Max Dashu
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"Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,” a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting “human animals” and, later, called for “total annihilation.” Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
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"In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.
"According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old.
"More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed.
"Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care.
"The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army.
"Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent articles and interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population."
https://archive.is/o4L3z#selection-695.0-725.505
AuthorMax Dashu"On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease-fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But following Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18 to break the cease-fire, the I.D.F. has been executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip’s southwestern edge.
"Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three-quarters of the territory.
This is also being facilitated by a plan that provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave.
"Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide.
"This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder."
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AuthorMax Dashu"The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media’s self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the “most moral army in the world.”
Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
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"In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “absolutely” a genocide.
"Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but “I don’t know them.”
"Most Holocaust scholars I know don’t hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism."
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Lisa Christianson
This inescapable conclusion has been obvious for many many months. What is with the huge effort to escape this conclusion?
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Eleanor Cowan
Lisa Christianson Perhaps the effort was to justify violence and hatred…to erase any annoying self doubt?
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Rodrigo Montero Cano
And Western political leaders are supporting this genocide.
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Willow Aster
I thought the UN s job was to resettle refugees, protect vulnerable populations and provide a buffer on borders of warring clans? Where are they?
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Drew Kitty
The UN's job is to start the separation of victims for the combatants to finish off.
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Denise Dumars
Israel is committing genocide.
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Muriel Strand
In April, Timothy Snyder shared his analysis that the Trump administration’s persecution of U.S. universities is itself anti-Semitic. https://substack.com/home/post/p-161117849
He bases his argument on 5 factors, focusing on the instigators (Trump & Musk who use symbols of fascism), the target (universities and the civil service), the history (of selective book banning which correlates with anti-Semitism), the provocation (actual and threatened defunding, and scorn for due process), all of which suggest to him that the Trump administration’s accusations are projection plain and simple. He also points out that many students at Columbia in particular are Jewish.
Then, on July 9 DemocracyNow! reported on Netanyahoo's attendance at a rightwing Christian Zionist conference of some sort. Reflecting on this, it occurs to me that these particular Christians are actually rather anti-Semitic. They don't really care about the Jews nor Israel except as instruments of the second coming of Christ… nor do I think these Christians are fans of the secular academies that are pillars of US science and culture.
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