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<h1 class="title" id="page-title">Israel’s extermination of whole
families in Gaza reflects genocidal impulse</h1>
<div class="submitted">
<span property="dc:date dc:created"
content="2014-08-27T01:31:27+00:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
rel="sioc:has_creator">Submitted by <span class="username"
xml:lang="" about="/users/rania-khalek"
typeof="sioc:UserAccount" property="foaf:name" datatype="">Rania
Khalek</span> on Wed, 08/27/2014 - 01:31</span> </div>
<div class="field-body">
<div id="file-28672" class="file file-image file-image-jpeg
media-element file-full" style="width:618px;"><b><small><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israels-extermination-whole-families-gaza-reflects-genocidal-impulse">http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israels-extermination-whole-families-gaza-reflects-genocidal-impulse</a></small></small></small></small></small></b><br>
</div>
<p>Eighty-nine families that existed seven weeks ago in Gaza have
been exterminated by Israel. </p>
<p>On Sunday 24 August an Israeli missile tore through the home of
Issam Jouda in Gaza’s Tal al-Zatar neighborhood east of <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/jabaliya">Jabaliya</a>
without warning, <a
href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/juda-family-mourns-ceasefire-announced-2053649886">killing
Issam’s wife Rawiya and their four children</a>—Taghrid,
Tasnim, Usama and
Muhammad.</p>
<p>According to the Palestinian health ministry , the Joudas were
the <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.612255">eighty-ninth
family wiped out</a> in Gaza since the Israeli army started
bombarding the besieged coastal enclave on 7 July.</p>
<p>A <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lost-war-gaza-struggle-justice-goes">ceasefire</a>
that took effect on Tuesday evening may stop the flow of blood,
but it will not heal the raw wounds of the families of more than
2,100 people killed, nor of the more than eleven thousand
injured and 100,000 whose homes were destroyed.</p>
<p>Between 7 July and 21 August, the UN documented <a
href="http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/humanitarian_Snapshot_21_august_2014_oPt_V4.pdf">140
families</a> in Gaza partially or completely annihilated by
Israeli attacks.</p>
<p>Many were crushed beneath the rubble of their homes. Eight
members of the Wahdan family, for instance, were killed in their
house in Jabaliya refugee camp after being <a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/gaza/11039636/Israeli-attacks-on-Gaza-families-must-be-investigated-as-war-crimes-say-human-rights-groups.html">instructed</a>
by Israeli forces to stay put. </p>
<p>Others were summarily executed in broad daylight by invading
Israeli forces in the catastrophically devastated <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/shujaiya">Shujaiya</a>
neighborhood. This was the fate of several members of the
Shamaly and al-Areer families according to <a
href="http://www.alternet.org/world/gruesome-tales-surface-israeli-massacres-against-families-gaza-neighborhood">testimony
collected by journalist Max Blumenthal</a>.</p>
<p>The <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/al-mezan-center-human-rights">Al
Mezan Center for Human Rights</a> has <a
href="http://www.mezan.org/en/details.php?id=19396&ddname=IOF&id2=9&id_dept=9&p=center">recorded</a>
at least 990 people killed inside their homes in Israeli
attacks, including 324 children. That’s almost half of all
people killed in the Israeli assault.</p>
<p>This is no accident.</p>
<p>Israel’s systematic targeting of entire families in Gaza this
summer is part of a <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israel-deliberately-targeting-civilians-gaza">deliberate
military strategy</a> that seeks to terrorize the civilian
population into submission in an effort to break their will to
resist Israeli conquest. In recent days, Israel escalated this
practice by <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/scorched-earth-israel-obliterates-two-more-gaza-high-rises">leveling
residential high-rise apartment buildings</a>. </p>
<p>But the wholesale slaughter of families is also part of
Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.</p>
<h2>Genocide</h2>
<p><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/michael-ratner">Michael
Ratner</a>, President Emeritus of the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/center-constitutional-rights">Center
for Constitutional Rights</a> <a
href="http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12155">argues</a>
that Israel’s acts in Gaza constitute more than just war crimes
and crimes against humanity. He says they are genocide, adding
his voice to the <a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/describe-slaughter-genocide.html">growing
chorus</a> of those who see the slaughter in Gaza as part of
an ongoing, systematic process of annihilation. </p>
<p>“These are clear violations of the Geneva conventions and war
crimes,” Ratner told The Electronic Intifada. “But you can’t
look at this as an isolated attack on Gaza because there’s a
history going back to Zionists charting out and destroying five
hundred plus villages in 1947-48,” he said, referring to the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba">Nakba</a> —
the premeditated ethnic cleansing of 750,000 indigenous
Palestinians by Zionist militias seeking to establish an
ethnically exclusive state with a Jewish majority. </p>
<p>“If you look at it historically it’s hard to escape [Israeli
author and historian] <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/ilan-pappe">Ilan
Pappe’s</a> conclusion that it’s ‘<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562">incremental
genocide</a>,’” said Ratner.</p>
<p>Ratner noted that the common response to such accusations is
that Israel has not killed enough Palestinians for its actions
to qualify as genocide. However, “You don’t have to kill a large
number of people to commit genocide,” he explained.</p>
<p>Indeed, Article 2 of the <a
href="http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html">Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide</a>,
defines genocide in the following terms (emphasis added): </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the
following acts committed with <strong>intent</strong> to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group, as such:</p>
<p><strong>(a) Killing members of the group;</strong></p>
<p><strong>(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group;</strong></p>
<p><strong>(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part;</strong></p>
<p>(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group;</p>
<p>(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Israel does not have to kill millions of Palestinians to be
guilty of genocide nor does it need to commit all the above
atrocities, though it is undeniably guilty of (a), (b) and (c).
It just has to commit any of them with the “intent” to “destroy”
Palestinians “in whole or in part” as “a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group.”</p>
<p>The question of genocide, then, is whether by looking at
decades of Israel’s practices, as well as the utterances of its
leaders, we can find this intent.</p>
<h2>The past is present</h2>
<p>As a settler-colonial state guided by Zionism, or Jewish
nationalism, Israel has spent every year since its creation
gradually destroying indigenous Palestinian communities and
expelling their residents to consolidate and maintain a Jewish
demographic majority in historic Palestine, a goal that by its
very nature requires the forced removal and erasure of
Palestinians. This process is ongoing within present-day Israel
as well, where <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/prawer-plan">Israel
plans to forcibly remove tens of thousands of Bedouins</a> in
the Naqab (Negev) in order to “Judaize” their land.</p>
<p>Gaza in particular—where eighty percent of the population is
made up of refugees ethnically cleansed from villages in
present-day Israel—has been subjected to <a
href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/13666-slaughter-in-gaza-the-lessons-of-history">periodic
massacres since Israel’s creation</a>. These massacres have
intensified in frequency since 2006, because unlike in the
occupied West Bank, armed resistance against Israeli
settler-colonialism has yet to be pacified in Gaza. </p>
<p>“It’s not that people are wrong that Israel is committing war
crimes. It’s just you have to look at it in context of the last
70 years,” said Ratner. “You have to ask yourself, what is
Israel doing here except trying to make life impossible for
Palestinians, to make them give up and get out?”</p>
<p>In his infamous <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.606258">1956
eulogy</a> for an Israeli settler killed by Palestinian
refugees from Gaza, then chief of staff of the Israeli army, <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/moshe-dayan">Moshe
Dayan</a>, candidly described Israel’s policy towards Gaza,
saying, “Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For
eight years now, [Palestinians] have sat in the refugee camps of
Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have
turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers
previously dwelled, into our home.”</p>
<p>He continued, “We are a generation of settlement and without
the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to
plant a tree and build a house… .That is our choice – to be
ready and armed, tough and hard – or else the sword shall fall
from our hands and our lives will be cut short.”</p>
<p>Later that year, under the leadership of Dayan, Israeli
soldiers carried out <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Cockburn-t.html">mass
executions</a> in Khan Younis and Rafah, where they gathered
all the males over the age of 15, lined them up in the street
for all to see, beat them and shot them dead, killing hundreds.
The stated aim was to crush armed resistance.</p>
<p>Many Israeli leaders over the years have echoed Dayan’s
attitude, most notably <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/arnon-soffer">Arnon
Soffer</a>, otherwise known as <a
href="http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/05/arnon_the_arabs.html">the
Arab counter</a> due to his compulsive fixation on the threat
posed by Palestinian babies.</p>
<p>A central architect of Israel’s policy in Gaza following then
Prime Minister <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/ariel-sharon">Ariel
Sharon’s</a> 2005 unilateral “disengagement,” Soffer once said
about the coastal enclave, “if we want to remain alive, we will
have to <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/gaza-massacre-price-jewish-state">kill
and kill and kill</a>. All day, every day.” This nightmarish
prediction is today’s reality in Gaza. </p>
<p>The difference between the days of Dayan and now is that Israel
— with its US-supplied arsenal of Hellfire missiles and bunker
buster bombs and an “international community” willing to
tolerate limitless Israeli aggression — has the capacity and
willpower to complete its genocidal conquest with absolute
impunity.</p>
<h2>Incitement </h2>
<p>Early this month, <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/moshe-feiglin">Moshe
Feiglin</a>, deputy speaker in the Israeli parliament the
Knesset, laid out a detailed proposal for <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/concentrate-and-exterminate-israel-parliament-deputy-speakers-gaza-genocide-plan">concentration
and extermination</a> of Palestinians in Gaza. Feiglin,
indicating a clear genocidal intent, denied the very existence
of a Palestinian people and defined Palestinians as enemies
because the vast majority of them are Muslim.</p>
<p>In the lead-up to the Gaza onslaught, Israeli lawmaker <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/ayelet-shaked">Ayelet
Shaked</a>, an increasingly popular member of the far-right <em><a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/habayit-hayehudi">Habeyit
Hayehudi</a></em> (Jewish Home) party and a high-level
partner in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, called for slaughtering
Palestinian mothers to prevent them from giving birth to “<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes">little
snakes</a>.”</p>
<p>Shaked’s clear call for genocide appears to have been carried
out to some degree against the 89 families in Gaza who were
completely obliterated as well as against the <a
href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/24/born-in-hell-the-gaza-maternity-ward.html">newborn
infants who died</a> after Israeli attacks on power stations
shut down their incubators. </p>
<p>Even if this weren’t the case, the incitement alone ought to be
grounds for prosecution.</p>
<p>Article 3 of the Genocide Convention stipulates that “direct
and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in
genocide” are punishable offenses.</p>
<p>Feiglin and Shaked are reflecting a mindset that can be found
pervasively in Israeli society and <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/israelis-facebook">social
media</a>, among the mobs in the streets chanting to “<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/death-arabs">Death to
the Arabs</a>” and among Israeli soldiers. Neither Shaked nor
Feiglin were censured and in fact their comments garnered
enormous support on social media.</p>
<p>And before sending his troops into Gaza, Colonel Ofer Winter,
the commander of the Israeli army’s Givati brigade, <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-commander-declares-holy-war-palestinians">wrote
to his men</a> that they were engaged in a war on behalf of
the Jewish “Nation of Israel” to “wipe out” an “enemy who
defames” God.</p>
<p>It is unnecessary for anyone to give explicit orders. Israeli
soldiers go into Gaza with a deep ethnic hatred of Palestinians
already inculcated into them.</p>
<h2>Aiding and abetting</h2>
<p>“The language is an important component. We saw it in Rwanda,
when they went on the radio and said kill the Tutsis,” said
Ratner, referring to broadcasts by the Rwandan
government-supported <a
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm">Radio
Television Libre des Mille Collines</a>. </p>
<p>“The words that are being used by Israeli legislators are
fomenting what are incredible genocidal attacks on the
Palestinian people. People in the parliament that are
encouraging that are aiders and abettors of all of these
crimes,” he said, adding that the same is true of US leaders
that continue to shower their Israeli counterparts with an
endless supply of weapons aimed at Palestinians civilians.</p>
<p>It is notable that in US politics, as in Israel, it has become
fashionable in recent years to <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/why-it-open-season-palestinians-us-presidential-race/10801">deny
the very existence of a Palestinian people</a>.</p>
<p>“Everyone of those Congress people who continues to vote for
military aid to Israel are aiders and abettors of crimes against
humanity, genocide and war crimes,” says Ratner. “It’s the US
primarily that is holding back real accountability for what
Israel is doing.” </p>
</div>
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