Summary
As Barghouti uses the term in Chapter 1 of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: Israel’s siege of Gaza and its 2008–9 war are “acts of genocide, albeit slow”, measured against Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, and preventing genocide is the first reason comprehensive boycott is “an urgent political necessity” (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.46, p.56).
Details
- Barghouti quotes Richard Falk’s 2007 warning of “a holocaust-in-the-making” and of “genocidal tendencies” in Gaza, and reads Falk as “predicting the slow genocide that has transpired as a result of the blockade and the December 2008–January 2009 Israeli war of aggression that aggravated it” (PDF p.47).
- Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is quoted: “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 …” (PDF p.56)
- Barghouti’s application: “Clearly, Israel’s hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction, qualifies as an act of genocide, if not yet all-out genocide.” (PDF p.56)
- He records the legal debate as he presents it: international law experts debate whether Israel’s crimes in Gaza, “which largely conform to the UN definition of genocide”, are committed with a clear intent, “a necessary condition to consider these acts as constituting full-fledged genocide”; his own category is “acts of genocide, albeit slow”, and, for Palestinians, “what feels very much like slow genocide” (PDF p.56).
- The evidence marshalled for the charge in Chapter 1 includes contaminated water and soil, toxic metals and birth defects, stunted growth and anemia, denied sustenance, and dying chronic patients in Gaza, whose population is 80 percent refugees (PDF p.49-51, p.56-57).
Related pages
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Gaza, Goldstone report, Responsibility to Protect, Ethnic Cleansing