Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I just want the bombing to stop. Billions of us around the world just want to the bombing to stop. But last night, in Rafah, Israel dropped countless US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs — hideously powerful weapons designed to pierce otherwise impenetrable military targets — on a displaced Palestinian civilian population, living in flimsy makeshift tents in what they were told was a “safe zone,” burning dozens of them alive, including children who were decapitated as their bodies burned.

For seven and a half months, a moral sickness has engulfed the State of Israel, also infecting parliaments and the mainstream media throughout most of the western world, as shrill, bullying and sometime gleeful proponents of genocide have sought to compel us, sometimes through violence, and often through intimidation, not only to turn a blind eye to the murder of 40,000 civilians in the Gaza Strip — killed with bombs of such intensity that they shouldn’t even exist, let alone be dropped onto packed civilian neighbourhoods day after day after day — but to endorse it, to support it as enthusiastically as they do.

For seven and a half months, those of us living in the majority of the countries of the west (or the Global North), have been ordered to believe that, despite the openly genocidal comments that have been regularly and insistently made by Israel’s leaders since the deadly attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, (in which 1,139 people were killed), Israel’s response, in which most of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and 10,000 decomposing corpses are buried under the rubble, is not a genocide, but simply Israel exercising its “right to defend itself”, to “eliminate Hamas”, and to free the hostages seized by Hamas and other militants on October 7.

For seven and half months, we have been told that “this began on October 7”, in a blatant and frankly sickening effort to erase 76 years of oppression of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel, oppression which began in earnest with the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered and 750,000 permanently exiled from their homes, but which actually began decades before, via the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government, then ruling Palestine as a Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, announced its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, and encouraged the migration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

For seven and half months, we have been told that, since this initial dispossession, and the painful subsequent events of 1967, when Israel seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, we must forget that there is a well-documented history of the Palestinian exiles, whose descendants still live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, being prevented from returning home, of Palestinians within Israel being treated as second-class citizens, and of those in the Occupied Territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (recognized as such by the United Nations) being subjected to a brutal system of apartheid, imprisoned in vast numbers in Israel’s lawless and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians, and frequently murdered with complete impunity.

In the 21st century, the oppression has only increased, with the West Bank fractured by a vast dividing wall and checkpoints, and eroded by huge numbers of illegal Israeli settlements, and with the Gaza Strip transformed into an “open air prison” in 2007, after Israel objected to Hamas taking power. Since then, on those occasions when Palestinian militants have sought to resist the occupation, Israel has responded with ferocious bombing raids, which it has described, with blunt dehumanization, as “mowing the lawn.” The most savage of these assaults, in 2014, lasted for seven weeks, and left 2,251 Palestinians dead, including 1,462 civilians, but nothing that has happened previously can compare to the devastation this time around.

Despite this, for seven and a half months, our silence and complicity has been demanded, as one Palestinian child is murdered every 20 minutes, and one Palestinian woman is murdered every half-an-hour, their bodies torn to shreds by 2,000-pound bombs, crushed or decapitated, or hurled through the air like broken dolls.

For seven and a half months, our silence and complicity has been demanded as the Gaza Strip’s hospitals have been systematically attacked, occupied and shut down by Israel, leaving, in their wake, as they depart with captive doctors, to be imprisoned, interrogated and sometimes murdered in Israel’s uniquely brutal and lawless prisons for Palestinians, mass graves of executed civilians and medical workers.

For seven and a half months, our silence and complicity has been demanded as schools and universities, courts, police stations, restaurants, cafes, shops, water supply plants, sewage plants — everything needed to sustain life — have been erased, along with those who sustained civil society, culture and education — from professors, teachers, artists and poets to taxi drivers, chefs and bakers. More doctors and medical personnel, more aid workers and more journalists (often deliberately targeted, and sometimes murdered with their entire families) have been killed than in any other conflicts since records began.

For seven and a half months, our silence and complicity has been demanded as the “complete siege” of an already trapped population, deliberately made reliant for survival on aid deliveries from outside, has been imposed, leading to an acute shortage of medical supplies, severe malnutrition, and increasing starvation, very evidently used deliberately as a weapon of war.

For seven and a half months, our silence and complicity has been demanded as Israel has lied and lied and lied — not only about how this “began on October 7”, but also via definitively debunked lies about beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7; about Hamas command centres being located beneath hospitals; about claiming to target Hamas leaders while actually destroying entire residential areas; about telling Palestinians to evacuate their homes and to proceed to “safe areas,” when, without exception, those “safe areas” have subsequently been bombed; about seizing, stripping, blindfolding and disappearing civilians described as Hamas militants, when they have been specifically identified by observers as civilians, doctors and aid workers; about their army being “the most moral army in the world”, when countless numbers of Israeli soldiers have filmed themselves announcing genocidal intent, violating people’s homes and shops, and blowing up evacuated residential blocks and civic buildings for “fun.” The list of lies is so voluminous that we could spend the rest of their lives compiling them, and I’m glad to note that some observers of this well-chronicled genocide have been doing just that.

From the beginning, power brokers in the region — primarily Qatar and Egypt — have tried to negotiate a ceasefire, as happened with previous examples of Israel “mowing the lawn.” At the end of November, a week-long “pause” led to the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but efforts to subsequently establish a more durable ceasefire, or even an end to hostilities have all failed, because, fundamentally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, doesn’t want to stop killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

Behind him, propping up his coalition government — the most far-right in Israeli history — two particular ministers, the genocidal settlers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, dream of colonizing the Gaza Strip, and expelling all the Palestinians. They talk of “encouraging voluntary emigration”, but in fact they, like Netanyahu, have no real aim beyond endless genocide. They are so caught up in their fevered messianic dreams of their own importance that they have little, if any recognition that no country is going to accept even a fraction of 2.3 million Palestinian refugees, either because they refuse to be complicit in enforced displacement, or, less generously, because their countries have become so riddled with racism over the last decade in particular that they are unwilling to take in any refugees, and especially not those who have been tarred by those who seek to expel them as terrorists and “human animals.”

While there are, finally, signs within Israel’s government of friction between Netanyahu and the two ministers who, with him, make up the post-October 7 war cabinet — Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, who seems to be tiring of sending soldiers to die in endless cycles of pointless destruction with no endgame in sight, and Benny Gantz, who is threatening to quit the government if Netanyahu doesn’t come up with a plan for Gaza’s post-war governance within three weeks — nothing seems to be able to stop the bombs from dropping, relentlessly, on the broken, devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip.

The limits of accountability: the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice

Legally, efforts to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire have been thwarted in the most significant global forum — the UN Security Council — where the US holds a veto as one of five permanent Security Council members (the others being China, France, Russia and the UK). After exercising its veto for months, the US finally abstained on a resolution on March 25, which was passed by the 14 other members, “demanding an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties, leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire.”

Typically, however, Israel ignored the resolution, as it has with almost all resolutions passed by the UN since its founding 76 years ago, made by both the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly. According to a report in December 2023, between 1948 and 2002 Israel ignored 31 UN Security Council resolutions, with a further 45 resolutions blocked by the US using its veto, as of December 2023.

With the UN Security Council made effectively powerless to deal with Israel’s relentless crimes against the Palestinians because of the US veto, which would also prevent any efforts to order UN military intervention to prevent violence against the Palestinians, hopes for restraining Israel have largely focused on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), one of the six organs of the UN, which rules on disputes between member states.

On January 26, the ICJ, having accepted a genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa, issued provisional measures in which the 15 judges, either unanimously, or via an overwhelming majority, ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II” of the 1948 Genocide Convention; namely, “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” via “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The ICJ also ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip,” with specific reference to statements of genocidal intent made by Israel’s leaders since October 7, and to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel ignored the court’s ruling, of course, as the slaughter of Palestinian civilians continued, and, with breathtaking cynicism, the Israeli government directly contravened the requirement to resume humanitarian aid by spreading unfounded lies about a handful of workers with UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), the primary aid agency for Palestinians, being involved with Hamas, in response to which major western donor countries immediately suspended funding.

In March, South Africa returned to the ICJ to seek additional provisional measures, and on March 28 the ICJ largely reiterated the demands it made in January, ordering Israel, “in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation,” to “take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary.”

The court also ordered Israel to “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group” under the Genocide Convention, “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.”

As Israel once more ignored the provisional measures, compounding its mounting body of crimes by conducting military operations in Rafah, in southern Gaza — the only city that had not yet been destroyed by carpet bombing, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had sought refuge after previously being ordered to evacuate from northern and central Gaza — and by blocking all deliveries of aid via the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, South Africa returned to the ICJ once more, and on Friday, May 24, the court issued its most strongly worded ruling to date.

Taking into account “the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate,” the court ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” to “open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance,” and to “take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide.”

Noticeably, this was the first time that the court specifically ordered Israel to halt its military actions (at least in Rafah), but while Israel responded with its by now typical mixture of hysteria, victimhood and undiluted aggression, bombing and incinerating civilians in Rafah, as noted at the start of this article, Netanyahu and his ministers can no longer ignore the fact that a legal noose is tightening around their necks, not just via the ICJ, but also via the International Criminal Court (the ICC).

The unprecedented intervention of the International Criminal Court

Established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression, the International Criminal Court (ICC) had been notably silent on Israel’s crimes throughout its 22-year existence, but surprised everyone on May 20 when the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, issued “applications for arrest warrants in the situation in the State of Palestine” against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismail Haniyeh.

As he stated, with regard to Netanyahu and Gallant, “On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for  the following war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 October 2023”; namely, four war crimes — “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” “wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health, or cruel treatment,” “wilful killing or murder” and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population” — and three crimes against humanity — “extermination and/or murder, including in the context of deaths caused by starvation,” “persecution” and “other inhumane acts.”

It would be impossible to overestimate the significance of the ICC prosecutor’s statement, as, for the first time in 76 years of US-backed impunity, significant Israeli figures — the Prime Minister and the defence minister — are on the verge of finally being held accountable for their crimes.

The reason this is so groundbreaking and unprecedented is because, fundamentally, it is testing the basis of international humanitarian law, established in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, like never before.

As Karim Khan explained in an interview with CNN’S Christiane Amanpour on the day his statement was issued, a “senior leader” (of an unidentified western country) told him “this court is built for Africa and thugs like Putin.” Khan added that other elected leaders, when speaking to him, had also been “very blunt” about their perceptions of what the court’s mandate should be.

Khan’s account exposes an unpalatable, but essential truth; that, fundamentally, international humanitarian law contained a dangerous bias at its founding, as is evident from the veto wielded in the UN Security Council by the Second World War’s ‘victors’ — the US, the UK, France, and, unfortunately for the west’s notions of its own supremacy, Russia and China.

In the decades since, it has become apparent that the countries that regard themselves as being above the law also include all the other countries of western Europe (including a rehabilitated Germany), as well as Canada and Australia, none of whom would expect that their own crimes would ever be investigated or punished.

And as we’re seeing now, the State of Israel — whose entire existence darkly shadows the entire history of the UN with its own relentless impunity — has also always been regarded as a member of this exclusive club of European colonialists and European settler colonial projects, because, essentially, Israel is regarded by the colonial club as the last ‘great’ European settler colonial project.

Israel’s sudden accountability not only finally and deservedly threatens its own impunity; it also, by extension, threatens, for the first time, those who have uncritically supported it for the last 76 years; primarily, of course, the US, but also, to varying degrees, most of the other countries of the exclusive colonial club.

The coming collapse of Zionism and its supporters

The only glimmer of hope, and it really is potentially world-changing, even if it can’t immediately stop the bombs from falling, is that Israel’s genocidal fury — and the west’s still largely unconditional support for it — is so horrendous that Israel’s increasing isolation as a pariah state will not only lead to its own collapse, but also to that of the cosy colonial club that has sustained it since its founding.

For seven and a half months, what Israel — and the US, as its primary backer and supporter — has been showing the world is a 21st century, live-streamed genocide of such inhumanity, conducted with such self-righteous enthusiasm on the part of Israel (while still portraying itself as the endless victim), that it has revealed a sickening truth about the colonial mentality that was supposed to have been consigned to the history books, where it could be safely re-packaged as fundamentally benevolent. However, there is, to be blunt, absolutely no way that this particularly abominable genie of wilful, gleeful genocide can be forced back into the bottle of feigned decency.

From the very first week of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, astute commentators remarked on how “the mask has fallen,” a reference to the west’s enthusiasm for supporting what, from the beginning, was graphically revealed to be Israel’s boundless vengeance on the Palestinians, at least as horrendous, if not more so, than the original Nakba (the “catastrophe”) of 1948.

From the beginning, this genocide has been undertaken on the basis of a deep-seated racism of such startling ferocity that it has illuminated the hidden truths of the west’s colonial histories — how the indigenous people who dared to resist their colonization were not only thoroughly dehumanized, but were also portrayed as sub-human monsters of unparalleled depravity to justify their erasure.

Hence the fabricated stories of 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7 that lit the spark of hysteria driving this genocide, and that continue to drive the three parties most responsible for pursuing it and supporting it — Israelis themselves, vocal and often powerful members of the Jewish diaspora, and the mostly white leaders of the supportive countries of the west, who, in some cases, are positively revelling in the fact that offering unconditional support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” has allowed them to support the extermination of an entire people just like their ancestors did in the glory days of imperial, colonial power.

This is what those billions of people around the world who are opposed to Israel’s genocide mean when they note that “the mask has fallen”, and this is why the revulsion that so many people feel will not be quelled until the bombs stop falling, and those responsible, if not facing prosecution, are banished from political power forever.

Already, the disconnect between the myopic bloodthirsty obsession of people like Joe Biden — who violently clings to lies about seeing non-existent photos of beheaded babies on October 7, sclerotically fuelling his endless support for Israel — and the people who, in their millions, will not be instructed to accept a genocide means that Biden may well lose the forthcoming Presidential Election, and in the UK it is, hopefully, not too far-fetched to say that Keir Starmer’s unconditional support for Israel is one of the main reasons that he may fail to secure an absolute majority over the sinking Tories in the forthcoming General Election on July 4.

For all of this to be taking place in defence of a foreign country raises truly uncomfortable questions about the extent to which the leaders of the US, the UK and other unconditionally supportive countries like Germany are working for Israel, rather than their own countries, and it doesn’t take much investigation to realize that these leaders — though evidently wedded to Zionism, and perhaps, as with Biden, because it revives their own malignant celebration of the glory days of their own rampant colonial slaughter — have also been bought, a glaring example of how so much of western politics actually involves politicians being nothing more than prostitutes.

AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), founded in 1963, is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the US, and the largest of numerous pro-Israel lobbying groups donating millions to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, either as a reward for their heroic understanding that the US works for Israel, or to buy their compliance, and in the UK Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel also wield extraordinary power over politicians of both the major parties.

The expulsion of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a startling example of their power and influence in the UK, as they helped to have him removed from power on fake charges of anti-semitism that have paved the way for subsequent efforts, throughout the whole of the west, to force governments, the media and key institutions to comply with their unacceptable edict that criticizing the actions of the State of Israel is anti-semitic.

As with the fossil fuel companies, who also wield extraordinary power over pliable politicians, these lobbying entities must collapse along with the corrupt politicians they support. It won’t be easy, but there is, simply, no way that enforced compliance with a genocide will persuade untold millions of people to vote for either of two evils (with genocide, there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils).

In the UK, as I noted, this will hopefully lead to a hung parliament, but in the US it is, of course, genuinely disturbing to think that Donald Trump might be returned to power. There are countless reasons to fear this, but one, which few people seem to want to pay attention to, is that, although Republican lawmakers have been as comprehensively bought as their Democratic counterparts, much of their base, while evidently being Islamophobic, and thoroughly racist in general, are no supporters of Jewish people either.

Like the boy who cried wolf, Israel has weaponized anti-semitism to such a deranged extent that few people are keeping an eye on the only genuinely anti-semitic people in the west: far-right white nationalists, who number more than most people want to consider, and who, while sometimes engaged in opportunistic dalliances with Zionists right now, fundamentally hate the Jews and regard them as controlling the world, keeping alive the dangerous conspiracy theories first espoused in the notorious ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in the 1920s, which were an influence on Adolf Hitler.

Without the dismantling of Zionism’s control of the west, it really isn’t too far-fetched to imagine far-right nationalists focusing once more on the Jewish “problem” as they look to “drain the swamp” under Donald Trump.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.