U.S. President Joe Biden announces a proposed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza while delivering remarks in the State Dining Room at the White House on May 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden also briefly spoke about former President Donald Trump’s conviction in a New York court one day earlier.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The continuation of violence will continue to increase the heart-wrenching death toll, increase the number of calls for a ceasefire, and decrease your poll numbers — straight through the election.

Jamie Beran, clommon Drewams, Jun 05, 2024

Editor’s Note: The following is an open letter addressed to U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, June 5, 2024 from Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a domestic-focused organization that explained that while it “does not work on policy toward Israel-Palestine or any foreign policy issues… chose to send this letter because of the urgency of the danger posed by the ongoing war to the safety of American Jews and to democracy” in the United States.

The Honorable Joseph R. Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Biden,

As American Jews deeply committed to justice, equity, and collective safety, we welcome your support for a permanent ceasefire plan. Since that announcement, unfortunately, Israeli officials have made it clear that they do not support such a plan.

Time and time again, despite your calls to end this violence, you have not followed through with material action. With over one million Palestinian refugees now being forced to flee Rafah, their last guaranteed refuge, thousands of lives lost, and families of captives being fined in Israel for demanding a ceasefire, it is long past time to end U.S. support for these attacks. Now is the moment to make good on your promise to stop providing offensive weapons to the Israeli military.

We as Jews — and particularly as Jews who have built and maintained strong, decades-long partnerships with all communities targeted by the rapidly encroaching white nationalist movement — know that historically, we are most in danger when democracy is weakened, and safest when it is strengthened.

We cannot overestimate how challenging it has been to focus on our strictly domestic priorities at Bend the Arc during this time. One of Bend the Arc’s founding principles is to mobilize American Jews as we are: a multi-issue community. We care deeply about pursuing justice in the United States, for Jews and non-Jews alike. But since the horrors of October 7th, the violence in Israel-Palestine has permeated our borders to the point where it jeopardizes our collective safety. It impacts Jewish life in the U.S. and the safety of Jewish and Arab Americans. And, under the threat of an emboldened authoritarian movement at our doorstep, it threatens our shared ability to defend and build what will protect all of us — a vibrant, multifaith, multiracial democracy.

When you named the deadly rally in Charlottesville as your motivation to run for President in 2020, we knew you shared our vision. We knew you saw that day as a harbinger of an alternate, likely irreversible, and very disturbing timeline for this nation — one further cemented by the January 6th insurrection and hardened each time Trump spells out his public plan to disassemble democracy.

From our shared fights to appoint Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, to bolster our historic movement for labor unions, and to champion the Inflation Reduction Act, we know we want to continue to work together to improve this democracy. And from our shared fights to counter antisemitism and protect public education — and from your invitation to collaborate with the White House, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education — we know we want to continue to work together to defend this democracy.

So today, as the Israeli government continues to ignore your red lines, has publicly vowed to continue to cross them, and has now promised at least seven more months of attacks, we, as American Jews, are sounding an alarm:

U.S. support for continued violence in Gaza is putting American safety and U.S. democracy in danger. For the sake of the lives of all people in the region, and the safety and futures of all of us in the United States, we urge you to make good on your own promise to cease sending offensive munitions to Israel. We urge you to end the ongoing violence, and reach a resolution that brings all captive loved ones home to their families, ends mass atrocities, prevents world war, and begins to achieve self-determination for all Israelis and Palestinians.

The status quo does not address our immediate safety. We’ve learned from history and the last eight months that explosions of global violence dramatically increase violence at home. Antisemitism, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry, racism, and xenophobia continue to surge. In these moments, leaders scramble for false solutions to quickly provide illusions of safety, ultimately increasing criminalization and decreasing the liberties required to keep democracy healthy.

The status quo does not address our future safety. Your victory this November is the single most powerful tool we have to obstruct an irreversible timeline towards the end of U.S. democracy and our continuing work to build a society that serves everybody — from protecting voting rights, to enshrining the right to abortion, to creating just pathways for immigration. Your success as a candidate is tied inextricably to the people’s faith in your ability to keep us safe. As the violence overseas continues to intertwine itself across all of our domestic work, it too is now tied to your success and all of our safety.

Since October, the majority of your voters among American Jewish Democrats and the vast majority of American Democrats have called for an end to this. The continuation of violence will continue to increase the heart-wrenching death toll, increase the number of calls for a ceasefire, and decrease your poll numbers — straight through the election. We’ve seen uncommitted movements nearly overtake your previous margin of victory in key regions and, in some cities, win. We’re seeing your base of young voters and progressives increasingly losing faith. Across our community, we’re seeing too many unaffiliated Jews — the second largest group of American Jews — go unheard. And across our partnerships with non-Jewish communities, we hear stories of alienation and isolation. Not acting on your own red lines, combined with the Israeli government’s promise to continue to violate them, will further erode your viability as a candidate in a race where every vote will matter.

At Bend the Arc, we fight for the joyful future we deserve: an American society free from white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism. One where Black liberation is realized and where we are all safe and thriving, no matter what we look like or where we come from. Our vision shines brightest against the ominous backdrop of white nationalism’s threat.

Your candidacy can also reintroduce that contrast and end a status quo that threatens to mirror the opposition. In doing so, we pray that you can regain the faith of voters and that we can work together to reintroduce the bright vision of the future required to inspire Americans in November.

Sincerely,

Jamie Beran
CEO, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action

This video may contain light patterns or images that could trigger seizures or cause discomfort for people with visual sensitivities.

By Stephen Quillen and Mersiha Gadzo

Aljazeera, 5 Jun 2024

• Morgues are overflowing and hospitals are struggling to cope with a surge of casualties in Deir el-Balah, medical sources tell Al Jazeera, as at least 75 people are killed in the past 24 hours by Israeli strikes on central Gaza.
• Israel announced its ground forces have moved into the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, while fighter jets and artillery attack targets in the area.
• Hamas says it cannot agree to any ceasefire deal unless Israel makes a “clear” commitment to a permanent truce and a complete withdrawal from Gaza, as Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterates the war will continue until the group is “eliminated”.
• At least 36,550 Palestinians have been killed and 82,959 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s attacks is at least 1,139 with dozens of people still held captive in Gaza.

Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, writer and activist. His main research areas are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Some may find his video title provocative, but the author’s thoughts are profound and worth noting.

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Harretz Editorial – 2 minutes read time.

The picture of Israel that emerged from an investigation published this week by the British newspaper the Guardian and the Israeli website +972 Magazine and its sister site Local Call is akin to the Cosa Nostra.

A state whose intelligence agencies have been converted into the attack dogs of Don Netanyahu. According to the report, then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, acting as the unofficial emissary of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led an operation designed to disrupt an earlier investigation of Israel in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, allegedly attempting to threaten and extort then-ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Cohen reportedly appealed to her personally on several occasions between 2017 and 2020, delivering threatening messages meant to dissuade her from investigating Israel.

According to the report, Cohen repeatedly exerted pressure on Bensouda to desist from her investigation. “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family,” he is alleged to have told her. On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown her photos of her husband, Philip, taken covertly when the couple was visiting London. The report claims that Israel used voice recordings of her husband conducting embarrassing conversations.

The results of the investigation are jaw-dropping. The investigation claims that for years, including in recent months, Israel spied on Bensouda’s successor at the ICC, Karim Khan, who 10 days ago requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Israel under Netanyahu has gone off the rails. It forgot what it means to be a state. This was well described by former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo in an interview with Yossi Melman. “If such a thing happened, we are not only cutting off the branch on which we sit, but the entire tree trunk,” Pardo said.

There is no front that has not been neglected and abandoned, no system that has not been corrupted under Netanyahu’s malignant leadership. Israel is now at risk of being accused of disrupting an international investigation. Anyone who believes that Cohen is a worthy candidate to replace Netanyahu is condemning Israel to a continued deterioration to the world’s margins.

Israel is clamoring for political change and for the beginning of a prolonged and thorough rehabilitation process. It must first get rid of the head, Netanyahu, and then toss out his crooked moral standards.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel

—Nasir Khan

The idea of a one-state solution looks attractive on paper, but there are many serious issues we need to consider if the Israel-Palestine conflict is to end. Some prominent writers and political figures have advocated this solution. This is an idea I have also supported, but with some reservations.

Israel was founded on a supremacist ideology, the ideology of Zionism. This ideology has ruled every part of the colonial entity since 1949. As long as that ideology is the foundation of this entity, any question of a one-state is not possible. However, if the ruling class of Israel and the United States turn away from this supra-racist ideology, then the idea of a one-state solution may be possible. Without this change, a one-state solution will remain an idle dream.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, speaks during a rally with supporters in the southern Israeli city of Sderot on October 26, 2022.

(Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)

One advocate responded: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza.”

Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, May 30, 2024

Israel’s forces have killed at least 36,224 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in less than eight months, and far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday threatened to similarly attack the illegally occupied West Bank.

Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, shared on social media a video he recorded in Bat Hefer, following similar posts a day earlier. The Times of Israelreported that the minister’s comments came after Palestinians’ gunfire from Tulkarem in the West Bank toward the Israeli settlement.

“Our message to the neighbors beyond the fence in Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Shuweika, and Qalqilya: We will turn you into ruined cities like in the Gaza Strip if the terror you are exerting on the settlements continues,” Smotrich said in Hebrew, according to a translation from Al Jazeera.

NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy pointed out that not only is Smotrich an advocate of illegal Israeli settlements—he has a home near Kedumim—but also “his role as finance minister means he oversees budgets, like police and army.”

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns of the U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians, said of Smotrich’s remarks: “Take this seriously. If extremists like Smotrich get their way they will do to the West Bank exactly what they have done to Gaza. Starting with the refugee camps and Area C communities (to a certain extent it has already begun).”

Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank.

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States, issued a statement about multiple recent events, including the minister’s comments.

“Every day, we see Israel’s far-right government targeting civilian infrastructure vital to the lives of ordinary Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank,” Hooper said. “This ongoing destruction has one goal—to make life unbearable for the Palestinian people and to force their removal from the land of Palestine.”

CAIR also “condemned the far-right Israeli government’s destruction of a vegetable market in the West Bank city of Ramallah,” explaining: “During a raid, Israeli stun grenades and tear gas canisters ignited the blaze that consumed a large portion of the market. Some 200 shops and stalls were impacted.”

The group further pointed out that the devastation in Ramallah followed Israeli forces bombing a pair of encampments in and near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, attacks that killed dozens of Palestinians displaced by the war—which over 30 countries have argued to the International Court of Justice amounts to genocide.

Smotrich has come under fire for other statements since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 7 attack. Just last month, in what critics called blatantly genocidal language, he advocated for “total annihilation” of Gaza.

In January, Smotrich said that the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be a “humanitarian solution” and “a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are 2 million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel.”

Smotrich made similar remarks before the current escalation, declaring in March 2023 that an entire Palestinian town should be “wiped out” by Israel and that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

by Medea Benjamin, Antiwar. com, May 30, 2024

Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled Secretary of State Blinken at a May 21 Congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “we are next.”

The audience at the hearing, stacked with CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion of the US being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the US must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in Israel but to protect ourselves.”

Graham was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the US accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he really meant that US thuggery prevailed because the Trump administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the US and freezing their assets in US banks. President Biden lifted the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court would not resume the probe of US crimes in Afghanistan. The message from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare hold the US to the same standards you use for others.

The International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no matter what country they are from or who their victims are.

Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by the Guardian and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared and threatened ICC officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Despite the pressure, on May 20, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan made his request for Israeli and Hamas arrest warrants. Among the charges against the Israeli officials are extermination, using starvation as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.

Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request has now gone to a panel of three judges who will determine in the coming weeks whether the request is granted. But pro-Israel forces in the US are trying their best to throw sand in the wheels of justice with threats of new sanctions.

One ultimatum already came from Senator Tom Cotton and 11 other Republican senators in a toxic April 24 letter. “Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators signaled to the ICC. “If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.” The letter concluded with a hair-raising: “You have been warned.”

The Biden administration has responded to the ICC by flip flopping like a fish on dry land. On May 20, the White House put out a statement calling the ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders “outrageous”, adding “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called the request “shameful.” At a hearing on May 22, he told Senator Graham that he welcomed working with him on efforts to sanction the ICC.

But on May 28, National Security Council Communications Advisor John Kirby said at a White House press briefing, “We don’t believe that sanctions against the ICC is the right approach here.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who spoke after Kirby, reiterated that message. She said that legislation against the ICC “is not something the administration is going to support” and that “sanctions on the ICC are not an effective or appropriate tool to address U.S. concerns.”

This new position from the White House will make it easier for more Democrats to say no to the bills that will be introduced as soon as Congress returns from recess on June 3. Already, dueling statements are coming out from Congressional members. While Senate Majority Leader Schumer called the ICC appeal “reprehensible” and Democrat Joe Manchin joined with Republicans to call for visa bans for ICC officials and sanctions on the international body, Senator Bernie Sanders defended the court, saying, “The ICC is doing its job. It’s doing what it is supposed to do. We cannot only apply international law when it is convenient.”

On the House side, progressives voiced support for the ICC.  Rep. Cori Bush said, “Seeking arrest warrants for human rights abuses is an important step towards accountability. It’s shameful for U.S. officials to threaten the ICC while continuing to send weapons that enable war crimes.” Rep. Mark Pocan gave a gutsy response, saying, “If Netanyahu comes to address Congress, I would be more than glad to show the ICC the way to the House floor to issue that warrant.”

While most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by Senator Van Hollen. “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere in a judicial matter by threatening judicial officers, their family members and their employees with retribution. This thuggery is something befitting the mafia, not U.S. senators.” It is also not befitting the White House, especially one that has been such a willing partner to Israel’s war crimes.

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK, is coauthor, with David Swanson, of the forthcoming NATO: What You Need to Know.

Consortium News, May 28, 2024

There is no ambiguity about Israel causing Gaza to suffer occupation, apartheid and genocide. To counter Israeli denialism, here is a short primer on why these terms are accurate.

Malak Mattar, Palestine, “Hind’s Hall,” 2024. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

In a chapter from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), called “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon writes about the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not sufficiently human.

The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called safe zone moves further and further south. 

In December, the Israeli government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi (west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe area.

A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London’s Heathrow airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah.

Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a refuge, but — according to the laws of war — a safe zone must be agreed upon by all parties.

Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Odyssey of a People,” 1980. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

“How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided by one part of the conflict?” asked Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); “It can only promote the false feeling that it will be safe.” Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. 

On Feb. 20, Israel attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, killing two family members of the organisation’s staff. 

On May 13, an international U.N. staff member was killed after the Israeli army opened fire on a U.N. vehicle, one of the nearly 200 U.N. workers killed in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination of aid workers. 

[On May 26, an Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed at least 45 civilians, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now tries to claim was a “tragic mistake.” The attack, which burned mostly women and children alive, took place two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its Rafah attack.]

Aref El-Rayyes, Lebanon, untitled, 1963. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether.

Starving Palestinians has long been Israeli policy, which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 Nakba or “Catastrophe.”

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: apartheid, occupation and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to anti-Semitism. 

But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is necessary to counter this denial.

Nelson Makamo, South Africa, “Decoration of the Youth,” 2019. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Apartheid. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority population within the borders defined in 1948 (21 percent) as second-class citizens. There are at least 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed in 2018, declares the country a “nation state of the Jewish people.” 

As the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote, through this new law, the Israeli government “formally endorses” the use of “apartheid methods within Israel’s recognised borders.” The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have both said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians falls under the definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.

Laila Shawa, Palestine, “The Hands of Fatima,” 2013. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

Occupation. In 1967, Israel occupied the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan region and southern Lebanon).

Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In U.N. documents and at the International Court of Justice, Israel is referred to as the “occupying power,” which is a term of art that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it occupies.

Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation that has not been revised.

An occupation is identical to colonial rule: it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of 21 illegal settlements), Israel continued to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of Gaza.

Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel’s obligation as the occupying power.

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are occupied have the right to resist.

In 1965, in the midst of Guinea Bissau’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2105 (“Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”). Paragraph 10 of this resolution is worth reading carefully: 

“The General Assembly… [r]ecognises the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invites all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories.” 

There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. 

Rather than sell arms to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, the members states of the United Nations — particularly from the Global North — should aid the Palestinians.

Genocide. In its order published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found “plausible” evidence of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians.

In March, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report called “Anatomy of a Genocide.”

In it, Albanese wrote that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” “More broadly,” she wrote,

“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.”

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel’s bombardment. In October 2023, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said that “an entire nation out there is responsible” for the attacks on Oct. 7, and it was not true that “civilians [were] not… aware, not involved.” 

The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it expresses Israel’s intent and use of “collective punishment,” a genocidal war crime. The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “an option” since “there are no non-combatants in Gaza.” 

Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe Saada, a member of the Israeli Parliament from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “all Gazans must be destroyed.” These sentiments, by any international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As with “apartheid” and “occupation,” the use of the term “genocide” is entirely accurate.

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu version of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already been translated into Arabic and Swahili).

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from The Wretched of the Earth:

“At 12 or 13 years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears.”

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a new South Africa 30 years ago.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Jordan Shilton, WSWS, May 28, 2024

The Israeli regime’s deliberate massacre of at least 45 displaced people in a tent camp in Rafah marks yet another act of barbarism in its genocide against the Palestinians. Dozens of men, women and children, who had already fled multiple times in the past seven months, were massacred and maimed in a firestorm of American-supplied missiles fired by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Palestinians react next to the destruction after an Israeli strike where displaced people were staying in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 27, 2024. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi]

Sunday’s bombardment was a direct response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic government to Friday’s order from the International Court of Justice calling for an end to Israel’s military intervention in Rafah. The Zionist regime wanted to make clear that it will not be bound by any restrictions imposed by international law. It feels able to act so provocatively because it has full confidence in the unflinching support of the imperialist powers, first and foremost the United States, for its “final solution” of the Palestinian question.

The strike was carried out “with precise ammunition and on the basis of precise intelligence,” the IDF asserted. Its statement blandly noted that the military was aware that “several civilians in the area were harmed. The incident is under review.”

The most commonly used “precise ammunition” fired by the IDF at Gaza are weapons fitted with US-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb kits, which transform standard weapons into GPS-guided munitions. US aerospace company Boeing accelerated the dispatch of at least 1,800 such kits to Israel in October 2023, as the Netanyahu regime’s genocide got underway. Since then, they have played a major role in slaughtering well over 36,000 Palestinians, the current official death toll.

The Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood of western Rafah, where the camp was located, was supposedly a “safe zone” for Palestinian civilians. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, many victims were “burned alive” in their tents. An estimated 249 people were injured the strike, which eyewitnesses told CNN included at least eight missiles. One survivor, who made it to the Kuwait hospital, stated, “The air strikes burned the tents, the tents are melting, and the people’s bodies are melting.”

With Gaza’s healthcare system collapsing after months of repeated attacks by the Israeli regime, many of the injured will not survive. A doctor, who spoke to Al Jazeera after returning to Britain from an aid mission in Gaza, stated that hospitals in the enclave are providing “medieval medicine” to patients. “It is what you would hear about or read about what would be happening in Europe maybe 300, 400 years ago,” commented Dr. Khaled Dawas, the head of gastrointestinal surgery at University College London. He added that injured Palestinians often avoid going to hospital because it “means pretty much a death sentence.”

One day after the massacre, the director of the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, where many of the injured were treated, announced the closure of the facility due to Israeli attacks. Earlier in the day, two healthcare workers were reportedly killed in a strike on the facility’s gates. The al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah was also set to suspend all services due to a lack of fuel triggered by an IDF blockade that was initiated on the same day as the refugee camp massacre.

This latest atrocity has the Biden administration’s fingerprints all over it. The IDF’s onslaught on Rafah has proceeded over the past three weeks after the White House gave it the green light. Just two weeks before Israel attacked Rafah, Biden signed a supplementary military assistance bill passed with bipartisan support that included $26 billion in funding for Israel.

Biden has asserted that Israel is doing “all it can to ensure civilian protection,” while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan insisted that the IDF’s assault has “not involved major military operations into the heart of dense urban areas.” This line has been maintained even as over 800,000 people have fled the city. Likewise, administration officials continue to claim that killing civilians in Rafah is a “red line,” even as the IDF does this every day with impunity.

The Biden administration’s lying claims that no “major” operations are taking place in Rafah and that it opposes killing civilians are no more credible than Netanyahu’s attempt to present the bombing of the refugee camp in comments Monday as a “tragic mistake.” The fact of the matter is that as horrific as Sunday’s massacre was, it is part of a pattern of the systematic targeting of defenceless civilians by the IDF.

From the bombardment of the al-Ahli hospital killing upwards of 500 people, to the storming of the al-Shifa hospital, and the destruction of Khan Younis, millions of workers and young people know all too well the brutality of Netanyahu’s regime and what it is capable of with imperialist backing.

The imperialist governments in the United States and Germany, Israel’s two most important weapons’ suppliers, reiterated their backing for the Zionist regime after Sunday’s massacre. Adopting the Israeli government’s propaganda wholesale, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said, “Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we all understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists, who are responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.”

German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit labelled the strike as a “mistake,” echoing Netanyahu. Hebestreit also noted that the Israeli military had launched an investigation to determine what happened, adding, according to Der Spiegel, “First of all investigate what happened and then judge. And don’t come to an immediate judgement on the basis of pictures.” In other words, let the murderers investigate the crime scene and cover up any evidence that implicates them before we say anything about it.

No “investigation” is needed to determine what the motivation for Sunday’s massacre was. Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly asserted since the genocide began that their plan is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, by killing them, starving them to death, or forcing them to flee the enclave, so that Israel can seize the territory. Gaza’s inhabitants are viewed by the Zionist regime as “human animals,” as Defence Minister Yoav Gallant put it in October. Fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently declared that he would like to live in Gaza, celebrated Sunday’s slaughter with a post on social media urging an intensification of the attacks: “Rafah with full force.”

The imperialist powers support this barbarism because they view the Gaza genocide as a critical component of their plans to redivide the world in a rapidly escalating Third World War. The same indifference to the savage massacring of human beings in Gaza by the IDF with its never-ending supply of US-manufactured bombs is on display in Ukraine, where the US and its NATO allies have sacrificed some 500,000 Ukrainians in a war for imperialist plunder.

It was not for nothing that US Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson remarked in his denunciation of the application of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant last week, “If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”

The key lesson that must be drawn following the Rafah refugee camp massacre is that appeals to the powers that be, whether to imperialist governments, the United Nations, or international courts, to “stop the genocide” will fall on deaf ears. The millions of workers, students and young people who have joined anti-genocide protests and encampments over recent months around the world must turn to the international working class, the only social force capable of leading a genuine struggle to halt the genocide against the Palestinians.

The mass political mobilisation of the working class, which produces all of society’s wealth, is the only way to stop the Israeli war criminals and their imperialist accomplices in their tracks. As workers are told in every country to accept sweeping attacks on conditions and public services to pay for militarism, war and genocide, a powerful basis exists to rally workers in struggle to stop the production and delivery of all conceivable military equipment to Israel and its allied imperialist war machines in North America and Europe. It is the fight to build such a movement which requires arming the working class with a socialist programme to defeat capitalist barbarism, that is the most urgent task of all for those who want to bring the genocide in Gaza to an end.

Renowned American political scientist and analyst Prof. John Mearsheimer says: On 15 May 2024, I was in Sydney, Australia, where I spoke at the Centre for Independent Studies about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. I analyzed both the war in Gaza, which started on October 7 and continues to rage, and the fighting between Iran on one side and Israel and the US on the other side, that took place between 1 April and 19 April 2024.

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