Human Rights?
By Bert Hetebry
The term Genocide was first used in 1945 to describe the deliberate, targeted killing of Jews by the German Nazi regime. It was a very specific term coined to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder during the Holocaust combining the Greek word for race or tribe (geno) with the Latin word for killing (cide).
The word was first used in a legal setting during the Nuremberg Trials by a young lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz who was a chief prosecutor at those trials. A fresh faced young lawyer, just 27 years old, a small man, 5ft 2inches or just short of 1.6metres tall had to stand on a pile of books when he addressed the court so he could look over the lectern. Apart from using the word genocide, the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ was used to place the actions of 22 men who oversaw and commandeered the Holocaust were seen to be tried not just as war criminals but criminals in a far deeper sense. War crimes happen in war, soldiers kill soldiers and bomb places where there may be ‘collateral damage’, but the Holocaust was an action aimed at eliminating people based on their race, their religion and their ideologies.
The German military, including the SS under the control of the Nazis were thorough in documenting their activities and reporting to the various government agencies including the ‘elimination of Jews, Gypsies and enemies of the Reich’, and these records were carefully archived and then used as evidence in prosecuting the case against those senior figures who were still alive and able to face the court.
As a result of the Second World War and the exposure of the inhumanity, the organised slaughter of about 13million people who were not soldiers fighting a war, as evidenced in the aftermath of the war, the opening of the death camps, the written records of those who reported their work to their superiors and the conducting of the Nuremberg Trial, a criminal trial, not a war crimes trial before impartial judges, the newly formed United Nations Organisation commissioned the Declaration of Human Rights which was presented to the General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948.
A further flow on from the Nuremberg Trials and the work of Ben Ferencz was the International Criminal Court in The Hague which recently heard charges against the State of Israel from South Africa over the devastation of Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinians who live in that enclave.
Unfortunately, crimes against humanity have continued despite the Declaration of Human Rights that all nations have signed up to. We witnessed the horrors of the Vietnam war with indiscriminate poisoning using Agent Orange, a defoliant and poison that caused birth defects spina bifida, cleft palate, limb deformities, structural heart disease and hypothyroidism, the murderous Pol Pot regime in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China with its re-education camps, Biafra, and so many more post-colonial wars, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. and on and on goes the list.
And most recently, the ongoing conflict in Israel.
The catalyst for the devastation being wrought on Gaza and the Palestinian people was a brutal attack on a Kibbutz and Music Festival which saw about 1200 Israelis killed and 240 taken as hostages by the armed militia, Hamas. An unspeakable act of terrorism.
Rarely however is there mention of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government, the virtual imprisonment of two and a half million people in the most densely populated area in the world, the Gaza Strip, an area of 365 square kilometres. (The Perth Metropolitan area of over 6,300 square kilometres has a similar population.) Nor of the treatment of Palestinians who live on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and the intimidation they are subjected to from settler communities who are building new settlements as the Palestinians are forced or bullied off their lands. Nor the intimidation of multiple security checks, sometimes a matter of a few metres apart, the constant sense of surveillance with soldiers, fully armed in battle fatigues patrolling the streets of positioned on rooftops. The buildup of frustration in both areas have since the Nakbah, or ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 which saw over 700,000 people displaced, and the taking of the West Bank in 1967’s Six day War led to various skirmishes and attacks on Israel people, like the suicide bombers who were active in 1989 and from 2002 to 2005, the First and Second Intifada.
Both attacks, the Hamas attack that was the catalyst for the current conflict and the suicide bombings which targeted Israeli civilians are illegal under international law and are rightly condemned. That said, the frustration of living in such oppressive conditions as in Gaza where all services, water, food, sewerage, electricity are imported from Israel and can be cut off at the drop of a hat, or the frustration of the constant harassment the people on the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subjected to leads to retaliatory actions.
As we get the news flow from Israel and Gaza we are told that it is mainly women and children who are dying. Supplies of food and drinking water are in short supply and apart from people dying because the building they lived in are being blown to smithereens, they are dying of starvation and diseases that come from unsanitary living as over a million people are camping out in a cramped area without sanitation.
Women and children featured in the evidence and defence of the Nuremberg criminals. where the justification for killing children was that they would grow up to be enemies. And women give birth to children.
The Declaration of Human Rights was written as a response to the inhumanity of the Holocaust which saw the killing of 13 million people because of their race, their religion, their ideologies were not acceptable to the Nazi regime in Germany. The races targeted were Jews and Gypsies, two marginalised groups, marginalised not just in Germany, but in much of Europe, and marginalised for centuries, Jews for their religious beliefs, Gypsies were ‘the wandering spirits of the earth’. On ideologies, these included homosexuals and people with disabilities.
Palestinians are marginalised in Israel, but not just in Israel, also in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Egypt where they are placed in Refugee camps, denied employment, treated as second class people and have really nowhere to go.
It seems those who ignore history are likely to repeat it while those who know history can only look on in wondrous amazement.
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Never thought I would see the day when Netanyahu, the PM of Israel who just so happens to be a Jew, was quite happy to commit the same genocidal murder against non-Jewish Palestinians as the German Nazis committed against Jewish civilians before and during WW2!
There’s a PHD for someone in this horror repeat of murder by descedants of the murderers of 1930s Germany and Europe.
I recall a time when we sat in cinemas cheering the Heros that broke out of concentration camps.
Films based on real life situations where the Hero makes a dash for freedom, and sticks one up the oppressive jailers.
In those days we could pick the good guy, from the bad guy, and we knew about ethics.
Now human rights is very much aligned with wealth, and we are the lesser for allowing this to influence our actions.
Thank you dear Bert, for this valuable and important article.
Netanyahu fears revenge that will come.
Agree with Tess, an important and valuable article. The often attested observation that failure to learn the lessons of history leads recurrent generations to repeat the same mistakes as those of the past is tragically evident in the current slaughterhouse of the Palestinian enclaves; Israeli actions rightly & accurately being compared to those of the Nazi regime which murdered so many of their own people.
However, genocide, as a phenomenon, predates both the coinage of the term and the historical period to which its coinage is attached. Colonialism and the forceful acquisition of lands from their indigenous and native inhabitants by invading – generally but not always European – powers was commonly associated with intentional acts designed to reduce or eliminate the original peoples by whatever means, as documented by Jared Diamond in his seminal work Guns, Germs, and Steel, and also augmented by the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist in his 1992 work, Exterminate All the Brutes.
Acts of partial or complete genocide have been intentionally committed (it’s always intentional, never accidental) across six of the seven continents. It was recently commented by a Tasmanian friend that the extermination of the indigenous people of that island was the only completely successful genocide to ever occur; nonetheless, European colonisers in both of the American continents acted with deadly intent to reduce opposition to their free for all acquisition of native peoples’ territories; along with destroying their civilizations and looting their material possessions and committing uncountable acts of cruelty and savagery against the people who they were subjugating. Same in Africa. Same in parts of Europe. Same in many regions of Asia. And clearly, also, same in this country, Australia.
And here we are, yet again, poor humans, witnessing yet another chapter in the dark history of man’s inhumanity against his own kind, based as is most often the case on the flimsiest of pretexts; language & religious differences, political rivalry, differences which prove to be intolerable and develop into fears and then to aggression… what a sad and sickening observation that the brute lurks beneath the veneer of civilised behaviour.
Utmost horror perhaps rather than ‘wondrous amazement’? At how the world can allow this to continue, if not actively supporting it by continuing to ship arms to Israel and cutting of support to the UNRWA very quickly, based on what is increasingly being shown to Hasbara (Israeli propaganda) And where this Hasbara attempts to label every criticism of Israel as anti-semitic, failing to recognise that Palestinians are Semites, just like Jews are.
……..the International Criminal Court in The Hague which recently heard charges against the State of Israel from South Africa over the devastation of Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinians who live in that enclave.
Actually it was the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that heard the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel : the International Criminal Court would normally hear specific criminal indictments against individuals.
The ICJ can only give an advisory opinion and cannot apply sanctions, even so its opinion carries weight or at least it used to.
Terence,
Same ICJ found that Putin had been responsible for serious war crimes.
Similar outcome ensued; unabated human slaughter.
Whatever.
CB, do you not check comments before posting?
Correction,
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and
So to make things absolutely clear CB, the arrest warrant you refer to was issued by the ICC, not the ICJ. This is an important distinction.
It’s the ICC that’s held in such high esteem by the US that they enacted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act to protect US armed forces members from prosecution.
.The Act authorizes the president of the United States to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”. This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed “The Hague Invasion Act”, as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.
But it gets worse.
UN report GENEVA (25 June 2020) – The unprecedented decision by the United States Government to target and sanction individual staff of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a direct attack to the institution’s judicial independence and could undermine victims’ access to justice, UN human rights experts* said today.
“The implementation of such policies by the US has the sole aim of exerting pressure on an institution whose role is to seek justice against crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression,” said Diego García-Sayán, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers. “It’s a further step in pressuring the ICC and coercing its officials in the context of independent and objective investigations and impartial judicial proceedings.”
The fact that the US threatened ICC staff and got away with has had serious consequences. It effectively means that the US now controls the court. The ICC has become a tool, a plaything of the US.
Nothing surprising in all of that, SD. The USA has always been a rogue state, prosecuting a process of ‘my way or the highway.’ A philosophical principle of fu^k with us and we’ll fu^k with you, double time. Perverse as it is, a natural consequence of the imperialistic hubris that is the underlying bedrock for all that follows in terms of America’s relations both internally and externally with its antagonists. If there is a God in heaven, how he must weep when he looks down at that blighted country and wonder just how it got to be so goddamm satanic.
Indeed Canguro, so much potential lost.
Steve Davis
Thanks Steve ; all I was trying to point out was that there are two bodies – the ICJ resolves disputes between States, while the ICC prosecutes individuals for crimes – the author had it the wrong way around.
Putin has been the subject of an arrest warrant by the ICC – Netanyahu maybe next but what South Africa were doing was calling on the ICJ for an advisory opinion on Israel’s’ actions in Gaza.
Interestingly both Putin and Netanyahu thumb their noses at these two bodies.
All good Terence.
I could see that there was no confusion in your comment, it was CB I was correcting.
“Interestingly both Putin and Netanyahu thumb their noses at these two bodies.”
I know that’s the case for the ICC, and there’s some others, US, and China I think, but does that apply to the ICJ?
As far as I know, ICJ decisions can go to a UNGA hearing, where outcomes are not binding, but where global opinion can at the very least be something of an embarrassment, destroying credibility.
Yep, good discourse,
And as I understand it, aside from the UNGA, the ICJ determinations can be put to the UNSC for ‘enforcement’. But with the parlous dysfunctional state of the UNSC, enforcements by them of ICJ determinations have a snowflake’s chance in hell.
What an utter mess, mainly generated by USA and Russia.
Needs to be said, the attack on the Settler outposts in the Occupied Territories was itself likely a response to decades of oppression, including Arab deaths prior to the attack,
How much should they have had to take?
It was supposedly a splinter-group of Hamas rather than mainstream Hamas, but I wonder if the people who did the attack were not manipulated to that point through utter frustration with so called “settler” murders of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
I am NOT trying to excuse the splinter group, but wish people would get the Oct 7 attack in perspective.