#un convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide

[tomorrowusa]

Mass kidnappings of kids are not unique to the Middle East. Putin's Russia has been doing it since its illegal annexation of Crimea and its de facto occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014. And it's grown greatly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine started in February of 2022.

This is a form of genocide as defined by international law. Putin and his cronies are war criminals and there is indeed a warrant for his arrest on the basis of his abduction of Ukrainian children from occupied parts of Ukraine.

This invasion has been going on for nearly two years – not just two months. There are thousands of Ukrainian child hostages held by Putin's kleptocratic mafia-terrorist state.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Israeli tanks, jets and bulldozers bombarding Gaza and razing homes in the occupied West Bank are being fueled by a growing number of countries signed up to the genocide and Geneva conventions, new research suggests, which legal experts warn could make them complicit in serious crimes against the Palestinian people.

Four tankers of American jet fuel primarily used for military aircraft have been shipped to Israel since the start of its aerial bombardment of Gaza in October.

Three shipments departed from Texas after the landmark international court of justice (ICJ) ruling on 26 January ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. The ruling reminded states that under the genocide convention they have a “common interest to ensure the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide”.

Overall, almost 80% of the jet fuel, diesel and other refined petroleum products supplied to Israel by the US over the past nine months was shipped after the January ruling, according to the new research commissioned by the non-profit Oil Change International and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Researchers analyzed shipping logs, satellite images and other open-source industry data to track 65 oil and fuel shipments to Israel between 21 October last year and 12 July.

It suggests a handful of countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Gabon, Nigeria, Brazil and most recently the Republic of the Congo and Italy – have supplied 4.1m tons of crude oil to Israel, with almost half shipped since the ICJ ruling. An estimated two-thirds of crude came from investor-owned and private oil companies, according to the research, which is refined by Israel for domestic, industrial and military use.

Israel relies heavily on crude oil and refined petroleum imports to run its large fleet of fighter jets, tanks and other military vehicles and operations, as well as the bulldozers implicated in clearing Palestinian homes and olive groves to make way for unlawful Israeli settlements.

In response to the new findings, UN and other international law experts called for an energy embargo to prevent further human rights violations against the Palestinian people – and an investigation into any oil and fuels shipped to Israel that have been used to aid acts of alleged genocide and other serious international crimes.

“After the 26 January ICJ ruling, states cannot claim they did not know what they were risking to partake in,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, adding that under international law, states have obligations to prevent genocide and respect and ensure respect for the Geneva conventions.[...]

“In the case of the US jet-fuel shipments, there are serious grounds to believe that there is a breach of the genocide convention for failure to prevent and disavowal of the ICJ January ruling and provisional measures,” said Albanese. “Other countries supplying oil and other fuels absolutely also warrant further investigation.”

In early August, a tanker delivered an estimated 300,000 barrels of US jet fuel to Israel after being unable to dock in Spain or Gibraltar amid mounting protests and warnings from international legal experts. Days later, more than 50 groups wrote to the Greek government calling for a war-crimes investigation after satellite images showed the vessel in Greek waters.

Last week, the US released $3.5bn to Israel to spend on US-made weapons and military equipment, despite reports from UN human rights experts and other independent investigations that Israeli forces are violating international law in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. A day later, the US approved a further $20bn in weapons sales, including 50 fighter jets, tank ammunition and tactical vehicles.

The sale and transfer of jet fuel – and arms – “increase the ability of Israel, the occupying power, to commit serious violations”, according to the UN human rights council resolution in March.

The US is the biggest supplier of fuel and weapons to Israel. Its policy was unchanged by the ICJ ruling, according to the White House.

“The case for the US’s complicity in genocide is very strong,” aid Dr Shahd Hammouri, lecturer in international law at the University of Kent and the author of Shipments of Death. “It’s providing material support, without which the genocide and other illegalities are not possible. The question of complicity for the other countries will rely on assessment of how substantial their material support has been.”[...]

A spokesperson for the Brazilian president’s office said oil and fuel trades were carried out directly by the private sector according to market rules: “Although the government’s stance on Israel’s current military action in Gaza is well known, Brazil’s traditional position on sanctions is to not apply or support them unilaterally.

Azerbaijan, the largest supplier of crude to Israel since October, will host the 29th UN climate summit in November, followed by Brazil in 2025.[...]

The Biden administration did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Vice-President Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign team.

Israel is a small country with a relatively large army and air force. It has no operational cross-border fossil fuel pipelines, and relies heavily on maritime imports.[...]

The new data suggests:

•Half the crude oil in this period came from Azerbaijan (28%) and Kazakhstan (22%). Azeri crude is delivered via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, majority-owned and operated by BP. The crude oil is loaded on to tankers at the Turkish port of Ceyhan for delivery to Israel. Turkey recently submitted a formal bid to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.

•African countries supplied 37% of the total crude, with 22% coming from Gabon, 9% from Nigeria and 6% from the Republic of the Congo.

•In Europe, companies in Italy, Greece and Albania appear to have supplied refined petroleum products to Israel since the ICJ ruling. Last month, Israel also received crude from Italy – a major oil importer. A spokesperson said the Italian government had “no information” about the recent shipments.

•Cyprus provided transshipment services to tankers supplying crude oil from Gabon, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan.[...]

Just six major international fossil-fuel companies – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – could be linked to 35% of the crude oil supplied to Israel since October, the OCI analysis suggests. This is based on direct stakes in oilfields supplying Israeli and/or the companies’ shares in production nationally.[...]

Last week, Colombia suspended coal exports to Israel “to prevent and stop acts of genocide against the Palestinian people”, according to the decree signed by President Gustavo Petro. Petro wrote on X: “With Colombian coal they make bombs to kill the children of Palestine.”

20 Aug 24

[omgellendean]

One aspect of the Lebanon story which I've seen mentioned nowhere but which is actually fundamental, is the fact that under the UN Genocide Convention states have a legal obligation to prevent *and punish* genocide. It's article 1 of the Convention which states: "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." And we have, as per below, Israeli officials telling us that the very reason why they're attacking Lebanon is because Hezbollah refused to accept a deal whereby they'd agree to let Israel continue its genocide unimpeded. Just think about that... And think about all the Western declaration of support for Israel's bombing and invasion of Lebanon in that context...

Just like Yemen, Lebanon is being punished and made into an example for not abandoning Palestine.

[amarshmallownamedo]

In case anyone was curious, here is article 2 from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II

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:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

And here is the link to the whole UN article

Just in case anyone needs absolute clarity that this is indeed a genocide and Israel needs to be held accountable

[girlactionfigure]

Ok, you want to know from a lawyer why the allegation that Israel is committing genocide is false? 

Fine. 

I prefer to focus on the absurdity of the allegation, especially since it is Hamas that expressly seeks Jewish & Israeli genocide; but it's clear people want this analysis.

Genocide is defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Prevention & Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as: (1) the coordinated; (2) planned; and (3) intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

Let's set aside for a minute the fact that the the #UN Convention regarding #genocide was adopted because of what the #Nazis had done to the #Jewsthereby making its invocation here not only absurdly false, but also unforgivably offensive.

That outrageousness aside, we can analyze the elements of the crime of genocide under the present situation in #Gaza.

The requisite mens rea to find a government guilty of genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group of people. 

This intent to commit genocide doesn't magically come into being just because people want to believe it exists. There must be actual proof of criminal intent to destroy a particular group of people.

#SouthAfrica cannot possibly carry its burden of showing Israel "intended or intends to commit genocide"; thus, the allegation fails.  

Just some of the obvious reasons intent to commit genocide could not possibly be shown follow:

- 10/7 & Hamas' words since 10/7 have proven the #terror group would, if it could, continue carrying out massacres until it killed every #Israeli & potentially every #Jew on Earth. Israel, like every other UN member state, has the inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. In this case, Israel's right to self-defense continues until it has done everything "necessary" to to ensure #Hamas can never attack Israeli civilians again because of: (1) the genocidal brutality of the #October7Massacre; (2) Hamas' 35+ years of genocidal warfare against Israel & Jews; & (3) Hamas' express & repeated commitment to repeat massacres like 10/7 "again and again." Therefore, Israel's right to self-defense includes both the right to eliminate the threat from Hamas to its civilians & to restore a sense of security to its civilians.

- The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claims 22,000 #Palestinians have died. Even if that number was reliable (it is not), Hamas claims every one of the deaths was a civilian, not a #HamasTerrorist. That is obviously not the case. Israel claims to have killed ~9,000 Hamas terrorists. Even assuming the Hamas numbers were correct, that would mean about 1.45 civilians have been killed for every 1 "combatant" (Hamas terrorist). As horrible as the loss of any civilian life is, it is simply a fact that civilians suffer disproportionately in war & what Israel has done in protecting civilian lives is unprecedented in the history of urban warfare. In fact, according to the UN statistics of global conflict, the average civilian to combatant killed ratio is 9 civilians killed for every 1 combatant killed. This ratio in and of itself makes the allegation of "genocide" a complete absurdity.

- Even assuming the "worst case scenario" numbers above of ~9,000 terrorists killed & ~13,000 civilians killed still does not take into account the cause of those civilian deaths. We know that somewhere between 20%-35% of all Hamas & #Palestinian #Islamic #Jihad missiles misfire & land in Gaza (like the one that landed at a Gaza hospital that Israel was wrongly accused of bombing). So, how many Gaza civilians were killed by misfired rockets from Palestinian terror groups? Suddenly, that already incredible ratio of civilians:combatants in the annals of warfare is improving even further.

- There are at least dozens of videos of Hamas #terrorists firing at #IDF troops while wearing civilian clothing (which is itself a #WarCrime) to blend in with the civilian population. So, how many Gaza "civilians" who were killed were actually just Hamas terrorists wearing #civilian clothing? That civilian:combatant ratio is improving once again.

- We know from video, reconnaissance, audio, interrogations, & eye-witness accounts (including from #Gazans themselves) that Hamas uses both voluntary & involuntary human shields to protect Hamas terrorists & their weapons (each time they do it, that is also a war crime). So, how many Gaza "civilians" who were killed were voluntarily acting as human shields for Hamas? And while Israel has made significant efforts to limit civilians casualties, those involuntary human shields who die are legally dead at the hands of Hamas. Wow, that civilian:combatant ratio is looking beyond amazing now! 

- There is video, photo, interrogation, & eye-witness accounts that Hamas uses women & children under 18 in combat roles. Therefore, not every allegedly killed woman or child counts as a "civilian." 

- What kind of genocidal army would do what Israel has been doing in engaging in massive warning campaigns before it attacks via hundreds of thousands of phone calls, text messages, leaflets, & via roof knocking? Gazans are actually given so much warning & time to evacuate that the extreme majority of "civilians" who remain in a targeted area are there either because they support Hamas or because they were forced to stay & act as human shields by Hamas. Essentially, not only is Israel obviously not conducting a genocide, it has completely eliminated their own advantage of surprise that would have helped Israel eradicate Hamas much quicker by providing warnings that reach both civilians & Hamas terrorists.

- A large percentage of Palestinian deaths in Gaza have been due to their combined use by Hamas as human shields & by Hamas' refusal to permit Gaza civilians to either to use Hamas tunnels as bomb shelters or to flee via safe corridors provided by the 

@IDF

 (what kind of genocidal army provides safe corridors for civilians even knowing some Hamas terrorists will manage to escape by blending in with the crowd???). In other words, it is Hamas that is by far the most responsible party for putting #Gazan #civilians in harm's way; and the mere fact that civilians have died is in no way indicative of any deliberate intent on the part of Israel to kill Palestinian civilians - let alone intentionally "destroy" the population, as required to prove genocide.

- A country's intention to destroy a group in whole or in part is typically found in state policy (as it was with the Nazis & as it is with Hamas). However, no such policy in Israel has ever existed. Israel has made clear repeatedly (and its actions, with some examples stated above, show this is more than just words) that its goal is to "operate[] against Hamas & other terrorist groups in Gaza, not against the civilian population ... Israel wishes no harm to civilians & is committed to addressing the humanitarian needs of those suffering ..."

- Simply, the loss of lives in Gaza are reasonably explained by & attributable to Israel's necessary self-defense military goal of eradicating Hamas' ability to make war. The loss of lives in Gaza are not, however, reasonably explained by some claimed genocide on the part of Israel, as there is no actual evidence to support a finding of the type of criminal intent required to prove genocide.

- Israel is a straight-up parliamentary #democracy; thus, it has voices in the Knesset that can be extreme. Those voices, however, are not mainstream; and, more importantly, those voices are not the ones who are responsible for prosecuting the war against Hamas. Therefore, their words (indelicate as they may have been) are irrelevant to a finding of genocide on the part of the government of Israel. The Israeli war cabinet in charge of prosecuting the war to eradicate Hamas consists of only five people: PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, unity coalition member, former Deputy PM, & Minister of Defense Benny Gantz, former military Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, & Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. Attempting to attribute the words of anyone else, especially in the very fringes of Israel's eclectic democratic government, to try to show proof of government intent to commit genocide fails as a matter of both fact & law. Any comments by the five members of the war cabinet at which any dishonest person may wish to point to try to prove "intent to commit genocide," in reality can only be reasonably interpreted as statements referring to the destruction of the Hamas terrorist regime.

So, what is the takeaway? 

It is South Africa's burden to show Israel had/has the intent to carry out a "genocide" of the Palestinian people in Gaza. For the foregoing reasons (among many others - but this is long enough for X), South Africa cannot possibly prove intent to commit genocide. 

South Africa's allegations are defamatory & are an attempt to hold the world's only Jewish State to a different standard than every other state in the history of humankind; and, perhaps worse, to try to turn the victims of a genocide into the alleged committers of a genocide. 

Were the #ICJ to find intent to commit "genocide" here, then no country on Earth would be permitted to act in self-defense in the event it is attacked - no matter how horrible the attack - if any civilians may be killed in the process. 

If that were the case, Hamas & other terrorist organizations would be given carte blanche to attack countries with impunity & then simply hide behind civilians to suddenly become entirely immune from justice. That obviously can never be the law.

Captain Allen

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Sent via email to Ahmed Hussen Minister of International Development:

“Suspension of Aid to UNRWA in contravention of the binding order of the ICJ for all countries to uphold the Genocide Convention”

Salutations,

I’m writing to express my discontent and outright moral opposition to the actions taken by the Minister of International Development against UNRWA following allegations of involvement in the Oct 7 2023 attack on the occupation forces internationally recognized as illegally enforcing a blockade and siege of Gaza. I will remind the Minister in no uncertain terms and with utmost seriousness that every country and any constitutionally responsible ruler, public official, or private citizen is now by order of the ICJ responsible for doing everything in one’s power to prevent the crime of genocide from occurring. To withdraw financial support from a UN humanitarian aid agency servicing a people facing a plausible case of genocide at the same time that more than 80% of all the world’s people who are facing starvation are living in gaza right now under siege because of allegations raised by the state of Israel—accused of genocide and found to be plausibly committing genocide—leveled at the same group of people who this state plausibly committing genocide is accused of targeting for genocide. The UNRWA has cut ties with the alleged perpetrators and has issued a full investigation and still Canada has made the conscious and free decision to punish the Palestinian people in service of a plausible genocide occurring against them.

To repeat; it is morally reprehensible the actions the Minister has taken against UNRWA and in the interest of his international legal duty and responsibility, the actions must be reversed posthaste or else the Minister risks jeopardizing his standing as a person innocent of the crime of genocide.

May Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words reach you: “to be neutral in situations of oppression is to choose the side of the oppressor.” Please change course before it is too late.

It is our responsibility as citizens of Canada to now more than ever hold our politicians accountable for their actions and inactions with regards to the “plausible case” of genocide of Palestinians. It not only a moral duty but a legal responsibility under the Genocide Convention and we should all be taking this as seriously as possible.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By GERALD M. STEINBERG

Only by falsifying everything about the Gaza conflict, including the IDF’s emphasis on evacuating civilians in order to fight Hamas and destroy the massive underground infrastructure is HRW able to accuse Israel of war crimes. 

Notably, the staffers who wrote this document admit that “it is impossible for Human Rights Watch to fully interrogate the military strategy of the Israeli military.” In fact, HRW clearly has no clue nor interest in understanding the IDF strategy against the brutal war machine constructed under Gaza. Without this information and expertise, there is no foundation for any accusations based on the laws of war, which require evaluating actual battlefield conditions. 

As in other numerous previous reports, the researchers at HRW have demonstrated that they are totally unqualified to write such reports.

In the absence of facts and evidence, HRW substitutes large-scale disinformation and distortion. In “‘Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,” they cite explicit statements from Israeli officials that demonstrate the legality and necessity of the Gaza strategy: “Israel justified the mass evacuation order as being for the safety of the civilian population and stated military reason... was centered on the presence of Hamas fighters and military infrastructure, including Hamas’ extensive tunnel infrastructure…”

But then, HRW devotes numerous pages to manipulating distorted and cherry-picked quotes in order to falsely claim that the initial IDF actions following the October 7 atrocities were actually designed to punish and displace civilians, with no military necessity. 

Through this entirely false narrative, HRW asserts its central propaganda claim, that “there is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times.”  For anyone who reads the text (and not merely the press release) with anything like an open mind, the distortion is painfully obvious. 

This is another example of the systematic bias and immorality that permeates HRW, as verified by Danielle Haas, a senior editor at the NGO for 13 years. 

Haas has referred to the “years of politicization” in singling out Israel, violating “basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and... the principles of accuracy and fairness.” Recalling this history, Haas observed that HRW staff know that the “unverified accusations would be widely cited as incontrovertible evidence.” 

The clear objective of HRW’s reports, including this one, is to promote the soft-power war based on arms embargoes, boycotts, and demonization that reinforce the hard war led by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

These bogus reports are cited blindly (or consciously) by UN demagogues, biased academics, journalists, and policymakers to prevent Israel from blocking genocidal terror and defending its civilians. By giving credibility to the propaganda produced by HRW and other NGOs, the international law and human rights community, created in the shadow of the Holocaust, has totally betrayed its mission to protect civilian lives.

[odinsblog]

Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.

The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.

It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.

—RAZ SEGAL, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.

[userautumn]

Listen I'm not even voting for Jill stein but that tweet shared about her and the Uyghurs is inaccurate. She said that she knows that China is committing human rights abuses but she is unsure if she can call it a genocide, which is exactly what the UN said about it as well. She didn't deny anything. Pay attention to what politicians actually say instead of misinformation spread by tweets

First of all: I'm going to acknowledge that you came back in a separate message and apologized for the tone of this ask. Thank you! I am still going to address this conversation though.

Second of all: For those who are just joining us, this is the tweet in question, and this is my response to the tweet in the tags of the post:

Alright, now, this is going to be long, but please ride the wave with me.

Jill Stein has based her entire campaign on being the antithesis to the Democratic and Republican parties by claiming she is "anti-genocide." She makes this claim specifically within the context of Israel's feud with Palestine. Similar to the accusations lobbied against China, the conflict between Israel/Palestine has yet to be declared a genocide by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In 2023, South Africa invoked the Genocide Conventions, but when Israel stood trial before the International Court of Justice, the ICJ determined that, while it was possible that Israel was in violation of the Genocide Conventions, their duty was to ensure that preventative measures were taken so the rights of the Palestinian people weren't violated any further:

[Source truncated and simplified for clarity]

Since South Africa has invoked the compromissory clause of the Genocide Convention, the Court must determine, at the present stage of the proceedings, whether it appears that the acts and omissions complained of by the Applicant (South Africa) are capable of falling within the scope of that convention ratione materiae. (20) Currently, the Court is not required to determine whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred. Such a finding could be made by the Court only at the stage of examining the merits of the present case. But as already noted, at the stage of making an order on a request for the indication of provisional measures, the Court’s task is to establish whether the acts and omissions complained of by the Applicant (South Africa) appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the Genocide Convention. In the Court’s view, at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the Convention. (30)

Source: APPLICATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP (SOUTH AFRICA v. ISRAEL)

Despite this ruling, Israel continues to be accused of genocide. Similarly, despite the United Nation's ruling that China was committing Crimes against Humanity [The Guardian; The OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China] against the Uyghur population, China also continues to be accused of genocide by several countries around the world. The United States is one such country which maintains that accusation. So while it's very well and good that Jill Stein is acknowledging her uncertainty on whether genocide is being committed against the Uyghurs or not, why is she not acknowledging the same uncertainty regarding the conflict unfolding in Israel/Palestine when the circumstances are exactly the same?

There are two answers to this question.

The first is that, similar to Donald Trump's campaign, Jill Stein's campaign has been built upon generating or exploiting an already-present distrust in the United States government and International governmental proceedings. Unfortunately, it's very easy to exploit that distrust because the United States government has made several missteps, often with egregious, deadly consequences, and continues to do so, even against her own people. Distrust helps both Trump and Stein because it allows them to position themselves as saviors to the nation's, and the world's, problems. Jill Stein takes advantage of American dissatisfaction with and reluctance to trust the government by casting doubt upon the ICJ's ruling re: Israel/Palestine. She does this by maintaining her stance that the unfolding conflict is, without shadow of a doubt, a genocide. But this tactic works because people, on average, don't know what genocide is.

Ask anyone on the street and they will most likely tell you that genocide is a mass slaughter of a population. But that's only one aspect of genocide. In truth, genocide is determined by certain criteria. Genocide must be legally defined because, during the course of war, civilians are often slaughtered en masse at disproportionate rates by the stronger, or more equipped, party. Having ways to identify genocide definitively, therefore, helps world leaders differentiate between mass casualties and genocidal intent. But there are other non-genocide crimes too: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.

Jill Stein is happy to acknowledge Crimes Against Humanity unfolding in China, but she won't admit to genocide because to do so would mean having to acknowledge and dissect the complexity of legally defined genocide. To do that would mean having to entertain the idea that the conflict unfolding in Palestine might not be Genocide but might, instead, be Crimes Against Humanity. (Which, to be clear, is still a very severe and appalling human rights violation). But to acknowledge that the conflict unfolding overseas might not be genocide would mean deconstructing the platform upon which her entire campaign is built, and she won't do that.

So all that leads us to the second answer, that answer being that Jill Stein is reluctant to acknowledge genocide against the Uyghurs—despite the fact that the United States, the same country she is trying to lead, maintains that accusation—because it doesn't suit her agenda. She co-opted the pro-Palestinian movement by preying on American ignorance for the sake of launching her campaign and used the same language the American Left uses because she knows how broadly people define genocide and—due to the fact that this conflict is such a red-button topic in the United States—knew what the progressive American Left would respond to.

Jill Stein is a con-artist whose entire gambit works because she knows how to manipulate a genuinely-held desire for world peace and therefore decided to adopt the fight for Palestinian self-determination for her own gain. Both of these things would be bad enough on their own, but let's sit with the horror of this for a minute: she built her campaign—a campaign we all know she cannot and will not win, on account of the fact that the US is, for all intents and purposes, a bipartisanship—on the backs of an already vulnerable and dehumanized population, reducing them to props, for her own gain. Her insistence on running continues to divide the vote in one of the most history-defining elections we've witnessed in American, and global, history—an election that will have tragic and drastic ramifications for the entire globe, including the people of Palestine, if Trump is re-elected.

This is what I mean when I said she played people.

So, circling back to the tweet, Jill Stein's admittance to "listening to her running mate, a Muslim with different sources" and being "open to learning more about what's going on" means nothing. It's a non-answer and a non-position with just enough progressive rhetoric to appeal to her staunch supporters. So while the tweet itself is, indeed, a misrepresentation of her words, the secondary tweet by Celia is not wrong—Jill Stein is not a woman against genocide, because she doesn't even care enough to define it.

Hope this helps, thanks for stopping by!

[bloghrexach]

🤔 … Francesca Albanaese has conducted a study: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, very telling. Here are some facts. — and still the world leaders/powers look on. Not the ‘younger generations’ though!!!

By: LaillaB, founder of ‘Reclaim the Narrative’, from LinkedIn …

“Israel has destroyed Gaza’

By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, the “Anatomy of a Genocide” report concludes reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.

One of the key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted ‘jus in bello’ principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimise genocidal violence against Palestinians.

In this report, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 (“oPt”), addresses the crime of genocide as perpetrated by the State of Israel (“Israel”) in the oPt, specifically in the Gaza Strip, since 7 October 2023.

As Israel prohibits her visits, this report is based on data and analyses from organisations on the ground, international jurisprudence, investigative reports and consultations with affected individuals, authorities, civil society and experts.

Since it imposed the siege on Gaza in 2007, which tightened the closure imposed since 1993, Israel, the occupying power, has carried out five major assaults before the present one.

By Day 9, this assault had already caused more deaths (2,670) than Israel’s previous deadliest war against Gaza, in 2014 (2,251) . Only a fraction of the mass killing, severe harm and ruthless, life-threatening conditions inflicted on Palestinians over the following months of assault can be captured in this report.

UN experts, 5 scholars, 6 and states, 7 including South Africa before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), 8 have warned that acts committed in this latest onslaught may amount to genocide.

The ICJ found a plausible risk of “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group under the Genocide Convention, 9 and ordered Israel, inter alia, to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts, prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and ensure urgent humanitarian aid.

In its defense, Israel has argued that its conduct complies with international humanitarian law (“IHL”).

A key finding of this report is that Israel has strategically invoked the IHL framework as “humanitarian camouflage” to legitimise its genocidal violence in Gaza.

The context, facts and analysis presented in this report lead to the conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.

More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its SETTLER-COLONIAL project in PALESTINE, signalling a tragedy foretold.

“It’s my solemn duty to report” -

GENOCIDE: ISRAEL: COLONISATION!!

“I say to all those leaders, do not look the other way. Do not hesitate … It is within your power to avoid a genocide of humanity.” — Mandela! … 🤔

A tragedy foretold —.🕊

#reclaimthenarrative — 🍉 — 🍉 #FreePalestine … @hrexach …

[tomorrowusa]

High-profile Russians have left no doubt in anybody's mind that they are intent on committing genocide in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin and his ethno-nationalist minions are intent on wiping out the concept of Ukraine as a country. That is what genocide is about as defined Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Vladimir Putin, along with other Russian officials and state-controlled media, openly declare their objective: the obliteration of the Ukrainian nation. The machinery of Russian state propaganda promotes a genocidal mindset towards Ukrainians among Russian soldiers today.  In Ukraine’s occupied territories, Russian forces are fulfilling their pledges through a series of atrocities, exemplified by the unearthing of mass graves and torture facilities in liberated cities such as Bucha and Izium.

You can see all ten quotes in the main link at the top of this post. But this is one that is particularly odious.

“[Ukrainian children] should have been drowned in the Tysyna [river], right there, where the duckling swims. Just drown those children, drown them right in Tysyna [river]… Whoever says that Russia occupied them, you throw them in the river with a strong undercurrent… Shove them right into those huts and burn them up… [Ukraine] is not supposed to exist at all,” Anton Krasovskyi, former Director of Broadcasting of Russia’s state-funded RT, said on 23 October 2022.

Putin and Company are basically Hamas-on-the-Volga. And we shouldn't be distracted by events elsewhere from the genocidal activities of Putin's Russia.

The Russian military’s aggression against Ukraine has resulted in numerous documented war crimes, as confirmed by international organizations, human rights NGOs, and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The International Criminal Court (ICC) initiated an investigation into the situation in Ukraine on 2 March 2022, encompassing potential war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Furthermore, on 17 March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, on suspicion of a specific war crime: the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to Russia during the invasion.

Yep, Putin is a wanted war criminal. Despite that, there is a Putin Caucus in the US House of Representatives encouraged by Putin vassal Donald Trump.

If you are in the US, contact your representatives in the US House and urge them to make aid to Ukraine a priority. Any House member of either party is worth a message – though you may wish to skip any Republican with a grade below a C on this list.

For contact information and to find out exactly who represents your district, check out this site. Have your ZIP+4 ready.

Find Your Representative | house.gov

If your rep has been supportive in the past, a quick thank you is appreciated as well as good manners.

Support for democracy at home and democracy abroad are linked. People who are 2020 election deniers are almost always Putin apologists.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

At the UN, Brazil’s human rights minister Silvio Almeida mentions 'genocide' and 'apartheid' and demands a peaceful solution for the Middle East

Almeida spoke on behalf of Brazil in the opening ceremony of the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council

On Monday (26), Brazil’s Minister of Human Rights and Citizenship, Silvio Almeida, restated the country’s defense of a peaceful solution to the massacre of Palestinians ongoing in the Gaza Strip. When speaking at the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, Almeida used the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to refer to the acts of the Israeli government in the occupied territory.

“We consider it the duty of this [UN Human Rights] Council to honor the self-determination of peoples, the search for a peaceful solution to conflicts, and to vehemently oppose all forms of neocolonialism and apartheid,” the minister emphasized. When referring to Israel’s attack, he cited excerpts from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, unanimously adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

The minister's speech follows the official statements of the Brazilian government, especially after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party) condemned Israeli military operations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and compared the current situation to the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany.

Continue reading.

[oh-my-damn]

Did they just call for a ceasefire or is Isreal still allowed to bomb I don’t get it Mandy 😅

Hi nonnie

No unfortunately the ICJ ruling does not equal a ceasefire. Something important to note is that the ICJ is a legal institution. They have no actual physical power in anything.

It is esentially like law in itself: the law doesn't forbid you from committing a crime. It says that IF you commit a crime, you will be punished in the ways explained within law.

So while this decision does not equal a ceasefire, what it does equal is ACKNOWLEDGEMENT that Israel is committing genocide. This is a huge step in the right direction, because if Israel continues what they have been doing from now on, they will be in breach of the genocide conventions knowingly which means they can be prosecuted.

I think the problem is that people expect the ICC or UN or ICJ to be able to take action. They can't. They can only outline the rules and judge on whether or not someone is in breach of them.

However, every country who has signed the genocide conventions has a responsibility to follow them and in them it states that it is EVERY state's (that has signed them) responsibility to prevent and stop genocide. Which in turn means that any country supporting Israel henceforth will ALSO be in breach of the conventions.

So with that in mind, hopefully that means Israel will have a much harder time continuing with this, and one can only hope the countries who previously aided them in their slaughter of innocent Palestinians will now change their tune which in turn could force Israel to stop.

But as ive said before, the UN, ICC and ICJ are all performance. They don't stop countries from committing international crimes. Theyre there to punish them after the fact and sometimes prevent crimes from happening if possible. And they are notoriously slow in getting shit done so I am actually pleasantly surprised it didn't take them longer to support South Africa in their case.

[knuckle]

This is the article Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream for sharing - by Israeli Genocide Scholar Raz Segal

October 13, 2023

On Friday, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” Over the last week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.”

Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.

The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.

It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.

Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.

[protoslacker]

As the United States continues to use its veto power to block the UN Security Council from calling for a ceasefire, war crimes and crimes against humanity are rife, and the risk of genocide is real. States have a positive obligation to prevent and punish genocide and other atrocity crimes. The ICJ’s examination of Israel’s conduct is a vital step for the protection of Palestinian lives, to restore trust and credibility in the universal application of international law, and to pave the way for justice and reparation for victims.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International. ICJ hearings over Israel’s alleged breaches of the Genocide Convention a vital step to help protect Palestinian civilians

Amnesty referenced a November 2023 call by UN Experts to prevent genocide.

US obligations to prevent genocide are not dependent upon future determinations. The UN Experts point out that the obligation to prevent genocide extend beyond states: "[N]ot only States but also non-State actors such as businesses, must do everything it can to immediately end the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people. "

[putrefawn]

UN Human Rights New York Office Director Craig Mokhiber has resigned in protest against the UN's incompetence and failure to intervene and acknowledge Israel's crimes against humanity in Palestine.

Dear High Commissioner,

This will be my last official communication to you as Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

I write at a moment of great anguish for the world, including for many of our colleagues. Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it. As someone who has investigated human rights in Palestine since the 1980s, lived in Gaza as a UN human rights advisor in the 1990s, and carried out several human rights missions to the country before and since, this is deeply personal to me.

I also worked in these halls through the genocides against the Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidi, and the Rohingya. In each case, when the dust settled on the horrors that had been perpetrated against defenseless civilian populations, it became painfully clear that we had failed in our duty to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocites, of protection of the vulnerable, and of accountability for perpetrators. And so it has been with successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN.

High Commissioner, we are failing again.

As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units.

Across the land, Apartheid rules.

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What's more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations "to ensure respect" for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel's atrocities.

Volker Turk, High Commissioner for Human Rights Palais Wilson, Geneva.

In concert with this, western corporate media, increasingly captured and state-adjacent, are in open breach of Article 20 of the ICCPR, continuously dehumanizing Palestinians to facilitate the genocide, and broadcasting propaganda for war and advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, and violence. US-based social media companies are suppressing the voices of human rights defenders while amplifying pro-Israel propaganda. Israel lobby online-trolls and GONGOS are harassing and smearing human rights defenders, and western universities and employers are collaborating with them to punish those who dare to speak out against the atrocities. In the wake of this genocide, there must be an accounting for these actors as well, just as there was for radio Milles Collines in Rwanda.

In such circumstances, the demands on our organization for principled and effective action are greater than ever. But we have not met the challenge. The protective enforcement power Security Council has again been blocked by US intransigence, the SG is under assault for the mildest of protestations, and our human rights mechanisms are under sustained slanderous attack by an organized, online impunity network.

Decades of distraction by the illusory and largely disingenuous promises of Oslo have diverted the Organization from its core duty to defend international law, international human rights, and the Charter itself. The mantra of the "two-state solution" has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people. The so-called "Quartet" has become nothing more than a fig leaf for inaction and for subservience to a brutal status quo. The (US-scripted) deference to "agreements between the parties themselves" (in place of international law) was always a transparent slight-of-hand, designed to reinforce the power of Israel over the rights of the occupied and dispossessed Palestinians.

High Commissioner, I came to this Organization first in the 1980s, because I found in it a principled, norm-based institution that was squarely on the side of human rights, including in cases where the powerful US, UK, and Europe were not on our side. While my own government, its subsidiarity institutions, and much of the US media were still supporting or justifying South African apartheid, Israeli oppression, and Central American death squads, the UN was standing up for the oppressed peoples of those lands. We had international law on our side. We had human rights on our side. We had principle on our side. Our authority was rooted in our integrity. But no more.

In recent decades, key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US, and to fear of the Israel Lobby, to abandon these principles, and to retreat from international law itself. We have lost a lot in this abandonment, not least our own global credibility. But the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses as a result of our failures. It is a stunning historic irony that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the same year that the Nakba was perpetrated against the Palestinian people. As we commemorate the 75* Anniversary of the UDHR, we would do well to abandon the old cliché that the UDHR was born out of the atrocities that proceeded it, and to admit that it was born alongside one of the most atrocious genocides of the 20* Century, that of the destruction of Palestine. In some sense, the framers were promising human rights to everyone, except the Palestinian people. And let us remember as well, that the UN itself carries the original sin of helping to facilitate the dispossession of the Palestinian people by ratifying the European settler colonial project that seized Palestinian land and turned it over to the colonists.

We have much for which to atone.

But the path to atonement is clear. We have much to learn from the principled stance taken in cities around the world in recent days, as masses of people stand up against the genocide, even at risk of beatings and arrest. Palestinians and their allies, human rights defenders of every stripe, Christian and Muslim organizations, and progressive Jewish voices saying "not in our name" to do is to follow them.

Yesterday, just a few blocks from here, New York's Grand Central Station was completely taken over by thousands of Jewish human rights defenders standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people and demanding an end to Israeli tyranny (many risking arrest, in the process). In doing so, they stripped away in an instant the Israeli hasbara propaganda point (and old antisemitic trope) that Israel somehow represents the Jewish people. It does not. And, as such, Israel is solely responsible for its crimes. On this point, it bears repeating, in spite of Israel lobby smears to the contrary, that criticism of Israel's human rights violations is not antisemitic, any more than criticism of Saudi violations is Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is anti-Buddhist, or criticism of Indian violations is anti-Hindu. When they seek to silence us with smears, we must raise our voice, not lower it. I trust you will agree, High Commissioner, that this is what speaking truth to power is all about.

But I also find hope in those parts of the UN that have refused to compromise the Organization's human rights principles in spite of enormous pressures to do so. Our independent special rapporteurs, commissions of enquiry, and treaty body experts, alongside most of our staff, have continued to stand up for the human rights of the Palestinian people, even as other parts of the UN (even at the highest levels) have shamefully bowed their heads to power. As the custodians of the human rights norms and standards, OHCHR has a particular duty to defend those standards. Our job, I believe, is to make our voice heard, from the Secretary-General to the newest UN recruit, and horizontally across the wider UN system, insisting that the human rights of the Palestinian people are not up for debate, negotiation, or compromise anywhere under the blue flag.

What, then, would a UN-norm-based position look like? For what would we work if we were true to our rhetorical admonitions about human rights and equality for all, accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims, protection of the vulnerable, and empowerment for rights-holders, all under the rule of law? The answer, I believe, is simple if we have the clarity to see beyond the propagandistic smokescreens that distort the vision of justice to which we are sworn, the courage to abandon fear and deference to powerful states, and the will to truly take up the banner of human rights and peace. To be sure, this is a long-term project and a steep climb. But we must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points:

Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law.

Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.

One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land.

Fighting Apartheid: We must redirect all UN efforts and resources to the struggle against apartheid, just as we did for South Africa in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s.

Return and Compensation: We must reaffirm and insist on the right to return and full compensation for all Palestinians and their families currently living in the occupied terntones, in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and in the diaspora across the globe.

Truth and Justice: We must call for a transitional justice process, making full use of decades of accumulated UN investigations, enquiries, and reports, to document the truth, and to ensure accountability for all perpetrators, redress for all victims, and remedies for documented injustices.

Protection: We must press for the deployment of a well-resourced and strongly mandated UN protection force with a sustained mandate to protect civilians from the river to the sea.

Disarmament: We must advocate for the removal and destruction of Israel's massive stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, lest the conflict lead to the total destruction of the region and, possibly, beyond.

Mediation: We must recognize that the US and other western powers are in fact not credible mediators, but rather actual parties to the conflict who are complicit with Israel in the violation of Palestinian rights, and we must engage them as such.

Solidarity: We must open our doors (and the doors of the SG) wide to the legions of Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian human rights defenders who are standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their human rights and stop the unconstrained flow of Israel lobbyists to the offices of UN leaders, where they advocate for continued war, persecution, apartheid, and impunity, and smear our human rights defenders for their principled defense of Palestinian rights.

This will take years to achieve, and western powers will fight us every step of the way, so we must be steadfast. In the immediate term, we must work for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the longstanding siege on Gaza, stand up against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank (and elsewhere), document the genocidal assault in Gaza, help to bring massive humanitarian aid and reconstruction to the Palestinians, take care of our traumatized colleagues and their families, and fight like hell for a principled approach in the UN's political offices.

The UN's failure in Palestine thus far is not a reason for us to withdraw. Rather it should give us the courage to abandon the failed paradigm of the past, and fully embrace a more principled course. Let us, as OHCHR, boldly and proudly join the anti-apartheid movement that is growing all around the world, adding our logo to the banner of equality and human rights for the Palestinian people. The world is watching. We will all be accountable for where we stood at this crucial moment in history. Let us stand on the side of justice.

I thank you, High Commissioner, Volker, for hearing this final appeal from my desk. I will leave the Office in a few days for the last time, after more than three decades of service. But please do not hesitate to reach out if I can be of assistance in the future.

Sincerely,

Craig Mokhiber