ICAHD Statement on Hamas incursion
and Israel's disproportionate retaliation
9 October 2023
ICAHD mourns the loss of all lives, Israeli and Palestinian, whether in the Hamas incursion or in the course of Israel’s disproportionate retaliation. All lives are precious, period. Precisely for that reason, however, we need to emphasize the political context if we hope to ever achieve a substantially just resolution and prevent further deaths and suffering.
The context is clear. The Palestinians have never been at war with Jews; they have been resisting a unilateral settler colonial project whose declared aim is the take-over of their homeland, the transformation of Palestine into Israel and the erasure of the Palestinian people, its culture and heritage. Calls to “end the violence” are not enough. On the contrary, they create a false dichotomy between military conquest, occupation, displacement, repression and the war crimes of a settler state on the one hand and the resistance of a colonized people with no state of their own, no army and no support from the major political powers on the other. Under the guise of “security” and “self-defense,” the United States and Europe have supported Israel’s killing and displacement of Palestinians – routinely described as “terrorists” – while ignoring and even justifying Israeli state terrorism.
The only way to end the violence and save all lives in Palestine/Israel is to decolonize the oppressive apartheid regime and its occupation, replacing them with a democratic state offering equal rights for all. We realize that in the midst of the ongoing events there exists no space for talk of a just political settlement and “peace.” But Israel can neither complete its settler project nor erase the Palestinian people, and no Palestinians should be killed or displaced in its futile attempt to do so. Nor can Palestinians achieve their liberation from an infinitely stronger Israel through armed struggle.
We call on Israel to stop its genocidal revenge attacks on Gaza, and certainly not to mount a ground invasion. We call on progressive forces everywhere to change the narrative. No longer should we speak of a “conflict” in which Palestinian resistance is criminalized and Israel’s expansion through military means is cast as its “right of self-defense.” Only a shift to an anti-colonial narrative will enable the emergence of a just, peaceful and secure post-colonial state and shared society out of the pools of blood in which we wallow.
ICAHD Calls for an End to Israeli Genocide Agaist the Palestinian People
2 November 2023
The term “genocide” was formulated by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin against the backdrop of the Holocaust. It was codified as a crime under international law in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The definition of genocide, as set out in Article 2 of the Convention, is simple and straightforward, its first three elements clearly reflecting Israeli policies and actions towards the Palestinian people since initiating its process of systematic genocide in 1947:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part.
By itself the ongoing destruction of Gaza and its people is a war crime, far too disproportionate to qualify as mere retaliation for the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, far too costly in civilian life and property to justify the scale of Israel’s militarily action against Hamas.
Genocide is often not a single event, but rather a series of deliberate events and processes over time whose ultimate intent is to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The Indian Wars in America lasted three centuries. If we step back from the war crime that is Israel’s current assault on Gaza to the concerted effort since Israel’s establishment to erase the country of Palestine and its Arab heritage, the picture that emerges is one of genocide, cultural as well as physical. Zionism’s and later Israel’s necessarily violent project to displace the country’s Palestinian population, take its land and replace it with a Jewish one constitutes deliberate destruction of the Palestinian people in part or in whole.
Three events have prompted ICAHD’s call for urgent international action to end Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people: the indiscriminate bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza on October 31, 2023, in which hundreds of innocent people – refugees from Israel’s campaign of expulsion in 1948 – were slaughtered in order to assassinate a single Hamas commander; the brutal attacks happening now against Palestinians in the West Bank in which Israeli settlers and soldiers are terrorizing families and emptying whole towns and villages – forced displacement, a crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention; and the statements of genocidal intent emanating from the highest Israeli government and military officials, whether towards the people of Gaza or directed at Palestinians (“the Arabs”) in general, statements that lead us to fear heightened colonization and further genocide if the international community allows Israel free reign to erase the Palestinian people politically, culturally and if need be physically.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) calls on the international community – the UN, governments and peoples – to hold Israel accountable for its decades of genocidal colonization. Most urgently we call for isolating and sanctioning Israel until its destruction of Gaza and its people ends, and the violent displacement of Palestinians from their lands and communities by Israeli settlers and soldiers cease.
We call on the International Criminal Court to bring to trial for war crimes the responsible Israeli political and military leaders.
We call on the United Nations to enforce Article 3(e) of the Geneva Convention punishing for “complicity in genocide” the United States, Canada, Europe and other countries contributing to Israeli genocide.
END ISRAELI GENOCIDE NOW!
IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE IN GAZA!
FREE ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES AND PALESTNIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS