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genocide convention
Israel Lobbies US Congress to Pressure South Africa to Drop ICJ Genocide Case
One human rights expert said Israel's effort to bully South Africa is born from "obviously fearing it will lose" its World Court trial.
Sep 09, 2024
Israeli officials are lobbying U.S. lawmakers to pressure South Africa into dropping its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, according to a report published Monday.
Axiossaid it obtained a classified Israeli Foreign Ministry cable sent Monday to the country's embassy in Washington, D.C. and all its U.S. consulates threatening consequences if South Africa proceeds with its case in The Hague—which is backed by dozens of nations and regional blocs, as well as countless legal and genocide experts.
"We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," the cable states.
As Axios reported:
The Israeli diplomats were instructed to ask members of Congress to issue public statements condemning South Africa's actions against Israel and threaten that it could lead tosuspending U.S. trade relations with South Africa. That's unlikely to happen because the U.S. wants to maintain its relationship with South Africa in order to counter the influence of Russia and China.
According to the report, Israeli officials are hoping that South Africa's new coalition government—the country's first to not be led by the leftist African National Congress since the beginning of post-apartheid majority rule—will eschew "boycotts and punishments" and prove more malleable.
This isn't the first time that Israel has been accused of trying to intimidate those who seek to hold it accountable for its obliteration of Gaza. Earlier this year, its government launched a pressure campaign urging world governments to condemn the ICJ trial.
South Africa filed its genocide case against Israel in December, alleging that statements and actions by Israeli government officials and armed forces "are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part" of the Palestinian population in violation of Article II of the Genocide Convention.
A final ICJ ruling is not expected for years. Israel says the case is "baseless" and has accused South Africa of "functioning as the legal arm of Hamas," which led the attacks in which more than 1,100 Israelis and others were killed—at least some by so-called "friendly fire"—last October 7. More than 240 other people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
Since October, Israeli forces have killed or maimed at least 145,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, while forcibly displacing almost all of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people. Israel's " complete siege" of Gaza has caused widespread starvation and disease. Eliminationist rhetoric by Israeli politicians, military officials, journalists, entertainers, and others started shortly after the Hamas-led attack of October 7 and continues to this day.
In January, the ICJ ordered Israel to "take all measures within its power" to uphold its obligations under Article II of the Genocide Convention. Israel's far-right government and military have been accused by human rights groups of ignoring the order.
As Israeli forces launched a major ground invasion of Rafah four months later, the ICJ issued another order for Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive" in the city, where around 1.5 million forcibly displaced and local Palestinian residents were sheltering. Instead of heeding the order, Israel ramped up its assault on Rafah.
At the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan is urging the tribunal to promptly act upon his May application for warrants to arrest Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders—at least one of whom, political chief Ismail Haniyeh, was subsequently assassinated by Israel.
Israeli and U.S. officials have threatened ICC members with retaliation if the tribunal issues arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. In June, 42 House Democrats joined Republican lawmakers in passing legislation to sanction ICC jurists in the event they authorize the Israeli leaders' arrest.
The U.S. is by far Israel's biggest benefactor, providing billions of dollars worth of weapons and invaluable diplomatic cover including United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolution vetoes.
Many experts say the U.S. is complicit in Israel's genocide. A group of Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, and rights groups is seeking to hold President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin criminally accountable for supporting Israel's Gaza slaughter at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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Amnesty Urges War Crimes Probe of 'Indiscriminate' Israeli Attacks on Gaza Camps
The human rights group said Israeli forces "failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives by using unguided munitions in an area full of civilians sheltering in tents."
Aug 26, 2024
In an investigation focusing on a pair of Israeli massacres of forcibly displaced Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International on Monday urged the International Criminal Court—whose chief prosecutor has already applied for warrants to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders—to open a war crimes probe of the attacks, which it said were likely "indiscriminate" and "disproportionate."
"On May 26, 2024, two Israeli airstrikes on the Kuwaiti Peace Camp, a makeshift camp for internally displaced people in Tal al-Sultan in west Rafah, killed at least 36 people—including six children—and injured more than 100," noted Amnesty, which early in the assault on Gaza found "damning evidence" of Israeli war crimes including indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The Tal al-Sultan attack, which hit an Israeli-designated "safe zone," ignited an inferno that burned people alive inside the tents in which they were sheltering. One survivor told Amnesty that "there were so many dead people all around us," many of them "in pieces and in pools of blood."
"The military could and should have taken all feasible precautions to avoid, or at least minimize, harm to civilians."
The Amnesty report states that the airstrikes, "which targeted two Hamas commanders staying amid displaced civilians, consisted of two U.S.-made GBU-39 guided bombs" and that "the use of these munitions, which project deadly fragments over a wide area, in a camp housing civilians in overcrowded temporary shelters likely constituted a disproportionate and indiscriminate attack, and should be investigated as a war crime."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Tal al-Sultan massacre a "tragic mistake."
"On May 28, in the second incident investigated, the Israeli military fired at least three tank shells at a location in the al-Mawasi area of Rafah, which was designated by the Israeli military as a 'humanitarian zone,'" Amnesty continued. "The strikes killed 23 civilians—including 12 children, seven women, and four men—and injured many more."
"Amnesty International's research found that the apparent targets of the attack were one Hamas and one Islamic Jihad fighter," the publication notes. "This strike, which failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives by using unguided munitions in an area full of civilians sheltering in tents, likely was indiscriminate and should be investigated as a war crime."
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said in a statement that "while these strikes may have targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders and fighters, once again displaced Palestinian civilians seeking shelter and safety have paid with their lives."
"The Israeli military would have been fully aware that the use of bombs that project deadly shrapnel across hundreds of meters and unguided tank shells would kill and injure a large number of civilians sheltering in overcrowded settings lacking protection," she added. "The military could and should have taken all feasible precautions to avoid, or at least minimize, harm to civilians."
Israel—whose 325-day bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza has left more than 144,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more suffering forced displacement, starvation, and disease—is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands.
In January, the ICJ ordered Israel to "take all measures within its power" to uphold its obligations under Article II of the Genocide Convention. Israel's far-right government and military have been accused by human rights groups of ignoring the order.
As Israeli forces launched a major ground invasion of Rafah four months later, the ICJ issued another order for Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive" in the city, where around 1.5 million forcibly displaced and local Palestinian residents were sheltering. Instead of heeding the order, Israel ramped up its assault on Rafah.
At the International Criminal Court, Prosecutor Karim Khan is urging the tribunal to promptly act upon his May application for warrants to arrest Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders—at least one of whom, political chief Ismail Haniyeh, was subsequently assassinated by Israel.
Guevara-Rosas on Monday reminded Israel of its legal responsibility to protect noncombatants.
"The avoidable deaths and injuries of civilians is a stark and tragic reminder that, under international humanitarian law, the presence of fighters in the targeted area does not absolve the Israeli military of its obligations to protect civilians," she said.
"All parties to the conflict must take all feasible precautions to protect civilians," Guevara-Rosas added. "This also includes the obligation of Hamas and other armed groups to avoid, to the extent feasible, locating military objectives and fighters in or near densely populated areas."
The new Amnesty report was published on the same day that Human Rights Watch called upon the ICC to investigate alleged and documented incidents of Israeli forces torturing imprisoned Palestinian medical workers, including at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, where guards are accused of war crimes including murder, rape, and torture.
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We Need to Take Trump's Threat to Deport Millions of Migrants Seriously
Racist, violent, and genocidal rhetoric inevitably drives the process of forced expulsion, and Trump churns out a daily chorus of murderous bile that must bring a smile to Julius Streicher's corpse.
Jun 27, 2024
We often trivialize former U.S. President Donald Trump's racism—we consider his bigotry in passing while ruminating at length on his legal woes and alleged cognitive deterioration. Social media pundit David Pakman has been showing clips of Trump slurring his words or rambling chaotically on a daily basis—as if the primary threat posed by another MAGA presidency would be to allow an incompetent, confused, and mentally ill bungler to have another go at the Oval Office. One hears the word "unfit" tossed in Trump's direction with monotonous regularity, but unfitness may be the least of our worries.
Trump's drooling tirades should not be seen as a reflection of creeping Alzheimer's dementia—there is an inevitable and intentional structure to his meandering tale about sharks, the virtues of autocrats and gangsters, and the somnolent and absurd boasting of personal omnipotence. No matter how silly, pointless, or psychologically damaged Trump's soliloquy may appear to be, his rambling narrative returns to an epic promise: Trump vows to deport some 11 million so-called illegals from U.S. soil.
The obsession with mass expulsion has emerged at various times in history—in Rwanda, in pre-World War II Nazi Germany, in Turkish Armenia, in Palestine, in 19th-century America, in Bosnia, in Somalia—one could go on and on. Fourteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II—the death count from that forced transfer of people has been estimated along a range from half a million to two-and-a-half million.
If one is nominally familiar with the history of genocide, Trump's memes and obsessions become ominously familiar.
There is an enormous and bloody climax forthcoming once mass expulsion leaps from being an act of political theater in the mouth of some ambitious autocrat, to becoming actual state policy. Once a nation assembles the bureaucratic and military force needed to move masses of people from their homes and communities—children and families—the act of genocide looms as a likely conclusion. Whether it is the mass extermination of Tutsis, Native Americans, Jews, Croatians, Armenians, Palestinians, or Yazidis, we should be exquisitely aware that genocide often follows on the heals of forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious "others."
There has been an ongoing international debate since the year that Trump was born (1946) as to whether or not mass expulsion should be added to the five defining features of genocide that comprise Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention.
We all should know the basic history. in October of 1938 the Nazi government arrested and moved 17,000 Polish Jews, residing in Germany, across the Polish border. The Polish government did not welcome these refugees, and they languished in terrible conditions without adequate food or medical care. As an act of revenge, Herschel Grynszpan—whose family had been deported to Poland—assassinated Nazi official Ernst vom Rath in Paris. This led directly to Nazi anti-Jewish retaliation—Joseph Goebbels' speech on November 9 of 1938 initiated massive state orchestrated violence against Jews (Kristallnacht) and the subsequent arrest of 30,000 Jewish men to be incarcerated in the burgeoning Nazi concentration camp system.
The Armenian genocide featured the deportation of prominent Armenian intellectuals at the behest of the Ottoman regime. This act, ordered and carried out in April of 1915, delineated a new policy of clear genocidal intent.
In recent decades, the Indigenous people of Bangladesh have been systematically removed from tribal lands and subjected to murder, beatings, and sexual assaults. The escalating genocide of the "Adibashis" follows a familiar pattern. Mass expulsion makes territory available to colonial settlers.
The Nakba of 1948 drove some 750,000 Palestinians from their homelands under the assault of Israeli military forces. Like the Bangladesh intrusion into Indigenous lands, the Israeli policy targeted long-term inhabitants to make room for growing settlement. This mass expulsion now, 76 years later, plays out in the current genocide perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime with U.S. military aid lavishly provided by the Biden administration. Many of the Palestinians expelled from what is now Israeli territory wound up in Gaza, and their descendants now lie under the rubble created by U.S. bombs.
Racist, violent, and genocidal rhetoric inevitably drives the process of forced expulsion, and Trump churns out a daily chorus of murderous bile that must bring a smile to Julius Streicher's corpse. He refers to refugees at the southern border as vermin, animals, monsters, invaders, murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. He tells us that unsupervised American kids will be brutalized by marauding hordes from "countries we've never even heard of." Latin countries, Trump gleefully informs his followers, systematically empty their prisons and transport all of their psychopaths to the southern border. Do we take Trump's assertions to be easily debunked bromides—unhinged nonsense—or do we regard Trump's verbal routines as genocidal preparation?
Article II of the U.N. Genocide Convention defines genocide as:
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.
A peer reviewed paper published in The University of Dundee (UK) Student Law Review concluded:
The discussion of the highly contentious and heavily debated topic of the inclusion of forced expulsion in Article II of the Convention is ongoing, and is likely to continue for many years to come. Decisions of international courts and tribunals have established the position of the law today—forced expulsion is only included as a contributory factor in a system of conduct directed against a particular group, or as an indicator of genocidal intent. However, it is likely that the law will progress, much like it has already progressed with regards to other acts, so that forced expulsion in itself will one day be established within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention.
It is unfortunate that forced expulsion is not yet included in Article II of the Genocide Convention. If one is nominally familiar with the history of genocide, Trump's memes and obsessions become ominously familiar. This story has been written and rewritten. We all know how the plot unfolds and how it ends.
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