By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The UN Security Council has finally passed a ceasefire resolution for Gaza, from which the US abstained, so it was passed by the other 14 members. Although UNSC resolutions are binding, and countries like Iraq and Iran have been severely punished for disobeying them, the US is running interference for the Netanyahu government by insisting that the resolution is “non-binding.”
Israel’s government was so furious at Joe Biden for abstaining rather than vetoing the resolution that it has canceled a planned trip to Washington. But this intransigence in the face of international law and international institutions could end up hurting Israel severely. Since the state is already under scrutiny for committing genocide by the International Court of Justice, its truculence and defiance of the UNSC can only harm its case.
In a further blow to Israeli policy, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 of the UN Human Rights Council, issued a report Monday entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.
Albanese, an attorney with degrees from Pisa and SOAS in London, has worked for a decade with the UN on human rights law. She is also at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University as an Affiliate Scholar.
Her report begins, “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza.” She points out that the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, included over 13,000 children, and has wounded 71,000. She says that not only has 80% of the population been made refugees but 70% of the areas where people lived have been destroyed. So they have no place to return to. Corpses have decayed “in homes, in the street or under the rubble.”
The report concludes that Israel’s policies in Gaza give “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
The Special Rapporteur finds that Israeli authorities are misusing and distorting the international law governing the prosecution of war (jus in bello), disregarding their function in protecting innocent civilian noncombatants, “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In other words, Israeli officials’ invocation of international humanitarian law is nothing more than a “camouflage.”
The Special Rapporteur argues that genocidal projects are inherent in settler-colonial states. She cites the mass killings of the Native Americans in the US, the First Nations in Australia, and the Herrero in Namibia. Since the settler-colonial state covets the land and the resources of the native people, it has a motive for provoking the disintegration of the native people’s social institutions and very identity.
The report alleges, “Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be ‘re-colonized’ and its population as invaders to be expelled. These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the ‘exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people’ on the land of ‘Greater Israel’, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.”
One of the problems for the Israeli government’s attempts to defend itself against charges of genocide is how openly and volubly Netanyahu and his cronies have proclaimed their intentions and the racist bases for them.
Turning to the charges of genocide, the report notes that in just the first few months of the current Israeli campaign against Gaza, the Israeli army deployed
a) over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on countless buildings
b) that these targets were chosen using Artificial Intelligence
c) that the Israeli military dropped 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs in “densely populated areas” and even on the “safe zones” declared by that very Israeli military.
d) The Israelis killed an average of 250 people a day in this period, including 100 children a day, destroying entire neighborhoods and necessary infrastructure.
Albanese points out that by early December, the Israeli government was alleging that it had killed “7,000 terrorists” in Gaza. But at that point only 5,000 adult males had been killed, so it is clear that the Israeli authorities considered all of them terrorists.
In a compelling bit of reasoning, she points out that “This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.” That is, the Israeli government’s triumphalist statistics are themselves genocidal.
She estimates moreover, that 10 children are dying of acute malnutrition daily that that over 500,000 Palestinians could die from malnutrition and poor health conditions in 2024.
So that’s the first element of genocide, “Killing members of the group.”
The report then goes down the other criteria for genocide. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group?” Check. This includes depriving them of needed medicines and inflicting psychological harm.
Then there is “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Check.
Here she mentions the destruction of 77% of healthcare facilities, 68% of telcoms, almost 50% of roads, and 60% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, all the universities, 60% of schools, etc.
What about “Genocidal intent”? Check.
The Israeli officials have made this one a no-brainer. Albanese writes,
50. In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced.150 High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows: (a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there…is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”;151 (b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek”152 and “monsters”.153 The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.154 (c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”,155 and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints…”
Finally, the Israeli military has subverted basic principles of international humanitarian law, which makes a key distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In essence, Israel’s government has treated all Palestinians in Gaza as combatants. Moreover, the Israeli military has declared all civilian institutions to be Hamas “power centers,” obliterating the distinction between hospitals and military garrisons. While such “objects” can be legitimate targets if they are used by the enemy for military purposes, they are only targets while they are so being used. Israel’s army is treating them as legitimate targets if they ever were or potentially might be used by Hamas. It is thus ignoring the distinction between military and civilian objects.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Juan Cole
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).