Exterminating the Genocide Convention?
In Its First Major Test Under Fire, the Genocide Convention Is Becoming a Symbol of the International System's Failures. How Can the Convention and the People It Is Supposed to Protect, Be Saved?
In May of 2024 Karim Kahn, the Chief Prosector of the International Criminal Court, explained the alleged violations of international law he intended to bring against five of the principal figures in the Gaza horror show. Kahn directed his accusations on the Israeli side against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. On the Palestinian side he pointed to Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyah, Mohammed Dief, and Yahya Sinwar.
Following the accusation of 20 May, the Israeli government has claimed credit for the assassination of all three of the Hamas leaders and many of their family members as well. This development is itself a telling illustration of the sorry state of international law. It is increasingly obvious that international law is a mere ornament disguising what Rudyard Kipling dubbed “the Law of the Jungle.”
https://allpoetry.com/The-Law-Of-The-Jungle
Netanyahu and Gallant are the surviving two members of what we might refer to as the Gaza Five. In Kahn’s application to bring arrest warrants against the Israeli leaders, he described many of their alleged crimes. Kahn paid particular attention, however, to the culpability of Netanyahu and Gallant with respect to deploying the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” a method that fulfills the legal criteria of “crimes against humanity.”
The Israeli imposition of mass starvation on the people of Gaza, with the clear intent of killing them, continues to become more and more intense. During a two week period in the month of October not one food truck was allowed by the IDF to enter Gaza.
The imposed starvation on the people of Gaza combines with imposed dehydration, trauma, severe injuries, lack of health care and the spread of deadly diseases helped along by the destruction of sewage systems and proliferation of vast garbage dumps. As Princeton Prof. Richard Falk has observed, “In Gaza the West is Enabling the Most Transparent Genocide in Human History.”
A very murderous five-month period in Gaza has gone by since May, and still the ICC judges have held back from approving the arrest warrants. These judges have been subject to many public representations and no doubt some aggressive behind-the-scenes pressures as well.
ICC officials have become subject to serial threats and recriminations every day in the effort to cripple their effectiveness. These assaults on the integrity of the ICC now include stifling the recent efforts of the Chief Prosecutor to realize his efforts to enforce international law.
It seems that the targets of Israeli interference in judicial processes do not want to become victims of the Israel First reign of ruthlessness that has long been making minced meat of the rule of law.
The government of the USA— the government that has shown itself to be more a partner in genocide rather than a complicit party— is playing a big role in the unabashed political interference to create havoc in the ICC’s workings.
There is in fact, plenty of evidence that the whole ICC is often recruited by the Israeli and US power elite to become subordinate stooges. The ICC, for instance, is prone to go after Russia for alleged violations of international laws that the USA and Israel can regularly violate with impunity.
Around the time that Karim Kahn began seeking the approval of his arrest warrants for the Gaza Five, there was a flood of disclosure including in The Guardian. This disclosure described the deep infiltration through spying by the Netanyahu government, including Mossad, of the entire staff of the ICC. The techniques to infiltrate and thus to destroy the juridical integrity of the ICC extended to attempted bribery and blackmail of core officials.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/may/31/exposing-israels-secret-war-on-the-icc-podcast
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/29/icc-israel-state-benjamin-netanyahu
Rather than bringing criminal charges to meet this seemingly successful effort to sabotage the integrity and credibility of a core institution in the investigation and arbitration of international law, no remedies have so far been sought.
The International Criminal Court came into existence in 2002 with the passage of the Statute of Rome. The ICC is based at The Hague. It forms a kind of junior partner to the International Court of Justice, the World Court, that draws its mandate from the United Nations Charter. The UN Charter was ratified in 1945 by the victorious countries to emerge from the Second World War.
Part of the work of the United Nations in its early days was to ratify in international law the existence of Israel. The formulation and enactment of the Genocide Convention was part of the larger Zionist effort to help get Israel up and running in the wake of The Holocaust and of the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
This historical background provides part of the framework for my SOS Alarm. This Alarm calls attention to the life-and-death implications of the impending extermination of the Genocide Convention as well as the credibility of the International Court of Justice.
One of the remedies I propose is a sharper focus on the connections linking the Jewish genocide in the era of WWII to the accelerating Palestinian genocide now underway.
Plausible Genocide?
The first anniversary of the ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza was accompanied by a infusion of new reports, documentary films, and other critical interventions by journalists, investigative reporters, professional associations, human right organizations and such.
https://www.unz.com/article/truths-that-come-out-like-the-sun/
The mass of evidence keeps growing to reinforce the position that became obvious to many in the opening weeks of the US-backed Israeli campaign to annihilate indiscriminately the civilian population of Gaza.
The growing weight of irrefutable proof demonstrates that what we have been seeing is a full-fledged genocide, a classic case of genocide, a textbook case of genocide. This issue, however, continues to be confused by the ruling of the UN’s International Court of Justice on January 26 of this year.
The ICJ determined that mass murder in Gaza was a “plausible genocide” requiring fuller investigation as well as a call for “provisional measures.” The government of Israel has contemptuously ignored any implementation of these court-ordered provisional measures.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1227078791/icj-israel-genocide-gaza-palestinians-south-africa
Nevertheless South Africa’s charges were accepted by the ICJ initiating a trial against the accused government of Israel that is theoretically underway. The duration of the trial is anticipated to be a number of years.
The insertion of this concept of “plausibility” has created the basis of juridical ambiguity sufficient to enwrap the continuation of the genocide with a aura of deniability. This uncertainty cannot be justified in light of the ubiquitous evidentiary record created by what has properly been described as the world’s first livestream of an international crime of this magnitude.
The word “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. The international crime of genocide was not codified until 1948. The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide was transformed into international law by the United Nations General Assembly. The enactment of the Genocide Convention was clearly meant to accompany the UN Resolution affording a problematic international authorization of a new nation to be known as Israel.
Among the top priorities of the winners of the Second World War, but especially a powerful Zionist constituency within the US government, was to use the new international organization in order to gain legal ratification for the project of creating Israel. This process extended to the formulation and enactment of the Genocide Convention.
This Zionist initiative continued to be played out internationally and domestically within the United States. The Zionist grip on the US government increased steadily from 1945 until the present when its “ironclad” status is often acknowledged.
This “ironclad” partnership in the top leadership of Israel and the USA seems to point only one way. The apparent subordination of the US government to the Israeli government currently on public display in the high-tech ruthlessness of the Gaza Genocide and its expansion into a regional war.
Why No Emergency Measures for Genocide?
The Genocide Convention is devoid of ambiguous language. There is nothing in the straightforward text defining genocide that comes anywhere near the idea of a “plausible” genocide. In fact the text presents a model of simple and direct language.
Article I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
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:
(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;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article III The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide
As many legal scholars have asserted, the provisions from (a) to (d) of article II obviously and unambiguously apply to what has been transpiring in Gaza. If the violation of even one of the five definitions of genocide can be demonstrated, along with an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, then the ICJ is obliged to convict the accused.
The South African submission accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention contained unequivocal evidence that the Genocide Convention was being violated. The submission’s illustration of the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group is especially unequivocal.
The Israel government responded to the South African submission. The lawyers representing the Israeli government characterized the document as anti-semitic. They condemned South Africa’s indictment as not respectful of the status of Israel as the number one embodiment of those on the receiving end of The Holocaust.
Important people, many of them at the highest levels of government and the Armed Forces, left no doubt that the intent of the Israeli military operations was to eliminate Palestinians through a variety of methods. The Palestinians were to be collectively eliminated through a multiplicity of methods for the alleged crime of being “human animals” or less than animals.
When Raphael Lemkin along with representatives of some UN member states came up with the wording of the Genocide Convention, I am quite sure these officials could not have envisaged the prolonged procedures currently underway.
What would they have thought of a trial based on the application of the Genocide Convention that would take place over many years while the genocide in question was being viciously and steadily pursued by the predators?
This conduct subordinates the sanctity of human life to the higher priority of prolonged observance of elaborate judicial procedures. We seem to easily accept the imposition of emergency for many issues but why not this one? What are the residents of Gaza supposed to do as they wait for the ICJ to decide whether the genocide they are living through is fully real rather than merely plausible?
The whole imperative of the Genocide Convention’s enactment was to set up the basis for timely action to prevent the furtherance of a genocide when it can be readily demonstrated to be happening. What went wrong?
The Great Holocaust Trial
I submit that the stultified judicial process currently underway at the United Nations is by far the most high-profile litigation ever mounted to prevent and punish the international crime of genocide. As shall be discussed, the event that has come to be known as The Holocaust occurred well before 1948. Never has the judiciary of the United Nations been involved in any procedure to arbitrate what did or didn’t happen in the course of The Holocaust.
There exists a vast, many-faceted and largely repressed body of literature dealing with both proven and contested aspects of the large complex of issues grouped together under the name of The Holocaust. Some of this literature was formally described as Holocaust Revisionism until this activity was stigmatized in the 1990s by Prof. Deborah Lipstadt as the stuff of so-called “Holocaust Denial.”
Professor Lipstadt sought to transform Holocaust Revisionism into “Holocaust Denial” in response to the surprising outcome of the prosecution of Ernst Zundel in Toronto in 1985 and 1988.
Please see the following for background on many facets of this essay including the absurdities espoused by Holocaust Studies Professor, Deborah Lipstadt
On the Condemnation of "Holocaust Denial"
“We understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and persecuted Jews and others. We understand many peoples, European Jews among them, experienced unfathomable tragedies in Europe during World War II. Nevertheless, to be clear, we no longer believe the German State pursued a plan to kill all Jews or used homicidal ‘gassing chambe…
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Aided by a team of scholars expert in various facets of Holocaust Studies, Zundel addressed the criminal charges he faced. Although taken up by the provincial government of Ontario, these criminal charges began with an allegation by the Zionist lobby in Canada that Zundel had engaged in spreading “false news.”
Many have argued that the Toronto Trials constitute the primary hearing to date anywhere in the world involving relatively open and vigorous litigation testing key facets of holocaust orthodoxy. This litigation was carried out in the adversarial venue of a properly-constituted court.
https://codoh.com/library/document/the-great-holocaust-trial-the-landmark-battle-for/
Launching the Holocaust Narrative at Nuremberg and Buchenwald
Let’s look briefly at the supposed judicial processes that took place before the institution at the UN of the Genocide Convention in 1948. The main venue of judgement, where the winners of WWII put the losers on trial, took place at Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Trial has become notorious for the many abuses that took place in a very politicized environment where the proponents of many agendas vied for pre-eminence.
The International Military Tribunal in 1945 and 1946 kicked off the Nuremberg Process. Many smaller trials ensued until 1949. The smaller trials included the Doctors Trial that came up with the Nuremberg Code.
The top agenda item for the most powerful delegation at the International Military Tribunal was to highlight the severity of the Nazi assault on European Jews. This allegation was emphasized in the opening address of Chief US Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson. He asserted,
“The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews….It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically committed to annihilate all Jewish People…. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole.”
https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-nuremberg-trials-and-the-holocaust/
Mark Weber has subjected the Chief Prosecutor’s explanation to a thoroughgoing reality check. An integral partner in Jackson’s inner circle was Nahum Goldmann. Goldmann had headed up in consecutive terms both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization.
Both entities share the same Zionist agenda pointing towards the founding of the Jewish state of Israel. The Nuremberg Trials were considered to be an excellent platform to harness public opinion to the Zionists’ project of building Israel.
Col. David Marcus was one of the key Zionist agents pulling strings behind the scene. He was the number three man in making the policies for the US-occupied part of Germany. He was made chief of the US government’s War Crimes Branch in 1946 and had a large part in shaping the procedures, personnel and priorities of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.
Torture and threats against family members were an essential means of manufacturing evidence to back up Jackson’s allegations that the Nazi goal was the annihilation of all Jewish people. For instance the former Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was tortured to extract from him a false and self-incriminating account that was quite instrumental in supporting a mass-extermination narrative. Many other witnesses gave into similar coercive tactics.
As Mark Weber concluded in his essay, “The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust”
the evidence that has been presented consists largely of extorted confessions, spurious testimonies, and fraudulent documents. The postwar Nuremberg trials were politically motivated proceedings meant more to discredit the leaders of a defeated regime than to establish truth…..The Holocaust story does not claim just a few isolated massacres, but a vast extermination program taking place across the European continent over a three-year period involving several governments and millions of people. The fact that the Holocaust story must rely so heavily on highly dubious testimony evidence and trials staged in a historically unparalleled atmosphere of hysteria, intimidation and propaganda demonstrates its inherent weakness.
One of the early announcements of the Holocaust narrative at the end of the Second World War was mounted by operatives of the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force led by Brigadier-General Robert McClure. The operation considered here took place at the Buchenwald concentration camp. It involved a widely disseminated film recording local Germans inspecting items said to have been created by the recently-defeated Nazis
These items included the shrunken heads supposedly of Polish Jews. These men were said to have been killed after trying to escape from Buchenwald.
They also included a lamp shade said to be made from the skin of murdered Jewish people.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph #74066
An exhibit of human remains and artifacts retrieved by the American Army from a pathology laboratory run by the SS in Buchenwald. These items were used as evidence of SS atrocities in the Buchenwald war crimes trial held at Dachau, Germany. The two shrunken heads are from Polish prisoners who were recaptured after escaping from the camp and executed.
The production was part of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s so-called “denazification” campaign. The display was also made to form part of a movie directed by Billy Wilder, a German Jew who later thrived in Hollywood where he directed many films including the Marilyn Monroe classic, Some Like It Hot.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Sykewar.html?id=OxAvAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-a-hackett/the-buchenwald-report/
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum apparently accepted the shrunken heads and lamp shade narrative. In due course, however, the fraudulent nature of claims was widely acknowledged including by officials at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.
https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-nuremberg-trials-and-the-holocaust/
https://holocausthandbooks.com/video/buchenwald/
https://thechristiansolution.com/doc2012/509_Denial1.html
The Genocide Convention: Going Right to the Heart of the Role of Law in Determining Life-and-Death Interactions in the Future of Humanity
So far the judiciary of the United Nations has not yet faced anything resembling the magnitude of the heavily-publicized genocide currently underway in the Middle East. The failure to enforce the rulings of the ICJ have already become a towering symbol of the UN’s impotence and failure to uphold the basic tenets of its Charter.
At the core of the problem is the contempt of the governments of Israel and the United States for the rule of law in the international arena. Both partnered polities have come to see themselves as being immune from legal constraints because of their dependence on the military, economic and soft power they have been accumulating since WWII.
The question of whether or not the UN’s Genocide Convention can be enforced under current conditions, constitutes the main test of whether the international organization created by the winners of WWII is still viable. The Genocide Convention gets to the heart of the role of law in determining who will live or die in the twenty-first century.
The Genocide Convention was created in tandem with the UN’s ratification of Israel’s admission into the international community. Now the legal apparatus that was meant to codify the ethos of “never again” for Israel, has doubled back on the Jewish state as the world’s most high-profile deliverer of genocide.
Can Israel and its main partner in genocide, the United States, be made to bend to the principles outlined in the Genocide Convention. If the USA and Israel won’t live within the rules involving the most basic features of life and death, why should other countries do so including China, Russia and Iran?
Will genocide continue to be normalized as is happening now? Can a reliable means be created to enforce the Genocide Convention? Are we past the point of no return on such questions? Has human life already been so desecrated that it has become the imperative of the strong to cancel the lives of those whose existence they find to be inconvenient and superfluous? Did the experience of death by mandated injections open the door to a future whose implications are now plain to see?
To reiterate, there is very little by way of judicial experience to draw upon in this legal standoff concerning the role of the Genocide Convention. This standoff is turning out to be unlike anything humanity has faced so far, including the heavily politicized contortions to treat The Holocaust as the first and last word on the status of genocide in the global community.
The UN’s Limited Experience with Arbitrating and Enforcing the Genocide Convention
For more than four decades the Genocide Convention created in 1948 was essentially kept buried away in the storage closets of the United Nations. The US government did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988 as the real or manufactured antagonisms of the Cold War began to wind down.
In the mid-1990s the Genocide Convention was seized upon and set in motion, often with very clear political motivations on the part of those directing the actions and arguments of the UN’s prosecutors. A special UN court was created in 1994 to deal with the high-profile genocide that had unfolded in Rwanda. The Rwanda Genocide was not subjected to serious UN intervention as it was underway. The UN dealt with crimes retroactively rather than as they were occurring.
As at the Nuremberg Tribunal as well as at the equivalent process in Tokyo at the end of the Second World War, the judicial proceedings in the wake of the Rwanda Genocide constitute a very clear example of victors’ justice. Those on the winning side, incorporating Paul Kagame’s Tutsi army, were not investigated for their many war crimes whereas the Hutu genocidaires were subjected to multiple investigations, prosecutions, and convictions.
In the same timeframe a similar heavily politicized UN process was put in place in the former Yugoslavia to address the complex of genocides and other war crimes that accompanied the balkanization of the Balkans—- of Yugoslavia— at the end of the Cold War.
Another UN agency, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was established with the publicly-declared purpose of enforcing international criminal and humanitarian law. The prosecutors, however, exempted NATO officials from prosecution for their many violations of international law.
Once again the United States as well as its satellites and extensions as comprised in NATO, manipulated the application of the Genocide Convention to advance political goals.
The Serbian President, Slobodan Milošević, was designated as the primary culprit singled out in the process of putting an end to the remnants of the independent polity created after WWII through the political genius of Josip Broz Tito. Milošević ended up facing a 4 year-long UN trial involving 66 charges of genocide plus war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The regime of dictator Pol Pot formed the basis of the third case commonly cited of a recognized genocide that involved UN officials. The Pol Pot regime of “Democratic Kampuchea” self-identified as the “Khmer Rouge.” Between 1976 and 1978 this regime killed two or three million people. UN-recognized jurists worked closely with the Royal Government of Cambodia to deal with the aftermath of the onslaught of atrocities.
https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/abunac/abunac.html
There have been other procedures in recent years where the UN judges have addressed genocide and related crimes in, for instance, Myanmar, Darfur, and South Sudan. There are many other sites where UN officials have poked at the edges of genocides like, for instance, those that took place in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983, and in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966.
Sometimes the issue of the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs and Tibetans comes up for discussion as a possible target of prosecutions according to the terms of the UN’s Genocide Convention.
Generally speaking there have not been instances accept for, possibly, Myanmar, where the ICJ has intervened to stop a genocide or at least slow it down as it was and is underway.
The accusation against the government of Myanmar for genocide and other international crimes was brought in 2019 by Gambia at the behest of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The accusation is that members of Myanmar’s Armed Forces have allegedly long directed genocidal treatment against the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people, mostly in Rakhine state.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1053221
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/01/1055841
As in the case brought against the government of Israel by South Africa and the World Court judges, the government of Myanmar was ordered to engage in “provisional measures” while the issue of the intentions of the accused genocidaires remained under investigation.
The ICJ explained that “the material [they examined] allowed for a plausible inference of genocidal intent, despite other plausible inferences.” While this investigation continued, the imposition of “provisional measures” was deemed to be justified.
Generally speaking, the UN’s applications of the Genocide Convention has been widely diagnosed as partial, too late, and ineffective. By and large the Genocide Convention has been used to assign blame retroactively. It has been twisted to advance political agendas.
It has not been much used as its authors probably intended, as a legal provision meant to prevent genocide or stop it while the process of mass murder of civilians is underway.
The experience of the ICJ involvement in the Gaza Genocide at a relatively early stage, is illustrating the depth of this problem of enforcement which is becoming the elephant in the room of the global community.
Two Mirrored Show Trials Mounted by Israel and Germany. Both Feature the Fixing of Criminal Responsibility for The Holocaust
In the first two decades after the Genocide Convention came into force, two important and mirrored show trials took place, one in Jerusalem in 1961 and the other in Frankfurt from 1963. Adolf Eichmann was charged, convicted and executed in the proceedings of the Jerusalem trial.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=historyrawleyconference
Eichmann was a Gestapo Officer seen in Israel as as one of the primary architects and implementors of The Holocaust. He was also one of the main officials in Hitler’s Nation Socialist government assigned to conduct negotiations with members of the Zionist Federation of Germany. He tried to learn Hebrew and Yiddish to better fulfill his assigned tasks.
In the 1930s Eichmann was prominently at the forefront of his government’s active collaboration with the Germany’s Zionist Federation.
Together the Nazis and Zionists negotiated the Transfer Agreement. Their collaboration was commemorated with a issuing of the above coin. The Transfer Agreement, or the Ha-avara in Hebrew, facilitated the migration of tens of thousands of German Jews to Palestine.
The agreement included provision to enable the migrants to draw on part of their capital to purchase German manufactured goods in establishing new homes and new businesses in the territory the Zionists anticipated would become their future site of a Jewish national government.
(See my essay, “On the Condemnation of ‘Holocaust Denial’” cited above)
The organizers of the Frankfurt Trial in West Germany assembled 22 individuals who were guards and SS officials previously employed at the complex of camps generally referred to as Auschwitz. The trial itself was meant to be a demonstration that West Germany was becoming sufficiently denazified to justify its gaining of jurisdiction over its courts.
This shift had taken place in 1959. Prior to that, all criminal proceedings against Nazis belonged in international courts. Some observers of the Frankfurt trial lamented that the German penal code was aimed at individuals and not well constructed to deal with collective or systemic crimes.
Hannah Arendt, who wrote about both the Eichmann and the Frankfurt trials, tried to picture the day-to-day substance demonstrating the “banality of evil.” She brought this perspective from her famous report on the Eichmann Trial to her reading of the Frankfurt Trial where, it seemed, the “circus of drunken debauchery and excessively crude behaviour was emphasized.
https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/8b9d929eb37d58a2acc4b869ea6abc3a7c832cc5.pdf
Eichmann was tracked down and apprehended in Argentina without the knowledge or agreement of the Argentine government. A key objective of the trial was to conduct this momentous legal proceeding within the framework of Israeli law. Eichmann’s trial was conceived by the Israel Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion’s vision was to make Eichmann the receptacle to embody all the crimes, real, exaggerated, or imagined, transacted in the course of The Holocaust.
Part of the body of Israeli law that Eichmann was accused of violating was the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Act of 1 August, 1950. This law enabled prosecution in Israel for crimes committed against Jews in Nazi Germany, German-Occupied Europe or territory under the control of other Axis governments between 1933 and 1945.
The law contained an Israeli version of the Genocide Convention with some slight differences, the big one being the Talmudic proviso that the law is exclusive to Jews. The law was to prevent or punish acts
committed with intent to destroy the Jewish people in whole or in part: through
(1) killing Jews
(2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to Jews;
(3) placing Jews in living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction;
(4) imposing measures intended to prevent births among Jews;
(5) forcibly transferring Jewish children to another national or religious groups;
(6) destroying or desecrating Jewish religious or cultural assets or values;
(7) inciting to hatred of Jews;
Crimes against humanity are defined as "murder, extermination, enslavement, starvation or deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, and persecution on national, racial, religious or political grounds.”
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1766&context=dlj
The inclusion of imposed “starvation” in an Israeli law outlining crimes against humanity, not against Jews in particular, brings this essay back full circle. It speaks to the contemporary significance of the frozen arrest warrants prepared in May of 2024 for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
What Are the Connections Linking the Jewish Genocide of WWII to the Palestinian Genocide Presently Underway?
The ICJ has promised the world a procedure that will move the markers away from its present position that a “plausible” genocide is underway. The World Court promised us a procedure that would arrive at a verdict of whether or not the government of Israel is guilty of violating the Genocide Convention.
Any claims in the future that some unforeseen or extenuating circumstance have arisen to alter the formulation of a clear verdict should and would increase already-high levels of suspicion and distrust that the UN’s criminal justice system is a scam.
Other national governments have gained standing making it possible for them to bring forward evidence in this apparently frozen deliberation. If the judicial deliberations are ignored and boycotted by the government of Israel, the juridical proceedings should continue nevertheless.
There is nothing to prevent the ICJ from mounting research projects in order to come up with solid findings and conclusions. In my view an authoritative judicial process would have to involve research looking at how the genesis and educational processes involving The Holocaust have affected the genesis of this current genocide that some are labelling as a holocaust.
Clearly the massive support of a large component of Jewish Israelis for all components of this many-faceted genocide in Gaza and beyond, is a significant aspect of this ongoing international crime. Questions about how public support for genocide is stimulated, incited, and sustained are highly relevant to the adjudication of the crime. In fact inciting genocide involves complicity in genocide.
Questions about how The Holocaust has been memorialized in hundreds of Holocaust Museums, throughout the media, and in school curricula bear directly on public perceptions concerning the Gaza Holocaust. Will there be multiple museums and other remembrance memorials to commemorate the Palestinian Genocide? Will the instrument of law be used to favour some interpretations and outlaw others?
As many have argued, The Great Holocaust Trial in Toronto in 1985 and 1988 is one of the major points of reference in assessing how the Jewish genocide in Europe has been understood and assessed by parties on both sides of a number of core issues of interpretation. We deserve nothing less than conscientious due diligence from the ICJ.
Governments, civil society and citizens must join with the ICJ in moving the Genocide Convention away from the sidelines to the main stage in testing the future viability of a global rule of law within the framework of many national sovereignties.
Tony thank you for another excellent essay summarizing the current state of affairs re Genocide being adjudicated at the ICJ/ICC. It appears thus far that the USA/Israeli lobby have effectively neutered the international judiciary to make it nothing more than a toothless paper tiger !
Nice work, Tony. Anyone can see that if the UN fails to inyervene in the corrent genicide, it's little more than a bad joke on the rest of humanity.