Laura Moyeby Laura Moye
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Photo Credit: Yairfridman2003/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE CASE THAT Israel’s atrocities in Gaza constitute genocide continues to grow stronger. Recently, adding weight to these growing calls, Amnesty International released a report titled “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”
The first part of this title uses a quote from a Palestinian father of three, struggling to survive with his family, who were pushed to an inhospitable area at the coast of the Gaza Strip without basic civilian infrastructure. “It’s like an apocalypse,” he said. “You feel like you are subhuman.” He is one of 200 individuals who were interviewed on the ground for Amnesty’s report.
The evidence of Israel’s brutality toward civilians in Gaza is abundant and has been in full view in media reports and social media posts for over a year. What Amnesty has done is to collect and review evidence over a nine-month period using the framework of international law. The organization’s intention is to increase pressure on Israel, its allies, and the entire international community. Genocide, after all, is a rarely invoked word meant to sound an alarm to everyone everywhere that it is time to act urgently and forcefully to prevent an irrevocable loss to humanity.
Amnesty concluded that Israel is committing genocide according to the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention. The convention famously requires not just proof that a distinct group of people is being destroyed, but that the perpetrators have intended to destroy the group. The convention lists five prohibited acts of genocide. Amnesty describes how Israel has committed three of these acts against the protected group: killing; causing serious bodily and mental harm; and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.
To prove intent, a key part of the definition of genocide, Amnesty looked to jurisprudence from international courts for guidance. Intent can be proven by direct statements by state officials, the scale and systematic nature of acts, patterns of conduct, and the context of broader policies and actions towards the targeted group.
Amnesty examined over 100 statements from government and military officials following the October 7 Hamas attack. Israeli officials have used dehumanizing and racist language about Palestinians in Gaza and have conflated civilians with militants. They have called for indiscriminate attacks, forcible transfers of Palestinians, annihilation of the Strip, denial of humanitarian aid, and Israeli settlement expansion into Gaza. Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza have echoed these messages.
The scale and speed of killing civilians as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure have been unprecedented. Patterns of conduct show a willful disregard for Palestinian lives. This includes the blocking of life-saving humanitarian aid. It also includes repeated, deliberate, indiscriminate, and direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects. Explosives that impact wide areas have been dropped on densely populated neighborhoods, hardly a precise targeting of Hamas militants.
Amnesty carefully examined fifteen airstrikes, a minuscule fraction of the attacks, and found no legitimate military targets. Required warnings to civilians to minimize fatalities have been confusing or misleading in some cases and absent altogether in others. Cultural property and agricultural land have been destroyed. Every seventeen meters there is destruction across Gaza. Evidence of an unlivable, razed urban landscape is plain to see in aerial and satellite imagery. Taken together, all of these actions against non-military targets do not show acts of war, but acts of genocide.
Israel reacted swiftly to the report, calling Amnesty an “antisemitic,” “fanatical organization” engaged in “blood libel.” Amnesty’s report is not a hateful attack on Israel. It is a measured analysis and critique of a state’s policies and actions. It is a call for Israel to be treated as the recognized state that it is in the international community. Being held accountable to international norms and standards is what all legitimate states should expect.
Israel would like us to focus on their right to self-defense. The stated goal of their operation in Gaza is to destroy Hamas. Amnesty condemned the October 7 killing of civilians in southern Israel and the taking of hostages as war crimes. Certainly the Hamas attack produced a collective trauma in Israel. Israelis are acutely in touch with the long traumatic history of the Jewish people perpetrated especially by Europeans.
What is missing, though, is the context of the situation of the Palestinian people since the founding of Israel in 1948, which continues to this day. Israel has unlawfully occupied the Palestinian territories for 57 years, maintained an illegal blockade around the entire Gaza Strip for 17 years, and has maintained a system of apartheid. The dehumanization of Palestinians by Israel and the incredible impunity, granted primarily by major Western powers, have laid the path to genocide.
Amnesty has methodically shown how Israel’s conduct meets the criteria of the Genocide Convention. It took over nine months to carefully do so. The word genocide and the requirements of the Genocide Convention are heavy. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who escaped the Holocaust, coined the word “genocide.” He tirelessly championed the Genocide Convention, which was adopted on December 7, 1948, by the United Nations. He meant for it to be a mechanism to prevent future genocides. It confers responsibility on nations both large and small to intervene to prevent genocide. South Africa has modeled this better than any other country, bringing a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest judicial body.
After Israel, the United States bears the greatest responsibility for what has taken place in Gaza. As an American, I have watched the violence and suffering inflicted on civilians for well over a year with outrage and shame. Without the stream of U.S. weapons and diplomatic cover, there could be no decimation of Gaza and its people. I know my job as a citizen is to keep pressing my country to reverse its deadly course.
Taiwan must also act. Taiwan plays an important role in global trade and is positively involved in many global issues. However, it has chosen to deepen its relationship with Israel during the genocide and to stay silent on Gaza’s destruction. Taiwan has signed cooperation agreements with Israel this year around technology, trade, and cultural exchange. In the process, Taiwan has missed the opportunity to use the well-established bilateral relationship to raise concern and join the global pressure campaign.
Israel projects itself as a vital democracy surrounded by threatening neighbors. It seems to have convinced Taiwanese political leaders that it is just like Taiwan in that regard, even though Taiwan is extremely different in its human rights record. Taiwan is not running an occupation, a blockade, a system of apartheid, or a genocide. No country is perfect, no country has a totally clean human rights record, but genocide is different.
Governments, individuals and civil society must act.
Encouragingly, a global protest movement has generated innumerable actions and massive demonstrations. Palestinians in the diaspora are standing up and raising their visibility and voice as a people with a culture and a history. Jewish people around the world who do not see their values in the current Israeli regime are speaking out. Taiwan has been building a passionate multinational protest movement to stop the genocide in Gaza. We need to bring more people into the fold to change the leadership of our respective home governments to put pressure on Israel’s government.
We hope Amnesty’s careful research and analysis can play a positive role in changing the tide. You can read Amnesty’s report online, sign the new petition, and ask your government representatives to speak up. Every country, every institution, and every individual has the duty and the choice to prevent genocide.