In the 13 months of Western-backed Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip, ongoing, more than 44,000 Gazan civilians have been recorded killed while more than another 100,000 are considered “missing presumed dead”. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) had already officially ruled this continuous massacre of humans as “plausible genocide”.
This ‘kill ratio’ by the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza compares favourably (if one is comfortable with such inane idiom describing mass murder) with the far more intensive pace of killing of about 245,000 killed per month on average in the half-year of genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But Nazi Germany bettered Rwanda’s racist murder rampage in the 1941-45 period with an estimated rate of ‘extermination’ that peaked at 400,000 per month in just three of the six ‘death camps’ run so industriously by the Nazi forces.
Some six million European Jews were ultimately killed in this five-year massacre, as well as around two million others designated as unsuitable to live. They were differently-abled people and also homosexuals and, people of the minority ethnic group Roma.
Secretive
An interesting difference between the handling of the victims of the Nazi human extermination in those infamous ‘death camps’ and the way the victims of Rwanda and Gaza were treated was that the Nazis attempted to be very secretive in their ‘Final Solution’ operation. The secrecy was also ensured by the non-existence of audio-visual recording technology (except expensive film cameras) and, the easy accessibility of media systems, that we enjoy today.
Thus, the tens of thousands of Jews and others rounded up in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and herded into trains and transported to the Nazi death camps, did not realise their terrible fate even as they were hurried directly from the trains into the gas chambers. They were told that they were to undergo ‘disinfection’ showers.
It was only in the final few seconds of their lives that the bulk of these millions of victims realised that it was toxic gas that poured out of what they thought were overhead shower spouts. Children, women and men died in this way after spending days travelling in trains under the pretence of being ‘transferred’ to new camps or to work sites. Only a smaller number – still totalling at least an estimated million victims – died in more traumatic circumstances under fire by Nazi shooting squads, the infamous Einsatzgruppen. Those victims, herded into large dug trenches, thousands at a time, would certainly have had to anticipate their imminent death as they saw the waiting machine guns and watched them open fire.
The ethnic Tutsi victims in Rwanda also did not have the luxury of that orderly pretence and ghoulish charade in the Nazi death camps with their toxic ‘showers’ followed by the incinerator ovens that then burned the massed corpses. As in any violent ethnic riot (as in South Asia), the Tutsis knew what was coming as they fled the mobs or were cornered and mutilated.
Certainly, those efficient Nazi mass murderers met their own fates at the hands of the victors of World War 2.
Justice
Then, too, the world experienced the justice of the victors when the defeated nations were subjected to punishment (including spontaneous punishments) ranging from imprisonment to death sentences. However, the victors did not undergo any judgment of the crimes of war perpetrated by them.
The perpetrators of nuclear bombing of Japan were not subjected to prosecution although the defeated Japanese military were punished. Likewise, the perpetrators of the ‘strategic bombing’ campaigns that saw the ‘carpet bombing’ of German and Japanese cities that deliberately targeted civilians, enjoyed hero-worship instead of war crimes tribunals.
In the much earlier colonial era, the Western powers of today were the perpetrators of genocide of whole indigenous populations. In that world, free of any form of news media, the colonial massacres were possibly even more bloody and on a larger scale. Instead of carpet bombing or gas chambers, the colonial methods of ethnic cleansing were forced starvation and the deliberate spread of European diseases unfamiliar to the indigenous peoples.
The 20th and 21st century victims of genocide and war crimes must suffer very public, and, indeed, formally announced, massacres. The IDF kindly sends phone calls and air-drops leaflets minutes before to enable Palestinian families “escape” missile bombardment and shelling.
Those who survive are few. A single medium calibre bomb’s blast radius is at least 50 metres or even 100 metres. Thus, many have neither the time nor the human ability to run that far. Only a very few are sprinters, no?
Such experiences of forewarned bombardment are now many – in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon – and, thanks to social media and professional journalism (by the victim nations themselves), the world is learning about such macabre military ‘courtesies’ of postmodern inhumanity.
Pious
The globalised human society of these postmodern times enables an emotionally acrid juxtaposition of violently conflicting human experiences. We learn about devastating bombardment and massacres in virtually the same instance as we learn about the pious ‘self-defence’ of the perpetrators and their warm enjoyment of safe lives.
After all, on that fateful October 7, young Israelis were ‘raving’ in musical ecstasy barely kilometres distant from the besieged, suffering, deprived, traumatised Gazans in the veritable concentration camp that is their Strip home. Are we not reminded of a military-sponsored ‘moto-cross’ tamasha being conducted just kilometres away from the bitterly contested Northern frontlines of our own war zone? What a brutal military debacle did that moto-cross suffer when the enemy used the festive distraction to inflict costly damage to our airforce!
This bizarre intimacy between two differently violent worlds – one an internalised, self-borne violence (Gaza) and the other, an externalised violence inflicted on others (Israel, West), is the emotive political foreground for last week’s long overdue, miserably symbolic, issuing of arrest warrants against possibly the two most, directly destructive, politicians currently doing their sick bit.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are now internationally “wanted” criminals and must hide from arrest in much of the world even as their regime in Occupied Jerusalem continues to wreak mass murder and war in West Asia. The evidence for the International Criminal Court’s indictments is there for all to see, as most of world humanity, traumatised by 13 months of televised unspeakable carnage, might point out.
With over 44,000 dead, most of them women and children in the devastated Gaza Strip, and the rest of the Palestinians literally starving inside that tiny enclave already under military siege for nearly two decades, Premier Netanyahu (75) and former Minister Gallant (66) who have jointly executed the current Israeli military campaign, have much to answer for. Last Thursday, November 21, Pre-Trial Chamber No. I of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in its decision on the ‘Situation in the State of Palestine’, unanimously issued two rulings in relation to Israel’s role in West Asia. The ICC first rejected legal challenges by Israel brought under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute.
Arrest
Warrants of arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant, are for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least October 8, 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.The Court also issued warrants of arrest for three Hamas militant leaders, all of whom have already been killed in action. Gallant had been Israeli Defence Minister serving 2022-2024 until he departed the post earlier this month.
The ICC has so far publicly indicted 67 people since its establishment. Proceedings against 35 are ongoing: 30 are at large as fugitives, four are on trial, and one is in the appeals stage. Proceedings against 32 have been completed: two are serving sentences, seven have finished sentences, four have been acquitted, seven have had the charges against them dismissed, four have had the charges against them withdrawn, and eight have died before the conclusion of the proceedings against them.
The ICC’s arrest warrants are classified as ‘secret’, in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations. The Court’s media release said that, however, the ICC decided to release the information about the investigations since criminal conduct similar to that addressed in the warrant of arrest “appears to be ongoing”.
In short, the International Criminal Court finds itself initiating a prosecution of crimes previously committed but also of crimes ongoing.
The two indicted criminal suspects, both Israeli citizens, are safely immune from arrest while they remain within their country’s borders as Israel is not a party to the ICC’s jurisdiction. Neither is the USA, Israel’s main backer and, in a real sense – as many justice activists argue – a state complicit in Israel’s “ongoing” crimes.
However, some 124 States are party to the ICC and are now legally bound to immediately arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they set foot on their soil. They include nearly all European Union states which are also major allies of the Israel and are supporting it in its current many wars.
Already, legal circles are poised to see how many countries will now cease providing military supplies to Israel for fear of being implicated in those same “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”.
But most justice activists point out that it took the ICC nearly a year before it issued arrest warrants during which tens of thousands of people have died, and whole territories laid waste. They said that the same ICC was far quicker to respond to the Russo-Ukraine war and indict Russian President Vladimir Putin.
