No justification for Israel’s war crimes, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid

By: Tariq Kenney-Shawa

At the time of writing, Israel’s latest onslaught on the Gaza Strip has killed at least 248 Palestinians, the majority of whom are civilians, including 66 children. Meanwhile, lucky enough to escape death or crippling injury are more than 58,000 Gazans who now find themselves homeless and destitute as a result of Israel’s latest and most brutal assault on the Palestinian enclave already suffocating under a decades-long Israeli blockade. The scene is similarly grim in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, where at least 24 Palestinian civilians have been killed and hundreds more injured by Israeli troops or rampaging far-right settlers chanting “death to Arabs,” while dozens of former refugees face the prospect of being kicked out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah – all in the midst of a pandemic. These aren’t just numbers and statistics, these are countless lives and entire families that have been eviscerated at the press of a button. One would think that Israel’s barbaric occupation, long history of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, and deepening apartheid identity, along with the IDF’s blatant war crimes in Gaza would evoke shame, or at the very least prompt some introspection among supporters of Israel. But no, their indifference towards Palestinian suffering appears endless. Although their voices are receding as the narrative slowly shifts and the world increasingly calls out Israeli brutality, some continue to obstinately defend Israel’s war crimes.

In a supposed effort to provide the “other side” of the story in response to the call by several SIPA student organizations for divestment from Israel, Marc Cohen effectively defends Israel’s ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, all while deceptively painting the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians as somehow equal or balanced. For someone apparently so concerned with providing an accurate assessment of “both sides,” Marc glosses over some of the most defining aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli “conflict” – the starkly asymmetrical relationship between Israel as an occupying force and the Palestinians as an occupied people. The oppressor over the oppressed. Israel boasts the most powerful, advanced, and well-equipped military in the region, which it uses to meticulously police every aspect of Palestinian life and brutally crush any form of resistance – to devastating effect. Israel is an established state benefiting from unwavering support and protection, along with an unfettered stream of funding from the world’s most powerful countries. The shocking imbalance of power is evidenced in the latest casualty counts, with over 248 Palestinians killed during the latest flare up compared to only 12 Israelis killed. No casualty, be they Palestinian or Israeli, is justified; however, what this shows is the shocking power disparity between each side and the vastly disproportional Israeli military response to Palestinian resistance. The failure or refusal to recognize the reality of this oppressor-oppressed relationship effectively entails standing with the oppressor. Unfortunately, their argument sounds eerily similar to the “all lives matter” response to the Black Lives Matter movement, as Marc, a former IDF soldier himself, defends the settler-colonial occupier and the apartheid system it perpetuates.

To begin with, Marc attempts to endorse the “morality” of the Israeli military by zeroing in on the killing of 16-year-old Saeed Odeh at the hands of Israeli forces, effectively justifying his murder by accusing him of throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. At least this is what the Israeli soldiers who shot him claim, but there are other accounts of what really happened. We are all too familiar here in the US with police who falsely claim their unarmed victims posed a threat. Even if Saeed was responsible for throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at heavily armed Israeli troops and armored vehicles, does this mean his extrajudicial killing was justified? Of course not. Unfortunately, Israel’s murder of Palestinian children is not new and is continuing apace. Saeed is now only one of at least 63 Palestinian children who have been killed by Israeli forces in the past few days alone, most of whom far younger than Saeed was. I ask Marc, what is your excuse for the children that have been killed in Israeli air strikes across the Gaza Strip? Were they throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails at the state-of-the-art, US-supplied F-35 fighter jets and drones that pick them off like fish in a bucket? What exactly did Mohammed Hadidi do to deserve having to dig through the rubble of his home only to discover that his wife and all but one of his five children were killed? Were they not killed for being Palestinian? What is the tactical justification for levelling entire apartment and office buildings, leaving dozens of families homeless or destroying Gaza’s only COVID-19 testing lab? This policy of collective punishment, a blatant war crime, combined with the testimonies of countless former Israeli soldiers who have spoken out against their own army, renders it impossible to “attest to the IDF’s morality” due to its inherent nature as an occupying force bent on the subjugation and gradual cleansing of the Palestinians. 

As an occupied people, Palestinians reserve the right, enshrined in international law, to resist against their occupier. This is not to say that violent resistance by Palestinians is effective, nor that the targeting of civilians is justifiable – just as Israeli air strikes on civilians should be considered war crimes, so should Palestinian rocket attacks that target civilians. However, it is vital that we recognize Palestinian violence for what it is – a justified response to state violence, persecution, and oppression. The violence of the oppressed is locked in tandem with that of the oppressor – if the oppressor chooses to cease the oppression, the occupied no longer have a reason to resist. In other words, the upwards spiral of violence is directed by Israel as the dominant occupying force. With every Palestinian child they kill, another is filled with hate and resentment. And so the cycle of violence perpetuates itself endlessly, a process that can only be stopped if Israel ends the occupation and oppression. By not even mentioning Israel’s military occupation over the Palestinians, Marc reflexively obscures the power dynamics and equates overwhelming state violence with justified resistance by the oppressed.

Marc then goes on to obfuscate the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, claiming that it somehow does not serve as an example of Israel’s long history of state sponsored ethnic cleansing. How then would you respond to Mohammed and Muna El Kurd, whose home in Sheikh Jarrah was forcibly taken over by far-right Israeli settlers in 2009 with the backing and protection of Israeli soldiers? For decades, the Israeli military has physically facilitated the dispossession of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and across the West Bank, thus expediting the Israeli state’s long-held goal of the total erasure of Palestinians from the land. Israeli soldiers forcibly evicting Palestinian residents from their homes is state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, many of these expulsions, including those in Sheikh Jarrah, are prompted by petitions from settler organizations that enjoy the close support of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's right-wing government and are tied to far-right groups that he needs to retain power. By calling the dispossession of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah a mere “legal dispute,” Marc ignores the extensive history of ethnic cleansing that Israel has relied upon since its inception in order to maintain a Jewish majority. In 1948, over 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were forced from their homes in the face of massacres by Israeli militias, the first major wave of Palestinian exodus that has continued at varying paces ever since. Ethnic cleansing has represented a core pillar of the Zionist movement since its inception – in 1937, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, foreshadowed what would become official Israeli policy when he said, “we must expel Arabs and take their place.” Today, Israel’s leaders have expressed the same revolting sentiment over and over again, backing their words with actions by expelling Palestinians from their land, preventing them from building homes, and only permitting Jews the right of return. The ongoing dispossession of Sheikh Jarrah’s residents represents a microcosm of Israel’s ongoing state-sponsored campaign to cleanse Palestinians from their land.

While denying proof of ethnic cleansing, Marc also makes it clear that he has not followed the recent discourse surrounding Israel’s rapid descent into apartheid. Although Palestinians have been pointing to evidence of Israeli apartheid for years now, the adoption of the term by leading human rights organizations and US-based activists has finally given the debate the attention it deserves. B’tselem was first to break ground by becoming the first major Israeli human rights organization to formally adopt the term in a detailed report they released in January. This was followed in April by an equally momentous study published by Human Rights Watch, which argued that recent political developments in Israel, ranging from the 2018 Nation-State Law that assigned national rights exclusively to Israel’s Jewish population, to the extension of Israeli sovereignty through land confiscations and annexation have carried Israel across the legal threshold of apartheid. As has been extensively detailed in the aforementioned reports, Israel represents the dominant sovereign between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, where they have enacted a permanent system that methodically privileges Jewish Israelis and discriminates against Palestinians. However, in many cases, Israel’s litany of crimes far exceed those of discrimination and apartheid. In fact, Israel is a genocidal state as evidenced by the massacres and mass expulsions that constitute Israel’s history. 

Photo by Wissam Nassar

Although it is difficult to find hope in the face of a seemingly endless stream of excruciating images of mutilated children being pulled from the rubble of their homes in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the globe in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against occupation and oppression. On college campuses and even in the halls of Congress, discourse around the Palestinian struggle is shifting, as we slowly yet surely dispel the many myths propagated by Israel’s decades-long hegemony over the Palestinian narrative. Those who feel threatened by op-eds that call for peaceful resistance to Israeli oppression in the form of boycotts or divestment, peaceful marches that call for an end to Israeli occupation, or the truth of Israeli apartheid itself are those who continue to defend and uphold the violent status quo of Israeli occupation and oppression. Just like those who feel threatened by Black Lives Matter are the ones who sustain this country’s systemic racism and rampant police brutality. If Marc is truly sincere in his professed desire to find a resolution to this “conflict,” then he would recognize Israel’s settler-colonial, apartheid, and genocidal reality, just as so many others have, and join the growing coalition of voices demanding change. Instead, Marc blames the victim for the oppressor’s crimes and regurgitates the same tired talking points that are spewed by Israeli military generals as they justify murder. 

For decades, Palestinian voices and perspectives have been marginalized and discredited, solely because they strive to expose the reality of Israeli oppression. Those who paint the conflict as anything but one between an occupying settler-colonial power and an occupied indigenous population or reduce Israel’s crimes to merely “undisputable and inexcusable flaws” effectively continue to silence Palestinians and obstruct truth. The PWG’s statement in solidarity with Palestinians, cosigned by several other student groups that recognize the urgency of calling out Israel’s crimes, was a call for Columbia University to take a stand against injustice committed by the state of Israel and respect the democratic wishes of its student body. The demands we made in the article – to follow through with what several other US universities have already done and divest from Israeli apartheid and war crimes – are not radical. They are the bare minimum of what we should be doing. Efforts to falsely portray our inclusive coalition as somehow anti-Semitic represent a disingenuous attempt to shut down actual debate. Marc is correct that “many of us will go onto illustrious careers in public service and positions of influence that will affect policy and public opinion.” That is why it is so critical that if we, as future policy makers, continue to ignore the realities of the Palestinians struggle, our attempts to find peace will be doomed before they even begin. Peace will not be achieved by empty, feel-good rhetoric that equates the oppressor and the oppressed. Peace can only be achieved by recognizing harsh realities and confronting uncomfortable truths.