The U.S. media works hard to refrain from enumerating, discussing and acknowledging the legal rights of a civilian population under illegal occupation and blockade by a state actor. Why?
CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS trot out an endless supply of political pundits to fill the minds of viewers with a plethora of opinionated falsehoods about Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
When it comes to U.S. domestic issues CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS pay an army of lawyers to discuss and dissect domestic matters, civil and criminal cases for viewer consumption.
But when it comes to discussing and analyzing international issues and U.S. foreign policy, CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS refrain from featuring international attorneys who have prosecuted war criminals to present the legal facts regarding int’l affairs and U.S. foreign policy.
CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS intentionally refrain from informing their viewers as to the legal rights of the Palestinian people and the situational legal rights conferred upon the Palestinian people as a direct result of Israel’s illegal occupation and military blockade of the Palestinian people and Palestinian territories.
The mere act of someone reciting the legal rights of the Palestinian people on American TV would be considered a “radical act” by slumbering Americans who have been spoon-fed lies about Israel’s illegal occupation since birth.
Americans just aren’t accustomed to actually hearing the legal rights of a civilian population under illegal occupation and blockade by a state actor.
Here’s a synopsis and short list of legal rights belonging to a civilian population under occupation such as Israel illegally occupying the civilian population and land of the Palestinian people:
1) A civilian population has a legal right to exist;
2) A civilian population has a legal right to form and maintain armed resistance groups;
3) A civilian population suffering an illegal occupation by an OCCUPYING POWER has a legal right to use ANY MEANS NECESSARY TO EVICT THE ILLEGAL OCCUPYING POWER;
4) Said OCCUPYING POWER has no legal right to use any military force whatsoever against a civilian population under illegal occupation and military blockade by said OCCUPYING POWER.
Simply put, Israel has no right to defense, has no right to use military force against their victims of illegal occupation, THE OCCUPIED, the Palestinian people.
ILLEGAL OCCUPYING POWER ISRAEL has no legal right to DO ANYTHING to the Palestinian people or its armed resistance groups.
The only lawful act ILLEGAL OCCUPYING POWER ISRAEL can execute in regard to Israel’s illegal occupation and military blockade is Israel’s full and complete withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.
CONVERSELY, BECAUSE the Palestinian people are being occupied by Israel, THE OCCUPIED (known as the Palestinian people) do in fact enjoy a legal, lawful right to use force of any kind to attempt to remove and evict the illegal OCCUPYING POWER ISRAEL.
Today, November 22, 2023 Israeli war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu said:
“Citizens of Israel, I wish to be clear, the war continues, the war continues and we are going to continue with this war until we achieve all of our goals to bring back all of our hostages, to obliterate Hamas and to ensure that the day after Hamas there won’t be any agent, any organization that rules Hamas which advocates terrorism, participated in terrorism, educates terrorism; we are going to bring back safety and security to the North of Israel and to the south of Israel.
We are winning and we are going to continue to fight until we achieve absolute victory.”
ADMIN: “Netanyahu admits to some of his war crimes in his statement: ‘….we are going to continue this war until we…..obliterate Hamas and to ensure that the day after Hamas there won’t be any agent, any organization that rules Hamas which advocates terrorism, participated in terrorism, educates terrorism’ – a state actor does not enjoy a legal right to obliterate a civilian population under illegal occupation and blockade by said state actor.
Legally-speaking, a civilian population does in fact include parts of the civilian population, such as armed resistance groups and civilian population government organizations, agencies, officials, workers and buildings.
War criminal Netanyahu falsely names Palestinian use of force as “terrorism.”
A civilian population under illegal occupation by a state actor enjoys a legal right to use force the Geneva Conventions describe as “…any means necessary” to free themselves from the ILLEGAL OCCUPYING POWER ISRAEL.
Because the terrorist Israeli government has been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories and blockading Gaza by land, sea and air for the past 56 years, THE OCCUPIED are unable to import a sufficient amount of military equipment to free themselves from their captors Israel and therefore are relegated to using the only means of force available to Palestinians.
What would you do if you lived in Gaza as a Palestinian and Israeli military forces arrested and jailed you or your family members under “immediate detention,” which means a minmum of six months in an Israeli jail without hearing, bail or communication; then after the first six months confinement, Israeli authorities extend it another six months and another six months after that; indefinitely if Israel so desires.
There’s over 7,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails right now who are held in gross conditions indefinitely. Those Palestinian prisoners are comprised of many women and children who are guilty of “minor offenses,” such as throwing rocks or protesting.
Those women and children languishing in Israeli jails have fathers, mothers, husbands, aunts and uncles who care about them, miss them and experience extreme sadness and despair at the reality of knowing Israel holds them indefnitely and the family member has no way of knowing when they will be released.
Hamas indicated they intended to kidnap Israelis and take them back to Gaza to trade them for Palestinians being held hostage by the Israelis. Some people argue that the int’l Law of Reciprocity applies in terms of Israelis capturing Palestinians using Israeli laws and rules that Palestinians do not recognize as binding over THE OCCUPIED, and transport them to Israeli jails to be held indefinitely and used for bartering with Hamas.
Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that he will not allow the Palestinian people run their own government, which is a war crime unto itself.
Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that he intends to indoctrinate young Palestinian boys and girls in Palestinian schools to support their captors Israel, teach them to respect and support Israel’s 56-year long illegal occupation and blockade of Gaza and teach them to never fight for their freedom and independence from Israeli rule; teach Palestinian little boys and girls to quietly accept defeat of their tiny human spirits, and accept your inevitable fate at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the US-backed Israeli apartheid terrorist government.
Israel has always been and remains 100% ON THE WRONG SIDE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS. The U.S. media absolutely refuses to explain and enumerate the legal rights of the Palestinian people and maliciously and intentionally cast the Palestinian people and their Palestinian armed resistance groups as terrorist perpetrators and the Israelis as victims.
The reason CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS does not hire and feature international lawyers to discuss the most important international issue in modern history is precisely because if they did, those int’l lawyers would invariably cast Israel in their true legal light as criminal perpetrator, ILLEGAL OCCUPIER of the Palestinian territories.
CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS are such longstanding, strong, extraordinarily biased supporters of Israel and against the Palestinian people that they will never tell the American people the naked, unvarnished truth that Palestinians are the victims of illegal Israeli occupation and that Israel has always been the criminal perpetrator of war crimes against the Palestinian people.
CNN/MSNBC/FOXNEWS will never inform and educate viewers as to HOW Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of 2.3 million Palestinians IS A WAR CRIME WHICH LEGALLY JUSTIFIES the Palestinian people and their Palestinian armed resistance groups to use any force necessary to remove Israel’s military blockade of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
CNN, MSNBC, FOXNEWS, the Biden administration, the Pentagon and Israel do not want to invalidate and expose the umbiquitous lie that Israel has a right to kill Palestinians at will, including Palestinian armed resistance groups in order to “defend Israel.”
Netanyahu’s entire array of war crimes is based on the categorical lie that Israel has a right to defend, use great military force on the very civilian population Israel illegally occupies.
Again, Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and illegal military blockades of Gaza are war crimes unto themselves – legally justifying Palestinians to use any means necessary to fight for their freedom and independence from another 75 years of US-backed Israeli occupations and blockades.
Here’s what world-reknown international attorney Univ. of Chicago Prof. Francis Boyle filed regarding Israel’s illegal occupation and the rights of the Palestinian people:
The Palestinians have been the victims of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
I say that because of my practical experience:
On 8 April, 1993 and 13 September, 1993 I singlehandedly won two World Court Orders on the basis of the 1948 Genocide Convention that were overwhelmingly in favor of the Republic of Bosnia and
Herzegovina against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
This was the first time ever that any Government had won two such Orders in one case since the World Court was founded in 1921.
On 5 August, 1993 I also won a so-called Article 74(4) World Court Order for Bosnia against Yugoslavia for genocide.
According to I.C.J. Statute Article 74(4), when the full World Court is not in session in The Hague, the President of the Court exercises the full powers of the Court and can issue an Order to the parties in a lawsuit that is legally binding upon them.
Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group such as:
(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;
As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even now intensifying against the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.
As Pappe’s analysis established, Zionism’s “final solution” to Israel’s much touted and racist “demographic threat” allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide, whether slowmotion or in bloodthirsty spurts of violence.
Indeed, the very essence of Zionism requires ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide against the Palestinians.
For example, concerning the 2008-2009 Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – so-called “Operation Castlead” – U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua during the Reagan administration’s contra terror war of aggression against that country which was condemned by the World Court, condemned it as “genocide.”
Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-law — the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs — have committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a), (b), and (c).
For over the past six and one-half decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law — the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious group (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) constituting the Palestinian people.
This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a).
This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b).
This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation
of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.
Nevertheless, apologists for Israel have argued that since these mass atrocities are not tantamount to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, therefore they do not qualify as “genocide.”
Previously, I had encountered and refuted this completely disingenuous, deceptive and bogus argument against labeling genocide for what it truly is, when I was the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina arguing their genocide case against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice.
There the genocidal Yugoslavia was represented by Shabtai Rosenne from Israel as their Lawyer against me.
Rosenne proceeded to argue to the World Court that since he was an Israeli Jew, what Yugoslavia had done to the Bosnians was not the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and therefore did not qualify as “genocide” within the meaning of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
I rebutted Rosenne by arguing to the World Court that you did not need an equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews in order to find that wholesale atrocities against a civilian population constitute “genocide” in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Indeed the entire purpose of the 1948 Genocide Convention was to prevent another Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.
That is why Article I of the Genocide Convention clearly provided: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” (Emphasis supplied.)
You did not need six million dead human beings in order to constitute “genocide.”
Furthermore, in support of my successful 1993 genocide argument to the World Court for Bosnia, I submitted that Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention expressly provided: “In the present
Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such…” (Emphasis supplied.)
In other words, that to be guilty of genocide a government did not have to intend to destroy the “whole” group as the Nazis intended to do with the Jews.
Rather, a government can be guilty of genocide even if it intends to destroy a mere “part” of the group.
Certainly Yugoslavia did indeed intend to exterminate all Bosnian Muslims if they could have gotten away with it, as manifested by their subsequent mass extermination of at least 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July of 1995.
I would later become the Attorney-of-Record for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.).
In that capacity, I convinced the I.C.T.Y. Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to indict Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for every crime in the I.C.T.Y. Statute for the atrocities he inflicted upon the Bosnians, including two counts of genocide one count of genocide for Bosnia in general, and the second count of genocide for Srebrenica in particular.
Milosevic died while on trial in The Hague after the I.C.T.Y denied his Motion to Dismiss these charges after the close of the Prosecution’s case.
But in 1993 it was not necessary for me to argue to the World Court that Yugoslavia intended to exterminate all the Bosnian Muslims.
Rather, I argued to the World Court that at that point in time the best estimate was that Yugoslavia had exterminated about 250,000 Bosnians out of the population of about 4 million Bosnians, including therein about 2.5 million Bosnian Muslims.
Therefore, I argued to the World Court that these dead victims constituted a “substantial part” of the group and that the appropriate interpretation of the words “or in part” set forth in Article II of the Genocide Convention should mean a “substantial part.”
The World Court emphatically agreed with me and rejected Rosenne’s specious, reprehensible, and deplorable arguments.
So on 8 April, 1993 the International Court of Justice issued an Order for three provisional measures of protection on behalf of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia that were overwhelmingly in favor of Bosnia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against all the Bosnians, both directly and indirectly by means of its Bosnian Serb surrogates.
This World Court Order for the indication of provisional measures of protection was the international equivalent of a U.S. domestic Temporary Restraining Order and Injunction combined.
The same was true for the Second World Court Order with three additional provisional measures of protection that I won for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia on 13 September, 1993.
The same was true for the Article 74(4) Order I won for Bosnia against Yugoslavia from the World Court on 5 August, 1993.
In its final Judgment on the merits in the Bosnia case that was issued on 26 February, 2007, the World Court definitively agreed with me once and for all time that in order to constitute genocide, a state must only intend to destroy a “substantial part” of the group “as such”:
- In terms of that question of law, the Court refers to three matters relevant to the determination of
“part” of the “group” for the purposes of Article II. In the first place, the intent must be to destroy at
least a substantial part of the particular group. That is demanded by the very nature of the crime of
genocide: since the object and purpose of the Convention as a whole is to prevent the intentional
destruction of groups, the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole. That requirement of substantiality is supported by consistent rulings of the ICTY and the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and by the Commentary of the ILC to its Articles in
the draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of mankind (e.g. Krstić, IT9833A, Appeals
Chamber Judgment, 19 April 2004, paras. 811 and the cases of Kayishema, Byilishema, and
Semanza there referred to; and Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 1996, Vol. II, Part
Two, p. 45, para. 8 of the Commentary to Article 17).
In other words, in order to find Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, it is not required to
prove that Israel has the intention to exterminate all Palestinians. Rather, all that is necessary is to
establish that Israel intends to destroy a “substantial part” of the Palestinians. Furthermore, in
paragraphs 293 and 294 of its 26 February 2007 Bosnian Judgment, the World Court found that you
did not even need 250,000 exterminated Bosnians in order to constitute genocide - let alone six million exterminated Jews. Rather, even the seven thousand exterminated Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica were enough to constitute genocide. According to the World Court, these victims
constituted about one-fifth of the Srebrenica community.
Starting in 1948 Israel obliterated about 500 Palestinian villages from off the face of the earth, literally reducing them to rubble now scattered across the Palestinian countryside in order to prevent their ethnically cleansed inhabitants from ever again returning to their homes because they no longer exist.- And the list of Israeli genocidal massacres of Palestinian communities is quite extensive. To name just a few of Israel’s most notorious acts of antiPalestinian genocide: Deir Yassin, Tantura, Sabra and
Shatilla, Jenin, Nablus, and repeatedly and continuously Gaza. As we meet here today, Israel is
“deliberately inflicting on the [1.75 million Palestinians in Gaza] conditions of life calculated to bring
about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part” in gross and flagrant violation of Genocide
Convention Article II(c).
In order to prevent yet another and predictable wholesale slaughter and acts of genocide by Israel
against the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and elsewhere, we most respectfully request this Tribunal to condemn Israel guilty as charged for genocide as well as for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Article I of the Genocide Convention requires: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.” The Genocide Convention has been incorporated into the Charter of Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal by means of Article 10.
Pursuant thereto, it is respectfully submitted that this Tribunal must “undertake to prevent and to punish” Israel for its genocide against the Palestinians by finding Israel guilty as charged. Should this Tribunal find Israel guilty as charged for genocide, it will then trigger the solemn obligation found in Article I of the Genocide Convention for every state in the world community to likewise “undertake to prevent and to punish” Israel for its ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal must issue this shot heard around the entire world on behalf of the Palestinians by finding Israel guilty of genocide against them.
This is exactly what the International Court of Justice did for Bosnia and the Bosnians in 1993 when it
ruled against Yugoslavia on genocide. The World Court deliberately shook up the entire world and
propelled humanity to act to save Bosnia and the Bosnians from annihilation and extermination by
Yugoslavia. Bosnia and the Bosnians are still alive today thanks in significant part to that 1993 World
Court ruling on genocide.
I am respectfully asking the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal to do the same today for Palestine and the Palestinians. Shake up the entire world! Get humanity to act to save Palestine and the Palestinians from further annihilation and genocide by Israel! Make sure that Palestine and the Palestinians are still alive twenty years from now! Convict Israel for genocide!
Thank you. And may God be with you when you retire to deliberate upon your Judgment.
[1] See Al Jazeera News, Israel Accused of Genocide, Jan. 14, 2009.
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2339254