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Author: Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor
Original article: https://theconversation.com/the-debate-over-genocide-claims-in-relation-to-gaza-intensifies-257847
In the past few days, discussion around whether Israel is committing acts of genocide in Gaza has intensified. On May 28 The Guardian reported that “380 writers and groups” had signed an open letter calling Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “genocide”. The letter reads, in part:
The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations.
This followed news of a letter to the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, signed by more than 800 lawyers, including former supreme court justices, calling on the prime minister to impose sanctions on the Israeli government.
“There is mounting evidence of genocide, which is either being perpetrated or at a minimum at serious risk of occurring,” the letter stated, adding that a recent statement from Israel’s finance minister Belazel Smotrich that the Israel Defense Forces would “wipe out” what remains of Palestinian Gaza was an indication of genocidal intent.
One of the signatories was Professor Guy Goodwin-Gill, a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, who has a track record of expertise in international humanitarian law. The Conversation spoke with him to discuss the issue. He said:
There is no doubt in my mind that war crimes have been committed and although genocide is basically an extreme form of war crime, it can be notoriously difficult to establish intent to destroy a people, in part or in whole.
The task of proving genocide is hard enough, but [in this case] the evidence can be gathered from the facts on the ground – they speak for themselves. And intent can be inferred from what politicians and officials actually say, especially when it is not denied or qualified.
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But he said he had “reservations about whether, at an inter-state level, a charge of genocide would be levelled against Israel by more than a few states. And if it succeeded, the legal and political consequences.”
But individual prosecutions for war crimes and genocide are “always a distinct possibility,” he added.
In fact, the crime of genocide has only been recognised on a handful of occasions since it was first established in 1948. James Sweeney, an expert in international law from Lancaster University has written a brief history of genocide.
Read more:
Why have so few atrocities ever been recognised as genocide?
Meanwhile, in the West Bank city of Jenin, IDF forces sparked international outrage when they fired “warning shots” closer to a group of 25 diplomats on a fact-finding visit in the wake of an Israeli military offensive there.
Andrew Forde, an expert in international humanitarian law at Dublin City University, considers that this act “crossed the Rubicon”, which is the convention, universally accepted over millennia, of the inviolability of diplomats and their staff. It’s a clear breach, he writes of article 29 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, to which Israel is a signatory, which states that the host state “shall take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on [their] person, freedom or dignity”.
Israel responded by offering an apology, but claimed that the diplomats in question had “deviated from the approved route” by entering a restricted area”.
The incident forced the group of diplomats to scramble for cover and hindered their work in Jenin, Forde writes. As such it is a flagrant breach of Israel’s duty of care. And it sets a dangerous precedent: “Diplomatic protections work effectively when they are reciprocal. Without trust, the system quickly unravels.”
Read more:
IDF firing ’warning shots’ near diplomats sets an unacceptable precedent in international relations
Israel’s campaign in Gaza is a factor in a hugely complex situation being played out at present in the Middle East, which is straining the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. The US president is talking up the idea of signing a new nuclear deal with Iran to replace the one he withdrew from in 2018. The Israeli prime minister is bitterly opposed to an US-Iran deal and has proposed launching strikes against Iran’s nuclear installations. The pair reportedly clashed over the issue in a phone call this week.
But Trump recently returned from a trip to the Gulf States, none of which want the sort of regional conflagration that Israeli strikes on Iran could cause. And, as Scott Lucas of University College Dublin writes, he is also very keen to burnish his credentials as a dealmaker, especially in light of his failure to bring the Ukraine war to a close within 24 hours and the failure of the ceasefire in Gaza for which he has claimed much of the credit.
As Lucas writes, “even as Trump does what he wants over Iran to Netanyahu’s chagrin, the Israeli prime minister is finding that Trump is not restricting what he does closer to home in Gaza”.
Read more:
Why are the US and Israel not on the same page over how to deal with Iran? Expert Q&A
Ukraine: as the US falters, Germany steps up
Volodymr Zelensky flew to Berlin this week where he met the German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said Germany would work with Ukraine to develop long-range missiles to attack targets inside Russia. It’s part of an overall plan to expand Germany’s military into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”.
Stefan Wolff believes Germany’s decision to step up both its military capabilities and its support for Ukraine is highly significant when considered in the context of Donald Trump’s recent threats to abandon his efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.
Wolff, an expert in international security from the University of Birmingham, who has written regularly for The Conversation about the war in Ukraine, says here that “Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing.” Given the US decision to downscale its security presence in Europe, this could be of enormous consequence for Nato, he writes.
Read more:
Germany steps up to replace ’unreliable’ US as guarantor of European security
This is also an important development coming, as it does, just a few weeks before Nato’s summit in The Hague on June 24-25. As Amelia Hadfield writes, most of Nato’s members will be only too aware of Trump’s disparagement of Nato and many of its members in recent times and will be considering the potential for a future without US leadership.
Hadfield, the head of the department of politics at the University of Surrey, notes the irony of Washington calling on the European Nato members to pay more for their own defence. Over much of the lifetime of the alliance, she writes, the US has actively discouraged European defence autonomy. Now, she says, the focus of Nato’s 31 other members must be to prepare for the likelihood that the US plans to at least significantly reduce its support for the alliance in Europe. “A clear mandate is needed, to ensure that being US-less does not render Nato itself useless,” she writes.
This is already starting to happen, as countries join the “coalition of the willing” spearheaded by Britain and France. But Hadfield believes that boosting European capabilities within Nato is the most sensible way forward and should be the focus of next month’s summit.
Read more:
Nato faces a make-or-break decision about how to protect Europe and its future in next few weeks
A lesson from history
Donald Trump’s on again off-again relationship with Vladimir Putin is confusing enough for casual followers of world affairs. It must present a considerable headache for the foreign ministers and other diplomats tasked with calibrating their policies around the US stance on Russian aggression.
But history suggests that the US president’s apparent willingness to allow Russia to grab Ukrainian territory in direct contravention of international law is storing up trouble for the future, writes Tim Luckhurst.
Luckhurst is the principal of South College, Durham University, and has made a study of the way some governments were happy to allow Hitler to get away with naked aggression in the run-up to the second world war. He sees direct parallels with the way Trump and his senior officials have proposed allowing Putin to have his way with the Crimea and the four provinces of Ukraine which Russia already occupies.
“Chamberlain’s version of appeasement failed to prevent Adolf Hitler’s aggression in the 20th century,” he writes. “Trump’s version appears equally incapable of deterring Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions in the 21st.”
Read more:
History shows that Donald Trump is making a serious error in appeasing Vladimir Putin
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