The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has called for an end to Israel’s 76-year “campaign of genocide” against the Palestinian people. The call has been made in a media statement issued by ICAHD Director Jeff Halper.
“The destruction of Gaza and its people going on before our eyes is just the latest, tragic chapter in Zionism’s/Israel’s drive to Judaise Palestine,” said ICAHD. “This is accompanied by the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank being carried out by Israeli settlers and soldiers, which is largely unreported.”
The committee described both Israel’s “assault on Gaza and the killing of innocent Israelis” by Hamas as war crimes.
If we step back and view the systemic destruction of the Palestinian people since 1947… the picture that emerges is one of genocide
Genocide, said ICAHD, is often a prolonged process comprised of successive war crimes. “If we step back and view the systemic destruction of the Palestinian people since 1947, their replacement by Jews and the transformation of their country into an exclusively ‘Jewish’ one, the picture that emerges is one of genocide.”
The process, the committee added, has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians killed; 80 per cent of the Palestinian population driven out in the 1948 Nakba and their lands seized; the dispersal of refugees; the denial of their national and human rights, even of their very existence as a people; and their physical, cultural and juridical erasure as a people with rights to self-determination in their homeland.
“We at ICAHD realise that this is an extremely serious accusation. But as an organisation that gives voice to Israeli Jews engaged in a joint anti-colonial struggle with their Palestinian comrades, we believe it is crucial to view that struggle in a clear historical light.”
The Genocide Convention, noted ICAHD, speaks of the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part, and the organisation contends that that is precisely what Zionism/Israel had to do in order to transform an inhabited Arab country into a Jewish one. “The Genocide Convention, as part of international law, carries with it sanctions and punishment for perpetrators of such a crime, and that is what ICAHD is calling for.”
Source : MEMO