It’s emblematic of the current intolerant climate that I feel compelled to publish this letter anonymously. Nonetheless, as an individual of decent conscience, this matter is too important to neglect. This letter comes from a place of deep compassion and the moral obligation we owe humanity to speak up when grotesque injustice becomes the norm. These are the values Osgoode prides itself on, and I shall now bring it into fruition.
Genocide: the crime of all crimes. To avoid its misuse, I shall define it herein. Raphael Lemkin, the esteemed Polish lawyer whose advocacy culminated in the establishment of the 1948 Genocide Convention, defines genocide as “the destruction of nation or an ethnic group…directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.” If we are truly committed to a rational and honest assessment of the conflict in Gaza, it is incontrovertible that Israel’s actions are genocidal.
On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a multi-pronged attack against the state of Israel, killing an estimated 1200 Israelis, both civilian and military, and taking 250 hostages. Since then, a brutal war has descended on Gaza, with civilians bearing the brunt of the carnage. What distinguishes this conflict from others in the region is not only the sheer scale—42,000 believed to have been killed (including over 17,000 children), over 2 million displaced, and infrastructure reduced to rubble all in the span of a year—but the way in which substantiated claims of clear genocide have been so fiercely rejected without a shred of evidence.
On 9 October 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who later joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s War Cabinet, made the following admission after an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Approximately 2.2 million people reside in this tiny enclave–50% of whom are children. As Defence Minister Gallant knows, humans require food and water to live. By withholding vital supplies, including medical aid, from millions of people whose only “crime” was living amongst the 7 October perpetrators, this becomes a clear case of deliberately engineered misery. Extend this practice over a long period and the extraordinary begins to happen, such as the first major polio outbreak in Gaza in over two decades. As South Africa put it in their written submissions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ): “Israel has now pushed the Palestinian population in Gaza to the brink of famine, with international agencies warning that “‘the risk of famine is real.’”
Fast forward one year and little has changed, as evidenced by a forceful letter from the Biden administration to Israel this month. The letter had one simple message: increase aid to Gaza to avert imminent famine, or US military supplies may be withheld. This is not the first time a threat was made from Washington to Tel Aviv. Biden previously withheld the provision of 2000 lbs bombs to Israel this year when it became clear that they were being used to decimate civilian infrastructure. This included apartment blocks, desalination plants (which produce clean water), sewage systems, universities, UN facilities, and more. This violates, inter alia, the federal Leahy Law, which prohibits the US Government from using funds to assist foreign forces where there is credible evidence of gross human rights violations. Furthermore, 25 doctors/nurses from around the world volunteering in Gaza reported babies who were born healthy return to hospitals and die from dehydration and starvation due to absent infant formula and clean water.
Over the past year, heroic individuals from various humanitarian organizations have risked their lives in the most dangerous warzone in the world to feed the traumatized Gazan population. And what have many been met with? IDF lead. In April 2024, IDF drones targeted a convoy of cars transferring food supplies belonging to the World Central Kitchen (WCK), killing eight of them in two consecutive strikes. It is difficult to understate the callousness of it all. The convoy’s route had been pre-approved with the IDF in advance, the trucks had “WCK” clearly engraved on their roofs, and just a day prior, the ICJ ordered Israel to ensure unhindered flow of aid into Gaza in response to South Africa’s genocide case. While Israel acknowledged its culpability and reprimanded IDF personnel as a result, WCK founder Jose Andreas said what many have been insisting for months: the IDF had deliberately targeted those protected by international humanitarian law. Aid agencies including the World Food Programme, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Islamic Relief, Save the Children, and more have also reported extreme difficulties imposed on them by the Israeli government when trying to deliver lifesaving aid. The criminal nature of this attack is not novel in Israel’s playbook, as extensively documented in the Goldstone Report, authored after Israel’s bloody 2008 Operation Cast Lead.
If Israel knows it is withholding life necessities while simultaneously making it fatal for NGOs’ to deliver said necessities, it is beyond question that the destruction of Gaza is on the IDF’s “to-do” list. Some may assert that the intention is to starve out Hamas. My response is threefold. Firstly, the ailing hostages trapped in Gaza require sustenance, much like the 2.2 million Gazans do. Secondly, you forfeit the moral high ground when you condone starving 1.1 million children in order to punish Hamas’s remaining fighting force, likely numbering 5,000-10,000. Thirdly, that constitutes collective punishment, which is a war crime. Does terror justify further terror in response? Never, but it helps explain its origin.
Senior statesmen and stateswomen in the Israeli government have been, in explicit terms, conveying their genocidal intent for over a year. And somehow the allegations are completely unfounded? Is it still not compelling when the rhetoric of the influential officials both reflects and seeks to justify these actions? Take two (of the countless) examples:
Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance: “[w]e need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza.”
Isaac Herzog, President of Israel: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”
For any wondering whether these quotes were “taken out of context,” I have one question: what sort of context could possibly exist to justify/rationalize this kind of homicidal rhetoric?
When I present the quotes above to my Zionist interlocutors, their responses are typically one of the following: i) “they wield no power over the war, so their words are empty,” or ii) “if they really wanted to commit genocide, they could just nuke Gaza.” I will try to illustrate how intellectually hollow each response is. Regarding the first point, Netanyahu’s precious coalition is currently being held together by a thread; that thread is composed of men like Smotrich, who could collapse Bibi’s government should he prove uncooperative. Speculation? No, Smotrich and others have informed us of this. This means Smotrich exerts the one thing you need to make your word count, regardless of how genocidal those words are—leverage.
Regarding the comment on “nuking” Gaza, the fallibility of this becomes obvious through a simple explanation of global politics. Israel’s very survival depends, in large part, on a joint commitment to its security between itself and its powerful allies, principally the US. If domestic campus protests led to Biden insisting to Bibi to keep his “hands off Rafah”—which he ignored while Israel’s killing spree continued—what kind of outcry would take place if Israel became the second country in history to deploy nuclear weapons? Not to mention deployed on the most defenceless and densely populated region on earth. If ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan already had enough evidence of serious war crimes to justify requesting arrest warrants for Bibi and Gallant, deploying a nuclear weapon in Gaza would turn Israel from an ostracized colonial power, to a completely isolated one. At that point, its survival would become a dubious proposition. With most victims of the Armenian genocide having died of starvation, it is unclear why deploying nukes would be the necessary modus operandi for widespread and intentional killing.
You can tell a lot about an individual’s motivations by their incentives. Why has PM Netanyahu not heeded to international outcry to end the mass slaughter? It is abundantly clear: the moment the guns fall silent, Bibi says goodbye to life as a free man. Like his American ally Trump, Bibi has an enormous interest in prolonging mayhem. Even if we ignore his growing disdain among Israeli society for the security failure that transpired on 7 October, and the 100 or so hostages still languishing in the tunnels of Gaza, his criminal trial on very serious corruption charges was underway when this current war began. His testimony was supposed to commence this coming December but the trial grinded to a halt following the 7 October attack. The longer he fights this war, the more distant the resumption of that trial becomes. Regarding the growing disdain, there is virtual unanimity in commentary on this. His Likud party coalition will not win re-election, thus leaving him open to jail time—I did mention they were criminal charges, right?.
Reconciliation and rehabilitation must be prioritized. However, these crimes must be answered through legal avenues. Accountability cannot be a simple afterthought. If we let this go, progressive democracies will never be able to preach and lecture about a “rules-based system.” The days of “rules for thee, but not for me” are over.