Genocide?

Is Israel inflicting genocide upon the Palestinians of Gaza?

Using the diagram below from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, you can see parallels. Listen to Israeli government ministers if you doubt this.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in October “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,”

“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Avi Dichter, Israeli Agriculture Minister and member of the right-wing Likud party, said Saturday, in comments widely reported by Israeli media. “From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war — as the Israeli army seeks to do in Gaza — with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he said. Pressed on his use of the word “Nakba” to describe the situation in Gaza, he said again: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu sparked outcry after he suggested that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities” in the current conflict. He was asked “Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there…,” In reply, Eliyahu responded, “That’s one way. The second way is to work out what’s important to them, what scares them, what deters them… They’re not scared of death.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a prominent settler activist, raised alarm himself earlier this month after calling for the creation of “sterile” zones in the West Bank in a letter he sent to Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that was shared with Israeli media. Such zones, he said, would block Palestinians from entering certain areas and bar them from harvesting olives close to Israeli settlements in the enclave.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. The war presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” Ben Gvir told reporters and members of his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, calling such a policy “a correct, just, moral and humane solution.”

“We want to encourage willful emigration, and we need to find countries willing to take them in,” says Smotrich. He has gone on to be reported as saying “We need to encourage immigration from there. If there were 100,000-200,000 Arabs in the Strip and not two million, the whole conversation about the day after [the war] would be completely different,” he said. “They want to leave. They have been living in a ghetto for 75 years and are in need.”

So we have classification, discrimination, dehumanisation, the invasion of Gaza is certainly planned, and pro-Israeli media have certainly spread polarising propaganda, 22,000 out of 2 million Gazans have died, many more injured, and there are certainly lots of denial going on. Is this Genocide?

What follows are two commentaries which delve further into the case against Israel, including a case brought by South Africa against Israel to the International Court of Justice.