Hugh Williams, Debec, NB

It is now irrefutably evident that Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and their dislocation of the population in the West Bank is the primary instance of genocide in the 21st C. It has also had the effect of destroying the pretense of the West’s commitment to human rights while exposing its imperialism and settler colonialism.

The evidence from longstanding and credible UN human rights sources is compelling and inescapable but nevertheless has been largely ignored by Western governments and censored by Western media. However, certain highlights from this evidence, however painful, need to be articulated in summary form at least.

Again, the evidence is compelling that the policies and practices of Israel are consistent with genocide. Israeli colonial settlers, military and security personnel have violated human rights with impunity. Senior Israeli government and military officials, it is widely agreed, must be held accountable.

Beyond this, crucial obligations under international law to limit the barbarity of war and protect human rights including the right to self-determination are all under threat by Israel’s violations and equally by the fact that other States are unwilling to hold Israel accountable while continuing to provide it with seemingly unconditional military and other support.

Despite these ongoing atrocities, Western democracies now largely regarded as historic colonial/ imperialist countries at the center of the capitalist world economy led by the United States, not only continue to offer direct economic and political support to Israel in its policy of extermination, but to provide it with unhindered and even expedited arms shipments including some of the most lethal weapons in existence.

This has contributed to the concerted development of a growing opposition to the West within the UN human rights community creating an unprecedented division between those trying to uphold universal human rights and what are now seen as Western imperial powers and their agents.

This painful division in many respects symbolizes the stark choice facing the peoples of the world unlike any other time in the United Nation’s history. The genocide in Gaza is now seen to be the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of native Palestinians. And world leaders supporting Israel’s actions against the Palestinians now must also carry this genocide with shame and at their own peril and the peril of their own nations.

Recent and mounting UN evidence is in accord with the World Court’s verdict that Israel was violating the Genocide Conventions. It now felt by many that it must be said and named clearly that this current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people is rooted in an ethno-nationalist-settler-colonial ideology. It is a textbook case of genocide and so many longtime UN experts are now urging the abandonment of a failed ‘two-state’ proposal and are calling for a One State based upon human rights, supporting a single democratic secular State in all of historic Palestine. This means ending the deeply racist settler colonial project and an end to apartheid throughout the land.

It seems now that this situation in Gaza with Israel’s genocide supported by the West has caused a profound and even traumatic critical analysis and reevaluation by many UN officials working on this issue.

UN work traditionally has been conducted by five regional geographic groups of nations – Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America-Caribbean, with the fifth group not being organized regionally but instead is grouped to include Western Europe and Turkey, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. This fifth group is known as ‘WEOG’, Western Europe and the Other Group. It is now identified by many associated with the UN as a group organized on an imperialist-settler-colony basis and no longer as the representative of western democracies as the group has tended to self-identify. The U.S. often takes on an observer status for this UN work but nevertheless the UN assigns it to this fifth grouping where it tends to rule over the others. Though this group only represents 11 per cent of the world’s population, it is very powerful having as members three out of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with members also holding seven out of the fifteen seats on the Council. It is the group of nations that tends to dominate UN bodies.

WEOG and especially its OG is seen as leading the way in the defense of colonialism, apartheid, and political Zionism in opposition to Indigenous Rights, anti-racism efforts, Palestinian Rights, and to the right to development. It is the leading defender of the use of mercenaries in military interventions, and of the imposition of unilateral coercive measures like sanctions. The OG, especially the U.S. and Israel are the strongest opponents of the UN’s official global program to combat racism.

One of the key recent findings of these UN officials is how Western Media has been complicit in Israel’s genocide in Palestine which has been widely recognized to have two main pillars – 1) the ruthlessness of Israel’s highly organized genocide machine in Palestine (Israel now holds the world record for the murder of journalists, aid workers, UN officials, and health care workers) and, 2) the direct complicity of the U.S., U.K., and other Western governments that include Canada. But now there is also recognized an essential third pillar – the complicity of Western media corporations in knowingly disseminating Israel’s disinformation and propaganda, and blacking out information on genocide for its Western audiences.

It is now widely viewed as a sign and symbol of both the hypocrisy and iniquity of the historic colonial-imperialist nations at the center of the world capitalist system that this painful and compelling evidence from these courageous longstanding UN human rights officials is largely hidden from the people of the West.

Hugh Williams works with the handicapped finding qualified employment and is a former university instructor of Philosophy. (see Pat Jamieson’s note on Len Desroche’s new book in the Other Features tab).