Citizens and public authorities around the world should attempt to have Feiglin arrested and prosecuted under the Genocide Convention for his statements, should he set foot in their territories.
by Ali Abunimah The Electronic Intifada
Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has published a plan for the total destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
His detailed plan, which calls for the use of concentration camps, amounts to direct and public incitement to genocide – a punishable crime under the Genocide Convention.
In a 1 August posting on his Facebook page, Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, calls for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”
“This is our country – our country exclusively,” he writes, “including Gaza.”
Feiglin’s posting is the text of a letter he addressed to Netanyahu.
Citizens and public authorities around the world should attempt to have Feiglin arrested and prosecuted under the Genocide Convention for his statements, should he set foot in their territories.
His abominable plan comes as the death toll from Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza reaches 1,752 people, including ten persons killed on Sunday morning when Israel once again bombed a United Nations-run school being used as a shelter, this time in the southern town of Rafah.
Moshe Feiglin (David Rabkin/Wikimedia Commons)
Feiglin, like his Knesset colleague Ayelet Shaked, has previously made genocidal statements, but these are perhaps his most specific and explicit.
Calling for mass extermination and ethnic cleansing, Feiglin now urges Netanyahu to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.”
Jaffa is a major Palestinian coastal city that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 and incorporated into present-day Israel. The few thousand Palestinians who remain in the city face ongoing attempts to force them out.
As of this writing, Feiglin’s Facebook post had more than eight thousand “Likes” and had been shared almost two thousand times.
“Concentrate” and “exterminate”
Feiglin writes that the Israeli army must “designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.”
“Tent encampments,” where the Palestinian civilian population would be “concentrated,” are simply concentration camps.
“The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected,” he adds.
He then calls for the “formerly populated areas” to be “shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.”
The Israeli army would then “exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.”
Expulsion
“Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza,” Feiglin writes, but “those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem.”
Feiglin’s statements are crimes
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of a number acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
These acts are:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Feiglin’s plan has clear genocidal intent in at least two respects: he denies that the Palestinian people exist and he defines Palestinians collectively as an enemy and target because of their religion:
- “There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people.”
- “The strategic enemy is extremist Arab Islam in all its varieties, from Iran to Gaza, which seeks to annihilate Israel in its entirety.”
In addition to outright acts of genocide, punishable crimes under the convention include “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”; “conspiracy to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.”
Any fair-minded prosecutor would see that Feiglin’s statements provide ample probable cause for action under the convention.
State parties to the Genocide Convention are obligated to punish crimes under the Genocide Convention in their domestic courts.
Citizens around the world should seek to have Feiglin and any other Israeli leaders who commit genocidal acts arrested and sent for trial by using whatever legal mechanisms are available, including notifying law enforcement and immigration authorities of such genocidal statements.
Full translation of Feiglin’s statement
Feiglin’s Facebook page is verifiable as his because it is linked from his official page on the Knesset website.
Here is Feiglin’s 1 August statement on Facebook, translated in full by Dena Shunra:
With God’s Help
Attention
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Mr. Prime Minister,
We have just heard that Hamas has used the ceasefire to abduct an officer. It turns out that this operation is not about to be over any too soon.
The failures of this operation were inherent to it from the outset, because:
a) It has no proper and clear goal;
b) there is no appropriate moral framework to support our soldiers.
What is required now is that we internalize the fact that Oslo is finished, that this is our country – our country exclusively, including Gaza.
There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people.
Having internalized this, what is needed is a deep and thorough strategic review, in terms of the definition of the enemy, of the operational tasks, of the strategic goals, and of course, of appropriate necessary war ethics.
(1) Defining the enemy:
The strategic enemy is extremist Arab Islam in all its varieties, from Iran to Gaza, which seeks to annihilate Israel in its entirety. The immediate enemy is Hamas. (Not the tunnels, not the rockets, but Hamas.)
(2) Defining the tasks
Conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.
(3) Defining the strategic goal:
To turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.
(4) Defining war ethics: “Woe to the evildoer, and woe to his neighbor”
In light of these four points, Israel must do the following:
a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.
The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected.
b) The formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.
c) The IDF will divide the Gaza Strip laterally and crosswise, significantly expand the corridors, occupy commanding positions, and exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.
d) Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza. Those who wish to emigrate will be given a generous economic support package, and will arrive at the receiving countries with considerable economic capabilities.
e) Those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem.
f) When the fighting will end, Israeli law will be extended to cover the entire Gaza Strip, the people evicted from the Gush Katif will be invited to return to their settlements, and the city of Gaza and its suburbs will be rebuilt as true Israeli touristic and commercial cities.
Mr. Prime Minister,
This is the a fateful hour of decision in the history of the State of Israel.
All metastases of our enemy, from Iran and Hizballah through ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, are rubbing their hands gleefully and preparing themselves for the next round.
I am warning that any outcome that is less than what I defined here means encouraging the continued offensive against Israel. Only when Hizballah will understand how we have dealt with Hamas in the south, it will refrain from launching its 100,000 missiles from the north.
I call on you to adopt the strategy proposed here.
I have no doubt that the entire Israeli people will stand to your right with its overwhelming majority, like myself – if only you will adopt it.
With high regards, respectfully,
Moshe Feiglin
This article was originally published at The Electronic Intifada