Genocide and war crimes are clearly defined in international law. The zionist entity should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
In the gray, smoldering rubble of Gaza, hope is elusive. The wails of babies clutched in the arms of staggering, broken, bloody Palestinian civilians are surpassed in volume only by Zionist bombs that shake the earth, level multilevel structures and create scenes so hellish that even vultures probably pass on the chance to feast on a massive banquet of carnage.
The world strains to find even the slightest reason for encouragement, and perhaps the only positive that flows dialectically from a profound negative is that the truth rises from Gaza’s ruins more brightly than a thousand suns.
The truth rises even as Israeli military officials stare into cameras and brazenly lie, urging viewers to disregard the more than 25,000 tons of bombs they have dropped on Gaza’s 2.3 million people. These same Israeli officials in effect dismiss as irrelevant the more than 12,000 deaths they have caused, while at the same time shedding no tears about the fact that half of those killed were children. Notwithstanding the fact that water, fuel, food and medical supplies are spent, electricity needed for infants’ incubators dwindles, and surgeries are being performed without anesthesia, Zionist spokespersons chant the mantra “no ceasefire” when the world begs for an opportunity to relieve these deadly conditions with humanitarian aid.
Unconscionable acts abound, but the world watches helplessly in the absence of world cops authorized to place Israeli officials under arrest. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established to criminally prosecute and punish genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, for a very brief moment during the opening years of the 21st Century, it was believed that, at long last, the means to hold accountable those responsible for Gaza-type violence was at hand. However, after the court’s first prosecutor was named in 2003, he and his immediate successors engaged in seemingly obsessive pursuit of African government officials while turning a blind eye to the crimes of western imperialists. In 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported:
“Of the 10 preliminary examinations [by the ICC prosecutors] that have proceeded to full investigations, nine have involved conflicts in Africa.”
In 2013, economics professor Mwangi Kimenyi explained: “Recent data show that about sixty percent of ICC funding comes from the European Union. Like other international organizations, it is claimed that there is a close relationship between funding and influence over the activities undertaken by the court.”
Consequently, Israel as an important project of western imperialism is unlikely to have its Gaza crimes targeted by the ICC. Nevertheless, the Rome Statute, the ICC’s authorizing treaty, has remarkable value for those who wish to place Zionist violence in Gaza in a legal context. Even a cursory review of the document leads one to suspect that the Israeli government uses the crimes that are the focus of the ICC’s work as a checklist for the operations carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Under the Rome Statute genocide involves the intentional destruction “in whole or in part” of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Certainly, killing members of the group qualifies as genocide, but it can also involve “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” The document defines crimes against humanity as including among other things: “…the intentional infliction of conditions of life, [such as] the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population…”
It is significant that the forcible relocation of populations “from the area in which they are lawfully present” is a crime against humanity when more than one million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.
The Rome Statute includes as war crimes intentional “attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives…” (emphasis added). Israeli airstrikes on hospitals alone could be the basis for a case against the Zionists for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Direct and indirect strikes have been made on the Al-Quds Hospital, The Rantissi Children's Hospital, the Nasser Hospital Complex, and the Al-Shifa Hospital, which is regarded as Gaza's largest medical facility, and which gives care to thousands of patients. Targets also include the Indonesian Hospital, the International Eye Care Center, and the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital.
In response to accusations that these bombings are crimes, Israeli officials insist – with a straight face – that it is Hamas, and not the Zionists who are responsible for the civilian deaths because Hamas has chosen to use civilian patients and medical personnel as human shields. Even if, for the sake of discussion, that illogical proposition is accepted as true, Israel’s decision to blow up the so-called innocent, civilian “human shields” is satanic.
The International Criminal Court may never pronounce judgment on the Israeli government, but the world is watching carefully, and its verdict is likely to be a condemnation of the stark contradictions of a Zionist program that purports to act in the interest of people they claim were chosen by God by engaging in mass wanton murder and destruction. A growing international consensus offers the potential for a devastating isolation of Israel. Such was the fate of South Africa’s apartheid regime. There is every reason to believe that the same can happen to Zionist-style apartheid, particularly when so many of the Jewish faith who are the presumed beneficiaries of the Zionist project are waking up to the ugly realities of settler colonial violence and then washing their hands of the innocent blood that it sheds.
Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.
This week’s featured author is Amanda Lock Swarr. Swarr is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
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