A terrible tipping point in Gaza has been reached. The number of people admitted to hospital or dying from starvation has surged. The journalists’ union for Agence France-Presse (AFP) has issued a statement warning that “without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza” will die of hunger.
This is horribly shocking, but it is no surprise: after all, we are now more than 140 days into Israel’s total siege on Gaza. In May, Israel abolished the UN’s effective method of delivering aid in favour of a dystopian system in which Palestinians are forced to compete for a trickle of often unusable aid, and are shot at while doing so. About 1,000 civilians have been murdered while seeking food since the end of May. “There is no case since World War II of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled,” declares Alex de Waal, one of the world’s leading experts on hunger. Under the Geneva conventions, “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”.
Against this backdrop, on Monday the former Tory cabinet minister Kit Malthouse stood up in parliament and asked the foreign secretary, David Lammy, if he did “not see the personal risk to him, given our international obligations, that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction?” Lammy bent over the dispatch box and adopted a tone of solemn disappointment, as one might do when seeking to rise above an unprovoked insult. “I have to tell him that it demeans his argument when he personalises it in the way that he does,” he shot back.
But Malthouse did not resort to abuse. Indeed, the presiding deputy speaker did not reprimand him for unparliamentary language. Lammy intentionally conflated scrutiny with personal attack to avoid answering the question. Alas, like our prime minister, he is a lawyer by trade, and he should know that the genocide convention of 1948 identifies five punishable acts: one of them is “complicity in genocide”. He should know that signatories to the convention have a legal obligation “to prevent and to punish” the crime of genocide. He should also know that his country signed the convention the day it was published, and incorporated it into law 55 years ago.
Israel’s official position is that, when it is finished, no Palestinians will remain in Gaza. “We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to,” Benjamin Netanyahu openly boasts. It is building what its former prime minister Ehud Olmert says is a “concentration camp” as the first step before deporting Gaza’s survivors. Eyal Benvenisti – the Israeli lawyer who is part of the legal team defending it against accusations of genocide at the international court of justice – says this would be a “war crime” and “fits the definition of a ‘crime against humanity’”. He subsequently signed a letter declaring that this plan “under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide”.
Indeed, international law leaves no room for doubt. When the UK ratified the arms trade treaty in 2014, it accepted that it must not “authorise any transfer of conventional arms … if it has knowledge at the time of authorisation … [that] would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes”. It also accepted that this included “parts and components” essential to the functioning of “combat aircraft”. Lammy’s government supplies Israel with components crucial for the functioning of F-35 jets, whose bombs indiscriminately destroy civilian infrastructure and shred the bodies of little children. Lammy also knows, of course, that Britain is a founding member of the international criminal court, which last year issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
When successfully defending the sale of F-35 components in the high court, the government offered its assessment that it had not seen any evidence of women and children being deliberately targeted in Gaza, and there was no serious risk of a genocide. This contradicts dozens of American doctors and nurses who served in Gaza, who last year testified they had received the bodies of Palestinian children shot in the head or chest by Israeli snipers. Israeli soldiers have confessed that they are deliberately targeting children. Nick Maynard – a British doctor working in Gaza’s Nasser hospital – says that he is seeing clusters of young teenagers who have been shot in different body parts: on one day, it’s the abdomen, on another, the head or neck, on another, the testicles. “So there’s a very clear pattern and it’s almost as if a game is being played,” he says.
The government’s official position of genocide denial contradicts the consensus of actual genocide scholars who dedicate their lives to the field. That includes Israeli academics such as Omer Bartov, a pre-eminent professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, who said that as a former IDF officer he agonised over reaching his conclusion: “But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”
Those who have facilitated or justified this abomination have no excuses, no place to hide. More than a year ago, South Africa’s legal team composed a dossier detailing statements of genocidal and criminal intent issued by Israeli leaders and officials: it was 121 – pages long, and is now completely out of date. There is more video footage of civilians being slaughtered and civilian infrastructure being destroyed than any other war crime as it was happening in history.
Yet not only does Britain supply Israel with those crucial F-35 components, its government refuses to describe a single Israeli act as a “war crime”, because it knows that then imposes sweeping legal obligations. Britain continues its annual trade with Israel, which last year was worth £5.8bn. Days after its tokenistic gesture of suspending trade treaty talks, Britain’s embassy in Israel celebrated the arrival of the UK trade envoy. When Britain imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, it did so on the grounds of their “horrendous extremist language”, rather than actions, because the latter implicates the British government. They refuse to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel itself.
By proscribing Palestine Action, the government has assured that it is opponents of genocide who face being hauled before the dock in the here and now. Our foreign secretary no doubt believes that the impunity traditionally enjoyed by western leaders and Israel itself will protect him and his colleagues for ever. That assumes the winds will never change. There is no statute of limitation for complicity in genocide. Israel’s crime is not yet complete. Lammy must believe that his freedom is safe for ever: that there will be no knock on his door in five, 10, 20 years. That is quite the bet.
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