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March 30, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
16:44
Anatomy of a Genocide - Analysis of the UN Report by Francesca Albanese
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While Atlantic Magazine was dedicating months worth of journalistic resources to investigating whether powerless college kids have opinions slightly outside of mainstream acceptability, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine was engaged in what one might reasonably say was a slightly more pressing endeavor, reporting on whether Israel is, in fact, committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Here is Francesca Albanese explaining her task.
Following nearly six months of unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied Gaza, It is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of and to present my finding, the anatomy of a genocide.
History teaches us that genocide is a process, not a single act.
It starts with the dehumanization of a group as other, and the denial of that group's humanity, and ends with the destruction of the group in whole or in part.
The dehumanization of Palestinians as a group is the hallmark of their history of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and apartheid.
In the words of Edward Said, Palestinians were made orphans of a homeland by the creation of the State of Israel and its continuous policies intended to erase their presence from their land.
Genocide is defined in international law as specific sets of acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.
It is often referred to as the crime of crimes due to its complexity and because of the challenge of proving the specific intent as the Convention requires.
And yet, this complexity is not about the creation of a hierarchy among atrocity crimes.
It's rather a reflection of a different nature and scale.
The heightened threshold for intent Namely, to destroy a group as prescribed by Article 2 of the Genocide Convention must be proven directly or inferred from facts which admit of no other reasonable inference.
But when genocidal intent is so conspicuous, so ostentatious as it is in Gaza, we cannot avert our eyes.
We must confront genocide.
We must prevent it.
And we must punish it.
I hope you really took that in.
Here we have Albanese.
She's a human rights lawyer hired by the UN Human Rights Council to provide analysis.
She is telling them in no uncertain terms that there are, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide.
The viewpoint maligned as fringe and hysterical by the U.S.
media is now finding widespread validation among everyone from U.N.-hired experts to the International Court of Justice to a majority of Biden 2020 voters to cultural figures like Joe Rogan, as we showed you earlier.
And as time passes, an awareness of what has already unfolded seeps in.
The truth is only going to become more undeniable, which is why when questioned about this report, U.S.
State Department spokesperson Matt Miller reacted in the most predictable way possible.
Rather than engaging with the compelling facts of the report, he smeared its author as an anti-Semite.
Let me ask you, have you, did you see or read the report made by Francesca Albanese yesterday in Geneva, where she cited, where she actually, what she showed was irrefutable, as far as she's concerned, irrefutable evidence that Israel engaged in genocide.
Did you see the report?
What is your comment?
I did see the report.
Let me say a couple things about it.
First, we have Long for long standing for a long standing period of time opposed the mandate of this special repertoire, which we believe is not productive.
And when it comes to the individual who holds that position, I can't help but note.
A history of anti-Semitic comments that she has made that have been reported.
She made anti-Semitic comments?
She has, and comments she made in December that appeared to justify the attacks of October 7th, so I think it's important to take that into account.
But with respect to the report itself, we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.
But at the same time, we are deeply concerned by the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and that's why we have Press the the government of Israel on multiple occasions to everything it can to minimize those civilian casualties.
Yeah, well, she's been getting a lot of death threats and other threats and so on, you know, because people think she made anti-semitic comments and so on.
Let me just go outside.
You can't make a comment like that without letting me respond.
Obviously, death threats against anyone are inappropriate.
Okay.
Of course, Francesca Albanese has not made anti-Semitic comments.
It's a baseless smear.
She has, though, been critical of Israel and is now offering compelling evidence and analysis of grave crimes which directly implicate the United States and Matt Miller himself.
His nasty response there is an indication of how significant this report actually is.
It's especially impactful for three key reasons.
First, because of the clarity and analytical precision with which it is written.
Second, because as a report by a U.N.
hired expert delivered for the benefit of that body, it may carry special weight with the International Court of Justice itself, a U.N.
body.
And finally, because it calls for specific actions to be taken by U.N.
member states, including or perhaps especially the United States of America.
Now, let's start with some of the details from the report which led Albanese to her dramatic conclusion.
She identifies three genocidal acts as defined by the Genocide Convention.
Number one, killing members of the group.
Number two, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
And number three, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Now, as evidence of these acts, she cites everything from the tonnage of explosives used in just the first several months of the the onslaught, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, to the lifelong trauma those who survive will no doubt struggle with after seeing every aspect of their civilian lives destroyed, and the siege, which is causing 10 children to starve to death every day.
She writes in the report, quote, Gaza has been completely sacked.
Israel's relentless targeting of all means basic survival has compromised the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to live on that land.
This engineered collapse of life-sustaining infrastructure corresponds to the stated intentions to make Gaza, quote, permanently impossible to live in where no human being can exist.
She also, of course, critically, spends quite a bit of time on intent.
The mens rea, or mental state required to prove genocide, includes both a general intent to commit the acts and a specific intent to eliminate a group in whole or in part.
This would be the now somewhat infamous dolus specialis.
Here's a portion of what Albanese writes with regard to how intent may be established and why she believes that intent has been demonstrated with regards to Israel in a uniquely clear-cut way.
Quote, the nature and scale of the atrocities, if demonstrably capable of achieving the genocidal outcome, are strong evidence of intent.
The words of state authorities, including dehumanizing language combined with acts, are considered a circumstantial basis from which intent can be inferred.
Dehumanization can be understood as foundational to the process of genocide.
Evidence of context may help determine the intent and must be considered with the actual conduct.
Conduct.
Intent should be evident above all from words and deeds and patterns of purposeful action, such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn.
In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present.
Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced, High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent.
She then proceeds to list a selection of such harrowing public statements, many of which you will probably already be familiar, and which, taken together, paint an undeniable portrait of dehumanization and intention to annihilate, coming from every level of government and echoing throughout society.
For anyone who has acquainted themselves with the South African filing against Israel, the facts and utterances offered in these sections will likely be pretty familiar.
But there were two areas in which I thought Albanese's report was particularly illuminating.
First, she systematically exposed the way that Israel has perverted the language of international humanitarian law in order to justify crimes against humanity.
Albanese writes that Israel has used this jargon to transform all civilians into human shields.
After October 7th, this macro-characterization of Gaza civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel's top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, accomplices, or human shields among whom Hamas is embedded.
In November, Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs defined the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields and accused Hamas of using the civilian population as human shields.
The ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately embedded in the population to such an extent that it cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming civilians or civilian objects have been targeted that an attack was unlawful.
Two rhetorical elements, she writes, of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a legitimate, targetable shield.
The use of the all-encompassing combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects, Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.
Another particular strength of this report is how Albanese acknowledges the context of this process of genocide, arguing that since the birth of the Zionist Settler Colonial Project, the groundwork has been laid for exactly this current outcome of annihilation.
That's a radical departure.
From the liberal Zionist claim that Israel simply lost its way under Bibi and the current horrors are due to a few bad apples, rather than being the logical outgrowth of a decades-long attempt to ethnically cleanse this land of its Arab inhabitants.
Take a listen to how she describes this logic and its importance to the present.
The genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a longstanding settler colonial process over Asia of the native Palestinians.
For over 76 years, this process has oppressed the Palestinians as a people in every way imaginable, crushing their inalienable right to self-determination demographically, economically, territorially, culturally, and politically.
Israel has attempted to displace them, expropriate their land and other resources, and ultimately replace them.
The colonial amnesia of the West has condoned Israel's colonial settler project from the violent history of the very birth of the State of Israel to its oppressive occupation since 1967, the crippling closure of Gaza since 1993 and its military assaults on Gaza since 2007.
The world now sees the bitter fruit of the impunity afforded to Israel.
This was a tragedy foretold.
Tragedy foretold.
Now, the report's not particularly long.
It's about 25 pages.
It's not intended to be exhaustive, but it is a highly effective summation and analysis of what's becoming increasingly undeniable.
This is not, it's never been, a targeted hunt for Hamas.
It's an excuse to attempt to finish the job of Zionism by fully dominating the Palestinians, destroying them in whole or in part, establishing a new demographic reality that can safeguard their state policy of Jewish supremacy.
The second reason that this report is consequential is because, as a report prepared for and delivered to the U.N., it may carry special weight with the International Court of Justice, which is, of course, a U.N.
body.
The International Court of Justice has already determined that South Africa's case against Israel on violation of the Genocide Convention is strong enough to be plausible.
I had the chance to speak with Mouin Roubani this week for Crystal Collins Friends, fresh off his debate on the Lex Friedman podcast.
He went so far as to say that Albany's report obligates The ICJ2 takes seriously a finding of genocide.
Take a listen.
I think the significant issue here is that the International Court of Justice, unlike the International Criminal Court, is a UN organ.
It's one of the principal UN organs and therefore you could almost consider it a kind of obligation, even if that's putting it too strongly.
The ICJ will take UN documents particularly seriously.
responded positively to South Africa's application in December was because so much of the information contained in the South African application was based on UN sources.
So the ICJ basically had to either confirm the validity of what the UN was saying or go against its own organization, so to speak.
I think this report is a little different because of the way it was produced.
But nevertheless, it will now become an official UN document.
It will have to be carefully studied by the ICJ.
And again, I have to read it in detail, but from what I've seen, it seems to be a well-argued summary of the case against Israel, which once again finds that there is a plausible case against Israel for genocide.
And finally, this report is significant because it demands action of the UN and its member states.
After all, it is incumbent on every signatory to the genocide conventions not just to abide by the conventions themselves, but to work to prevent genocide and to punish genocide.
Specifically, Albania calls for a complete arms embargo of Israel and suggests sanctions may also be required to secure an immediate and lasting ceasefire.
Unfortunately, of course, the U.S.
has gone in the polar opposite direction.
The very week that this report, titled Anatomy of a Genocide, was presented, the U.S.
outrageously claimed that Israel was acting in compliance with international humanitarian law, accepting that country's perversion of such law and the logic that all civilians and civilian infrastructure can be safely marked for destruction and extermination.
This certification was granted Specifically, in order to enable the weapons shipments on which Israel is wholly dependent for continuation of their genocidal acts.
The U.S.
State Department additionally asserted that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid.
Which is funny, since the U.S.
has been reduced to dropping aid into Gaza from the sky at great danger to civilians.
As if into some hostile territory, rather than into a strip of land controlled by our great ally, Israel.
Those of us who have been paying attention have been watching this genocide unfold clearly for months.
From the reporting on how civilian power targets were being intentionally destroyed, to the early announcement of a complete siege in which Palestinians were described as human animals, to dire warnings of starvation and seeing those dire warnings becoming a nightmare reality.
But for some reason, the last couple weeks do seem to have really shifted perceptions.
That Al Jazeera drone video showing four unarmed Palestinians strolling along, obviously before being killed by a robot, which was controlled by some murderous human being who was doing the bidding of their entire genocidal government, seems to have been what flipped Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, the flower massacre.
Where over 100 Palestinians were murdered for the crime of seeking aid for their starving families.
That seems to have brought home for many the scale of barbarism and cruelty.
The levels of absolute desperation that Israel has driven these people to.
With our help, of course.
A new poll taken after the Flower Massacre actually shows a majority of Americans now disapprove of Israel's military action.
Democrats disagree by a margin of 75 to 18.
In addition to everything else, this report is validation.
You aren't crazy.
The horrors you're watching every day are exactly what they seem to be.
The powerless college kids who oppose this genocide?
They're not the maniacs.
They're not the monsters.
The supposedly civilized class of D.C.
elites who have turned the Gaza Strip into a pit of human misery, death, starvation, and despair?
They are the true demons.
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