Israel’s attacks on Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip, which have killed tens of thousands, have generated controversy among scholars, lawyers, political activists, journalists and others, but an Israeli newspaper writes: Israel is really committing genocide in Gaza. “We must face the facts and understand the depth of the horror we have created,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said in a report of its state army’s attacks on the Palestinians. What is happening in Gaza is not the Holocaust, but the crime of genocide.
“Genocides in the United States and France”
At the beginning of the report, the newspaper refers to the opinion of historian Shlomo Zanid, who refuses to recognize the atrocities and horrific war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza as genocide, on the grounds that the atrocities committed by the French army in Algeria (1954-1962). (1965-1973) have not been described as genocide, although they were “no less atrocities. To refute Zanid’s view, the newspaper refers to the book “Blood and Soil: A Global History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” by Ben Kirnan, one of the world’s leading genocide researchers: “What happened in Algeria is genocide because between 500,000 and one million Algerians died or were killed as a result of hunger, disease and murder,” he said.
Like the Israeli and Hamas cases, the Russell court is accused of ignoring the crimes of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, and North Vietnam’s crimes against civilians in the south. “But acknowledging the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong and Hamas does not deny the crimes committed by the US military in Vietnam and the Israeli army in Gaza.
“Hiroshima and Gaza”
In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing thousands of civilians. Israeli Culture Minister Amiha Eliyahu has proposed a similar bombing of Gaza, Haarenz reported. But his request has been rejected, although “Israel violated the restrictions in the Gaza war that it insisted on not violating in the past. The newspaper cited two studies, the first conducted by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, which found that the Israeli army used artificial intelligence to bombard Gaza, causing an increase in the number of casualties among innocent civilians. Sometimes, just to destroy a senior Hamas figure, an entire neighborhood has been allowed to be destroyed, killing 300 people who were not involved in the fighting.” The second study was conducted by Dr. Lee Mordecai. “It can be estimated that between 60 and 80 percent of the victims in Gaza are non-participants, far more than Israel has allowed in the past,” the newspaper said.
“Genocide in Gaza”
All states and powers that commit genocide call their actions in reaction and self-defense, so Israeli officials say in official statements that what they are doing in Gaza is a reaction to Hamas’ October 7 attacks. “Killing children, starving, destroying health infrastructure, destroying most houses, including the complete wiping out of neighborhoods such as Jabalya and Beit Lahiya, ethnic cleansing in the northern Gaza Strip, destroying all universities and most cultural institutions and mosques,” Haaretz wrote governance and regulatory infrastructure, mass graves, destruction of local food production infrastructure and water reservoirs; All these things paint a clear picture of genocide. Hence, Gaza no longer exists as a collective human and ethnic whole, and this is exactly what genocide is like.
