In December, 2024, Amnesty
International, a highly reputed human rights international organization “found
sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to
commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.”[1]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) had recently issued arrest warrants for
a former defense minister and the sitting prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, and
the UN’s high court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had also ruled
that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank violates international law. When
Amnesty’s report came out, the ICJ was considering whether to declare a
genocide in Gaza. Considering the series of determinations against Israel in
Gaza, did it matter that the ICJ had not yet ruled specifically on genocide?
Formally yes, but the currency of formal rulings and determinations regarding
Israel based on international law had lost considerable de facto value,
given Israel’s ongoing infliction of such widespread and dire suffering on
civilians in not only Gaza, and Russia’s attacks in Ukraine (the ICC had
already issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s sitting president. Oddly, news that
Israel was committing an apartheid genocide seemed at the time to be old news,
whereas that the U.S. was complicit, as an accomplice in providing the weapons,
in a genocide was news.
So even legalists can let
themselves hold that Israel was indeed treating the Palestinians in Gaza (and
even the West Bank) to a genocide, and thus that the United States Government
was acting as an accomplice by continuing to sell weapons to Israel used in
Gaza. Agnes Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, said at
the time of the organization’s resounding report, “Amnesty International’s
report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide
Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These
acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately
inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about
their physical destruction.”[2]
It may be said that Amnesty had uncovered the true motive of the Israeli ministers
of state in destroying residential housing such that over 2 million Gazans were
by then in camps and in restricting how many food trucks could enter Gaza even
as famine existed in 2024. As harsh as this determination is, it is not clear
that a report even with damning findings would “serve as a wake-up call to the
international community” even though Callamard said it would.[3]
Because Israel had likely “heard it
all before,” and so had the world with respect to the rather extreme vengeance
of the Israeli Knesset, as if the millions of Gazans had all been culpable in Hamas’
killings and kidnappings in 2023 as Israel’s president had said back then,
Amnesty’s report is perhaps more striking in how it characterizes the role of
the U.S. than in finding indications of a genocide in Gaza. “States that
continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time,” Callamard went on, “must
know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of
becoming complicit in genocide.”[4]
At the time, the U.S. was the most glaring or significant of the accomplices,
though the E.U. was hardly blameless. Even though it had been no secret in the
United States that President Biden was strongly in favor of selling weapons that
had been and could be expected to be used by the Israeli military in Gaza, the
complicity in Israel’s genocide had not hitherto reached the consciousness of
public discourse in America.
As for the fine print, Amnesty noted
in its report that the organization had “examined Israel’s acts in Gaza closely
and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous
occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually
reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of
the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by
officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in
the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts.”[5]
The effort was neither shotty nor unsystematic, and it took “into account the
pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military
occupation.”[6]
The report’s basic conclusion is that the Israeli government was intent on eradicating
Palestinians in Gaza (for they could not leave!).
The fecklessness of international
law had been readily apparent, given the obvious lack of any legal enforcement
mechanism; that the U.S. had played a major role in the genocide was not often
realized and digested. It may be a factor in President Biden’s very low
approval ratings and the fact that Kamala Harris lost Michigan while Jill Stein
of the Green Party did noticeably well there—Stein long having been a recurrent
presidential candidate with no hope of winning but very useful nonetheless in
providing voters with a way to vote against their government being complicit in
genocide. As startling as this sounds, its exuberance would surely fade and the
inherent weakness of international law once again become the undercurrent of
discontent not only in the U.S., but in the E.U. as well. Amnesty’s report can
be interpreted as saying: Yes, it can get this bad—this painful—in
a world in which international law is law in name only (i.e., sans regular
enforcement).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
