By Edwin Heath
What is genocide? What is a war crime?
In 1941/42, risking their own lives, a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto secretly undertook a study of the effects of starvation on its blockaded inhabitants. A Nazi official order dated April l9, l941, stated that “the basic provisioning of the Jewish Residential District must be less than the minimum necessary for preserving life, regardless of the consequences”.
More than 100,000 of the ghetto’s residents died due to rampant disease or starvation even before the Nazis began massive deportations of the inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp in July 1942. Enforced starvation – intentionally starving an imprisoned population within months, allowing the average person less than 10% of the recommended energy intake for a healthy human being, as a weapon of war, was then, as now, nothing new.
Even then, allowing the whole truth to emerge about their policy of creeping genocide would not have been in the Nazis’ best interests: hence the need for secrecy about the Warsaw physicians’ study, which, hidden away until after the war, provided ground-breaking insights into what they termed ‘hunger disease’. Nowadays, given the age of media awareness in which we live, such cover- ups are a far more challenging proposition: whether they take the form of outright denial of starvation used as a weapon of war; or, shifting the blame to some kind of collective collateral damage in conflict zones; or whatever excuse comes in handy at the time.
In private – but more often voiced publicly in Israel by far-right politicians and war-mongers – the line, accepted by many, including members of the IDF, whose triumphalist videos echo their ingrained hatred, is that the civilians they slaughter are mere semi-humans, or human animals; and that they will gladly help them to die. That is the whole point about genocide: its perpetrators cannot see it. Even President Biden, a self-confessed Zionist who continues to finance and militarily supply the perpetrators, has publicly denied that Israel is committing any genocide in Gaza.
No matter that, of the 41,000 killed in Gaza so far, at least 17,000 are children. Children are also the least able to cope with famine, as with the effects of bombing, since their bodies are smaller and less well developed. Children who have malnutrition in the first two years of their lives have permanent damage to their cognitive and physical abilities and their immune systems.
Alison Griffin, Head of Conflict and Humanitarian Campaigns, Save the Children, recently put it this way:
“It’s a war on children. It’s a war on their childhood … to die from malnutrition as a child means that over a period of time your liver fails, your kidneys fail, your hairfalls out, essentially you go blind and you probably die from diarrhoea and vomiting, particularly because the sanitation systems are so bad”.
That alone might count as ‘plausible’ genocide. One might, for instance, set aside the legal wrangling, and imagine oneself as one of the estimated 4,000 children left to die under the rubble. You are in indescribable pain; you are trapped, inaccessible to rescuers, your small body crushed or dismembered; you are left all alone in that terrifying silence, to die slowly of suffocation or thirst, with no words of comfort, no human voice ever able to reach you again, or offer you any hope in your ultimate despair.
In some sense, any verdict of genocide always comes too late. From the point of view of those promulgating the Zionist master plan – to ‘Judaise’ the whole of former Palestine – the recent estimate that roughly one eighth of the Gazan population has now been liquidated will come as welcome news: as history, in the form of apartheid, even unto death, successfully repeats itself, albeit in another guise. But on the ground, for those in charge, things may be getting uncomfortably hot.
It is not for nothing that Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court. Moreover the ICJ’s case is reinforced by the International Criminal Court, its sister court, which is actively seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, for war crimes. Slowly and surely, the noose is tightening.
Those and other court rulings, by forcing world attention on Israel’s crimes of genocide and apartheid conducted against the Palestinian people, increasingly present its Western backers with an unavoidable choice: to continue their support, or start to back down. The shadow of international complicity is beginning to loom larger. It has significantly impacted the new UK government, which, having already said it will drop Britain’s legal objections at the ICC, has now announced a curtailment of military exports to Israel which might be used for war crimes.
In Israel itself, top military commanders, suddenly seeing themselves being hauled into the dock at the Hague, have started to backtrack on their leniency towards acts of abuse, including rape, by Israeli soldiers against the thousands of Palestinians, including women, children and medical staff, seized and held in army detention camps.
But this is just the start. The ICJ’s ruling on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is a truly momentous one. It shows the western states’ support for racist colonial occupation for what it really is: support for an enforced system of apartheid, which is a crime against humanity.
All this will no doubt take time to sink in, and the tragedy in Gaza will continue to play out as long as the weapons flow. The irony of vaccinated children being killed by bombs will not go unnoticed. But sooner or later humanity will be forced to the realization that the real fight, the only fight worth having, is to save itself from the moral collapse staring it in the face. World moral survival, backed up by the ethics of international law, may be the last hope for us all – not just for Gaza and Palestine.
