kenway

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf 1. This Application concerns acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a distinct national, racial and ethnical group, in the wake of the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023. South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’ or ‘Convention’),1 whether as a matter of law or morality. The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’). The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. The acts are all attributable to Israel, which has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention, and which has also violated and is continuing to violate its other fundamental obligations under the Genocide Convention, including by failing to prevent or punish the direct and public incitement to genocide by senior Israeli officials and others. @Vrubel @Nivsch

8000 dead children. 60%-80% civilian to combatant ratio. 1.5 million people homeless. You're defending genocide. STOP.

Firstly, my only agenda is nothing other than basic empathy. It's not complicated. Secondly, I'm not DECIDING anything in relation to your x y z thoughts in contrast to basic empathy. You DECIDED to respond to my post, which specifically relates to an 84 page application to the ICJ from an entire country - specifically South Africa. I am not uncomfortable with any of your claims because what you are saying is 1) totally biased, 2) totally ridiculous and 3) totally in conflict with the overwhelming population of the planet, not least the representatives of the United Nations, who are consistently vetoed by agents that don't represent the spirit of ordinary people. And in regards to the "10,000 of young Israeli IDF who are risking their lives in order to carry out such warcrimes", my advice is to simply stop doing that. There are plenty of avenues for conscientious objection in Israel - there's an entire film dedicated to it.

Relevant:- As a historian who has researched and studied genocide in places like Indonesia and Timor Leste, I am deeply aware of the difficulties of determining when it seems clear that genocidal violence is unfolding. The Israeli annihilation of Gaza clearly meets that threshold. In most genocides there is an information vacuum, and details trickle out because of the difficulties of reporting in real time and placing events in context. Even in well publicized genocides - Rwanda, Bosnia - reporters and diplomats were behind the curve in grasping events. In East Timor and Indonesia, which I have studied well, a handful of voices characterized what was happening at the time as genocide (or politicide), but it took months or years before the international or scholarly community would generally acknowledge this. The Israeli annihilation of Gaza may be the first episode in history of genocide unfolding in real time, in full view of the world, with the perpetrators proudly announcing their intentions every day, and other governments proudly trumpeting their participation. The South African petition to the international criminal court will expose the total bankruptcy of international law, since the most powerful country in the history of the world is an open accomplice and has already announced that the perpetrators will get away with it. ~ Bradley Simpson https://twitter.com/bradleyrsimpson/status/1741290160677867885

You're playing a very dangerous and stupid game. If successfully prosecuted then you would be effectively defending war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It's funny - because I kind of suspected that me posting isolated snippets of the application would result in this response, so I recommend you read more of the actual document itself.

It's such a massive document it's almost impossible to digest but it's crammed with damning paragraphs:- "29. The Commission found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers “intentionally shot” children, knowing them to be children,114 and they also “intentionally shot” health workers and journalists “despite seeing that they were clearly marked as such”.115 It further found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israeli snipers shot disabled demonstrators “intentionally, despite seeing that they had visible disabilities” and despite them not presenting an imminent threat." "629. Taking into account the weapons used, and in particular the use of white phosphorous in and around a hospital that the Israeli armed forces knew was not only dealing with scores of injured and wounded but also giving shelter to several hundred civilians, the Mission finds, based on all the information available to it, that in directly striking the hospital and the ambulance depot the Israeli armed forces in these circumstances violated article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and violated customary international law in relation to proportionality. . . ." "114. Israel has engaged in and failed to prevent or to punish acts and measures which are genocidal, constituting flagrant violations of Israel’s obligations under Articles I, III (a), III (b), III (c), III (d), III (e), IV, V and VI of the Genocide Convention. As further evidenced in the materials set out in the application, the acts of genocide in question in breach of Articles II (a), II (b), II (c) and II (d), in particular, that collectively target the Palestinians in Gaza include, inter alia: (1) killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children — estimated to account for around 70 per cent of the more than 21,110 fatalities — some of whom appear to have been summarily executed; (2) causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including through maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment; (3) causing the forced evacuation and displacement of around 85 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded — as well as causing the large scale destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, refugee camps, towns and entire areas in Gaza, precluding the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes; (4) causing widespread hunger, dehydration and starvation to besieged Palestinians in Gaza, through the impeding of sufficient humanitarian assistance, the cutting off of sufficient water, food, fuel and electricity, and the destruction of bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other methods of production and sustenance; (5) failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate shelter, clothes, hygiene or sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including the 1.9 million internally displaced people, compelled by Israel’s actions to live in dangerous situations of squalor, alongside the routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and the killing and wounding of those sheltering, including women, children, the disabled and the elderly; (6) failing to provide for or to ensure the provision for the medical needs of Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts causing serious bodily harm, including through directly attacking Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities in Gaza, killing Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses, including the most qualified medics in Gaza, and destroying and disabling Gaza’s medical system; and (7) destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, through the destruction of Gaza’s universities, schools, courts, public buildings, public records, stores, libraries, churches, mosques, roads, infrastructure, utilities and other facilities necessary to the sustained life of Palestinians in Gaza as a group, alongside the killing of entire family groups — erasing entire oral histories in Gaza — and the killing of prominent and distinguished members of society. (8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, through the reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborn babies, infants, and children."

The full 84-page application to the registrar of the International Court of Justice by the government of South Africa:- https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf Very damning.

@Danioover9000 Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to provide this analysis as well as your thoughts written on the other thread. Body language is always very interesting.

It's actually the other way around. You wouldn't say such things or hold such viewpoints if you knew for certain that you would reincarnate as Palestinian. If you had to experience the life of every Palestinian from birth to death, your moral wisdom would be quasi-Messianic, to the extent you wouldn't want to hurt a fly. You'd see the truth for how it really is.

How are you defining modern times? Nuremberg, Milosovic, Saddam Hussein all occured within the past 100 years. I understand your point though. That's because many people in the West regard Israel as a fellow Western country, and therefore should be held to the same standards as any other Western country. Don't forget millions of Europeans and Americans protested against their own governments in regard to many many conflicts, not least Vietnam and Iraq. Also... occupation, ethnic nationalism and genocide tends to piss a lot of people off.

@Nivsch You ask whether there are better ways to annihilate this terror organisation. I would argue that anything is better than a civilian genocide. It's like going to the doctor for a headache only for the doctor to repeatedly hit you over the head with a hammer.... and for him to then ask: "You have a better way?" I don't know how to destroy Hamas. But my suspicion is that the Israeli far-right benefit from Hamas' existence more than they suffer from it. There is a curious dimension to both Hamas' history, and indeed the Oct 7th attacks, that deserve proper investigation, and I wouldn't exclude that from any strategy.

A massive aerial bombardment targeting a densely populated area where half of the population consists of children, constitutes a violation of the principles of international humanitarian law. There is no difference between deliberate and indiscriminate. This includes hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and residential areas. Therefore, the current Israeli regime is engaged in persistent warcrimes. All that remains is by what mechanism Netanyahu (et al) can be delivered to face trial for such crimes (i.e the Hague). If that is not possible, then the United Nations is clearly not fit for purpose and we will need a massive reboot of the entire concept of International Law, and in particular, it's policing. If that is not achieved, then everything will get very messy for everybody.

Again, from "Distinction and Loss of Civilian Protection in International Armed Conflicts" (Yoram Dinstein):- The principle of distinction excludes not only deliberate attacks against civilians, but also indiscriminate attacks, i.e., instances in which the attacker does not target any specific military objective (due either to indifference as to whether the ensuing casualties will be civilians or combatants or, alternatively, to inability to control the effects of the attack). A leading example is the launching by Iraq of Scud missiles against military objectives located in or near residential areas in Israel in 1991, notwithstanding the built-in imprecision of the Scuds which made accuracy in acquiring military objectives virtually impossible (and, in the event, no military objective was struck)."

The counter to that would be the legal disposition that the occupier has no right to invoke genocide, whereas the occupied has the right of defense against the occupier. This isn't my argument, by the way, but one that is frequently made. It's also worth pointing out that the phrase "Israel has the right to defend itself" is itself something of a semantic game, bordering on the precipice of psychological gaslighting. In truth, "rights" are somewhat phantomic. If we're talking about the United Nations, Israel stop listening to them a long long time ago.

~ Dr Brian Feeney, The Irish News https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/genocide-joe-biden-has-got-the-gaza-crisis-wrong-in-every-way-brian-feeney-PVL4BQU4YZFZ7FLC67S2APUYDU/

Comments like this are depressing. People you care about? As opposed to people you don't care about? I will never understand how the phrase "people you care about" can be used in this manner. Don't you understand that when you write "people you care about" you are also saying that there are people you don't care about? You clearly don't understand love, and it's depressing.

@Nivsch And to be clear, posting videos of stupid soldiers is pretty mild. The majority of footage coming out of Gaza is just dead Palestinian children all the way down - none of which can be posted here.

It's not a ridiculous conclusion. Either the IDF is incredibly incompetent at avoiding civilian casualties, or incredibly competent at creating them.

"My father picked me up from school one day, and we played hooky and went to the beach. It was too cold to go in the water, so we sat on a blanket and ate pizza. When I got home, my sneakers were full of sand, and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn’t know the difference. I was six. My mother screamed at me for the mess, but (my father) wasn’t mad. He said that billions of years ago, the world shifting and the oceans moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach, and then I took it away. 'Every day,' he said, 'we change the world,' which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe full of sand home until there is no beach, until it made a difference to anyone. Every day, we change the world, but to change the world in a way that means anything, that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. It’s slow. It’s methodical. It’s exhausting. We don’t all have the stomach for it.” - Mr Robot.