When do we call Israel’s attacks genocidal?
On May 18, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, told Democracy Now! that Israel’s massive attack on the Gaza Strip “really is an act of genocide.”
The word ‘genocide’ may seem hyperbolic, but here is how the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN in December 1948, defines it:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
What Israel is doing to the people of the Gaza Strip can readily be slotted into a., b., or c. above.
It has been erasing entire families, destroying medical facilities and the roads accessing them, as well as the only biological lab for conducting tests at a time of surging Covid-19. By May 18, at least 6 hospitals and 9 primary clinics had been badly damaged. The main road to Gaza’s most important hospital, al-Shifa, had been bombed to such an extent that it could no longer be used by ambulances, and the head of internal medicine at al-Shifa, Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf, and a leading psychiatric neurologist, Dr. Mooein Ahmad al-Aloul had been killed.
Israel’s assault has badly damaged the water and sanitation infrastructure as well as the electricity system, leaving Gazans with only 2 – 3 hours of electricity a day. The New York Times reported on May 18 that the streets of Gaza City were flowing with wastewater due to the destruction of the sewage system. Nearly a million people (about half the population) are without water due to the partial shut down of a desalination plant and the smashing of water pipes, with the situation growing more dire with each passing day.
The conditions that Israel is inflicting on the fragile Gaza Strip make it hard to imagine how the population can recover its physical and mental health, much less thrive.
Some recent history
But none of this is new. Back in 1992, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated, “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won't happen, and a solution must be found.” The solution he thought he had found was the Oslo Accords, and he was killed for it by a far right extremist Yigal Amir.
Israel began cutting Gaza off from the West Bank and the world in the 1990s. In the following years, it was relentlessly pummeled by Israel’s military might.
From 2000 to 2008, Israel repeatedly used tanks, F16s and helicopter gunships against a defenseless civilian population. Some 3,000 people were killed in the Gaza Strip during these years – the per capita equivalent of 600,000 American dead. Among them were approximately 700 children.
Israel’s withdrawal of its Gaza settlers in 2005 completed the transformation of the Gaza Strip into what the Israeli human rights group B’tselem called the largest prison on earth. Totally encircled by walls, fences and towers, Israel continued to control the land, sea and air, and who goes in and out.
Once the Israeli settlers were gone, Palestinians were repeatedly subjected to eardrum shattering sonic booms and frequent tank fire and missile strikes, as the Israeli armed forces attacked the Gaza Strip with increasing ferocity. Operation Summer Rains (June 2006) during which it destroyed the only power plant in the Gaza Strip was followed by Operation Autumn Clouds (November 2006).
Collective punishment
Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip was tightened after Hamas won the January 2006 legislative election that former US president Jimmy Carter called transparent and fair. It was transformed into a chokehold in June 2007 after a clash with a CIA-backed Fatah militia led to a total Hamas takeover of the territory.
Under the harsh economic siege initiated by Israel only 12 basic items were permitted to enter the Gaza Strip – and just enough of them to keep people alive. Electricity and fuel were severely rationed, and cement, soap, many medical supplies, potable water and raw materials were kept out all together as Israel made Gaza a laboratory for trying out its new weapons systems and finding the breaking point of human beings.
On March 6, 2008 a coalition of human rights groups issued a devastating report entitled The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion. It concludes: “This humanitarian crisis is a direct result of on-going collective punishment of ordinary men, women and children and is illegal under international law. Peace will not be achieved by locking 1.5 million people into a prison of spiraling poverty and misery…”.
Still, the siege went on, preparing Gazans for the “shock and awe” of Israel’s military might over the next dozen years: what it called Operation Cast Lead (Dec. 2008-January 2009); Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012) and the summer 2014 51-day onslaught named Operation Protective Edge and today’s Operation Guardian of the Walls.
These offensives have killed thousands of people (more than 800 of them children) and wreaked massive destruction on homes, schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, the industrial area, agricultural lands, and the vital infrastructure for water, sewage and electricity. And after each aggression the Israeli-imposed closure has remained in place, barring the import of essential building materials and forcing people to live in the rubble of their homes.
Such have been the methods used by Israel in its seven-decades-long project of destroying resistance to dispossession – for it is in the tiny Gaza Strip where 70% of the residents are refugees and half are children that Palestinian resistance has been at its most unrelenting and determined.
Shame on the US for subsidizing and colluding in the destruction of the lives and future of the Palestinian people which fits the definition of genocide.
Nancy Murray
