A report published
by the United Nations in 2018 stated that by the year 2020 the Gaza Strip would
be uninhabitable. It said specifically that, “the United Nations has stated
that Gaza may well be unlivable by 2020.” The report emphasized also that
“Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the
Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, drew attention to Israel’s
persistent non-cooperation with the Special Rapporteur’s mandate. As with his
two predecessors, Israel has not granted him entry to visit the country, nor
the Occupied Palestinian territory.” Anyone who thinks that the Gaza Strip was
liveable prior to 2020 is out of their mind.
The
Gaza Strip has been a humanitarian disaster since it was artificially created
in the aftermath of the 1948 Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing. It was created
primarily as a holding place for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
driven off of their lands by Zionist terrorists in southern Palestine.
Impoverished and homeless, these refugees were forced to survive on handouts,
and today they make up more than half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million
inhabitants. Considering the high standard of living Jewish citizens of Israel
in that part of the country enjoy, living as they do on the very lands from
which the Palestinians were exiled, the “Strip” was never “liveable.”
Now
2020 has come and gone, the United Nations report is shelved, and not a thing
has changed. Over two million people remain imprisoned by Israel in the Gaza
Strip. They suffer from a lack of the most basic needs like drinkable water,
electricity, medicine, and nutrition. Israel also denies them basic human
rights while Israeli Jews living minutes away enjoy a standard of living that
is, by any measure, enviable with full access to the finest health care,
nutrition, and clean water.
A European delegation comes to visit
A
delegation of European representatives recently visited Gaza, yet Europeans
have not used their influence, political or otherwise, to end Israeli
violations of human rights and international law.
It
would not have taken much for EU representatives to see the devastation,
poverty, and severe shortages experienced by the people of Gaza. All one needs
to do is drive through the Gaza Strip to see the evidence, and yet no change
seems to be forthcoming from the Europeans.
In fact, according to the Israeli press, Germany just announced that in order to provide
Israel with a European made vaccine for Covid-19, “Germany used its influence
in the EU to bend the rule that a European-produced vaccination would be given
to European countries first. Germany justified the decision in part through its
“historical commitment to supporting Israel.” Knowing full well that millions
of Palestinians are denied health care and that the spread of Covid-19 among
Palestinians is alarming, no such commitment was made to assist the
Palestinians in their fight against the deadly disease.
Complicity
The comfort that Europeans display as they cooperate
with the State of Israel, even as they claim to be champions of human rights,
amounts to complicity. According to the Geneva Convention,
particularly the Rome Statute, European cooperation with Israel constitutes
complicity in genocide. When one looks at the definition of genocide and
compares it with the actions of Israel in Gaza, it is quite clear that the
Zionist State is engaged in genocide.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide
Article II
In
the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group, as such:
1.
Killing
members of the group;
2.
Causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3.
Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
4.
Imposing
measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5.
Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group;
Three of the five examples given here are constantly
committed by Israel in Gaza. Furthermore, Article II of the Genocide Convention “contains a narrow definition of
the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements,” one of which is the
“intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group, as such.” Israeli attacks on Gaza for over seven decades
clearly demonstrate that they are part of a larger strategy and that
there is clear intent to bring about the destruction of a people.
According to a report published
by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the issue of complicity with genocide is quite
clear. “Prior jurisprudence has defined the term complicity as aiding and
abetting, instigating, and procuring […] Complicity to commit genocide in
Article 2(3)(e) refers to all acts of assistance or encouragement that have
substantially contributed to, or have had a substantial effect on, the
completion of the crime of genocide.”
The
report defined the following as elements of complicity in genocide:
§
“complicity
by procuring means, such as weapons, instruments or any other means, used to
commit genocide, with the accomplice knowing that such means would be used for
such a purpose;
§
complicity
by knowingly aiding or abetting a perpetrator of a genocide in the planning or
enabling acts thereof;
According
to that definition, both the EU states and the United States are complicit in
the crime of genocide.
Human
Rights Watch maintains that Israel has, “entrenched discriminatory systems that
treat Palestinians unequally.” It “involves systematic rights abuses,
including collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force against
protesters, and prolonged administrative detention without charge or trial for
hundreds.”
It
continues to state that Israel, “builds and supports illegal settlements
[…]expropriating Palestinian land and imposing burdens on Palestinians but not
on settlers, restricting their access to basic services and making it nearly
impossible for them to build.”
Regarding
the Gaza Strip, HRW writes that “Israel’s more than decade-long closure of Gaza
severely restricts the movement of people and goods, with devastating
humanitarian impact.”
What constitutes aid?
The
first order of business needs to be the immediate and unconditional lifting of
the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2007. A no-fly zone monitored by UN
or European naval forces must be imposed on all Israeli aircraft. In addition
to these measures, humanitarian relief must be made available to the people of
Gaza without delay.
Israel
must be sanctioned and all military and economic cooperation with Israel must
be stopped until such time that it complies with international law and ends all
its violations of human rights. This should be followed by setting a date for
free and fair one person, one vote elections in all of historic Palestine. Then
processes must be put in place for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees,
and funding must be set aside for payment of reparations and restitution.
Israel
must also be held accountable for its violations of international law since
1948 and Israeli politicians, as well as military commanders, must be
investigated and charged with war crimes.
European
countries are fully aware of the reality that exists in Gaza. A long and cruel
siege, constant Israeli attacks resulting in the killing of countless
civilians, destruction of homes and infrastructure, extreme poverty, and trauma
are the daily bread of Palestinians in Gaza.
The
reality in Gaza is no secret and Israeli violations of international law are
well known. However, European governments are in the habit of seeing colonized
and formerly colonized people as needing aid and doing little to provide the
aid. The aid they provide is sometimes monetary and sometimes humanitarian in
the form of food items, but rarely is it sufficient. In the case of the Gaza
Strip, real political action is called for, but it is not clear if and when the
EU will be willing to act.
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