It is no secret that the Israeli military is carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
At the human rights organisation where I work, Defense for Children International – Palestine, I’ve analysed and reported on more first-hand accounts of Palestinian child killings, injuries, arrests and torture than I can count.
People around the world have seen for themselves the gut-wrenching images of charred Palestinian children’s bodies on social media; heard Israeli leaders spell out their intentions to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza; and from where I live in Washington, DC, witnessed the Biden administration continue to diplomatically support and send weapons to Israel with abandon.
While President Joe Biden recently said that “no one is above the law”, in response to guilty verdicts in former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, his administration is seemingly committed to shielding Israel from accountability at any cost – even if that means tearing apart the rules-based international order.
Biden has so far not only refused to support the ongoing case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but he has actively rejected the preliminary findings of the World Court determining that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Even more, Biden continues to undermine the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, after news emerged that he was pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
While the US court system seems to finally be holding Trump accountable for some of his litany of crimes, the courts have failed to stop Biden from furthering US complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
‘Unflagging’ support
On 10 June, an appellate court in San Francisco will have the opportunity to demonstrate that indeed no one, including the president of the United States, is above the law.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, representing plaintiffs Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), Al-Haq, Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian Americans, will ask a panel of judges to reconsider the district court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to stop the US government from transferring more weapons to Israel during an ongoing genocide.
The Center for Constitutional Rights brought the lawsuit against Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in November, arguing that the Biden administration is complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians by continuing to provide financial and diplomatic support, as well as weapons.
In its response to the lawsuit, the Biden administration has maintained that the courts do not have purview over foreign policy, a legal concept known as the political question doctrine.
In January, Palestinians and Palestinian Americans testified in a federal court in Oakland, California, about the impacts of US weapons and support to Israel on their families and loved ones in Gaza, and asked the judge to issue an emergency order to prevent the US from sending more weapons to Israel.
Just days after the ICJ issued its first provisional measures in South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza, the US federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against the Biden administration on jurisdictional grounds, but “implored” Biden to reconsider his “unflagging” support for Israel.
Since then, Israeli forces have killed thousands more Palestinians in Gaza; repeatedly targeted journalists, doctors and humanitarian aid workers; besieged hospitals; bombed displacement camps; starved disabled Palestinian children and newborn babies to death; blocked humanitarian aid and basic necessities from reaching people in need; and more.
Yet still, Biden has continued expediting the transfer of US funding and weapons to Israel. Not only have US weapons, warplanes and technology been used to directly carry out much of the Israeli military’s campaign of genocide, but American taxpayers have paid for it.
Choice between life and death
The Israeli military dropped American bombs – GBU-39 small diameter bombs, manufactured by Boeing – on a displacement camp in Rafah at the end of May, igniting the tents sheltering thousands of Palestinians. At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the attack, including women and children.
These families were sheltering in a “safe area” after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Gaza, following evacuation orders from the Israeli military. Israeli planes bombed them anyway.
While Biden has acknowledged that Israeli forces have used US weapons to kill civilians, and a report by the State Department last month said “it is reasonable to assess that [US] defense articles … have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations”, they have done everything possible to keep the stream of US weapons flowing to Israel.
The US courts have an opportunity in front of them: judges can choose to take a minimal step towards allowing DCI-P and the other plaintiffs to have a chance at holding the Biden administration accountable for its role in the genocide of Palestinians, or they can sit back and refuse to carry out checks on the executive branch.
It is a choice, quite literally, between life and death.
Israeli forces, emboldened by the so-called ironclad support of the Biden administration, have killed on average more than 60 Palestinian children every day since 7 October. That’s more than 15,000 children who won’t go back to school, or play with their friends, or hug their parents ever again. Those 15,000 children will not grow up and live in a free Palestine.
If the US courts continue to green-light Biden’s impunity, more Palestinian children and their families will pay the price. It is a price that I, alongside many other voters in the US, are not willing to accept.
Contrary to Biden’s portrayal of the deal, it does not guarantee an end to the war, nor a full withdrawal of Israeli forces
Israeli army tanks are deployed near the Gaza Strip on 5 June 2024 (Jack Guez/AFP)
If anyone owns the daily carnage in Gaza being carried out by an angry and humiliated Israeli army, whose ranks are filled with religious settlers, it is US President Joe Biden.
From the first days after the Hamas attack on 7 October, Biden framed this savage act of collective punishment on 2.3 million Palestinians as a just war.
It was he who led the charge that Israel had the right to defend itself. It was he who sabotaged calls for an immediate ceasefire at the UN Security Council. It was he who replenished Israel’s stocks of smart bombs and missiles.
And it is under his watch that the US turned its back on the two highest courts of international justice.
Last week, Biden told Time Magazine: “The [International Criminal Court] is something that we don’t, we don’t recognise.” You have to blink twice before rereading. It is really Biden talking, not former President Donald Trump.
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The known death toll is approaching 40,000 people, and thousands more bodies could be under the rubble. More than half of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, along with its hospitals, universities, schools, shelters, sewage systems, and agricultural land. Israel has now dropped more bombs on Gaza in eight months than were dropped on London, Dresden and Hamburg during the six years of the Second World War.
The first, second and a good part of the third ranks of civilian administrators of Gaza have been killed, Palestinian sources close to Hamas told me in Doha. Gaza could take decades to recover from this assault.
Fews Net, the US-based famine early warning system network, said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. According to UN estimates, more than one million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.
‘Red line’ in Rafah
It is not for nothing that a coalition of Democrats – Arab, Muslim and student voters – in swing states are considering riding the next four years out under Trump to achieve the ultimate goal of ensuring that Biden is their party’s last Zionist president.
Biden has made two attempts to apply the brakes to the campaign being waged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man whom the US president himself has suggested is pursuing this war out of personal political interest.
The first was his threat to stop the supply of heavy bombs if Netanyahu went ahead with his operation in Rafah. Netanyahu nonetheless went ahead with the operation to seize the Rafah crossing and reoccupy the Philadelphi Corridor. His army is in eastern Rafah and is bombing the western part continually.
In early May Biden declared a “major invasion” of Rafah would be a red line. What then happened to this threat, after one million Palestinians have fled Rafah?
When asked how many charred bodies from Israeli air strikes Biden has to see before acting on his threat, White House spokesperson John Kirby floundered in reply.
Biden appears to be forcing Netanyahu’s hand by making an offer he wanted to keep under wraps explicit and public, when in reality something quite different is happening
“How does this not violate the red line that the president laid out?” asked Ed O’Keefe, political correspondent for CBS. “As I said, we don’t want to see a major ground operation,” Kirby blathered.
But that is just it. You are seeing one, Mr Kirby.
Netanyahu clearly saw Biden’s threat for what it was – bluster – and acted accordingly.
Biden gave a second performance of his party piece in confronting Israel last Friday. Out of the blue and to the obvious discomfort of the Israeli war cabinet, the US president publicly announced that he was throwing Washington’s weight behind a “full and complete ceasefire”, casting it as an Israeli offer to Hamas.
A few weeks earlier, Hamas had signed a ceasefire document under the gaze of, and with the full approval of, CIA director Bill Burns, which detailed exactly that. But the Israeli cabinet walked away from it, and the US meekly followed, calling the signed agreement a Hamas “counteroffer”.
The truth emerges
So if what Biden said a week ago was indeed him throwing his weight behind an identical proposal, it would have been progress.
Here is what Biden said a week ago: “I know there are those in Israel who will not agree with this plan and will call for the war to continue indefinitely. Some are even in the government coalition. And they’ve made it clear: They want to occupy Gaza, they want to keep fighting for years, and the hostages are not a priority to them. Well, I’ve urged the leadership in Israel to stand behind this deal, despite whatever pressure comes.
“And to the people of Israel, let me say this … I ask you to take a step back and think what will happen if this moment is lost. We can’t lose this moment. Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’ … will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining the economic, military and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world.”
Israeli ceasefire proposal does not guarantee Gaza war will end
These words could have been said with as much force eight months ago, but at last, they were being said now.
Biden’s speech threw the war cabinet into confusion for 48 hours. Netanyahu issued two apparently contradictory statements.
And then the truth emerged: Biden’s description of the three-stage ceasefire deal did not match the document the cabinet had signed off on in several critical places.
Most importantly, the deal, published here, does not offer a “full and complete ceasefire”.
Biden said in his speech that after the first phase of hostage and prisoner release ended, the ceasefire would hold while negotiations on the second phase continued.
The text says something quite different. The key section, paragraph 14, is worth quoting in full: “All procedures in this [first] stage including the temporary cessation of military operations by both sides, aid and shelter effort, withdrawal of forces, etc., will continue in stage 2 so long as the negotiations on the conditions for implementing stage 2 of this agreement are ongoing. The guarantors of this agreement shall make every effort to ensure that those indirect negotiations continue until both sides are able to reach agreement on the conditions for implementing stage 2 of this agreement.”
“Make every effort?” None of this binds Israel to continue with the second stage if negotiations fail. And if they fail, Israel goes back to war.
Waving a white flag
The second major difference is that the timeline for Palestinians to be able to return to their homes in northern Gaza has been put back. This means, in theory, that if there is no agreement on phase two, war could resume without time for the population to move.
The text also marks a departure from previous deals in that Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, has lost much of its say on which prisoners Israel would release in exchange for the return of hostages. Israel now demands a veto on a group of 100 prisoners who comprise the leadership of the main Palestinian resistance groups.
This is targeted at people like the popular Fatah leader and potential presidential candidate, Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences.
Once again, Biden appears to be forcing Netanyahu’s hand by making an offer he wanted to keep under wraps explicit and public, when in reality something quite different is happening.
US President Joe Biden announces a proposed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, at the White House on 31 May 2024 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP)
Once again, Biden is serving Israel’s bottom line. He has cemented Israel’s bottom line throughout these negotiations. Just as he allowed a major ground offensive against Rafah to proceed, Biden is supporting Israel’s right to continue the war after an initial release of hostages and prisoners.
On this, Netanyahu is right: the text does not support Biden’s contention that the ceasefire would be “full and complete”.
For Hamas leaders to sign a document like this would mean putting their hands in the air, emerging from their tunnels and waving a big white flag. And we all know what happens to people who wave white flags.
The deal would not guarantee an end to the war, a withdrawal of Israeli forces, or a return of more than one million displaced Palestinians to their homes. Eight months of war would have been for nothing.
Weakening Biden
And as I recently reported, Hamas is in no mood to do this. Rightly or wrongly, it feels it is winning the battle of wills in Gaza. It thinks the Israeli army is on the ropes.
Hamas acknowledges the destruction and havoc wreaked above ground, but it is confident of its ability to function for months to come underground.
Having signed one document which was presented as a deal by Egyptian and Qatari negotiators, Hamas is in no mood to deviate from the text. It “reacted positively” to Biden’s speech, but I understand from Palestinian sources that it regards the text of Israel’s offer as a non-starter.
Full text of Israel’s Gaza ceasefire proposal that was announced by Biden
One said: “Hamas is now challenging Biden to put what he said in his address into the text of the offer. They want it in writing. They want a guarantee that once the hostage and prisoner exchange starts, the war will be over.”
Quite demonstratively, there are large gaps between Biden’s description of the ceasefire deal, and the ceasefire deal itself. They are two different things.
It is equally clear now, that the closer the presidential election comes, the weaker Biden will become.
Far from winding down the Rafah operation, the Israeli army is preparing to open a second front in Lebanon. This is another of Biden’s “red lines”, which Netanyahu feels increasingly emboldened to challenge.
Netanyahu is playing for time. He is outmanoeuvring Biden, hoping that he needs only to keep the war going until Trump comes along to save him. The longer this game drags on, the weaker Biden becomes.
Major miscalculation
That weakness will be on display for all Americans to see when Netanyahu addresses both houses of Congress, posing as a hero of the Judeo-Christian world. That speech will not be rhetorical.
It will be an event that will cast a long, dark shadow over the US as a world power. It will live on in infamy for a long time to come.
The most extreme government in Israel’s history, a government in the dock for genocide and war crimes, will reaffirm its vice-like grip over the US political elite.
Fundamentally, however, Israel is making a huge miscalculation, and one it has always made.
The idea that the Palestinian conflict will vanish without an honourable settlement and a just return of refugees to their lands, alongside full political rights, is just Zionist dreamland
It has always preferred to deal with Arab leaders rather than addressing the real problem: the Palestinian people themselves. But its conflict is not with Hamas, nor Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Its conflict is with the Palestinian people themselves.
After every battle, Israel seems to think the Palestinians will surrender – and yet, every war creates a more determined leadership. Every family whose members have been killed by Israeli forces is an exponential pool of brothers and sons and grandchildren who survive, and whose only mission in life is to seek revenge.
Palestine is not Andalusia in the 14th century, on the fringes of the Muslim world. It lies at the centre of the Arab and Muslim world. The idea that the Palestinian conflict will vanish without an honourable settlement and a just return of refugees to their lands, alongside full political rights, is just Zionist dreamland.
The biggest delusion in the theory that a nation can function in a perpetual state of war is not Biden’s. It is Israel’s, and this delusion has spelt the end of more than one settler-colonial project. It is certainly enough to spell the end of the apartheid state in the not-too-distant future.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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)
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.
Peace and Justice Post 
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