Why has Israel escaped the label of genocide?

#Israel #escaped #label #genocide
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full screen The demonstrators, whether in Malmö or New York, are dismissed as “Palestine activism”. Photo: Andres Kudacki / AP

Those that the world over demonstrating against Israel’s ongoing war crimes and mass murders against the Palestinian population in Gaza are malicious enemies of democracy, I gather from Svenska Dagbladet’s editorial page (April 24).

The demonstrators, whether in Malmö or New York, are dismissed as “Palestine activism”. The ironic quotation marks are due to the editorial writer’s exclusive knowledge that the “activists” don’t really care about 34,000 dead people in Gaza. Because “the population of Gaza is used as a bat to attack Israel, governments in the West and anything else that displeases the activists”.

The rascal’s left doesn’t even hesitate to use 34,000 dead to express their displeasure. But that is typical of the left, they have always used poverty just as insidiously to express their displeasure with an unequal society.

However, the editorial writer is particularly upset about “the grotesque accusations of the activists, such as the baseless claim that the war against Hamas would constitute genocide”.

Let’s disregard the beautifying paraphrase “the war against Hamas” and go directly to the problem of genocide.

Protesters around the world take it for granted that Israel’s war against the Palestinian population is an ongoing genocide. Like the television channel Al Jazeera (the Arab world’s equivalent of the American CNN). It is equally obvious to the global right that the war against Gaza is absolutely not to be considered genocide, just ordinary war.

I don’t know myself, but I can guarantee that no right-wing politician knows either, or any bomb liberal or Sweden Democrat and above all no editorial writer in Svenska Dagbladet.

The Bosnian Serb massacre of 8,300 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 was genocide. The “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” has established that.

The military dictatorship in Myanmar (Burma) committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority when it massacred 10,000 people and displaced 720,000 in 2017. That it must be defined as genocide was determined by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022. And before that, a UN investigation 2018.

So why has Israelwhich killed twice as many women and children as the Bosnian Serbs killed men and boys, or three times as many people as the dictatorship in Myanmar, escaped the trademark label of genocide?

I don’t know that. And no ever-so-confident right-wing party or Sweden Democrat or editorial writer in Svenska Dagbladet either, I can assure you.

The UN Convention on Genocide from 1948 sets out a series of criteria for what counts:

Yes, you can you stick to the paragraphs themselves. But what conclusions can be drawn from it? To begin with, you don’t have to meet all of the set criteria to qualify for the genocide label. And that Israel seems fully on par with the regime in Myanmar and the Bosnian Serbs.

So far the formal. But informal political circumstances and power relations are likely to be as important as clauses. For example, that it is guilty as the United States points out, as in the Myanmar case. And by the same logic, 4-5 million dead during the Vietnam War 1965 -1975 cannot mean that the US would have been guilty of genocide, because the US does not agree.

The Right and the United States will never agree to label Israel a genocidal state, preferring, in all seriousness, to level that accusation at Hamas.

The left around the world has decided on the opposite stance. The only thing that is uncontroversial and beyond discussion is that Israel is guilty of widespread mass murder of civilians and systematic war crimes. That’s bad enough.

Furthermore, I believe that…

…it is fascinating to see how Expressen’s foreign correspondent states (April 30) that Israel has killed 11-13,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, “only” two dead civilians per terrorist, that is. How did he sort and count the bodies? How would even Israel have managed it?

…YouTuber and right-wing populist Henrik Jönsson’s launch on Expressen’s debate page admittedly consisted of normally unpublishable chatter. But he can thank Magdalena Andersson for the promotion.