The 1948 Genocide Convention was immediately abused to perpetrate more genocide. ‘Israel’ was founded the same year. It’s only this year (2024) that Israel is finally being indicted for its crimes. Israel’s crime isn’t really genocide, which they’ve been doing for decades. Their crime is doing it too quickly and too obviously, so much so that the International Court of Justice cannot remain blind.

South Africa has filed an 84-page case against ‘Israel’, which we’ll cover highlights of here. What SA has done is collect the genocidal acts, open incitement, and horrific results that we’ve all seen for the past three months. Israel has destroyed millions of years of human life in that time, razed Gaza just as they said they would, and traumatized an entire population, half of them children. Hell, they’ve traumatized the world, which is why South Africa is making this filing.

I’d say it’s a useful collection of links, but I don’t hold out too much hope for international institutions doing anything. Law without enforcement — like words without deeds — is ultimately moot. South Africa’s filing is good, but the Resistance has to deliver their own summons, with RPGs and an army of orphaned youth.

An Introduction To The Introduction

The 1948 Genocide Convention might as well be ‘Israel’s’ Constitution. They have openly committed every act for decades now. The South African case, emphasizes three points out of five, focusing on the past three months. Those points are “[A] killing Palestinians in Gaza, [B] causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and [C] inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” We’ll go through them one by one, but I think it’s worth reproducing part of the South African introduction at length:

Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.

We’ve all seen this happening and we’ve also seen Israeli officials, leaders, and citizens openly inciting genocide, not to mention American and European leaders and citizens. It’s basically a big colonizer pogrom, live-streamed globally. Incitement is usually the hardest thing to prove in a genocide case, but not this time. As they say in the Big Short, these guys aren’t confessing, they’re bragging. As the case goes on:

Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine.

Intent aside, there’s also what’s happening. Gaza is destroyed, almost everyone is displaced, and Israel has purposefully targeted hospitals, bakeries, sanitation, and energy to kill as many people as possible. As the case continues:

It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world, forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed. Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm.

Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system.

Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.

This basically covers it. It’s an open-and-shut case if it weren’t still an open wound, and ‘Israel’ hadn’t bombed all the hospitals to keep people bleeding and dying from infections. The deaths from starvation and disease will at least double the current count and Israel is doing this on purpose. They are bombing and starving a population of largely children to death in front of the whole world, traumatizing everyone with eyes and a heart.

We’ll go through the case point by point, but make no mistake. Nobody’s coming to save these people. The brave Axis of Resistance is liberating themselves, while these judges merely deliberate.

A) The Killing

I’m just going to reproduce the Genocide Convention in each section because it’s short.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

For highlights I rely on @hanoooonz, who describes herself as a “Palestinian, lawyer, certified hater (she/her),” which is more qualified than me. I merely add commentary as a rando Sri Lankan, in solidarity.

The first charge is killing, which one can know from the topline number of 30,000 and climbing. I remember saying 10,000 just weeks ago, which shows you how insanely bloodthirsty the Israelis are. As in any war — many more will be killed be deprivation and disease, which Israel is ‘strategically’ doing. This isn’t a normal murder case, it’s a mass murder in progress. As the filing notes:

And as Ms. Hanoooonz, esquire summarizes “Approximately 1 in every 100 people has been killed. 1 Palestinian in Gaza is killed every 4 minutes. Hundreds of multigenerational families have been killed in their entirety, with no remaining survivors.”

I hate the fact that these individual lives lost have to be put in pithy statistics to elicit sympathy. They are people and each death is a universe. As the Holy Quran (ie, Allah) says,

I feel like Israel has killed humanity a thousand times over. The highlighted part about men executed in front of their families is just one example. Israel and America have executed tens of thousands of people in front of the whole world. And they’re still going.

B) The Trauma

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

The second part of the Genocide Convention being used by ‘Israel’ as an instruction manual is causing them serious bodily and mental harm. Everyone in Gaza is traumatized, and everyone in the world by watching this happen. Children being amputated without anaesthetics, children are self-harming in constant fear, and adults that have to be there with them, somehow trying to make this all make sense and keep their own sanity. It’s impossible. I talk about the children, but women and men have no less right to bodily and mental integrity. The traumatization is total.

As the case states (via Hanooooz), “Children are telling us that they would rather die than continue living in Gaza right now.” And Israelis are gloating about it. “Images of mutilated and burned corpses are circulated in Israel via a channel called ’72 virgins — uncensored.’” Not to mention the social media of Israeli soldiers and citizens. It’s really ugly.

Proving intention once again, hospitals have been targeted over and over, while Israel mainly runs from open combat. The suffering is the point, and American weapons have been utilized to maximize the atrocities. This is just a textbook genocide, civilians being rounded up, stripped and led into stadiums, tortured and executed or just disappeared. And Israel brags about this. As if these are victories. They are losing the war and winning the genocide. It’s really cowardly.

C) The physical destruction

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Israeli Crime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “we will turn Gaza into an island of ruins,” which is precisely what they’ve done. The singular image of the ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’ has been Israel’s repeated and targeted attacks on hospitals. As the case states:

Israel has bombed doctors in their wards, in their homes, ambulances on the street, sniped patients in the halls. Just absolute lack of humanity, designed and planned (people had meetings about this!) to make Gaza unlivable.

The dead cannot even rest! Israel digs up and defiles the bodies! Israel bombs people with massive American munitions which damage limbs if not life, and then forces those people to undergo amputations without anaesthesia! Pregnant women must undergo c-sections without anaesthesia. And this is all intentional. The horror, the horror. The cruelty and the calculation.

Israel has also targeted and destroyed ‘life-sustaining infrastructure’ in general. Homes, every single university, schools, teachers, professors, mosques, churches, ancient buildings and new. As the case states, “Across Gaza, Israel has targeted the infrastructure and foundations of Palestinian life, deliberately creating conditions of life calculated to bring upon the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.”

What ties this all together is the open and frankly insane incitement. This is just a sample and there’s more being added every day.

They’re not even trying to hide it. This is a genocide in plain sight. Only justice remains blind.

D/E Preventing birth and stealing children

Finally, we’ll briefly discuss the two parts of the Genocide Convention South Africa doesn’t rely on, though these atrocities are also happening. Killing the unborn or being born, and stealing children.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

E) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we’ve seen, bombing hospitals and leaving incubators to die and horrifyingly decompose certainly prevents births. As does forcing mothers to undergo c-sections without anaesthesia, and bombing maternity hospitals, and sniping them in the streets, and preventing them from having access to clean water and food.

Israeli soldiers have also kidnapped Palestinian children. The full horror of what they’re doing is yet to be known. But I think we’ve seen enough. The Genocide Convention warrants prosecution for any of these acts. And ‘Israel’ has done them all.

Conclusion: No Conclusion

Read the case yourself, or read through Hanooooz’s highlights. Or just trust the evidence of your eyes, ears, and heart. Blow through the fog of war blown by the colonial media, trying to incite another genocide against ‘merciless Savages’,long after everyone knows better. This is the most well-documented genocide in human history and it’s happening live and 24/7. People are losing their lives every day, in front of us. It’s a global act of terror, brought to you by Israel and America, and they’ve already gotten away with so much. And this case won’t stop it.

At best the International Court of Justice will write an injunction (to further hear the case), which no one will enforce. Because international institutions are a farce, because the ‘rules-based order’ is precisely the violation of international law, and because — as Gramsci put it — the old world is dying and the new world still struggles to be born.

There is no conclusion in this text, only a litany of contusions upon the human soul. There is no resolution from these institutions, that will have to be won by the blood of many more martyrs — some fighters, some fallen — may Allah receive them all. While South Africa has done yeoman work in documenting the reason for resistance, it’s all a (literally) dead letter without works. Without the praxis of resistance. Hence it is not enough to condemn the offenses of Israel while also condemning the brave fighters defending these people.

So let me add some clarity the South Africa filing doesn’t. The filing also (lightly) condemns the Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th, and it shouldn’t. That act of great bravery was Palestinians breaking out of their concentration camp to attack their captors and take hostages to get the release of so many more. The Israeli response was to turn their concentration camp into an extermination camp, in front of the whole world. They were fighting the slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people over genocide, and Israel accelerated the process in response.

To support Palestinian freedom and condemn their freedom fighters is uselessness and moral cowardice. The Palestinians are a peaceful people who have known nothing but genocidal war since the colonizers dumped their guilt and greed upon them, in 1948. The cunning colonizers violated the Genocide Convention as soon as it was written and they will never listen to reason. They have to be resisted by any means necessary, a lesson the Palestinian people have learned most painfully, written in so much blood and suffering.

Written by indi.ca
Location: Sri Lanka 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I'm a writer. People also call me Indi or Jit. I was born in Canada, raised in America, and live in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.