Rome Statute: Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Under international law, even one of these actions is sufficient to be charged with genocide.
The UN Commission report, of course, converges with what AP has called a “rising chorus” of belated yet direly needed acknowledgements of the single greatest crime yet committed in our century, including from: the International Association of Genocide Scholars (the “world’s leading” such association according to the BBC), the Israeli NGO’s B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), and now even US Senator Bernie Sanders, who used to struggle tooth and nail to unforgivably deny this genocide as long as he could.
More generally, by now 43 percent even of Americans see that Israel is committing genocide – and are ready to say so when asked by pollsters. 53 percent simply don’t like Israel. Both figures are nothing short of sensational in the US context, especially if you consider that it is the young who have had enough of Zionism. Moreover, traditionally staunchly pro-Israel-come-what-may constituencies are cracking: The Right and MAGA in particular now feature leaders and influencers openly critical of Israel, such as Marjorie Taylor Green and Tucker Carlson. Even American evangelicals are rapidly deserting the Zionist color. The Economist has just acknowledged the collapse, with dread, under the headline “How Israel is losing America.”
There is nothing to discuss about facts: Water is wet, blood is red, and Israel is committing genocide. Whoever is still denying this crime or trying to smear those reporting it as “Hamas proxies” and “antisemites” – as Israel is, as expected – is only delivering more evidence of their limitless dishonesty. As Chris Sidoti, member of the UN Commission, noted at the press conference presenting its report, “no one takes” such Israeli propaganda “seriously” anymore. At least, no one with a working brain and a decent conscience.
The questions that matter are different. They will shape the common – or not so much – human future. It is horrible to have to state it, but even if it is not yet history, the Gaza Genocide has already happened: if it were stopped today – it will not – humanity has long missed its chance to prevent it. For that, the Israeli perpetrators, who have never made a secret out of their crime, would have had to be confronted with force, at the very latest in November 2023. Now, many future Palestinian victims could still be saved – and probably won’t.
But the genocide is a fact we cannot reverse. What is still at stake – apart from many more lives – is whether we will let this crime become a new normal, a “Gaza Method,” which is the de facto aim of Israel, the US, and the EU. Our world is terrible as it is and getting worse by the day, but some of us at least still know that war and genocide are not and must not be the same thing. If the promoters of the “Gaza Method” prevail, then war will be genocide. Especially when waged by the West and its monstrous creation, Israel.
Let’s focus on four questions that will matter: First, what are – or should be – the consequences of Israel’s genocide? Second, what about the many in governments, media, and the public sphere, most of all but not only in the West, who are complicit in this crime or even so deeply involved that they are really co-perpetrators? And what about the larger group of those – again states, organizations, businesses, academia, think tanks, you name it – who have done nothing? And, finally, last but by no means least, what about the victims and those who have been resisting – including by armed struggle – on their behalf?
Regarding consequences, it is easy to understand what must happen as a minimum: the surviving victims must finally be protected, the perpetrators brought to justice. In particular now, as Israel is launching its final assault on Gaza city itself – an attempt at a final solution by even more murder and the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza – that protection could still make a difference.
As international law expert Craig Mokhiber has pointed out, the UN General Assembly could use the Uniting for Peace procedure to bypass the American veto in the Security Council and mandate an international protection force for Gaza.
Of course, Israel, supported by the US and other genocide co-perpetrating states, such as the UK and Germany, would resist such an intervention. That is no reason not to take the necessary first steps. But it is a reason to be realistic. Ultimately, saving what is left of Gaza and its people will take a more robust approach. Israel is an extremely criminal state under an entirely insane regime. Like Nazi Germany, it will have to be defeated militarily by a pro-active coalition waging a determined war.
Here as well, realists will point out many obstacles. Yet it is the only way to stop not only the Gaza genocide but Israel’s endless violence and destabilization in not only Western Asia but, in reality, the world as a whole. Israel’s entirely illegal and rogue nuclear arsenal, with which it has threatened not only its neighbors but, again, the whole world is not a reason not to finally intervene militarily. On the contrary, it is yet another compelling reason to do so in order to disarm it.
Regarding the Israeli perpetrators, they need to be punished, in large numbers, high and low. First because their victims and their surviving families have a right to justice. And second, because Israel’s outrageous impunity is one of the key causes of the current genocide. If it is not finally and demonstratively broken, things will only get even worse. And not only in Israel.
Short of military intervention, which is what is really needed, economic boycott is the other inevitable consequence. All trade and all other relationships with this monster of a state must cease. This concerns by no means only the West, for instance, the despicable US, UK, Germany, and EU.
Critics of the global non-West and the aspiring leaders of a new multipolar order are right in this regard: If Beijing and Moscow, for instance, do not want to lose credibility, they cannot remain de facto neutral. The very least they must do is lead a global movement to completely isolate Israel, economically, politically, and in every other sphere of human activity.
A first step is to finally shift the debate from the non-issue of whether to “recognize” Palestine. Obviously, it must be recognized, and about 150 states have done so already. What we really need to talk about is de-recognizing Israel: whatever it is, it is not an ordinary state, and other states need to stop pretending it is.
If the potential leaders of a better international order fail to, at the very least, isolate Israel, they will have only themselves to blame. Yet if they take the initiative to lead the majority of humanity that has had enough of Israel’s crimes and impunity, they will benefit not only morally but politically as well (and mightily). In addition, short of sending troops themselves, they must at least help Israel’s victims, from Gaza to Yemen to Iran, to arm themselves and resist.
In the West, it is time to build systematic registers of those who need to be charged with complicity. To include thousands of government representatives and bureaucrats, at central and local levels (for instance, in Berlin) as well as academic, think tank, media and social media figures who have supported the genocide by broadcasting, sharing, and amplifying Israel’s genocidal propaganda, from the “mass rape” hoax to silencing the fact that many of the victims of 7 October 2023 were killed not by the Palestinian Resistance but by Israeli forces carrying out a “Hannibal” operation against their own.
Beginning with Julius Streicher at the Nuremberg Trials and recently confirmed during the trials after the Rwandan Genocide, using media to promote crimes against humanity and genocide is a crime in and of itself. The world will need many new convictions in this area.
Finally, amends will have to be made: How can a Hamas fighter, for instance, be vilified as a “terrorist,” if in reality, he has desperately and against the odds struggled to stop Israel’s genocidal forces? This is perverse. In general, the Palestinians have a right under international law to armed resistance. Resisting genocide makes this only even more obvious. And those who have resisted in the rest of the world, whether by demonstrations, campus occupations, boycotts, or sabotaging Israeli arms makers must have justice, too. That is, they must be recognized as exemplary instead of being persecuted, as, for instance, in Germany, the UK, and the US.
Much more will need to happen if a world that is already post-Gaza Genocide wants to reverse a steady descent into hell. It will take decades, at least, to clean up the filth produced by the crime itself and the widespread complicity. There is no guarantee at all that, as a collective, we will even try. But one thing is certain: if we don’t, we will deserve everything that is coming for us in a world where we all have made genocide the norm or allowed this to happen.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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