A presidential pardon and the killing fields of Gaza

First published in Canadian Dimension, December 10, 2024 / 20 min read

On December 1 Joe Biden, acting under the authority conferred upon presidents under the US Constitution, granted to his son Hunter Biden a “Full and Unconditional Pardon”:

For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions) …

Hunter Biden had already been charged and convicted of three federal gun and nine federal tax charges, for which he was due to be sentenced on December 12 and 16 respectively. He could have served up to 25 years in federal prison on the gun charges and 17 years on the tax charges, though the general expectation was of leniency.

Other US presidents, including George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, have also (ab)used this power to pardon associates, including friends and relatives. But the only precedentfor a pardon this open-ended (it covers all offenses that Hunter may have committed or taken part in over 11 years), is the pardon Gerald Ford granted to Richard Nixon following the latter’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.

Even if evidence surfaced proving that Hunter committed murder during this timeframe, he could not be prosecuted federally for it, because Dad has pardoned him in advance.

A loving father?

Biden appended a personal statement to the official announcement of Hunter’s pardon, explaining why, despite having promised on several occasions not to do so (“I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him,” he said in June), he had taken so extraordinary a step.

He maintained that Hunter was treated differently than people who commit the same crimes typically are, and the reason for this was political vindictiveness by the GOP.

His statement concludes:

I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice—and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.

Biden’s action has sharply divided Americans. Most people understand why a father might wish to pardon his son in these circumstances. Fewer accept that paternal love justifies their president taking the law into his own hands to overrule the courts.

Republicans have predictably accused Biden of nepotism and hypocrisy, with MAGA attack dog Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gleefully proclaiming: “Democrats can spare us the lectures about the rule of law when, say, President Trump nominates Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to clean up this corruption.”

That Senator Cotton can say this with a straight face, when a convicted (though never sentenced) felon who appointed his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner to (very lucrative) positions in his first administration is about to re-enter the White House—a felon who avoided sentencingand escaped other trials for election interference and stealing confidential documents only because his hand-picked Supreme Court justices manufactured a new definition of presidential immunity—boggles the mind.

But it is also beside the point. The issue here is not Trump (of whom nothing better is to be expected) but Biden—who made a “sacred pledge” that “the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy would remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.” A cornerstone of any democracy is the rule of law.

Democratic dilemmas

Hunter Biden’s pardon has split the Democrats, who are already reeling from Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat.

Some—many of them progressives—have cheered Biden’s decision on the realpolitik grounds that Trump has made it clear he will not play by the rulebook and will weaponize the Department of Justice to exact revenge on his political opponents, including Hunter Biden. Why should Joe abandon his son to the mercies of a judicial system the incoming administration has made clear it intends to pervert?

Biden is now reportedly facing calls to extend a similar preemptive pardon to others on the Trump hit list, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, special prosecutor Jack Smith, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Others—who are mostly, though not all, on the more “moderate” wing of the party—worry about the precedent Biden has set and erosion of respect for the law.

“I’m disappointed,” admitted Colorado representative Jason Crow. “He promised he would not do this. I think it will make it harder for us going forward when we talk about upholding democracy.” Biden’s “decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all,” agreed Colorado senator Michael Bennet. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan said that “A president’s family and allies shouldn’t get special treatment … This was an improper use of power, it erodes trust in our government, and it emboldens others to bend justice to suit their interests.”

In a biting editorial, the New York Times editorial board agreed:

This was a significant misstep that could leave lasting damage. It will not only tarnish Mr. Biden’s own record as a defender of democratic norms, it will also be greedily embraced as justification for Donald Trump’s further abuses of pardon power and broader attacks on the integrity of the justice system.

Trump is already hinting at using Biden’s pardon of Hunter to justify pardoning at least some of those jailed for the January 6 insurrection (as he likely intended to do anyway).

Other critics have pointed out that there are many other miscarriages of justice in the American system, including inmates sitting on federal death row convicted on dubious evidence and thousands of mostly Black prisoners jailed for minor drug offences or non-violent crimes, who are at least as deserving of a presidential pardon as Hunter Biden. Trump has already promised a spree of executions should he regain the presidency.

What better way of signaling that there is one law for the rich and powerful and another for everyone else?

A basket of deplorables

On December 3, two days after Biden pardoned Hunter, the US—presumably on the president’s instructions, and certainly with his knowledge—voted against a UN General Assembly resolution titled “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine,” which was designed to reinforce the organization’s commitment to a two-state solution. Despite American opposition, the resolution was adopted with the overwhelming support of the international community—157 votes in favor, eight against, and seven abstentions.

The resolution was unambiguous. It also concerned the rule of law, in this case laws governing relations between states and the conduct of war:

By terms of that text, the 193‑member organ stressed the need to urgently commit to a Middle East peace process. Israel, the occupying Power, must comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Apart from the US and Israel, the only states opposing the motion were far-right populist Javier Milei’s Argentina; Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” Hungary; and the US client states of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Papua New Guinea (which signed a defense pact with the US in May 2023). A basket of deplorables, one might say. The seven abstainers were Cameroon, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Paraguay, Ukraine—whose arms supply for its war with Russia relies on continuing American goodwill—and Uruguay.

All members of the G7 except the US supported the motion, as did all EU and/or NATO members except the US, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Australia and New Zealand were on board. These countries—the so-called “Western democracies,” whatever their geographical location—have been among Israel’s strongest backers historically and throughout the fourteen months of its current assault on Gaza.

In supporting the motion, Canada was breaching its “years-long policy” of siding with Israel in all UN votes.

Whatever their past positions (or present evasions, including on enforcing ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes should either set foot on their territory), the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand’s votes calling for Israel to comply with international law put them on a collision course with the US.

If Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements and proposed appointments (Marco Rubio as secretary of state; Mike Waltz as national security advisor; Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the UN; Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel) are anything to go on, this rift will likely grow even wider under the incoming US administration.

For some unfathomable reason—though America’s habitual arrogance, insularity, and bottomless faith in its own exceptionality might have something to do with it—the Biden administration’s complicity in enabling Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and (“plausible”) genocide in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories does not arouse the same outrage among US politicians and pundits as Hunter Biden’s pardon.

Indeed, these crimes are seldom seriously debated at all outside university campuses and fringe media, and any attempt to raise them is likely to be met with accusations of antisemitism and support for terrorism by Republican and Democratic politicians alike.

Yet the same legal, moral, and political questions of respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law arise in both instances.

The ICJ provisional measures

A number of judgments over the last year from the world’s two highest courts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) set up by the UN in 1946, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) established by the Rome Statute in 2002, have put it beyond any doubt that both Israel’s continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories and the manner in which it has conducted its military campaign against Gaza since October 7, 2023, are contrary to international law.

On January 26, the ICJ delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide (which will likely take years to arrive at a final judgment).

The court imposed six “provisional measures” on Israel aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts.” The judges ruled that this right to protection was “plausible” (§54) because there was “a real and imminent risk” (§74) that genocide could occur before the ICJ delivered its final judgment unless steps were actively taken to stop it happening.

The ICJ required Israel to:

take all measures within its power to prevent … (a) killing members of the group [Palestinians]; (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; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (§78).

The court also instructed Israel “to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” (§80).

Benjamin Netanyahu protested that “the very claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is not just false, it is outrageous, and the court’s willingness to discuss it at all is a mark of disgrace that will not be erased for generations.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who on 9 October 2023 ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip” in which “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”—complained that “The ICJ in The Hague went above and beyond, when it granted South Africa’s antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza, and now refuses to reject the petition outright.”

The US stood behind Israel, asserting that “We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded and note the court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling and that it called for the unconditional, immediate release of all hostages being held by Hamas.”

Further ICJ measures on Gaza

On further petitioning from South Africa, on March 28 the ICJ ordered Israel to:

(a) take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance … to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary; and (b) ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza … including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance (§45).

Revisiting the case for a third time on May 24, the ICJ ordered that “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; “take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry …mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide”; and “submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order” (§57).

Remember Rafah? It was one of Joe Biden’s “red lines,” which did not stop the IDF expelling its population and reducing it to ruins. Joe caved, of course. His fatherly concern evidently does not extend to the 17,400 Palestinian children killed—mostly by US bombs—in Gaza, or the thousands more who have been maimed or orphaned.

Israel did not comply with any of the January, March or May ICJ orders. The Rafah offensive continued. So did massacres of civilians. This was followed by a renewed IDF seige of North Gaza, which even the onetime Likud Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon characterizes as an exercise in “ethnic cleansing.” In October and November the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza hit its lowest levels since the beginning of the war.

Instead of cooperating with the UN—let alone permitting it to conduct an inquiry into allegations of genocide—Israel has prohibited UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterras from entering the country and has conducted a vicious smear campaign to discredit the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestine territories, Francesca Albanese.

In an ultimate snub to the ICJ, on October 28 the Israeli parliament adopted two laws designating UNRWA—the principal channel for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza—as a “terrorist organization,” banning it from operating in Israel or the occupied territories.

The US breaks its own laws for Israel

Once again the US fully supported Israel in its defiance of the court and continued to supply it with arms. Having suspended funding in January, the US banned all funding to UNRWA for a year on March 25, with substantial bipartisan support from Congress.

In late April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignored both a US Agency for International Development (USAID) memo claiming that Israel was “subjecting US humanitarian aid destined for Gaza to ‘arbitrary denial, restriction and impediments,’” and misgivings within the State Department over whether Israel’s use of US-supplied weaponry in Gaza was “consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy,” and certified Israel’s own assurances as “credible and reliable.”

This was arguably contrary to both the Biden administration’s own National Security Memorandum (NSM) 20, a measure adopted on February 8 with the declared aim of ensuring accountability, and the Leahy Laws “prohibiting the US Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”

This pattern repeated itself even after the US presidential election. In what was clearly in retrospect an electoral ploy, the US had put Israel on 30 days notice that if it did not show “a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining” concrete measures “to reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory” in Gaza, there might be “implications for US policy under NSM-20 and relevant US law (weapons supply).”

On November 12—despite massive evidence to the contrary—the State Department announced it “has concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating US law.” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a Senate motion of disapproval on the administration’s continuing to supply arms to Israel in these circumstances, which gained only 20 votes in the 100-member assembly.

The ICJ advisory opinion on the occupation

In a development that is independent of South Africa’s genocide case, on July 19 the ICJ delivered a far-reaching advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (including Gaza).

While ICJ advisory opinions are not binding, they “carry great legal weight and moral authority … [and] contribute to the elucidation and development of international law and thereby to the strengthening of peaceful relations between States.” To ignore the court’s advice is to undermine a central pillar of the post-war international legal order.

The judges concluded that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must therefore “end its unlawful presence … as rapidly as possible”; ”cease immediately all new settlement activities, and … evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”; and “make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Importantly, the ICJ judgment also made it emphatically clear to Israel’s supporters that:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Israeli reaction was furious. Foreign Minister Israel Katz damned the ICJ judgment as “fundamentally warped, one-sided, and wrong.” Israel Gantz, head of one of the largest settler councils, the Binyamin Regional Council, argued that it was “contrary to the Bible, morality and international law.” Benjamin Netanyahu posted to X:

The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the ICJ conclusions “prove for the thousandth time that this is a clearly political and anti-Semitic organization,” while his fellow far-right cabinet member, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said the appropriate response to the ICJ’s decision is to “impose sovereignty (over the West Bank) now.”

As an original signatory of the statute that established the ICJ (though one that has since had a fractious relationship with the court, withdrawing from its compulsory jurisdiction in 1986), the US was more measured in its response—while making its disapproval of the ICJ’s unwanted interference in its plans for the Middle East clear.

Expressing “concern” that that “the breadth of the court’s opinion will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict,” the State Department said that the demand for Israel to withdraw as soon as possible from the occupied territories was “inconsistent with the established framework” for resolving the conflict—i.e., the “peace process” established by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which Benjamin Netanyahu has proudly sabotaged—and warned all parties not to use the ICJ advisory opinion “as a pretext for further unilateral actions that deepen divisions or for supplanting a negotiated two-state solution.”

The ICC arrest warrants

The most damning legal indictment of Israel’s conduct of its offensive in Gaza came on November 21, when the pre-trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.

The court stopped short of charging Netanyahu and Gallant with genocide, accusing them only (!) of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Among (many) other things, the ICC pre-trial chamber asserts:

both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity … [as well as] impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal …

Needless to say, reaction in Israel—though not always among the Jewish community internationally—was uniformly hostile. Netanyahu’s office denounced the chamber’s decision as “antisemitic,” while Gallant claimed it “sets a dangerous precedent against the right to self-defense and moral warfare.” Opposition politicians concurred. Benny Gantz said the decision was a “shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten,” and Yair Lapid called it a “prize for terror.” Not to be outdone, Itamar Ben-Gvir urged Israel to annex the West Bank by way of reply.

Unlike most Western democracies—and together with Israel, Russia, China, and India—the US is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2002, and is not one of the 124 countriesthat accept its jurisdiction. This did not stop it from welcoming the same court’s issue of an arrest warrant in March 2023 against Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine (which Joe Biden said was “justified” and “makes a very strong point”).

But for Israel—as usual—it is a different story. “We fundamentally reject the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.” In fact, the court took months longer to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant than it had for Putin. “The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter,” the US national security council added.

It is telling that these statements focus on questions of the court’s jurisdiction—which the Chamber actually considered in its decision—and process, and avoid addressing the substance of the charges entirely.

Republicans outdid one another in macho belligerence. Mike Waltz posted that “The ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the US government,” adding “You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC and UN come January.” Invoking the 2002 so-called Hague Invasion Act, which authorizes the use of military force to free Americans or allied citizens detained by the ICC, Tom Cotton declared that “The ICC is a kangaroo court and [ICC prosecutor] Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants.”

Trump’s ally South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—who ironically is a former Chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary—not only called on the US government to impose sanctions against ICC personnel (as the previous Trump administration did), but threatened “To any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we’re going to sanction you. If you are going to help the ICC as a nation enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant … I will put sanctions on you.”

Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer didn’t go so far as to threaten America’s allies, but urged the Senate “to pass the bipartisan legislation that came from the House sanctioning the Court for such an outrage and President Biden needs to sign it.”

As ever, US support for Israel—even against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity—was bipartisan. Among other Democrats, Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz accused the ICC of “antisemitic double standards,” Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen urged Biden to “use his authority to swiftly respond to this overreach,” and New York Congressman Ritchie Torres accused the ICC of “criminalizing self-defense.”

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman posted on X, “No standing, relevance, or path. Fuck that,” accompanied by an emoji of the Israeli flag.

Questions of equivalence

More chilling than any of this all-American bluster was the official White House response from Joe Biden. Here is his presidential statement—in full:

The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.

Though Justin Trudeau promised that Canada would abide by the ICC ruling, he had advanced the same line of argument back in May, when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan first requested arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant (as well as three Hamas leaders whom Israel has since assassinated). What the Canadian prime minister found “troubling,” in his words, was “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas.”

Trudeau’s Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Anthony Housefather, similarly condemned drawing “moral equivalency … between the leaders of a recognized terrorist organization and the elected leaders of a democratic state.” Then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got on the same high horse, pontificating that “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defense and the terrorist group Hamas. It is wrong to conflate and equivocate between those two different entities.” In similar vein, on November 24 the Washington Post condemned the ICC for “putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians.”

It suffices to recall that Adolf Hitler was the duly elected leader of a Western democratic state to see the fundamental flaw in these arguments. The issue is not the standing of the accused—democratically elected politicians as against “terrorists” (as designated by the West though not in this case by much of the rest of the world)—but the equivalency of the crimes they are charged with having committed, no matter who they are.

To argue that democratic regimes should be exempt from prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide simply because they are democracies is to say that there should be one law for the West and another for the rest.

Lindsey Graham obligingly let the cat out of the bag, when he told a Turkish broadcaster that “The Rome Statute doesn’t apply to Israel, the United States, France, Germany, or Great Britain because it wasn’t conceived to come after us.”

Kind of like US law doesn’t apply to Hunter Biden because his loving Dad pardoned him.

Where ignorant armies clash by night

It is not only Palestinians that are dying on the killing fields of Gaza. The genocide exacts a toll on its perpetrators too. Israel and its Western enablers—principally, but no means exclusively, the United States—are committing two kinds of crime in Gaza.

The first are the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal acts that have led to the ICJ and ICC rulings discussed here. Though the mainstream Western media has for the most part denied, distorted, deflected from, or simply not reported these crimes, there can be no excuse for continuing to ignore them. The evidence is overwhelming.

Apart from the courts’ own documents, Israel’s crimes have been copiously documented in reports published over the last year from UN agencies and rapporteurs, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children, and research units like Forensic Architecture.

A particularly rich and detailed—and extremely harrowing—source is the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s online database of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, which:

[C]ontains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources. It details instances of Israeli troops shooting civilians waving white flags, abusing individuals, captives and corpses, randomly firing their weapons, gleefully destroying houses, burning books and defacing Islamic symbols.

I quote a lengthy article on Mordechai’s database in the newspaper Haaretz—Israel’s longest-running daily newspaper (it was founded in 1918), with which the Netanyahu government has now banned its employees from having any contact.

To dismiss all of these as “antisemitic propaganda” is risible—and disingenuous in the extreme.

The second kind of crime, with which I have been more concerned here, are crimes against the rule of law. These may prove to be no less consequential. Or genocidal.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Joe Biden has overridden the US judicial system in order to grant his wayward son an unprecedented pardon and Donald Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

An old-new Wild West beckons, only this time with nukes and 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and hellfire missiles and AI-guided quadcopters and drones in place of Colt 45s. A lawless future is a bleak future. For everybody except the rich and powerful.

The closing lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” written in 1867, the same year Karl Marx published Capital, come to mind:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

As America votes, the genocide in Gaza goes on—and on and on

First published in Canadian Dimension, November 4, 2024

An eternity ago, back in March, accepting his Academy Award for The Zone of Interest, director Jonathan Glazer coined the concept of an “ambient genocide.”

The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife and children in a palatial home and beautiful garden immediately adjacent to the camp walls. The only indications of the genocide going on behind the walls and out of sight lie in the film’s soundtrack, in which “the ambient noise generated by the horrors within the camp is evoked with a suffocating intensity that matches the choking pall of smoke billowing continuously from the Auschwitz furnace chimneys.”

Commenting on both the film and Glazer’s speech (which got him denounced as a kapo and antisemite by Zionists), Naomi Klein applied the concept to present-day events:

More than five months into the daily slaughter in Gaza, and with Israel brazenly ignoring the orders of the international court of justice, and Western governments gently scolding Israel while shipping it more arms, genocide is becoming ambient once more—at least for those of us fortunate enough to live on the safe sides of the many walls that carve up our world. We face the risk of it grinding on, becoming the soundtrack of modern life. Not even the main event.

After a year of bombardment, and with all eyes on the US presidential election, Gaza has become exactly what Klein feared—part of the soundtrack to everyday life, background noise we can all too easily tune out. But while life goes on as normal on our side of the walls, the genocide continues, barely within earshot.

A week is a long time in genocides

On October 15, in a letter whose convenient leaking many suspected had more to do with trying to salvage the Democrats’ electoral chances in Michigan than changing US policy on Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put Israel on notice that if it did not take “concrete measures” to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians in Gaza within 30 days—taking us to November 15, and therefore after the US election—its supply of American weapons might be in jeopardy.

So far, at least—assuming it was ever anything more than a cynical electoral ploy in the first place—this latest (alleged) US attempt to rein in Israeli aggression appears to have had zero effect.

The last few weeks have seen significant escalation in the Middle East conflict with Israeli assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders; bombardment and invasion of Lebanon (where at least 3,000 people have now been killed); air strikes on Syria, Yemen, and Iran; and growing settler and IDF violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

In the Gaza Strip, the last three weeks have been among the bloodiest for civilians since the early days of the war.

Writing in the Guardian on October 29, Peter Beaumont details how,

Israel’s current offensive in northern Gaza, which began on October 7, has killed more than 700 people in a little over three weeks, with nearly 300 of those deaths, mainly in the north, occurring in the past nine days alone.

By November 4, according to the Palestinian civil defence agency, that figure had risen to over 1,300 deaths. These figures are—it is always necessary to add—almost certainly a considerable underestimate. Many more bodies will be rotting beneath the rubble.

Earlier, on October 29, Beaumont filed another report on a single incident, describing how that morning the IDF had bombed apartment blocks in Beit Lahiya in Northern Gaza for the second time in nine days. In the earlier attack, on October 20, “At least 87 people were killed overnight when an Israeli airstrike hit several multi-storey buildings … Images suggested two or three big blocks of flats were demolished in the strike.” This time,

Scores of Palestinians, including many women and children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a crowded block of flats in Beit Lahiya. Gaza’s civil defence agency said 93 people had been killed and 40 were missing, as emergency workers dug through the rubble on Tuesday looking for the dead and injured. Many of those in the block were members of the extended Abu Nasr family as well as Palestinians displaced from elsewhere.

According to the UN Human Rights Office, the airstrike “left 93 dead or missing including at least 25 children, making it one of the deadliest single attacks in Gaza in nearly three months.”

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem demanded that “Israel’s campaign of vengeance and destruction in the Gaza Strip must cease immediately”:

Whoever gave the order to bomb a building where sheltering civilians were gathered is a war criminal. Whoever carried out this patently unlawful order is an accomplice to this crime … Dr. Husam Abu Safiyah, a physician at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, told the media: “Only two pediatricians remain in the hospital. Most of the specialized medical staff have been arrested by the Israeli army or evacuated. We’re working around the clock, performing surgeries, because otherwise, we’ll lose a wounded person every hour.” [He added] “there are no working ambulances left in Beit Lahiya and Jabalya, and without urgent aid, people will, literally, die in the streets.”

The appeal fell on deaf ears. For the IDF the assaults on Beit Latiya were just another day at the office. This is what the brave boys and girls of the most moral army in the world have been doing in Gaza every day for a year. Massacres of the innocent are par for the course.

According to various UN agencies, two days later “the third floor of Kamal Adwan Hospital was bombed, destroying medical supplies delivered just five days ago during a joint mission led by the World Health Organization” … “Rescue teams are unable to work due to the arrests of personnel and the confiscation of essential equipment, including ambulances and a fire truck” … “Attacks on hospitals in the north—including Kamal Adwan, which is the main provider of obstetric care—have shut down the last functioning neonatal intensive care unit in the region” … “Only two out of 20 health service points in the north are partially functioning. The same applies to two hospitals there, with the Al-Awda Hospital inaccessible due to damaged roads and the Israeli army presence.“

In the meantime, “Almost no aid operations have been permitted into North Gaza … and the humanitarian crisis is being worsened by dwindling supplies, high casualties, frequent strikes on healthcare facilities and widespread displacement.”

Forced displacement continues to be reported. According to humanitarian partners, some 300 Palestinians—including women, children and the elderly—were displaced today [Oct 31] from the north to the south through the Al Rashid checkpoint. Within northern Gaza, Palestinians staying around the Indonesian hospital and Tal Al Arabi school in the Al Fakhoura area were displaced today to Beit Lahiya.

Since the start of this latest ground operation in the north on 6 October, about 100,000 people have been displaced from North Gaza Governorate to Gaza city.

Meantime, back in Tel Aviv

Blinken and Austin’s letter went on to warn that the passage of legislation before the Knesset aimed at effectively preventing the UN’s Palestine refugee agency, UNRWA, from operating in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, “would be devastating for the humanitarian effort in the Gaza Strip at a critical time and would prevent education and welfare services for tens of thousands of Palestinians in Jerusalem.” The Americans demanded that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exercise his powers and influence over Knesset members so the bill doesn’t pass.”

On October 26, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom weighed in with a joint statement expressing their “grave concern” over the upcoming Knesset vote. In considerably stronger language, they affirmed that “We once again condemn in the strongest possible terms the brutal and unjustified terror attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023.”

They might as well have given Israel a green light. It was pretty clear that just as on earlier occasions, Israel’s Western allies might offer mild criticisms of Israeli excesses but they would not take any significant practical actions to defend Palestinian lives, like an arms embargo or other sanctions. This remained the case even after the IDF fired on UN peacekeepers who refused to leave their posts in southern Lebanon.

Just as Israel had previously defied Joe Biden’s publicly stated “red line” with impunity and gone ahead with its invasion (and wholesale destruction) of Rafah, in this case too, it thumbed its nose at its US ally and principal arms supplier.

On October 28—the day before the second Beit Lahiya attack—the Knesset passed two billsdesignating UNRWA as a “terrorist organization,” banning it from operating in Israel or the occupied territories, and prohibiting Israeli authorities from having contact with it.

The bills passed by majorities of 92 to 10 and 87 to nine, with the only opposition coming from Arab MPs.

This legislation has since been condemned not only by UN and UNWRA personnel, but by among others the European Union (“This legislation stands in stark contradiction to international law and the fundamental humanitarian principle of humanity, and will only exacerbate an already severe humanitarian crisis”), the governments of Ireland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain (“The legislation … sets a very serious precedent for the work of the United Nations and for all organizations of the multilateral system”), and NGOs.

A statement by Doctors without Borders (MSF) is representative of the latter:

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) denounces this legislation, which represents an inhumane ban on vital humanitarian aid. The Knesset’s vote is propelling Palestinians towards an even deeper humanitarian crisis. It is imperative that the world acts to safeguard Palestinians’ fundamental rights. Immediate international intervention is needed to pressure Israel to allow unhindered access to humanitarian aid, implement a ceasefire and bring to an end the current campaign of destruction in Gaza.

Unlike Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Keir Starmer and David Lammy (who recently informed the UK parliament that that using the word genocide about Gaza “undermines the seriousness of that term”), Antony Albanese and Penny Wong, Justin Trudeau and Mélanie Joly, MSF have first-hand knowledge of that of which they speak.

The Israeli government has since confirmed that it has formally notified the UN that the country will ban UNRWA from operating inside Israel within 90 days.

Apocalypse now

Founded in 1991, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) is “the longest-standing and highest-level humanitarian coordination forum of the United Nations system”—an international body, in other words, whose pronouncements should not be taken lightly.

On 1 November IASC issued a statement titled “Stop the assault on Palestinians in Gaza and on those trying to help them.” It makes for bleak reading:

The situation unfolding in North Gaza is apocalyptic. The area has been under siege for almost a month, denied basic aid and life-saving supplies while bombardment and other attacks continue. Just in the past few days, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, and thousands have once again been forcibly displaced. 

Hospitals have been almost entirely cut off from supplies and have come under attack, killing patients, destroying vital equipment, and disrupting life-saving services. Health workers and patients have been taken into custody. Fighting has also reportedly taken place inside hospitals. 

Dozens of schools serving as shelters have been bombed or forcibly evacuated. Tents sheltering displaced families have been shelled, and people have been burned alive. 

Rescue teams have been deliberately attacked and thwarted in their attempts to pull people buried under the rubble of their homes. 

The needs of women and girls are overwhelming and growing every day. We have lost contact with those we support and those who provide lifesaving essential services for sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence. 

And we have received reports of civilians being targeted while trying to seek safety, and of men and boys being arrested and taken to unknown locations for detention. 

Livestock are also dying, crop lands have been destroyed, trees burned to the ground, and agrifood systems infrastructure has been decimated. 

The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence. 

Two other recently published reports document Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza in chilling detail and on a monumental scale.

Compiled by the Goldsmiths College, University of London Forensic Architecture team, A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023 comprises an incredibly detailed 826-page report and an “interactive cartographic platform” that “compiles evidence of thousands of acts of violence, destruction, or obstruction committed by the Israeli military against all aspects of civilian life in Gaza.” A summary of the group’s findings can be found here. I recommend it to anyone who wants to face the facts, as distinct from deluding themselves with platitudes or propaganda.

Complementing this is the report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese. Genocide as colonial erasure, which runs to 387 pages. This is Albanese’s summary:

In the present report, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, examines the unfolding horrors in the occupied Palestinian territory. While the wholesale destruction of Gaza continues unabated, other parts of the land have not been spared. The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, State- organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians. This trajectory risks causing irreparable prejudice to the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine. Member States must intervene now to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history.

It is not beside the point to record here that as I was writing this article, authorities at McGill University in Montréal (according to student union representatives) “fought to shamelessly shut down” a talk by Albanese organized by several student law groups and the university’s chapter of Independent Jewish Voices. Having been excluded from the law faculty—there is a nice symbolismin that, given Israel’s flagrant contempt for international humanitarian law—Albanese was heard by a rapt audience in a packed ballroom in the students’ union building. There may yet be hope in the young.

Listen to the sounds from behind the walls of complicity, of doublethink, of evasion, of repression, of denial. Whoever wins the US presidential election, in Palestine it is apocalypse now.