Two days ago, according to the Israeli-Palestinian human rights group B’Tselem, Israeli forces attacked the community of Khirbet a-Taban, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and demolished all the community’s 12 homes, leaving 70 people, including 28 children, homeless.
Also demolished were 12 outhouses, four water cisterns, 10 livestock pens, seven tarpaulin and sheet-metal structures used to store fodder, 15 water tanks, a mobile water tanker and two sheep-milking stations.
It was the 66th Palestinian West Bank community to have been destroyed since the Hamas attack on Gaza in October 2023. A total of five thousand West Bank Palestinians are said to have been forced from their homes over the past three years in what human rights groups say is a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing by Jewish settlers, often backed by the Israeli military and police. More than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed.
According to B’Tselem:
‘The sword of demolition is hanging over the heads of thousands more Palestinians living in dozens of communities that suffer daily attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers, as well as ongoing, systemic abuse by state institutions.’
A reminder: under the terms of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, passed in 1947 as Resolution 181, what is now known as the West Bank was meant to form part of an independent Palestinian state. Under international law, specifically Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits transferring civilian populations into occupied territories, the half million Israeli settlers living in the West Bank are all there illegally. (Another 200,000 live in east Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel in 1980.)
There is a word for what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza — and that word is genocide. So today I want to explain why I believe it is the right word to use, despite Israel’s furious insistence that all its military activity since October 2023 has been designed solely to secure the safety of its citizens and to destroy Hamas.
In an interview on the latest New Statesman podcast, the eminent historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argues that Israel cannot legitimately be accused of attempting to commit genocide because, and I quote: ‘If Israel wanted to destroy Gaza or destroy the Palestinian people, it would’ve done so immediately.’
He adds, correctly: 'For genocide to be proven, intent must be established. International law is extremely clear about this.’
But he then goes on to say, and this is where I think he is mistaken: ‘There’s no evidence of any intent whatsoever.’
Which is odd, when you look at what Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz said just two days ago. Encouraging what he called ‘emigration’ from Gaza remains Israel’s policy, he said, adding: ‘There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration … President Trump put the issue on the agenda. Now every country needs to take people in — and that’s the big issue.’
In other words, just as soon as Mr Trump can persuade some other country to open its doors to between one and two million Palestinian refugees, they’ll be on their way. In Mr Katz’s words, Israel ‘is organised and prepared to get them out — by sea, by air, by every way possible.’
But is encouraging ‘emigration’ the same as committing genocide? Let’s look at the legal definition. Under the terms of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an essential element of genocide is a ‘specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.’
The key point here, I think, which is widely misunderstood, is that genocide does not mean trying to wipe out every single member of a targeted group. And that’s where, in my view, Montefiore gets it wrong. Committing genocide against Palestinians does not mean killing every single man, woman and child — it means, according to the legal definition, intending to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian nation, or Palestinian society, however you wish to define it.
Or, as the Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholar Professor Omer Bartov put it: ‘Genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it will never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity.’
Is that the intention of the current Israeli government? How else could you explain the words of Israel Katz and his many fellow ministers who have made similar comments?
How else could you explain the Israeli government’s stated intention to hold on to the territory it still controls in Gaza — more than half the total area — thus squeezing the territory’s entire population into a totally inadequate sliver of land?
And how else could you explain the recent spate of violent attacks by Jewish settlers on the West Bank, expelling Palestinians from their homes, destroying their villages and uprooting their olive groves?
If intent is the key element required to establish the crime of genocide, I would argue that Israel has made its intentions abundantly clear: to destroy, once and for all, any remote possibility that one day — even far off into the future — the Palestinians are able to establish a viable nation of their own.
It’s not just me who takes this view. As long ago as July of last year, Professor Bartov wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. The headline was: ‘I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it.’ In the article, he wrote:
‘Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
‘My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.’
Two months later, the world’s largest professional organisation of scholars studying genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, came to the same conclusion. In a formal resolution approved by more than 85% of those voting, it said unequivocally: ‘Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.’
No one is any doubt about the weight that is carried by the word genocide. First and foremost, of course, the Nazi Holocaust, in a league of its own. But joining it in the pantheon of human-inflicted horror are the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, the oppression of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uighur in China, the continuing mass atrocities in Sudan.
It is an obscenely long list.
So why all the attention on Israel, the world’s only Jewish state? Why is it Israel that finds itself accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice and not, for example, China, or Sudan?
And what about Hamas itself, perpetrator of that egregious act of barbarity on 7 October, 2023 that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand Israelis, and then the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians?
Indeed, I’d go further: if it hadn’t been for Hamas’s murderous campaign of suicide bombings in the 1990s, there might have been at least some chance of making progress towards the fabled ‘two-state solution’ following the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. But Hamas, and Yigal Amir, the ultra-nationalist Israeli who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, effectively put an end to those admittedly slim hopes.
But let’s not forget who encouraged the Hamas hold on Gaza. As David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel, pointed out just this week:
‘[Benjamin Netanyahu] backed — indeed passionately championed — years of Qatari funding of Hamas-controlled Gaza, to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars, right up until the [October 7] invasion, proclaiming that it was essential to keep Gaza from humanitarian disaster, when it was manifestly easing Hamas’s rule in Gaza and helping finance its terrorist army.’
(In 2018, for example, it was reported that Netanyahu authorised the payment of $90 million by Qatar to Hamas in six monthly instalments of $15 million, ostensibly to cover the salaries of Hamas officials. So much for fighting the ‘terrorists’.)
Now, the foreign secretary Ed Miliband says he’s about to announce a ‘comprehensive set of measures’ in response to Netanyahu’s pre-election, pro-settlers campaign in the West Bank. The British government, he says, ‘will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution.’
But he knows as well as anyone that that ship sailed long ago. Only a genuinely comprehensive, internationally-coordinated sanctions campaign against Israel will force a change of policy.
It will be much too late for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have lost their lives over the past three years and the hundreds of thousands more whose lives have been shattered.
Perhaps, though, Benjamin Netanyahu felt just a momentary shiver run down his spine when he heard of the death in jail last week of the former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić.
The so-called ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ had been convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by an international court. At the time of his death at the age of 84, he had served nine years of a life sentence.
Netanyahu is already facing charges at the International Criminal Court of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has not — so far — been charged with the crime of genocide. ARTICLE END
