Genocide in Gaza
I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.
Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.” (1) That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.
The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. The application has three main components.
First, it describes in detail the horrors that the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians since 7 October 2023 and explains why much more death and destruction is in store for them.
Second, the application provides a substantial body of evidence showing that Israeli leaders have genocidal intent toward the Palestinians. (59-69) Indeed, the comments of Israeli leaders – all scrupulously documented – are shocking. One is reminded of how the Nazis talked about dealing with Jews when reading how Israelis in “positions of the highest responsibility” talk about dealing with the Palestinians. (59) In essence, the document argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza, combined with its leaders’ statements of intent, make it clear that Israeli policy is “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.” (39)
Third, the document goes to considerable lengths to put the Gaza war in a broader historical context, making it clear that Israel has treated the Palestinians in Gaza like caged animals for many years. It quotes from numerous UN reports detailing Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. In short, the application makes clear that what the Israelis have done in Gaza since 7 October is a more extreme version of what they were doing well before 7 October.
There is no question that many of the facts described in the South African document have previously been reported in the media. What makes the application so important, however, is that it brings all those facts together in one place and provides an overarching and thoroughly supported description of the Israeli genocide. In other words, it provides the big picture while not neglecting the details.
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government has labelled the charges a “blood libel” that “has no factual and judicial basis.” Moreover, Israel claims that “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.” A close reading of the document, however, makes it clear that there is no basis for these assertions. In fact, it is hard to see how Israel will be able to defend itself in a rational-legal way when the proceedings begin. After all, brute facts are hard to dispute.
Let me offer a few additional observations regarding the South African charges.
First, the document emphasizes that genocide Is distinct from other war crimes and crimes against humanity, although “there is often a close connection between all such acts.” (1) For example, targeting a civilian population to help win a war – as occurred when Britain and the United States bombed German and Japanese cities in World War II – is a war crime, but not genocide. Britain and the United States were not trying to destroy “a substantial part” of, or all the people in those targeted states. Ethnic cleansing underpinned by selective violence is also a war crime, although it is also not genocide, an action that Omer Bartov, the Israeli-born Holocaust expert, calls “the crime of all crimes.”
For the record, I believed Israel was guilty of serious war crimes–but not genocide—during the first two months of the war, even though there was growing evidence of what Bartov has called “genocidal intent” on the part of Israeli leaders. But it became clear to me after the 24-30 November 2023 truce ended and Israel went back on the offensive, that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Second, even though the South African application focuses on Israel, it has huge implications for the United States, especially President Biden and his principal lieutenants. Why? Because there is little doubt that the Biden administration is complicitous in Israel’s genocide, which is also a punishable act according to the Genocide Convention. Despite his admission that Israel is engaged in “indiscriminate bombing,” President Biden has also stated that “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel. Not a single thing.” He has been true to his word, going so far as to bypass Congress twice to quickly get additional armaments to Israel. Leaving aside the legal implications of his behavior, Biden’s name – and America’s name – will be forever associated with what is likely to become one of the textbook cases of attempted genocide.
Third, I never imagined I would see the day when Israel, a country filled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants, would face a serious charge of genocide. Regardless of how this case plays out in the ICJ – and here I am fully aware of the maneuvers that the United States and Israel will employ to avoid a fair trial – in the future Israel will be widely regarded as principally responsible for one of the canonical cases of genocide.
Fourth, the South African document emphasizes that there is no reason to think this genocide is going to end soon, unless the ICJ successfully intervenes. It twice quotes the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 December 2023 to drive that point home: “We are not stopping, we are continuing to fight, and we are deepening the fighting in the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being over.” (8, 82) Let us hope South Africa and the IJC bring a halt to the fighting, but in the final analysis the power of international courts to coerce countries like Israel and the United States is extremely limited.
Finally, the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
Reprinted with permission from John’s Substack.
John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and one of the leading foreign policy scholars in America.
How Israel Leverages Genocide With Hamas ‘Massacres’
Reprinted from Consortium News with the author’s permission.
In the days after Hamas entered Israeli kibbutzim near Gaza on Oct. 7, foreign press accounts of what happened have broadly reflected the Israeli interpretation of events of the deliberate slaughter and dismemberment of innocent civilians by Hamas fighters.
Those stories were blood-curdling in the extreme: Babies beheaded. People dismembered and deliberately burned to death. And the total of innocent civilians murdered in cold blood were said to be as high as 1,400.
The Israelis quickly recycled parallels between Hamas and the Islamic State, with its glorification of killing innocents.
But a reconstruction of how that story line emerged as the dominant theme in early press coverage shows that it was deliberately created by a decision by top Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was done by inventing stories about nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous U.S. news outlets.
Origins of the Hamas Atrocity Stories
Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Gaza on the horizon, 2019. (max nathans, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The documentary evidence now available shows that the stories about Hamas atrocities committed in the Kfar Aza Kibbutz and elsewhere were politically motivated fabrications. And how and why those atrocity stories became the dominant political reality within days of the offensive is an important political question bearing on the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first explanation for those stories is that they came from Israeli private “first responder” organizations with an obvious self-interest in peddling such a line: they were competing with one another to generate the biggest donations, as reported by Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone.
But the real source of those Hamas atrocity stories from Kfar Aza was the Netanyahu government itself, and it is now clear that the objective was to ensure that the Biden administration would go along with the plan to reduce all of Gaza to a pile of rubble.
In an address to the nation on Oct. 9 Netanyahu invoked a long-time basic Israeli propaganda line: Hamas is ISIS. “We have always known what Hamas is,” he declared. “Now the whole world knows Hamas is ISIS.”
When he spoke to the nation the day after the Hamas offensive, of course, the rest of the world had no such idea. That is why Netanyahu ordered a special project of hasbara — the Israeli term for propaganda to reshape public opinion abroad — to ensure that both the U.S. public and the Biden administration fully supported the Israeli position on Hamas’ attack.
The first part of that program was to have a senior IDF commander pass information to the news media, who were allowed to enter Kfar Aza Kibbutz on the morning of Oct. 10, while ensuring that a senior IDF commander would be on hand to speak to the press about Hamas atrocities in the kibbutz.
Thus Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Depth Corps, told CNN correspondent Nic Robertson that women, children, toddlers and the elderly had been “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”
A later CNN story quoted Gen. Veruv as saying,
“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms.”
Veruv in 2021. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Veruv had not seen anything of the sort himself, but it was emblematic of the IDF manipulation of the Western press on the issue. When Business Insider contacted the IDF from New York about the story, spokesperson Major Nir Dinar claimed that its soldiers had found the decapitated corpses of babies at Kfar Aza.
But when the Turkish Anadolu Agency and The Intercept sought confirmation of the claim of beheaded babies from the IDF on Oct. 10 and 12, respectively, the IDF couldn’t back up the statement by Veruv.
Anadolu reported in a post on “X” that the IDF had “no information” confirming the allegations of beheaded babies.
And the IDF spokesperson told The Intercept that the military had not been able to independently confirm the claim.
Despite the absence of actual evidence for that propaganda claim, a cascade of such stories were aired by major U.S. television networks and the BBC. It was a major triumph of deliberate Israeli deception by manipulating broadcast media eager for Hamas atrocity stories.
The second part of the Netanyahu plan — ensuring the full political support of U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Biden for the utter destruction of the urban society of Gaza — was easy as well.
Blinken was already fully committed to the Zionist cause. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he invoked his Jewish ancestry and likened the Hamas attacks to those of the Nazis against Jews.
And he endorsed the Israeli claim of “babies slaughtered, bodies desecrated, young people burned alive, women raped, parents executed in front of their children, children in front of their parents.”
Behind IDF’s ‘Preliminary Estimate’ of Civilians Killed
IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. (Justin LaBerge, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
On Oct. 14, the IDF put out a “preliminary estimate” of 1,400 innocent civilians killed by Hamas in the attack, a figure that stood until Nov. 10, when the Israeli Foreign Ministry reduced the estimate of civilians “murdered in cold blood” to 1,200.
However, that figure, too, was shown to be seriously misleading when IsraeI’s Social Security Administration in mid-December released a complete list of those killed in the attack, with the circumstances of death of each.
That official document showed that 695 of the deaths were Israeli civilians, 373 were Israeli security forces, and 71 were foreigners, for a total of 1,139 victims.
Hamas gunmen certainly did fire indiscriminately during the rampage, and they caused a large number of civilian deaths when their plan for taking hostages quickly went awry, because people refused to come out of their houses.
To force the occupants to jump out through open windows, some Hamas gunmen set fire to the houses, but some families never made it and were burned to death.
Hamas operatives were not the only ones to destroy houses and kill those inside it, however.
In the two communities where the largest number of civilians said to have been killed — Kfar Aza, where total civilian deaths was variously estimated at between 38 and 46; and Be’eri, where it was estimated at 112, numerous civilian deaths from tank and/or helicopter fire — including the deaths of a number of those who were being held as hostages — have been well documented.
The IDF commanding officer who unleashed violence on Be’eri spun an elaborate lie to cover up the actual circumstances in which many houses were destroyed by Israeli tank fire or by rockets from helicopters.
In a report in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz, the deputy commander of an IDF armored reserve battalion, Brig. Gen Barak Hiram, described how his tank unit “fought…from house to house, with tanks” in Be’eri, adding, “We had no choice.”
In another interview, this time in The New York Times, Hiram also presented a completely falsified and self-serving account of his handling of the situation he encountered at one house where Hamas gunmen held 14 hostages.
He claimed that one hostage, Yasmin Porat, had managed to escape, and that the gunmen inside then fired two RPG rounds at IDF troops outside the house they were occupying. In fact, however, the Hamas group’s leader had decided to surrender and contacted the police by phone.
He gave himself up along with Porat, according to her account, leaving the other Hamas gunmen to fend for themselves. But Gen. Hiram immediately demanded that the house be taken by force “even at the cost of civilian casualties,” with the result that all 13 remaining hostages but one were killed.
In Kfar Aza, which had more than 49 civilian deaths, a parallel process unfolded, as Lt. Col. Golan Vach similarly ordered a tank attack on houses that Hamas had taken over and in which 19 Israeli hostages were being held.
Both decisions reflected the explicit implementation of the IDF’s “Hannibal Protocol,” under which it is required to kill Israeli hostages to ensure that they could not be exploited by Israel’s enemy — even though that requirement was supposedly canceled by the IDF in 2016.
Most of the civilian deaths appear to have taken place at or near the grounds of the early morning music festival, where 260 bodies were found.
Hamas operatives sought to take people hostage as they fled from the grounds, but many of the victims were killed by firing from helicopters from troops who were unable to distinguish Hamas operatives from revelers.
No one knows how many were killed by each side but the 28 Israeli helicopters were firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to guide their shooting, certainly took a share of the human toll, especially in the chaotic scene during the flight from the rave that morning, according to Electronic Intifada.
In light of the new evidence, the number of innocent civilians killed by Hamas was clearly significantly less than the 695 civilian victims identified by the Israeli Social Security Administration and a fraction of the 1,200 civilians the Netanyahu government has claimed, because the IDF itself was responsible for a significant proportion of the deaths of innocent civilians.
It is also clear, however, that the Hamas offensive was poorly conceived and badly executed. And most importantly, it handed Netanyahu and the whole extremist Israeli socio-political system a golden opportunity to pursue their genocidal plans in Gaza.
Within 24 hours of Hamas’ operation, that Israeli genocide plan had already gone into operation with its campaign of phony atrocity stories. And nearly three months later, little or nothing has been done to stop its murderous progress toward its genocidal goal.
CORRECTION: The revised figure for innocent civilian deaths from the Israeli social security administration, which was incorrectly reported in the article as originally published, has been corrected in the two relevant paragraphs.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on U.S. national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
Bombing Gaza – Disturbing Comparisons with Vietnam
Indiscriminate Bombing
Investigations into Israel’s use of 2000-pound bombs in its Gaza campaign have determined that you have to go back to Vietnam to compare the brutality and mindlessness of what Israel is doing. These bombs, many supplied by the US, are being dropped in densely populated areas.
Both the New York Times and CNN have provided videos of the craters those bombs create on the ground. It is little wonder that the civilian death toll in Gaza is over 20,000 now.
As CNN reports, the bombs being dropped by Israel “are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq,” during that war:
“Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy munitions such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll. The population of Gaza is packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth, so the use of such heavy munitions has a profound effect.”
The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) response? “In stark contrast to Hamas’ intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.” But intelligence experts consulted by CNN say they haven’t seen such intense bombing since the Vietnam War.
The Washington Post also investigated the Israeli air strikes, using (it reports) “satellite imagery, airstrike data and U.N. damage assessments,” as well as interviews of people on the ground and “experts in munitions and aerial warfare.” The Post’s report says:
“The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.”
Israel’s Plan
The IDF seems to be doing very little to protect civilian populations from the bombing. In southern Gaza, the IDF’s instructions to civilians on where to move to safety have either been murky, insufficient, or at worst wrong.
As a result, civilians are being bombed and shot in areas they were instructed to be. (Thomas White, the director of UN Relief Works Agency affairs in Gaza, tweeted Saturday on this forced displacement: “The Israeli Army just orders people to move into areas where there are ongoing airstrikes. No place is safe, nowhere to go.”)
Providing no safe place for fleeing Palestinians may be part of a larger strategy: the “voluntary removal” of the Gaza population as far south toward Egypt as possible. That objective would fulfill a longstanding ambition of the Israeli far right.
This so-called “ethnic transfer” amounts to ethnic cleansing. The only obstacle to the strategy is that neither Egypt nor any other nearby country is willing to accept two million Gaza refugees.
A Vietnam War Comparison
The Israeli government should not be surprised to find, as I reported based on recent polling, that the Gaza population’s support of Hamas is actually growing as IDF operations expand. Confirmation comes from US intelligence which, as reported by CNN December 22, believes the Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank see Hamas as a defender of their cause based not just on its October 7 attack but also its success in freeing prisoners in exchange for hostages.
My own research during the Vietnam War lends plausibility to that intelligence finding. Villagers invariably blamed the US when it bombed or napalmed in order to flush out Vietcong (VC) soldiers. At the RAND Corporation where I worked, I read numerous interviews of villagers and captured VC soldiers to assess (as the research project was called) the “motivation and morale” of enemy forces.
It was clear that the more villages were destroyed, killing innocent people and driving away others, the greater the support of the VC and the stronger the resentment of the US and the South Vietnamese government it supported. In turn, those US actions enabled recruitment by the VC, just as Israeli bombing will enable recruitment by Hamas.
There is a case to be made that Israel is violating international law by indiscriminately bombing civilian populations, forcibly moving them, and using outsize weapons that increase casualties. (Yes, Hamas’ terrorist assault of Oct. 7 and its treatment of hostages also violate international law.)
There is also a case to be made that the Biden administration’s message to Israel to limit civilian casualties is absurd on its face, not to mention contradicting its continued arming of Israel with weapons that increase casualties. There are no heroes here, only leaders blinded by aggressive ambitions and refusing to recognize the human interest, which in short involves putting an end to the violence and investing in peace.
Fulfilling those aims starts with a cease-fire; massive food, energy, and housing assistance to Gaza’s people; and movement toward a two-state, mutual security solution.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.
