Our Wednesday News Analysis | Biden and Starmer are destroying international law to protect Israel’s genocide

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (L) speaks with US President Joe Biden during the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington, DC, on 11 July 2024 (Ludovic Marin/AFP)

For more than a year, those calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza have been relentlessly vilified: as apologists for Hamas, as antisemites, even as supporters of a genocide against Israel and the wider Jewish people.

These smears have been buttressed by Western politicians and the media insisting that Israel is conducting a legitimate, “defensive” war with limited aims: supposedly to eradicate Hamas and free a few dozen remaining Israeli hostages.

The bigger picture has had to be swept from view. That Israel has levelled the infrastructure in Gaza needed to sustain life; bombarded Palestinians wherever they have sought refuge; butchered many tens of thousands of civilians - or more likely hundreds of thousands; and actively starved most of the population by withholding aid.

And, overlooked in all of this, Israel has failed to make any significant impact on Hamas’ fighting ability and has almost certainly endangered the lives of the hostages with its indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

Finally, 14 months on, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has struck a major blow against Israel’s tissue of lies and deceptions - as well as the complicity of Western elites.

Judges at the war crimes court approved last month the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

After six months of delays, the ICC has agreed, against a background of unprecedented intimidation, to put the pair on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity, including the targeting of civilians and the use of starvation as a method of war.

Should either step on the soil of any of the 124 member states - including Britain and all of Europe - that state will be obligated to arrest them and transfer them to The Hague.

The charges laid against Netanyahu and Gallant are likely also to bolster the case being made at the ICC’s sister court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

What is clear is that the walls are closing in on Israel, as they are for those who have aided and abetted its crimes. Which includes western political and media establishments...

Read more: Biden and Starmer are destroying international law to protect Israel’s genocide

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THE WEST BANK VILLAGES WIPED OFF THE MAP BY ISRAELI SETTLER VIOLENCE

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/the-west-bank-villages-wiped-off-the-map-by-israeli-settler-violence/

Oren Ziv writes in +972 on 4 December 2024

Since October 7, over 50 rural Palestinian communities have been forced to abandon their homes amid intensifying attacks, threats, and harassment by Israeli settlers — almost always with the backing of the army and police.

Israeli settlers harass Palestinian residents of Khirbet Zanuta, South Hebron Hills, occupied West Bank.

Several weeks before October 7, +972 Magazine published an investigation into the seizure by Israeli settlers of a vast area of the occupied West Bank, stretching east from Ramallah to the outskirts of Jericho. Through the establishment of an array of new settler outposts and sustained harassment of Palestinian shepherding communities, which was often ignored or actively facilitated by the Israeli army, settlers managed to expel virtually all the Palestinians living in an area measuring approximately 150 square kilometers.

In that investigation, we reported on the forcible displacement of four shepherding communities within a period of four years, totaling several hundred people. But over the past 14 months since the Gaza war began, what was already a dramatic process of ethnic cleansing has accelerated exponentially.

According to new data gathered by the left-wing Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, which monitors Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land in the West Bank, at least 57 Palestinian communities have been forced to flee their homes since October 7 as a result of Israeli settler attacks. Of these, seven have been partially displaced — meaning the expulsion of at least one residential cluster, located several hundred meters away from the next — and 50 have been wiped off the map entirely.

Most of the displacement has been concentrated in four areas: the northern Jordan Valley, east of Ramallah, southeast of Bethlehem, and the South Hebron Hills. “Unsurprisingly, most new outposts have been established in these areas,” Etkes explained. “There is a direct link between their establishment and the rise in violence [against Palestinians].”

Kerem Navot and another left-wing Israeli NGO, Peace Now, estimate that since October 2023, at least 41 illegal settler outposts and herding farms have been established in the West Bank. At least 10 of these were built in close proximity to Palestinian communities that were subsequently forced to flee their lands. In addition, settlers have set up “observation posts” or planted Israeli flags in areas abandoned by Palestinians in order to prevent them from returning.

“Expelling [Palestinian] communities has helped the settlers take over hundreds of thousands of dunams of grazing and agricultural land,” Etkes said — all of which is done “with the backing of the Israeli army and police. Even if the state does not officially declare it, it permits it. This cannot happen in so many communities without [the assistance of] the military.”...

Read more: The West Bank villages wiped off the map by Israeli settler violence

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PALESTINE LETTER: REPORTING GENOCIDE, AND WHY WORDS DO MATTER

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/palestine-letter-reporting-genocide-and-why-words-do-matter/

By Qassam Muaddi
Published December 4, 2024

Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a journalist. I want to practice journalism in Palestine and about Palestine. I never doubted that through journalism, I could help Palestine and the world be a better place until last year.

Palestinian journalists filming a building being destroyed by Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip, May 14, 2021. (Photo: Osps7/Wikimedia)

Ever since I could remember, I wanted to be a journalist. I always wanted to practice journalism in Palestine, and about Palestine. Not only to get the plight of my people known to the world, but also to share Palestine’s culture, history, creativity, and everyday life with the world. I always believed that this is my way of putting my love of Palestine into practice, and contributing to its journey to freedom, but also to its thriving and flourishing even under occupation. I always believed this is my way to fulfill journalism’s ideal of advancing knowledge and understanding on the important issues of the world, to help advance public accountability, and there are few issues as central to the world as Palestine. I never doubted that through journalism I can help Palestine and the world be a better place, until last year.

My generation of Palestinians have seen, before reaching the age of 30, intense difficult moments that would put the strongest convictions of any person to the test. The second Intifada and all of its bloody events. The 2002 invasion of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, and the images of Israeli tanks rolling through the streets of my city, tearing it apart. The 2008 Israeli bombing of Gaza and white phosphorus raining down on school yards. The summary executions of our age-peers in 2015 and 2016. Israeli snipers hunting down protestors during the great march of return. The arrest campaigns of our classmates, the incursions into our college campuses, the demolition of homes, settler attacks, curfews, checkpoints, and a thousand individual moments that were burned into our memory and our souls. However, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is something else entirely different.

Everything we lived and witnessed before pales in comparison to what Gaza has been subjected to since last year. Never before have we felt more vulnerable, more helpless, more speechless, more suffocated, and more guilty than in the past 14 months. Guilty of having a roof over our heads. Guilty of being able to reach out for a snack when our stomachs crunch, or for a blanket when we feel cold. Guilty of being alive, and of being able to go to sleep without worrying that we might wake up, or not, under the rubble of our bedrooms. Guilty of having nothing else to offer but tears and horror, this sense of guilt includes us journalists in a particular way...

Read more: Palestine Letter: Reporting genocide, and why words do matter