Genocide is not a grotesque game by numbers; it is the worst of crimes
There is a tsunami of blood red ink gushing forth from the incredulous pens of angry far-right defenders of the Zionist State of Israel who are reeling from the shock of the unprecedented legal action taken against Israel’s leaders by the International Criminal Court: arrest warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Defence Minister he sacked earlier this month, Yoav Gallant.
Such a response was as predictable as Netanyahu’s claim of “anti-Semitism” — as was the flow of whataboutery — as each tried to outdo the other in their efforts to justify Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. One desperate defender of all things Israeli has even plumbed the depths of depravity by calling out nations with “higher kill counts”.
Admittedly, when it comes to genocide whataboutery, there is one country in a league of its own: the United States of America. In recent centuries, European settlers have wiped out indigenous populations without so much as a by your leave. But this is a poor excuse for letting Israel act with impunity.
We must not forget that among the disappearing nations are the once proud Native Americans of North and South America, and Australia’s Aborigines, wiped out in their millions by Europe’s greed for land and resources. It’s a fact that whenever there is a genocide, European imperialists and colonial settlers are rarely far away, and the same is true in occupied Palestine. The numbers involved in such genocides far outweigh the industrial scale massacre of Palestinians since the Nakba. However, do the supporters of the Zionist state really expect us to sit idly by, and say and do nothing until Israel has killed enough Palestinians to join the major league of genocidal maniacs?
This is not a game of numbers.
Moreover, do the Zionist genocide apologists seriously expect the Palestinians to be sitting ducks instead of fighting for their very existence in the face of a brutal military occupation of their land? Resistance against occupation is their right under international law.
The number slaughtered in the Holocaust was six million, mostly Jews. Mercifully, the Nazi extermination programme was halted, thank God, because European, US and Soviet forces came together to stop the fascists in their tracks. What would those brave men and women think of today’s crop of right-wing extremists pulling the strings in Europe and the US to defend the neo-fascist Zionist state, I wonder?
Lest the current crop of right-wing extremists forget, the International Court of Justice was formed post-World War II as a direct result of the Nazi war crimes and genocide committed in Europe against Jews and other minority groups. The ICC followed in 2002 to hold individuals, rather than states, to account.
The UN Charter was signed on 26 June, 1945, and the organisation came into existence a few months later on 24 October. It was established to protect millions of ordinary citizens and work to prevent future world wars. The initial membership has expanded from 51 nations in 1945 to 193 today. The UN has been hanging precariously since 7 October 2023, with its own employees targeted by Israel. At least 233 staff members of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) have been killed by Israel since 7 October last year. The agency has now been banned from working in the occupation state, which refuses to recognise the UN passports of its staff, and many UNRWA buildings and schools have been destroyed by Israeli bombs.
That a global force for good can be so publicly trashed and derided by Zionistsspeaks volumes about where “Western civilisation” stands today. For more than 400 days the world has watched, torn between shock and revulsion at what Israel has done to the Palestinians in the name of self-defence. The Gaza genocide has been (and still is) filled with truly shocking murders, prison rapes, torture and starvation as the Zionist State’s inhumanity has been broadcast in real time on social media.
Who can forget little Hind Rajab, the six-year-old who went missing in Gaza City in January?
Her fragile body was found in the family car alongside her aunt, uncle and three young cousins, as well as two paramedics who had tried to save her; all had been killed by the crew of an Israeli tank just metres away. Listen to the heartbreaking audio recordings of the call made by Hind to Gaza’s emergency services letting them know that she was the only one left alive in the car, hiding from Israeli forces among the bodies of her relatives. Israeli soldiers in a tank killed her mercilessly; a six-year-old child.
Two months later, we heard the testimony of Hadeel Al-Dahdouh, a 24-yeaar-old mother of two, who was beaten, tortured and buried alive by Israeli occupation forces.
Then just when we thought we could not be shocked any more, in July we heard that 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, who had Down’s Syndrome, was found dead by his family a week after Israeli soldiers set a military attack dog on him in his home. He was savaged and left to die.
Throughout the past 400+ days we’ve been exposed to the crimes of Israeli soldierswhich they felt empowered enough to film and share on Facebook and Instagram. The perverts dressed in the underwear and night clothes of their Palestinian female victims, laughing and joking for all to see, will, please God, come to regret their crimes. Others filmed themselves looting and pillaging the homes of their victims. All of these well-documented war crimes will, if there is any justice at all in this world, come back to haunt these soldiers, some of whom live in Europe and have been identified.
War crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed with apparent impunity, ordered and enabled from the very top of the occupation regime, hence the arrest warrants, a clear signal from the ICC that it doesn’t trust Israel’s corrupt legal system to be robust enough to bring the criminals to account. When it comes to genocide, “never again” must mean just that. Convictions at all levels of the Israeli hierarchy at The Hague will be a tribute to every single person around the world who has marched for justice for Palestine; for all the university students who set up peace camps; and for activists such as those working with Palestine Action who risked their own liberty to try to stop the war.
World leaders will ignore such movements at their peril in future. It might have taken a while for the Global North to wake up to what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established on 10 December 1948 really means, but Israel — if it survives in its present form — will learn a lesson that no nation, state or people, is above the law, and nor are the so-called superpowers.
Might should never be right in a civilised world; justice has to be for everyone, including the Global South.
This means that the law cannot be applied according to some sort of grotesque numbers game. The Srebrenica Genocide in July 1995 saw Serb forces slaughter8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys. While it is impossible to try to quantify 80 years of pain and suffering endured by the Palestinian people, there is no doubt that the number of civilians killed by Israel in Gaza is more than ten times that of the Bosnian genocide, with tens of thousands more wounded and missing, presumed dead. And yet, media commentators and talking heads such as Piers Morgan still cannot acknowledge that a genocide is taking place before our eyes in Gaza. He and those like him think that they know better than UN experts, lawyers and genocide scholars.
This is something he will have to live with as long as writers like myself are able to remind him. It would serve Morgan and his ilk well to remember how former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came to her senses when being interviewed by Democracy Now! presenter Amy Goodman about her atrocious comment that the “price was worth it” when 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of US sanctions.
The late Albright told Goodman in 2004: “I have said 5,000 times that I regret it. It was a stupid statement. I never should have made it. And if everybody else that has ever made a statement they regret would stand up, there would be a lot of people standing. I have many, many times said it, and I wish that people would report that I have said it. I wrote it in my book that it was a stupid statement.” Over to you, Piers.
Britain’s Guardian published an editorial this week pointing out that international law should not only apply to weaker nations. “The crimes at the centre of these [ICC arrest] warrants are among the gravest violations of international humanitarian law, including starvation as a weapon of war and deliberate attacks on civilians. When such acts are systematic and state-driven, they demand accountability. The ICC’s pursuit of justice tests the international community’s resolve to uphold these norms in the face of political resistance.”
The ICC arrest warrants are a victory for people power and the growing anti-war movement, but it is also a huge victory for the heroic Palestinians who have struggled so bravely to expose the crimes committed against them to a watching world which has been almost totally blind to Zionist cruelty. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the Palestinians we would never have known exactly how evil the Zionist State of Israel and its supporters really are.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.