A consensus is building. On 5 December, Amnesty International concluded after an investigation that “Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”. A few days later, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) stated that after research and analysis, it concluded that “there is a legally sound argument that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza”.
A few days after that, Human Rights Watch (HRW) declared that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide”, and Médecins Sans Frontières reported that its medical “teams in the north of Gaza are seeing clear signs of ethnic cleansing”. Earlier in November, HRW also concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”, and appeared to “also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing”.
Following the issuing of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant by the international criminal court (ICC), also in November, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, all these recent judgments end the year with an emphatic categorisation of the assault in Gaza as a violation of international law. They join the International Commission of Jurists and the UN in condemning Israel’s war. The country, and its head of state, are now, according to the courts and human rights organisations that make up the world’s legal and moral authorities, outlaws.
But the judgments, strong language and suggested measures echo in a vacuum: there is no enforcement. The US continues to defend Israel against an emerging global consensus and to arm it. Other supporters use the language of loopholes and riddles that we have become so accustomed to since the start of the war. The UK suspended a small portion of its arms exports, but insists that it remains a “staunch ally” of the country and would still engage with Netanyahu, but also would somehow still comply with its legal obligations. France came up with an impressive legal reading, stating that Netanyahu in fact enjoyed immunity as Israel was not a signatory to the ICC (a reading that would also extend immunity to Vladimir Putin and Omar al-Bashir).
Meanwhile, more evidence mounts that Gaza is undergoing not just a law-breaking, human rights-violating assault, but a historic one. According to Airwars, an organisation that monitors civilian casualties: “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st-century air campaign.” The view from several months of research efforts is supplemented by the confessions and testimonies of Israeli military personnel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz featured accounts from IDF soldiers who served in Gaza, stating that civilians, even children, are being treated as combatants. The regime of arbitrary, even competitive killing, was described as “the wild west on steroids”.
These descriptions do not only capture legal and militaristic methods of engagement, they detail killing, starvation, maiming, torture and psychological trauma that is impossible to fathom.
These investigations reveal the permutations of pain that can be inflicted on a civilian population. Tiny broken bodies, rotting babies, flattened corpses, mass graves, levelled neighbourhoods and the wild, wild grief of the bereaved. It is a spectacle of slaughter. All unfolding in plain sight, livestreamed and posted by Palestinian citizens and journalists, witnessed by outsiders, and described by Israelis themselves.
Despite the overwhelming evidence we see before us, still nothing changes. The war continues. Things that appeared to be breakthroughs, such as the first hearing by the international court of justice (ICJ), now look like exercises in observation. It is profoundly disorienting, crushing even, to begin to feel that actors, no matter what criminal thresholds they breach, will not be stopped or held to justice.
But the failure is not in the descriptions of what is happening in Gaza. The failure, as Lina Mounzer wrote, is “of the rotten substructure of the world within which this language is meant to function”. The danger now is that Palestinians die twice, once in physical reality and second in a moral one where the powerful diminish the very standards that shape the world as we know it. By refusing even to accept the designations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, let alone act upon them, Israel’s allies force an adaptation on to the world after which it simply becomes accepted that rights are not bestowed by humanity, but by the parties who decide who is human.
Which is why the outrage must continue, even if it is reduced to note taking and report writing. Whatever semantic acrobatics are performed at podiums across Europe and the US, these reports document the fact that a crime is taking place. The rights of those in Gaza may have been vaporised on the ground, but they can be upheld in the public record. Whenever the war ends, those accounts will prevent, or at least compromise, attempts to rewrite history and deny atrocities.
As the murder continues, what stops it from being a perfect crime is that people remain on the scene, loudly call it murder, point to the culprit, say the names of the dead, mourn them, hold vigils, and fiercely protect their rights for restitution. When the time comes, Palestinians are owed a huge debt of reparations. A ledger of what they have been subjected to must be kept.
“If I must die,” wrote the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed early in the war on Gaza, “let it bring hope, let it be a tale.” That hope is also in not allowing death to pass merely as a fact. If they must die, let it be a crime.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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