Notices by Bilal Barakat 🍉 (bifouba@kolektiva.social)

@aral Yep. There's even a book about the phenomenon: https://thenewpress.com/books/except-for-palestine

Let's be clear on what it means that a famine in the technical sense is imminent for 1.1 million people in Gaza according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

One of the criteria is 2 deaths per 10,000 people from outright starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease... PER DAY.

The people who understand this stuff are saying that a situation is imminent where there are AT LEAST 200 starvation deaths every day.

@palestine #Gaza #famine #genocide

Another myth is that UNRWA is unique in granting refugee status to the descendants of refugees. A moment's thought exposes this as obvious nonsense: *of course* babies born in UNHCR settings also inherit their parents' refugee status. How could it be otherwise? The actual difference in determination is that UNRWA refugees keep their status even if they gain the *citizenship* of another country.

However, this difference matters less than Israel likes to pretend. As an aside, note that the Israeli propaganda “they gambled on returning after an Arab victory but lost” is a legally irrelevant non-argument because whether you leave voluntarily or are expelled has no bearing on the Right to Return under The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Consequently, the Right to Return is a general principle in international law that also applies to voluntary departures, *the Right to Return is not tied to refugee status*. In other words, Palestinian refugees don't have a Right to Return "because" they are registered with UNRWA. Having those with citizenship elsewhere lose their refugee status under UNHCR's criteria would not, by itself, diminish their claim, which rather rests on their "genuine and effective link" with Palestine as the relevant standard under international law. 🧵 4/4

Like we didn’t see that coming. Every knowledgeable person knew Israel was lying about UNRWA and now those lies are unraveling for everone to see.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/unrwa-report-says-israel-coerced-some-agency-employees-falsely-admit-hamas-links-2024-03-08/

#Gaza #UNRWA

@HistoPol @DrALJONES @Miro_Collas The point is the obvious contradiction implied by your position, namely that doing something less bad (abduction instead of killing) somehow adds up to something worse. If you don't accept live video capture or testimony from foreign doctors as reliable, that's on you.

Also, your basic premise is false. First of all, the scale is very much sufficient. Killing going on 2% of the population directly is a significant part by any comparison to “legitimate war”, and moreover, a continuation of CURRENT CONDITIONS leads to a trajectory of several hundreds of thousands dead from starvation and disease. As you already conceded, creating those conditions by itself is sufficient to meet the definition of genocide. In any case, there is absolutely no "minimum number" of deaths required by the genocide definition. That is simply not a criterion. So much so that in their intervention to the ICJ in the Myanmar case, Germany, the UK, and friends have urged to the court to take the position that genocide can occur even absent ANY direct deaths.

You're also vastly overstating the need for it to be "systematic". There is literally no such criterion stated in the convention. Sure, if you send out killer squads with lists of named members of the group to kill that makes it easy to establish intent, but it's not a necessary part of the definition. Just because the killing is arbitrary and haphazard does not in any way stand in the way of it constituting genocide. You are simply making up conditions out of thin air. And then you don't even apply your fantasy criteria consistently. Leopold II didn't give a fuck how many millions of Africans died to make him rich, but where was his GOAL to "systematically exterminate" them?

Moreover, you conflate the question of whether it IS genocide with whether it can be PROVEN to be genocide, by saying you'll only accept that it is if the court rules so, which it only will if it is proven. This allows you to just casually dismiss all other expert assessment as "some scholars”. I don't know if you read the charge against Biden for complicity in the US court. It was supported by William Shabas, former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, who literally wrote the book on the topic, “Genocide in International Law”. Moreover, who adopts a conservative position and doesn't consider the Holodomor to have constituted genocide in a strict legal sense, for instance. Yet he fully endorsed the view that Israel's actions in Gaza are prima facie genocidal, while fully aware of the numbers and scale.

Compared to that you're just some totally unqualified rando making up the definition as he goes along and fabricating legal criteria out of thin air. Don't bother replying, I'm muting both you and this thread as a waste of time.

@HistoPol @DrALJONES @Miro_Collas So Russians kidnapping Ukrainian children “really is genocide” but Israeli snipers killing Palestinian children for sport is not, got it.

@HistoPol @DrALJONES Thanks for clarifying. Still debatable, but not unreasonable.

@HistoPol @DrALJONES Whatever merit anything else you wrote has, you lost every reader of sound mind and morals at “naming Oct 7th as the starting point”.

First of all, UNRWA *excluded* groups of displaced Palestinians at the time that UNHCR's criteria then and now would have included. Unlike UNHCR which later established the category of ‘refugee’ as a question of political and legal status, the registration of Palestinian refugees was originally performed according to their eligibility for relief services. It therefore automatically excluded Palestinians who still had an independent income or property, or those who dropped from the record because they no longer received assistance due to the agency's budget limitations, for instance. Nowadays, the UNHCR criteria are recognised as more meaningful. ‘Refugee status is a legal concept; it is not obligatory for a refugee to live in squalor or poverty to retain his or her rights’ (Weighill, 1995, p. 167). Apart from those who were excluded or deemed ineligible, as many as 12 percent of those satisfying UNRWA’s criteria never registered with the agency (Schiff, 1995).

Schiff, Benjamin N. (1995). Refugees unto the third generation: UN aid to Palestinians. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Weighill, Louise (1995). ‘The future of assistance to Palestinian refugees’. In: Asian Affairs 26.3, pp. 259–69.

🧵 2/4

Secondly, unlike UNHCR, UNRWA’s mandate does not include protection and advocacy, severely WEAKENING the Palestinian refugees’ position in their host countries and vis-à-vis Israel. Whereas UNHCR’s priority approach in other refugee crises has moved steadily towards negotiating voluntary REPATRIATION if preferred by the refugees concerned, UNRWA’s mandate prevents it from lobbying for such a solution. 🧵 3/4

The current #UNRWA crisis is a good opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings.

Chief among them is that Palestinians are somehow getting beneficial special treatment by having their own agency in UNRWA rather than being included in UNHCR's mandate.

This is nonsense to start with, because the origin of that setup is not special treatment but the simple fact that *UNRWA predates the establishment of UNHCR*.

For the longest time, this suited Israel just fine, because *UNRWA's mandate is actually WEAKER than UNHCR’s*.

#Palestine @palestine

A short🧵 1/4

@aral I hear you, but let’s not underestimate the legal leverage this gives vis-à-vis third parties, such as Germany, including in domestic law.

@aral Don't forget South Africa are Hamas too!

Für den Fall, dass es für manche einfacher ist, Rassismus bei anderen wahrzunehmen als bei sich selbst, und irgendwem dabei evtl. endlich ein Licht aufgeht: Bidens Statement anlässlich der mittlerweile 100 Tage andauernden Krise in Gaza erwähnt die zehntausende palästinensischen Opfer MIT KEINEM WORT.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/01/14/statement-from-president-joe-biden-marking-100-days-of-captivity-for-hostages-in-gaza/

You may have seen the viral video of the Israeli soldier bragging openly about killing Palestinian children and babies in #Gaza, to the merry amusement of the people he was speaking to.

Neither the attitude nor the action is new or rare and it's certainly not a post-traumatic response to Oct 7.

More than twenty years ago, I spent some time on a teaching English certification course together with an American evangelical couple. I was probably the only Palestinian they'd ever met. After a couple of weeks they worked up the courage to ask me about something that had been bothering them. They told me how an American-Israeli acquaintance of theirs back home had told them casually about having killed a young child when he was in the IDF “but so what, he was only an Arab".

This couple were decent people who clearly suffered from the cognitive dissonance that encounter had triggered. I guess they were hoping to hear something from me that would help them make sense of it. But I'm not sure it helped when they saw that I was not even the slightest bit shocked or surprised to hear about their friend’s admission, because of course he did.

#Palestine @palestine

@EU_Commission Shame on the EU for not speaking with one voice calling for a ceasefire. Shame.

@martinvermeer @aral Just to highlight for the casual passerby that the article is about the long-going blockade. The current siege is much worse, of course.

“Unconditional” support for Israel’s actions in Gaza should terrify any clear-eyed Jew. The people expressing it are telling you that they can be convinced of the “necessity” of mass murder as long as it targets a group that doesn’t count. They are telling you that all it would take for them to support the mass murder of Jews is to change their mind about which side of the line you’re on.

@Jonius @aral The right to self-defense does not include the right to commit war crimes. What’s so hard to understand? It’s black and white in int’l law: “They started it!” Irrelevant. “They’re also committing war crimes!” Irrelevant. “What else are we supposed to do?” Irrelevant.