By Jeremy Salt
There is virtually no rule of law relating to warfare that Israel is not violating, flagrantly, blatantly and without any regard for what the rest of the world thinks.
‘Delenda est Carthago’ (Carthage must be destroyed). So spoke Cato the Elder, the Roman senator, ahead of the destruction of the North African city in 146 BC.
Outside God’s commands to the ancient Israelites in the Bible, Cato’s pronouncement is said to have been the first recorded declaration in history of an intention to commit genocide. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was not, given the propensity of humans to slaughter each other.
Of the 400,000 citizens of Carthage, about 150,000 were said to have been killed. The city was destroyed, the land on which it stood salted so nothing could grow there again.
In fact, plants and humans did grow once more. Described as having been “utterly exterminated,” Carthage is now a pleasant upper-class suburb of Tunis, built around the extensive ruins of the old city.
Since the Roman destruction of Carthage, what have been called genocides since the word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in the early 1940s have marked human history as regularly as milestones.
In modern history, the ‘expansion of the west’ has been the setting for the worst. Multiple millions died as Europe pushed into every corner of the world. Within the present boundaries of the US, an estimated 12 million indigenous people were killed or died as the direct result of European settlement from the late 15thcentury until the beginning of the 20th.
To the present day, many millions more have died as the result of colonial exploitation and military intervention in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and southeast Asia, including close to four million in Vietnam in the decades following the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945.
US involvement in Vietnam, beginning in the 1950s but rapidly expanding in the decade after 1965, caused about 1.4 million civilian casualties, including more than 400,000 dead, at the top end of US estimates.
Almost certainly this is an undercount, as civilian deaths as a result of its actions were never something an US administration wanted to dwell on. The Vietnamese government puts the number at two million dead in both north and south. These figures do not include the civilians killed in Laos and Cambodia.
The Russell Tribunal (1966/67) into the conduct of the war found US armed forces guilty of the “deliberate, systematic and large-scale bombardment of civilian targets including civilian populations, dwellings, villages, dams, dikes, medical establishments, leper colonies, schools, churches, pagodas (and) historical and cultural monuments.”
It also found that the US had used weapons prohibited by the laws of war, had subjected prisoners to inhuman treatment in violation of the laws of war and overall, was guilty of genocide.
Since 9/11, there have been many more wars, on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, involving border countries (Pakistan) as well. Brown University’s ‘Costs of War’ project concluded in a 2021 report that 900,000 people had been killed and at least 3.6-3.8 million people had died indirectly in these zones of conflict. Thirty-eight million people had been displaced as a result of these wars and 7.6 million children left suffering from acute malnutrition.
Even before the second Iraq war was launched in 2003, Denis Halliday, former UN assistant-secretary general and coordinator of the ‘oil for food’ program, said in 1997 that 1-1.5 million Iraqis had died from malnutrition or inadequate health care because of sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990. The dead included hundreds of thousands of children.
“For me,” Halliday said, “what is tragic in addition to the tragedy of Iraq itself, is the fact that the UN Security Council member states are maintaining a program of economic sanctions deliberately, knowingly killing thousands of Iraqis each month and that definition fits genocide.”
The second Iraq war was the cause of up to one million ‘excess deaths.’ The British medical journal the Lancet found that out of 654, 165 ‘excess deaths,’ more than 90 percent (601,027) were violent. Throughout these wars, the use of white phosporus and depleted uranium shells has added to civilian suffering along with, in the case uranium depleted shells, a rise in cancers and congenital birth defects. Israel is reported to have used both weapons in Gaza and Lebanon.
These genocides raise numerous questions. One is the way in which United Nations member states complied with sanctions and thus were complicit in the genocide being committed in Iraq from 1990-2002.
By 2002, the scale of the genocide was so catastrophic that many governments refused to apply the sanctions any longer. Basically they were upheld for so long only at the insistence of the US and the UK. Now the same states are complicit in the genocide being committed in Gaza.
Another issue is the genocidal background of all the ‘western’ states supporting Israel in one way or another. Does this common background in some way explain why they support Israel? Or is it the fact that they created Israel, as a ‘rampart of civilisation’ that is still tied to western strategic, military and corporate interests in the Middle East? Needless to say, for the people of the region the rampart has been regarded from the beginning as a bridgehead of imperialism.
Yet another consideration is the racism at the core of these genocides. The Balkans war of the 1990s is an example. In 1995 Bosnian Serbs massacred about 8000 Bosniak (Muslim) men and boys at Srebenica and ethnically cleansed another 25,000. They slaughtered the Bosniaks because they were Muslim.
The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) found one individual, Radovan Karadzic, guilty of genocide for the massacre at Srebenica and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In 2005 the US Congress found that Serbian aggression and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia constituted genocide.
With this one exception, no president, prime minister or government minister responsible for invasions and sanctions since 1990 that are widely held to be genocidal has been called to account in a court of law. Mostly in the Middle East, the slaughter of civilians in these attacks has been on an infinitely greater scale than the massacre of Bosnian Muslims.
It cannot even be remotely imagined that if the victims of these genocides were Christian or Jewish, and white-skinned rather than brown, western governments would stand by doing nothing, or even worse, by giving the perpetrator active political support and the weapons needed to continue the genocide.
In this respect, the US is continually replenishing the Israeli arsenal, for which reason the Gaza genocide has to be regarded as a joint US-Israel project, with other ‘western’ states complicit.
It might be argued – and certainly has been – that compared to the genocidal killing of millions, the tens of thousands of Gazans who have been ‘killed’ do not add up to genocide.
The crucial point here is that genocide is not classified as genocide in the 1948 convention because of numbers but “the intent to destroy whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This has been clearly demonstrated in the case of Israel.
Also punishable is conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide and complicity in genocide. Under the convention, the Israeli political and military command as well as politicians and media commentators have committed one if not all of these crimes.
Complicity would also have to extend to governments supporting the genocide by continuing arms supplies and defence ‘ties.’ As they are underwriting the genocide, trade and diplomatic ties would surely have to be included under this heading.
There is another significant issue. The killing of civilians in Vietnam, for example, was brutal and callous but not personal. American soldiers might have looked down on the Vietnamese, might have treated them with racist contempt, but they did not hate them. The killing was relatively indifferent.
It was the same in Iraq, where civilians were mostly killed from the air, were written off as ‘collateral damage’ but they were not being killed because they were hated, which is a defining feature of the Gaza genocide. Gaza is very personal, existential for Israel in ways that go beyond the existence of the state into the cruelty and sadism flaunted daily by the Israeli soldiers.
Yet, as soldiers, whether in Gaza or Lebanon they are not fighting Hamas or Hizbullah man to man. They have failed against Hezbollah before. In 2006, they were routed and now they have proven themselves incapable of taking one village beyond the Israel-Lebanon armistice line despite the presence of 50,000 troops with all the protection that artillery and air power can give them.
Apart from their questionable capacity as soldiers, there is no reason to put their lives at risk when they have an entire array of weapons available to kill at a distance. These are weapons that their foes do not have, from tanks, jet fighters, helicopters, killer drones and quad copters to bunker buster bombs, exploding robots and Iron Domes.
Gaza – and to an increasing degree Lebanon – is largely the machine extermination of a civilian population, with the added military capacity to cut off all means of life by destroying forested and agricultural land and blocking supplies of food and medicine. Like the Iraq sanctions, this is what Israel’s ‘friends’ have been supporting, actively or through their inaction.
The population is being weakened not just by death from the air or at the end of a tank shell of a sniper’s bullet but deliberately caused malnutrition. Already by July this year, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) had reported that famine in Gaza was “imminent,” with 1.1 million people experiencing “catastrophic” food insecurity.
With forced starvation now being implemented as a weapon of war in northern Gaza, in particular, the situation almost six months later is much worse. The psychological impact of losing friends and family in daily air attacks is also deliberately calculated to break down civilian resistance.
There is virtually no rule of law relating to warfare that Israel is not violating, flagrantly, blatantly and without any regard for what the rest of the world thinks. Far from pulling back after the ICJ’s ruling of “plausible” genocide in January, it has intensified and extended what Norman Finkelstein has correctly identified as extermination, not a war.
Israel’s meticulous, carefully thought-out destruction of Gaza and its civilian population is unique amongst all the wars fought since 1945.
There is an explanation for this. For Israel to live, Palestine has to die, not just the people, their villages and their agricultural production but Palestine physically, culturally and as a presence in history.
The olive is as much an enemy as the people, which is why over decades olive groves have been a primary target for the Jewish colonists on the West Bank. The conflict is personal and existential: as long as the Palestinians and everything they represent live, in their villages, farms, schools, universities and schools, in their rich culture and history, Israel is in danger of dying.
This is the fear the criminal has of eventually being caught despite all precautions.
That is why Palestine in its totality has to be wiped out, even as a name on the map.
Why Israeli snipers kill children; why upwards of 15,000 have been killed in Gaza since October 7 2023 and more than 170 on the West Bank, in air strikes or targeted killings by ‘soldiers’ and settlers. Most are young teenagers, deliberately shot in the head or the upper torso, the evidence indicates.
Why Israeli pilots kill medics and the wounded they are rushing to help in a ‘double tap’ operation.
Why they destroy hospitals and schools, even bombing them when they have been turned into refuges for the homeless.
Why they bomb them even in their tents.
Why soldiers – so-called – cheer and laugh when blowing up schools and universities in Gaza and entire villages in Lebanon.
Why the same so-called soldiers humiliate, torture, rape and kill their imprisoned captives.
Why the Israeli military command decides to starve the Gazans to death.
Hatred, fear and contempt have to be very deeply embedded for human beings to be turned into the young Israeli Palestinian-hating sociopaths capable of committing the terrible crimes the world is witnessing every day in in Gaza and on the West Bank.
Under the skin, behind their arrogance and bragging, the Israelis, the soldiers and the great majority that support them in their infamous behavior, are deeply insecure.
Their lives depend on a continuing flow of billions of dollars in economic and military aid from the US, while the future that awaits them is uncertain unless they destroy everything associated with that one word: ‘Palestine.’
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
