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#UnitedAgainstCorruption
As 2024 closes, I pay tribute to over 300 humanitarian workers who lost their lives this year – deadliest on record.
I hope that in 2025 international law is upheld, we see genuine accountability, and humanitarian workers are protected to serve those most in need.
“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.
And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.
A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage.
But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide.
But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.
It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words.
But there does need to be a clear intent.
And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there.
A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here.
Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership.
Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.
And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.
But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.
But reality cannot be denied.
So yes, it is a genocide.
And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.”
- Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024
- Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024
Gaza, the prelude of the end of humanity. We have been watching a live streamed genocide for 14 months, while our political leaders have clapped hands to it. Never in my life will I get over this horror alternative reality. A never ending black mirror episode.
"We do the most on adaptation, over 50% of global adaptation climate finance, linking it with development. We don’t have separate lenses; we see development and climate integrated." - Juergen Voegele
Watch the #COP29 event replay: https://t.co/vEvnYy3ims
"We lost everything in this hospital...they burned our hearts"
We are still here. Watching these endless massacres.Again and again. All carried out with complete and utter impunity. Global "governance", world "leaders", and silent bystanders, you are a disgrace.
🎥: @MiddleEastEye
Are we getting numb and blind on the horrors of Gaza?
Never have @UN warnings been as desperate as now on the disaster in northern Gaza.
All proportions of self defense are lost in the massive death, destruction, relocation and starvation of civilians carried out by Israel.
Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss:
“Man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as permission is given from higher-ups, from the government, it accelerates.”
Shaban al-Dalou’s father described how he tried to save his children after an Israeli air strike that engulfed their tent in flames.
Ahmad al-Dalou spoke to Middle East Eye about the horrifying night. He explained how helpless he felt when he could not save Shaban, who was connected to an IV drip when the strike hit the tents.
Footage shared on social media showed Shaban trying to move as he was burned to death.
You can be a celebrity or a ordinary person. If you stay SILENT, PASSIVE, INACTIVE while Palestinians trapped in Gaza - human beings who breath, feel and dream exactly like you - get slaughtered by an unchecked army, you are no different from those who continued to go by their lives during past genocides who erased from earth millions.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, says Israel has contravened international humanitarian law given the large number of Palestinian civilian women, children and men killed.