US Congress: ‘We Stand With Genocide’

December 31, 2023

U.S. lawmakers, in the last quarter of 2023, approved a series of resolutions smearing pro-Palestine activism as anti-Semitic and giving Israel PR cover for its open-ended killing spree, writes Corinna Barnard.

Chanukah for Ceasefire celebration/vigil in front of the White House on Dec. 11. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Corinna Barnard
Special to Consortium News

The Biden administration in the last three months of 2023 asked Congress to give Israel an additional $14 billion in military assistance on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. allots every year; vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza at the U.N.; circumvented Congress to sell weapons to Israel and deployed warships to the waters off Gaza to prevent anyone from interfering with the Israeli regime’s campaign of atrocities there.

Congress did not quite match the White House effort to comfort a genocidal Israel. The House approved a $14.3 billion package for the Netanyahu regime, but hinged it on off-setting cuts to the Internal Revenue Service and the bill was blocked in the Senate.

But lawmakers did give Israel heavy-duty backup by stonewalling calls for a ceasefire. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian-American in Congress, and a few other lawmakers — all people of color— introduced a “Ceasefire Now” resolution on Oct. 16 that is only slowly gaining co-sponsors. A Data for Progress poll shows that while the majority of Americans support a ceasefire, that position has only marginal support in Congress.

And lawmakers used a series of resolutions — expressions of sentiment — to make grand political gestures on behalf of Israel; providing heavy PR cover to the open-ended killing spree.

While blotting out any reference to the Palestinian cause, or the immense suffering of the Palestinian people, these resolutions lathered the marauding government with approval. Looking back on them, in the pause before Congress resumes in January, they read like so many decrees of an imperial court intent on generating its own version of events, at complete odds with external reality beyond their chambers.

‘Standing With Israel’

Senate Resolution No. 417, sponsored by Majority Leader Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, affirmed Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on civilians.

This was on Oct. 19, 10 days after Israel had imposed a complete siege of the Gaza Strip and made it clear that it was committed to a campaign of slaughter. The Gaza Health Ministry was reporting that at least 3,785 Palestinians had been killed and 12,493 wounded by Israeli strikes on Gaza since Oct. 7.

Massive street demonstrations in cities around the world were raising a hue and cry for a ceasefire and charging the U.S. president with genocide as senators approved the resolution 97-0.

A considerable portion of the opening of the resolution is spent on a reminder of Hamas’ designation as a terrorist organization and harping on the “heinous” crimes the indigenous resistance group committed on Oct. 7.

[Related: Evidence Missing in ‘Mass Rape’ Charge Against Hamas]

This set the keynote for all the resolutions that followed. From No. 417 on, condemnation of Hamas was obligatory, repeated over and over; crowding out any possible criticism of Israeli atrocities before or after Oct. 7.


Schumer visiting Israel on Oct. 15. (US Embassy Jerusalem, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The House, which had been mired in GOP in-fighting over who would replace their fallen leader, Kevin McCarthy, rushed to issue a matching “standing with Israel as it commits genocide” resolution.

On Oct. 25, the same day Republicans catapulted Mike Johnson — a MAGA legal activist and friend of Christian nationalists — into the speaker post, reps approved, with overwhelming bipartisan support, House Resolution 771, “Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.”

The lone Republican in the House to vote against No. 771 was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, also the only white person to vote no. All of the nine Democrats in the House who voted “no” were people of color.

[Related: The ‘Genocide Moment’]


Johnson delivering remarks after his election as speaker of the House on Oct. 25. (Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Another resolution followed in the Senate on Oct. 26, when lawmakers issued another obligatory condemnation of Hamas along with “antisemitic student activities on college campuses in the United States.” This resolution, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley,


“… denounces the rhetoric of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups as antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible for sympathizing with genocidal violence against the State of Israel and risking the physical safety of Jewish Americans in the United States.”

The House followed suit with a similar resolution on Nov. 2.

With these two strokes, Congress declared open season on student protests against Israel’s campaign of carnage.

Censuring Tlaib

On Nov. 7, congressional representatives moved to censure Rep. Tlaib for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.” (The charges against Tlaib were far from credible as Robin Abcarian lays out in her Los Angeles Times column “Censuring the House’s only Palestinian American is a cynical ploy to silence opposition to Israel.”)

By the time congressional representatives had ganged up on the Michigan Democrat — for what amounted to Tlaib’s refusal to disavow the movement to liberate her ancestral land and people — Israeli forces had killed at least 10,328 Palestinians in Gaza since Oct. 7.

Since resolutions are expressions of sentiment, with no funding attached, they can be used to just vent political hot air. But these resolutions, during rising political opposition to Israel, signaled a congressional counter-attack.

Lawmakers were going after the protest movement that had been energized in opposition to what the Palestinians were going through; a second full-scale Catastrophe, 75 years after the original Nakba.

On Nov. 28 — as Israel was doing all it could to pound Gaza out of existence — House legislators, with near unanimity, once again showed their solidarity with war crimes, affirming Israel’s right to exist. In a separate, fully unanimous resolution that same day, Hamas was called upon to free the hostages, with no mention of the political prisoners held by Israel.

Condemning Hamas, standing with Israel, censuring Tlaib, completely ignoring the Palestinian viewpoint — by this point, Congress had perfected its three-ingredient recipe for a giant batch of Islamophobia:

1) ignore Israeli culpability 2) scapegoat Palestinians and their allies for Israel’s crimes and 3) give the silent treatment to the pain and agonies of people in Gaza as they are being killed, wounded, driven from their homes and deprived in almost every conceivable way.

Representatives, by the end of November — almost two months into the barbaric slaughter — had gone far beyond treating Palestinians as “lesser victims.” They had suppressed any recognition of Palestinians whatsoever; lowering the blinds, institutionally speaking, on the war criminality of both Israel and the U.S.

The rhetorical, psychic effort to disappear Palestinians in the halls of Congress was sickeningly like what Israel was intent on doing to real people, in real life and death.

Intensifying Attack on Demonstrators

On Dec. 5, the House approved Resolution 894, “strongly condemning and denouncing the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world.”

While opening with a broad statement against ethnic bias, the resolution focused exclusively on a grab-bag of incidents of anti-Semitism since Oct. 7. Some look like serious matters, some marginal and some possibly not anti-Semitic incidents at all. It’s hard to say from the way they are written up.

But lawmakers undermined any serious consideration of these incidents by associating them with an ostensible statement about bias-crime that omitted any mention of victimized Palestinian people in the U.S.

In late October the Department of Justice opened a hate-crimes investigation of the murder of Wadea Al Fayoume, a 6-year-old American boy in Illinois whose parents are from a village in the West Bank. The killer stabbed Wadea multiple times. He also stabbed Wadea’s mother, Hanaan Shahin, who was hospitalized with wounds after the attack.

As CNN reported, the family’s landlord was arrested and charged with committing the crimes “allegedly because the tenants are Muslim.”

Joe Biden condemned the murder during a nationwide TV address, but an uncle of Wadea criticized the U.S. president for inciting hatred by repeating false Israeli claims — most notoriously allegations of Hamas beheading babies — and not publicly correcting them.

About a week before the House approved the anti-Semitism resolution, a man in Burlington, Vermont, shot three college students of Palestinian descent. Hisham Awartani of Brown University, the most seriously wounded of the three victims was left paralyzed with a bullet lodged in his spine that surgeons could not remove.

The Real Purpose of No. 894


Signs at a Gaza ceasefire rally and march in Washington, D.C., on Oct 28. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

From the get-go, No. 894 was an obvious political decoy. Any sincere effort at reducing ethnic tension would not only take a broad view of bias crimes, it would begin by calling for a ceasefire to end the cause of those tensions: Israel’s violence in Gaza. The tribal approach of this resolution was clearly up to no good. Something else was at work here.

The real intent of Resolution No. 894 becomes clear in its closing declaration that “the House of Representatives clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

That phrasing caused Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York City, to lead over 100 Democrats to withhold “yeah” votes and vote simply “present.”

Nadler said the resolution “ignores nuanced examples such as the Satmar sect, a Hasidic Jewish movement, which remains staunchly anti-Zionist and quite obviously is not antisemitic.” Nadler represents a New York City district that includes Borough Park, Brooklyn, home to many Hasidic Jews.

The conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel brings up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group of countries led by Sweden that has been working to preserve and bolster public awareness of the atrocities Jews suffered under in Nazi Germany.

The IHRA set itself the task of defining anti-Semitism and as part of that produced a list of illustrative examples. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

“The rhetorical, psychic effort to disappear Palestinians in the halls of Congress was sickeningly like what Israel was intent on doing to real people, in real life and death.”

The IHRA’s decision to make criticism of Israel an example of anti-Semitism has drawn valid controversy for inoculating Israel from legitimate criticism. This objection is extremely consequential now.

At any time in the past several years, Israel’s apologists reflexively denounced criticism of the country as anti-Semitic, giving the Netanyahu regime space, in that time, to become increasingly hateful and extreme.

Had criticism of Israel been more permissible, it might have helped steer the nation off its current, genocidal course.


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv on Nov. 30. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)

Last May, the State Department put the IHRA’s controversial definition at the center of its hefty plan for combating anti-Semitism; a decision that historian Lawrence Davidson criticized in his article “Misdirecting the Fight Against Anti-Semitism.”

By embracing the IHRA’s definition, Davidson wrote, the Biden State Department had complicated “the fight against anti-Semitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be ‘a racist endeavor.’ ”

U.S. lawmakers turned Congress into their own “racist endeavor” by issuing an outcry against ethnic-bias crimes that overlooked the murder in Illinois of Wadea Al-Fayoume; the serious injuring of Hanaan Shahin, Wadea’s mother; and the shooting of Hisham Awartani and his two friends in Vermont.

In late December a few legislators introduced a resolution to “memorialize” 6-year-old Wadea. The wording includes opposition to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia — both, together.

The bill is co-sponsored by Democrats Delia Ramirez of Illinois, Lauren Underwood of Illinois Sara Jacobs of California and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey, all of whom joined Nadler in voting against No. 894. We will see how it fares in the new year.

Virginia Foxx’s Hearing


Rep. Virginia Foxx opening a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses on Dec. 5. (C-Span still)

On Dec. 5, as lawmakers were condemning the rise of anti-Semitism, the congressional attack on student demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine was heating up. That same day, Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican from North Carolina, opened a congressional hearing on “anti-Semitism on college campuses.”

Three university presidents had been called for questioning about pro-Palestinian demonstrations on their campuses that members of Congress had decided to construe as involving anti-Semitic speech.

The three witnesses were Harvard’s Claudine Gay, M.I.T.’s Sally Kornbluth and the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill. They gave a lukewarm defense of students’ constitutional right to protest which, despite its timidity, outraged one of their inquisitors, in particular.

As widely reported, Rep. Elise Stefanik made headlines when a clip from the hearing of her aggressive attack on Penn President Magill went viral.

“They failed on a global stage,” Stefanik gloated afterwards, in reference to the trio of presidents. “What will go down in congressional history as the most-viewed congressional testimony in the history of the United States Congress.”

A couple of days after her infamous run-in with Stefanik, Magill resigned. That left blood in the water for the sharks to circle, as they are doing now at Harvard. It will be a purge if the Republican representative from New York has her way.


Harvard’s Claudine Gay during the Dec. 5 congressional hearing. (C-Span)

[Related: US Students for Palestine Under Attack]

On Dec. 13, a triumphant Stefanik sponsored House resolution No. 927. This one condemned “anti-Semitism on university campuses and the previous week’s testimony by university presidents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.” It passed a roll call vote with 303 “yeas.”

Stefanik may have stolen the show in the committee hearing, but Foxx also deserves a star turn for the way she opened her political-persecution hearing on Dec. 5.

“Today,” Fox told Gay, Kornbluth and Magill, “each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate filled, anti-Semitism on your respective campuses.”

That was how she greeted three university presidents — by giving them a chance to atone.

[See: Zionist Suppression in Congress]

After laying out the atonement welcome mat, Foxx went on to quote some pearl-clutching comments by Sen. Schumer concerning demonstrators who chant slogans such as “intifada,” an Arabic word for uprising.

“Many of the people who express these sentiments in America aren’t neo-Nazis or card carrying Klan members or Islamist extremists,” Schumer said, according to Foxx’s quoting. “They are in many cases, people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers. Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives.”

By the time Schumer was trying to make a Fifth Column out of people saying words and slogans in protests, the U.S.-backed Israeli military had since Oct. 7 killed more than 15,900 Palestinians in Gaza.

After instructing the three university presidents to prepare for atonement, after amplifying Schumer’s alarmist rhetoric, Foxx introduced video clips of student demonstrations at the three campuses of the three presidents. It was clear from her manner that the room was about to witness something of grave concern.

All the videos revealed were students engaging in peaceful protest; calling for the liberation of Palestine, the survival of Gaza. “Intifada Revolution; Intifada Revolution,” they chanted. That was it.

The video clips were shown in a surreal, sanitized void; with no reference to the massive crime wave Israel was committing against humanity in Gaza. There were no dead bodies to see; no bombed hospitals; no streams of refugees, no lists of dead journalists; no piles of white shrouds, no names of dead poets.

There was nothing to explain why students might be calling for an uprising.

The production crew for Foxx’s videos had arranged ominous closing music. As that soundtrack faded, the chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce looked meaningfully around the room, as though some point had been made about the scenes shown in those videos.

It was a Rorschach test, in which, for some apparently, the very sight of students demonstrating on behalf of Palestinians had become evidence of heresy.

Trail of Tears

Map of the expulsion process of Indigenous people, 1830–1838. Oklahoma is depicted in light yellow-green. (Nikater, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Members of the U.S. Congress have been supporting Israel unconditionally for so long that it is almost automatic, no matter what Israel does. The core of this support is the demonstrated power of the Israel Lobby to fund a politician’s opponents, jeopardizing their careers.

On a more philosophical level, the kinship between the stories of two settler colonial nations may make it too difficult for members of Congress to face this history.

Think of the way the U.S. government encouraged white colonialist settlers in the 19th century to dehumanize the way they thought of the Indigenous people in order to force them off their homelands. Virulent racism is required to commit an ethnic cleansing.

“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms … “ President Andrew Jackson said in an 1830 address on behalf of his Indian Removal Act.

In that address, Jackson rested his argument for occupying and annexing land in part on the great sacrifices of the white settlers’ forebears; an argument that resonates today in Israeli justifications for its takeover of Palestine.

“Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers,” Jackson said, “but what do they [sic] more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects.”

Catharine Beecher, an early American women’s rights activist and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was an ardent opponent of Jackson’s plan to force indigenous people off their land. In 1829 and 1830, the women’s movement Beecher sparked to protest Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill is known as the first national campaign on the part of women in the United States.

In a petition, Beecher wrote:

“it has become almost a certainty, that these people are to have their lands torn from them, and to be driven into western wilds and to final annihilation, unless the feelings of a humane and Christian nation shall be aroused to prevent the unhallowed sacrifice….”

The feelings of a humane and Christian nation were not sufficiently aroused. The U.S. Army force-marched members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muscogee/Creek and Cherokee nations off rich, arable land east of the Mississippi River over a vast distance to the dry soil of Oklahoma in what the Cherokee called their Trail of Tears.

For the kinds of agony they suffered, the world has only to look at Gaza now.



Corinna Barnard, deputy editor of Consortium News, formerly worked in editing capacities for Women’s eNews, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the magazine Nuclear Times, which covered the antinuclear war movement.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Pro-Palestine Rally Banned in Berlin on New Year’s Eve

District mayor of Berlin-Neukölln, Martin Hikel, noted the rally may cause unrest instead of expressing solidarity with people in Gaza

Published 12/30/23 

Palestinian demonstrators march to demand a ceasefire in the current Gaza conflict on December 28, 2023 in Berlin, Germany.

Photo by Maryam Majd/Getty Images

Police in Berlin banned a pro-Palestine rally that was set to take place on New Year’s Eve, fearing that the protests would incite violence.

Officials said that the ban was issued over concerns that the rally “will result in inciting, antisemitic shouts, glorification of violence, the conveying of a willingness to use violence and thus intimidation and violence,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

"Crimes are to be expected — in the area or from this gathering," Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik said on Saturday.

The rally was scheduled for Sunday at 10:30 p.m. local time in Neukölln district. Organizers said that around 100 people are expected to take part in the rally, but the police said they are expecting more protesters to show up.

"The situation is emotional. An influx of troublemakers is to be expected who could use the meeting to commit crimes. No meeting leader could keep such a development under control. That's why the police banned the demonstration," said Slowik.

District mayor of Berlin-Neukölln, Martin Hikel, welcomed the ban, saying that the rally may cause unrest instead of expressing solidarity with people in Gaza. 

"That's why it's understandable to ban the rally," he said, according to Deutsche Welle.

Israel launched its massive air and ground strikes in the Gaza Strip in response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, when the terror group killed over 1,100 Israelis and kidnapped some 200 others.

Israeli strikes killed nearly 21,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported, citing the latest figures by the Gaza Health Ministry. 

The Israel-Hamas war sparked pro-Palestine protests worldwide, calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, which is home to over 2.2 million people.

Germany has previously banned pro-Palestinian protests over fears of unrest and arrested over 170 protesters from those demonstrations in October, according to Deutsche Welle.

 

UK students stage walkout in solidarity with Palestinians: report

Hundreds of students from UK’s Luton Sixth Form College have staged a walkout in solidarity with Palestinians killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

“At exactly 11am on a Saturday in mid-November, hundreds of students from Luton Sixth Form College streamed out of their school, gathering outside in a sea of black, white, and red keffiyehs and Palestinian flags,” the report said.

It said the students carried banners and placards saying “Bombing kids is not self-defence” and “This is no ‘conflict’ it’s genocide”, referring to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

“Student organisers of the rally read out speeches against the conflict,” the report added.

“Yet Israel wasn’t the only target of criticism at the rally: The students were protesting against their college’s links to an arms company that had supplied weapons and advanced military platforms to Israel.”

DAWN

When time doesn’t fly

Abbas Nasir 

DAWN

Published December 31, 2023 

AS one New Year’s Eve turns into the next, most people tend to say time flies. Another year gone by quickly, and time does, indeed, seem to fly. But for this to happen, you must have a semblance of a ‘normal’ life, a bit of a luxury in these trying times.

Just imagine what life would be like for you if you happened to be one of the 2.2 million Gaza Palestinians who are being choked and killed in their thousands, men, women, children and infants in their homes, hospitals and schools, whose roads and areas, designated as ‘safe zones’ by the Israeli occupation forces, are, in fact, no less than killing fields.

Time must be at a standstill for them as they survive from one day to another amidst the struggle for safe shelters, food and water and the constant noise of the overhead drones whose din is only broken by screaming warplanes.

These planes discharge their cargo of US-gifted JDAMS (joint direct action munitions), 900-kilogramme ‘bunker buster’ bombs that slam into their targets, including apartment blocks, where people, mostly women and children, are sheltering. Explosions fill the air, huge clouds of smoke and dust rise up as fire obliterates any sign of life that survived the blast.

Explosions fill the air, huge clouds of smoke and dust rise up as fire obliterates any sign of life that survived the blast.

The wailing sirens of ambulances are a reminder of how accurate these brutal ‘smart bombs’ are in finding their victims from among the most vulnerable of Gaza’s citizens. So far, nearly 70 per cent of the over 21,000 Palestinians slaughtered have been women and children.

Every missile or bomb that hits a multi-storeyed apartment building and razes it to the ground and claims dozens of innocent victims, is followed by frantic activity on the part of mostly untrained rescue volunteers and family members of those entombed in the rubble, and who try and dig out anyone alive with nothing but their bare hands. Time is at a standstill if this is what you are forced to brave.

Time is also at a standstill if the democratic West led by the US, which always takes the moral high ground, tells you the root cause of the death, destruction, murder and mayhem lies in the ferocious attack by Hamas on Oct 7 this year in which 1,200 Israelis, a third of whom were uniformed security personnel, were killed.

Countless other lives were snuffed out as attack helicopters and tank crews followed the ‘Hannibal directive’ and fired shells and missiles at homes and cars suspected of having/ carrying those taken hostage and their captors.

This is not to say for a moment that unarmed civilians were not killed by Hamas in the action described by former US Defence Department official and ambassador Chaas Freeman as a “break out” by prisoners of the open-air prison called Gaza.

But Israel’s retaliation is miles beyond reasonable and largely disproportionate to what is allowed under international law. However, international law is something Israel has always held in contempt just as its main backer and enabler US has.

The expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral lands happened in 1948 in what the Palestinians call Nakba (catastrophe). Those confined to Gaza today are what remain of those expelled from the southern parts of Palestine (now southern Israel), their children and grandchildren.

Not satisfied with usurping the land it did in 1948, Israel attacked its neighbours and occupied large tracts of the West Bank in 1967. Even after the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, that granted very limited self-rule to the Palestinians, Israel over the past 20 years has continued to ‘settle’ its citizens in West Bank settlements. Today, these setters number nearly a million.

Where Gaza resembled a prison fenced in with watchtowers and CCTV camera/ drone surveillance round the clock, the humiliation faced by the Palestinians living in the West Bank, where under the protection of the Israeli Defence Forces, settlers subjected the centuries-old rightful owners of the land to humiliation, further displacement and often murder.

All this as the US and its Western allies seemed to suggest that it was kosher for the Palestinians to atone for the sins of Nazi Germany which brutally annihilated 5m to 6m Jews in the Holocaust during Hitler’s reign of terror.

Today, the unbroken will of the wounded and tormented Gazans stands in the way of Israel executing a second Nakba as its forces have followed a scorched-earth policy, destroying homes and obliterating any sign of infrastructure necessary for living. One has no idea when and how Gaza will be rebuilt once Israel’s genocidal war ends.

Time must be at a standstill for those in temporary shelters with their homes, belongings, schools, hospitals, universities gone and many educated professionals such as doctors, professors, health workers, and journalists killed for the crime of telling the world through social media of the mass murder of their people.

Closer to home, one is equally sure that time is not flying for our Baloch citizens whose kith and kin have been the victims of enforced disappearance. The clock stopped for the valiant but tormented Sammi Deen Baloch 14 years ago when her father, a doctor, was ‘taken’ from the hospital where he worked and was disappeared without a trace.

Ms Baloch and Mahrang Baloch, who become the figurehead of the protest march from Turbat to Islamabad where the sit-in is happening after the latest extrajudicial murder, beseech the state for information of their loved ones — to no avail. In deploying water cannons and using other third-degree methods the state has shown its contempt for them.

Returning his Sitara-i-Imtiaz, acclaimed journalist-novelist Mohammed Hanif wrote: “Journalists of my generation have seen Sammi Baloch and Mahrang Baloch grow up in protest camps. Ashamed to witness a new generation being denied their basic dignity.”

I so want to say Happy New Year to you, but honestly, don’t have the heart to. Stay safe, give your loved ones a hug.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2023

 

Genocidal Tremors: Taking Israel to the International Court of Justice

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by Binoy Kampmark / December 30th, 2023

Litigating against countries is the stuff of esoteric delight for international lawyers.  Such matters become yet more complex when it comes to claims of genocide or broader crimes against humanity.  Accusations, however motivated, are always easy to make.  Proving them in a court of law is quite another proposition.  International law remains a terrain of punctures and potholes, rather than smooth lines and fine paving.  Working around those punctures is a skill worthy of prize and praise.

The ongoing flattening, mauling and extirpation of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s armed forces has drawn interest from jurists and litigants.  The potholes and punctures, in that sense, seem to be filling up.  It’s hard not to see why, when you have such startlingly grotesque admissions as those from Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a chief spokesman for the IDF, that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

Then come such background briefs as those from retired Colonel Pnina Sharvit Baruch, former director of the wing celebrated for advising IDF commanders about complying with the rules of war.  A dive into the short overview from Baruch makes for grim reading.  The aim, not method, is what matters, namely, the destruction of Hamas.  “Without achieving this goal, Hamas will succeed in de facto denying Israel the exercise of its sovereignty in the areas adjacent to the border with the Gaza Strip.  In light of this significant military advantage, even if many civilians in Gaza are harmed during the attacks, this is not necessarily excessive incidental damage and therefore would not be disproportionate attacks that are illegal.”  Mass murder can thereby be excused.

Leonard Rubenstein, a professor of practice at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was sufficiently troubled by such reasoning to suggest that Israel had “asserted a theory of justifiable conduct in war that, contrary to this body of [humanitarian] law, elevates claims of military necessity in achieving the war’s aims over protection of civilians, particularly in a just war.”

In the international community, a number of actions are testing the waters of legality regarding Israel’s novel view of waging what is increasingly looking like a war of ghoulish extermination.  In November, the New York Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a suit on behalf of Palestinian human rights groups, US citizens with relatives in Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza arguing that the Biden administration had been complicit and failed to prevent “the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide”.  It notes the language of various Israeli government figures that demonstrate “clear genocidal intentions” while deploying “dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians, including ‘human animals’”.

That same month, South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros and Djibouti, according to Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, expressed the view that an investigation of “the situation in the state of Palestine” should take place.  Khan accordingly declared that an investigation into the events in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank from March 2021 was duly expanded to include “the escalation of hostilities and violence since the attacks that took place on October, 2023.”  Despite Israel not being a member of the ICC, the prosecutor called “upon all relevant actors to provide full cooperation with my office.”

South Africa has decided to test the validity of Israel’s methods of war in Gaza through the offices of the International Court of Justice, a body of feeble, if acceptable dignity.  On December 29, Pretoria filed an application regarding, in the words of the relevant press release, “alleged violations by Israel regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”  The application makes the claim that “acts and omissions” by the Israeli government “are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

It further claims that “the conduct of Israel – through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence – in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of the obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

The application instituting proceedings gives more detail to the South African case, noting such alleged genocidal acts as “killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.”

South Africa requests a number of provisional measures in its ICJ application, namely, that Israel immediately suspend military operations in and against Gaza; ensure all its military or irregular units under the state’s control “take no further steps in furtherance of the military operations” aforementioned; “desist from the commission of any and all actions within the scope of Article II” of the Genocide Convention (killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group); intentional infliction upon the group of conditions “calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.

The response from Israel was hardly one of chastened reflection.  Its government rejected “with contempt the blood libel by South Africa in its application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).”  The Israeli Foreign Ministry scorned the South African claim as lacking any “factual and judicial basis and is a despicable and cheap exploitation of the court.”  Pretoria was, in effect, “collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of Israel.”

In some ways, South Africa, with its historically thick layering of scar tissue regarding racial hatred, segregation, policing and administrative detention may be better suited than most in understanding the zealots prosecuting the war in Gaza.  Far from proving a blood libel, the case may turn out to be something of a bloody revelation.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, explained

Friday’s action reflects South Africa’s solidarity with the Palestinian cause — and its domestic and foreign interests

By Ellen Ioanes  

Dec 31, 2023

VOX

President Cyril Ramaphosa with the delegates of Organisations supporting the Liberation of Palestine at Chief Albert Luthuli House on December 18, 2023, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Luba Lesolle/Gallo Images via Getty Images

Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.

The South African government has taken its firmest stance yet against Israel’s war in Gaza, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in a new case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague.

South Africa initiated the case Friday and requested the ICJ order Israel to stop its onslaught in Gaza immediately. While South Africa’s filing may not affect the outcome of the war in any meaningful way, it does draw on longstanding ties between Black South Africans’ liberation struggle and that of the Palestinian people. It also signals the country’s desire to challenge the US-dominated international order that it sees as unfair to African and non-Western interests.

The 84-page application states that “The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group,” in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Israel quickly rejected the filing “with disgust,” calling it a “blood libel” — a reference to a false accusation that originated in the Middle Ages that Jewish people would murder Christians and use their blood in rituals, and which was used as a justification for oppression of Jewish communities.

The ICJ is different from the International Criminal Court, which is already investigating alleged war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas stemming from the October 7 attacks. The ICC is set up to investigate and prosecute individuals at the highest levels who are accused of planning and directing war crimes, while national courts are typically the venue to prosecute perpetrators of low-level war crimes — individual fighters who may have carried out war crimes directed by those high-level commanders or leaders.

Under the Genocide Convention, any country can bring charges of genocide against another at the ICJ, regardless of whether they are party to the conflict; in 2019, Gambia brought a genocide case against Myanmar due to its crimes against the Rohingya ethnic group, and the ICJ upheld the legality of the case in 2022. South Africa’s petition represents one of the few avenues for an international body to make a clear statement about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Israel continues to bombard Gaza, the Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas, following that group’s attack on Israel on October 7. During that attack, Hamas and fighters from Palestine Islamic Jihad killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, many of whom have been released. Since then, Israel has killed more than 21,000 people including more than 8,500 children, according to Gaza’s media office; internally displaced 1.9 million; and damaged or destroyed nearly 70 percent of the homes and 50 percent of the buildings in the region.

The Palestinian foreign ministry, based in the West Bank, lauded South Africa’s action and called on the court to “immediately take action to protect Palestinian people and call on Israel, the occupying power, to halt its onslaught against the Palestinian people.”

Accusations of genocide are difficult to prove because they include not just actions but intention. Throughout the conflict, pro-Palestinian activists, scholars on the subject, and politicians have accused Israel of genocide — an accusation that’s particularly fraught since Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust. But there have been successful prosecutions of genocide in the 20th century, in Rwanda and Bosnia, via international criminal tribunals set up through the UN.

South Africa has multiple reasons to file the accusation against Israel

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has deep ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), stretching back to its former leader and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. The ANC aligned itself with the PLO and other revolutionary causes while Mandela was in prison; after his release, Mandela was a vocal supporter of the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat, saying in 1990 that “we identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination.”

Decades later, that sentiment remains in the South African government, and for many ordinary South Africans who see their struggle against colonialism and apartheid in the Palestinians’ own plight and decades-long struggle for self-determination. That’s particularly salient in an election year for South Africa as the ANC and its leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, struggle to stay the dominant power there.

“There’s huge historical precedent for it, both in a domestic political context and in a moral [and] legalistic context,” Michael Walsh, visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley, told Vox. “South Africa has been engaged on the Palestinian issue since really the end of apartheid and the founding of the state. It’s been a prominent issue in South African politics and among South African leaders.”

The ICJ referral is not the first step South Africa has taken to hold Israel to account for its attacks on Gaza; Ramaphosa has repeatedly condemned Israel’s actions against Palestinians; since the October 7 attacks and subsequent Israeli campaign in Gaza, the government has repeatedly condemned Israel in the international press. The parliament also voted to close the Israeli embassy and withdrew its diplomatic staff from Israel, while the foreign ministry delivered a referral to the International Criminal Court to investigate alleged crimes, including the crime of genocide, in the Palestinian territories in November.

Though South African solidarity with the Palestinian cause is a crucial part of its condemnation of Israel, there are domestic and foreign policy reasons to try to hold Israel to account on an international stage — one of those reasons being “legitimacy in the international system and being perceived as a major player,” Walsh said. “I think there’s a perception that South Africa has really fallen in its stature on the international stage.”

That perception is at least partly due to South Africa’s refusal to arrest Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2015, when the ousted leader traveled to the country for a meeting of the African Union. The ICC had issued warrants for Bashir’s arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2009, and on genocide charges in 2010; South Africa, as a party to the ICC, was obligated to arrest Bashir and turn him over to the court for prosecution. However, the ICC effectively failed to punish the country by refusing to refer South Africa to the UN Security Council or the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, perhaps out of concern that South Africa would withdraw from the ICC.

South Africa avoided a similar conundrum last year when Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is also subject to an ICC arrest warrant for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, opted to attend a summit via video instead of in person this summer.

“There’s been lots of pressure put on South Africa over the last couple of years to deal with individuals who have been accused of war crimes but who are clearly not on the Western side of the international political divide,” Walsh said. With the ICJ case, South Africa is able to assert itself as a player on the international stage, express longstanding solidarity with the Palestinian cause, address domestic political sentiments, and point out the imbalance of international bodies when it comes to prosecuting war crimes.

South Africa has a “deep-seated belief that Israel is committing war crimes, and that there’s an important need to hold accountable any state that commits war crimes,” Walsh said. “And I think that they see a tremendous hypocrisy in how war crimes are prosecuted around the world. And so they’ve made this a cause.”

The ICJ has limited power to enforce its rulings

The ICJ represents one of the only possibilities to bring the conflict before an international body, Iva Vukušić, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, told the Guardian, as “states, globally, don’t have a lot of places to ‘go to’ in these kinds of situations, especially with the [UN] Security Council being as polarized and dysfunctional.” But it has little ability to put consequences behind its decisions.

The ICC can prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression — for example, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it has the ability to hold people in detention in the Hague until they can serve out their sentence in one of the countries that have agreed to carry out those sentences. The ICJ can render judgments on these, too, but against states and not individuals.

But the mechanism for carrying out that ruling is the ruling itself, which does not mean that a state will comply — for example, the ICJ ruled that Russia should immediately end its hostilities in Ukraine; that war is getting ready to enter its second year. The UN Security Council theoretically enforces consequences should a party to the case fail to comply, but, as Vukušić noted, that body is highly politicized, especially among the five permanent members with veto power.

It could be months or even years before the ICJ delivers a ruling in the case. But in the immediate term, South Africa is calling for an interim order for a ceasefire from the court, which could be delivered in the coming weeks, the Associated Press reports.

Watchdog Submits Evidence of Israeli Executions of Gaza Civilians to UN, ICC

Euro-Med Monitor documented nine separate cases in which Israeli troops executed Palestinians—including numerous women and children—during the ongoing invasion of Gaza.


Fatima and Ahmed al-Khaldi were killed, and their 4-year-old son Adam (right) was severely wounded, during a December 21, 2023 Israeli raid on their Gaza City home.
(Photo: family photo)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMONDREAMS
Dec 26, 2023

A prominent European human rights group on Monday submitted a report to the International Criminal Court and United Nations special rapporteurs documenting "dozens of cases of field executions carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip."

Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based nonprofit, requested the ICC and U.N. immediately investigate "the widespread killing operations carried out by Israeli forces targeting Palestinian civilians, especially the field executions and physical liquidations in the Gaza Strip."

In addition to ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, Euro-Med Monitor sent copies of its preliminary findings to Maurice Tydball Benz, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial or arbitrary executions; Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; and Navanethem Pillay, head of the Investigative Committee on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

"Nearly 10 days after the Israeli army began its ground attack in the Gaza Strip on October 27, the Israeli army carried out dozens of executions and direct physical liquidations against civilians as part of its all-out military campaign that started on October 7 in retaliation for the armed attack that Palestinian factions carried out in Israeli settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip," Euro-Med Monitor said in a statement.

The group's report lists nine separate instances in which it says Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops executed Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Victims include multiple elderly couples shot and left to bleed to death after being forced from their homes in Gaza City last week; a mentally ill man shot in his home in the Jabalia refugee camp; six members of the al-Khaldi family shot dead during an Israeli raid on their home; and nine forcibly displaced civilians including women and children who were massacred while seeking shelter in the Shadia Abu Ghazala School near Jabalia on December 13.

"The Israeli soldiers came in and opened fire," one unidentified witness said of the school attack. "They took all men, then entered classrooms and opened fire on a woman and all the children with her," including "newborn children."

"The Israeli soldiers executed those innocent families point-blank," she added.

In the case of the al-Khaldi family, surviving relative Fahed al-Khaldi toldMiddle East Eye that after an Israeli airstrike on a neighboring home killed several people and wounded Fatima al-Khaldi, his pregnant sister-in-law, IDF ground troops "lobbed two grenades into the house" where about 30 people were sheltering "without regard for women, children, or the elderly."

"They then opened fire directly at people and in an indiscriminate manner, without differentiating between young and old," he said.

Five people were killed instantly. Al-Khaldi said Israeli troops ordered the survivors out of the home, where they were stripped of their clothes.

"The soldiers then returned to the room and executed all the injured," he said. Fatima al-Khaldi was shot and left to bleed to death.

Last week, Euro-Med Monitor reported that more than 1,000 Palestinian elders have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, including dozens of people over the age of 60 who were executed.

"These incidents included soldiers shooting elderly people immediately after ordering them to evacuate their homes, and in some cases, executing them just moments after their release from hours or days of arbitrary detention," the group said.



Euro-Med Monitor said Monday that:

More than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the Israeli genocide campaign in the Gaza Strip, a number that includes those who remain trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings and are now presumed dead. Women and children make up 70% of the recorded victims. Thus, Palestinian deaths constitute the highest rate of civilian casualties worldwide in the 21st century.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Tuesday that the Palestinian death toll from 81 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks was approaching 21,000, with nearly 55,000 others wounded and thousands more missing. More than 1.9 million of the besieged enclave's 2.3 million people have also been forcibly displaced and face increased risk of starvation, hypothermia, and disease.

The submission of Euro-Med Monitor's report came nearly a week after the group Democracy for the Arab World Now published a list of 40 Israeli military commanders it called "prime suspects" for ICC war crimes investigations.


Topping the list is Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who on October 9 ordered a complete siege on Gaza City, cutting off the water, fuel, power, and humanitarian aid to millions of Palestinians.

Like numerous other Israeli leaders, Gallant attempted to justify Israel's actions with what one commentator called "blatantly genocidal" language calling Palestinians "human animals."