Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights

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Yesterday, December 10, was Human Rights Day, marking the anniversary of the proclamation and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hugely commendable and aspirational template for a better world, in which, to quote from its Preamble, “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” were recognized as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

Translated into 577 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, the UDHR is, as the UN explains, “the most translated document in the world”, and is “generally agreed to be the foundation of international human rights law”, having “inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”

These include, as I discussed in an article year ago, entitled, Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (more generally known as the Torture Convention), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Eleven years ago, a recent manifestation of the widespread flouting of the Torture Convention — the US’s post-9/11 program of kidnap and torture — was exposed via the release of the 500-page unclassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the torture program, a damning condemnation of the policy, which ought to have established, definitively, that the use of torture remains one of the greatest betrayals of our common humanity.

The day before the UDHR was adopted, on December 9, 1948, the UN also announced and adopted another founding human rights document dealing with humanity’s most grievous failures — the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (more generally known as the Genocide Convention), a specific response to the atrocities of the Second World War that was meant, above all, to ensure that those kinds of atrocities never took place again.

In a world that truly cared about universal human rights, the commitments to rein in humanity’s darkest impulses — on December 9 and 10, 1948, and on December 10, 1984 — would be marked every year with newspaper headlines and TV features, accompanied by probing questions about the extent to which the post-WWII struggles to prevent genocide and torture and to defend fundamental human rights are being observed or are being flouted, and what both the aspirations and their frequent betrayals say about us as societies.

Instead, however, 77 years on, the mainstream media shows little or no interest, politicians are largely silent, and the populations of western nations are, as a result, for the most part oblivious. and the days marked to commemorate these visionary reminders of the need for constant vigilance to prevent us sinking into depravity — Human Rights Day yesterday, and the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of This Crime, on December 9 —  are largely ignored.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza: the most egregious violations of the Genocide and Torture Conventions

77 years on from the creation of the UDHR and the Genocide Convention, instead of embracing aspirations for a better world, and challenging and condemning violations of everyone’s fundamental rights, a handful of countries, led by the State of Israel, but with critical support from the US, the UK and Germany (to cite just the most prominent examples), have been deliberately engaged, over the last 26 months, in pursuing, supporting and defending what are, by any objective measure, the most egregious violations of the Genocide Convention and the Torture Convention that have been undertaken, in most of our lifetimes, by countries that claim to be beacons of moral superiority.

Anyone paying attention wasn’t surprised by Israel’s actions after the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. For nearly two decades before, after Hamas began its governance of Gaza, and Israel responded by cutting it off from the outside world, turning it into what international NGOs accurately described as the world’s largest “open-air prison”, Israel regularly engaged in what it sickeningly and euphemistically described as “mowing the lawn”, indiscriminately bombing Gaza for weeks, or months, killing civilians and destroying homes, until reluctantly agreeing to a succession of ceasefires.

Nor, of course, was that the beginning of Israel’s fundamental violations of the Palestinians’ human rights. For almost its entire history, the UN has been dogged by Israel’s uniquely arrogant refusals to be bound by international humanitarian law — with its persistent violations including its illegal occupation, since 1967, of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, its violent and discriminatory system of apartheid, its persistent and unjustifiable cold-blooded murder of Palestinian civilians, and its brutal and almost entirely lawless prisons, specifically for Palestinians, marked by arbitrary detention, abusive conditions, and absolutely none of the legal protections afforded to Israelis.

On torture, it is worth reflecting, just after the 11th anniversary of the publication of 500 pages of devastating revelations about the CIA and the US government in the Senate torture report, that Israel’s crimes dwarf those of the US in the “war on terror”, and that Israel also refuses to investigate itself or to abide by the damning conclusions of international and domestic investigations into the regime of systemic torture, abuse and murder that has been implemented in its prisons for Palestinians since October 7, 2023 under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right fanatic who is the Minister of National Security in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.

The official condemnations include a report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, in October last year, which I discussed in an article entitled, UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians, a devastating report, Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps, by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and the fall-out from a rape scandal at Sde Teiman prison, which I covered in depth in a recent article, “More Horrific Than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”: The Unsalvageable Depravity of Israel’s Prisons for Palestinians.

Over the last 26 months, however, as with the increased and systemic violence throughout its prisons for Palestinians, the scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza has been unprecedented — nothing less than a nakedly genocidal effort to erase the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and to murder as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

Everything and everyone has been a target — every home, every hospital, every school, every aspect of the infrastructure of civil society that, as the Genocide Convention recognizes as a hallmark of genocidal intent, constitutes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Civilians — women, children and men with no involvement in any military activity whatsoever — have been targeted and slaughtered, killed in such numbers that the mind is scarcely able to conceive of the extent of the annihilation — at least 70,000 people killed, mostly civilians, and another 170,000 wounded, often grievously.

And even theses figures are, it is widely recognized, a massive undercount, which will, if the genocidal strangulation of Gaza ever stops, be revealed, through secondary deaths resulting from disease, starvation, the destruction of medical facilities and the withholding of medical equipment and supplies, as a death toll running into hundreds of thousands, all fulfilling other key aspects of the Genocide Convention’s definitions of genocidal intent — “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The west’s absolute complicity in Israel’s genocide

Just as disturbing as Israel’s descent into exterminatory fascism, akin to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews in the Second World War, has been the absolute complicity of western nations in this unforgivable genocidal carnage, even as evidence has mounted to confirm that Israel is engaged in a genocide, including the grave warnings issued by the International Court of Justice in January 2024, and the recent confirmation, by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, that Israel has, unequivocally, been engaged in a genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

The US tops the list, as the major provider of weapons to Israel, both under Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

For the first 15 and a half months of the genocide, Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel, filtered through his decaying mind, led to him refusing to recognize that what he was supporting was the vilest US complicity in another nation’s sustained genocidal rampage in US history.

Under Donald Trump, meanwhile, whose unreliability is such that he can, from one moment to the next, call for the gates of hell to be opened on Hamas, or reimagine Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”, the US’s position overall has not improved. The Trump administration was deeply involved in the scandal of the joint US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which sought to replace established humanitarian aid supplies by the UN and other competent bodies with a chaotic mercenary- and military-led operation  in which desperate starving Palestinians were treated as target practice.

Trump has also imposed draconian sanctions on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC), who dared to do what the ICC was set up to do — to hold world leaders to account for horrendous crimes — when, under their chief prosecutor Karim Khan KC, arrest warrants were issued in November 2024 for Netanyahu and Israel’s then-defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity; specifically, the war crimes of “starvation as a method of warfare” and “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”, and the crimes against humanity of “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Biden and Trump also persistently undermined the UN, using their veto in the UN Security Council (which the so-called “victors” of WWII, including the UK, France, Russia and China, granted to themselves when the UN was founded, and which the US has persistently used to defend Israel) to repeatedly block calls for a ceasefire, and in August the Trump administration extended its punitive sanctions regime to Francesca Albanese.

The tenacious UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese has singlehandedly done more to expose Israel’s genocide, and the complicity of other nations, through numerous reports which confirm the importance of the UN’s Special Procedures system — consisting of independent experts empowered to investigate human rights abuses by UN member states — as the conscience of the UN.

In addition, I’ve singled out Germany and the UK as major destroyers of human rights, in defence of Israel, for a number of reasons — in Germany’s case, because it is the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, and because it has also engaged in draconian clampdowns on dissent, and, in the case of the UK, because it has persistently provided military and intelligence support for Israel, and has also enacted draconian legislation at home, proscribing a direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terrorist organization based solely on their success in disrupting the production of weapons and machinery used to facilitate the genocide by the Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems.

With almost the whole of the Labour government’s Cabinet being members of the lobbying organization Labour Friends of Israel, and with most of these individuals having received donations from Israeli lobbyists, the crisis in the UK is such that Keir Starmer and his Cabinet are, fundamentally, engaged in treason, placing the interests of Israel above those of their own country.

This is, of course, a situation that is also mirrored elsewhere, particularly in the US, where the majority of the members of Congress, both Republican and Democrats, are also traitors, putting Israel’s interests before those of the US through the power of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). This extraordinarily powerful lobbying group controls the majority of the US political establishment, buying representatives with huge donations, or rewarding them for their existing support, and also pouring vast amounts of money into campaigns to unseat representatives who don’t support Israel’s control of the US.

Their baleful influence also extends to influencing legislation (bans on the BDS Movement, for example), and, with other groups that really ought to be regarded as foreign terrorist organisations (Betar Worldwide and Canary Mission, for example), to strenuous efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian support in US universities, and to deport opponents of genocide, most notoriously in the case of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil.

Francesca Albanese’s recent report confirming that 63 countries worldwide are complicit in Israel’s genocide

However, in case anyone thinks that the three countries discussed above — the US, the UK and Germany — are the only countries that have been actively involved in Israel’s genocidal actions over the last 26 months, Francesca Albanese’s most recent report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, makes clear that, worldwide, 63 countries in total are complicit.

As her report states, in its opening paragraphs, which also include reference to Israel’s ever-increasing violence in the West Bank as part of its genocidal intent:

Without the direct participation, aid and assistance of other States, the prolonged unlawful Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, which has now escalated into a full-fledged genocide, could not have been sustained. The military, political and economic support of some Third States and the unwillingness to hold Israel accountable has enabled Israel to embed its regime of settler-colonial apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), with more colonies, home demolitions, restrictions on movement and loss and erasure of Palestinian life. Since October 2023, Israel has escalated its violence to an unprecedented level.

In light of this complicity, this report demonstrates that the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians must be understood as an internationally enabled crime. Many States, primarily Western ones, have facilitated, legitimized and eventually normalized the genocidal campaign perpetrated by Israel. By portraying Palestinian civilians as “human shields” and the broader onslaught in Gaza as a battle of civilization against barbarism, they have reproduced the Israeli distortions of international law and colonial tropes, seeking to justify their own complicity in genocide.

Focusing on the aid and assistance that Third States have provided to the illegal Israeli occupation and its genocide of the Palestinian people, the report identifies four sectors of support: diplomatic, military, economic and “humanitarian”. Each is indispensable to the ongoing Israeli violations of international law. Diplomatic initiatives have normalized the Israeli occupation and failed to achieve a permanent ceasefire. Large-scale military aid, cooperation and arms transfers, primarily to and from the United States and European States, have enabled Israeli domination over the Palestinian people. This has also facilitated Israeli actions to dismantle humanitarian aid and impose conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians as a group. Economic cooperation has fuelled the Israeli economy, which has profited from the illegal occupation and genocide.

Providing further details, Francesca Albanese’s report identified 26 states, in addition to the US, the UK and Germany, who had “sent at least 10 consignments of ‘arms and ammunition’ to Israel, the most frequent being China, including Taiwan, India, Italy, Austria, Spain, Czechia, Romania and France”, while those engaging in “indirect transfers by supplying components for arms used by Israel” also included Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Singapore and Switzerland. Other countries were identified in other sections of the 24-page report.

In her conclusions, Francesca Albanese called on all UN member states to take action to end Israel’s violence and its occupation, to isolate Israel economically and diplomatically, to cooperate fully with the ICC and the ICJ, to support UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians that Israel permanently seeks to destroy, to suspend Israel from the UN under Article 6 of the UN Charter, which mandates expulsion for countries who have “persistently violated” the UN Charter, and even for international intervention under the UN’s “Uniting for Peace” declaration, which states that, “if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security … the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including … the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Instead, however, reinforcing the mortal threat that human rights face on this anniversary, we’re meant to believe that the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”, the UN Security Council resolution that was passed on November 17 at the instigation of the US, based on the 20-point “Peace Plan” that Donald Trump bullied and cajoled the world into accepting in October, when he pressurized Israel into stopping its relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, can establish peace by imposing a colonial-style administration in Gaza.

Via this desperately insulting plan, which whitewashes Israel’s genocide and torture, the Palestinians are meant to be sidelined, and their entitlement to self-determination and independence from Israel’s brutal yoke ignored, even though that is the only viable route to any kind of lasting peace, and the only route forward that addresses, rather than dismisses the grotesque crimes of the last 26 months, in which so many countries are complicit.

If Israel and its complicit partners in genocide win, there will be nothing left to protect further atrocities taking place anywhere that brute force can prevail. We need human rights at least as much now as we did 80 years ago, when the UN was founded in the ashes of the Second World War, and those of us who care about our common humanity must be prepared to fight for it, or face an even darker future.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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