IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.
The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.
This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.
But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Jewish State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.
Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.
Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”
In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.
The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.
Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara. …
In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.
Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.
Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes. …
… Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.
Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.
“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)
Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.
As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:
“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.” …
Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself ~ilana.
According to Truthout.org, “the Israeli Knesset, on Monday [its lawmakers, no less] was debating whether or not sexual abuse was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) … Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the reservists.”
Real lovelies, aren’t they?!
To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military said, Monday, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”
According to Middle East Monitor, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”
Next, by Democracy Now’s telling, “A right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”
+972 Magazine’s Oren Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the riots, and the apathy of the military police all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are “mainstream” views in Israeli society.” (Confirmed. See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?“)
Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off the genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One central lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself.
A new report authored by said 972 Magazine journalist “for the human rights group Yesh Din shows how the main role of Israel’s military law enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”
Essentially, to fend off the very notion idea that this lawless thug state is not a lawless thug state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of lawless, unfathomable thuggery and cruelty.
Rape of hostages, held in detention without charge, bleeds nicely into extra-judicial assassination.
Ismail Haniyeh, a major political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, who also enjoys wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as polls clearly show), was executed extra-judicially—how else?—by rogue state Israel.
Haniyeh is widely viewed among the people of the Arab world—not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide—as a uniter of Shia and Sunni. He was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp.
“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.” (Middle East Eye)
From diplomatic attaches, to university professors, to scientists, to thinkers and men of words—as in activists—to military men, to jailed prisoners, to resistance figures and fighters, and some just “unknown” collateral-damage, for-fun kills: you name them; Israel has targeted them.
As I pointed out in “The U.S. As The Globe’s Judge, Jury And Executioner,” a 2020 column, “blind patriotism stateside, too, is predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.” Some say war criminal Netanyahu pushed for the murder of Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general. Among the Axis of Genocide, with respect to extra-judicial, illegal assassinations—it is safe to say that, while America emulates Israel, Israel is a kingpin crime boss on this front. Unmatched in picking off people with whom it doesn’t wish to talk diplomatically. Theoretically, that is almost everyone.
Ismail Haniyeh, “who served as the fourth Palestinian prime minister and the third political leader of Hamas, … [Hailed] from a family of refugees expelled from historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948, he grew up in northern Gaza’s beachside al-Shati refugee camp. He ascended through the ranks of Hamas, starting as the secretary to the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, and eventually leading its political bureau.”
Haniyeh—also lead negotiator in the matter of the hostages, Palestinian and Israeli—had lost upwards of 60 members of his family, including children and grandchildren. His murder, on Iranian territory, “came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians,” as well as murdering “Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant.”
In “an attack that killed at least 90 people and wounded 300 in al-Mawasi, an Israeli designated ‘safe zone’ west of Khan Younis,” the Coward Army, IDF, which bombs civilians from above, seldom engaging in face-to-face combat, had killed Mohammed Deif, commander of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The genocide has made it unequivocally clear that, as I explained in logic (“Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation,” 07/03/2024) that—boy, oh boy—do the Palestinians need their resistance.
When Ismail al-Ghoul, a young Gazan journalist, and Rami al-Rifi, his cameraman, went to report from Haniyeh’s humble home, in the al-Shati refugee camp—where kids had congregated to commemorate their neighbor, also the political leader of their resistance–-Israel assassinated them too. As is the case with all journalist targeted by the criminal enterprise Israel, they were “in a clearly identifiable press vehicle when a missile directly hit them. It killed both reporters and a young boy walking by. The strike left young Ismail al-Ghoul headless.”
Al-Ghoul’s colleague, Al Jazeera’s journalist Hind Khoudary, such a reserved young woman whose courageous reporting we’ve watched over ten months, broke down on air, inconsolable. Her utter despair was that of one who has followed the rules, but found that those were no deterrents to Israel’s wanton—clearly intentional—slaughter of Gaza’s best, brightest and bravest, young people in the full flowering of their vitality.
China was also quick to condemn the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who had been acting as Israel’s lead interlocutor in hostage negotiations, as an “act of assassination.” An “unacceptable political assassination,” responded Russia’s foreign ministry. Türkiye’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, “condemned the assassination in Tehran and said the killing would not break Palestinians’ will.” (Reuters)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had pointed out, July 17, 2024, that,
Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict over the past 10 years since the [US sponsored] state coup in February 2014.
Correction: These are the confirmed deaths, where Gaza’s pitifully diligent Hamas-run government has managed to faithfully tally individual with his or her remains.
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.
Furthermore, I believe my “lying eyes.” Going by the “lying eyes” standard—satirist Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto—I believe my “lying eyes.” Those “lying eyes” speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. Once the “runaway Zombie Killing Machine” (Rami Khouri‘s coinage) is stopped, I believe it quite possible, given the scale of annihilation, that as many as half-a-million Palestinians will have been exterminated, with American imprimatur, and only the faintest protest.
BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with BRICS announcing the admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina as new member states) might want to consider an urgent course of action to stop Israel—an amoral pornographically violent terrorist state by any other name—or their leaders will be next. I venture that dissidents, activists or writers (whose careers have not yet been destroyed by neoconservatives decades ago) are in danger, all, of death by the demon state.
The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, the most perverse and pornographically murderous society imaginable, fail. In the tradition of bearing witness, at which all my Gaza Essays aim, I close with some recent Israeli feats of depravity visited upon Palestinians martyrs by their Israeli occupier-pornographer:
“In particular,” comments Ron Unz, unmatched in his courage, “it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads.”
“…it published. [A] very lengthy account by two experienced American surgeons who had visited Gaza to provide medical assistance and were utterly horrified by what they encountered there. According to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, in just a couple of weeks he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous thirty years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world. In particular, it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads“.
American volunteer surgeons, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, attest that Israeli snipers deliberately shoot Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at hearts and heads.
… We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
“In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
THEN THERE WAS
The sight of thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles was truly something to behold — convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls of a tunnel directing us toward Gaza….
By Israel.
… health sector salaries are paid by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and are always cut off during Israeli attacks. …
Since October 7, at least 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.
MORE HERE.
* The screen picture of the image, via the two doctors, depicts one young man in three stages of slow death inflicted by his Israeli torturers: The picture of the Palestinian man, a nurse, and what Israel visited upon him over three encounters, rendering him a husk, a shadow of the first image, in which his leg has been blown off, but he is still otherwise youthful. The man in the wheelchair’s wasted legs can no longer ambulate.
I want to hear no sympathy, not ever, for IDF psychopaths, who, the evidence is conclusive, shoot and loot for fun. Nobody ordered them to shoot kids in the head; they do it for the love of it, because of who they are.
“His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that ‘as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.”
UPDATE (8/12/024): The kind of money behind the Fifth Column that is AIPAC destroyed the political career of Rep. Jamaal Bowman because he dared to voice disdain for the Israeli genocide. Cori Bush, a Democrat representing the 1st Congressional District in Missouri, didn’t stand a chance. In 1963, William Fulbright, academic, statesman and politician, tried to investigate AIPAC for assorted fraud. Guess what became of him. (Track AIPAC) https://lnkd.in/gge-QJxB
Thes images, a daily reality, are via heroic Gazan photojournalists Adel Al-Hawajri and Hosni Salah.
Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.
Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.
The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE … of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.
Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW—how Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.
On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that, “A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.
Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.
The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.
Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world. Excerpt from the coda:
…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?
Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.
The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.
The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.
UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.”
UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress.Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.
… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.
UPDATEV (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:
“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”
(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.
UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.
UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”
UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’
UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet, has awoken to its obligation to Truth:
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.
ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:
No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”
? Bram Settenbrino shared these videos of himself indiscriminately shooting a gun and blowing up a mosque
The title is self-explanatory. In this new essay I comprehensively show Israel to be In violation of all laws of war and much of Customary International Humanitarian Law. God’s Law and
Natural Justice are close corollaries.
I go through the US ceasefire farce and lies—the ceasefire is BINDING!–I exposit the laws of war all violated, and expound on at least four laws that make up the genocide standard, flouted by Israel. Rafah appears to be a Final Solution of sorts.
I visualize what a Super Power could and should do. The visual of the essay’s coda is that of a patriot. Alas, and sadly, there is not much to be patriotic about.
Please share, for truth-tellers on Israel’s war of annihilation against Gaza’s Palestinians are being banned and excommunicated. Go figure: WE CANNOT BE BOUGHT OR SILENCED.
Short excerpt:
AMERICA’S CEASEFIRE DECEPTION
America has conditioned the inalienable right to life of Palestinians on the return of Israeli hostages, in effect nullifying that right ~ilana
For throwing-up clouds of obfuscating sepia over its abstention vote on the United Nations Security Council’s ceasefire resolution, March 25, the Biden Administration and its UN representative must be exposed.
“Ceasefire” in previous U.S. drafts amounted to Orwellian News Speak. Having never once called for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire, the U.S. had perfunctorily predicated temporary ceasefireresolutions on the return of Israeli hostages.
Whereas it was obligated morally to compel Israel to forthwith cease and desist its systematic and sustained onslaught on Gaza’s civilians; the US had opted, until March 25, to merely condition the temporary cessation of immoral and illegal mass murder of innocent Palestinians on the release of Israeli hostages, in effect tethering a “ceasefire” to the return of the Israeli hostages.
Against the wishes of citizens of our country and the world, America has deployed its veto power, repeatedly and reliably, in previous United Nations Security Council votes, so as to prevent an immediate, unconditional cease-fire in Gaza.
By so doing, America had conditioned the inalienable right to life of Palestinians on the return of Israeli hostages, in effect nullifying that inalienable right.
Recognizing that the right to life of innocent men, women and children is unconditional; Security Council member states, aside the United States and its protégé Israel, had refused to tether the fate of Gaza to hostage negotiations.
With pellucid logic, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the U.N and the Arab bloc’s current Security Council member, had stated, February 20, 2024, that, “A vote in favor of [an unconditional ceasefire] is a support to the Palestinians’ right to life.” With its prior vetoes and current abstention, the US had nullified Palestinian right to life independent of the rights of Israeli hostages to the same.
You can say that Gaza’s innocent civilians are being held hostage by Israel enablers Blinken, Biden and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
The general run of people around the world, however, are having none of this. We have been chanting “ceasefire” with catechetical promptness. The West’s “smart” set is belatedly getting the message that their constituents, decent citizens, are revolted by Israel’s acts and are in-revolt against supporting it.
In response, and oh-so cynically, all Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield did on March 25 was to abstain from using American veto power to stop the good guys—China, Russia, Algeria and the rest of the 15-member UN Security Council—from demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. That’s all.
Expect the Biden Administration and its bi-partisan backers to keep gently cajoling brief lulls—conditional breaks—in the IDF’s bloodletting of a helpless, cornered civilian population.
For moral compass scrambled; it’s hard to beat former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. In this protracted foreign-policy mirage, Blinken, Biden, Thomas-Greenfield and their political posse do Nikki Haley, a Republican, proud, for Trump’s appointee to the UN would have done nothing different.
CEASE AND DESIST! WHERE’S THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT?
A violent offender, a serial killer, must be stopped; not cautioned and observed! ~ilana
IDF soldiers vaporize young men picking their way through rubble as though in a video game; they mock their victims, invade their homes; filch from their businesses, and rummage through the piteous intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed ~ilana
In the world of patronage, it doesn’t get much worse. The United States is at Israel’s elbow—it is a cobelligerent: In actively sustaining Israel’s armed forces, and running diplomatic interference for its politicians; America is acting as Israel’s “principal sponsor,” complicit in war crimes, signaling to the Jewish State that it will let it continue to its evil endgame.
As I ventured in January, the issuance of the equivalent of a legal cease-and-desist or a restraining order against a violent offender, Israel, is urgent and long overdue. It’s already too late for Gaza as a habitable landmass.
While progressives lauded the International Court of Justice (ICJ), my perspective about the Court’s indecision, some months back, was dimmer. (Disgust, actually.) Unfocused as I was on legalistic definitions of genocide; it was obvious to me that, what was indubitably mass murder and ethnic cleansing—crimes that are in process and ongoing—had to be stopped right away. A violent offender, a serial killer, must be stopped; not cautioned and observed!
Were the International Court of Justice an effective and just organization it would have issued some sort of binding cease and desist order, some manner of restraining order, if you will, instructing the Israel Defense Forces, the Devil’s emissaries on earth, to stop its depredations.
Another international tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), had “issued, in March of 2023, warrants of arrest, no less “for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine,” one of whom was Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, president of the Russian Federation, who was being sought for war crimes.
With respect to Israel, the inept International Court of Justice appears compromised.
For in a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also extend to the collective. Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. If the citizen must not murder; neither should The State, any state.
UN SECURITY COUNCIL CEASEFIRE IS BINDING
A Security Council resolution not defanged by the US could have included a call for diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution ~ilana
In its uncontested superiority, the United States has asserted, moreover, that the UN ceasefire resolution is “non-binding.” “Completely false,” fumes international law expert Graig Mokhiber, in an interview, March 26, with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” And I paraphrase Mr. Mokhiber:
It is black-letter law in the U.N. Charter that all members of the United Nations are bound to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. The Charter, in Article 25, and in subsequent decisions of the International Court of Justice, has made it indisputable that Security Council resolutions are binding for all member states.
Not only is the last ceasefire resolution binding, but it opens up an opportunity, given that Israel is in breach of it, to table a resolution for enforcement under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which “empowers the Security Council to orchestrate … collective actions … through a Military Staff Committee.”
A Security Council resolution not defanged by the United States could include a call for corporeal action: diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution. …
