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Pope Francis Urges Genocide Probe of Israel's War on Gaza
The pontiff's call comes as the International Court of Justice is reviewing evidence in a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel.
Nov 17, 2024
In a new book set to be released this week, Pope Francis I endorsed a genocide investigation into Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed or maimed more than 150,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened millions more over the past 13 months.
"In the Middle East, where the open doors of nations like Jordan or Lebanon continue to be a salvation for millions of people fleeing conflicts in the region: I am thinking above all of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory," the pontiff wrote in his latest book, which goes on sale in some countries on November 19.
"According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide," the Pope added. "It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies."
The Pope's words echo last week's finding by a United Nations expert panel that Israel's annihilation of Gaza is "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."
The International Court of Justice—a U.N. organ—is currently weighing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs as well as hundreds of groups and experts around the world.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three former Hamas leaders assassinated by Israel, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination.
Many jurists, scholars, and other experts—including some of Israel's leading Holocaust historians—have called Israel's policies and actions in Gaza genocide. Early in the war, Raz Segal—an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey—called Israel's Gaza onslaught "a textbook case of genocide."
Numerous world leaders and other international officials, artists, entertainers, and others—including half of Democratic voters in the United States surveyed in May—also agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Many Palestinian Christians have been killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by Israeli forces during the bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza. With just 800 to 1,000 people believed remaining in Gaza, members of the world's oldest Christian community warned early in the war that they were "under threat of extinction."
In their most infamous attack on Gaza Christians, Israeli forces bombed the 12th century Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, Gaza's oldest, in October 2023, killing 18 Palestinians including numerous children. Among the victims were two women and an infant related to former Republican U.S. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan.
After an Israeli sniper fatally shot an elderly woman and her daughter on the grounds of a Catholic church in Gaza City last December, Pope Francis condemned what he called an act of "terrorism."
Amid the death and destruction wrought by Israel's assault on Gaza, last December's Christmas celebrations were canceled in Bethlehem, the purported birthplace of Jesus Christ.
"How can we celebrate when we feel this war—this genocide—that is taking place could resume at any moment?" asked Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac at the time.
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By Rescinding Its Offer to Raz Segal, the University of Minnesota Has Scaled Mt. Irony
To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views.
Jun 25, 2024
The resurrection of McCarthyism in the U.S. has returned in full force since October 7. Careers have been truncated, protests have been muffled, and employment opportunities curtailed.
MSNBC canceled “The Mehdi Hasan Show” in November. In June, Briahna Joy Gray was canned by The Hill, where she co-hosted the Rising web series. Almost 30% of students who demonstrated against the Israeli genocide and famine as a weapon of war had their jobs rescinded. University presidents have responded to pro-Palestinian encampments on campuses in true anti-First Amendment fashion (and hence anti-American) by calling in the police to clear them. While the police have used heavy-handed tactics against pro-Palestinian activists, when the same protesters were attacked by a pro-Israeli mob, the police stood idly by.
While these are just some instances of McCarthyism related to Palestinian rights not seen since the 1950s Red Scare, this month has shown us layer upon layer of irony, yielding Mt. Irony.
As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right.
The University of Minnesota rescinded its offer to Israeli historian and leading genocide scholar Dr. Raz Segal to become director of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Dr. Segal had been prescient in describing Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” during the first week of the conflict, when Israel had already killed almost 1,900 and displaced more than 400,000 Palestinians.
The canceling of Dr. Segal’s directorship was fueled by two CHGS board members resigning in protest of his hiring and pressure from a local Jewish advocacy group. Interestingly, the advocacy group did not just have a problem with Segal’s genocide article. The group also voiced concern over Dr. Segal describing Israel as a “settler-colonial” state and his alleged dismissing of campus antisemitism. If the latter claim is true, it was likely dismissed by Dr. Segal as he surely understands that almost all the “antisemitism” on campus related to pro-Palestinian protests is not antisemitism at all. It is just discomfort with students decrying Israel’s genocide, constructed famine, and apartheid.
Here’s where the layers of irony come in.
One layer is that an Israeli scholar was barred from a university position by those who are pro-Israeli, in an extreme, fundamentalist sense. To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views. They sacrificed one person’s career for the greater good of genocide and starvation.
The ironies mount.
Second layer: Dr. Segal had the foresight and, frankly, courage to call out Israel on October 13, 2023, for perpetrating “another chapter in the Nakba,” in which a genocide was unfolding. In his article for Jewish Currents, Dr. Segal noted his status as a scholar of genocide. For his experience and expertise, he was selected to become the director of University of Minnesota’s CHGS—to guide the center’s role in studying genocide and the Holocaust. For utilizing his knowledge in calling out the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he was prevented from leading an organization that focuses on genocide. The university would apparently prefer to hire someone who cherry picks which genocides to actually consider genocide. If I were to guess, these would be genocides that the U.S. did not perpetrate (such as those committed against Native Americans or the Vietnamese) or act as an accomplice to (such as Bangladesh in 1971).
The last layer of Mt. Irony is the revival of full-fledged McCarthyism in the U of M’s trampling on the First Amendment. Because Dr. Segal exercised First Amendment rights within an American magazine, he was prevented from assuming CHGS directorship. Universities are supposed to be bastions of open discussion and debate, yet University of Minnesota and innumerable other U.S. higher learning institutions have embraced the antithesis.
Mt. Irony is deeply interwoven with troubling contradictions in the American public sphere. As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right. If one speaks up against injustice, one’s career should not be curtailed. At least, so says the First Amendment.
The Clash’s “Know Your Rights” lyrics ring true, now more than ever:
You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not
Dumb enough to try it
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Former ICC Prosecutor Says Both Israel and Hamas Guilty of Genocide
"Each bombing, each of the killings, should be properly investigated," said Luis Moreno Ocampo, "but... the siege itself is already genocide."
Dec 01, 2023
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the International Criminal Court's first chief prosecutor, said Friday that both Hamas and Israel perpetrated genocide—the Palestinian resistance group by murdering around 1,200 Israelis on October 7, and the Israeli government by besieging Gaza.
Appearing on Al Jazeera's "UpFront," Moreno Ocampo said that "you have Hamas committing war crimes... crimes against humanity, the crime committed in Israel on October 7... and probably genocide, because Hamas has [the] intention to destroy Israelis as a group."
"Then, Israel's reaction also includes many crimes," he continued. "It's complicated to define the war crimes, because each bombing has to be evaluated. But there is something very clear: The siege of Gaza itself... is a form of genocide."
"Article 2C of the Genocide Convention defines that you don't need to kill people to commit genocide," the Argentinian jurist added. "The rules say inflicting conditions to destroy the group, that itself is a genocide. So creating the siege itself is a genocide, and that is very clear."
"Many officers of the Israeli government are also
expressing genocidal intentions," Moreno Ocampo noted. "That's why it's easy to say and there's reasonable basis to believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, just the siege. Each bombing, each of the killings, should be properly investigated but... the siege itself is already genocide."
Under Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly—genocide is defined as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group":
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Raz Segal, a leading Israeli Holocaust scholar,
argues that his country is perpetrating "a textbook case of genocide" in Gaza.
More than 800 international lawyers, jurists, and genocide scholars in October published an open letter stating that "we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
The letter notes that "preexisting conditions in the Gaza Strip had already prompted discussions of genocide prior to the current escalation," notably by the National Lawyers Guild, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).
CCR attorneys warned U.S. President Joe Biden in October that his "unwavering" support for Israel, including pushing for an additional $14.3 billion in American military aid for the country atop the nearly $4 billion it already gets each year—could make him complicit in genocide.
As for the problem of prosecuting Israeli genocide perpetrators when the country is not signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Moreno Ocampo noted during the interview that "the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem."
"Any crime committed in those places, by any person, could be mitigated by the International Criminal Court," he added.
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'We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,' Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker
Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.
Nov 18, 2023
Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is "too humane."
"All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing," Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, wrote Friday after the country's war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. "We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!"
"Don't allow fuel in, don't allow water in until the hostages are returned back!" Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi's words could fuel "anti-Israel propaganda," the lawmaker shot back: "Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane."
The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi's tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just "one old man" alive in Gaza so he could "tell everyone" what happened there.
Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that "a child is a child," whether Israeli or Palestinian.
Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel's 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.
Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.
Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to "eliminate everything" there.
Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu's Likud Party, said that "Gaza should be wiped off the map."
Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a "Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of '48," a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.
Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a "doomsday kiss"—that is, use of Israel's undeclared nuclear weapons. "Not flattening a neighborhood," she clarified, but "crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!"
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said "we are now rolling out the Great Nakba," was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.
Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel's imminent ground invasion of Gaza a "holy mission" and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his "chosen people" to exterminate, in what critics called "an explicit call to genocide."
Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal told Democracy Now! in an interview last month that "if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don't know what is."
"We're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent," he added. "This is indeed a textbook case of genocide."
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800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating 'Crime of Genocide' in Gaza
"The ongoing and imminent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are being conducted with potentially genocidal intent."
Oct 18, 2023
More than 800 scholars of international law and genocide have signed a public statement arguing that the Israeli military may be committing genocidal acts against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as the total siege and relentless airstrikes continue to inflict devastation on the occupied territory.
"As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," reads the statement. "We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it."
The scholars noted that Israel's yearslong blockade on Gaza—which has left much of the territory's population impoverished and without access to basic necessities—had previously been described as "slow-motion genocide" and cited a United Nations warning about Israelis' use of dehumanizing language, which is often a prelude to mass atrocities.
But the new statement contends that Israel's current assault on Gaza, launched in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack on October 7, is "unprecedented in scale and severity."
"The Gaza Strip has been subjected to incessant and indiscriminate bombardment by Israeli forces," the scholars wrote. "Israel's defense minister ordered a 'complete siege' of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault."
The scholars also pointed to Israel's evacuation order aimed at the entire population of northern Gaza—roughly 1.1 million people—and subsequent Israeli attacks on civilian convoys fleeing to the south.
"Statements of Israeli officials since 7 October 2023 suggest that beyond the killings and restriction of basic conditions for life perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza, there are also indications that the ongoing and imminent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are being conducted with potentially genocidal intent," the scholars wrote.
They continued:
Language used by Israeli political and military figures appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide. Dehumanising descriptions of Palestinians have been prevalent. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October that "we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly." He subsequently announced that Israel was moving to "a full-scale response" and that he had "removed every restriction" on Israeli forces, as well as stating: "Gaza won't return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything."
On 10 October, the head of the Israeli army's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: "Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell." The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza: "The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy."
Under international law, a party is guilty of genocide if it kills or severely harms members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group with the "intent to destroy" that group.
Raz Segal—an Israeli historian, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, and signatory of the new statement—argued in Jewish Currents last week that Israel's actions in Gaza since October 7 constitute "a textbook case of genocide."
"Indeed, Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed," Segal wrote. "Israel's goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so."
Segal and the 800 other statement signatories implored nations around the world to swiftly "take concrete and meaningful steps to individually and collectively prevent genocidal acts, in line with their legal duty to prevent the crime of genocide."
"We call on all relevant U.N. bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene, to carry out the necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide," they added.
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1,100+ People Sign 'Israelis Against Apartheid' Petition for Immediate Gaza Cease-Fire
"The Israeli government is using the tremendous loss of Israeli civilian lives to implement a genocidal campaign on the men, women, and children of Gaza," the group said.
Oct 17, 2023
More than 1,100 people have signed an open letter by Israelis Against Apartheid urging the international community "to intervene immediately to stop the indiscriminate bombing of 2.3 million people living in the Gaza strip," the U.S-based group Jewish Voice for Peace said Tuesday.
"We, Israeli citizens, are watching with grave concern the ongoing massive Israeli military assault on the people of Gaza," states the letter, which is hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace. The signers noted that the besieged coastal enclave "has been bombed day and night by land, air, and sea since October 7."
That was the day Hamas-led militants launched a surprise infiltration attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Since then, Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza has killed over 3,500 Palestinians, including more than 1,000 children, while Israel has cut off food, fuel, and electricity to the densely populated strip—an apparent war crime.
"The horrors and atrocities starting October 7 are indescribable. Thousands of civilians—Israelis and Palestinians—are paying the price of apartheid."
"We fear that in the coming hours, Gaza's hospitals will turn into graveyards," continues the letter, which was written before an attack on the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of civilians on Tuesday. "With fuel reserves for electricity generators all used up, there will be no more power for operation rooms, vital monitors, ventilators, ICU drips, newborn incubators, or even lights. Communication networks are failing and people can no longer call for ambulances."
The letter also urges the international community to "prevent the imminent and disastrous ground military invasion into Gaza."
"In the face of an unprecedented huge-scale humanitarian disaster, the Israeli government should be pressured to desist immediately, before more lives are wasted on top of the thousands already lost," the signers asserted. "We call on the Israeli government to agree to a prisoner and hostage exchange immediately, and for a safe humanitarian corridor to be created for civilians and supplies, electricity, and fuel to the medical facilities."
"The horrors and atrocities starting October 7 are indescribable. Thousands of civilians—Israelis and Palestinians—are paying the price of apartheid," the letter concludes. "We are calling you to intervene immediately to stop the war crimes that are still happening."
Israelis Against Apartheid was formed in 2021 during Israel's last major assault on Gaza.
"As we watch now hundreds killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza hospital, we implore the international community to stop its cooperation and support for any further killing and displacement of civilians," the group said in a statement.
"The Israeli government is using the tremendous loss of Israeli civilian lives to implement a genocidal campaign on the men, women, and children of Gaza, ignoring calls of Israelis, including those who just lost their loved ones, to stop," the organization added.
The open letter follows Jewish-led protests across the U.S., with scores of demonstrators arrested in cities including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Another major Jewish-led protest is planned for Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
While many Israelis bristle at the assertion that their country is perpetrating apartheid, a growing number of prominent Israelis including former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp, and former ambassadors to South Africa Alon Liel and Ilan Baruch, endorse the description. So do more and more Israeli journalists, artists, veterans, and human rights groups, including Yesh Din and B'Tselem.
A growing number of Israelis are also accusing their country of genocide, pointing to Israel's indiscriminate killing of thousands of Palestinians, the order for 1.1 million Gazans to flee for their lives ahead of an expected ground invasion, and incendiary statements made by Israeli leaders.
For example, far-right Israeli parliamentarian Ariel Kallner last week called for a new Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine by militant Zionists establishing the modern state of Israel—while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week described Gazan civilians as "children of darkness" and Israeli President Isaac Herzog said there were no innocent civilians in Gaza.
"When we look at the actions taken, the dropping of thousands and thousands of bombs in a couple of days, including phosphorus bombs, as we heard, on one of the most densely populated areas around the world, together with these proclamations of intent, this indeed constitutes genocidal killing, which is the first act, according to the convention, of genocide," Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal told Democracy Now! on Monday, referring to provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
"And Israel, I must say, is also perpetrating act number two and three—that is, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and creating conditions designed to bring about the destruction of the group by cutting off water, food, supply of energy, bombing hospitals, ordering the fast evictions of hospitals, which the World Health Organization has declared to be, quote, 'a death sentence,'" he continued.
"So, we're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent," Segal added. "This is indeed a textbook case of genocide."
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