An International Tribunal for Zionist Crimes

At long last, a voice from the United Nations has spoken strongly and clearly. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay accuses Israel of war crimes and of violating the fourth [article of the] Geneva Conventions, while at the same time denouncing the supply of arms and financial aid from the United States to its Zionist ally. The consistent consequence [for the crimes] should have been placing of those responsible for the massacre against the people of Gaza before an international tribunal, especially Benjamin Netanyahu.

In regard to Barack Obama, we find ourselves faced with a president who has been one of the Jewish lobby’s most abused puppets, brutally and directly complying with the slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians — mostly young boys and girls. Obama will go down in history as the president who, not having won a single war, left countries bled out and fractured: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Syria. The hope of many, myself among them, that American foreign policy would change for the better has now been completely buried.

A state that indiscriminately attacks the civilian population of Gaza, killing over 1,400 people — the vast majority of them innocent civilians — destroying 2,655 homes, bombing 116 schools and 18 health centers, forcing over 200,000 people from their homes, pulverizing mosques, electric plants, children’s parks and police stations, and — if there are still any doubts of its brutality — bombing three U.N. refugee schools, and killing dozens of people, is worse than a terrorist organization: It is a criminal state governed by criminals. And what are these people called who act as the criminals’ accomplices? The governments of the European Union, for example?

At least, the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia have had the courage and decency to condemn Israel. There is still room for dignity.

What is happening under the pretext of self-defense is the same old story. Before the slaughter began four weeks ago, until then, Israel had killed 42 Palestinians in 2014. Incidentally, world public opinion should note that in the last 50 years, the Israeli army has killed hundreds of minors. It is a strange obsession that is perhaps explained by the testimony given in 2008 by a Spanish reporter, a member of the nongovernmental organization Holidays in Peace, on Radio Nacional de Espana. “On the border with Jordan, the Israeli military has stolen young boys’ and girls’ luggage, while checking them as they came to Spain for vacation. When I told them that they were just children, an official replied that they are future terrorists.” The reporter, an expert on the region, was deeply affected. The bomb that summer that killed over 20 children in a building in southern Lebanon, while terrible, was only one more demonstration by a terrorist state that defies the world.

The crimes of Israel are justified by its government, and by the United States and EU, under the pretext of self-defense, but in fact, they all know perfectly well the cause of this terrible crisis: the occupation of the Palestinian territories by a military force and by more than 200 Jewish colonies. This is the open wound in the Middle East that a distortion of the facts attempts to have us forget. Zionism won’t stop conquering more territory in occupied Palestine, since in its hidden agenda are plans to rule all of historical Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. On its particular road map, the state of Israel doesn’t intend to submit to international law or humanitarian law. To continue being a wayward state, it relies on the unconditional support of the United States, where Zionism and the new Christian right maintain a theological and military alliance.

In the words of the Jewish intellectual Michel Warschawski, “Zionists have taken on the concept of a clash of civilizations and see the need for a war of non-ending anticipation.”* The Arab, the Muslim, the historic enemy in the state of Israel’s fight for survival, has now been turned into an even greater enemy that fights to crush the civilized world. This thesis-proven paranoia justifies absolutely all of the violence deployed against the Muslim world. Years ago, the Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt observed that Zionism would become a disgrace to Jews.

No, really, however often it is said, this is not a battle against terrorism; it is a war that seeks to change the political map of the region, [a war] of weakening states and puppet governments, with Israel as the great police officer. This insanity cannot go unpunished, although Israel, keeping to the statute of being a [nation of] Holocaust victims, may blame its adversaries for its own havoc. Invoking the evils suffered by the Jewish people makes up the basis of the discussion that seeks ultimately to be a passport to perpetual immunity for exercising merciless violence.

What is unfortunate and dramatic are the similarities between Nazism and Zionism: the idea of a superior people, of a race that must fulfill a holy mission; the methods of ethnic cleansing; their inability to feel the slightest empathy for the other side; their constant violent behavior; their methods of collective punishment, of the destruction of property belonging to the persecuted … too many similarities. The victim learns from the executioner and imitates him. He is no longer a victim; he looks in the mirror and sees his own murderer.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers and generals deserve international judgment for crimes against humanity. The mass murders they are guilty of are not comparable even to those [perpetrated] by terrorist organizations for the simple reason that a state is subject to the law. Whenever a state commits acts of terrorism like those of Israel, the guilt is greater — since by breaking the law and violating humanitarian conventions, it puts the world’s society, its international relations and its regulations in serious danger.

How will it be possible to justify the history of [failing to] prosecute the Zionist leaders proven guilty of horrible killings? Today, it seems evident that there is not one government or international organization prepared to try Zionism on a Nuremberg-like stage. On the contrary, it seems that the United States and EU will continue to allow this monster to grow increasingly larger and bring us to the brink of a global inferno, but [those of us from] civil society and in human rights organizations should do something — even if it’s symbolic — [like] demanding that the International Court of Justice at The Hague begin proceedings against Zionism. Governments that stand in solidarity with Navi Pillay should also do this. They will then be able to ask Israeli leaders and generals why there has been graffiti in Jerusalem’s bus station for a long time that says, “Holocaust for the Arabs!”

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.