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zondag 7 april 2024

WORLD WORLDWIDE ISRAEL PALESTINE - news journal UPDATE - (en) Israel/Palastin: The human rights discourse has failed to stop the genocide in Gaza by Jonathan Pollak* (2024-02-13) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]


We are now more than 120 days into an unprecedented Israeli attack on
Gaza. Its terrible repercussions and our inability to end it should
force us to reevaluate our perspective on power, our understanding of
it, and, most importantly, what we need to do to combat it. ---- In the
midst of the blood shed, the endless days of death and destruction, the
unbearable scarcity, hunger, thirst and despair, the incessant nights of
fire and brimstone and white phosphorus raining indiscriminately from
the sky, we must face the harsh reality and reshape our strategies.

The officially recorded fatalities - in addition to the many
Palestinians who remain buried under the rubble and who do not yet
appear in the official count - already represent the annihilation of
almost 1.5% of all human life in the Gaza Strip. As Israel intensifies
its attacks on Rafah, there appears to be no end in sight. Soon the life
of one in every fifty inhabitants of Gaza will be extinguished.

The consequences of the Israeli airstrikes on Rafah this week.

The Israeli military is inflicting an unprecedented number of suffering
and death on Gaza's 2.3 million people, surpassing anything ever
witnessed in Palestine - or anywhere else - during the 21st century .
However, these staggering figures have not penetrated the thick layers
of dissociation and disconnection that characterize Israeli society and
Israel's Western allies. If anything, reducing this tragedy to
statistics seems to hinder rather than improve our understanding. It
presents a whole that obscures the specific: the figures hide the
personality of the countless individuals who have suffered painful and
particular deaths.

At the same time, the unfathomable magnitude of the Gaza massacre makes
it impossible to understand it through the stories of individual
victims. Journalists, street sweepers, poets, housewives, construction
workers, mothers, doctors and children, a multitude too vast to recount.
We are left with faceless anonymous figures. Among them there are more
than 12,000 children. Probably many more.

Please pause and say this out loud, word for word: more than twelve
thousand boys and girls. Murdered. Is there any way we can take it in
and move beyond the realm of statistics to understand the horrible reality?

The cold, hard figures also hide hundreds of annihilated families , many
of them completely erased - sometimes three, even four generations,
wiped from the face of the earth.

These figures dwarf the more than 67,000 people who have been injured,
thousands of whom will be paralyzed for the rest of their lives. Gaza's
medical system has been almost completely destroyed; vital amputations
are being carried out without anesthesia. The level of destruction of
infrastructure in Gaza exceeds that of the bombings of Dresden at the
end of World War II. Nearly two million people - approximately 85% of
the Gaza Strip's population - have been displaced, their lives shattered
by Israeli bombardments as they take refuge in the dangerously
overcrowded south of the Strip, which the Israeli government declared
falsely "safe", but continues to bombard with hundreds of 2000 pound
bombs. The hunger in Gaza , created by Israeli state policy even before
the war, is so severe that it amounts to famine. In desperation, people
have resorted to eating forage, but now even that is ending.

About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine who fled to Rafah from Gaza
City after his home there was bombed told me that he and his family had
already been forced to move from one temporary shelter to another six
different times in their attempts to to escape the bombs. Desperate, he
told me: "There is no food, no water, no place to sleep. We are
constantly thirsty, hungry and wet. I have already had to pull my
children out from under the rubble twice: once in Gaza and once here in
Rafah."

In December 2023, the Israeli military designated Al-Mawasi as one of
the only "safe zones" in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of
refugees fled there, finding only a barren strip of land without food,
water or sanitation. Now the Israeli army is also attacking the
so-called "safe zones." This photograph shows the refugee camp on
February 9, 2024.

https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/13/4.jpg

These rivers of blood must break the walls of our apathy. I wish time
would stop long enough for us all to process our grief. But it won't. It
keeps happening as more bombs fall on Gaza.

Decades of injustice have paved the way for this. It has been 75 years
since the Nakba, 75 years of Israeli colonialism, and its defenders
continue to deny the facts. Even after the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) affirmed that there is reason to fear that genocide is
being committed in Gaza, the United States and many of Israel's other
Western allies have remained silent.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the court's mere
willingness to debate the case "a shame that will not be erased for
generations." Indeed, the sentence is a shame. Even though everything
was in plain sight, the court did not order Israel to cease fire. It is
an embarrassment to the court itself and to the very idea that
international law should protect the lives and rights of people who are
crushed by the military force of nations.

It will undoubtedly be said that law, by nature, is meticulous and that
it considers the forest not as a whole but as individual trees. To that
we must respond that reality, the facts, common sense must be above the
law, not below it. Israel devotes considerable resources to battlefield
legalism, intended to provide cover for its murderous acts. This
approach consists of slicing reality into thin slices of independent,
legally approved observations and actions. In Block X there was a
military objective, which justifies the death of more than two dozen
uninvolved civilians; Block Y was the home of a firefighter employed by
Hamas, which legitimizes, according to the principle of proportionality,
the decision to annihilate three neighboring families. But this practice
cannot turn genocidal water into legitimate wine. This is legal
gaslighting that dismantles reality to hide a pattern of indiscriminate
mass murder.

If the killing of 1.5% of the population in four months is not genocide;
If Israel's acts are not considered serious enough for a court to order
an immediate halt to the killing, even in light of open incitement to
the extermination of Palestinians by prominent Israeli politicians and
members of the press , not to mention the president and prime minister
of Israel; when the lack of punishment for such incitements and such
acts is accepted instead of calling them genocide in the simplest terms,
then the words we use to describe reality have lost all their meaning
and we urgently need a new language that goes beyond the confines of
legal jargon.

Leaving the butcher's knife in the butcher's hand - leaving Israel
unhindered and unhindered - means allowing the slaughter in Gaza to
continue. This is the absolute and continuing failure of international
law and the institutions charged with maintaining it.

This failure shifts the responsibility of forcing an end to the ongoing
catastrophe onto the shoulders of civil society. This should force us to
overcome the empty liberal paradigms of human rights, which have
replaced liberation as the dominant discourse in left-wing politics.

The consequences of an Israeli attack on the al-Zawaida refugee camp on
February 7, 2023.

https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/02/13/2.jpg

The way to follow

The human rights discourse that has hijacked the political left in
recent decades has distanced us from a framework of liberation and
effective action. It is now clear that we must deviate from liberal
thinking to reestablish strategies that disarm and deconstruct power.
The moral complicity with Israel's crimes represented by the ICJ's
refusal to order an immediate ceasefire forces us to do so. He makes a
compelling argument that we must all break away from the current failed
system.

On the other hand, reality won't wait for us to figure things out. We
cannot simply take our time and wait to take action until we have
developed and popularized new narratives and conceptual frameworks. We
have to use all the means at our disposal to act right now.

Does the ICJ offer us any tools that we can use? The ICJ is considered
the highest court of international law. Although it does not have
enforcement mechanisms independent of the United Nations Security
Council, its rulings and jurisprudence are considered the basis of the
jurisprudence of international law, and are often incorporated into the
rulings of national courts on these matters. Despite ordering very few
measures against Israel or the ongoing genocide being carried out, the
court did determine that there is considerable reason to believe that a
genocide is occurring.

Since the court took no real action against Israel, it should be clear
that the onus is on us and our movements to act. Fortunately, the ruling
could also give us some tools to use here and now as we develop new
liberation frameworks. An example of this is a recent lawsuit in federal
court in California that sought to order the US administration to end
military support for Israel. The case was dismissed on the grounds that
US foreign policy is outside the court's jurisdiction, but the court
determined that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in
Gaza based on the ICJ ruling.

The legal argument that governments must refrain from complicity in
genocide is not without foundation in US law, as well as in many other
countries. A Dutch court has recently ordered the Netherlands government
to stop delivering parts for the F-35 fighter jets that Israel is using
to bomb the Gaza Strip. It might now be plausible to force more
governments to impose arms embargoes, sanctions or other measures
through national courts.

However, such strategies continue to reduce us to trusting supposed
experts; They will not help us build movements. The genocide will not
stop from within Israeli society. The pressure to do so must come from
outside. Now is the time for direct action and bottom-up efforts, such
as community-driven boycotts of Israeli products, sellers who trade in
them, Israeli cultural and propaganda exports, and anything else that
fuels the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The
blockade of the port of Tacoma or the actions of dock workers around the
world who refuse to load Israeli ships and goods and transport weapons
to Israel are examples of how we could move forward, building towards a
proactive grassroots movement.

We must do everything in our power to stop the genocide taking place
now, but it is important that we approach doing so as a step toward
promoting Palestinian liberation and dismantling Israeli settler
colonialism. The depiction of the Palestinian people as little more than
victims at the mercy of Israeli repression is sometimes
well-intentioned, but it erases their personality and agency. As we
strive to end Israel's war machine, we must articulate that this is part
of the fight to end Israeli colonialism, and center Palestinians as
protagonists of that history.

The roots of the problem

Since before the creation of the Israeli state, Israel has been a racist
and colonialist society, based on the idea that Israelis are
fundamentally superior to Palestinians. This is the mainstream of
Israeli political thought, both on its right wing and on the so-called
left. This is the thinking that motivated the mass dispossession of
Palestinian families that preceded the formation of the state, the
ethnic cleansing of the Nakba in 1948, and various forms of apartheid
and military rule since then. In fact, there has only been one year in
Israel's history - 1966 - in which it did not impose a military
dictatorship regime on at least part of its Palestinian population.

Since long before the current assault on Gaza, the daily reality of
Palestinian existence under Israeli rule has been continuous and
permanent terror amidst violence and uncertainty. Being Palestinian
means going through a checkpoint without knowing if you will be taken
out and detained; it means the violence of settler mobs; It means that
they put you in jail under administrative detention, without knowing why
or for how long; means a military raid in the middle of the night. It's
all these things and worse, day after day, over a lifetime, over
generations. One of the many things that happened on October 7 was that,
for a brief period of time, Israelis, too, as a society, experienced
that kind of existential terror, that disturbing uncertainty and lack of
security.

The events of October 7 have had such an impact on Israeli society that,
even today, the majority of Israeli citizens continue to focus on
themselves as the main victim of the narrative. One of the effects of
this is the Israeli obsession with contextualizing the Gaza genocide in
relation to the violence of October 7. A common complaint about the ICJ
decision among Israelis is that the court did not mention October 7 in
its decision (in fact, it did mention it). At the same time, this demand
for context is intended to suppress the broader context. Many people,
even on the so-called left, express outrage when the current situation
is put in the context of the Nakba, the 1967 occupation or the ongoing
siege. According to this backwards logic, providing that context is
perceived as genocide against Israelis.

Israeli racism was prevalent before, but since October 7, undisguised
genocidal discourse and open calls for actual genocide have become the
norm. Within Israeli society there is no truly significant movement
against genocide. The protest movements that do exist are of negligible
size and influence, or are primarily dedicated to demanding a hostage
exchange deal, or focus on internal Israeli issues, reminiscent of the
pre-October 7 pro-judicial movement .

The tiny isolated islands of resistance to the assault on Gaza and the
broader aspects of Israeli rule are so small that they should be
understood as a rounding error, not real strength. The idea that there
is a movement against colonialism and for Palestinian liberation within
Israeli society is an illusion. To play a role in forging a path toward
a future of true freedom, those who come from this settler society will
have to reject Israeli colonialism at its roots. We must keep in mind
that as much as we want to be part of the solution, we will also
inherently remain part of the problem.

As we address the post-genocide future, we must ask how egalitarian
ideas will survive in a reality ravaged by war, death and destruction.
It is unclear how we can foresee and create a future that can transcend
the trauma of the recent past, especially given that, although the ruin
and violence may subside once the assault has ceased, Israeli repression
will continue.

There is still nothing clear about the post-genocide future, including
what turns the Palestinian liberation movement will take. Only the
Palestinians can decide that. What is obvious - and should have been
clear long before - is that those who oppose colonialism must not bask
in the privileges it grants. The exact details of the path to liberation
are uncertain, but it is undeniable that those who want to help pave it
can only play a role in it within the Palestinian movement. The
responsibility to find ways to do this, to transgress the limits of
forced national identity that exist precisely to prevent it, falls on
those who wish to support the Palestinian people and break the confines
of colonialism.

* Jonathan Pollak is a long-time participant in the Anarchists Against
the Wall initiative

https://acracia.org/el-discurso-de-los-derechos-humanos-ha-fracasado-en-detener-el-genocidio-en-gaza/
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