Genocide Blog 32 – Senior Advisors put Biden and Sunak on Warning for Complicity in Genocide
09.02.2024
Even after the ICJ finds there is a prima facie case against Israel for genocide, and tells Israel to stop killing Palestinians, President Biden still continues to arm Israel, fund Israel, back Israel. USA ambassador to the UN Thomas-Greenfield still vows to veto a Security Council Resolution against Israel – even after the ICJ ruling. Complicity in genocide knows no bounds. But the impunity is dented. And we need to expose it. We have to stop this genocide.
All the USA chooses to do when faced with Israeli genocide – it may have made you perplexed to hear this on TV – is to impose economic sanctions on four miserable, individual Israeli citizens in the West Bank.
It accuses them of “settler violence” and threatens their “purses” outside of Israel. Finally, the USA is addressing illegal land-grabs, even if in a pathetically “token” way.
The settler violence is indeed now more than appalling.
Sixteen whole Bedouin communities have been forced off their West Bank land by settler violence since October, and Palestinian families are hounded off their own homes in villages in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem more than before. Settlers are now armed by the Israeli State, weapons provided by Biden. So, no wonder Biden acts.
But, why only sanction four individuals? And this, even as the ICJ statutes “plausible” genocide in Gaza committed with American weapons, you may ask?
Here is the reason. It needs a bit of recent history.
Barack Obama, while US President, did one brave act concerning Palestine: his UN ambassador abstained once at the Security Council on a Resolution condemning Israel. the USA abstained on a Resolution “to immediately halt settlement construction in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” So, a UN Security Council binding Resolution was voted. It is in force. Obama acted two days before Christmas 2016 and left office 30 days later. So, while Biden does not respect ICJ Provisional Measures as “binding”, though they are, he seems to hesitate at defying the Security Council Resolution. It frightens the daylights out of him. What if he, as President, is guilty of violating a UN Security Council Resolution? Already, he must quake at the thought of his complicity in genocide, based “merely” on the judgment of the highest UN Court. There is prison in it down the line for him and his senior civil servants.
The problem is that Biden and his Western chatwas have received a written warning from 800 of their senior civil servants in the form of a formal petition that what they are doing in Gaza is against the law. It is against the professional advice already offered by them, they say. Top civil servants in the USA, Britain and Europe warn their political bosses in writing of “grave violations of international law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing and genocide” when they facilitate Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They accuse Israel of acting with “no boundaries” in its Gaza invasion that has caused tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths, and in its deliberate blocking of aid “which puts hundreds of thousands of civilians at risk of starvation and slow death.” Their bosses must “stop asserting to the public that there is a strategic and defensible rationale behind the Israeli operation. They urge their bosses to halt military support and secure a ceasefire that will increase aid for Palestinians.
At the same time, to make legal jeopardy worse for the European leaders, we read in the EUobserver, that as well as this petition, “more than 1,500 EU civil servants have signed a letter warning the bloc’s leaders of their legal obligation to contribute to peace, protect human rights – including the rights of children – and to ensure the application of international law in Gaza, in a sign of growing internal anger and dissent within the Brussels’ institutions over the bloc’s policy.” The letter was sent to Alexander de Croo, Belgian prime minister who is EU chair before the 1 February EU summit.
These petitions leave individual leaders like Biden, Scholz, Sunak and Macron exposed to possible prosecution when the genocide stops. Their legal and political advisors have made public their own dissociation from the policies, leaving them individually liable and exposed.
We must expose them. Which is why it is so important to put pressure on Mauritius to join the South African case against Israel for genocide. Even while we continue our daily lives – feeding the family, taking care of the dogs or cats or birds, and looking after the very young, very old, the sick and the dying, even as we go to a wedding or a birthday party.
There are effects that weaken Israel. Nearly half a million (470,000) Israelis have left Israel since October. And they show no sign of returning. It means they do not agree with the Israeli state and there is no space in Israeli society for disagreement, so they are leaving. But we need to act so as to save the people of Palestine, in Gaza in particular.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT.
