sujithxavier Announcements

(Settler Colonial) Genocide in Gaza: The Report of the UN Special Rapporteur

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has submitted her report to the Human Rights Council on Israel’s perpetration of genocide in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The report can be read here. It concludes:

‘The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group. This report finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.’ (para. 93).

Forensic Architecture’s ‘Gaza Hospital Platform’ showing the status of hospitals in Gaza as of 1 February 2024.

The Special Rapporteur’s report also points, importantly, to the settler colonial context and the reality that ‘Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure’ (para. 95). The sections of the report setting out this context in paragraphs 8-14 are copied here:

Genocide as inherent to settler-colonialism  

8.   Genocide, as the denial of the right of a people to exist and the subsequent attempt or success in annihilating them, entails various modes of elimination.1 Raphael Lemkin, who coined  the term “genocide”, observed that genocide is “a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction”,2 ranging from physical elimination to the “forced disintegration” of a people’s political and social institutions, culture, language, national sentiments and religion.3 Genocide is a process, not a single act.4

9.   Genocidal intent and practices are integral to the ideology and processes of settler-colonialism,5 as the experience of Native Americans in the U.S., First Nations in Australia or Herero in Namibia illustrates. As settler-colonialism aims to acquire Indigenous land and resources, the mere existence of Indigenous peoples poses an existential threat to the settler society.6 Destruction and replacement of Indigenous people become therefore ‘unavoidable’ and take place through different methods depending on the perceived threat to the settler group. These include removal (forcible transfer, ethnic cleansing), movement restrictions (segregation, large-scale carceralization), mass killings (murder, disease, starvation), assimilation (cultural erasure, child removal) and birth prevention.7 Settler-colonialism is a dynamic, structural process and a confluence of acts aimed at displacing and eliminating Indigenous groups, of which genocidal extermination/annihilation represents the peak.8

‘No al genocidio en Gaza’ – mural in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 2014

Palestine and the context of genocide

10. Historical patterns of genocide demonstrate that persecution, discrimination and other preliminary stages prepare the ground for the annihilation stage of genocide.9 In Palestine, displacing and erasing the Indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’.10 In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Colonization Department stated: “there is no room for both peoples, together in this country. The only solution is Palestine without Arabs. And there is no other way but to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe should be left.”11

11. Practices leading to the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish population occurred in 1947–1949, and again in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip with mass displacement of hundreds of thousands, killings, destruction of villages and towns, looting and the denial of the right to return of expelled Palestinians.12

12. Since 1967, Israel has advanced its settler-colonial project through military occupation, stripping the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination.13 This has resulted in the segregation and control of Palestinians, including through land confiscation, house demolitions, revoked residencies and deportation.14 Punishing their indigeneity and rejection of colonization, Israel construed Palestinians as a ‘security threat’ to justify their oppression and “de-civilianization”, namely the denial of their status as protected civilians.15

13. Israel has progressively turned Gaza into a highly controlled enclave.16 Since the 2005 evacuation of Israeli settlers (which Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposed),17 Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be “re-colonized” and its Palestinian population as invaders to be expelled.18 These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the “exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people” on the land of “Greater Israel”, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.19

14. This is the historical background against which the atrocities in Gaza are unfolding.

The Special Rapporteur’s report concludes with a series of recommendations for UN member states to implement — from an immediate arms embargo and other sanctions on Israel to full funding of UNRWA and support for South African resort to the Security Council over Israel’s non-compliance with the ICJ’s provisional measures order. These recommendations and remedies are all aimed towards what Albanese presents as the overarching imperative:

The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.

infographic by Visualizing Palestine, January 2024

~

  1. Adhikari, ed., Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, (Routledge, 2019), p.13.
  2. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (Washington,1944), p.92.
  3. Ibid, p.79.
  4. Green et al., Countdown to Annhilation: Genocide in Myanmar,(London,2015).
  5. Laban-Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity:Toward an Anthropology of Genocide,” in Annihilating  Difference, ed. Laban-Hinton, (University of California Press,2002), pp.1-40.
  6. Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal”, J.Intercult.Stud.,(29)4 (2008), p.369.
  7. Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” J.Gen.Res.,(8)4 (2006), p.402.
  8. Lemkin, p.92; Wakeham, “The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism,”J.GenocideRes.,(24)3 (2022), pp.340-346.
  9. Stanton, “10 Stages of Genocide”, GenocideWatch, 1996.
  10. Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,(Metropolitan Books, 2020).
  11. Cited in Davis, “Palestine into Israel”, JPS, (3)1 (1973), p.89.
  12. Abu-Sitta, The Palestinian Nakba 1948, (Palestine Return Center, 2000), ch.15.; MRP, Chronology for Palestinians in Jordan, (2004). 
  13. A/77/35 (2022).
  14. BADIL, Coercive Environments: Israel’s Forcible Transfer of Palestinians, (2017). 
  15. A/HRC/53/59(2023), para. 80, 95.
  16. Ibid, para. 82.
  17. “Netanyahu quits over withdrawal from Gaza”, The Guardian, 08/08/2005.
  18. Perugini, “Settler-Colonial Inversions”, Settler-Colonial Studies, (9)1 (2019), p.44-45; see Smotrich, Ben-Gvir.
  19.  “Netanyahu returns with hard-right cabinet”, Reuters,29/12/2022. See also Jewish Nation-State Basic Law,19/07/2018