Sounds like I need I reread it and consider that context. Thanks for raising - it’s always good to keep educating myself
Excerpts from Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov’s essay in the New York Times today explaining why it’s a genocide happening in Gaza:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide…
In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel’s case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 – and has since become ever clearer – as the IDF has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip…
The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the IDF has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army.
Today the IDF is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing…
Following Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the IDF has been executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip’s southwestern edge.
Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three-quarters of the territory.
This is also being facilitated by a plan that provides – intermittently – limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south…
On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the IDF would build a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave.
Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide.
This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder.
To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust, and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it, has issued a warning that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.
The full article here: archive.ph/0dpn2
I hope that this message will be conveyed towards all people in power, especially in the West. They need to open their freaking eyes.
This is literally poking them in the eye with it! If this won’t do it, nothing will.
Yea, I while I think there is really only 1 clause of the strict definition itself that is controversial (Jews have the right to self determination) it is the disconnect between what they say the definition is and the situations that meet the definition of it that is brain breaking.
If that isn’t genocide, then I don’t know what is.
They set up this bullshit food distribution bollocks outside UN auspices to straight up murder Palestinians at will, didn’t they
Notice the language “killed by Israeli gunfire”…as if the bullets somehow danced out of their guns and, via the bullets’ own free will, embedded themselves in the Palestinians.
They were shot and murdered by the IDF
i understand when language is used to frame a narative different that what its saying, but i dont think thats the case here
killed by isreali gunfire means directly that, even the most absurdly stupid person wouldnt fail to realise what the statement means
Can’t really argue with that. It’s a gold-mine for the likes of Putin. Accepting and encouraging the genocide effectively means that everyone, including the western countries, accepts that the only law on international level is the law of the strongest.
The time of the so-called ‘international community’, as hypocritical as it may have been at times, is effectively over. We’ll all suffer from that down the line, but the first on the line are obviously the people from Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and all other countries around Israel.
Israel currently launching a full-scale ground assault on central Gaza. From the bbc live-feed:
This is the IDF’s first incursion into Deir al-Balah
published at 12:08
Yolande Knell
Middle East correspondent, in Jerusalem
Deir al-Balah is one of the few parts of Gaza where Israel has not conducted a major ground operation in 21-months of war against Hamas.
Because of that, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have remained crammed in the city, alongside locals.
There are more buildings still standing than in other parts of the strip and there have been functioning medical points, drinking water from the desalination plant and waste disposal systems.
The UN and other humanitarian agencies relocated key parts of their operations to Deir al-Balah from Rafah after Israeli forces entered the very south of the Gaza Strip over a year ago.
One of the reasons why Israeli sources say there was not previously an army incursion of Deir al-Balah was because of concerns about the presence of Israeli hostages held there by Hamas.
It is not clear what might have changed the military’s thinking.
I think that has been the case for nearly a decade. Netanyahu is just arguably one of the first to understand that and take advantage - granted, previous Israeli leaders have been quite willing to act against any expression of international concern, but this regime seems to represent something new and significantly more aggressive.
It’s the Homelander meme. We can talk about the domestic issues in Israel that shifted Netenhayu’s coalition right, but once those people got into government and shifted the rhetoric without any change in attitude from the international community they realized how much leeway they had.
‘My children cry from hunger all night’
11:09
Rushdi Abualouf
Gaza correspondent, reporting from Istanbul
Local residents are describing what they say is the worst famine in Gaza’s history, with most markets closed due to the acute shortage of food.
“My children cry from hunger all night,” Mohammad Emad al-Din, a father of two who works as a barber in Gaza, tells the BBC.
“They’ve had only a small plate of lentils over the past three days. There’s no bread. A kilo of flour was $80 (£59) a week ago. I had to stop working after my salon’s solar panels were damaged in an air strike.”
Residents blame the worsening situation on Israeli restrictions, saying not enough food supplies are being allowed into the territory, deepening the humanitarian crisis.
Figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef show alarming levels of child malnutrition.
In May alone, over 5,000 children under the age of five were treated for acute malnutrition in Gaza, including more than 600 with severe acute malnutrition a life-threatening condition.
The World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week that Gaza is facing famine-like conditions across the entire territory, citing critical access restrictions, food shortages, and market collapse.
‘Suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths’: 26 nations call for immediate end to war in Gaza
15:25 Breaking
We’ve just had a statement from the UK and more than 20 other countries calling for an immediate end to the war in Gaza.
Here’s the statement from the UK Foreign Office in full:
We, the signatories listed below, come together with a simple, urgent message: the war in Gaza must end now. The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.
The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.
We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food. It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.
The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law. The hostages cruelly held captive by Hamas since 7 October 2023 continue to suffer terribly. We condemn their continued detention and call for their immediate and unconditional release.
A negotiated ceasefire offers the best hope of bringing them home and ending the agony of their families. We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs [non-governmental organisations] to do their life-saving work safely and effectively. We call on all parties to protect civilians and uphold the obligations of international humanitarian law.
Proposals to remove the Palestinian population into a “humanitarian city” are completely unacceptable. Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law. We strongly oppose any steps towards territorial or demographic change in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The E1 settlement plan announced by Israel’s civil administration, if implemented, would divide a Palestinian state in two, marking a flagrant breach of international law and critically undermine the two-state solution.
Meanwhile, settlement building across the West Bank including east Jerusalem has accelerated while settler violence against Palestinians has soared. This must stop. We urge the parties and the international community to unite in a common effort to bring this terrible conflict to an end, through an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire.
Further bloodshed serves no purpose. We reaffirm our complete support to the efforts of the US, Qatar and Egypt to achieve this. We are prepared to take further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political pathway to security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region.
This statement has been signed by: The foreign ministers of Australia , Austria , Belgium , Canada , Denmark , Estonia , Finland , France , Iceland , Ireland , Italy , Japan , Latvia , Lithuania , Luxembourg , the Netherlands , New Zealand , Norway , Poland , Portugal , Slovenia , Spain , Sweden , Switzerland and the UK . Plus the EU commissioner for equality, preparedness and crisis management.
It’s good that a few countries come together and condemn what is going on. But it isn’t enough. Maximal pressure must be put down on Israel, and imo, it means stopping to do any kind of business with them until they return to some form of common sense, if that is possible. Netanyahou lives by the rule of surviival of the strongest.