Israel is not the worst: Israel does not have a problem with a terrorist attack on Israel, nor does Israel care about the Palestinian people in Gaza
I have friends who were killed and who lost children in Hamas’s murderous attack on Oct. 7. People who were injured and killed in Gaza went to be with me. My heart has broken, along with the people of this country and people around the world, for each and every family searching for loved ones, grieving them or trying to bring them home.
Those of us who are Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel are uniquely positioned to see through his bluster and warmongering to the failure he really is — truths that the past several days have laid bare. We can see that he is not interested in long-term solutions for the sake of a good life for us, Palestinians and Israelis.
The answer is peace because of our bones, which are made of the soil of this land. The only way we can fulfill our responsibility to the nation of our youngest children is to recognize the nation of Palestine and the nation of Israel.
Perhaps it was, just not in the way I thought. As I write this, it looks increasingly likely that Israel was correct about an Islamic Jihad rocket hitting Al-Ahli hospital. Both early American intelligence and a number of independent experts have found that way. Assuming their analysis holds up, it means the best analogy for this world-convulsing event is not the killings of five boys in Gaza last year. There is a myth surrounding the massacre at the Jenin refugee camp.
That year, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 30 people at a Passover Seder in the seaside city of Netanya, in what was, until this month, the deadliest single attack on Jewish Israelis since the country’s founding. As part of its response, Israeli Defense Forces invaded the West Bank city of Jenin, leveling dozens of refugee camp buildings. Palestinian leaders claimed Israel had committed a massacre; the Palestinian official Saeb Erekat told CNN that at least 500 people had been killed. People all over the world believed these reports; as a BBC headline put it, “Jenin ‘massacre evidence growing.’”
Interviews with dozens of liberal Jewish leaders and voters, together with a review of social media posts, private email and text chains of liberal Jewish groups, show that a majority of American Jewry is reaching a breaking point. They have long opposed the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supported a two-state solution and protested the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Many people were worried about whether they would face attacks in the U.S., which was evoked by the Hamas attacks. They were surprised to discover that many of their ideological allies did not see the threats the same and thought of them as deserving of blame.
Many of the most inflammatory comments came on social media, from progressive groups that responded to the immediate aftermath of the massacre of Israeli civilians by skipping even a moment of mourning and instead moving immediately to try to justify the attack.
chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have been used in many protest marches that leaves no place for the state of Israel.
From Los Angeles to Israel: The D.S.A. After the Heschel-Melvoin Reaction in New York City
“I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way,” said Nick Melvoin, 38, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board who is now running for Congress and keeps a framed picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. “Now we see, this is how that happens: When you dehumanize the group. The warnings about this indoctrination hit us like a ton of bricks.
The most rattling episodes occurred on college campuses and social media, where statements from small organizations were amplified across the globe. But during a worldwide conflict, those statements have taken on totemic status, heightening fears that they are a precursor to a more treacherous and lasting shift in the standing of Jews in America.
Eric Spiegelman, a lawyer and podcast producer in Los Angeles who has serves on municipal boards, was enraged by the protest in New York City promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America after the attack. The organization was urged by the letters sent to Los Angeles to be labeled a hate group. The D.S.A. apologized for not making our values explicit and backpedaled from the protest.
“It’s like, I belong to this political organization that believes in three things: affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and the wholesale murder of Jews,” said Mr. Spiegelman, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he condemned local leaders who are affiliated with the group. Two out of three is not bad.
“We need to remember that anyone dehumanizing Israelis rightly has zero representation in the United States government, while many federal officials have been dehumanizing Palestinians for decades,” Eva Borgwardt, the political director of IfNotNow, said in an interview.
And Hamas’ attacks, brutal killings and kidnapping of Israelis, clearly constitute war crimes, says Hathaway, coauthor of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.
Civilians often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time — near, for example, what is presumed by combatants to be a legitimate military target. Those cases can be a gray area for military decision-makers and in international humanitarian law, where the principle of proportionality applies.
A violation of protections under the Geneva Convention, such as the prohibition against deliberately targeting civilians, opens up leaders and common soldiers alike to prosecution. Such prosecutions could be decided by a tribunal or court in the country where the crimes are being committed.
“That’s right, every government in the world subscribes to these rules,” says Kenneth Roth, a visiting professor at the university’s school of public and international affairs. “I think it’s important to stress that these [rules] are not the concoctions of human rights groups. These are not the kind of people who will be good for the world. These are the rules that the militaries themselves adopted for themselves,” he says.
Universal doctrine applies equally to Israel and Hamas, the militant group that governs the Gaza Strip, as well as Islamic Jihad, a small extremist group that has also carried out attacks against Israel.
Israel, like the United States and Russia, is not among the 123 states that are party to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The Palestinians, however, joined in 2015, so the ICC has jurisdiction over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Since the start of the conflict in Palestine, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, says it has begun collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes.
Oona said that Hamas is subject to the same international humanitarian law as the Israel Defense Force solders.
An attack would not be proportional if civilian injury, death or damage to civilian objects expected from such an attack would be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated from that attack, according to Tom Dannenbaum, associate professor of international law.
The densely populated Gaza Strip presents “a huge challenge” for the Israeli military, Travesí acknowledges. Fighting a force that doesn’t wear uniforms is more difficult when you consider that they operate in urban areas.
“It can be difficult for the attacker to distinguish between a combatant and a noncombatant. That difficulty doesn’t mean the attacking party cannot always distinguish between who can be targeted and who can’t, as long as they know who they are.
The Gaza War, and Who Gets Held Accountable? Here’s What You Need to Know: Israeli War Crimes and the International Criminal Court
During the last several days, Israel’s defense forces ordered Gazans to leave the north of the territory in anticipation of a ground assault.
That could be seen as a humanitarian gesture, “but it has been done in a wholly inhumane way, because to order 1.1 million people to evacuate in the course of a few hours is obviously impossible,” Roth says. “It’s cruel, [and] it creates panic.”
It could be a war crime if medics weren’t supplied and they weren’t given the medical care that they needed, because it would constitute a collective punishment.
And simply warning the population to leave to avoid further harm does not allow a military force to wash its hands of responsibility, Dannenbaum notes.
Whether or not individuals comply with the warning doesn’t change their status according to him. “So, if they stay at that location, their civilian status is the same as it would have been without the warning, since they have the same weight in the context of proportionality.”
“That’s why many, many human rights activists and many journalists, they collect a lot of documentation and evidence that might be very, very important for the future or accountability processes,” he says.
Suspects can be brought before the International Criminal Court at The Hague or ad hoc tribunals, or at the national level, something that the ICC encourages, Dannenbaum says.
It defers to the genuine national prosecutorial efforts. In this way, it’s different from the former Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, which had primary jurisdiction. The International Criminal Court encourages national governments to prosecute their own offenders.
In 1961, Israel was able to exercise universal jurisdiction to try the Nazi officer for his role in the Holocaust and other war crimes. The trial was broadcasted around the world.
“In any conflict in the world, you can’t have the expectation that you will prosecute everybody,” Travesí says. “So, you have to choose some. You have to pick and prioritize cases.
Source: What is a war crime, and who gets held accountable? Here’s what you need to know
Why Vladimir Putin didn’t travel to South Africa for the BRICS summit in August 2005? (British-based) Comment on Are Russian President Vladimir Putin in Johannesburg?’
“That’s the reason that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin did not travel to South Africa for the BRICS summit this summer,” he says, referring to the international meeting of emerging economies that took place in Johannesburg in August. South Africa would have had to arrest him due to the fact that he was wanted by the International Criminal Court.