Photo by Emad El Byed

Palestine is a special case of “no man’s land.” For the moment, Palestinians still live there. But, according to the Israeli government and the tourism-inspired dreams of Donald Trump, they should not. Israeli soldiers are actively making their lives hell on earth. Genocide is in full swing.

Palestinians also live, or try to do so, in the Western Bank and in East Jerusalem, but settlers coming from Israel are deadly serious about evicting away, robbing them of their land, burning their crops, destroying their villages, and intimidating them in the most brutal ways. All sorts of crimes against humanity are on the display. But for the Israeli government that is simply a “campaign” of protective measures against Hamas. The Israeli government is intent on protecting the “heart of Judea” by all means necessary.

In the 2002 film No Man’s Land (Ničija zemlja) directed by Danis Tanović, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the plot follows two soldiers during the war in Bosnia. One is Bosniak and the other is a Serb, both of whom find themselves in no man’s land between enemy lines. The third protagonist is another Bosniak, a wounded soldier lying on a land mine. If he makes any move, the mine will explode.

At first, the two soldiers next to him exchange the expected insults and skepticism towards each other. But eventually they begin to find some common ground. An army officer of the UNPROFOR appears, and then a British reporter who makes sure there’s media pressure on the UN high command to try to save the soldiers. Two are rescued but it turns out that the mine underneath the third one cannot be defused. The UN high command, trying to save face, state that the mission was successful and then leaves the area, along with the reporters and everyone else….

It is possible to imagine a Palestinian and an Israeli in a similar situation, lost on disputed land, mistrusting each other but eventually finding some common ground. But the UN doesn’t have a peace mission on the ground, and no British journalist could appear on the scene. The local journalists risk being targeted and killed by the Israeli army, which would then accuse Hamas of the crime.

As during the war in Bosnia, information nevertheless reaches the outside world. Hundreds of thousands of citizens protest around the globe, and several governments have decided that enough is enough, including most recently Canada, Australia, and the UK. But others—the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands—are calculating that their arms industries and trade with Israel are more important than the life of anyone lying on a landmine. And, at least for now, the UN is powerless though unwillingly so.

International Condemnations

On November, 21, 2024, the UN-backed International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant

who bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts… The Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that Hamas military commander Mohammed Mr. Deif…is responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and rape and other form of sexual violence.

This September, a UN commission of inquiry said that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, taking into account acts defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Although nobody can forget the atrocious Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage, the fact remains that at least 64,964 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then.

The commission looked at statements made by the Israeli authorities indicating genocidal intent as well as “at the pattern of conduct of Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces to show that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference.” Some of the statements are telling, such as Netanyahu promising “mighty vengeance [on] all of the places where Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.” Israel is “fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Gallant said. And, from Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the Hamas-led attack.

These are not exceptional statements, opinions shared by just a few Israeli extremist politicians or people of influence. Although legal experts correctly point out that any scheme to annex territory and forcibly displace Palestinians is tantamount to ethnic cleansing, Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich has no problem arguing that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to … the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.” And Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the settler movement, has boldly stated that “Gazans will not remain there. They will go to other countries. Supporters of Hamas we will fight. But those who want to live a normal life, they will have to leave Gaza because of the October 7 attack…Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and other unspecified African countries…Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews.”

Netanyahu’s Speech at the UN

The terms for the Israeli actions in Gaza used by international lawyers, human rights groups, and protestors are: crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And yet, Benjamin Netanyahu, under ICC indictment for crimes against humanity, freely appeared at the UN in New York to present his speech to the UN on September 26. Here are some salient excerpts:

Our enemies hate all of us with equal venom. They want to drag the modern world back to the past… to a dark age of violence, fanaticism, and terror. I think many of you are already feeling in your own societies the radical Islamist surge. …. We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again… It’s an indictment of weak-kneed leaders who appease evil rather than support a nation whose braver soldiers guard you from the barbarians at the gate…The head of urban warfare studies, Col. John Spencer … says, ‘Israel is applying more measures to minimize civilian casualties than any military in history.’ And because we’re doing that, the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is less than 2 to 1 in Gaza… antisemitic lies have consequences. In recent months, Jews have been assaulted in Canada, Australia, Britain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere… So here’s another message for these Western leaders: Israel will not allow you to shove a terror state down our throats. We will not commit national suicide because you don’t have the guts to face down a hostile media and antisemitic mobs demanding Israel’s blood… So my opposition to a Palestinian state is not simply my policy or my government’s policy. It is the policy of the state and people of the State of Israel…

Netanyahu liberally uses missionary zeal, threats, warnings, condemnation, xenophobic rhetorics, and plain lies. It is true that many world leaders, with their own agendas, are “weak-kneed leaders,” but not the ones he has in mind. What he calls ‘antisemitic mobs’ are pro-Palestinian protestors and not anti-Jewish hooligans. But one statement is correct: Jewish people are under attack now more than a few years ago, being perceived as Zionists by those prone to violence and not interested in nuances. Netanyahu and his government are guilty for the problems inflicted on innocent Jews as well.

Netanyahu, as any devoted Zionists, is focused on ancestral, holy land, “our beloved homeland for more than 3,000 years.” This kind of statement encourages the equation of Zionism with Judaism. Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, on the other hand, is actively trying to make the distinction transparent. “Judaism and Zionism are as different from each other as the earth and the sky,” he observes. “They contradict each other. Judaism is about submitting to Almighty God, while Zionism is the name for extreme nationalism that aims to possess everything related to forming a nation.” Weiss also notes that Zionism led to the Great Catastrophe (Nakba) in 1948, with the founding of the state of Israel, which resulted in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, which he laments. (Tellingly enough, many Israelis pretend Palestinian anger only started on October 7).

Most of all, Rabbi Weiss stresses: “To declare the existence of a Jewish state is direct rebellion against God. This is because we are in an exile that we were sent to by God. We will remain in that exile until a metaphysical change occurs, where all of humanity will serve God in harmony.”

A Great Migration in the Making

With the Israeli regime turning “that wicked city into rubble” because “an entire nation out there is responsible,” all have to pay, children included. According to the logic of the Isreali Defense Forces, these children could grow up and join Hamas, so better safe than sorry. The “godmother” of Israeli settlers has a solution: send all surviving Palestinians somewhere in Africa.

But even if Zionists would have the right to expel millions of people unwilling to leave, some questions have to be asked. What if now certain members of the First Nations decide to chase away the children of those who conquered and spoiled their land a few centuries ago? Where could they send them? Surely not to Europe where the cousins of the Celts and Illyrians would be in the process of cleansing their ancestral space of misbehaving Slavs, Germans, Italians, and all of their visitors.

But what is certain is that, in the contemporary world, Netanyahu’s version of “his” people as the “light unto the nations,” combined with his complete disregard of international law, is disgraceful.

As if all the above-mentioned crimes were not enough, in the last 24 hours Israel committed the crime of abducting a peaceful flotilla heading to Gaza to bring humanitarian aid and break the illegal, two-decades-long blockade of Gaza from the sea. In an undisputedly piratical way, the Israeli army kidnapped hundreds of people on more than 40 private ships in international waters, armed only with their consciousness, and transported them to Israel. Around the globe, protests are in full swing, and Italian trade unions have called a general strike. Some world leaders have condemned Israel’s action; many are silent. The response to this latest display of unlawfulness will perhaps put international law and norms back on the agenda. How Trump will respond is anyone’s guess. After all, Netanyahu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize…

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post The Problem of No Man’s Land appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed