"Genocide" is an emotive term, and one few people wish to use in relation to Israel, given the extermination of many millions of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis. But it is a term that exists outside of, and apart from, the Holocaust. It has a meaning clearly defined in international law, and one that is key to analysing and evaluating political situations and their likely future trajectories. The term was coined precisely to offer tools for early detection so that genocides could be prevented from taking place, not simply labeled once the atrocity was over. To preclude genocide as a possible explanation for Israel's behavior in Gaza is to prioritize the historic sensitivities of some Jews over the current, urgent and existential threats to a substantial part of the Palestinian people.
The United Nations adopted a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, the year of Israel's creation. It defined genocide as:
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 an other group.
Genocide is confirmed by only one of these five acts, and there should at least be a suspicion as we shall see that Israel is effecting the second and third in Gaza.
Israeli academics too have noted the need for another term in addition to ethnic cleansing and apartheid to describe Israel's policy towards the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. The late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, one of the country's foremost scholars of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, invented a word politicide to avoid the term genocide. In 2003, years before Israel's blockade and repeated attacks on Gaza had begun, he defined politicide as having two effects:
The first is the destruction of the Palestinian public sphere, including its leadership and social and material infrastructure. The second effect is to make everyday life for the Palestinians increasingly unbearable by destroying the private sphere and any possibility of normalcy and stability. " All of these conditions are " designed to lower Palestinian expectations, crush their resistance, isolate them, make them submit to any arrangement suggested by the Israelis, and eventually cause their voluntary mass emigration from the land.
It hardly matters whether we describe the Israeli plan outlined by Kimmerling as incremental genocide or politicide; he accurately presents Israel's monstrous vision of a half-life for Palestinians in the occupied territories in which they are stripped not only of their rights but also of their humanity. On this view, Palestinians are conceived of not so much as lesser beings but as non-beings whose fate should not trouble us.
Putting Gaza on a dietThere have been three clear signals from senior Israeli officials of the strategic shift in thinking about Gaza, of how the limits of what is imaginable have been gradually shifting.
The first was articulated in 2006 by Dov Weissglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister of the time, Ehud Olmert. He alluded to Israel's new approach to Gaza during an interview with the Haaretz newspaper. "It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die," he said, referring to Israel's recent imposition of an economic blockade on Gaza, backed by an aid boycott by western governments. Most observers at the time dismissed his comment as hyperbole. But later it emerged that Weissglass had actually been describing a policy that was about to be implemented by the Israeli army.
In 2012, after a three-year legal battle by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose a document called "Red Lines" that had been drafted in early 2008. At that time, as the blockade was tightened still further, the Israeli defense ministry requested calculations by health officials of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza's inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day at the crossings.
But in practice the military authorities ignored the advice of the government's own calorie-counters. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition requiring 170 trucks a day military officials found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure. An average of only 67 trucks much less than half of the minimum requirement entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks that had been entering before the blockade began.
Israeli officials had deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in what they termed the "culture and experience" of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale that was never explained. Gisha, which fought for the document's publication, observed that Israeli officials had ignored the fact that, as we shall see, the blockade had severely impaired Gaza's farming industry, with a shortage of seeds and chickens that had led to a dramatic drop in food output.
Further, the UN noted that Israel had failed to factor in the large quantity of food from each day's supply of 67 trucks that never actually reached Gaza. That was because Israeli restrictions at the crossings created long delays as food was unloaded, checked and then put on to new trucks. Many items spoiled as they lay in the sun.
And on top of this, Israel adjusted the formula so that the number of trucks carrying nutrient-poor foods like sugar were doubled while the trucks carrying nutrient-rich food like milk, fruit and vegetables were greatly reduced, sometimes by as much as a half. Robert Turner, director of the UN refugee agency's operations in the Gaza Strip, observed at the time: "The facts on the ground in Gaza demonstrate that food imports consistently fell below the red lines."
The question was why, if the politicians and generals were advised by health experts that Gaza needed at least 170 trucks a day, did they oversee a policy that allowed in only 67? How could such a policy be described?
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
