[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Israel's 'genocide' documented

[Patrick Bond]

The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians

Professor Francis A. Boyle

(from “Tackling America’s Toughest Questions,” now at Amazon.com)

As long ago as October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights 
Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting “war crimes” 
and “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people, most of whom 
are Muslims. The reader has a general idea of what a war crime is, so I 
am not going to elaborate upon that term here. But there are different 
degrees of heinousness for war crimes. In particular are the more 
serious war crimes denominated “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva 
Convention. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, the world 
has seen those heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against 
the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful 
killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and by Israel’s 
illegal paramilitary settlers. These Israeli “grave breaches” of the 
Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the 
perpetrators and their commanders, whether military or civilian, 
including and especially Israel’s political leaders.

But I want to focus for a moment on Israel’s “crimes against humanity” 
against the Palestinian people—as determined by the U.N. Human Rights 
Commission itself, set up pursuant to the requirements of the United 
Nations Charter. What are “crimes against humanity”? This concept goes 
all the way back to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 for the trial of the 
major Nazi war criminals in Europe. In the Nuremberg Charter of 1945, 
drafted by the United States Government, there was created and inserted 
a new type of international crime specifically intended to deal with the 
Nazi persecution of the Jewish people:

Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, 
deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian 
population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, 
racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any 
crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in 
violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The paradigmatic example of “crimes against humanity” is what Hitler and 
the Nazis did to the Jewish people. This is where the concept of “crimes 
against humanity” came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights 
Commission determined that Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian 
people: crimes against humanity. Expressed in legal terms, this is just 
like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews. That is the significance 
of the formal determination by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that 
Israel has inflicted “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian 
people. The Commission chose this well-known and long-standing legal 
term of art quite carefully and deliberately based upon the evidence it 
had compiled.

Furthermore, the Nuremberg “crimes against humanity” are the historical 
and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by 
the 1948 Genocide Convention. The theory here was that what Hitler and 
the Nazis did to the Jewish people was so horrific that it required a 
special international treaty that would codify and universalize the 
Nuremberg concept of “crimes against humanity.” And that treaty 
ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of 
genocide in relevant part as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts 
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, 
ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

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

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated 
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

….

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The 
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal policy against 
the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very 
foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even 
intensifying against the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza. 
Zionism’s “final solution” to Israel’s much touted “demographic threat” 
allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always 
been genocide.

Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, 
forces, and terrorist gangs—have committed genocide against the 
Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has 
continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles 
II(a), (b), and (c). For at least the past six decades, the Israeli 
government and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and 
terrorist gangs—have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and 
comprehensive military, political, and economic campaign with the intent 
to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and 
different religious (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) group 
constituting the Palestinian people. This Zionist/Israeli campaign has 
consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of 
Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has 
also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in 
violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist/Israeli 
campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people 
conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction 
in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide 
Convention.

Article I of the Genocide Convention requires all contracting parties 
such as the United States “to prevent and to punish” genocide. Yet to 
the contrary, historically the “Jewish” state’s criminal conduct against 
the Palestinians has been financed, armed, equipped, supplied and 
politically supported by the “Christian” United States. Although the 
United States is a founding sponsor of, and a contracting party to, both 
the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United 
Nations Charter, these legal facts have never made any difference to the 
United States when it comes to its blank-check support for Israel and 
their joint and severable criminal mistreatment of the 
Palestinians—truly the wretched of the earth!

The world has not yet heard even one word uttered by the United States 
and its NATO allies in favor of “humanitarian intervention” against 
Israel in order to protect the Palestinian people, let alone a 
“responsibility to protect” the Palestinians from Zionist/Israeli 
genocide. The United States, its NATO allies, and the Great Powers on 
the U.N. Security Council would not even dispatch a U.N. Charter Chapter 
6 monitoring force to help protect the Palestinians, let alone even 
contemplate any type of U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement actions 
against Israel – shudder the thought!. The doctrine of “humanitarian 
intervention” so readily espoused elsewhere when U.S. foreign policy 
goals are allegedly at stake has been clearly proved to be a joke and a 
fraud when it comes to stopping the ongoing and accelerating Israeli 
campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Rather than rein in the Israelis—which would be possible just by turning 
off the funding pipeline—the United States government, the U.S. 
Congress, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the “Jewish” state to the 
tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose munificence this 
instance of genocide – and indeed conceivably the State of Israel itself 
– would not be possible. What the world witnesses here is (yet another) 
case of “dishumanitarian intervention” or “humanitarian extermination” 
by the United States and Israel against the Palestinians and Palestine. 
In today’s world genocide pays so long as it is done at the behest of 
the United States and its de jure or de facto allies such as Israel.

Of course miracles can always happen. But I anticipate no fundamental 
change in America’s support for the Israeli campaign of genocide against 
the Palestinians during the tenure of the Obama/Clinton administration.