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The
White Racist Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians |
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by
Francis A. Boyle
Friday, 3 July 2009, 2:22 pm
Opinion: Prof. Francis A. Boyle
In direct reaction to Israel provoking the Al
Aqsa Intifada, on October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights
Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting "war crimes" and
"crimes against humanity" upon the Palestinian people, some of whom are
Christians, but most of whom are Muslims.16 This Special Session of the U.N.
Commission on Human Rights adopted the Resolution set forth in U.N. Document
E/CN.4/S-5/L.2/Rev. 1, "Condemning the provocative visit to Al-Haram Al-Shariff
on 28 September 2000 by Ariel Sharon, the Likud party leader, which triggered
the tragic events that followed in occupied East Jerusalem and the other
occupied Palestinian territories, resulting in a high number of deaths and
injuries among Palestinian civilians." The U.N. Human Rights Commission said it
was "[g]ravely concerned" about several different types of atrocities inflicted
by Israel upon the Palestinian people, which it denominated "war crimes,
flagrant violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against
humanity."
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In operative paragraph 1 of its 19 October
2000 Resolution, the U.N. Human Rights Commission then: "Strongly condemns the
disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force in violation of international
humanitarian law by the Israeli occupying Power against innocent and unarmed
Palestinian civilians…including many children, in the occupied territories,
which constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity;…" And in paragraph 5
of its 19 October 2000 Resolution, the U.N. Human Rights Commission: "Also
affirms that the deliberate and systematic killing of civilians and children by
the Israeli occupying authorities constitutes a flagrant and grave violation of
the right to life and also constitutes a crime against humanity;…" Article 68 of
the United Nations Charter had expressly required the U.N.’s Economic and Social
Council to "set up" this U.N. Commission (now Council) "for the promotion of
human rights." This is its U.N.-Charter-mandated job.
The reader has a general idea of what a war
crime is, so I am not going to elaborate upon that term here. But there are
different degrees of heinousness for war crimes. The more serious war crimes are
denominated "grave breaches" of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since the outbreak
of the first Intifada in 1987, the world has seen those heinous war crimes
routinely inflicted by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied
Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army
and by Israel’s illegal paramilitary settlers. These Israeli "grave breaches" of
the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the perpetrators
and their commanders, whether military or civilian, including and especially
Israel’s political leaders
Let us address Israel’s "crimes against
humanity" against the Palestinian people—as determined by the U.N. Human Rights
Commission itself, set up pursuant to the requirements of the United Nations
Charter. What are "crimes against humanity"? This concept goes all the way back
to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals
in Europe. In the Nuremberg Charter of 1945, drafted by the United States
Government, there was created and inserted a new type of international crime
specifically intended to deal with the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people:
Crimes against humanity: namely, murder,
extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed
against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on
political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any
crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of
the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
The paradigmatic example of "crimes against
humanity" is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people. This is where
the concept of "crimes against humanity" originally came from. And this is what
the U.N. Human Rights Commission determined that Israel is currently doing to
the Palestinian people: crimes against humanity. Expressed in legal terms, this
is just like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews. That is the significance
of the formal determination by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that Israel has
inflicted "crimes against humanity" upon the Palestinian people. The Commission
chose this well-known and long-standing legal term of art quite carefully and
deliberately based upon the evidence it had compiled.
Furthermore, the Nuremberg "crimes against
humanity" are the
historical and legal precursor to the
international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The
theory here was that what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people was so
horrific that it required a special international treaty that would codify and
universalize the Nuremberg concept of "crimes against humanity." And that treaty
ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Article II of the Genocide Convention defines
the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(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;
….
As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe
in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal
policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the
very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even
intensifying against the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza as this book
goes to press. As Pappe’s analysis established, Zionism’s "final solution" to
Israel’s much touted "demographic threat" allegedly posed by the very existence
of the Palestinians has always been genocide, whether slow-motion or in
blood-thirsty spurts of violence. Indeed, the very essence of Zionism requires
ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide against the Palestinians.17 In regard to
the latest 2008-2009 Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, U.N. General
Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former Foreign Minister of
Nicaragua during the Reagan administration’s criminal aggression against that
country, condemned it as "genocide."
Certainly, Israel and its
predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have
committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or
about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide
Convention Articles II(a), (b), and (c). For at least the past six decades, the
Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and
terrorist gangs—have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive
military, political, and economic campaign with the intent to destroy in
substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious (Jews
versus
Muslims and Christians) group constituting the
Palestinian people. This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing
members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article
II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental
harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article
II(b). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the
Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical
destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide
Convention.
Article I of the Genocide Convention requires
all contracting parties such as the United States "to prevent and to punish"
genocide. Yet to the contrary, historically the "Jewish" state’s criminal
conduct against the Palestinians has been financed, armed, equipped, supplied
and politically supported by the "Christian" United States. Although the United
States is a founding sponsor of, and a contracting party to, both the Nuremberg
Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United Nations Charter,
these legal facts have never made any difference to the United States when it
comes to its blank-check support for Israel and their joint and severable
criminal mistreatment of the Palestinians—truly the wretched of the earth!
The world has not yet heard even one word
uttered by the United States and its NATO allies in favor of "humanitarian
intervention" against Israel in order to protect the Palestinian people, let
alone a "responsibility to protect" the Palestinians from Zionist/Israeli
genocide. The United States, its NATO allies, and the Great Powers on the U.N.
Security Council would not even dispatch a U.N. Charter Chapter 6 monitoring
force to help protect the Palestinians, let alone even contemplate any type of
U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement actions against Israel— which are actually
valid international legal options for humanitarian intervention! The doctrine of
"humanitarian intervention" and its current "responsibility to protect"
transmogrification so readily espoused elsewhere when U.S. foreign policy goals
are allegedly at stake has been clearly proved to be a joke and a fraud when it
comes to stopping the ongoing and accelerating Israeli campaign of genocide
against the Palestinian people.
Rather than rein in the Israelis—which would
be possible just by turning off the funding and weapons pipeline—the United
States government, the U.S. Congress, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the
"Jewish" state to the tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose
munificence this instance of genocide—and indeed conceivably the State of Israel
itself—would not be possible. Without the United States, Israel is nothing more
than a "failed state." In today’s world genocide is permissible so long as it is
done at the behest of the United States and/or its de jure or de facto allies
such as Israel. I anticipate no fundamental change in America’s support for the
Israeli ongoing campaign of genocide against the Palestinians during the tenure
of the Obama/Clinton administration.
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