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Retired International war correspondent Chris Hedges, who many times put his own life on the line in war zones, needs to stop hedging his bets, by continuing to give Hamas a free pass, and to help him do that, Chris needs to leave his Princeton armchair and head to Gaza and talk with people there and hear what they think about Israel and Hamas and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, and report that.
The Chris Hedges Report
The Case for Genocide
The International Court of Justice may be all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and genocide.
CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 12, 2023
The exhaustive 84-page brief submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide is hard to refute. Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate killing, wholesale destruction of infrastructure, including housing, hospitals and water treatment plants, along with its use of starvation as a weapon, accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from its political and military leaders who speak of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing the 2.3 Palestinians, makes a strong case for genocide.
Israel’s smearing of South Africa as “the legal arm” of Hamas exemplifies the bankruptcy of its defense, a smear replicated by those who claim that demonstrations held to call for a ceasefire and protect Palestinian human rights are “anti-Semitic.” Israel, its genocide live streamed to the world, has no substantial counter argument.
But that does not mean the judges on the court will rule in Israel’s favor. The pressure the U.S. will bring – Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called the South African charges “meritless” - on the judges, drawn from the member states of the U.N., will be intense.
A ruling of genocide is a stain that Israel - which weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its brutalization of the Palestinians - would find hard to remove. It would undercut Israel’s insistence that Jews are eternal victims. It would shatter the justification for Israel’s indiscriminate killing of unarmed Palestinians and construction of the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza, along with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would sweep away the immunity to criticism enjoyed by the Israel lobby and its Zionist supporters in the U.S., who have successfully equated criticisms of the “Jewish State” and support for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.
Over 23,700 Palestinians, including over 10,000 children, have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas and other resistance fighters breached the security barriers around Gaza. Some 1,200 people were killed – there is strong evidence that some of the victims were killed by Israeli tank crews and helicopter pilots that intentionally targeted the some 200 hostages along with their captors. Thousands more Palestinians are missing, presumed buried under the rubble. Israeli attacks have left over 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed, the majority of them women and children. Thousands more Palestinian civilians, including children, have been arrested, blindfolded, numbered, beaten, forced to strip to their underwear, loaded onto trucks and transported to unknown locations.
A ruling by the court could be years away. But South Africa is asking for provisional measures that would demand Israel cease its military assault – in essence a permanent ceasefire. This decision could come within two or three weeks. It is a decision that is not based on the final ruling by the court, but on the merits of the case brought by South Africa. The court would not, by demanding Israel end its hostilities in Gaza, define the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocide. It would confirm that there is the possibility of genocide, what the South African lawyers call acts that are “genocidal in character.”
The case will not be determined by the documentation of specific crimes, even those defined as war crimes. It will be determined by genocidal intent - the intent to eradicate in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group – as defined in the Genocide Convention.
These acts collectively include the targeting of refugee camps and other densely packed civilian areas with 2,000-pound bombs, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the destruction of the health care system and its effects on children and pregnant women - the U.N. estimates there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day - as well as repeated genocidal statements by leading Israeli politicians and generals.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu equated Gaza with Amalek, a nation hostile to the Israelites in the Bible, and cited the Biblical injunction to kill every Amalek man, woman, child or animal. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated, as the South African lawyers told the court, that everybody in Gaza is responsible for what happened on Oct. 7 because they voted for Hamas, although half the population in Gaza are children who are too young to vote. But even if the entire population of Gaza did vote for Hamas this does not make them a legitimate military target. They are still, under the rules of war, civilians, and entitled to protection. They are also entitled under international law to resist their occupation via armed struggle.
The South African lawyers, who compared Israel’s crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa, showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians – they sing as they danced “There are no uninvolved civilians” - as evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli war machine and political system. They provided the court with photos of mass graves where bodies were buried “often unidentified.” No one – including newborns – was spared, the South African lawyer Adila Hassim, Senior Counsel, explained to the court.
The South African lawyers told the court the “first genocidal act is mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.” The second genocidal act, they stated, is the serious bodily or mental harm inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza in violation of Article 2B of the Genocide Convention. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another lawyer and legal scholar representing South Africa, argued that “Israel’s political leaders, military commanders and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent.”
Lior Haiat, spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, calledThursday’s three hour hearing one of the “greatest shows of hypocrisy in history, compounded by a series of false and baseless claims.” He accused South Africa of seeking to allow Hamas to return to Israel to “commit war crimes.”
Israeli jurists, in their response on Friday, called the South African charges “unfounded, “absurd” and amounting to “libel.” Israel’s legal team said it had – despite U.N. reports of widespread starvation and infectious diseases from a breakdown in sanitation and shortage of clean water – not impeded humanitarian assistance. Israel defended attacks on hospitals, calling them “Hamas command centers.” It told the court it was acting in self-defense. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent,” said Christopher Staker, a barrister for Israel.
Israeli leaders accuse Hamas with carrying out genocide, although legally if you are the victims of genocide you are not permitted to commit genocide. Hamas is also not a state. It is not, therefore, a party to the Genocide Convention. The Hague, for this reason, has no jurisdiction over the organization. Israel also claims the Palestinians are warned to evacuate areas that will come under attack and provided with “safe areas,” although as the South African lawyers documented, “safe areas” are routinely bombed by Israel with numerous civilian casualties.
Israel and the Biden administration intend to prevent any temporary injunction by the court, not because the court can force Israel to halt its military assaults, but because of the optics, which are already disastrous. The ICJ’s ruling depends on the Security Council for enforcement – which given the veto power by the U.S., renders any ruling against Israel moot. The second objective of the Biden administration is to make sure Israel is not found guilty of committing genocide. They will be unrelenting in this campaign, heavily pressuring the governments that have jurists on the court not to find Israel guilty. Russia and China, who have jurists in The Hague, are battling their own charges of genocide and may decide it is not in their interests to find Israel guilty.
The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt what, by its own admission, is Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including “dumb” bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. It insists it upholds the rule of law while it subverts the legal mechanism that can halt the genocide.
Cynicism pervades every word Biden and Blinken utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue this might be the case. But it cannot be the case with genocide.
Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
Sloan Bashinsky
Chris, I appreciate your dogged, thankless effort to shine bright sunshine on the Gaza horror show. Here’s a link to a recent report in Middle East Monitor,
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240111-hamas-sinwar-sends-important-letter-to-movement-members/
in which Yahya Sinwar tells a very different story about how the war in Gaza is going for Israel’s military, and how proud Sinwar is of the Gaza people, whom he encourages to hang tight and have faith and keep supporting Hamas.
I agree with just about everything you write about Israel, and having practiced law in Alabama, and having had a law school professor, Clinton McGhee, a University of Alabama Law School graduate, who went into the U.S. Army during World War II and prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg, I appreciate your reporting of the genocide complaint filed by South Africa against Israel before the United Nations.
As you pointed out, getting to a final judgment against Israel will take a while, and might never come about, because of U.S. resistance. But even if there is a final judgment against Israel, I don’t see any way the U.N. can enforce it against Israel. Nor do I see how the World Court can enforce a judgment against Israel. But then, that’s blanced by, as you also pointed out, the UN has no jurisdiction over Hamas, which is an Islam outfit that claims to answer only to Allah.
Where I have steadily differed with you is you continue to ignore the huge elephant in the Gaza living room, Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar, who was in an Israel prison for a long time, where he learned and carefully studied Israelis and Israel, and analyzed Israel the way a very good psychiatrist would analyze you or me. Seeing no way to destroy Israel, as called for in Hamas’s charter, Sinwar concluded only way to defeat Israel was in the court of public opinion.
Sinwar was released in a hostage exchange, and he implemented what he calculated would punch every last button in the higher regions of the Israel government and its military, which was the October 7 attack, which happened to me my 81st birthday, which in my line of work was not a coincidence.
The October 7 attack was clever bait, which Sinwar hoped Israel would swallow hook, line and sinker, and do the very things in Gaza about which you and others have written so much. It was a brilliant strategy to let Israel, and people like yourself, who have large audiences, and the news media and the social media, destroy Israel in the court of public opinion. For free, not one red cent did Sinwar or Hamas pay for all that tree publicity.
While Sinwar tells the people of Gaza he and Hamas are with them, he and Hamas use them as Israel cannon fodder martyrs, who go straight to Paradise when they are killed by IDF. That’s fundamental to radical Islam’s belief system.
So, Chris, keep pounding Israel, and President Biden and the U.S. Congress for sticking with Israel, and in that way be Sinwar’s free press secretary. He loves you for doing that, and for leaving his sorry ass alone.PITA ContrarianHedges is a turncoat ...He has actually taken sides with the globalists on the issues of climate change and vax-related bodily autonomy ... and he's betting the ranch that you won't notice.Sloan BashinskyI’m not familiar with that, but I keep wondering if Hedges’s paid subscriptions increased after the Oct 7 attack, which gave him a whole lot of fresh stuff to write about, and if his paid subscriptions did increase, did he donate his “war profits” to the beleaguered people of Gaza?
PITA Contrarian
I've followed Hedges as closely as anybody this past decade ...
He used to be my hero ... and I'm willing to bet that he pockets every last cent of income generated by his Substack writings ... he has 60k subscribers here ... In a 2021 interview with Jimmy Dore, Hedges actually volunteered to him that he resides in Princeton, NJ ... so I did my research and discovered that the average price of a house in that city is between $700k-$800k! ... and when his otherwise excellent show ON CONTACT on RTV was cancelled, he brazenly said "I cannot continue without YOUR support"! ...
No Chris, you do not need our support:Sloan Bashinsky
Perhaps former international war correspondent Chris, who many times put his own life on the line in war zones, needs to stop hedging his bets, by continuing to give Hamas a free pass, and to help him do that, perhaps Chris needs to leave his Princeton armchair and head to Gaza and talk with the people of Gaza and hear what they have to say about what they think about Israel and Hamas and its leader, Yahya Sinwar:-), and then he pulls out his notepad and finds an internet connection and tells us all about that :-)
PITA Contrarian
Yes, once a true activist, Hedges has morphed into an armchair QB ...
Your suggestion that he do some real "boots-on-the-ground" reporting is excellent ...
He has now been writing almost exclusively about Gaza for the past 3 months, while things are going to hell here in the U.S. ... there are people out there like Hedges' friend Naomi Wolf and former Phizer exec Karen Kingston literally risking their lives to expose the truth ... but Hedges now hides risk-free behind the heinous crimes of Gaza ...
Sloan Bashinsky
Amen.
I wonder if Hedges gives any thought to what it will be like in the so-called holy land, if Donald Trump gets back in the White House, after telling Israel he is their best friend, hoping to get the vote of every Jew and conservative Christian in America? :-)
WikipediaYahya Sinwar (Arabic: يحيى السنوار, romanized: Yaḥyá al-Sanwār, born 1962), also spelled Yehya Sinwar,[3] is a Palestinian politician who has been leader of Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political and military organization that rules the Gaza Strip, since 2017.[4][5]
Born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza in 1962, his family was expelled or fled from Al-Majdal Asqalan (Ashkelon) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He finished his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies.
For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.[4] Sinwar was one of the co-founders of the security apparatus of Hamas.[6][7][8][9] In 2017, he was elected as Hamas' leader, and claimed to pursue "peaceful, popular resistance" the following year, a position which was later abandoned.[10] He was re-elected as Hamas leader in 2021, and was subject to an assassination attempt by Israel that year.
In September 2015, Sinwar was designated a terrorist by the United States government,[6] and Hamas and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades have also been designated terrorist organisations by the United States, the European Union and other countries.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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