IADL Position Paper on Gaza Genocide: End the genocide, arms embargo on Israel now!

IADL POSITION PAPER ON GAZA GENOCIDE: END THE GENOCIDE, ARMS EMBARGO ON ISRAEL NOW

Summary

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a worldwide NGO of progressive law professionals with consultative status at ECOSOC in the UN, reasserts its urgent call for action and global accountability to bring an immediate end to the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip by Israel. We note that the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and other powers are directly complicit in this ongoing genocide through their ongoing trade in arms; provision of economic, military and intelligence support; and use of diplomatic and official cover to prevent meaningful accountability for those responsible for carrying out the genocide.

It is an urgent task not only for the legal community and for international institutions, but for all of humanity, to immediately impose a full-scale arms embargo on Israel and to force Israel to cease fire in Gaza, end the genocide, and immediately remove all of its forces from the Gaza Strip. We further emphasize the urgent need for full Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty throughout Palestine and the dismantlement of all structures of occupation and colonization everywhere in occupied Palestine, as well as the urgent need to hold Israeli officials and military officers accountable in domestic and international courts for their ongoing acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, against the Palestinian people.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers urges all states, international bodies, and legal organizations to immediately take all measures possible in order to:

• End the Israeli genocide in Gaza and secure a ceasefire;
• Impose a total arms embargo on Israel;
• Secure the complete removal of all Israeli military forces from Gaza and the return of all displaced people to their homes everywhere in Gaza;
• End the occupation of Palestine, recognizing and implementing full Palestinian sovereignty;
• Advance the liberation of all of occupied Palestine;
• Recognize the Palestinian right to resist occupation as upheld in international law, including removing Palestinian, Lebanese and Yemeni armed resistance organizations from “terrorist lists” and sanctions regimes;
• Ensure freedom for all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and detention camps;
• Secure and implement the right to return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants;
• Take immediate action to secure humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza and a comprehensive rebuilding for Gaza, including through reparations from the parties responsible for the genocide, including Israel, the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom;
• Expedite and secure the passage of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza to deliver civil society humanitarian support to Palestinians in Gaza and to break the siege;
• End the blockade and siege upon Gaza;
• Prosecute members of the Israeli Occupation Forces in countries around the world, including countries of dual citizenship;
• Advance boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel and all complicit corporations, including weapons manufacturers;
• Impose international sanctions upon Israel similar to those against South African apartheid at both the official and popular levels, including sports boycott, cultural boycott and economic boycott;
• Confront and bring an end to the repression targeting human rights defenders and advocates for Palestinian rights and liberation, including the thousands of arrested, expelled and suspended students in the United States; the attempts to silence the speech of Charlotte Kates and others in Canada; the attempts to deport and strip residency from Palestinians throughout Europe, including Mohammed Khatib in Belgium and dozens of Palestinians in Germany, including Zaid Abdulnasser and Musaab Abu Atta; the bans on Palestine organizations and demonstrations in Germany and France; and the attempted bans on Palestine Action in Britain. We particularly urge lawyers to participate in mass defense activities and other methods to defend those subjected to state repression.
• Swiftly use all available legal mechanisms, including the ICJ and ICC but also national jurisdictions under the principle of universal jurisdiction, to hold Israeli leaders and military accountable for the international crimes committed against the Palestinian people, including and especially the crime of genocide.

We reiterate our conclusions of October 11, 2023: “IADL reassures its complete solidarity with the Palestinian people. IADL calls upon all peace- and justice loving people in the world to stand up in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right for self determination and against occupation, to face and confront the forces in the world that are complicit with the crimes committed by Israel and thereby organize impunity for said crimes. The people of the world played an essential role in bringing down the apartheid regime and its supporters mainly in the US and Europe. The same task lies ahead of us to support the Palestinian people until Palestine is free.”

Full Text

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a worldwide NGO of progressive law professionals with consultative status at ECOSOC in the UN, reasserts its urgent call for action and global accountability to bring an immediate end to the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip by Israel. We note that the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and other powers are directly complicit in this ongoing genocide through their ongoing trade in arms; provision of economic, military and intelligence support; and use of diplomatic and official cover to prevent meaningful accountability for those responsible for carrying out the genocide.

It is an urgent task not only for the legal community and for international institutions, but for all of humanity, to immediately impose a full-scale arms embargo on Israel and to force Israel to cease fire in Gaza, end the genocide, and immediately remove all of its forces from the Gaza Strip. We further emphasize the urgent need for full Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty throughout Palestine and the dismantlement of all structures of occupation and colonization everywhere in occupied Palestine, as well as the urgent need to hold Israeli officials and military officers accountable in domestic and international courts for their ongoing acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, against the Palestinian people.

Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

In the past seven months, over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli weaponry. This number remains incomplete and does not express the full extent of the devastation imposed upon the Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation regime. Nearly two million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, with many of them pushed to Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, now facing ongoing bombardment and a ground invasion by Israeli forces. Despite the acceptance of a ceasefire agreement by Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, Israel’s government has only escalated its assault on the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.

Israel has openly carried out its assault on hospitals, schools, refugee camps, mosques and churches. It has publicly boasted of its attacks on the Palestinian health care system, imposing sieges on all of Gaza’s major hospitals. After the withdrawal of Israeli forces, Palestinians have uncovered mass graves outside these hospitals, which include, among others, bodies whose hands were zip-tied, the bodies of patients still connected to medical equipment, and the bodies of health care workers still dressed in scrubs. Thousands of Palestinians from Gaza have been kidnapped to the infamous Sde Teiman concentration camp, where they have been subjected to extreme torture, unnecessary amputations and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to mass denial of humanitarian aid, enforced famine and denied access to water and basic medical and human needs by the Israeli army.

Nearly all of these crimes have been vividly documented by both Palestinian journalists, who have themselves faced repeated assaults and killings in the past seven months, as well as by Israeli soldiers on social media, where they have routinely and repeatedly boasted of their war crimes. Israeli officials and members of the Knesset, its parliament, have loudly and clearly declared their intentions and plans to kill large numbers of Palestinians and to make life unliveable in Gaza. The Israeli government is replete with fascists of various stripes, who openly and loudly call for the forcible transfer and/or extermination of the Palestinian people and the theft and confiscation of Palestinian land throughout all of occupied Palestine.

As the Republic of South Africa documented extensively in its filing before the International Court of Justice, Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, and its leadership and military officials have openly boasted of their intent to do so. The ICJ found that South Africa’s case was plausible, ordering provisional measures to end the genocide; however, Israel has flouted these provisional measures, intensifying its bombing and invasion campaigns, confident in the impunity provided to it by its allies and sponsors in the United States and other, mainly Western, powers.

The IADL commends the Republic of South Africa as well as the Republic of Nicaragua for their efforts to hold Israel – as well as the countries that arm and fund its genocide, such as the United States and Germany – accountable through the international legal system. However, the past seven months have also underlined that the so-called “rules-based international order” – touted by the United States and its allies as essentially an alternative to international law – is one in which Israel and its supporters are expected to hold complete impunity for genocide.

The IADL further commends and recognizes the importance of the actions of Yemen in taking concrete action to halt the supply lines to genocide in the region by confronting Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, as well as that carried out by the US and Britain.

IADL emphasizes that the Palestinian people have the right to resist by all means at their disposal, including armed resistance, against the occupation. As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has held, Israel does not have the claimed “right to self-defense” against the people it is occupying and colonizing in Gaza and throughout Palestine. We urge all states to remove Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni armed resistance organizations and political parties from their lists of “terrorist organizations,” as such designations aim to criminalize, stigmatize and undermine the legitimate and lawful resistance of a people subjected to foreign military occupation.

As the IADL noted in its White Paper on Gaza in 2009, “Actions taken by Hamas or any other Palestinians to resist the blockade are not ‘acts of aggression,’ so they do not allow Israel to claim its actions were taken in self defense.” This is only more urgent today, when the Palestinian resistance is confronting an ongoing genocide.

IADL affirms that Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as its military aggression throughout the region presents a clear and urgent danger to global peace and security. Israel has attacked Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria, and it has repeatedly bombed Syria and Lebanon, including repeated attacks against civilians in the South of Lebanon, all acts of aggression and warfare against all of these states. Israel and the United States have carried out multiple attacks on Syrian, Yemeni, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian sovereignty in order to continue to perpetrate genocide in occupied Palestine. We underline the right of Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq to defend their sovereignty against these ongoing assaults.

We further note that the genocide in Gaza is also being mirrored in the occupied West Bank of Palestine, where armed settlers have carried out pogroms against Palestinian villages, over 14,000 Palestinians have been detained since October 2023, and the Israeli government has boosted its support for illegal colonial settlers and their ongoing theft of land and destruction of Palestinian homes.

As we speak, we note that we approach the 76^th anniversary of the Nakba, the occupation of 78% of the land of Palestine and the forced expulsion of over 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, and the declaration of the state of Israel on colonized and occupied Palestinian land. IADL emphasizes that it is urgent to bring an end not only to the genocide of the past seven months in the Gaza Strip, but to the ongoing Nakba of the past 76 years. In fact, over 70% of the Palestinian population in Gaza are themselves Palestinian refugees; they or their families were forcibly expelled from their homes and lands in Palestine in 1947-48 by Zionist military forces; they have been denied their internationally recognized right to return home ever since. It is not accurate that Palestinians displaced in Gaza have nowhere to go; they have the right to return to their original homes and lands in Palestine from which they were displaced 76 years ago.

In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” noting not only the occupation of Palestine but also the “unholy alliance” between Zionism and South African apartheid and racism. This resolution was later rescinded under United States pressure in 1991. We underline the fundamental legitimacy of Resolution 3379 and urge its re-institution by the General Assembly.  In the past seven months, the United States has repeatedly blocked resolutions in the United Nations Security Council calling for a ceasefire, through the use of its veto power. In the case of the one resolution it did not veto, the US then immediately proceeded to unlawfully declare the resolution to be “non-binding.” In addition to the billions of dollars in weaponry provided to Israel by the United States, its conduct in the United Nations has been that of a co-conspirator in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The United States and its imperialist allies, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy, have collaborated in this genocide in multiple ways. Since October 2023, Germany has increased its arms exports to Israel by a multiple of 10; the United States most recently committed to another $26 billion in weaponry for Israel, even as it actively carries out a genocide. All of these countries have also intensively escalated their internal repressive activities targeting the growing popular movement in support of Palestine.

Hundreds of people are being prosecuted or investigated by police in France for “glorification of terrorism” for affirming Palestinians’ right to resist. Germany has banned demonstrations and conferences for Palestine, imposed Schengen-wide bans on Palestinian intellectuals like Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, the rector of Glasgow University and a surgeon who worked directly in Gaza in 2023; banned Palestine advocacy organizations like Samidoun; and instituted deportation and residency revocation procedures against numerous Palestinians. In Belgium, Palestinian activist Mohammed Khatib is being threatened by Migration Minister Nicole de Moor with stripping of his refugee status; in Canada, IADL member and Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates was arrested for giving a speech on Palestinian resistance and banned from attending events and demonstrations for five months. Across the United States, militarized police have invaded student  demonstrations at universities across the country, arresting thousands of students and beating and brutalizing many more.

In Britain, officials are proposing a new mechanism to ban organizations like Palestine Action that disrupt the weapons industry as well as those disrupting the fossil fuel industry and impose sanctions upon them similar to those used against those designated as “terrorists.” The Freedom Flotilla, scheduled to sail to break the blockade of Gaza from Turkey, was suddenly blocked from sailing after a removal of the ship’s flags by Guinea-Bissau, an action that followed visits by both U.S. and German officials to Turkey seeking to stop the sailing of the civil society flotilla carrying tons of humanitarian aid as well as passengers including IADL Bureau member and US National Lawyers Guild president Suzanne Adely.

Despite overwhelming evidence of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the head of state, members of the war cabinet of Israel, other Israeli military and civil officials, illegal settlers, and officials of NATO powers supplying lethal weapons prohibited by the laws of war among other weaponry being used to target Palestinian children, women and men, doctors and health workers, journalists, UN and other aid and relief workers in occupied Palestine, no warrants of arrest have been issued by the International Criminal Court. The delay in issuing arrest warrants, in contrast with other cases in which the ICC has acted swiftly, both exposes the bias of the ICC and also draws attention to the open and covert threats against the ICC by US Senators and members of Congress, among others, to subvert justice by blocking any indictments of Israeli officials.

At the same time, all of these repressive efforts have failed to block millions upon millions of people from expressing widespread popular support for the rights of the Palestinian people and a growing demand to impose an end to the genocide and a complete arms embargo on Israel. Thousands of campuses have seen new protest movements develop as students demand their universities divest from Israel and the weapons companies arming its genocidal conduct.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers urges all states, international bodies, and legal organizations to immediately take all measures possible in order to:

• End the Israeli genocide in Gaza and secure a ceasefire;
• Impose a total arms embargo on Israel;
• Secure the complete removal of all Israeli military forces from Gaza and the return of all displaced people to their homes everywhere in Gaza;
• End the occupation of Palestine, recognizing and implementing full Palestinian sovereignty;
• Advance the liberation of all of occupied Palestine;
• Recognize the Palestinian right to resist occupation as upheld in international law, including removing Palestinian, Lebanese and Yemeni armed resistance organizations from “terrorist lists” and sanctions regimes;
• Ensure freedom for all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and detention camps;
• Secure and implement the right to return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, including the 70% of Palestinians in Gaza who are refugees and the millions of Palestinians in refugee camps surrounding Palestine and those around the world in exile and diaspora;
• Take immediate action to secure humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza and a comprehensive rebuilding for Gaza, including through reparations from the parties responsible for the genocide, including Israel, the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom;
• Expedite and secure the passage of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza to deliver civil society humanitarian support to Palestinians in Gaza and to break the siege;
• End the blockade and siege upon Gaza;
• Prosecute members of the Israeli Occupation Forces in countries around the world, especially their countries of dual citizenship;
• Advance boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel and all complicit corporations, including weapons manufacturers;
• Impose international sanctions upon Israel similar to those against South African apartheid at both the official and popular levels, including sports boycott, cultural boycott and economic boycott;
• Confront and bring an end to the repression targeting human rights defenders and advocates for Palestinian rights and liberation, including the thousands of arrested, expelled and suspended students in the United States; the attempts to silence the speech of Charlotte Kates and others in Canada; the attempts to deport and strip residency from Palestinians throughout Europe, including Mohammed Khatib in Belgium and dozens of Palestinians in Germany, including Zaid Abdulnasser and Musaab Abu Atta; the bans on Palestine organizations and demonstrations in Germany and France; and the attempted bans on Palestine Action in Britain. We particularly urge lawyers to participate in mass defense activities and other methods to defend those subjected to state repression.
• Swiftly use all available legal mechanisms, including the ICJ and ICC but also national jurisdictions under the principle of universal jurisdiction, to hold Israeli leaders and military accountable for the international crimes committed against the Palestinian people, including and especially the crime of genocide.

We reiterate our conclusions of October 11, 2023: “IADL reassures its complete solidarity with the Palestinian people. IADL calls upon all peace- and justice loving people in the world to stand up in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right for self determination and against occupation, to face and confront the forces in the world that are complicit with the crimes committed by Israel and thereby organize impunity for said crimes. The people of the world played an essential role in bringing down the apartheid regime and its supporters mainly in the US and Europe. The same task lies ahead of us to support the Palestinian people until Palestine is free.”