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International Court of Justice/Application of the Convention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel)/24 May 2024

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The International Court of Justice, which has its seat in The Hague,
is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations

INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE

APPLICATION OF THE CONVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE

CRIME OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP (SOUTH AFRICA VS ISRAEL)

24 MAY 2024

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240524-pre-01-00-en.pdf

  INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE

 Peace Palace, Carnegieplein 2, 2517 KJ The Hague, Netherlands 

Tel.: +31 (0)70 302 2323 Fax: +31 (0)70 364 9928 

Press Release Unofficial 

No. 2024/47 

24 May 2024 

  Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in

the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)  

Request for the modification of the Order of 28 March 2024

The Court reaffirms its previous provisional measures and indicates new measures 

THE HAGUE, 24 May 2024. The International Court of Justice today delivered its Order on 

the request for the modification and the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa 

on 10 May 2024 in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and 

Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel). 

In its Order, the Court: 

“(1) By thirteen votes to two 

Reaffirms the provisional measures indicated in its Orders of 26 January 2024 

and 28 March 2024, which should be immediately and effectively implemented; 

IN FAVOUR: President Salam; Judges Abraham, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Iwasawa, 

Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant, Gómez Robledo, Cleveland, Aurescu, Tladi; 

AGAINST: Vice-President Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;             

  (2) Indicates the following provisional measures:

The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention    on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the

worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate:

  (a) By thirteen votes to two

Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah 

Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that 

could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 

  IN FAVOUR: President Salam; Judges Abraham, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Iwasawa,

Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant, Gómez Robledo, Cleveland, Aurescu, Tladi;

PAGE 2    

  – 2 –

AGAINST: Vice-President Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak; 

(b) By thirteen votes to two, 

Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance; 

IN FAVOUR: President Salam; Judges Abraham, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Iwasawa, 

Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant, Gómez Robledo, Cleveland, Aurescu, Tladi; 

AGAINST: Vice-President Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak; 

(c) By thirteen votes to two, 

Take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any 

commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or other investigative body mandated by 

competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide; 

IN FAVOUR: President Salam; Judges Abraham, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Iwasawa 

Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant, Gómez Robledo, Cleveland, Aurescu, Tladi; 

AGAINST: Vice-President Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak; 

(3) By thirteen votes to two, 

Decides that the State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures 

taken to give effect to this Order, within one month as from the date of this Order. 

IN FAVOUR: President Salam; Judges Abraham, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Iwasawa, 

Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant, Gómez Robledo, Cleveland, Aurescu, Tladi; 

AGAINST: Vice-President Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak.” 

Vice-President SEBUTINDE appends a dissenting opinion to the Order of the Court; 

Judges NOLTE, AURESCU and TLADI append declarations to the Order of the Court; 

Judge ad hoc BARAK appends a dissenting opinion to the Order of the Court. 

In its Order, the Court emphasizes that the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza 

Strip which, as stated in its Order of 26 January 2024, was at serious risk of deteriorating, has 

deteriorated, and has done so even further since the Court adopted its Order of 28 March 2024. It 

notes that,                            

  “[a]fter weeks of intensification of military bombardments of Rafah, where more than

a million Palestinians had fled as a result of Israeli evacuation orders covering more 

than three quarters of Gaza’s entire territory, on 6 May 2024, nearly 

100,000 Palestinians were ordered by Israel to evacuate the eastern portion of Rafah and 

relocate to the Al-Mawasi and Khan Younis areas ahead of a planned military offensive 

PAGE 3      

  3 –

The military ground offensive in Rafah, which Israel started on 7 May 2024, is still 

ongoing and has led to new evacuation orders. As a result, according to United Nations 

reports, nearly 800,000 people have been displaced from Rafah as at 18 May 2024.” 

The Court considers that these developments are exceptionally grave and constitute “a change in the 

situation within the meaning of Article 76 of the Rules of Court”. The Court is also of the view that 

the provisional measures indicated in its Order of 28 March 2024, as well as those reaffirmed therein, 

do not fully address the consequences arising from the change in the situation, thus justifying the 

modification of these measures 

The Court further considers that, on the basis of the information before it, the immense risks 

associated with a military offensive in Rafah have started to materialize and will intensify even 

further if the operation continues. In addition, the Court is     

  “not convinced that the evacuation efforts and related measures that Israel affirms to

have undertaken to enhance the security of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and in particular 

those recently displaced from the Rafah Governorate, are sufficient to alleviate the 

immense risk to which the Palestinian population is exposed as a result of the military 

offensive in Rafah”. 

A summary of the Order appears in the document entitled “Summary 2024/6”, to which 

summaries of the opinions and declarations are annexed. This summary and the full text of the Order 

are available on the case page on the Court’s website. 

Earlier press releases relating to this case are also available on the Court’s website. 

Note: The Court’s press releases are prepared by its Registry for information purposes only 

and do not constitute official documents. 

  The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.

It was established by the United Nations Charter in June 1945 and began its activities in April 1946. 

The Court is composed of 15 judges elected for a nine-year term by the General Assembly and the 

Security Council of the United Nations. The seat of the Court is at the Peace Palace in The Hague 

(Netherlands). The Court has a twofold role: first, to settle, in accordance with international law, 

legal disputes submitted to it by States; and, second, to give advisory opinions on legal questions 

referred to it by duly authorized United Nations organs and agencies of the system. 

PAGE 4

– 4 – 

Information Department: 

Ms Monique Legerman, First Secretary of the Court, Head of Department: +31 (0)70 302 2336 

Ms Joanne Moore, Information Officer: +31 (0)70 302 2337 

Mr Avo Sevag Garabet, Associate Information Officer: +31 (0)70 302 2394 

Email: info@icj-cij.org

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Eid Mubarak 2024!

EID MUBARAK 2024!

To all muslim readers of my website, in the Netherlands and over the world, EID MUBARAK!

ASTRID ESSED

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Article from Amira Hass/”If the Israeli army invades Rafah, what will be of more than 1.5 million Palestinians, who take shelter there?

Juli 2014. Het Israëlische leger bombardeert de Gazastrook.

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

Reuters

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

ICJ South Africa v. Israel (Genocide Convention)  CC-BY-SA-4.0

Foreword:

Dear Readers

On the request of drs J Wijenberg, former Dutch ambassador and

an important activist of the Palestinian Case, hereby I publish

the following article of another great advocate for Palestinian Rights:

AMIRA HASS:

The article is titled:

”IF THE ISRAELI ARMY INVADES RAFAH, WHAT WILL BE OF MORE

THAN 1.5 MILLION PALESTINIANS WHO TAKE SHELTER THERE?”

The article was published in the Israeli newspaper The Haaretz

SEE MORE ABOUT AMIRA HASS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amira_Hass

And see for more information about drs J Wijenberg 

OR

https://electronicintifada.net/content/former-dutch-ambassador-calls-sanctions-if-israel-refuses-comply-international-law/6034

Read further o Readers

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

ASTRID ESSED

AND NOW THE AMIRA HASS ARTICLE!

IF THE ISRAELI ARMY INVADES RAFAH, WHAT WILL BE OF MORE

THAN 1.5 MILLION PALESTINIANS WHO TAKE SHELTER THERE?

AMIRA HASS

PUBLISHED IN THE HAARETZ

10 FEBRUARY 2024

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-02-10/ty-article-magazine/.premium/if-israel-invades-rafah-what-will-be-of-over-1-5m-palestinians-who-take-shelter-there/0000018d-9360-d443-a19f-fff113ba0000

PAGE 2

Since Yahya Sinwar, his close aides and Hamas militants have never been

found in Gaza City and then not in Khan Yunis, the Israeli army is

considering expanding its ground operation into the southern Gaza city of

Rafah. 

The army is doing so because it assumes that Sinwar and his aids

are hiding in the tunnels underneath this southern region of the Gaza Strip,

presumably holding on to the Israeli hostages who are still alive.

Most of the Gaza Strip residents, some 1.4 million people, are concentrated

in Rafah. 

Tens of thousands are still fleeing into the city from Khan Yunis,

where the fighting continues. The thought that Israel will invade Rafah and

that fighting will take place between and near civilians terrifies the city's

residents and the internally displaced persons. 

The terror they feel is

augmented by the conclusion that nobody can prevent Israel from carrying

out its intention – not even the ICJ ruling that orders Israel to take all

measures to avoid acts of genocide.

Military correspondents in Israel report and assume that the army intends to

order residents of Rafah to move to a safe area. Since the war started, the

army has been waving around this evacuation or

der as evidence that it is

acting in order to prevent any harm to ”uninvolved civilians”

This safe zone, however, which was bombarded and still is bombarded by

Israel, is gradually shrinking. 

The only safe zone that truly remains, and

which the IDF is now designating for the masses of people in Rafah, is Al-

Mawasi – a southern Gaza coastal area of approximately 16 square

kilometers (about 6 square miles).

It’s still unclear by what verbal measures the IDF and its legal experts

intend to reconcile this squeezing of so many civilians with the orders

given by the ICJ.

PAGE 3

”The humanitarian zone designated by the army is around the size of Ben-

Gurion International Airport (about 6.3 square miles)” concluded Haaretz

journalists Yarden Michaeli and Avi Scharf in their report earlier this week.

The report, titled "Gazans Fled Their Homes. 

They Have Nowhere to

Return to”, revealed the vast devastation across the Gaza Strip as captured

in Satellite images.

The comparison with Ben-Gurion International Airport invites one to imagine

a density beyond anything imaginable, but Israeli TV commentators don't go

much further beyond the deep insight that the ground invasion of Rafah will

indeed, ”won’t be that simple.”

Although it’s difficult, we must imagine what awaits the Palestinians in

Rafah if the army’;s plan is carried out. 

We must do so not so much as of humanist and moral considerations, which after October 7 aren’t that relevant to the majority of the Israeli-Jewish public, but because of the military, humanitarian, and -eventually- legal and political entanglementsthat are surely expected if we go down that road.
The compression

Even if ”only” about a million Palestinians will flee for the third and fourth

time into Al-Mawasi – an area which is already full of displaced Gazans –

the density will be about 62,500 people per square kilometer (about

157,000 people per square mile).

This will happen in an open area with no skyscrapers to house the

refugees, that has no running water, no privacy, no means of living, no

hospitals or medical clinics, no solar panels to charge phones, and all while

aid organizations will have to cross through or near battle zones in order to

distribute the small amounts of food that do enter the Gaza Strip.

It seems that the only position in which this narrow area could

accommodate everyone would be if they're all standing or kneeling.

Perhaps it’ll be necessary to form special committees that will determine

sleeping arrangements in shifts: a few thousand would lie down while the

rest continue to stand awake.

The buzzing of the drones above and below,

the cries of babies born during the war and whose mothers have no milk or

not enough of it – these will be the unnerving soundtrack.

From what we saw during the IDF’s ground raids and the battles in Gaza 

City and Khan Yunis, it’s clear, that the ground operation in Rafah if it

PAGE 4

eventually unfolds, will last many weeks. Does Israel believe that the ICJ

will consider the compression of hundreds of thousands or a million

Palestinians on a small piece of land a proper ”measure”; that prevents

genocide?

About 270 thousand Palestinians lived in the Rafah district before the war.

The one-and-a-half million who are currently staying there suffer from

hunger and malnutrition; they suffer from thirst, cold, diseases and

spreading infections, from lice in their hair and skin rash; they suffer from

physical and mental exhaustion and a chronic lack of sleep.

They crowd in

schools, hospitals and mosques, in tent neighborhoods that have sprung up

in and around Rafah, and in apartments that house dozens of displaced

families.

Tens of thousands of them are wounded, including those whose limbs were

amputated due to the army's attacks or surgeries that followed. They all

have relatives and friends – children, babies and elderly parents – who

have been killed in the past four months.

The houses of most of them were destroyed or badly damaged. All their

possessions are lost. 

Their money has run out due to the high and

exorbitant food prices. 

Many escaped death only by chance, and witnessed

the dreadful sights of dead bodies. They don’;t mourn the dead yet because

the trauma continues. 

Along with displays of support and solidarity, disputes

and fights also occur. Some lose their memory and sanity from all the

suffering.

As it has done in other areas in the strip, to maintain the element of

surprise, the IDF will issue a warning about two hours before a ground

invasion into Rafah. This will give the residents a time window of a few

hours that day to evacuate the city.

Imagine this convoy of refugees and the mass panic of people fleeing

toward Al-Mawasi in the west. Think of the elders, the sick, the disabled and

the wounded who will be ”lucky” to be transported in donkey carts or

makeshift wheelbarrows and in cars that run on cooking oil.

All the others – both sick and healthy – will have to leave on foot. They’;ll

probably have to leave behind the little that they’ve managed to collect and

take with them in previous displacements, like blankets and plastic sheets

for shelter, warm clothes, some food and basic items such as small

cookers.

This forced escape march will probably go through the ruins of some of the

buildings that Israel bombed not long ago, or the craters created on the

PAGE 5

road due to the attacks. The whole convoy will then stand still until a detour

is found. Someone is bound to trip; a cartwheel will get stuck in the mud.

And all of them – hungry and thirsty, frightened by the imminent attack or

the expected tank shelling – will continue going forward. Children will cry

and get lost. People will feel bad. 

Medical teams will struggle to reach

whoever needs care.

Only 4 kilometers (about 2.4 miles) separate Rafah from Al-Mawasi, but it’;ll

require several hours to cross. 

The people marching will be cut off from any

communication, if only because of the packed convoy and the

overcrowding. They’;ll fight over the area where they wish to set up a tent.

They’ll fight over who gets to be closest to a building or a water well. 

They’;ll

faint due to thirst and hunger.

The following image will repeat itself several times over the next few days:

A march of starving and frightened Palestinians starts fleeing in panic each

time the IDF announces another area whose residents are supposed to

evacuate, while the tanks and infantry troops advance toward them. 

The

shelling and ground troops will get closer to the hospitals that are still

functioning. Tanks will surround them, and all the patients and medical

teams will be required to evacuate to the crowded Al-Mawasi area.

The ground operation

It’;s hard to know how many of them will decide not to leave. 

As we learned

from what happened in the northern Gaza districts and Khan Yunis, a

significant number of residents prefer to stay in an area that is destined for

a ground operation. 

Among them will be tens of thousands of displaced,

sick and seriously wounded Gazans who are hospitalized, pregnant women

and others who will decide to stay in their own homes and the homes of

their relatives or in schools turned into shelters. 

The little information they

will get from the concentration area of Al-Mawasi is enough to discourage

them from joining.

IDF soldiers and commanders, however, interpret the evacuation order

differently: anyone who remains in an area designated for ground invasion

isn’t considered an innocent civilian; they aren’;t considered ”uninvolved”

Anyone who stays in their homes and goes out to fetch water from a city

facility that is still operating or from some private well, medical teams called

to treat a patient, a pregnant woman walking to a nearby hospital to give

birth – all of them, as we saw during the war and in past military campaigns,

are criminalized in the eyes of the soldiers. 

Shooting and killing them

follows the IDF’s rules of engagement.

PAGE 6

According to the army, such shootings are carried out in accordance with

international law because these individuals were warned that they must

leave. 

Even when soldiers break into houses during the fighting, Gazans,

mainly men, are at risk of death from gunfire. 

A soldier shooting someone

because they felt threatened or followed an order – it doesn’t matter. It

happened in Gaza City, and it might happen in Rafah.

Just as the aid teams aren’t authorized or are unable to reach the northern

Gaza Strip to distribute food, they won’t be able to distribute it in the fighting

areas in Rafah. 

The little food that the residents managed to save will

gradually run out.

Those who remain in their homes will be forced to choose the lesser of two

evils: either they go out and risk Israeli fire or starve at home. 

Most of them

already suffer from a severe lack of nutrients. In many families, adults are

giving up food so that their children can be fed. There’s a real danger that

many will starve to death while in their home as the fighting rages outside.

The bombings

Since the war started, the army bombarded residential buildings, open

areas and passenger cars in every location it had defined as ”safe” (that its

residents weren’;t required to leave). It doesn’t matter if the attacks target

Hamas facilities, the group’s officials or other members who were staying

with their families or have come out of hiding to visit them – civilians are

almost always killed.

The bombings didn’t stop in Rafah either. Overnight into Thursday, two

houses were bombed in the western Rafah neighborhood of Tel al-Sultan.

According to Palestinian sources, 14 people were killed, including five

children.

The sources also said that a mother and daughter were killed in an Israeli

attack on a house in northern Rafah on February 7 and that a journalist was

killed together with his mother and sister in western Rafah the day before.

Also on February 6, the sources added, six Palestinian police officers were

killed in an Israeli attack while they were securing an aid truck in eastern

Rafah.

These attacks indicate that the so-called collateral damage calculations

approved by IDF legal experts and the State Prosecutor’s Office are

extremely permissive. The number of uninvolved Palestinians that it is

”permitted”; to kill in return for hitting an army’s target is higher than in any

previous war.

PAGE 7

People in Rafah are afraid that the IDF will apply these permissive criteria

also in Al-Mawasi, and attack there as well if a target is in the area, among

the hundreds of thousands who take shelter. This is how an announced

safe haven will become a death trap for hundreds of thousands.

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Article from Amira Hass/”If the Israeli army invades Rafah, what will be of more than 1.5 million Palestinians, who take shelter there?

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Blessed Ramadan 2024!

Image result for Rising star on the sky/Nature/Images

BLESSED RAMADAN 2024!

TO ALL MY ISLAMIC READERS AND ALL OTHER MUSLIMS IN THE WORLD, I WISH A BLESSED AND HAPPY RAMADAN!


Kind greetings/Astrid Essed

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Article from Patrick Lawrence/”Israel’s place in Global Public Space/The Zionist State, like the US, can’t survive in it”

Juli 2014. Het Israëlische leger bombardeert de Gazastrook.

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

Reuters

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

ICJ South Africa v. Israel (Genocide Convention)  CC-BY-SA-4.0

https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/29/patrick-lawrence-the-palestinians-won-in-the-hague-so-did-the-rest-of-us/

Foreword:

Dear Readers

On the request of drs J Wijenberg, former Dutch ambassador and

an important activist of the Palestinian Case, hereby I publish

the following article of another great advocate for Palestinian Rights:

PATRICK LAWRENCE

The article is titled:

”ISRAEL’S PLACE IN GLOBAL PUBLIC SPACE

THE ZIONIST STATE, LIKE US, CAN’T SURVIVE IN IT”

See more about Patrick Lawrence down below under his article [1]

And see for more information about drs J Wijenberg 

or

https://electronicintifada.net/content/former-dutch-ambassador-calls-sanctions-if-israel-refuses-comply-international-law/6034

Read further o Readers

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

ASTRID ESSED

AND NOW THE PATRICK LAWRENCE ARTICLE!

ISRAEL’S PLACE IN GLOBAL PUBLIC SPACE”

The Zionist State, like the US, can’t survive in it

Patrick Lawrence

10 FEBRUARY 2024

PAGE 2

10 FEBRUARY

—At writing, it emerges that Israeli propagandists spun of whole

cloth the tales that Hamas militias engaged in “systematic” rape and sexual violence

when they breached the border between Gaza and southern Israel four months ago

this week. 

Many of these accounts were preposterously implausible, but never mind:

Many Western media reported on Hamas’s “weaponization” of sexual violence. The

phenomenon now gets its own acronym. Those who accept this stuff as credible now

take to calling it CRSV, conflict-related sexual violence.

It is enough to put you off acronyms altogether.

There have been powerful, persuasive exposés of this assembly line—Israeli

propaganda productions to Western correspondents to the eyes, ears, and minds of

their readers and viewers. Here I should single out the work of  Mondoweiss , which

covers developments in Israel and Palestine, and The Grayzone, which covers Israel,

Palestine, and a great deal more.

Let us rotate this phenomenon such that we see it

from another perspective. Let us then ask, to what extent does Israel pollute what I

will call global pubic space in the cause of its survival? Follow-on question: Can

Israel survive in global public space?

The International Court of Justice’s recent ruling on genocide in Gaza is a usefully

revealing place to begin seeking our answers.

PAGE 3

Two days before the ICJ ruled, on 26 January, that South Africa has presented

plausible evidence of Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza and a court case must

proceed, the Zionist government claimed it had declassified nearly three dozen

documents—cabinet minutes, internal orders, advisory notes—to suggest that its

intent all along has been to limit casualties among the Palestinians of Gaza. One of

these documents—these alleged documents, this is to say—reads in part:

The prime minister stressed time and again the need to increase significantly the

humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.

And from another:

It is recommended to respond favorably to the request of the U.S.A. to enable the

entry of fuel.

The Israelis allowed The New York Times to see copies of these texts—alleged copies

of alleged texts. So far as we know, no other person or organization other than the

ICJ has had access to them. The Times, as is its wont whenever it covers Israel,

reported on these alleged copies of alleged documents with wide-eyed credulity. It

never questioned their provenance or their authenticity—an omission that is easy to

understand but difficult to forgive.

Read these passages carefully. Can you imagine a circumstance in which an Israeli

minister or another government official would make such remarks in a closed-door

cabinet meeting or in an internal memorandum?

 I cannot.

I interpret this exercise in

“declassification” at the eleventh hour as crude propaganda in anticipation of The

Hague’s ruling. My prediction: We will never again hear anything about these

“documents,” references to which merit quotation marks.

Instantly after The Hague ruled against Israel, shortly after The Times’s report on the

alleged copies of the alleged minutes and memos, the apartheid regime asserted it had

evidence that a dozen employees of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which bears

responsibility for the welfare of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere across the region,

participated in the incursions into southern Israel led by Hamas militias last October

7.

The evidence this time derives—the supposed evidence supposedly derives—from

several sources. There are the cellular telephone intercepts. Here are supposed

confessions of Palestinians the Israel Defense Forces captured during or after the

PAGE 4

events of 7 October. In addition, the Israelis claim to have cross-referenced a Relief

and Works Agency staff list with a list of Hamas members it claims to have found on

a computer in the course of its ground campaign in Gaza.

Again, no Western official or Western medium has raised even the mildest question

as to the verity of Israel’s “evidence.” The Israelis have a long, sordid record of

torturing confessions from captive Palestinians.

They operate a propaganda machine

the match of any nation’s and superior to most.

These realities go unmentioned.

No

one has yet proven Israel’s allegations to be true. Nonetheless, nearly 20

nations—Among them Britain, Germany France, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland,

Finland, Australia, Canada, Japan—have followed the Biden regime’s lead in cutting

off aid to Relief and Works.

On Saturday The Times published a piece quoting at length the director of Relief and

Works in Gaza, Philippe Lazarini, who gives a credible account of the circumstances

in which his agency works and the procedures it follows to prevent staff from

collaborating with Hamas.

Nonetheless, at writing the agency predicts it will be

unable to operate by the end of February.

Famine, starvation, disease, chronic

dehydration:

This kind of catastrophe is now very near. As Jonathan Cook notes in an

excellent commentary published 30 January, the U.S. and those acting with it are no

longer merely complicit in Israel’s genocide: They are now participants in it.

It is important at this moment to recognize what we know and do not know about

Israel’s reaction to ICJ’s judgment. We cannot be entirely certain that the Zionist

state has submitted falsified evidence at The Hague, although this is very likely the

case.

We are very unlikely ever to know the contents of any telephone intercepts, or if

there were indeed any such intercepts.

We cannot know with certainty how Israeli

interrogators obtained the confessions of captive Palestinians, or if they indeed

obtained any confessions, or if the IDF possesses any kind of Hamas membership list,

as the Israelis claim, and if they cross-referenced it as they also claim.

I confirm my

skepticism as to all of Israel’s accounts of these matters, but it is important also to

confirm that they remain too opaque to permit us to judge them with full confidence.

But the World Court’s ruling and Israel’s preliminary response are nonetheless

transformative—clarifying as a chemical agent turns a solution with suspended solids

transparent. We know two things now, as they are perfectly clear. One, Israel, with

PAGE 5

the backing of the U.S. and the various pilot fish that follow it, has begun—or

resumed, better put—a concerted attack on the U.N., global justice, and altogether on

international public space.

Two, if this strategy tells us anything, it is that neither the Israelis nor their Western

backers have any idea what time it is on history’s clock.

They do not understand that

the international public space just mentioned is undergoing a process of restoration.

John Whitbeck, an international lawyer and commentator in Paris, put last month’s

events in their proper historical context as well as anyone.

He subsequently wrote in

his privately circulated newsletter:

More so with each passing day, it appears that our world is restructuring itself for

the long term into two new geopolitical blocs, largely if not exclusively based on

historical divisions between colonizing states and colonized states and

ethnic/cultural divisions between “white” states and “non-white” states.

On one side is a New Evil Empire (the Israeli/American one), supplemented by its

faithful and obedient servants in Europe and the settler-colonial Anglosphere.

On

the other side is a New Free World, encompassing countries with widely varying

cultures and internal governance systems which are both willing and able to stand

up to and resist domination by the New Evil Empire and, more broadly, to assert

their own freedom, sovereignty and national preferences …

Itamar Ben–Givr, Israel’s national security minister and one of its more repugnant

public figures, went on social media after the ICJ announced its decision with two

words those who know Jewish colloquialisms will easily recognize: “Hague

Schmague,” Ben–Givr posted on the message platform known as X.

Apart from this degree of crudity coming from an official of cabinet rank, there is no

surprise here. Illegal settlements, the criminal mistreatment of Palestinians, incidents

of torture, assassinations and covert operations:

The list of Israel’s transgressions of

international law is long.

It has contravened more than 30 Security Council

resolutions since the Six–Day War in 1967.

As the Israelis ignore the ICJ ruling and

proceed with their campaign to exterminate the Palestinian population of Gaza, this is

entirely of a piece with “the Jewish state’s” conduct since its founding amid the

PAGE 6

massacres and forced removals—al–Nakba, “the Catastrophe,” as Palestinians call

it—that began 76 years ago (but has never ended).

It is a forlorn hope that Israel’s leadership, psychotically extremist as it is, could

recognize that the global order is changing, that the ICJ decision reflects this, and a

new set of responses is necessary.

There is no chance of this.

The bitter truth is that

Israel, as constituted in 1948, cannot survive in international public space.

It is too

committed to Zionism, which is precisely the racist ideology the U.N. proclaimed it

to be, not quite 50 years ago, in General Assembly Council Resolution 3379.

3379. Israel is

in consequence too reliant on unending war, repression, institutionalized

discrimination, and violence to count as anything other than a failed experiment. 

Resolution 3379, revoked in 1991 under heavy U.S. pressure, should be restored in

recognition of this reality.

Rejecting the validity of global public space is a considerable part of the bond Israel

enjoys—do I mean exploits?—with the U.S.

Where do we begin enumerating

America’s genocides—with Jackson’s Native American removals, the “Trail of

Tears,” in the late–1830s? Where its flouting of international law—with  with the

annexation of Texas and the Mexican–American War, 1846–48?

Closer to our time,

matters have become more explicit. In 2002, shortly after the U.S. invaded

Afghanistan, it passed the American Service–Members Protection Act, otherwise

known as the Hague Invasion Act.

It proclaimed unilaterally that American military

personnel were immune from prosecution in courts such as the ICJ. Joe Biden, then a

senator, was an enthusiastic supporter of this bill as it made its way into law.

Quickly after the events of 7 October, the Israelis took to calling it “Israel’s 11

September,” a reference to the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001.

This is

too histrionic a notion to take seriously, in my view, except for one thing these events

have in common.

Israel and the U.S. share an obsession with total security, both

believing they were impregnable against the intrusions of others.

The Events of 7

October shocked Israel out of this illusion, just as 11 September ended it for

Americans. Both discovered, on these dates, that there is no such thing as total

security or immunity from history and the tempests that are inevitably part of it.

Two nations with “chosen people” complexes, to put the point another way, found

they were no more chosen than anyone else. It is not difficult to imagine the

PAGE 7

psychological shocks that led both to extreme, irrationally violent reactions when this

consciousness was disturbed.

And in my read, Israel is about to begin struggling with

the same bitter lesson Americans have so far declined to learn: As there is no such

thing as total security, quests for it are not merely doomed to failure but also to

destroy the people or nation seeking it.

It is useful now to consider Zionism as a variant of America’s claim to

exceptionalism. And in their responses to the judicial ruling in The Hague two weeks

ago, Israel and the U.S. have signaled they intend to continue insisting that they are

exceptions to the international community’s laws and norms.

Sadly but not

tragically—tragedy implies a cleansing, suffering that leads to knowledge—they have

read our moment wrongly. Can Zionism survive this mistake? Only with more

extreme violence. Can Israel survive the mistake of Zionism? Should it? These are

our questions now.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Global Bridge.

END OF THE PATRICK LAWRENCE ARTICLE

[1]

MORE ABOUT PATRICK LAWRENCE!

SEE THIS ARTICLE

PATRICK LAWRENCE: THE PALESTINIANS WON IN THE HAGUE: SO

DID THE REST OF US

PATRICK LAWRENCE

29 JANUARY 2024

https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/29/patrick-lawrence-the-palestinians-won-in-the-hague-so-did-the-rest-of-us/

The non–West has spoken, it has raised its voice.

Half a dozen years ago I sat in the lobby lounge at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan talking at length with Richard Falk, the scholar, lawyer, U.N. rapporteur, and advocate of Palestinian rights. Inevitably, the conversation turned for a time to international law, a topic on which Falk has long been a recognized authority. Here is a little of what he said as we took our afternoon tea:

When international law is on the side of the geopolitical actors, then they are very serious about its relevance. When the American embassy was seized in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution, they talked about the flouting of international law as if that was the most sacred body of law that ever existed. International law is used very instrumentally. If you’re protecting private investment in Venezuela or Chile, then it’s barbaric not to uphold it. But if it’s blocking the pursuit of some kind of interventionist project, then it’s flaky or irrelevant to talk about it …

I thought about that exchange over the weekend, as I considered the International Court of Justice’s ruling last Friday that the apartheid state of Israel may be guilty of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinian population, as South Africa charges, and that the case Pretoria brought last month must proceed. Later Friday, the estimable Phyllis Bennis quoted Falk in a piece she wrote for In These Times. Falk called the decision the court’s “greatest moment,” and went on to explain, “It strengthens the claims of international law to be respected by all sovereign states—not just some.”

Consistency of thought: It does not get more admirable than this.

There are many, many ways to look upon the ICJ’s ruling, many things worth saying. The very first of these is that the significance of the ICJ’s interim finding lies beyond dispute. Will the barbarities of a nation self-evidently suffering a collective psychosis now stop? No. What Dick Falk said six years ago still holds: Israel has already made clear it will ignore The Hague’s judgment. 

But what “the Jewish state” does this week or next is not for the moment our question. What are the enduring consequences of this ruling for the global order? How shall we situate the court’s judgment? Where does its importance lie? These are our questions. And Falk was right last Friday, too: The ICJ has begun the work—the long work—of restoring international law as a foundational feature of a world order worthy of the term.

Having made this point, I must immediately note the abject deflections we find in the reports of our corporate media—which, nearly to a one, urge their readers, listeners, and viewers to dismiss the ICJ’s interim finding as, borrowing from Falk, more or less flaky and irrelevant. In the second paragraph of its main story Friday, The New York Times, fairly bursting to get the point across, wrote, “The court did not rule on whether Israel was committing genocide, and it did not call on Israel to stop its campaign to crush Hamas…”

Three untruths here, straight off the top.  One, the South Africans did not ask The Hague to issue a ruling on genocide one way or the other. In the cause of expedience, to stop the savagery as quickly as possible, it asked for what it got—a swift interim judgment so the court could order Israel to stop the violence and that the larger case on genocide could proceed.

Two, a mountain has been made of the fact that the ICJ did not, in so many words, call upon Israel to cease fire in Gaza. This is preposterously misleading. Peruse the six stipulations that comprise the ruling, the first of which reads, “Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent all acts within the scope of Genocide Convention, Article 2.” Here I defer to Raz Segal, an Israeli historian who professes at Stockton University in New Jersey. This is from a segment of Democracy Now!, distributed last Friday:

We’re already seeing headlines in The New York Times today which frame this as, “The court did not issue an order for a ceasefire”—which, in effect, it actually did, because if it ordered that Israel should cease from genocidal acts, and it ordered Israel should facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid, it actually said, “You have to cease fire because there is no [other] way of doing that.”

And three, what Israel is doing in Gaza—as any review of the daily death toll will make clear, any five minutes of video footage—can be characterized as “a military campaign to crush Hamas” only by those so abjectly committed to defending Israeli atrocities that all thought of honest reporting and writing is cast aside. 

Almost all major media have followed The Times’s lead, per usual. Among the exceptions—and I confess my surprise here—is National Public Radio. It got the no-ceasefire bit wrong, but it otherwise published a quite good, balanced report from London that included worthy material from its South Africa correspondent (unless NPR took this off the wires):

Since former President Nelson Mandela’s administration, South Africa has long supported the Palestinian cause, saying it sees echoes of apartheid in the situation between the Israelis and Palestinians.

“We, as South Africans, will not be passive bystanders and watch the crimes that were visited upon us being perpetrated elsewhere,” [South African President Cyril] Ramaphosa said Friday. He noted the ICJ affirmed South Africa’s right to take Israel to court, “even though it is not a party to the conflict in Gaza.”

But exceptions prove rules, let us not forget. For the sheer nonsense of its reporting, I have to single out—the envelope, please—the reliably egregious MSNBC. You may want to take a moment to read this twice. In its Friday evening newscast, it had it that the ICJ ruling is nicely aligned with the Biden regime’s calls to minimize civilian casualties. Further, we need to know what The Hague’s finding is not and what it does not do: It is not any kind of indictment of the Biden regime’s policy, no, and it does not make Biden and the U.S. complicit in genocide. 

It is and it does, in my view. 

The running theme in American media is that The Hague’s judgment has changed nothing. Who can be surprised? Nothing ever changes when these media are telling us about the world. America is never wrong. America never makes a mistake. America is never on the wrong side. America is always good. America never loses. 

Let us now consider what enormous changes occurred when Joan Donoghue, an American judge who currently presides at The Hague, read out the ruling.  

As the Israeli military and propaganda machines reached full throttle late last autumn, a friend sent me a video link to a film called Defamation, made in 2009 by an Israeli documentarian named Yoav Shamir. It is a strangely lighthearted but thoroughly serious treatment of how Israel drills into its people, youth and adults alike, the thought that the world, all of it, rages with anti–Semitism, that they are destined to be hated, that they must remain a people apart. My friend urged me to watch it amid the circus-like charges of anti–Semitism everywhere just then overtaking America. I found the film sad—as I do the cynical manipulation of history and memory by people who seem to think nothing of pimping their own past and the suffering of the six million. 

I watched Defamation again over the weekend. Here I transcribe a brief passage that features one Suzanne Prince and her husband, Harvey, who are active in the Los Angeles office of the American Defamation League. Shamir, who speaks from behind his camera, has asked them why the ADL makes incessant references to events that occurred many decades in the past:

S.P. To combat it [anti–Semitism] effectively you have to take responsibility for everything that happened in the past, then reach the present, and then go forward….

Y.S. Sometimes you need to give some slack to get what you want. 

S.P. No, no, absolutely not…. I bring up everything from the past…. We need to play on that guilt.

Y.S. Maybe the guilt trip we are giving them doesn’t help. Maybe we should give them some slack. 

H.P. Moderate.

S.P. The guilt of the father should not be visited upon the sons, true….

H.P. You cannot let it go down, but you can’t keep playing on it as heavily as some people do. You have to be moderate. 

This dialogue is now 15 years in the past. Until last Friday I would have said it is likely we are in for at least another 15 years of this kind of thing. We may be: The Israelis have already begun to sound the anti–Semitism bell in response to the ICJ decision. Over the weekend they accused a dozen U.N. employees—of 13,000 in Gaza—of collaborating with Hamas on October 7. I will believe this when I see evidence of it—evidence other than what the Israelis claim is evidence. The Zionist propaganda machine is now exposed. There is no air left in the tires of the Suzanne and Harvey Princes among us. At long last, the disgraceful decades of guilt-tripping is up and one can say so publicly. The Holocaust card, to put the point another way, is at last played out. 

Let us not miss the significance of this moment. As others have noted, 75 years of Israeli impunity will now draw to a close. Israel’s crimes can now be called Israel’s crimes.  Contempt for the Zionist state can now be legitimately expressed. I describe as best I can a change of consciousness, or of the rules of discourse, or both. All the rubbish condemning criticism of Israel as anti–Semitic can now be discarded for what it is. The ICJ, in the six stipulations it imposes on Israel, requires Tel Aviv to report to the court in one month of its efforts to “prevent genocide.” This is subtle, and very astute. It imposes a higher authority on the Israelis. It tells them, “You are answerable now to something other than yourselves (and, of course, the United States). You are answerable to the community of nations.”

There are many things that are for the moment unclear. If Israel ignores the court, as seems likely, and the U.N. Security Council convenes in response, what will the

Biden regime do? Veto a disciplinary resolution? Abstain? To what extent will Israel be isolated? And to what extent the U.S. with it? What about the Europeans? Will they act with some measure of autonomy in response to The Hague’s judgment? Cut off arms sales, scholarly and cultural exchanges? There are too many such questions to list. 

However such eventualities turn out, there are larger matters we must not miss. International law, as Richard Falk noted well, stands to count more now, even if the Israelis transgress it for the umpteenth time. Equally, or maybe this is a yet larger point, it is highly significant that it was South Africa that precipitated last week’s events. The South Africans have emerged over the past year or so, maybe a little more, as committed advocates of a new world order I will call post–Western. They have an enlarging identity as a non–Western power.  

We must all stand with the Palestinians, yes, however each of us is able to make this manifest. But we cannot isolate the ICJ’s ruling as a remedy for one incidence of genocide or one case of the aggression of Western power against the non–West. What happened last Friday in The Hague is best understood as a step, a big one, to ending half a millennium of genocides and violence. 

The non–West has spoken, it has raised its voice. And it will have ever more to say from here on out.

END OF THE ARTICLE

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Article from Patrick Lawrence/”Israel’s place in Global Public Space/The Zionist State, like the US, can’t survive in it”

Opgeslagen onder Divers

Article from Electronic Intifada [2006]/Former Dutch ambassador calls for sanctions if Israel refuses to comply with International Law

Juli 2014. Het Israëlische leger bombardeert de Gazastrook.

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

ELECTRONIC INTIFADA

FORMER DUTCH AMBASSADOR CALLS FOR SANCTIONS IF

ISRAEL RFEFUSES TO COMPLY WITH

INTERNATIONAL LAW

19 JUNE 2006

https://electronicintifada.net/content/former-dutch-ambassador-calls-sanctions-if-israel-refuses-comply-international-law/6034

Some weeks ago I heard Jan Wijenberg, a retired Dutch Ambassador, speak about what the International Community could do to break with its complicity to the ongoing violations of international law and human rights by the Israeli regime. Wijenberg served over a decade as an ambassador for the Dutch government in Jemen, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia. He regularly writes to Dutch ministers and politicians to remind them of the responsibility of the international community, and specifically of the Dutch Government and the European Union, to hold Israel accountable to international law. His views are expressed in this article.

Israel is the problem

Quite often is spoken about the conflict in the Middle East between the Palestinians and Israel. If we look at the situation more closely we can observe something different. The media in Israel provide a platform for unpunished, insane calls for murdering peoples and a nation. An example is offered by Professor Arnon Sofer talking about Palestinians living in closed-off Gaza, “…those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam… So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill we will cease to exist…..”1

In 2005 Ehud Barak stated on Dutch television2 that – in a secret and illegal retaliatory campaign against the Palestinian hostage takers at the Munich Olympic Winter Games – he personally had murdered thirteen innocent citizens. According to Barak this would teach the world not to fool around with Israel. Barak was and is not prosecuted for premeditated murder and could achieve the position of the country’s prime minister.

Among the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories are opportunists and extremely violent Israeli’s who aim to occupy East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinians must be driven out of these territories by all means possible, including murder. The government of Israel supports the settlers in full while they lay there hands on Palestinian property and act out their violence on Palestinians.

The annexation of East Jerusalem by Ehud Olmert while he was the mayor of West-Jerusalem can according to the Fourth Geneva Convention be interpreted as a war crime. After the last elections in Israel Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party won the vote and he is now the Prime Minister of Israel.

Israeli policies are driven by the Zionist ideal of creating a Jewish state, including the Palestinian territories. Israel is aiming systematically at destroying the identity of the Palestinian people. The so called “conflict in the Middle East” between Palestinians and Israel does not exist. Zionist Israel is the problem.

Rogue state

Israel is the world’s sole remaining occupying colonial power. It systematically sabotages all international efforts to end the occupation. In its capacity of occupying power Israel violates numerous obligations emanating from Security Council Resolutions and the Geneva Conventions. It also breaches the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The USA applies a doctrine and the US-administration labels selected countries as ‘Rogue states’. These countries possess weapons of mass destruction illegally, suppress large populations, torture, keep people in detention on a large scale and commit murder outside their national borders. Israel has adopted as a strategy the execution of land and water grabs, the destruction of Palestinian infrastructure (including in education and health), the carrying out of extraterritorial executions, torture, and collective punishments and keeping thousands of Palestinians imprisoned indefinitely without charge or prosecution. On the basis of the definition by the USA, Israel has ever since its establishment been a monumental Rogue state and a highly active member of the Axis of Evil.

Letter to Dutch ministers

In February Wijenberg wrote to the ministers Bot, van Ardenne-van der Hoeven and Nicolaï, ministers of Foreign Affairs, Development Co-operation and State Secretary of European Affairs respectively. He reminded them that according to article 90 of the Dutch Constitution “The government nurtures the development of the international order of law”. So many previous Dutch governments violated this article when it concerns the Middle East. With referral to the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice of 9 July 2004 Wijenberg calls upon the Dutch ministers to show the world that they are serious about international law, justice and democracy. A copy of the letter was sent to the prime minister Balkenende and the minister of Justice Donner. In his view the United States and the European Union – including the Netherlands – have for too long condoned Israels disrespect for international law.

In its response the ministry of Foreign Affairs replies that the Dutch government is actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Israel. Wijenberg questions this policy. “”Since when do we politely ask notorious violaters of international law to stop their daily terrorisation of the Palestinian civilians, with assassinations in broad daylight and theft of property, houses, land and water? Why aren’t the harshest peaceful means used to fight this?”

Cal for sanctions

In the view of Wijenberg the European Union and the Netherlands have become an instrument of Israels foreign policy by ignoring its own core values values and respect for international law and human rights. Europe can play a key role in achieving lasting peace for Israel and its neighbours. If Israel refuses to show respect for international law, heavy sanctions against Israel should be installed.

Adri Nieuwhof is an independent consultant and human rights advocate from the Netherlands.

Endnotes

[1] The Jerusalem Post, Up Front weekend supplement (21 May 2004)

[2] NOVA (15 December 2005)

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Article from Electronic Intifada [2006]/Former Dutch ambassador calls for sanctions if Israel refuses to comply with International Law

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Article from Gideon Levy in the Haaretz/AN ISRAELI INCURSION INTO GAZA’S RAFAH WILL BE AN UNPRECEDENTED HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE

Juli 2014. Het Israëlische leger bombardeert de Gazastrook.

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

Reuters

THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA

Foreword:

Dear Readers

On the request of drs J Wijenberg, former Dutch ambassador and

an important activist of the Palestinian Case, hereby I publish

the following article of another great activist for Palestinian human rights,

the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy

SEE ALSO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Levy

And see for more information about drs J Wijenberg the Electronic Initfada

article down Below the Gideon Levy article 

ARTICLE FROM THE HAARETZ

GIDEON LEVY

AN ISRAELI INCURSION INTO GAZA’S RAFAH WILL BE AN

UNPRECEDENTED HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE

11 FEBRUARY 2024

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-02-11/ty-article-opinion/.premium/an-israeli-incursion-into-gazas-rafah-will-be-an-unprecedented-humanitarian-catastrophe/0000018d-9435-d443-a19f-fcb529aa0000

All we can do now is to request, beg, cry out: Don’t enter Rafah. An Israeli incursion into Rafah will be an attack on the world’s biggest displaced persons camp. It will drag the Israeli military into committing war crimes of a severity that even it has not yet committed. It is impossible to invade Rafah now without committing war crimes. If the Israel Defense Forces invades

Rafah, the city will become a carmel house.

Around 1,4 million displaced people are now in

Rafah, sheltering in some cases under plastic bags that have been turned into tents. The

American administration, the supposed gatekeeper of Israeli law and

PAGE 2

conscience, has conditioned the invasion of Rafah on an Israeli plan

to evacuate the city. There is not and cannot be any such plan, even if

Israel manages to come up with something. 

It is impossible to transport one million entirely destitute people,

some of whom have been displaced two or three times already, from

one safe place to another, that always turn into killing fields. It is

impossible to transport millions of people as if they were calves

meant for shipment. Even calves cannot be transported with such

cruelty.

There is also nowhere to evacuate these millions of people. In the

devastated Gaza Strip, there is nowhere left to go. If the Rafah

refugees are moved to Al-Mawasi, as the IDF will propose in its

humanitarian plan, Al-Mawasi will become the site of a humanitarian

disaster the likes of which we haven’t seen in the Strip.

Yarden Michaeli and Avi Scharf report that the entire population of the

Gaza Strip, 2.3 million people, is supposed to evacuate into an area of

16 square kilometers (6.2 square miles), about the size of Ben-Gurion

International Airport. All of Gaza in the area of the airport, just

imagine.  

Amira Hass calculated that if only one million people go to Al-Mawasi,

the population density there will be 62,500 people per square

kilometer. There is nothing in Al-Mawasi: No infrastructure, no water,

no electricity, no homes. Only sand and more sand, to absorb the

blood, the sewage, and the epidemics. The thought of this is not only

bloodcurdling, it also shows the level of dehumanization Israel has

reached in its planning.

Blood will be spilled in Al-Mawasi, as it has been spilled recently in

Rafah, the penultimate safe haven offered by Israel. The Shin Bet

security service will come up with some beat officer affiliated with

Hamas who has to be eliminated by dropping a one-ton bomb on the

new tent camp.

Twenty bystanders, most of them children, will be

killed. The military correspondents will tell us, their eyes shining,

about the wonderful work the IDF is doing in liquidating the top

command of Hamas. Total victory is near, Israelis will be sated once

again.

But even through this force-feeding, the Israeli public must wake up,

and with it the Biden administration. This is an emergency more dire

than any other during this war. The Americans must block the

invasion of Rafah with actions, not words. Only they can stop Israel. 

PAGE 3

The conscientious sector of the Israeli public seeks sources of

information other than the cakes for soldiers stations here that call

themselves news channels.

 Watch pictures of Rafah on any foreign

network – you won’t see anything in Israel – and you’ll

understand

why it can’t be evacuated.

ll understand the war crimes that are

rampant here.

On Saturday, the body of six-year-old Hind Hamada – or Rajab, in

some news outlets – was found

The girl had became famous all over

the world after the moments of terror she and her family experienced

on January 29 in the face of an Israeli tank – moments that were

recorded in a phone call with the Palestinian Red Crescent, until heraunt’s screams of terror stopped.

. Seven members of the family were

killed; only little Hind was saved, and her fate had remained a mystery

ever since.

Hind was found dead in her aunt’s burned car 

at a gas station in Khan
Yunis.

She had been wounded, covered by the seven bodies of her

relatives, and she bled to death before she could extricate herselffrom the vehicle.

Hind and her family had responded to Israel’s humanitarian call to evacuate.

Anyone who wants thousands more

Hinds should invade Rafah, whose population will be evacuated to Al-Mawasi.

END OF THE GIDEON LEVY ARTICLE

END OF THE GIDEON LEVY ARTICLE

DOWN BELOW THE GIDEON LEVY ARTICLE:

MORE ABOUT DRS J WIJENBERG

ELECTRONIC INTIFADA

FORMER DUTCH AMBASSADOR CALLS FOR SANCTIONS IF

ISRAEL RFEFUSES TO COMPLY WITH

INTERNATIONAL LAW

19 JUNE 2006

https://electronicintifada.net/content/former-dutch-ambassador-calls-sanctions-if-israel-refuses-comply-international-law/6034

Some weeks ago I heard Jan Wijenberg, a retired Dutch Ambassador, speak about what the International Community could do to break with its complicity to the ongoing violations of international law and human rights by the Israeli regime. Wijenberg served over a decade as an ambassador for the Dutch government in Jemen, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia. He regularly writes to Dutch ministers and politicians to remind them of the responsibility of the international community, and specifically of the Dutch Government and the European Union, to hold Israel accountable to international law. His views are expressed in this article.

Israel is the problem

Quite often is spoken about the conflict in the Middle East between the Palestinians and Israel. If we look at the situation more closely we can observe something different. The media in Israel provide a platform for unpunished, insane calls for murdering peoples and a nation. An example is offered by Professor Arnon Sofer talking about Palestinians living in closed-off Gaza, “…those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam… So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill we will cease to exist…..”1

In 2005 Ehud Barak stated on Dutch television2 that – in a secret and illegal retaliatory campaign against the Palestinian hostage takers at the Munich Olympic Winter Games – he personally had murdered thirteen innocent citizens. According to Barak this would teach the world not to fool around with Israel. Barak was and is not prosecuted for premeditated murder and could achieve the position of the country’s prime minister.

Among the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories are opportunists and extremely violent Israeli’s who aim to occupy East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinians must be driven out of these territories by all means possible, including murder. The government of Israel supports the settlers in full while they lay there hands on Palestinian property and act out their violence on Palestinians.

The annexation of East Jerusalem by Ehud Olmert while he was the mayor of West-Jerusalem can according to the Fourth Geneva Convention be interpreted as a war crime. After the last elections in Israel Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party won the vote and he is now the Prime Minister of Israel.

Israeli policies are driven by the Zionist ideal of creating a Jewish state, including the Palestinian territories. Israel is aiming systematically at destroying the identity of the Palestinian people. The so called “conflict in the Middle East” between Palestinians and Israel does not exist. Zionist Israel is the problem.

Rogue state

Israel is the world’s sole remaining occupying colonial power. It systematically sabotages all international efforts to end the occupation. In its capacity of occupying power Israel violates numerous obligations emanating from Security Council Resolutions and the Geneva Conventions. It also breaches the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The USA applies a doctrine and the US-administration labels selected countries as ‘Rogue states’. These countries possess weapons of mass destruction illegally, suppress large populations, torture, keep people in detention on a large scale and commit murder outside their national borders. Israel has adopted as a strategy the execution of land and water grabs, the destruction of Palestinian infrastructure (including in education and health), the carrying out of extraterritorial executions, torture, and collective punishments and keeping thousands of Palestinians imprisoned indefinitely without charge or prosecution. On the basis of the definition by the USA, Israel has ever since its establishment been a monumental Rogue state and a highly active member of the Axis of Evil.

Letter to Dutch ministers

In February Wijenberg wrote to the ministers Bot, van Ardenne-van der Hoeven and Nicolaï, ministers of Foreign Affairs, Development Co-operation and State Secretary of European Affairs respectively. He reminded them that according to article 90 of the Dutch Constitution “The government nurtures the development of the international order of law”. So many previous Dutch governments violated this article when it concerns the Middle East. With referral to the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice of 9 July 2004 Wijenberg calls upon the Dutch ministers to show the world that they are serious about international law, justice and democracy. A copy of the letter was sent to the prime minister Balkenende and the minister of Justice Donner. In his view the United States and the European Union – including the Netherlands – have for too long condoned Israels disrespect for international law.

In its response the ministry of Foreign Affairs replies that the Dutch government is actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Israel. Wijenberg questions this policy. “”Since when do we politely ask notorious violaters of international law to stop their daily terrorisation of the Palestinian civilians, with assassinations in broad daylight and theft of property, houses, land and water? Why aren’t the harshest peaceful means used to fight this?”

Cal for sanctions

In the view of Wijenberg the European Union and the Netherlands have become an instrument of Israels foreign policy by ignoring its own core values values and respect for international law and human rights. Europe can play a key role in achieving lasting peace for Israel and its neighbours. If Israel refuses to show respect for international law, heavy sanctions against Israel should be installed.

Adri Nieuwhof is an independent consultant and human rights advocate from the Netherlands.

Endnotes

[1] The Jerusalem Post, Up Front weekend supplement (21 May 2004)

[2] NOVA (15 December 2005)

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International Court of Justice/Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel)/26 january 2024

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The International Court of Justice, which has its seat in The Hague,
is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations

INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE

APPLICATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND

PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP 

(SOUTH AFRICA V. ISRAEL)

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-pre-01-00-en.pdf

INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE  

Peace Palace, Carnegieplein 2, 2517 KJ The Hague, Netherlands  

  Tel.: +31 (0)70 302 2323 Fax: +31 (0)70 364 9928

Press Release 

Unofficial   

No. 2024/6 

26 January 2024 

Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime 

of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) 

The Court indicates provisional measures 

THE HAGUE, 26 January 2024. The International Court of Justice today delivered its Order  

  on the Request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case

concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of 

Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)  

  It is recalled that, on 29 December 2023, South Africa filed an Application instituting proceedings against Israel concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

 In its Application, South Africa also requested the Court to indicate provisional measures in order to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention” and “to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide” (see press release No. 2023/77).   

  Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures were held on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024.

In its Order, which has binding effect, the Court indicates the following provisional measures: 

“(1) By fifteen votes to two, 

The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: 

(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; and 

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  – 2 – 

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;  

IN FAVOUR: 

President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte,

 Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;   

AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;  

  (2) By fifteen votes to two,

The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above; 

IN FAVOUR: 

President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;    

  AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;  

(3) By sixteen votes to one 

The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip; 

 IN FAVOUR:

 President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke;

 AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde;  

  (4) By sixteen votes to one,

The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; 

IN FAVOUR: 

President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke;    

 AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde;  

  (5) By fifteen votes to two,

The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip; 

IN FAVOUR: 

President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;    

 AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;  

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(6) By fifteen votes to two,  

  The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order.

IN FAVOUR: 

President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;   

AGAINST: 

Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak.”  

  *  

Judge XUE appends a declaration to the Order of the Court; 

Judge SEBUTINDE appends a dissenting opinion to the Order of the Court; Judges BHANDARI and NOLTE append declarations to the Order of the Court; Judge ad hoc BARAK appends a separate opinion to the Order of the Court  

   ___________

 A summary of the Order appears in the document entitled “Summary 2024/1”, to which summaries of the declarations and opinions are annexed.  

 This summary and the full text of the Order are available on the case page on the Court’s website.  

  ___________

Earlier press releases relating to this case are available on the Court’s website. 

Note: The Court’s press releases are prepared by its Registry for information purposes only and do not constitute official documents.     

  ___________

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. 

It was established by the United Nations Charter in June 1945 and began its activities in April 1946 

The Court is composed of 15 judges elected for a nine-year term by the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations. 

The seat of the Court is at the Peace Palace in The Hague (Netherlands). 

The Court has a twofold role: first, to settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes submitted to it by States; 

and, second, to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by duly authorized United Nations organs and agencies of the system 

___________          

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  4 

  Information Department:

Ms Monique Legerman, First Secretary of the Court, Head of Department: +31 (0)70 302 2336 

Ms Joanne Moore, Information Officer: +31 (0)70 302 2337 

Mr Avo Sevag Garabet, Associate Information Officer: +31 (0)70 302 2394 

Email: info@icj-cij.org

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor International Court of Justice/Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel)/26 january 2024

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Article by Ilan Pappe, published in Journal of Palestine Studies, 2006/The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

https://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Jaffa/Picture1253.html

https://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Jaffa/index.html
Palestinian women and children driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948.

PALESTIJNSE VLUCHTELINGEN, ETNISCH GEZUIVERD DOOR

ZIONISTISCHE TROEPEN [1948]

https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/jps/vol36-141/vol36-141_b.pdf
https://ifamericansknew.org/history/

WIKIPEDIA

ILAN PAPPE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9

ARTICLE FROM ILAN PAPPE, PUBLISHED IN JOURNAL OF

PALESTINE STUDIES, 2006: THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

INSTITUTE FOR PALESTINE STUDIES/JOURNALS

THE1948  ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

BY ILAN PAPPE

PUBLISHED IN FALL 2006

https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/jps/vol36-141/vol36-141_b.pdf

  The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. 

While sketching the context and diplomatic and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year “Village Files” project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner “caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. 

The article ends with a statement of one of the author’s underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948  

 ILAN PAPPÉ, an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Haifa University, is the author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (I. B. Tauris, 1994) and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

The current article is extracted from early chapters of his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming in October 2006).  

THE 1948 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE ILAN PAPPÉ

  This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948.

While sketching the context and diplomatic and political developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year “Village Files” project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner “caucus” of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans culminating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. 

. The article ends with a statement of one of the author’s underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. 

  ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine1.

 That same evening, military orders were dispatched to 

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units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country 2. 

The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning.  

Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. 

Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine 3  

The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. 

This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go  

  The plan, which covered both the rural and urban areas of Palestine, was the inevitable result both of Zionism’s ideological drive for an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine and a response to developments on the ground following the British decision in February 1947 to end its Mandate over the country and turn the problem over to the United Nations

Clashes with local Palestinian militias, especially after the UN partition resolution of November 1947, provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. 

Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants. 

The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an ethnic cleansing operation.     

DEFINING ETHNIC CLEANSING  

  Ethnic cleansing today is designated by international law as a crime against humanity, and those who perpetrate it are subject to adjudication: a special international tribunal has been set up in The Hague to prosecute those accused of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and a similar court was established in Arusha, Tanzania, to deal with the Rwanda case.

The roots of ethnic cleansing are ancient, to be sure, and it has been practiced from biblical times to the modern age, including at the height of colonialism and in World War II by the Nazis and their allies 

. But it was especially the events in the former Yugoslavia that gave rise to efforts to define the concept and that continue to serve as the prototype of ethnic cleansing. For example, in its special report on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the U.S. State Department defines the term as “the systematic and forced removal of the members of an ethnic group from communities in order to change the ethnic composition of a given region.” 

The report goes on to document numerous cases, including the depopulation within twenty-four hours of the western Kosovar town of Pec in spring 1999, which could 

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only have been achieved through advanced planning followed by systematic execution.4

  Earlier, a congressional report prepared in August 1992 for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had described the “process of population transfers aimed at removing the nonSerbian population from large areas of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” noting that the campaign had “substantially achieved its goals: an exclusively Serb-inhabited region . . . created by forcibly expelling the Muslim populations that had been the overwhelming majority.”

” According to this report, the two main elements of ethnic cleansing are, first, “the deliberate use of artillery and snipers against the civilian populations of the big cities,” and second, “the forced movement of civilian populations [entailing] the systematic destruction of homes, the looting of personal property, beatings, selective and random killings, and massacres.”5 

Similar descriptions are found in the UN Council for Human Rights (UNCHR) report of 1993, which was prepared in follow-up to a UN Security Council Resolution of April 1993 that reaffirmed “its condemnation of all violations of international humanitarian law, in particular the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing.’” 

Showing how a state’s desire to impose a single ethnic rule on a mixed area links up to acts of expulsion and violence, the report describes the unfolding ethnic cleansing process where men are separated from women and detained, where resistance leads to massacres, and where villages are blown up, with the remaining houses subsequently repopulated with another ethnic group.6     

  In addition to the United States and the UN, academics, too, have used the former Yugoslavia as the starting point for their studies of the phenomenon.

Drazen Petrovic has published one of the most comprehensive studies of ethnic cleansing, which he describes as “a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin. 

Such a policy involves violence and is very often connected with military operations.”7 Petrovic associates ethnic cleansing with nationalism, the creation of new nation-states, and national struggle, noting the close connection between politicians and the army in the perpetration of the crime: the political leadership delegates the implementation of the ethnic cleansing to the military level, and although it does not furnish systematic plans or provide explicit instructions, there is no doubt as to the overall objective    

  These descriptions almost exactly mirror what happened in Palestine in 1948: Plan D constitutes a veritable repertoire of the cleansing methods described in the various reports on Yugoslavia, setting the background for the massacres that accompanied the expulsions.

 Indeed, it seems to me that had we never heard about the events in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s and were aware only of the Palestine case, we would be forgiven for thinking that the Nakba had been the inspiration for the descriptions and definitions above, almost to the last detail.   

  Yet when it comes to the dispossession by Israel of the Palestinians in 1948, there is a deep chasm between the reality and the representation.

This is most bewildering, and it is difficult to understand how events perpetrated in modern times and witnessed by foreign reporters and UN observers could be systematically denied, not even recognized as historical fact, let 

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alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted, politically as well as morally. 

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has been almost entirely eradicated from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.     

SETTING THE STAGE

  When even a measure of Israeli responsibility for the disappearance of half the Arab population of Palestine is acknowledged (the official government version continues to reject any responsibility whatsoever, insisting that the local population left “voluntarily”), the standard explanation is that their flight was an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of war.

But what happened in Palestine was by no means an unintended consequence, a fortuitous occurrence, or even a “miracle,” as Israel’s first president Chaim Weitzmann later proclaimed 

Rather, it was the result of long and meticulous planning.     

The potential for a future Jewish takeover of the country and the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people had been present in the writings of the founding fathers of Zionism, as scholars later discovered

  . But it was not until the late 1930s, two decades after Britain’s 1917 promise to turn Palestine into a national home for the Jews (a pledge that became enshrined in Britain’s Mandate over Palestine in 1923), that Zionist leaders began to translate their abstract vision of Jewish exclusivity into more concrete plans

New vistas were opened in 1937 when the British Royal Peel Commission8 recommended partitioning Palestine into two states. 

Though the territory earmarked for the Jewish state fell far short of Zionist ambitions, the leadership responded favorably, aware of the signal importance of official recognition of the principle of Jewish statehood on even part of Palestine. 

Several years later, in 1942, a more maximalist strategy was adopted when the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, in a meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, put demands on the table for a Jewish commonwealth over the whole of Mandatory Palestine.9 

Thus, the geographical space coveted by the movement changed according to circumstances and opportunities, but the principal objective remained the same: the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish state, both as a safe haven for Jews and as the cradle of a new Jewish nationalism 

And this state had to be exclusively Jewish not only in its sociopolitical structure but also in its ethnic composition. 

That the top leaders were well aware of the implications of this exclusivity was clear in their internal debates, diaries, and private correspondence. Ben-Gurion, for example, wrote in a letter to his son in 1937, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”10 

Unlike most of his colleagues in the Zionist leadership, who still hoped that by purchasing a piece of land here and a few houses there they would be able to realize their objective on the ground, Ben-Gurion had long understood that this would never be enough. 

He recognized early on that the Jewish state could be won only by force but that it was necessary to bide one’s time until the opportune moment arrived for dealing militarily with the demographic reality on the ground: the          

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presence of a non-Jewish native majority. 

The Zionist movement, led by Ben-Gurion, wasted no time in preparing for the eventuality of taking the land by force if it were not granted through diplomacy. 

These preparations included the building of an efficient military organization and the search for more ample financial resources (for which they tapped into the Jewish Diaspora). 

In many ways, the creation of an embryonic diplomatic corps was also an integral part of the same general preparations aimed at creating by force a state in Palestine. 

The principal paramilitary organization of the Jewish community in Palestine had been established in 1920 primarily to defend the Jewish colonies being implanted among Palestinian villages. 

Sympathetic British officers, however, helped transform it into the military force that eventually was able to implement plans for the Zionist military takeover of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its native population.       

 One officer in particular, Orde Wingate, was responsible for this transformation.

  It was he who made the Zionist leaders realize more fully that the idea of Jewish statehood had to be closely associated with militarism and an army, not only to protect the growing number of Jewish colonies inside Palestine but also—more crucially—because acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against possible resistance by local Palestinians.

Assigned to Palestine in 1936, Wingate also succeeded in attaching Haganah troops to the British forces during the Arab Revolt (1936–39), enabling the Jews to practice the attack tactics he had taught them in rural areas and to learn even more effectively what a “punitive mission” to an Arab village ought to entail. 

The Haganah also gained valuable military experience in World War II, when quite a few of its members volunteered for the British war effort. 

Others who remained behind in Palestine, meanwhile, continued to monitor and infiltrate the 1,200 or so Palestinian villages that had dotted the countryside for hundreds of years.     

THE VILLAGE FILES

  Attacking Arab villages and carrying out punitive raids gave Zionists experience, but it was not enough; systematic planning was called for. In 1940, a young bespectacled Hebrew University historian named Ben-Zion Luria, then employed by the educational department of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist governing body in Palestine, made an important suggestion.

He pointed out how useful it would be to have a detailed registry of all Arab villages and proposed that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) conduct such an inventory. 

“This would greatly help the redemption of the land,” he wrote to the JNF.11 

He could not have chosen a better address: the way his initiative involved the JNF in the prospective ethnic cleansing was to generate added impetus and zeal to the expulsion plans that followed. 

Founded in 1901 at the fifth Zionist Congress, the JNF was the Zionists’ principal tool for the colonization of Palestine. 

. This was the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land on which it then settled Jewish immigrants and that spearheaded the Zionization of Palestine throughout the Mandatory years. 

From the outset, it was designed to become the 

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“custodian” on behalf of the Jewish people of the land acquired by the Zionists in Palestine. The JNF maintained this role after Israel’s creation, with other missions being added to this primordial task over time.12 

Despite the JNF’s best efforts, its success in land acquisition fell far short of its goals. Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British policies had become restrictive. 

. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948 the Zionist movement had been able to purchase no more than 5.8 percent of the land in Palestine.13 

This is why Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department and the quintessential Zionist colonialist, waxed lyrical when he heard about Luria’s village files, immediately suggesting that they be turned into a “national project.”14              

 All involved became fervent supporters of the idea.

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a historian and prominent member of the Zionist leadership (later to become Israel’s second president), wrote to Moshe Shertock (Sharett), the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency (and later Israel’s prime minister), that apart from topographically recording the layout of the villages, the project should also include exposing the “Hebraic origins” of each village. 

Furthermore, it was important for the Haganah to know which of the villages were relatively new, as some of them had been built “only” during the Egyptian occupation of Palestine in the 1830s.15  

But the main endeavor was mapping the villages, and to that end a Hebrew University topographer working in the Mandatory government’s cartography department was recruited to the enterprise.

He suggested preparing focal aerial maps and proudly showed Ben-Gurion two such maps for the villages of Sindyana and Sabarin. (These maps, now in the Israeli State Archives, are all that remains of these villages after 1948.)

The best professional photographers in the country were also invited to join the initiative. 

Yitzhak Shefer, from Tel Aviv, and Margot Sadeh, the wife of Yitzhak Sadeh, the chief of the Palmah (the commando units of the Haganah), were recruited as well.

The film laboratory operated in Margot’s house with an irrigation company serving as a front: the lab had to be hidden from the British authorities who could have regarded it as an illegal intelligence effort directed against them. 

Though the British were aware of the project, they never succeeded in locating the secret hideout.

In 1947, this whole cartographic department was moved to the Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv.16   

The end result of the combined topographic and Orientalist efforts was a large body of detailed files gradually built up for each of Palestine’s villages.  

By the late 1940s, the “archive” was almost complete.  

  Precise details were recorded about the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its mukhtars, its relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (16–50), and much more

An important category was an index of “hostility” (toward the Zionist project, that is) as determined by the level of the village’s participation in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. The 

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material included lists of everyone involved in the revolt and the families of those who had lost someone in the fight against the British. Particular attention was given to people alleged to have killed Jews.  

That this was no mere academic exercise in geography was immediately obvious to the regular members of the Haganah who were entrusted with collecting the data on “reconnaissance” missions into the villages. 

One of those who joined a data collection operation in 1940 was Moshe Pasternak, who recalled many years later: 

We had to study the basic structure of the Arab village.  

This means the structure and how best to attack it.  

 In the military schools, I had been taught how to attack a modern European city, not a primitive village in the Near East.  

We could not compare it [an Arab village] to a Polish, or an Austrian one. 

The Arab village, unlike the European ones, was built topographically on hills. 

That meant we had to find out how best to approach the village from above or enter it from below. 

We had to train our “Arabists” [the Orientalists who operated a network of collaborators] how best to work with informants.17 

Indeed, the difficulties of “working with informants” and creating a collaborationist system with the “primitive” people “who like to drink coffee and eat rice with their hands” were noted in many of the village files. 

Nonetheless, by 1943, Pasternak remembered, there was a growing sense that finally a proper network of informants was in place. 

That same year, the village files were rearranged to become even more systematic. 

This was mainly the work of one man, Ezra Danin,18 who was to play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

In many ways, it was the recruitment of Ezra Danin, who had been taken out of his successful citrus grove business for the purpose, that injected the intelligence work and the organization of the village files with a new level of efficiency 

Files in the post-1943 era included for each village detailed descriptions of the husbandry, cultivation, the number of trees in plantations, the quality of each fruit grove (even of individual trees!), the average land holding per family, the number of cars, the names of shop owners, members of workshops, and the names of the artisans and their skills.19

Later, meticulous details were added about each clan and its political affiliation, the social stratification between notables and common peasants, and the names of the civil servants in the Mandatory government. 

The antlike labor of the data collection created its own momentum, and around 1945 additional details began to appear such as descriptions of village mosques, the names of their imams (together with such characterizations as “he is an ordinary man”), and even precise accounts of the interiors of the homes of dignitaries. 

Not surprisingly, as the end of the Mandate approached, the information became more explicitly military orientated: the number of guards in each village (most had none) and the quantity and quality of arms at the villagers’ disposal (generally antiquated or even nonexistent).20     

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Danin recruited a German Jew named Yaacov Shimoni, later to become one of Israel’s leading Orientalists, and put him in charge of “special projects” in the villages, in particular supervising the work of the informants.21  

  (One of these informants, nicknamed the “treasurer” (ha-gizbar) by Danin and Shimoni, proved a fountain of information for the data collectors and supervised the collaborators’ network on their behalf until 1945, when he was exposed and killed by Palestinian militants.22)

Other colleagues working with Danin and Shimoni were Yehoshua Palmon and Tuvia Lishanski, who also took an active part in preparing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

Lishanski had already been busy in the 1940s orchestrating campaigns to forcibly evict tenants living on lands purchased by the JNF from present or absentee landlords. 

Not far from the village of Furiedis and the “veteran” Jewish settlement, Zikhron Yaacov, where today a road connects the coastal highway with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) through Wadi Milk, lies a youth village called Shefeya. 

It was here that in 1944 special units employed by the village files project received their training, and it was from here that they went out on their reconnaissance missions. 

Shefeya looked very much like a spy village in the cold war: Jews walking around speaking Arabic and trying to emulate what they believed were the customs and behavior of rural Palestinians.23 

3 Many years later, in 2002, one of the first recruits to this special training base recalled his first reconnaissance mission to the nearby village of Umm al-Zaynat in 1944.        

The aim had been to survey the village and bring back details of where the mukhtar lived, where the mosque was located, where the rich villagers lived, who had been active in the 1936–39 revolt, and so on.

  These were not dangerous missions, as the infiltrators knew they could exploit the traditional Arab hospitality code and were even guests at the home of the mukhtar himself.

As they failed to collect in one day all the data they were seeking, they asked to be invited back. 

For their second visit they had been instructed to make sure to get a good idea of the fertility of the land, whose quality seemed to have highly impressed them: in 1948, Umm al-Zaynat was destroyed and all its inhabitants expelled without any provocation on their part whatsoever.24 

The final update of the village files took place in 1947. It focused on creating lists of “wanted” persons in each village. 

In 1948, Jewish troops used these lists for the search-andarrest operations they carried out as soon as they had occupied a village.      

  That is, the men in the village would be lined up and those whose names appeared on the lists would be identified, often by the same person who had informed on them in the first place, but now wearing a cloth sack over his head with two holes cut out for his eyes so as not to be recognized.

The men who were picked out were often shot on the spot. 

Among the criteria for inclusion in these lists, besides having participated in actions against the British and the Zionists, were involvement in the Palestinian national movement (which could apply to entire villages) and having close ties to the leader of the movement, the Mufti Haj Amin alHusayni, or being affiliated with his political party.25    

  Given the Mufti’s dominance of Palestinian politics since the establishment of the Mandate in 1923, and the prominent positions held by members of his party in the Arab Higher Committee that became the embryo government of the Palestinians, this offense too was very common. Other reasons

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for being included in the list were such allegations as “known to have traveled to Lebanon” or “arrested by the British authorities for being a member of a national committee in the village.”26   

   An examination of the 1947 files shows that villages with about 1,500 inhabitants usually had 20–30 such suspects (for instance, around the southern Carmel mountains, south of Haifa, Umm al-Zaynat had 30 such suspects and the nearby village of Damun had 25).27

Yigael Yadin recalled that it was this minute and detailed knowledge of each and every Palestinian village that enabled the Zionist military command in November 1947 to conclude with confidence “that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organize them properly.” 

The only serious problem was the British: “If not for the British, we could have quelled the Arab riot [the opposition to the UN Partition Resolution in 1947] in one month.”28 

GEARING UP FOR WAR 

As World War II drew to a close, the Zionist movement had obtained a much clearer general sense of how best to go about getting its state off the ground. 

By that time, it was clear that the Palestinians did not constitute a real obstacle to Zionist plans. True, they still formed the overwhelming majority in the land, and as such they were a demographic problem, but they were no longer feared as a military threat 

A crucial factor was that the British had already completely destroyed the Palestinian leadership and defense capabilities in 1939 when they suppressed the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, allowing the Zionist leadership ample time to set out their next moves. 

The Zionist leadership was also aware of the hesitant position that the Arab states as a whole were taking on the Palestine question. 

Thus, once the danger of Nazi invasion into Palestine had been removed, the Zionist leaders were keenly aware that the sole obstacle that stood in the way of their seizing the country was the British presence.          

As long as Britain had been holding the fort against Nazi Germany, it was impossible, of course, to pressure them.  

But with the end of the war, and especially with the postwar Labor government looking for a democratic solution in Palestine (which would have spelled doom for the Zionist project given the 75-percent Arab majority), it was clear that Britain had to go.

Some 100,000 British troops remained in Palestine after the war and, in a country with a population under two million, this definitely served as a deterrent, even after Britain cut back its forces somewhat following the Jewish terrorist attack on it headquarters in the King David Hotel.  

 It was these considerations that prompted Ben-Gurion to conclude that it was better to settle for less than the 100 percent demanded under the 1942 Biltmore program and that a slightly smaller state would be enough to allow the Zionist movement to fulfill its dreams and ambitions.29  

This was the issue that was debated by the movement in the final days of August 1946, when Ben-Gurion assembled the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Royal Monsue hotel in Paris.  

  Holding back the more extremist members, Ben-Gurion told the gathering that 80 to 90 percent of Mandatory Palestine was plenty for creating a viable state, provided

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 they were able to ensure Jewish predominance. “We will demand a large chunk of Palestine” he told those present.  

 A few months later the Jewish Agency translated Ben-Gurion’s “large chunk of Palestine” into a map which it distributed to the parties relevant to deciding the future of Palestine.  

  Interestingly, the Jewish Agency map, which was larger than the map proposed by the UN in November 1947, turned out to be, almost to the last dot, the map that emerged from the fighting in 1948–49: pre-1967 Israel, that is, Palestine without the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.30

The major topic on the Zionist agenda in 1946, the struggle against the British, resolved itself with Britain’s decision in February 1947 to quit Palestine and to transfer the Palestine question to the UN.   

In fact, the British had little choice: after the Holocaust they would never be able to deal with the looming Jewish rebellion as they had with the Arab one in the 1930s. 

Moreover, as the Labor party had made up its mind to leave India, Palestine lost much of its attraction. 

Fuel shortages during a particularly cold winter in 1947 drove the message home to London that the empire was soon to be a second-rate power, its global influence dwarfed by the two new superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and its postwar economy crippled. 

Rather than hold onto remote places such as Palestine, the Labor party saw as its priority the building of a welfare state at home. In the end, Britain pulled out in a hurry, and with no regrets.31  

By the end of 1946, even before Britain’s decision, Ben-Gurion had already realized that the British were on their way out and, with his aides, began working on a general strategy that could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone.  

  This strategy became Plan C, or Gimel in Hebrew. Plan C was a revised version of two earlier plans.

Plan A was also named the “Elimelech Plan,” after Elimelech Avnir, the Haganah commander in Tel Aviv who in 1937, at Ben-Gurion’s request, had set out possible guidelines for the takeover of Palestine in the event of a British withdrawal. 

Plan B had been devised in 1946. 

Shortly thereafter, the two plans were fused to form Plan C.  

Like Plans A and B, Plan C aimed to prepare the Jewish community’s military forces for the offensive campaigns they would be waging against rural and urban Palestine after the departure of the British.   

  The purpose of such actions would be to “deter” the Palestinian population from attacking Jewish settlements and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads, and traffic.

Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:   

Striking at the political leadership. 

Striking at inciters and their financial supporters. 

Striking at Arabs who acted against Jews. 

Striking at senior Arab officers and officials [in the Mandatory system]. 

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Hitting Palestinian transportation.

Damaging the sources of livelihood and vital economic targets (water wells, mills, etc.).  

Attacking villages, neighborhoods, likely to assist in future attacks. 

Attacking clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. 

Plan C added that the data necessary for the successful performance of these actions could be found in the village files: lists of leaders, activists, “potential human targets,” the precise layout of villages, and so on.32 

The plan lacked operational specifics, however, and within a few months, a new plan was drawn up, Plan D (Dalet). 

This was the plan that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. 

Unlike Plan C, it contained direct references both to the geographical parameters of the future Jewish state (the 78 percent provided for in the 1946 Jewish Agency map) and to the fate of the one million Palestinians living within that space: 

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.33  

No village within the planned area of operations was exempted from these orders, either because of its location or because it was expected to put up some resistance. 

This was the master plan for the expulsion of all the villages in rural Palestine 

Similar instructions were given, in much the same wording, for actions directed at Palestine’s urban centers. 

The orders coming through to the units in the field were more specific.  

The country was divided into zones according to the number of brigades, whereby the four original brigades of the Haganah were turned into twelve so as to facilitate implementing the plan  

Each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighborhoods in his zone that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled, with exact dates 

Some commanders were overly zealous in executing their orders, adding other locations as the momentum of their operation carried them forward. 

Some of the orders, on the other hand, proved too ambitious and could not be implemented within the expected timetable. 

This meant that several villages on the coast that had been scheduled to be occupied in May were destroyed only in July. 

And the villages in the Wadi Ara area—a valley connecting the coast near Hadera with Marj Ibn Amr (Emeq Izrael) and Afula (today’s Route 65)—somehow 

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succeeded in surviving all the Jewish attacks until the end of the war. But they were the exception. 

For the most part, the destruction of the villages and urban neighborhoods, and the removal of their inhabitants, took place as planned. 

And by the time the direct order had been issued in March, thirty villages were already obliterated. 

A few days after Plan D was typed out, it was distributed among the commanders of the dozen brigades that now comprised the Haganah. 

With the list each commander received came a detailed description of the villages in his field of operation and their imminent fate— occupation, destruction, and expulsion. 

The Israeli documents released from the IDF archives in the late 1990s show clearly that, contrary to claims made by historians such as Benny Morris, Plan Dalet was handed down to the brigade commanders not as vague guidelines, but as clear-cut operative orders for action.34 

Unlike the general draft that was sent to the political leaders, the instructions and lists of villages received by the military commanders did not place any restrictions on how the action of destruction or expulsion was to be carried out. 

There were no provisions as to how villages could avoid their fate, for example through unconditional surrender, as promised in the general document.  

  There was another difference between the draft handed to the politicians and the one given to the military commanders: the official draft stated that the plan would not be activated until after the Mandate ended, whereas the officers on the ground were ordered to start executing it within a few days of its adoption.  

This dichotomy is typical of the relationship that exists in Israel between the army and politicians until today —the army quite often misinforms the politicians of their real intentions, as Moshe Dayan did in 1956, Ariel Sharon did in 1982, and Shaul Mofaz did in 2000.   

What the political version of Plan Dalet and the military directives had in common was the overall purpose of the scheme. In other words, even before the direct orders had reached the field, troops already knew exactly what was expected of them. 

The venerable and courageous Israeli fighter for civil rights, Shulamit Aloni, who was an officer at the time, recalls how special political officers would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operation ahead, often planned for the day after the indoctrination had taken place.35  

THE PARADIGM OF ETHNIC CLEANSING   

In my forthcoming book, I want to explore the mechanism of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 as well as the cognitive system that has allowed the world to forget and the perpetrators to deny the crime committed by the Zionist movement against the Palestinian people.   

In other words, I want to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948.  

I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is one reason why the denial of the catastrophe has gone on for so long. It is not that the Zionist  

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movement, in creating its nation-state, waged a war that “tragically but inevitably” led to the expulsion of “parts of the indigenous population.”   

  Rather, it is the other way round: the objective was the ethnic cleansing of the country the movement coveted for its new state, and the war was the consequence, the means to carry it out.

On 15 May 1948, the day after the official end of the Mandate and the day the State of Israel was proclaimed, the neighboring Arab states sent a small army—small in comparison to their overall military capability—to try to stop the ethnic cleansing operations that had already been in full swing for over a month. 

The war with the regular Arab armies did nothing to prevent the ongoing ethnic cleansing, which continued to its successful completion in the autumn of 1948.    

To many, the idea of adopting the paradigm of ethnic cleansing as the a priori basis for the narrative of 1948 may appear no more than an indictment.  

 And in many ways, it is indeed my own J’Accuse against the politicians who devised the ethnic cleansing and the generals who carried it out.   

These men are not obscure. 

They are the heroes of the Jewish war of independence, and their names will be quite familiar to most readers. 

The list begins with the indisputable leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, in whose private home all the chapters in the ethnic cleansing scheme were discussed and finalized. 

He was aided by a small group of people I refer to as the “Consultancy,” an ad-hoc cabal assembled solely for the purpose of planning the dispossession of the Palestinians.36 

 In one of the rare documents that records the meeting of this body, it is referred to as the Consultant Committee—Haveadah Hamyeazet; in another document the eleven names of the committee appear.37 

 Though these names were all erased by the censor, it has been possible to reconstruct them.  

This caucus prepared the plans for the ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution until the job of uprooting half of Palestine’s native population had been completed.  

  It included first and foremost the top-ranking officers of the future state’s army, such as the legendary Yigael Yadin and Moshe Dayan.

They were joined by figures little known outside Israel but well grounded in the local ethos, such as Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Sadeh, followed by regional commanders, such as Moshe Kalman, who cleansed the Safad area, and Moshe Carmel, who uprooted most of the Galilee. 

Yitzhak Rabin operated both in al-Lyyd and Ramleh, as well as in the Greater Jerusalem area. Shimon Avidan cleansed the south; many years later Rehavam Ze’evi, who fought with him, said admiringly that he “cleansed his front from tens of villages and towns.”38 

Also on the southern front was Yitzhak Pundak, who told Ha’Aretz in 2004, “There were two hundred villages [in the front] and they are gone. We had to destroy them, otherwise we would have had Arabs here [namely in the southern part of Palestine] as we have in Galilee. We would have had another million Palestinians.”39 

  These military men commingled with what nowadays we would call the “Orientalists”: experts on the Arab world at large, and the Palestinians in particular, either because they themselves came from Arab lands or because they were scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

Some of these were intelligence officers on the ground during this crucial period. 

Far from being mere collectors of data on the “enemy,” intelligence officers not only 

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played a major role in preparing for the cleansing, but some also personally took part in some of the worst atrocities that accompanied the systematic dispossession of the Palestinians.  

  It was they who were given the final authority to decide which villages would be ground to dust and which villagers would be executed.40

In the memories of Palestinian survivors, they were the ones who, after a village or neighborhood had been occupied, decided the fate of its peasants or town dwellers, which could mean imprisonment or freedom or spell the difference between life and death. 

Their operations in 1948 were supervised by Issar Harel, who later became the first head of Mossad and the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret services. 

I mention their names, but my purpose in doing so is not that I want to see them posthumously brought to trial. 

Rather, my aim here and in my book is to humanize the victimizers as well as the victims: 

: I want to prevent the crimes Israel committed from being attributed to such elusive factors as “the circumstances,” “the army,” or, as Benny Morris has it, “la guerre comme la guerre,” and similar vague references that let sovereign states off the hook and give individuals a clear conscience. 

I accuse, but I am also part of the society that stands condemned. 

 I feel both responsible for, and part of, the story.   

But like others in my own society, I am also convinced that a painful journey into the past is the only way forward if we want to create a better future for us all, Palestinians and Israelis alike. 

NOTES 

1. The composition of the group that met is the product of a mosaic reconstruction of several documents, as will be demonstrated in my book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006). 

The document summarizing the meeting is found in the Israel Defense Force Archives [IDFA], GHQ/Operations branch, 10 March 1948, File no. 922/75/595, and in the Haganah Archives [HA], File no. 73/94. 

The description of the meeting is repeated by Israel Galili in the Mapai center meeting, 4 April 1948, found in the HA, File no. 80/50/18. Chapter 4 of my book also documents the messages that went out on 10 March as well as the eleven meetings prior to finalizing of the plan, of which full minutes were recorded only for the January meeting. 

2. The historian Meir Pail claims, in From Haganah to the IDF [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zemora Bitan Modan, n.d.), p. 307, that the orders were sent a week later 

For the dispatch of the orders, see also Gershon Rivlin and Elhanan Oren, The War of Independence: Ben-Gurion’s Diary, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1982), p. 147. 

The orders dispatched to the Haganah brigades to move to State D—Mazav Dalet—and from the brigades to the battalions can be found in HA, File no. 73/94, 16 April 1948. 

3. On Plan Dalet, which was approved in its broad lines several weeks before that meeting, see Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Emergence of Israeli Militarism, 1936–1956 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1995), p. 253: “Plan Dalet aimed at cleansing of villages, expulsion of Arabs from mixed towns.” 

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4. State Department Special Report, “Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo,” 10 May 1999.

5. “The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations,” U.S. Senate, August 1992, S.PRT. 102–103. 

6. United Nations, “Report Following Security Council Resolution 819,” 16 April 1993 

7. Drazen Petrovic, “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 (1994), pp. 342–60. 

8. On Peel, see Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), pp. 135–37 

9. Smith, Palestine, pp. 167–68        

10. Ben-Gurion Archives [BGA], Ben-Gurion Diary, 12 July 1937  

  11. “The Inelegance Service and the Village Files, 1940–1948” (prepared by Shimri Salomon), Bulletin of the Haganah Archives, issues 9–10 (2005).

12. For a critical survey of the JNF, see Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (London: Zed Books, 2004). 

13. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 

14. Teveth, Ben-Gurion. 

15. HA, File no. 66.8 

16. Testimony of Yoeli Optikman, HA, Village Files, File 24/9, 16 January 2003.     

  17. HA, File no. 1/080/451, 1 December 1939

18. HA, File no. 194/7, pp. 1–3, given on 19 December 2002. 

19. John Bierman and Colin Smith, Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion (New York: Random House, 1999). 

20. HA, Files no. S25/4131, no. 105/224, and no. 105/227, and many others in this series, each dealing with a different village. 

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  21. Hillel Cohen, The Shadow Army: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hozata Ivrit, 2004).

22. Interview with Palti Sela, HA, File no. 205.9, 10 January 1988. 

23. Interview, HA, File no. 194.7, pp. 1–3, 19 December 2002 

24. HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255 files from January 1947 

25. IDFA, File no. 114/49/5943, orders from 13 April 1948. 

26. IDFA, File no. 105.178. 

27. HA, Village Files, File no. 105/255, from January 1947. 

28. Quoted in Harry Sacher, Israel: The Establishment of a State (London: Wiedenfels and Nicloson, 1952), p. 217. 

29. On British policy, see Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951 (London: St. Antony’s/Macmillan Press, 1984) 

30. Moshe Sluzki interview with Moshe Sneh in Gershon Rivlin, ed., Olive Leaves and Sword: Documents and Studies of the Haganah [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications, 1990), pp. 9– 40 

31. See Pappé, Britain.              

  32. Yehuda Sluzki, The Haganah Book, vol. 3, part 3 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: IDF Publications, 1964), p. 1942.

33. The English translation is in Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–20. 

34. See discussion of State D (Mazav Dalet)—that is, the transition from Plan D to its actual implementation—in chapter 5 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing. 

35. The plan distributed to the soldiers and the first direct commands are in IDFA, File no. 1950/2315 File 47, 11 May 1948. 

36. The most important meetings are described in chapter 3 of Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing 

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  37. “From Ben-Gurion to Galili and the Members of the Committee,” BGA, Correspondence Section, 1.01.1948–07.01.48, documents 79–81. The document also provides a list of forty Palestinians leaders that are target for assassination by the Haganah forces.

38. Yedi’ot Aharonot, 2 February 1992. 

39. Ha’Aretz, 21 May 2004. 

40. For details, see Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing. The authority to destroy can be found in the orders sent on 10 March to the troops and specific orders authorizing executions are in IDFA, File no. 5943/49 doc. 114, 13 April 1948. 

Source : Institute for Palestine Studies URL : http://www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/abstract.php? id=7175

END 

Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Article by Ilan Pappe, published in Journal of Palestine Studies, 2006/The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Opgeslagen onder Divers

Christmas Sermon from Bethlehem by reverend Munther Isaac/Christ under the rubble

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REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: Christ Under the Rubble.

We are angry. We are broken. This should have been a time of joy; instead, we are mourning. We are fearful.

More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways, day after day. One-point-nine million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide.

The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on.

We are asking here: Could this be our fate in Bethlehem? In Ramallah? In Jenin? Is this our destiny, too?

We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so-called free lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover. Not only did they make sure to pay the bill in advance, they veiled the truth and context, providing the political cover. And yet another layer has been added: the theological cover, with the Western church stepping into the spotlight.

Our dear friends in South Africa taught us the concept of the “state theology,” defined as “the theological justification of the status quo with its racism, capitalism and totalitarianism.” It does so by misusing theological concepts and biblical texts for its own political purposes.

Here in Palestine, the Bible is weaponized against us — our very own sacred text. In our terminology in Palestine, we speak of the empire. Here we confront the theology of the empire, a disguise for superiority, supremacy, chosenness and entitlement. It is sometimes given a nice cover, using words like “mission” and “evangelism,” “fulfillment of prophecy,” and “spreading freedom and liberty.”

The theology of the empire becomes a powerful tool to mask oppression under the cloak of divine sanction. It speaks of land without people. It divides people into “us” and “them.” It dehumanizes and demonizes. The concept of land without people, again, even though they knew too well that the land had people — and not just any people, a very special people. Theology of the empire calls for emptying Gaza, just like it called for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, a “miracle,” or “a divine miracle,” as they called it. It calls for us Palestinians now to go to Egypt, maybe Jordan. Why not just the sea?

I think of the words of the disciples to Jesus when he was about to enter Samaria: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” they said of the Samaritans. This is the theology of the empire. This is what they’re saying about us today.

This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the color of our skins. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of a political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. So they say if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single “Hamas militant,” then so be it. We are not humans in their eyes. But in God’s eyes, no one can tell us that.

The hypocrisy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling. They always take the word of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally. Yet, on the other side, despite a clear track record of misinformation, lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible.

To our European friends: I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. And I mean this. We are not white, I guess. It does not apply to us, according to your own logic.

In this war, the many Christians in the Western world made sure the empire has the theology needed. It is thus self-defense, we were told. And I continue to ask: How is the killing of 9,000 children self-defense? How is the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians self-defense?

In the shadow of the empire, they turned the colonizer into the victim, and the colonized into the aggressor. Have we forgotten — have we forgotten that the state they talk to, that that state was built on the ruins of the towns and villages of those very same Gazans? Have they forgot that?

We are outraged by the complicity of the church. Let it be clear, friends: Silence is complicity. And empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action, all under the banner of complicity.

So here is my message: Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7th, and the world was silent. Should we be surprised at their silence now?

If you are not appalled by what is happening in Gaza, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity. And if we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.

If you fail to call this a genocide, it is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace. Some have not even called for a ceasefire. I’m talking about churches. I feel sorry for you.

We will be OK. Despite the immense blow we have endured, we, the Palestinians, will recover. We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians, although this is by far maybe the biggest blow we have received in a long time. But we will be OK.

But for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this? Your charity and your words of shock after the genocide won’t make a difference. And I know these words of shocks are coming. And I know people will give generously for charity. But your words won’t make a difference. Words of regret won’t suffice for you. And let me say it: We will not accept your apology after the genocide. What has been done has been done. I want you to look at the mirror and ask, “Where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?” …

In these last two months, the psalms of lament have become a precious companion to us. We cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Gaza? Why do you hide your face from Gaza?”

In our pain, anguish and lament, we have searched for God and found him under the rubble in Gaza. Jesus himself became the victim of the very same violence of the empire when he was in our land. He was tortured, crucified. He bled out as others watched. He was killed and cried out in pain, “My God, where are you?”

In Gaza today, God is under the rubble.

And in this Christmas season, as we search for Jesus, he is not to be found on the side of Rome, but our side of the wall. He’s in a cave, with a simple family, an occupied family. He’s vulnerable, barely and miraculously surviving a massacre himself. He’s among the refugees, among a refugee family. This is where Jesus is to be found today.

If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza. When we glorify pride and richness, Jesus is under the rubble. When we rely on power, might and weapons, Jesus is under the rubble. When we justify, rationalize and theologize the bombing of children, Jesus is under the rubble.

Jesus is under the rubble. This is his manger. He is at home with the marginalized, the suffering, the oppressed and the displaced. This is his manger.

And I have been looking and contemplating on this iconic image. God with us precisely in this way, this is the incarnation — messy, bloody, poverty. This is the incarnation.

And this child is our hope and inspiration. We look and see him in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble. While the world continues to reject the children of Gaza, Jesus says, “Just as you did to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” “You did it to me.” Jesus not only calls them his own, he is them. He is the children of Gaza.

We look at the holy family and see them in every family displaced and wandering, now homeless in despair. While the world discusses the fate of the people of Gaza as if they are unwanted boxes in a garage, God in the Christmas narrative shares their fate. He walks with them and calls them his own.

So this manger is about resilience. It’s about sumud. And the resilience of Jesus is in his meekness, is in his weakness, is in his vulnerability. The majesty of the incarnation lies in its solidarity with the marginalized. Resilience because this is very same child who rose up from the midst of pain, destruction, darkness and death to challenge empires, to speak truth to power and deliver an everlasting victory over death and darkness. This very same child accomplished this.

This is Christmas today in Palestine, and this is the Christmas message. Christmas is not about Santas. It’s not about trees and gifts and lights. My goodness, how we have twisted the meaning of Christmas. How we have commercialized Christmas. I was, by the way, in the U.S.A. last month, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, and I was amazed by the amount of Christmas decorations and lights and all the commercial goods. And I couldn’t help but think: They send us bombs, while celebrating Christmas in their lands. They sing about the prince of peace in their land, while playing the drum of war in our land.

Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is this manger. This is our message to the world today. It is a gospel message. It is a true and authentic Christmas message about the God who did not stay silent but said his word, and his word was Jesus. Born among the occupied and marginalized, he is in solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness.

This message is our message to the world today, and it is simply this: This genocide must stop now. Why don’t we repeat it? Stop this genocide now. Can you say it with me? Stop this genocide —

CONGREGATION: Stop this genocide now.

REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: Let’s say it one more time. Stop this genocide —

CONGREGATION: Stop this genocide now.

REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: This is our call. This is our plea. This is our prayer. Hear, O God. Amen.

SOURCE:

DEMOCRACY NOW

”CHRIST IN THE RUBBLE”: WATCH PALESTINIAN

PASTOR DELIVER POWERFUL CHRISTMAS SERMON

FROM BETHLEHEM

26 DECEMBER 2023

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/26/christ_in_the_rubble_christmas_sermon

TEXT

In the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, city and church leaders canceled all Christmas festivities this year to mourn the more than 20,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. We feature the Christmas sermon, “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament,” delivered Saturday by Reverend Munther Isaac at the landmark Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, which has received international attention for a nativity scene depicting the figure of baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble. “If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza,” preached Isaac, who condemned using theology to justify Israel’s killing of innocent civilians. “If we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.”


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in the occupied West Bank in the city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. City and church leaders canceled all Christmas festivities in the Holy Land this year to mourn the more than 20,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. The landmark Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem created a nativity scene with the figure of baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble.

Later in the show, we’ll be joined by the church’s pastor, the Reverend Munther Isaac, but we begin by airing his Christmas sermon, which he delivered on Saturday.

REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: Christ Under the Rubble.

We are angry. We are broken. This should have been a time of joy; instead, we are mourning. We are fearful.

More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways, day after day. One-point-nine million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide.

The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on.

We are asking here: Could this be our fate in Bethlehem? In Ramallah? In Jenin? Is this our destiny, too?

We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so-called free lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover. Not only did they make sure to pay the bill in advance, they veiled the truth and context, providing the political cover. And yet another layer has been added: the theological cover, with the Western church stepping into the spotlight.

Our dear friends in South Africa taught us the concept of the “state theology,” defined as “the theological justification of the status quo with its racism, capitalism and totalitarianism.” It does so by misusing theological concepts and biblical texts for its own political purposes.

Here in Palestine, the Bible is weaponized against us — our very own sacred text. In our terminology in Palestine, we speak of the empire. Here we confront the theology of the empire, a disguise for superiority, supremacy, chosenness and entitlement. It is sometimes given a nice cover, using words like “mission” and “evangelism,” “fulfillment of prophecy,” and “spreading freedom and liberty.”

The theology of the empire becomes a powerful tool to mask oppression under the cloak of divine sanction. It speaks of land without people. It divides people into “us” and “them.” It dehumanizes and demonizes. The concept of land without people, again, even though they knew too well that the land had people — and not just any people, a very special people. Theology of the empire calls for emptying Gaza, just like it called for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, a “miracle,” or “a divine miracle,” as they called it. It calls for us Palestinians now to go to Egypt, maybe Jordan. Why not just the sea?

I think of the words of the disciples to Jesus when he was about to enter Samaria: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” they said of the Samaritans. This is the theology of the empire. This is what they’re saying about us today.

This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the color of our skins. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of a political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. So they say if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single “Hamas militant,” then so be it. We are not humans in their eyes. But in God’s eyes, no one can tell us that.

The hypocrisy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling. They always take the word of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally. Yet, on the other side, despite a clear track record of misinformation, lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible.

To our European friends: I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. And I mean this. We are not white, I guess. It does not apply to us, according to your own logic.

In this war, the many Christians in the Western world made sure the empire has the theology needed. It is thus self-defense, we were told. And I continue to ask: How is the killing of 9,000 children self-defense? How is the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians self-defense?

In the shadow of the empire, they turned the colonizer into the victim, and the colonized into the aggressor. Have we forgotten — have we forgotten that the state they talk to, that that state was built on the ruins of the towns and villages of those very same Gazans? Have they forgot that?

We are outraged by the complicity of the church. Let it be clear, friends: Silence is complicity. And empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action, all under the banner of complicity.

So here is my message: Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7th, and the world was silent. Should we be surprised at their silence now?

If you are not appalled by what is happening in Gaza, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity. And if we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.

If you fail to call this a genocide, it is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace. Some have not even called for a ceasefire. I’m talking about churches. I feel sorry for you.

We will be OK. Despite the immense blow we have endured, we, the Palestinians, will recover. We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians, although this is by far maybe the biggest blow we have received in a long time. But we will be OK.

But for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this? Your charity and your words of shock after the genocide won’t make a difference. And I know these words of shocks are coming. And I know people will give generously for charity. But your words won’t make a difference. Words of regret won’t suffice for you. And let me say it: We will not accept your apology after the genocide. What has been done has been done. I want you to look at the mirror and ask, “Where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?” …

In these last two months, the psalms of lament have become a precious companion to us. We cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Gaza? Why do you hide your face from Gaza?”

In our pain, anguish and lament, we have searched for God and found him under the rubble in Gaza. Jesus himself became the victim of the very same violence of the empire when he was in our land. He was tortured, crucified. He bled out as others watched. He was killed and cried out in pain, “My God, where are you?”

In Gaza today, God is under the rubble.

And in this Christmas season, as we search for Jesus, he is not to be found on the side of Rome, but our side of the wall. He’s in a cave, with a simple family, an occupied family. He’s vulnerable, barely and miraculously surviving a massacre himself. He’s among the refugees, among a refugee family. This is where Jesus is to be found today.

If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza. When we glorify pride and richness, Jesus is under the rubble. When we rely on power, might and weapons, Jesus is under the rubble. When we justify, rationalize and theologize the bombing of children, Jesus is under the rubble.

Jesus is under the rubble. This is his manger. He is at home with the marginalized, the suffering, the oppressed and the displaced. This is his manger.

And I have been looking and contemplating on this iconic image. God with us precisely in this way, this is the incarnation — messy, bloody, poverty. This is the incarnation.

And this child is our hope and inspiration. We look and see him in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble. While the world continues to reject the children of Gaza, Jesus says, “Just as you did to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” “You did it to me.” Jesus not only calls them his own, he is them. He is the children of Gaza.

We look at the holy family and see them in every family displaced and wandering, now homeless in despair. While the world discusses the fate of the people of Gaza as if they are unwanted boxes in a garage, God in the Christmas narrative shares their fate. He walks with them and calls them his own.

So this manger is about resilience. It’s about sumud. And the resilience of Jesus is in his meekness, is in his weakness, is in his vulnerability. The majesty of the incarnation lies in its solidarity with the marginalized. Resilience because this is very same child who rose up from the midst of pain, destruction, darkness and death to challenge empires, to speak truth to power and deliver an everlasting victory over death and darkness. This very same child accomplished this.

This is Christmas today in Palestine, and this is the Christmas message. Christmas is not about Santas. It’s not about trees and gifts and lights. My goodness, how we have twisted the meaning of Christmas. How we have commercialized Christmas. I was, by the way, in the U.S.A. last month, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, and I was amazed by the amount of Christmas decorations and lights and all the commercial goods. And I couldn’t help but think: They send us bombs, while celebrating Christmas in their lands. They sing about the prince of peace in their land, while playing the drum of war in our land.

Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is this manger. This is our message to the world today. It is a gospel message. It is a true and authentic Christmas message about the God who did not stay silent but said his word, and his word was Jesus. Born among the occupied and marginalized, he is in solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness.

This message is our message to the world today, and it is simply this: This genocide must stop now. Why don’t we repeat it? Stop this genocide now. Can you say it with me? Stop this genocide —

CONGREGATION: Stop this genocide now.

REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: Let’s say it one more time. Stop this genocide —

CONGREGATION: Stop this genocide now.

REV. MUNTHER ISAAC: This is our call. This is our plea. This is our prayer. Hear, O God. Amen.

AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend Munther Isaac, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, delivering his Christmas sermon on Saturday. He titled it “Christ in the Rubble.” Coming up, Reverend Isaac will join us from Bethlehem in occupied West Bank. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Song to the World,” a version of the popular Christmas song “Little Drummer Boy” sung by the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. The three Palestinian college students who were shot in Burlington, Vermont, last month are graduates of the Ramallah Friends School and met there in the first grade. The three students who were shot now go to Haverford, Trinity and Brown in the United States. In the video shared by the school, current students sing in Arabic with English subtitles. The school wrote, “Our hearts come together in prayer for the safety of the children in Gaza. May our shared prayers echo for peace and justice, weaving a tapestry of hope that goes beyond borders, embracing the shared humanity we all hold dear.”

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