Genocide

What is the definition of genocide? A quick online search will take you to un.org where, in bold, sharp, unmissable script this is spelt out:

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

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:

…

Killing members of the group;

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

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

…

In the matter of Israel’s actions in respect of its remorseless and violent occupation of the Palestinian territories, it would require fancy word scrabbles – which, of course, numerous defenders of this genocide readily and happily proffer – and logical acrobatics to conclude that what has been inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel’s inhumane regime is nothing if not genocide, a Holocaust. The sheer tragi-comic irony of it all. A true Greek drama the proportions of which would make the Ancients proud. And it has been going on since the Nakba.

The Jewish Holocaust lasted 4 years. The Palestinian Holocaust has been ongoing for 78 years. And still too many of us remain silent, tight-lipped, fearful that because our own governments do and say not much of any real consequence, we have no protection for our own reputations and livelihoods by speaking our minds, by proffering, fully and frankly, what we know to be true. Because we read, we witness, we hear, and live in the world.

What are the elements of the crime of genocide? As with any crime, there is a mental element (mens rea) and the physical element (actus reus). In the case of genocide, the UN Convention requires the satisfaction of a special intent or dolus specialis which specifically refers to the intent to destroy, and the deliberate targeting of, one of the four protected groups (national, ethnic, religious, racial) or its members through a State or country’s plans or policies. This dolus specialis can also be referred to as genocidal intent.

Israel’s latest because-we-can move is the blocking of UN food aids to starving Palestinians and thereby hastening the deaths of innocents. What can we infer by Israel’s lates actions? What does Israel intend by bringing about the starvation of Palestinians? If, as is well-established at common law, that mens rea can be inferred by actions, then there is only one conclusion that any reasonable person could come to, that Israel intends, and has intended, through a pattern of targeted destruction and violence directed at one group in particular, to bring about the genocide of Palestinians. The Palestinian Holocaust has been afoot for a very long time, and generations of people not only in the occupied territories but around the world, have had to pay too high a price for what occurred during WWII for something the majority had zero involvement. Whatever the successive governments of Israel have chosen to commit to the annals of history, there are many of us living who cannot give open testimony in support of the truth, of what the evidence sharply illustrates, for fear that we will be labelled as “anti-semitic”. Israel does not want a two-state solution. What it wants is to eradicate an entire group of people, to drive the Palestinians out of their homes in perpetuity, and it cares not, as it continues to act with impunity when in the main, the world’s most powerful economies condone its actions by turning the other cheek.