UK
ICJ rules Israel’s actions in Gaza fall under Genocide convention
Court in Case orders Israel to take ‘all’ measures to avoid further genocide, as South Africa strikes huge blow for Palestinians and humanity
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that at least some (!) of Israel’s actions in Gaza fall under the provisions of the Genocide Convention and that Israel must take a list of measures to prevent further genocide, including immediate, ongoing and adequate humanitarian relief, which South Africa says must amount to a ceasefire order to allow relief to reach those who need it, and the prevention of any attempts to destroy evidence of genocide. Israel must return to the ICJ in a month with a report on what it has done to comply with the orders.
The court also threw out Israel’s request for the case to be taken off the genocide case list.
The rulings were by a huge majority – on two of the orders, even the Israeli judge on the ICJ, a hard-line Zionist, voted against Israel. No matter how Netanyahu’s regime tries to spin it, Israel is now on trial for genocide.
South Africa, in bringing the case, has struck a huge blow for Palestinians, for justice and for humanity.
Of course, an Israeli regime that has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, has flattened hospitals, schools and homes and conducted mass arrests and summary executions is unlikely to listen, but other countries now have an unequivocal duty to act to prevent Israel’s genocide.
The court did not order a complete halt to military operations in Gaza, but this is not the victory that Israel has tried to claim. As Ali Abunimah pointed out, the language of ‘ceasefire’ is not applicable in a one-sided slaughter:
And the court has ordered Israel to stop killing Palestinians:
The complete list of orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to Israel regarding the South African genocide case against Israel. pic.twitter.com/NRBploz4t4
— Furkan Gözükara (@GozukaraFurkan) January 26, 2024
But how big a blow to Israel this judgment represents can be seen in the furious, spitting reaction of the regime and it’s spokespeople to it.
From now on, any government or so-called ‘opposition’ which, like the US and UK, now provides assistance or cover to the Israelis in their mass slaughter of innocents is now expressly on the wrong side of international law.
So toxic is international realpolitik that this will not stop them, but their already shredded claims to stand for order or democracy are now dust. Shame on them forever.
Congratulations South Africa. Solidarity with the people of Palestine and all who stand with and for justice and humanity.
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The ‘Treasury View’ makes no sense…
The Treasury View of ‘sound money’ has come under critisism from the Institute for Government (IoG). They say that: The Treasury’s outsized power creates problems for government and that Excessive power, rather than ‘orthodox’ thinking, is the main problem with the Treasury. ain’t that the truth? and also that: Future governments would benefit if brave... Read more
14 nations with greater population than US and EU combined co-sponsor ICJ Gaza genocide case
Nations covering over a billion people back prosecution while UK shamefully fails to back case – despite backing Myanmar genocide case at ICJ just six weeks ago
Fourteen nations with a population of over a billion people – more than the combined populations of the US and EU – have formally co-sponsored South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide. The nations are:
Turkey
Indonesia
Malaysia
Bolivia
Nicaragua
Maldives
Venezuela
Namibia
Morocco
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Iran
Jordan
Despite co-signing a genocide case against Myanmar only six weeks ago – specifically because of Myanmar’s crimes against Rohingya children – the UK continues to refuse to back South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel, which has murdered more than thirty thousand people, including around thirteen thousand children.
Yet again, the UK and US are backing the oppressors against the oppressed – and the world knows it.
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Video: former US assistant SecDef agrees kibbutz/rave deaths caused by IDF
In ‘extraordinary’ interview, Chas Freeman blames Israeli forces for ‘massacre’ and says Israel has equated itself with ‘burned buildings and dead babies’
A former US assistant Secretary of Defence has blamed Israeli forces for the mass deaths inflicted on kibbutz residents and rave-goers, either intentionally through Israel’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ of killing potential hostages rather than let them be taken captive, or through poor training and discipline.
The explosive video was posted by French observer Arnaud Bertrand, who earlier spotted former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev’s inadvertent admission that Israel had killed the many people found incinerated after the raid:
In a series of posts accompanying the video on Twitter/X, Bertrand noted that:
– [Freeman] agrees that many of the victims of Oct 7th were killed by the Israeli army in the form of “undisciplined fire by helicopters with hellfire missiles or by tanks with incendiary rounds directed at buildings”. In the case of the victims of the music festival he even says they “were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces”.
To him this “disgrace in military terms” stems from a “lack of discipline and training necessary to respond” but also from the IDF’s “Hannibal directive”, which “says that rather than get into bargaining over hostage exchange you should just kill the Israeli hostages along with their captors.”
– He says that with Oct 7th “Hamas had 2 objectives”:
1) “Put the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda”, something he says they’ve “succeeded” in doing since they’re is “widespread recognition outside Israel that only self-determination for Palestine in the form of a 2-state solution can provide security to Israel”. He says that even in “the US, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel, many Jews have come to realize that this is the case. Younger Jews in particular in the U.S. are very disillusioned with Zionism and don’t want to suffer contagion from it in the form of antisemitism, which is actually growing now as a result of Israeli actions”.
2) “Give Hamas enormous popularity among Palestinians because they are seen as having stood up, as having been willing to accept death rather than captivity”. He refers to Norman Finkelstein’s “analogy of slave revolts in the U.S.” and particularly the “1831 revolt by Nat Turner, a well-educated very intelligent enslaved African who led a slave revolt in Southern Virginia which had as its objective the murder of every white person they encountered.” He says it “raises a moral question: ‘Is the violence of the slave-owner morally the same as the violence of the slave trying to end that violence?’. The same moral question arises with Israeli oppression of Palestinians versus Palestinian resistance to oppression.”– All in all he concludes that much like the violence against African-Americans that followed slave revolts in the 19th century, the Israeli vengeance against Palestinians “won’t be remembered fondly by anyone in the future”. In fact he goes as far as saying that “when people think of Israel in the past they thought of it as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust… now they will think of it as the home of perpetrators of genocide. When they think of Israel, they will think of burned buildings and dead babies. This is an image problem of a fundamental nature and from the point of view of Israel it strips Israel of its protection by charges of antisemitism against anyone who is critical of Israel because to be critical of people who are carrying out genocide cannot be antisemitism, it cannot be considered immoral. Antisemitism is a despicable attitude but to oppose genocide by Israel is not.”
With Israeli families also now awake to the fact of the mass ‘friendly fire’ deaths – which the IDF quietly admitted were ‘immense and complex’ – Israel’s narrative of ‘Hamas savagery’ on the day of the raid is fundamentally discredited.
That does not, of course, cause a moment’s pause for the regime’s apologists, western politicians or western ‘mainstream’ media in repeating it.
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Video: Starmer supports UK hitting Houthis trying to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Red Tory ‘leader’ backs Shapps plan to stop Yemeni de facto government attempt to block trade shipping to pressure Israel into ending mass slaughter
‘Zionist without qualification’ Keir Starmer has said that he supports the Tory government’s plan to use UK military forces to stop Houthis – the de facto government in a large part of Yemen – blocking Israeli-bound shipping, a measure the Yemenis are taking, with considerable economic impact, to try to pressure Israel into ending its genocide in Gaza.
Starmer told Sky News that he backs Defence Secretary Grant Shapps – far from the first time he has supported the Tories at a cost of innocent lives:
Yet again, while many of the world’s developing nations and the vital BRICS bloc are backing the prosecution of Israel for its crimes, the oppositionless UK is on the wrong side of world events and backing a genocidal regime that has slaughtered more than 30,000 people, more than ninety percent of them innocent civilians and more than two thirds women and children.
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Israel planning to transfer Palestinians to Congo
Ethnic cleansing plans outed further but still ignored by western ‘mainstream’ media
Image: ActionAid
Israel is negotiating with Congo – it is unclear from reports which of the two neighbouring Congos – and other African nations to transfer the Palestinian people, according to reports in the Times of Israel and its sister site Zman Israel.
Both the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) regularly see serious human rights violations, including massacres. A 2022 US Department of State report on human rights in the Republic, which is commonly known as Congo Brazzaville after its capital city to distinguish it from its neighbour – states that:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference
and more.
In the DRC, human rights groups have noted massacres and other human rights violations. Amnesty International said in 2022 that the DRC:
continued to experience serious human rights violations, including mass killings in the context of armed conflict and inter-communal violence, a crackdown on dissent and ill-treatment of detainees. People from regions affected by armed conflict, including eastern DRC, were particularly affected amid mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis. The authorities continued to show a lack of political will to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations to account. The right to education was violated.
The Times quoted a ‘senior’ security cabinet source and comments by Israeli minister Gila Gamliel:
Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells [journalist] Shalom Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”
The UK government has disgraced itself by continued attempts to transfer desperate refugees to Rwanda, attempts continually blocked by the courts – but the Israeli regime was the first to do it, sending around 4,000 Black refugees fleeing war in Eritrea and Sudan to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018 before discontinuing what it called ‘voluntary’ departure – similar to the ‘voluntary emigration’ euphemism it uses for its ethnic cleansing plan, alongside ‘humanitarian migration’.
Israel has an appalling record toward Black people, even Black Jews – and last year threatened to deport them, too. The SAGE Race & Class Journal notes that:
Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements.
Now, as well as the already-outed plan to force huge numbers of Palestinians out of Gaza into the Egyptian desert, Israel is actively working on plans to force more out of the Middle East altogether and into Africa. The Israeli regime’s war crimes continue to pile up.
Despite the similarities with the UK’s racist government, at the time of writing the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media have not reported Israel’s plan – as has been the case with much of Israel’s racism and criminality.
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Video: Ukraine ambassador – Ukraine had agreed peace deal with Russia
Deal in spring 2022 scuppered by US and UK
Oleksandr Chalyi, left, at the GCSP event
The Ukraine war could have been ended more than a year and a half ago, according to a senior Ukrainian peace negotiator – and the deal had the personal approval of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi told a Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) event that the deal was ‘concluded’, but was postponed ‘for some reason’:
As Canadian journalist Aaron Maté has pointed out, another top Ukrainian peace negotiator has said that the UK and US prevented the agreement being put in place because they did not want Ukraine to agree to neutrality. All the many thousands of lives lost since could have been saved, as well as the huge financial cost of continuing the war, which has been used by the Ukrainian regime to ban opposition parties and take over Ukraine’s newspapers and broadcasters.
Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski responded to the revelation:
Wow! Ukraine Ambassador Chalyi, who participated in peace talks with Russia in Spring 2022, states that “we concluded” “Istanbul Communique” & “were very close in… April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement” & that Putin “tried everything possible to conclude agreement with Ukraine.”
He says that it was Putin’s “personal decision to accept the text of this communique.” Such peace deal framework to end war was also confirmed by head of Ukrainian delegation, officials close to Zelensky, ex-Israeli PM, ex-German chancellor, Putin, Turkish FM, former US officials & Arestovych. First five stated that deal was blocked by US/UK.
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Mass graves, grave questions: Britain’s secret Srebrenica role
Widely ignored official reports and never-before-seen declassified files suggest shadowy British special forces operatives played a crucial role in one of the 20th century’s most notorious and controversial massacres. In July 2023, few media observers took notice when influential British intelligence operative-turned-lawmaker Alicia Kearns issued a public call for Western boots on the ground in the former Yugoslavia. Addressing a packed session of the House of Commons, Foreign Affairs Committee chair Kearns made the alarming call: “I…urge the Government: let […]
The post Mass graves, grave questions: Britain’s secret Srebrenica role first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Mass graves, grave questions: Britain’s secret Srebrenica role appeared first on The Grayzone.
How do We Fix this Brexit Mess?
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. George Orwell The 5th and final part of this Brexit series analyses the state of the nation and recommends ways forward, not... Read more