The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
– Gloria Steinem
More than a year into Israel’s devastating military response to the atrocities committed on October 7th by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, authorities in nearly all of the Western world absolutely refuse to accept that genocide is occurring in Gaza.
This is in contrast with a relatively significant number of the actual citizens of these countries who, like a majority of those in the Global South, do think that the actions of Israel contravene the genocide convention. Lamentably, Western media are also complicit in parroting the denial of their corporate and political masters.
The Genocide Convention, which was adopted in 1948 as a direct response to the Holocaust of WW2, is quite explicit about the acts which constitute genocide:
… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Ironically, Israel, many of whose citizens were the victims of the Holocaust, is undeniably systematically carrying out at least three of these actions. The proof is unquestionable, and it has been recorded live and broadcast daily for the last fourteen months on every type of screen imaginable. It’s, therefore, quite inexplicable that so many people deny it is happening.
Worse, these acts are being carried out with egregious impunity and depravity simply because the US and other colonialist Western nations (with the support of their media) have been providing the political, military and financial cover necessary for its sustenance.
Last week, The Oxford Union Society debated the motion This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide. The Oxford Union has a time-honoured history and reputation for debate since 1823. Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian writer, human rights activist, and animal rights advocate, led the motion. Below is an impassioned excerpt from her speech, which detailed the many atrocities contravening the Genocide Convention.
It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.
Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decades stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came to watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;
If Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;
If Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year-old die of heart attacks;
If we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
If Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving Jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;
If a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
If Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan al Bursh and others;
If Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…
If the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
Susan echoed the sentiment of another speaker for the motion, Mohammed El-Kurd. Mohammed, who is a Palestinian activist, writer and poet, questioned why it was necessary to debate1 whether genocide was occurring. The following is an excerpt from his speech:
… personally I don’t think there is any room for debate in the presence of burning flesh. I don’t think there is any room for side conversations while people are being literally burnt alive and incinerated and the mere notion that we can sit here and ponder and pontificate about a real real live streamed genocide happening in real time is so arrogant; it’s so insensitive; it’s so cruel and it’s it’s absurd.
The question is what more do we all need to see to be convinced that this is a genocidal regime waging a genocidal War? Have we not seen enough fathers carrying their children’s limbs; their children’s remains; and shoe boxes and plastic bags? What more images of cruelity must we see to contend with the fact that not only is this a genocide committed by the Israeli regime but that this very Empire [British]2 is funding it and facilitating it and codling it?
Indeed! Is it not blatantly obvious already?
As expected, the speakers against the motion, which included a self-identified Arab-Israeli agitator, Yoseph Haddad, demonstrated their complete inability to defend the indefensible by resorting to bluster, hysterical shouting, and frequently interrupting the speakers for the motion. Their incompetence showed as the vote tally for the motion at the end of the debate was a staggering 278 votes for and 59 against.
If that’s not enough to convince you, just about a day ago, Amnesty International released a 296-page report which confirms that there is “…sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.” This concurs with the educated opinion of most academics, scholars, humanitarian organisations and legal experts worldwide, including Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Already, arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court for Israeli war criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for their role in the genocide. Finally, to top all the voices calling out the genocide, Jewish historian Amos Goldberg, who is a professor of Holocaust studies, also confirmed in a moving video that it’s a genocide.
The debate is conclusively over. All that’s left to do is for ordinary people around the world to pressure their governments into action to stop the genocide, especially those Western nations whose complicity is the only thing keeping it going.
Both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have sufficient evidence to prosecute the two war criminals already identified and a string of others who escaped early identification. I just hope that I see actual prosecutions and sentencing in my lifetime.
lenny unencumbered 