[News] Another expert report finds Israel is committing genocide. The West yawns

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-another-expert-report-committing-genocide-west-yawns>
Another expert report finds Israel is committing genocide. The West yawns
Jonathan Cook
December 24, 2024
------------------------------

Three separate reports published this month by leading international human
rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that
Israel <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> is well advanced in
its genocide of the Palestinian
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> population in Gaza.

Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently
clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-war-gaza> tens of thousands of
Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time
gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to
medical care.

Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be
carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the
same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the
elimination of a people.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres
(MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden
its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.

Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their
media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to
actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying
Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the
extermination.
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Last week, MSF issued its report
<https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/life-death-trap-gaza>, titled
Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was
intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society”.

The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has
caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any
functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing
offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].”

MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would
be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.”

Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span
generations”.
Intention proven

MSF’s findings followed hot on the heels of an 185-page report
<https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza>
by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel was committing “acts of
genocide”.

The organisation limited its focus to one Israeli policy: its systematic
effort to deprive the population of access to water - a clear measure of
intentionality, the critical yardstick for judging whether mass killing has
crossed into genocide.

At a news conference, Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said their
research
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/19/israel-committing-acts-of-genocide-by-cutting-off-water-in-gaza-hrw-says>
had proved Israel was “intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by
denying them the water that they need to survive”.

Israel had done so in four coordinated moves. It had blocked pipelines
supplying water from outside Gaza. It had then cut off power to run the
pumps that Gaza’s own supplies from wells and desalination plants depended
on.

Next, it had destroyed the solar panels that were the backup to deal with
such power cuts. And finally, it had killed crews trying to repair the
supply system and aid agency staff trying to bring in water supplies.

“This is a comprehensive policy preventing people from getting any water,”
HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine director, Bill Van Esveld, concluded. He
added that the group had made “a very clear finding of extermination”.
‘Pattern of conduct’

HRW echoed a much wider-ranging report by Amnesty International, the
world’s best-known international human rights organisation.

In a 296-page report
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/> published in
early December, Amnesty concluded that Israel had been “brazenly,
continuously” committing genocide in Gaza - or “unleashing hell” as the
organisation phrased it more graphically.

The period of Amnesty’s research ended in July, five months ago. Since
then, Israel has further intensified its destruction of northern Gaza to
drive out the population.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-genocide-israel-burning-alive-destroying-world-as-we-know-it>

The West's support for Israel's genocide is destroying the world as we know
it


Nonetheless, Amnesty described a “pattern of conduct” in which Israel had
deliberately obstructed aid and power supplies, and detonated so much
explosive power on the tiny enclave - equivalent to more than two nuclear
bombs - that water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems had collapsed.

The scale of the attack, it noted, had caused death and destruction at a
speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict.

Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher for Israel and the occupied Palestinian
territories, said Israel’s actions went beyond the individual war crimes
associated with conflicts: “This is something deeper
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/05/israels-war-in-gaza-amounts-to-genocide-amnesty-international-report-finds>
.”

Agreeing with major Holocaust and genocide scholars, Amnesty concluded that
the high bar needed to prove genocidal intent in law was crossed last May
when Israel began destroying Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that it had
herded Palestinian civilians into as a supposedly “safe zone”.

Israel had been warned not to attack Rafah by the world’s highest court,
the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but went ahead anyway.
‘Mass denial’

For some time, leading Holocaust and genocide scholars - among them
Israelis - have been speaking up to warn not only that a genocide is
unfolding, but that it is nearing completion.

Last week, Omer Bartov <https://vivo.brown.edu/display/obartov>even managed
to get his message out on CNN. He told Christiane Amanpour
<https://x.com/amanpour/status/1869818758501675259> that Israel was
carrying out “a war of annihilation” on the Gaza Strip. “What the IDF
[Israeli military] is doing there is destroying Gaza,” he said.

Amos Goldberg
<https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/amos-goldberg>,
another Israeli Holocaust expert, noted that
<https://x.com/ByDonkeys/status/1864248466278318427> Raphael Lemkin, a
Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the term “genocide”
<https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/coining-a-word-and-championing-a-cause-the-story-of-raphael-lemkin>,
described its two phases.

“The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is
what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We
are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed
areas for Israeli settlements.”

Goldberg added: “Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now
we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”

The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared
so-called 'kill zones', even children, and then claiming them to be
'terrorists'. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs

Bartov’s invitation by CNN appeared to have been provoked by an article in
Haaretz
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-12-18/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-expose-arbitrary-killings-and-rampant-lawlessness-in-gazas-netzarim-corridor/00000193-da7f-de86-a9f3-fefff2e50000>,
Israel’s most liberal newspaper. It published last week testimonies from
Israeli combat soldiers, in which they described committing and witnessing
war crimes in Gaza. They paint a picture of systematic erasure that, even
from their limited perspective, looks ominously like genocide.

The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared
so-called “kill zones”, even children, and then claiming them to be
“terrorists”. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs.

The only words one Israeli reservist found to describe Israel’s repeated
and intentional killing of children in Gaza was “pure evil”.

According to a senior reserve commander recently returned from the enclave,
the Israeli army has created “a lawless space where human life holds no
value”.

Another says units compete to see who can kill the greater number of
Palestinians, indifferent to whether they are Hamas fighters or civilians.

Others describe these units as operating like “independent militias”,
unrestrained by military protocols.
‘Everyone is a terrorist’

How the Israeli army implemented the Gaza genocide is alluded to in the
Haaretz article. After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the military
leadership devolved normally centralised decision-making to local field
commanders.

Many of those commanders live in the most religiously extreme of the
illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Not only are they Jewish
supremacists, but they follow rabbis who believe all Palestinians, even
babies, pose a threat to the Jewish people and must be exterminated.

Notoriously, a group of influential settler rabbis formalised their
genocidal teachings into a book called *The King’s Torah*.
<https://www.haaretz.com/2009-11-09/ty-article/west-bank-rabbi-jews-can-kill-gentiles-who-threaten-israel/0000017f-e28c-d38f-a57f-e6deda480000>


<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-failing-empire-so-blind-cheer-netanyahu-and-his-genocide>

Only a failing US empire would be so blind as to cheer Netanyahu and his
genocide


One senior commander identified by Haaretz is Brigadier General Yehuda Vach
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hundreds-indiscriminately-shot-dead-israeli-soldiers-gaza-kill-zone>,
a settler from Kiryat Arba, possibly the most extreme of all Israel’s West
Bank settlements.

For many years, Vach headed the military’s officers training school,
passing on his extreme views to a new generation of officers, presumably
some of whom are now making decisions in Gaza.

Today, he heads Division 252, in which many of the soldiers who spoke to
Haaretz have served.

One of his officers recounted how, after Hamas’ military leader Yahya
Sinwar was killed
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-confirms-sinwars-death> in
October, Vach held an official meeting to determine what to do with his
body. He wanted to strip Sinwar’s corpse naked, put it in a public square,
dismember it and pour sewage over the remains.

In an address to soldiers, he is reported to have echoed a genocidal view
widely shared in Israel, that "there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even
Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much
<https://x.com/SprinterFamily/status/1713064886027063584>.

But according to one officer, Vach has made this view an “operational
doctrine”.

Vach’s view of Palestinians is that “everyone's a terrorist". And that
means, given Israel’s current, explicit aims in Gaza, everyone must be
killed.
Nothing sticks

None of this should surprise us. Israeli leaders from the very start
announced their genocidal intent. And more than a year ago, Israeli
soldiers serving in Gaza began telling us
<https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/>
of the systematic nature
<https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/> of Israel’s war
crimes.

But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on
the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it
is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it
is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to
genocide.

How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing
normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously
manufactured

It has been nearly a year since the ICJ, comprising more than a dozen
internationally respected judges, decided that a “plausible” case had been
made
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/icj-rule-israel-allies-put-on-trial-genocide>
that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

The judiciary is amongst the most conservative of professions.

The situation in Gaza is incalculably worse than it was last January when
the court issued its ruling.

But the wheels of justice are required to turn slowly, even though Gaza
does not have time on its side.

How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing
normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously
manufactured.

Only because we live in a world where billionaires own our politicians and
media do we need courts and human rights groups to confirm what we can
already see quite clearly being live-streamed to our devices.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/western-foreign-policy-friends-everything-enemies-law>

Western foreign policy: 'For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the
law'


Only because we live in a world owned by billionaires do those same courts
and rights organisations spend long months weighing the evidence to protect
themselves from the inevitable backlash of smears aimed at discrediting
their work.

And only because we live in a world owned by billionaires is it possible,
even after all those delays, for our politicians and media to ignore the
findings and carry on as before.

The system is rigged to favour the imperial hub of the United States
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us> and its client states.

If you are an African dictator, or an official enemy of the so-called West,
the most minimal evidence suffices to prove your guilt.

If you are under the protection of the US godfather, no amount of evidence
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/western-foreign-policy-friends-everything-enemies-law>
will ever be enough to put you behind bars.

It is known as realpolitik.
Always another story

For many months, the western media’s role has been to gaslight us by
pretending the genocide is something else.

First, the mass slaughter of Palestinians was presented simply as a natural
desire by Israel to eliminate “terrorism” on its doorstep following the
Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.

[image: Pro-Palestinian protesters run into a group of counter-protesters
waving Israeli flags in London, on 30 November 2024 (Carlos Jasso/AFP)]
Pro-Palestinian protesters run into a group of counter-protesters waving
Israeli flags in London, on 30 November 2024 (Carlos Jasso/AFP)

It was chiefly a story of Israeli "self-defence" that conveniently
overlooked the preceding decades in which Israel had driven Palestinians
off their land, either out of their homeland entirely or into ghettoes,
then colonised the land illegally with apartheid-style Jewish settlements,
and subjected the Palestinian ghettoes to brutal Israeli military rule.

In the coverage after 7 October, the Palestinians - long the victims of an
illegal occupation - were viewed as squarely to blame for their own
suffering. To suggest anything else - to worry that a genocide was
unfolding - was a sure sign of antisemitism.

Then, as the slaughter intensified - as Gaza was levelled, hospitals
wrecked, the population collectively punished with an aid blockade - the
official story faltered.

We were back to the familiar framework of an intractable conflict, in which
both sides were to blame - though, of course, the Palestinians more so

So a new narrative was advanced: of international efforts to reach a
ceasefire ending “the cycle of violence”, of the focus on securing the
release of the hostages, of Hamas intransigence.

We were back to the familiar framework of an intractable conflict, in which
both sides were to blame - though, of course, the Palestinians more so.

Now, as it becomes impossible to continue pretending that Israel wants
peace, to ignore the fact that it is expanding the slaughter, not reining
it in, the media strategy has shifted once again.

As the genocide reaches its “final stage
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/we-are-witnessing-the-final-stage-of-genocide-in-gaza>”
- as the Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg warn -
the media have largely lost interest. If there is no way to both-sides the
genocide, then it must be disappeared.

And in media-land, there is always another story that can be promoted.
There will always be another front-page lead rather than the most
disturbing one of all, in which western leaders and the media are full
participants in the live-streamed extermination of a people.
BBC buries the news

That is the context for understanding the media’s collective yawn as the
three genocide reports dropped one after another this month.

Israel’s accusations that Amnesty’s report was antisemitic were entirely
expected. What should not have been was the media’s largely indifferent
response.

The BBC was a case study in how to bury bad news. Its flagship television
news programmes - the dominant news source for Britons - ignored the story
completely.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/bbc-lebanon-israel-reporting-weaponising-crimes-pagers>

The BBC is weaponising its Lebanon reporting to help disguise Israel's
crimes


Meanwhile, its poor cousin, the 24-hour news channel, which draws a far
smaller audience, did mention the Amnesty report, but captioned it
<https://x.com/Hamza_a96/status/1864650545765499149>: “Israel rejects
‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.”

In other words, when the BBC did offer very limited coverage, it skipped
the news story of Amnesty’s findings and went straight to Israel’s
predictable, outraged reaction.

In an investigation for Drop Site News
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-biased-coverage>
last week, Guardian columnist Owen Jones spoke to 13 current and recently
departed BBC staff. They said the corporation’s coverage of Gaza was
heavily skewed to present Israel’s actions in a favourable light.

In a WhatsApp chat for senior BBC Middle East editors, correspondents and
producers, one participant - incensed by the “fabricated claims” caption -
wrote: “FFS! - It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of
upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’
narrative’.”

The BBC’s website, by far the most influential English-language online news
source, inexplicably ignored
<https://x.com/PulaRJS/status/1864704295444074638> the Amnesty report for
12 hours after the embargo was lifted.

Even then, it appeared as the seventh item. For the following week, it was
not included in the “Israel-Gaza” index on the website’s front page, making
it unlikely it would be found.

This pattern has long been true in the BBC’s coverage of Israel and
Palestine, but it has become far more glaring since the stakes were raised
for Israel by its genocide.

As Jones’s investigation discloses, BBC management has tightly restricted
control over the Gaza coverage to a small number of journalists known to
hew closely to Israel’s view of events - and despite their editorial role
provoking what Jones calls a “civil war” in the BBC newsroom.

Notably, Jones did not publish his investigation in the Guardian, where
there have been similar reports of staff indignant
<https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/18/discontent-deepens-among-guardian-staff-over-palestine-double-standard/>
at the paper’s failure to give proper weight to the genocidal nature of
Israel’s actions.
Rigged algorithms

What the BBC has been doing is not exceptional. As soon as a light is shone
into the dark recesses of the state- and billionaire-owned media, the same
picture always emerges.

Last week, an investigation revealed that Meta, the company that owns
Facebook and Instagram, intentionally rigged its algorithms
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo> to suppress reports from
the biggest Palestinian news sources after the Hamas attack of 7 October
2023.

Palestinian news outlets saw their views on Meta platforms fall
significantly after the attack - on average by 77 percent - when they
should have expected to see far greater interest. By contrast, views of
Israeli news outlets rose sharply.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/new-york-times-antisemitism-name-genocide-does-not>

For The New York Times, antisemitism has a name but genocide does not

Paradoxically, the investigation was published by the BBC, though notably
the research was initiated and carried out by the staff of its Arabic news
service.

Also last week, more than a dozen whistleblowers from Deutsche Welle,
Germany’s equivalent of state broadcaster the BBC, revealed to Al Jazeera
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/19/as-gaza-war-rages-deutsche-welle-insiders-accuse-outlet-of-pro-israel-bias>
that a culture of fear reigns in the newsroom when it comes to critical
coverage of Israel.

Similar reports from whistleblowing staff have exposed the rigged nature of
the coverage - always in Israel’s favour - in other major outlets, from CNN
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/cnn-israel-bias-laid-bare-norm-not-exception>
to the New York Times
<https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/>
and the Associated Press news agency.

In reality, the same skewed news agenda can be found in every newsroom in
every corporate media outlet. It just requires whistleblowers to come
forward, and for there to be someone willing to listen and in a position to
publish.

Why? Because a genocide unfolding in plain sight cannot be made to appear
normal without an enormous expenditure of effort from institutional media
to close the eyes of their audiences. To hypnotise us into indifference.
State of anxiety

Too many of us are susceptible to this process - and for a number of
reasons.

In part, because we still trust these institutions, even though their chief
function is to persuade us that they are there for our benefit - rather
than the reality that they serve the interests of the larger corporate
structures to which they belong.

Those western structures are invested in resource theft, asset-stripping
and wealth concentration - all, of course, pursued at the expense of the
global south - and the war industries needed to make this pillage possible.

But also, it is part of our psychological makeup that we cannot sustain
attention on bad news indefinitely.

We cannot sustain attention on bad news indefinitely. To watch a genocide
unfold week after week, month after month, and be unable to do anything to
stop it, takes a terrible toll on our mental health

To watch a genocide unfold week after week, month after month, and
be unable to do anything to stop it, takes a terrible toll on our mental
health. It keeps us in a permanent state of anxiety.

The corporate structures that oversee our media understand this only too
well. Which is why they cultivate a sense of powerlessness amongst their
audiences.

The world is presented as a baffling place, where there are inexplicable
forces of evil that act without any comprehensible causation to destroy all
that is good and wholesome.

The media suggest international affairs are little different from a game of
whack-a-mole. Whenever the good West tries to solve a problem, another evil
mole pops up its head, whether it be Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah
terrorists, Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad, or the mad mullahs of
Iran.

With this as the framework for the Gaza genocide, audiences are left
sensing either that what is happening to Palestinians, however horrifying,
may be deserved or that investing too much concern is a waste of energy and
time. Another crisis will be along in a moment equally demanding of our
attention.

And so it will. Because that is precisely the way the corporate media
works. It offers a conveyor belt of bad news, one bewildering event after
another - whether it be another disgraced celebrity, or murdered
schoolgirl, or an outbreak of war.

The media’s role - the reason states and corporations keep such a tight
grip on it - is to stop us from gaining a wider picture of the world, one
on which our hands look far more bloodied than the "terrorists" we sit in
judgment on. One where a powerful western elite, its corporate empire
headquartered in the US, runs the planet as nothing more than a
wealth-extraction machine.

And so we, the publics of the West, shrug our shoulders once again: at
“man’s inhumanity to man”, at “the cycle of violence”, at “the barbarians
at the gate”, at “the white man’s burden”.

Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has
become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside
pages.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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