“Clear Intention of Ethnic Cleansing”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov Warns of Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza. Bartov says the disproportionate killing of civilians by Israel, as well as dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders and suggestions of mass expulsion, are of grave concern. He recently joined hundreds of lawyers and academics in signing an open letter warning about Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza. “There is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity,” says Bartov. “If this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing … and that may become genocide.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: “If there is a hell on Earth, it’s the north of Gaza.” Those were the words of a U.N. official earlier today as Israel intensifies its aerial and ground assault. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled on foot from northern Gaza after being forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks. More than half of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged over the last month.
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced Israel has agreed to implement what the White House described as daily four-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza to give Palestinians a chance to head south. Many Palestinians fear they’ll never be allowed to return home. Some have accused the Biden administration of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Images of Palestinians fleeing on foot have been widely compared to the Nakba, or catastrophe, when some 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes upon Israel’s founding in 1948.
We begin today’s show with the Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Bartov is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
Democracy Now!'s Juan González and I spoke to professor Omer Bartov on Wednesday from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I began by asking him to talk about his own experience serving as an Israeli soldier in the northern Sinai in the 1970s and how it's impacted his view on what’s going on today.
OMER BARTOV: I was a soldier in the IDF, in the Israeli Defense Forces, between 1973 and 1976. And so, as a young soldier, the first thing that I experienced was the trauma, the huge surprise of the Arab — the Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel on October 6th, 1973. And I should say that when the Hamas attack on Israel occurred on the 7th of October, 2023, 50 years and a day later, that was quite traumatic, I think, for myself and many members of my generation. And we can talk further about why it was so traumatic.
But in the course of my service, I also served in the northern Sinai, and the command post that I belonged to was in Gaza. And so I would go quite often to Gaza, which was then — had a population of about 350,000, was poor, hopeless and congested. And since then, of course, now we have between two and two-and-a-half million people living in Gaza, which is much poorer, much more congested and whose population is much more desperate, and has been desperate for a long time, considering that it’s been under Israeli siege now for 16 years. So, for me, the lack of progress for all those years in somehow resolving this terrible humanitarian problem is very personal.
And I should add one thing. I was usually not employed as a soldier in occupation duties, but there was a time that I was. And I have very distinct recollection of that, leading my platoon through an Egyptian city at the time, with people looking at us from behind the windows, obviously not wanting us to be there, obviously afraid of us, and us walking on the street obviously feeling uncomfortable being where we are and being somewhat afraid of what might happen to us as we were marching then. That sort of sense of what being an occupation soldier means stayed with me all those years, and it’s always made me — has been one of the reasons, a sort of more personal rather than political or analytical reason, why I’ve always thought that it’s time to end this occupation, for which we called in that August 4th petition, two months before the Hamas attack on Israel.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering — we hear often now these days, especially in conflicts such as these, the terms “crime against humanity,” “war crime,” “genocide.” Most people don’t understand the distinction. And for some of us, war itself is a crime, and saying a “war crime” is almost redundant. But I’m wondering if you could give us more of a guidance or sense of the distinction between these terms.
OMER BARTOV: Yes. So, I think that’s a really important question, because people, as you say, just use these terms without really thinking what they mean. And because genocide is perceived as the worst crime, then any atrocity that happens, anything that people think deserves some sort of extreme title, they call genocide.
So, there are actually U.N. resolutions on war crimes and on genocide, and they define them clearly. Now, one can dispute those definitions, but those are the definitions under international law. The convention, the U.N. Convention on Genocide, so, 1948, defines it as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. And that’s a very important definition, because it calls for two things. It calls, first of all, for intention — you have to show that the killing is intentional, is not just part of war, part of violence, but is intentional — and, second, that the intention is to destroy that group, defined as such by the perpetrator as such. That is, it’s not the killing of individuals; it’s the killing of individuals as members of a particular group.
That’s very different from war crimes, because war crimes are violations of the laws and customs of war against both combatants and noncombatants, civilians. And crimes against humanity has to do with extermination or other mass crimes against any civilian population. You do not have to show intent, and it does not have to happen at a time of war. So, it is important to distinguish between these these three categories.
And I would add to it a third, which has a definition, although there is no resolution on it, which is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a population from a particular territory, usually because you want that territory, and you don’t want the people living on it to stay on it. Genocide is the attempt to kill a particular group, wherever it is. But there is a connection between the two, because often ethnic cleansing becomes genocide. That happened, in fact, in the Armenian genocide in World War I, and it happened, in fact, also in the Holocaust, which began as an attempt to remove Jews from particular territories, and then, when the Germans felt there was no place to move them to, they decided to murder them en masse. So, if we think about these different categories, we can distinguish between what we see on the ground and how we feel about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your sense of what is happening in terms of these categories right now in Gaza?
OMER BARTOV: So, my sense is the following. Israeli political leaders and military leaders have made very startling and frightening statements about Gaza, speaking about flattening Gaza, speaking about Hamas, but by sort of extending it also, by extension, also Gazans, in general, as human animals, speaking about moving the entire population of Gaza out of Gaza. That is a clear intention of ethnic cleansing. So, those statements show intent. And that’s a genocidal intent, which is often very difficult to prove in genocide. People who carry out genocide don’t always want to say that they’re doing it.
The second is: What are they actually doing there? And military leaders on the ground keep saying that what they’re trying to do is to hit Hamas targets, that Hamas often — and I think that’s often true — places its own headquarters, rockets and so forth under hospitals, inside mosques, playgrounds, schools and so forth. So the military claim that they’re trying to hit Hamas and not the population, but, unfortunately, the population is also getting killed. In that sense, there is clearly disproportionate killing of civilians. That is, the numbers, as you quoted earlier, are now estimated to be over 10,000. And even if we don’t believe the numbers given out by Hamas, they’re still in the many thousands. They may even be more, because many bodies are probably buried under the debris. And of those, at least 4,000 are children. And one has to remember that half of the population of Gaza is under 18 years old. So, to me, there is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity.
Whether at the moment this is genocide, my own sense is that it is not genocide at the moment, because there is still no clear indication of an attempt to destroy the entire population, which would be genocide, but that we are very close on the verge of that. And if this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing — in part, it’s already happened with the move of so many Palestinians from northern Gaza to southern Gaza — and that may become genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Omer Bartov, I was really struck by you saying it was in August that you joined other leading historians and Israeli scholars in signing this letter criticizing the, quote, “regime of apartheid.” So, that is two months before Hamas attack of October 7th. Now, often these days, after the attack that killed over 1,300 people in Israel, if you raise any kind of context, you’re accused of justifying what happened. If you, as a historian, can talk about your use of that term? I remember years ago interviewing the Nobel laureate Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. And he said, when he went to the Occupied Territories, he found it worse than apartheid in his own country of South Africa, which he survived. So, your clearly thought-out use of this term, and then a discussion about what it means to try to explain what’s happening, including using the term “occupation”?
OMER BARTOV: So, let me say, when we crafted that statement, and we worked on it quite a bit in July and finally issued it, so-called “The Elephant in the Room,” the elephant in the room that we were talking about was the occupation, and which we defined as — in the West Bank, as a regime of apartheid. Now, the reason we did it at the time was that, if you remember, there were vast protests in Israel at the time against the Netanyahu government, the Netanyahu government attempt to so-called overhaul the judicial system, which was really an attempt to undermine the rule of law in Israel to strengthen the executive and weaken the judiciary, which is the only control over the executive in Israel, with the goal of extending the occupation regime in the West Bank and, finally, of annexing that area and making life impossible for the Palestinian population there. There are over half a million Jewish settlers there and somewhere around 3 million Palestinians living there.
Now, what do we mean by “apartheid”? First of all, people tend to think of apartheid as what happened in South Africa. And the term comes from there. But there is, in fact, a U.N. resolution on apartheid that defines what apartheid is. And curiously, all the elements that are mentioned in that resolution exist also in the West Bank, the most important of which is that you have two populations in the West Bank, Jews and Palestinians. The Jews, the settlers, are extraterritorial Israeli citizens. They live under Israeli law, or some kind of figment that creates them as living under Israeli law. They can vote to the Israeli parliament. They enjoy all the rights of democracy the Jews in Israel enjoy. The Palestinians live — the Palestinians there live under a completely different set of laws, which gives them almost no rights at all. That is, they live under a military regime. They are tried before military courts, where the judges are lawyers on reserve service, Israeli lawyers on reserve service. One can detain them endlessly in prison. And so, these are two groups that live under totally different laws. They’re also separated from each other by a set of roads, roadblocks, checkposts, that make life increasingly difficult for Palestinians and make life much better for the Jewish population there. So, from that point of view, there’s clearly an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
And that has, in many ways, filtered into Israel. That is, generation after generation of young Israeli men and women are called up and go to serve as policemen in the West Bank in military uniform. Most of what they do is police the population. And that has a corrupting impact on more and more generations of Israelis, who get used to the idea that they can break into homes at 4:00 in the morning, arrest whoever they like. And so, that effect is not only that we have an apartheid regime, but we have a corruption of democracy in Israel itself, which ultimately resulted in this attempt by Netanyahu’s regime to change the very system of democracy in Israel, which was really only for Jews in the first place.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, I’m wondering if you — you mentioned previously the acquiescence or the refusal to confront the problem in general Israeli society of the occupation? Why do you think that is, especially given the fact that Israel in its early years had a very vibrant labor, socialist and humanitarian movement among those who who created the state of Israel? What has happened?
OMER BARTOV: Well, I would say, I mean, the simple answer is that power corrupts, and that Israel has suffered for years from a kind of euphoria of power. And when I talked about the sort of link between what happened in 1973 and what happened in 2023, it is exactly that — that is, that Israel came to believe that it’s strong enough to be able to do what it likes, and it does not need to have any political compromise, which means territorial compromise. The War of 1973 could have been avoided, had Israel agreed to negotiate with Anwar Sadat at the time, the president of Egypt — which it did, eventually, after the war — and return the Sinai Peninsula and receive peace in return. But 3,000 Israeli soldiers were killed, some of whom were my classmates. And the same happened now. That is, Israel refused to talk about any territorial compromise and believed that Hamas can lob a few rockets here and there, but, by and large, it’s not a problem for it, and therefore, there’s no need to think of any territorial compromise.
And this, you know, became the sense in the large sectors of the Israeli public. People could live in Tel Aviv, have a good time, have a good life. And 20 miles to their east, there was an apartheid regime, but it really had very little to do with them. And the curious thing was — and this is what we were trying to point out in August — was that the people who were protesting, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, quite remarkably, went out to the streets every Saturday to protest against the erosion of democracy in Israel, refused to talk about the occupation. And when I was there protesting against that, we were marginalized. We were pushed to the side. And people said, “Well, occupation, that’s a kind of — that’s a difficult term. You know, not everybody agrees on that. Let’s not talk about it now. It will divert attention,” whereas, in fact, it was the core of the very attempt to change the rules of the game in Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll return to our interview with Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Back in 20 seconds.
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“From the River to the Sea”: Omer Bartov on Contested Slogan & Why Two-State Solution Is Not Viable
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov says the two-state solution is dead after decades of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, making the creation of an independent Palestinian state all but impossible. He says a one-state solution — a single democratic state for all Jewish Israelis and Palestinians — is also unlikely to work given the competing national visions of the two communities. “The only solution is a confederation,” says Bartov, describing a scenario in which two states would be closely intertwined and interdependent. He also discusses the phrase “from the river to the sea,” used by both Israelis and Palestinians to refer to the land.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
We return to Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on genocide. He spoke to us on Wednesday, one day after the House voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, for her criticism of Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bartov, you are a professor at Brown University in Providence. You’re in Cambridge right now. And I wanted to ask you about the dissent on college campuses and how they’re being dealt with. In Cambridge, at Harvard, you know about the students who were protesting on behalf of Palestinian rights. A truck carries around their faces, and above their faces, it says, “antisemite.” And on television, you’ll see pieces on antisemitism, which is very real in the world, for example, the burning of the Austrian cemetery in Vienna and many other situations. But they will be blended together — this is on the mainstream networks — with images of people protesting, holding a Palestinian flag. Can you talk about what’s happening on college campuses and people fearing that their concern for justice is being translated as antisemitism and cause for them to be blacklisted?
OMER BARTOV: So, look, this is a very complex issue, I agree. I think part of it is, frankly, ignorance about the reality on the ground in Israel-Palestine. And that has to do, obviously, not with your show, but with much of how the mainstream media in the United States is presenting things. But also, young people, students can find other sources of information to better know what is happening on the ground. So, generally, I think there’s a little bit of an issue of information.
Antisemitism is real, as you say, and has been growing, and is a not just lamentable, but frightening phenomenon. And obviously, I have no sympathy with it. But there is, and there has been for a long time, a tendency to label any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the policies of any particular government, let alone criticism of Israel as a state as such, as antisemitism. And that is a policy of the right wing in Israel, and that’s a policy of the right wing in this country, and it has nothing to do with the truth. One can be a Zionist or a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, and not be antisemitic. One can be, again, Zionist, but against particular Israeli policies. I very strongly support the existence of the state of Israel, and I’m highly critical of its policies, and some people would call me a self-hating Jew. But that is nonsense. That has to do with criticism of policies that not only function as oppression of Palestinians over a very long period of time, 56 years of occupation of Palestinians, a refusal by the Israeli government to ever talk about what happened in 1948, so this kind of shutting up the entire conversation, and at the same time a belief that Jews, like other nations, have a right of self-determination. So we have to separate the two.
I think that at the moment, in the demonstrations, there is a sort of heightening of passions, and in part it is because of the policies of the Israeli government. I do feel that when people march in support of Palestinian lives — and I’m very much in favor of that — one does also have to remember what happened on October 7. On October 7th, over a thousand Jewish civilians, Israeli Jewish civilians — there were actually some Arabs there, too, some Bedouin, who live there, too — were butchered in the most heinous manner. And this was live-streamed. This has been deeply wounding to Israeli society. Almost every person in Israel knows people who were killed there or kidnapped, including myself. Members of my own family were either killed or are now in Gaza. And one has to recall that there are 240 people now held as hostages. And so, I think that when when protests the policies of Israel, for the sake of — and this has to do also with what Representative Tlaib said, which I completely agreed with. I thought it was a very moving speech. But I think it’s important to also stress that other side.
There has been a dehumanization of both sides. Occupation dehumanizes people. It dehumanizes the occupier, and it dehumanizes the occupied. And the way to deal with this is to talk about the political future: How do we move forward? A ceasefire would be wonderful, and I’m very much in support of it, but it won’t put an end to the violence. The end to the violence will come only as a result of a peaceful resolution of this 100-year-old conflict which has caused so much blood. That is, I think, what we should try to push the American administration to do, to change its policies, to put pressure on the Israeli government to finally relent and to begin again negotiations with the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you about the term “from the river to the sea,” which the Israeli government takes, and those who charge others with antisemitism say, it means the annihilation of the Jewish population of Israel. I’m looking at the Likud party platform of March 1977, “The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel),” which is the land of Israel. And it says, “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” That’s between the sea and the Jordan River, between the river and the sea. Can you talk about that term?
OMER BARTOV: Yes. You know, the originators of the Likud party, the Revisionist part of Zionism, under the great leader Jabotinsky, had a song that they used to sing. And the song was, “The Jordan has two banks / this one belongs to us, and the other one, too.” That is, they were not only talking actually about so-called historical Palestine, which is Mandatory Palestine of the interwar period; they were actually talking also about parts of the Jordan, of what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, as belonging to the future Jewish state.
So, when we talk about “from the Jordan to the sea,” we are talking about the territory that is now controlled by Israel. In that territory, there are now 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians — 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, 3 million Palestinians who are in the West Bank, and two to two-and-a-half million Palestinians — most of the population of Gaza are refugees in Gaza. So it’s 7 million versus 7 million.
To talk about a Palestinian state or a Jewish state between the Jordan and the sea, the question, of course, arises: So, what happened to the — what will happen to the other half? That is really the question. If one talks about a Palestinian state that refuses to recognize the Jewish right of self-determination — that is, of the right of Jews to have a state of their own — the question is: What will happen to the Jews there? Would they go back to Europe, as some people say, whatever that actually means? And if you have a state the way the Israeli right, the Likud party, and now the much more radical, really Jewish supremacist elements in Netanyahu’s government, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, these people who sort of trace their roots back to Rabbi Kahane, who are really Nazis — if you think — if you ask yourself, “What do they mean?” they want to create a Jewish state that does not have Palestinians in it, nor Arabs in it. And the policy has been consistently to make life as unbearable for the Palestinians there, so that either they will finally move out, which they have no intention of doing, or to use an emergency situation, such as exists right now, under the cover of which they could be ethnically cleansed. And that’s a major worry now among Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, who are worried about a second Nakba, a second expulsion of Palestinians after 1948, something that has been mentioned by a number of Israeli politicians, and, of course, a major worry in the West Bank and in Gaza.
So, what we need to think of is not the term “from the Jordan to the sea,” which is the territory that Israel now controls, but how does that territory get to be shared by these two groups in ways that do not include oppression, lack of any rights, lack of equality, and certainly does not include violence and expulsion.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Omer Bartov, the issue of a two-state solution or a one-state solution, if you could take that on in a nutshell?
OMER BARTOV: Yeah. So, you know, I used to be a strong supporter of the two-state solution. And I gradually realized that this was a sort of fig leaf of the Israeli left, while the country kept settling the West Bank and making it impossible to create an independent Palestinian state there. And we kept saying, “Well, but at the end, there will be a two-state solution.” So, the traditional two-state solution, to my mind, is no longer viable. ’
So what is viable? And I think — and I belong to a group of people who have been talking about it for quite a while — that the only solution is a confederation, which would mean that there would be two states. There would be a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. They both would have full sovereignty. And they would be along more or less the borders of 1967, the Green Line, so-called, but they will make a distinction between residency and citizenship, so that people, say, Jews who live in a Palestinian state, could remain Israeli citizens, who have rights of residency in a Palestinian state, but have to then adhere to all the laws, rules and regulations of that Palestinian state. And Palestinians who live, say, in Nablus and would like to live in Haifa, like a French man from Paris who would like to live in Berlin, could move to Haifa, and they could have rights of residency, but they’d have to conform to all the rules and regulations of the Israeli state, but they would vote for — to a Palestinian parliament. And Jerusalem would be the joint capital of both. And above that, there would be institutions that will take care of the mutual affairs of these two states, which are very tightly woven together now by the infrastructure, electricity, water and so forth. It’s really impossible to cut them apart. That is — right now, of course, sounds like a pipe dream. But I think that in the long run, that is probably the only viable solution.
And I’ll add one last thing to that, which is very important both to Jews and Palestinians, which is that both states would have the right of return. The Jews could say, as they say now, that Jews who want to become Israeli citizens, wherever they live, can come. And Palestinians in the Palestinian state could say all Palestinian refugees who would like to come back to Palestine could come and become Palestinian citizens, and, under certain rules, could also move to the Israeli part of so-called Mandatory Palestine as residents.
AMY GOODMAN: And why not simply a one-state solution?
OMER BARTOV: I think a one-state solution is something that neither one side nor the other wants, because the Palestinians, quite rightly, want the right of self-determination, want to have their own state, as do the Jews. And both sides are afraid that the other side would be more powerful. Obviously, right now, under current conditions, the state of Israel is much more powerful militarily, economically than the Palestinian part of the land. And so, in that sense, a one-state solution would actually perpetuate Jewish supremacy in the whole country.
AMY GOODMAN: Omer Bartov is professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Israeli American scholar is one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. He recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza.
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Palestinian Groups Ask ICC to Arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu for War Crimes & Genocide in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
November 10, 2023
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/10 ... transcript
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about a new effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza, where Israel’s monthlong air and ground assault has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. On Wednesday, three Palestinian rights groups filed a lawsuit with the international body, urging it to investigate Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid. The petition also calls for arrest warrants to be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. International inaction against Israeli aggression is part of “a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades,” as well as the “absolute double standard” applied to war crimes committed against people of the Global South, says Erakat, who was part of a team of academics and activists who came together to support the ICC lawsuit. “This is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Three Palestinian human rights groups have filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court calling on the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders for genocide, incitement to genocide, and the crime of apartheid. The three groups — Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — told the court that Israel’s suffocating siege of Gaza and the indiscriminate attacks on densely populated civilian areas amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The lawsuit also seeks the arrest of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant. This comes as the death toll in Gaza is nearing 11,000, according to Palestinian health officials.
We’re joined now by Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erekat, associate professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, part of the Palestinian team of academics, intellectuals and activists who helped bring the ICC lawsuit. She’s joining us from Philadelphia.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noura. If you can explain what this lawsuit is all about?
NOURA ERAKAT: Absolutely. This lawsuit comes as a collective effort on behalf of the three organizations you mentioned — Al-Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights — who are on the ground and documenting the ongoing atrocities. It’s one of a myriad of efforts that have been filed before the International Criminal Court. For example, very recently, Reporters Without Borders have also submitted a petition calling on the ICC to investigate the now killing of 34 journalists, several of them while they were working during this onslaught.
The one thing that we want to highlight as the ad hoc team is that this is not merely a lawsuit against Israeli individuals as stipulated by the petition, which it very much is, but it is also holding on trial the International Criminal Court, the international criminal law, international legal institutions as a whole, which have demonstrated an absolute double standard when it comes to the Global South. We’ve seen this in the tenure of the ICC, which, since its establishment, has opened over two dozen cases, all of them on the African continent. All those who have been indicted, with the exception of Slobodan Milošević, have been Arab and African individuals, heads of state, officials.
And so, here we are pushing the ICC to either hold Israel to account in what is an ongoing genocide, where the leaders of it have told us very much that they have the specific intent to destroy a Palestinian people, in whole or in part, and demonstrated the specific underlying acts in order to effectuate it, or demonstrate for us that this is actually a moment where the ICC demonstrates that it’s not effectuate, that it’s not effective, that it is actually part of punishing a Global South and letting Western countries move forward with impunity.
AMY GOODMAN: We spoke to Raji Sourani, the world-renowned human rights attorney in Gaza, in Gaza City, in a heartbreaking plea from Raji, who remained in northern Gaza, after his house was bombed. He particularly held Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor of the ICC — called him out, saying when Russia attacked the children of Ukraine, the ICC immediately opened war crimes investigations, and then raised the issue of where is he on Israel and Palestine. If you can address this and also talk about an ICC case that has already been opened, an official investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank back in 2021, in West Bank, in Gaza and East Jerusalem?
NOURA ERAKAT: Raji is absolutely right. Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the ICC, opened the investigation within a week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, immediately, without question. In this case, it took the prosecutor, Karim Khan, three weeks to travel to Rafah in order to investigate what was in the first week an evident example of genocidal intent, mass killings, the destruction of those conditions of life that would reduce the ability of Palestinians to survive.
In this situation, what we see is not merely a repetition of history, but a continuation of colonial legacies, and one that led to the failure of the League of Nations, frankly, in the aftermath of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, where a fascist Italy, led by Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. And in that moment, Ethiopia, which was a member state of the League of Nations — and rather than hold Italy to account, which was dropping indiscriminate chemical weapons on the Ethiopian people, instead, the Red Cross decried the Ethiopians as being too savage to follow the laws of war. Media were running headlines that Ethiopians were hiding and sheltering in hospital, using them as human shields. And world powers failed to impose sufficient sanctions on Italy in this moment. And this demonstrated the limits of these international institutions and led to the failure of the League of Nations.
In a similar — we are in a similar moment right now. These international institutions need to act. And instead we’re seeing a stalemate, and we’re seeing international leaders, like led by the United States, as well as the U.K., as well as France, who are basically providing a green light to Israel to commit genocide, to commit these atrocities.
This is not out of nowhere. Everything started before October 7th. And Israel — this is a moment where Israel has not been held to account. It is a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades. International organizations have said that Israel is practicing the crime against humanity of apartheid. There was a near consensus between 2020 and 2021. And yet, rather than impose sanctions in that moment, rather than mobilize international mechanisms and institutions in order to dismantle apartheid, we saw the United States celebrate and normalize Israeli apartheid, and we saw them continuing to normalize relations with other Arab regimes. It was this fundamental failure that has led us to this moment and an ongoing crisis of a lack of accountability, of an imposition of two types of law — one for the Global North, one for the Global South. This is a hypocrisy on the part of Western governments and demonstrates that there is no such thing as Western universalism, but instead continues to be two sets of laws on two sets of people.
And what’s wonderful, the only thing that provides us hope, is that a mass, mass movement of individuals, peoples, communities have risen up against their governments also to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Western democracy. Even in the United States, consider that 66% of Americans have demanded a ceasefire. Eighty percent (80%) of registered Democrats have demanded a ceasefire. And yet, only 19 out of 535 members of Congress have endorsed it. Consider that that same Congress censured the only Palestinian American representative in government, at the very moment that she represents the majority. So this is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does the tens of thousands of Palestinians being forced south right now — we just have 20 seconds — fit into your charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity?
NOURA ERAKAT: What we’re seeing is an ongoing Nakba of the Palestinians, who are with their hands up and on their feet with white handkerchiefs in order not to be killed. This is an ethnic cleansing of the north of Gaza. It’s a continuation of the Nakba to take Palestinian land without Palestinian people. It is a crime against humanity and fits in a larger framework of genocidal warfare.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, associate professor at Rutgers University, we thank you so much. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.