النذير

The world’s leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with a number of evidences provided. However, prior to October 7^th 2023, other evidences went unnoticed despite expert warnings. This article attempts to document some of such evidence.

1. In 2008, before Gaza’s first war, Israel’s deputy defense minister threatened Gaza with a huge military operation that would bring on the Gazans a “bigger shoah”, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. It requires no genius to understand that inflicting a holocaust would be obviously genocidal.
2. Israeli officials openly dehumanizing all Gazans, labeling Palestinians as animals, worms, insects, caner, etc. Dehumanization is what genocide scholars call the fourth stage of a genocide in which “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder”. There is a plethora of examples confirming the prevalence of such sentiments in the highest echelons of the Israeli state. One such example from the early 1980’s was when Rafael Eytan, the former chief of staff of the Israeli army proposed that for every incident of stone-throwing by Palestinians, ten Israeli settlements should be built, with such settlements, ”all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle”. A more recent example is when Binyamin Netanyahu announced in 2016 his intention to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to protect the country from infiltration by “wild beasts”. There are many other examples.
3. Before dehumanization, a genocide also starts with classification, basically dividing people by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. This is very evident in Israel, a country based on racial supremacy. This manifests in Jewish-only settlements, roads, transportation, etc.
4. Another step towards genocide happens when the dominant group “uses law, custom, or political power to deny the rights of other groups”, i.e. there are two separate legal systems. This is also abundant in Israel and this is why Israel is increasingly being labeled as an apartheid state. Illegal Jewish settlers are armed, trained and protected by the Israeli state while Palestinians living in the same vicinity are subjected to systemic prosecution and extreme controls by that same state. Illegal settlers have full political rights while Palestinian living in the same territory have zero say in the Israeli government that rules and controls every details of their lives. Illegal Israeli settlers carry out terrorist attacks, however, they are not subjected to Israeli extrajudicial executions, they are not put under indefinite “administrative detention”, they don’t face military courts and their homes are not demolished by the state. This extends to Arab citizens of Israel in a variety of ways. Institutional discrimination and demographic anxieties pushed Zionism to be more explicit about the Arab citizens. This includes passing a 2018 Israel law making self-determination preserved exclusively for the Jewish citizens of the state, and declaring the establishment of “Jewish settlement” as a national value.
5. Systemic efforts to make Gaza uninhabitable. As early as 2012, the UN warned Gaza will be unlivable by 2020, then sounded the alarm again in 2015. These persistent governmental efforts included almost two decades of blockade, prohibiting very basic and necessary humanitarian aid and a calories count for the improvised besieged population of Gaza. In fact, as early as 2006 we have quote from Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, stating that “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
6. Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin of the Likud party proposed a plan in 2014 for Gaza that involved attacking the strip and the “enemy population” without regard to civilian “human shields”, with the final goal being to relocating Gazans to Egypt’s Sinai while the area would be populated by Jews settlers, which “will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel”
7. Prominent Israeli politician Avigdor Liberman, in his capacity as defense minister back in 2018, commented on the Gaza border protests by declaring that “there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas. Everyone receives a salary from Hamas.”
8. Prior to his death, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stated that in 2010 the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanhyu proposed a resettlement of Palestinians in Sinai, which was rejected by Egypt, according to Mubarak.
9. Throughout the years, many Israeli proposals for an alternative Palestinian state in Sinai and/or Jordan were thrown around, which Trump reiterated in the current conflict without the “state” component. These proposals are usually labeled as “the Jordanian option” and the “Sinai option”. For example, in 2017, Israeli social equality minister Gila Gamliel called for a Palestinian state to be established in Sinai. The Elon Peace Plan of 2002 is an example of openly wanting to expel the Palestinians to Jordan proposed back then by the Israeli tourism minister Rabbi Binyamin Elon. These are many other similar examples of a “final solution” rooted in ethnic cleansing and genocide.
10. Extremist Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked, once the minister of justice, supported a genocide in Gaza back in 2014 by labeling everyone there as an enemy. “What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? … They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there”. Notice the dehumanization here too.
11. The last stage in genocide is denial. This is when “the perpetrators deny the crime, hide evidence, blame the victims, and attack the truth-tellers”. This is very clear in the case of Gaza, but it actually is as old as Israel. The Israeli state constantly denies the 1948 Nakba ethnic cleansing, blames the uprooted population and burry evidence. Systemic efforts were carried out to distort the genocidal history of Israel, and in recent years such efforts were even escalated.

This brings us to an important final paragraph: Zionism was always genocidal. From the early beginnings, Zionists realized that it was impossible to establish a Jewish state where there were virtually no Jews. A Jewish majority state can come to existence if and only if the local populace was uprooted and displace, and this is precisely why the Nakba took place. The ethnic cleansing was the mean to establish the manufactured Jewish majority that Israel is today, this is why we have millions of Palestinian refugees and why Israel vehemently denies them their right of return.

We can end the genocide – and not only the war – by liberating Palestine. This is a global priority and responsibility now.