IT'S TIME TO STOP REPUBLICAN WAR MONGERS WHO SUPPORT GENOCIDE & 

ISRAELI BOMBING CIVILIANS, BUT ESCHEW A CEASEFIRE & PEACEFUL 

SETTLEMENT! 

ISRAEL MAY HAVE A RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF, BUT MASSACRES, WAR CRIMES 

& GENOCIDE DO NOT CONSTITUTE DEFENSE! 

ISRAEL IS BLOCKING HUMANITARIAN AID - A WAR CRIME! 

FOOD AS WEAPON IS A WAR CRIME! 

THERE IS EVIDENCE OF ISRAELI TORTURE & MASS EXECUTIONS! 

THERE IS EVIDENCE OF MASS GRAVES!

WHERE IS AMERICAN HUMANITY? 

CORRUPT NETANYAHU INTERRUPTED HIS CORRUPTION TRIAL & CONTINUES 

TO LIE!

Netanyahu openly Reneges on Ceasefire, Stabs Biden in Back, Charging US cut off Weaponry

JUAN COLE06/24/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In an interview on Israeli Channel 14, the Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The heavy duty phase in the war is about to end with the end of the operation in Rafah. Therefore, the forces will be moved to the north.” By “north” he meant the border with Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire. He underlined, however, that the war on Gaza would continue until his objectives of “eliminating Hamas and returning the hostages” are achieved. He said, “I reject leaving Hamas in existence. The war will not end.”

Since Israel killed 100 Palestinians in Gaza in 24 hours over the weekend, there isn’t actually any evidence that the “heavy duty” phase of the total war on the residents of the Strip is ending.

Netanyahu openly reneged on the earlier alleged cabinet decision reported by President Joe Biden in late May and endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution, that there would be a halt in the fighting to allow an exchange of hostages. He said, “I am ready to reach a partial agreement with Hamas to recover some of the hostages, and this is no secret.” That Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies were the bottleneck here had been clear for some time, but the Biden administration chose to blame Hamas.

On Sunday, Netanyahu at a cabinet meeting repeated in public his false allegation that the Biden administration has reduced its weapons shipments to Israel. Not only have Biden spokesmen denied it, the charge makes no sense since Israel could not have continued its intensive bombing campaign on Gaza without daily resupply of arms and munitions by the United States. Israel ran out of its own ammunition months ago.

Having been invited to address Congress, Netanyahu clearly intends to cooperate with the Republicans in trying to damage Biden and plump for a return to the presidency of Donald Trump by spreading the Big Lie that Biden cut off weaponry to Israel. The only shipment that was paused consisted of 2,000-pound bombs, which Biden did not want Netanyahu using against the dense neighborhoods of Rafah. Those heavy bombs were in any case not suited to the Rafah campaign and would mainly have destroyed civilian infrastructure and killed innocent civilians.

I mean, I wish what Netanyahu is saying were true — it would much improve my opinion of the Biden team. But alas, like almost everything that comes out of the Polish-Israeli politician’s mouth, it is a piece of monumental prevarication.

The liberal American Zionists in Congress such as Chuck Schumer, who joined Republicans in issuing the invitation to the war criminal Netanyahu to come to Washington, have been had.

Regarding the Arab 48 story on Netanyahu’s retreat from his own peace plan, Hamas immediately fired back at the Israeli leader’s comments: “The position expressed by Netanyahu, which confirms that he will continue the war, and that he wants a partial agreement to recover a number of prisoners; and then resume the war after that, is substantiation of his rejection of the Security Council decision, and Joe Biden’s proposals.” Hamas pointed out that the prime minister’s assertions are “the opposite of the line the US administration tried to peddle about the alleged acceptance” of it by Israel.

The terrorist organization added: “Our insistence that any agreement contain a clear affirmation of a permanent ceasefire, and a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, is absolutely necessary, in order to bar Netanyahu’s evasive and deceptive attempt to perpetuate aggression and genocide against our people.”

Netanyahu, of course, does not accept any scenario in which Hamas reemerges to take control of Gaza again, and said he was working on an alternative model that would be gradual, involving the creation of a “civil administration” in Gaza within a new framework for “the day after the war.”

This proposal sounds a lot like that of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who wanted to find local partners in Gaza civil society with whom to cooperate in administering the Gaza Strip, but who failed to do so. Netanyahu acknowledged that failure, and sounds to me like Tricky Dick Nixon running for president in 1968 with a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. Netanyahu said “We want to establish a civil administration in cooperation with locals; I will not divulge the details.”

The prime minister was asked about the prospect of Israeli squatters flooding into post-war Gaza to usurp land from local people and settle on it. He replied, “I know there are many who support the resettlement in the Gaza Strip; but I am realistic and I see that this is unrealistic.”

Arab 48 says that his Jewish Power (i.e. fascist) National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, immediately shot back on social media after the interview, “If we wanted, it would be realistic.”

Netanyahu continued to put out the line that no commission of inquiry into the security failures on October 7 should be established during the war, since it would eat up scarce resources. He hinted that internal, secret investigations are anyway superior because an open commission might throw up information helping international courts make cases against Israel.

That sounds like about the most explicit confession of war crimes that a war criminal could make.

An organization of the families of Israeli hostages, infuriated at the interview, put out a statement saying, “Netanyahu has retreated from accepting the Netanyahu deal.”

Their statement read: “The Forum of Prisoners’ Families condemns the Prime Minister’s announcement regarding his retreat from accepting the Israeli proposal (for the prisoner exchange deal), which means that he decided to abandon 120 hostages and violate the moral duty of the state towards its citizens.”

It added that “the end of fighting in the region without releasing the hostages is an unprecedented national failure, and a failure in achieving the goals of the war. The families of the hostages will not allow the government and its leader to abandon their fundamental commitments towards the fate of our loved ones.” The families underlined that “the responsibility and duty to return all hostages lies with the Prime Minister.”

Netanyahu replied by blaming Hamas. He said he was committed to bring out the hostages. He has, however, repeatedly refused to engage in good faith negotiations that have any prospect of doing so.

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

INFORMED COMMENT

 

Conditions ‘Unspeakable’ as Israeli Onslaught Forces Over 1 Million to Flee Rafah

"Public health concerns are beyond crisis levels" in the areas where Palestinians have been forced to shelter, and "the sounds, the smells, the everyday life, are horrific and apocalyptic," a U.N. official said.

EDWARD CARVER

Jun 03, 2024

More than 1 million Palestinians have fled Rafah as the city comes under a continued Israeli assault, forcing many to shelter in badly damaged buildings in the nearby city of Khan Younis, according to the United Nations.

The assault on Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, has left the displaced in "unspeakable" conditions, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on social media. Approximately 1.7 million displaced people are now in Khan Younis and "Gaza Middle Areas," according to UNRWA.

Khan Younis, which saw sustained fighting earlier in the war, still does not appear to be a safe zone: Israeli military vehicles entered the city in recent hours after advancing to two towns just east of Khan Younis with "heavy gunfire and artillery shelling," Al Jazeera reported.

Since early May, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has issued evacuation orders for parts of Rafah, telling people to go to an "expanded humanitarian zone" in Al-Mawasi, located roughly 12 miles from the city.

Israeli forces subsequently launched attacks on designated safe zones, including in Al-Mawasi. Two strikes killed 45 and 21 people last week, mostly women and children. The first of the attacks, known as the "tent massacre," was carried out with U.S. weapons, later analysis showed.

Many of the people fleeing Rafah are having to move for at least the second time during the war. Roughly 1 million Palestinians who'd been displaced elsewhere had gone to Rafah for refuge earlier in the war. They began to leave Rafah nearly four weeks ago as Israeli started its assault on the city. Before the war, Rafah's population was about 275,000, but the governorate reached a population of 1.4 million by February as Israel ordered Palestianians to move there from northern Gaza. This meant squeezing more than half of Gaza's prewar population of 2.3 million into one governorate, NPRreported.

More than 18,500 pregnant women have been forced to leave Rafah, while about 10,000 pregnant women remain in the city in "desperate conditions," the U.N. reported.

"They're exhausted, traumatized, dehydrated, and malnourished," the U.N. Population Fund wrote on social media of pregnant women dealing with "Israel's terrifying military operation in Rafah."

"Pregnant women in Gaza are living in an unrelenting nightmare," the agency added.

After successive operations last month, Israel now controls the entire Gaza-Egypt border. Humanitarian corridors have shut down, with many agencies and aid groups pausing operations in Rafah due to lack of supplies and security concerns.

"We are living and working precariously in the south," Matthew Hollingsworth said, World Food Program (WFP) country director in Palestine, said late last week, the U.N. reported. The areas where the displaced have been forced to shelter are nightmarish, he said.

"Public health concerns are beyond crisis levels" and "the sounds, the smells, the everyday life, are horrific and apocalyptic," Hollingsworth added.

More than half of the structures in the Gaza Strip have been damaged, destroyed, or possibly destroyed during the eight-month Israeli assault, the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) concluded, in findings released Monday.

The mass displacement from Rafah continued as the Biden administration sought to arrange a cease-fire after after being pressured for months to end its military support for Israel’s onslaught. President Joe Biden called for an end to the war on Friday and backed a roadmap to a deal, which drew praise from Palestine defenders—the Council on American-Islamic Relations called it "long overdue" and a "positive step"—as well as criticism that it did not address the root causes of the conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that the deal would not stop the war, which could not end until "total victory" had been achieved, according to Israeli National News.

A truck is used to evacuate the International Medical Corps American field hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on June 2, 2024.

 (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)

COMMON DREAMS

 

As Israel bombs ambulances and levels refugee camp, Netanyahu receives bipartisan invitation to address US Congress

in Palestine

by Oscar Grenfell

01/06/2024

The death toll from the Israeli offensive on Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, and attacks throughout the Strip continues to grow with reports in recent days of widespread deaths and injuries to children, aid workers and other civilians. 

Signaling their ongoing support for the murderous onslaught, the leaderships of the Democratic and Republican parties issued an effusive open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, hailing him as a leader of a global fight against “terrorism” and inviting him to address the US Congress.

That invitation was made a day after the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) issued a statement detailing the deliberate killing of two of its paramedics in the Tel Sultan area west of Rafah. 

According to the PRCS, on May 29 a convoy of three ambulances was bombed by Israeli war planes. When one of the ambulances caught fire as a result and the paramedics attempted to extinguish the blaze, Israeli soldiers “opened heavy fire towards the teams, forcing them to withdraw from the site before they could retrieve the paramedics’ bodies, which were found in pieces this morning.”

The PRCS noted that with these latest killings, it has now lost 19 paramedics killed by Israel. An estimated 270 aid workers have been murdered throughout the genocide. The PRCS said that it “holds the international community fully responsible for the continued targeting by the Israeli occupation of the PRCS teams, facilities, and ambulances, clearly marked with the Red Crescent emblem, protected under international humanitarian law.”

The two paramedics were among at least 113 Palestinians killed between the afternoons of May 29 and 31, according to Gaza’s health ministry, along with 637 injured. They join the more than 36,000 recorded Palestinian deaths over the past seven months, but with reporting having broken down, estimates place the true death toll at tens of thousands more.

The United Nations and aid agencies are warning that in addition to the direct killings, the offensive against Rafah is creating a massive humanitarian crisis. The assault has displaced an estimated 1 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people; deliveries of food and other essentials have been restricted, and humanitarian groups have been forced to withdraw.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization reported that just three of its aid trucks had been able to enter Gaza since the assault on Rafah began, with 60 more stuck at the Egyptian border. 

That prompted the World Food Programme to warn that “Constrained access to southern parts of Gaza risks causing the same catastrophic levels of hunger witnessed in the north,” where there have been shocking scenes of death from starvation as hundreds of thousands have been forced to subsist on the equivalent of less than a small can of beans a day.

On Thursday, Médecins Sans Frontières closed its primary care centre in Al Mawasi, the desertous piece of land at the southwestmost point of Gaza, to which Israel is herding hundreds of thousands of people from Rafah. The doctors’ group reported that the centre had treated more than 33,000 people since February and stated that its forced closure marked “another step in Israel’s systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health system.” 

Earlier in the week, it had been forced to end operations at a stabilisation centre in Tel Sultan. SOS Children’s Villages, which provides assistance to the displaced with a focus on children, also announced that it was evacuating from Rafah.

Meanwhile, the healthcare system there is on the brink of a complete collapse. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported yesterday that “key health services, such as dialysis, medical imaging, surgery, internal medicine, and maternity and pediatric care, are no longer available, and many of the highly skilled doctors and nurses have been displaced from the city. With Al Emirati Maternity Hospital ceasing operations, all three hospitals in Rafah that were partially functional prior to the Israeli military operation are now out of service.”

While Israel is besieging the people of Rafah, it is also intensifying operations in central and northern Gaza, from which many of them were forced to flee. The clear aim is to render the strip entirely uninhabitable and to complete its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

This week Israel ended a siege of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza that it began on May 11. In those three weeks, the Zionist forces had carried out mass roundups, executions and indiscriminate shootings, killing hundreds. 

With the operation over, a Euro-Med Monitor field team that surveyed the damage reported that “not a single residential building was spared from bombing, bulldozing, or burning operations. The complete destruction of the area’s infrastructure was evident, as was the burning of the main market and shops in the streets surrounding it, to the point where walking on the roads of most of the camp’s ‘blocks’ has become impossible due to the rubble and massive destruction.”

The headquarters in the camp of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had been completely demolished through systematic shelling and arson with petrol, along with six school buildings.

In the final stages of this destruction operation, at least four Palestinian civilians, including a child, were killed by Israeli forces on Tuesday.

The OCHA also reported that in central Gaza, “four Palestinians, including two women, were reportedly killed and 15 injured when a house was hit in Bloc C of An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah” on Thursday. Five were killed the day before in Gaza City when a bomb was dropped on a residential house.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, from which many now in Rafah fled, at least 12 civilians, including two children, were killed Wednesday in separate bombings of two residential buildings.

While US and other imperialist leaders have shed cynical crocodile tears over the onslaught against Rafah, they continue to oversee the genocide, which has been facilitated militarily, politically and diplomatically by American imperialism and its allies.

The ongoing line-up was underscored by the joint letter to Netanyahu, signed by the fascistic Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, together with Democratic Party Senate Majority leader Charles Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Inviting the Israeli mass murderer to address a special joint session of Congress, the Democratic and Republican leaders gushed: “To build on our enduring relationship and to highlight America’s solidarity with Israel, we invite you to share the Israeli government’s vision for defending democracy, combatting terror, and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region.”

The historical analogy that presents itself would be an invitation to Hitler or Mussolini to explain their “vision for peace.” 

The letter linked this endorsement of the genocide with American imperialism’s broader war drive, including its moves to provoke a conflict with Iran in the Middle East and its confrontations with Russia and China. Those three countries were joined together as a threat to “security, peace and prosperity…around the world.”

The letter again makes plain that the US support for Israel is bound up with its broader program of global war, including the intensifying proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the continuous military build against China, which is viewed as the chief threat to US capitalist dominance. The Israeli “solution” of the “Palestinian problem” is viewed as a means of clearing the decks to enable the Zionist regime and the US to pursue this program more directly in the Middle East, including through a war with Iran.

In addition to backing an Israeli strike on Iran last month, the US is already engaged in war with Iran-aligned forces throughout the region. Yesterday, the Houthis reported that joint US and British strikes on Yemen the day before had killed at least 16 people and wounded 42 others. The Houthi statement claimed that air strikes had hit a building housing Hodeida Radio and civilian homes in the port city on the Red Sea.

US officials confirmed the strikes were carried out by F/A-18 fighter jets that took off from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, along with other US warships that are stationed in the region from which they can carry out attacks, not only against the oppressed Yemenis but potentially more broadly.

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

COUNTER CURRENTS

WATCH: Live — UN Security Council on Rafah

 

WATCH: Live — UN Security Council on Rafah

The U.N. Security Council meets at 3pm EDT Wednesday to debate Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gazan city of Rafah, where it has been condemned for civilian deaths. Read here...

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Vijay Prashad:
‘Rockin’ in the Free World’

As the U.S. celebrates $95.3 billion in military funding for Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine and itself, here’s a look at Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy and what’s at stake. Read here...

_______________________________________________________________________________________

PATRICK LAWRENCE:
US Endgame in Ukraine —
War Without End, Amen

What happens when a powerful nation cannot afford to lose a war it has already lost? Read here...

_______________________________________________________________________________________

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Vijay Prashad: Three Evils

May 28, 2024

 

There is no ambiguity about Israel causing Gaza to suffer occupation, apartheid and genocide. To counter Israeli denialism, here is a short primer on why these terms are accurate.

Malak Mattar, Palestine, “Hind’s Hall,” 2024. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

In a chapter from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), called “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon writes about the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not sufficiently human.

The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called safe zone moves further and further south. 

In December, the Israeli government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi (west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe area.

A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London’s Heathrow airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah.

Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a refuge, but — according to the laws of war — a safe zone must be agreed upon by all parties.

Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Odyssey of a People,” 1980. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

“How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided by one part of the conflict?” asked Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); “It can only promote the false feeling that it will be safe.” Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. 

On Feb. 20, Israel attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, killing two family members of the organisation’s staff. 

On May 13, an international U.N. staff member was killed after the Israeli army opened fire on a U.N. vehicle, one of the nearly 200 U.N. workers killed in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination of aid workers. 

[On May 26, an Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed at least 45 civilians, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now tries to claim was a “tragic mistake.” The attack, which burned mostly women and children alive, took place two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its Rafah attack.]

Aref El-Rayyes, Lebanon, untitled, 1963. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether.

Starving Palestinians has long been Israeli policy, which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 Nakba or “Catastrophe.”

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: apartheid, occupation and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to anti-Semitism. 

But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is necessary to counter this denial.

Nelson Makamo, South Africa, “Decoration of the Youth,” 2019. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Apartheid. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority population within the borders defined in 1948 (21 percent) as second-class citizens. There are at least 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed in 2018, declares the country a “nation state of the Jewish people.” 

As the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote, through this new law, the Israeli government “formally endorses” the use of “apartheid methods within Israel’s recognised borders.” The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have both said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians falls under the definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.

Laila Shawa, Palestine, “The Hands of Fatima,” 2013. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Occupation. In 1967, Israel occupied the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan region and southern Lebanon).

Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In U.N. documents and at the International Court of Justice, Israel is referred to as the “occupying power,” which is a term of art that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it occupies.

Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation that has not been revised.

An occupation is identical to colonial rule: it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of 21 illegal settlements), Israel continued to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of Gaza.

Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel’s obligation as the occupying power.

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are occupied have the right to resist.

In 1965, in the midst of Guinea Bissau’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2105 (“Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”). Paragraph 10 of this resolution is worth reading carefully: 

“The General Assembly… [r]ecognises the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invites all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories.” 

There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. 

Rather than sell arms to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, the members states of the United Nations — particularly from the Global North — should aid the Palestinians.

Genocide. In its order published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found “plausible” evidence of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians.

In March, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report called “Anatomy of a Genocide.”

In it, Albanese wrote that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” “More broadly,” she wrote,

“they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.”

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel’s bombardment. In October 2023, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said that “an entire nation out there is responsible” for the attacks on Oct. 7, and it was not true that “civilians [were] not… aware, not involved.” 

The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it expresses Israel’s intent and use of “collective punishment,” a genocidal war crime. The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “an option” since “there are no non-combatants in Gaza.” 

Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe Saada, a member of the Israeli Parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “all Gazans must be destroyed.” These sentiments, by any international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As with “apartheid” and “occupation,” the use of the term “genocide” is entirely accurate.

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu version of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already been translated into Arabic and Swahili).

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from The Wretched of the Earth:

“At 12 or 13 years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears.”

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a new South Africa 30 years ago.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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