Good evening, everyone.
My name is Michael Spath and I’m the Executive Director of the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace. We’re a “voice of conscience for peace, justice, human rights, and intercultural encounter.”
We’re here tonight to stand in full solidarity with the government of South Africa as it presents its case of genocide against Israel before International Court of Justice.
The State of Israel “has failed to prevent and is continuing to commit acts of genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza,” lawyers for the Republic of South Africa told the International Court of Justice earlier today. South Africa’s lawyers spelled out the acts Israel has committed against the Palestinian people of Gaza – acts defined as genocidal under Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Day 97 of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of them women and children, 7000 unaccounted for, 60,000 injured, 1.9million – that’s 90% of the 2.3 million Gazans – displaced, 80% of their homes destroyed. Nothing and no one has been spared – not health care workers and hospitals, not school teachers and schools, not churches and mosques and religious leaders, not civilians, not children, not babies. No one has been spared.
Here’s some of the evidence given in South Africa’s 84-page document:
Prime Minister Netanyahu quotes from the Bible: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.”
Minister of Defense Gallant: ”We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly. Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”
Minister of Agriculture Dichter: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
Knesset Deputy Speaker Vaturi: “Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
And 95-year-old, Ezra Yachin, a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre during the 1948 Nakba, called up for reserve duty as a motivational speaker to “boost morale” among Israeli troops, dressed in fatigues, he says,
“Finish them off, don’t leave anyone behind. Erase their memory. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home shoot him. . We want to invade, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. Let’s drop bombs on them and erase them.”
All this out loud. All this out in the open. And there’s ten more pages with similar quotes.
Various UN officials have described Gaza as “a crisis of humanity,” a “living hell,” and a “situation of utter, deepening, and unmatched horror where an entire population is besieged and under attack, denied access to the essentials of survival on a massive scale.”
And more and more, Israel is talking about how they’re “encouraging migration” from Gaza into Egypt or other countries, trying to bribe other countries into their ethnic cleansing agenda.
And our US government? Blinken and Biden try to convince us they’re telling Israel to “minimize Palestinian civilian casualties”; while Biden bypasses Congress, expediting the sale of an additional – an additional – $147 million worth of weapons to Israel. Our tax dollars at work. Every bomb has our name on it.
How cynical. He wants to have it both ways. The US is not simply complicit anymore. We’re a full and active partner in the genocide of the Palestinian people. We should be standing in the docket alongside Israel. We’re actively providing weapons to Israel to drop on Palestinian babies.
I’ve been saying this for weeks now. This is not about Hamas, and it’s not even about Gaza. This is part of a 100-year-plus agenda – to eliminate Palestinian history, tradition, culture, to eliminate the Palestinian people, to eliminate from memory the very idea of Palestine itself. It’s genocide. It’s nothing less than Genocide.
So we at Indiana Center for Middle East Peace are proud to stand with the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, and over 1000 international organizations supporting South Africa – South Africa, that knows a thing or two about apartheid and oppression and ethnic cleansing – all characteristics of settler-colonial genocide. And we’re grateful to our board member, attorney Sam Jarjour, who is part of the legal support team for the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation for keeping their work in front of our eyes. Thank you, Sam.
We reject powerlessness and helplessness. We embrace our power. Because change will not come from the top down. It will start from the bottom up, with people like us.
Thank you for standing with South Africa. Thank you for standing with the people of Palestine. Thank you for standing with us.