Genocide and despair in Gaza: Facing up to Netanyahu’s crimes

The Lowdown with Arthur Snell

A logical error stops many people treating the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza with the horror it deserves.

It goes like this:

• Antisemites threaten Jews across the world – which is true.

• Antisemites hate Israel because it is the world’s only Jewish state – also true.

• Progressives don’t want to look at the horror Hamas and other Islamist movements inflict – and few can deny that either.

• Therefore, we must defend the Israeli government, whatever crime it commits – and at this point, the argument goes off a cliff.

Although they never admit it, in practice many people, including friends of mine, behave as if they believe that Israel can act with impunity. They are the British branch of the Netanyahu fan club the GB-Bibis, if I may coin a phrase. They can be pathetic figures.

The Israeli right and far right don’t give a damn about them. Netanyahu would never stop an attack on a hospital out of fear of provoking antisemitism in Europe or America. Indeed, his government has shamefully redefined opposition to anti-Jewish bigotry as support for anti-Muslim bigotry.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a grimly significant conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem, where the Israeli state welcomed one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, who denied that the genocidal murder of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s had ever happened.

The Israeli state embraces these modern versions of Holocaust deniers because the victims were Muslims, not Jews.

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The International Criminal Court decided that the Serb war criminals, whose heirs Netanyahu now honours in Jerusalem, were guilty of genocide.

They did not try to murder every Bosnian Muslim, as the Nazis tried to murder every European Jew. However, the killing of the male population of Srebrenica and mass rape and ethnic cleansing elsewhere in Bosnia were enough for the court to declare that the 1948 Genocide Convention had been breached.

Can we say the same about Israel?

In the Lowdown this week I talked to Arthur Snell, former Foreign Office diplomat, and now one of the best authors and commentators on foreign affairs around.

You can listen on the Apple iplayer at the top. On Spotify here

On Amazon or on all other players via the Acast link

Here is an edited and annotated version of our conversation

I began with a picture of Israel triumphant. Hamas and Hezbollah shattered. Iran humbled. Assad overthrown.

And yet despite these victories, there is no offer from Israel to the Palestinians. No hint of a new settlement. Just demands for mass deportations from the Israeli far right.

Arthur Snell: “I think what you've correctly identified is that Israel has managed to slay the giants that were ranged against it. Notably Iran, Hezbollah, and other Shia proxies of Iran, but the Palestinian population continues to be sucked into this incredibly destructive ongoing drama, which in my view has crossed the threshold into genocide.

Even if we didn't want to care about the crimes that are underway, one could make the argument that Israel is storing up terrible, terrible problems for its future.”

Like many other lawyers and diplomats Arthur has written about Gaza and whether it breaches genocide law – you can read his thoughts here

On the podcast he put it like this

“The Genocide Convention looks at wider definitions than mass murder. It looks at deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a population’s physical destruction

“It's very hard to look at what's happening in Gaza and draw any other conclusion that the intention of the Israeli government is to make Gaza unliveable for Palestinians with the objective that most people will be forced to flee.”

We all know about Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, who has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”. Then there is the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who incites violence against Palestinians on the West Bank.

The UK and others have sanctioned them.

But, as Arthur said, focusing on a handful of extremists is too easy.

“If you look at what Benjamin Netanyahu himself is increasingly talking about, if you look at what the defence minister's talking about, there is a consistent message now that Gaza must be made unliveable for its Palestinian population

“We end up, reaching the judgment that this is a desire to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza. That destruction, of course, involves many deaths, hundreds of thousands probably, but it, it doesn't have to involve the death of all two million, to destroy Gaza as a place where people can live.”

I pointed out that liberal Israelis I knew had abandoned their liberalism after the October attacks. The brutality of Hamas’s crimes was such they gave up on supporting a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran the results of a blood-chilling poll that showed