As I write 9,000 Palestinians, almost half of them children, have been killed in Israel’s relentless genocidal siege and bombardment of Gaza. Thousands more lie buried under the rubble of bombed residential buildings, hospitals and schools. One third of Gazan hospitals and 29 UN schools have so far been demolished and fifty percent of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed.
I argue that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Genocide is a term not to be used lightly but as a genocide scholar Israel’s actions in Gaza and historic actions against the Palestinian people fit both legal and criminological definitions of the crime. As the author of the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin wrote, genocide is not limited to spectacularised acts of mass killings but includes ‘a coordinated plan aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups’. Intention is thus an underlying requirement in establishing the crime of genocide. Genocide must also be understood as a process designed to erase a people ‘in whole or part’ based on their racial, ethnic or religious identity. Israel’s announcement and implementation of a “total siege” of Gaza, cutting off water, food, electricity and medical supplies, fits the Genocide Convention definition of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (Genocide Convention 1948, Article 2).
Intention may also be inferred from statements made by Israeli political and IDF leaders. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that ‘The emphasis is on damage, not accuracy’ when referring to Israeli aerial bombardments, while Netanyahu threatened to ‘flatten’ Gaza reducing it ‘to an island of ruins’. Knesset member, Arial Kallner, revealed ‘there is only one goal ‘Nakba [catastrophe], a Nakba that would dwarf the Nakba of 1948’. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “human animals”, and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog declared that ‘there are no innocent civilians in Gaza’. The ‘non-human’ epithet underpins and makes easier the mass extermination of the ‘other’ and is a hallmark of all genocides.
With the complicity of Western governments, Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants are trapped in an apocalypse. For 16 years Israel has imposed an illegal blockade on Gaza turning it into what the UN had described as an already “unliveable” zone. A total siege will ensure death for more of those who haven’t yet been murdered by its indiscriminate bombardments. When 1.1 million Gazans were given 24 hours by Israeli military forces to evacuate to the south, Israeli aircraft bombed their route.
Genocide is a process which begins with dehumanisation and ends with erasure. In between and often concurrent are occasions of litmus-testing violence, structural discrimination, forced isolation and ghettoization and systematic weakening. Empirically we know that genocide unfolds over years and frequently decades. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians did not begin with Hama’s murderous attack on October 7th 2023. It began many decades earlier. During the Nakba thousands of Palestinians were killed and 750,000 were driven from their homeland, forever denied a right of return by the Israeli state. Decades of dispossession, occupation, structural violence, forced eviction and apartheid discrimination have followed. What we are witnessing now is a second Nakba.
9 novembre 2023
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Penny Green è professoressa di Diritto e globalizzazione presso la Queen Mary University di Londra. Si occupa principalmente di crimini e violenze di Stato, disastri ‘naturali’, genocidio, espulsioni forzate di massa e forme di resistenza alle violenze di Stato.