Denial of the Palestinian genocide should be made a criminal offence around the world, just like denial of the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide is criminalised in some countries.
During World War I, more than one million Armenians were murdered by the Ottomans. Generations of scholarship have documented this atrocity and made it clearly accessible to the wider public, including Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris and Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act.
During World War II, the government of Nazi Germany deliberately and systematically slaughtered six million European Jews. This is a horrid historical fact predicated on a long history of European antisemitism, obscene for anyone to deny. Since then, a number of countries have criminalised Holocaust denial, and rightly so.
In the mid-1990s, notorious Islamophobe and Zionist Bernard Lewis denied the Armenian genocide and faced civil court proceedings in France. Years later, the ridiculous former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made a fool of his already cartoonish character by hosting a 2006 jamboree of lunatics and antisemites to deny the Holocaust in Tehran – a gathering denounced around the world.
In July 2024, the respected Lancet medical journal estimated that Israel’s savagery in Gaza might have caused up to 186,000 deaths, far higher than the official toll. That was a year ago and a conservative estimate.
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Israeli forces have killed more Palestinians every day since, and they continue to do so as I write these words. The full scale of the incremental Palestinian genocide over the last century may never be known; complete documentation of these atrocities must remain an ongoing project.
In perhaps the most detailed account to date of Israel’s criminal thuggeries, “Anatomy of a Genocide”, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese provided incontrovertible evidence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This document must remain the basis for further investigations.
Broad consensus
In yet another historic document, legal scholars in South Africa put a compelling case before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Palestine. More than a dozen countries have joined South Africa in the case.
In a futile, ridiculous attempt to retaliate and discredit its historic role in exposing Israeli criminal atrocities, the genocidal Zionists orbiting US President Donald Trump subsequently pushed him to accuse South Africa of a “genocide” against white Afrikaners – a lie that has been fully exposed.
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Leading organisations and scholars in a position to make this assessment have almost unanimously concurred that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza meets the textbook definition of genocide. A study by the Dutch newspaper NRC, citing seven renowned genocide scholars, noted that “without exception, they qualify the Israeli actions as ‘genocidal’. And according to them, almost all their colleagues agree.”
With barefaced vulgarity, the New York Times leads other US outlets in concealing or dismissing this fact. When it reports that Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing genocide, it instantly counters this fact by citing Israel’s contention that the charge was “based on lies”.
Any individual, media corporation or government agency that denies the Palestinian genocide must be held accountable
Denying the still-unfolding genocide in Gaza should be made a criminal offence, particularly in countries like Germany and the US, where both government officials and leading media outlets consistently dismiss, downplay or even ridicule the genocide.
Offenders should be legally persecuted where this is possible, and publicly shamed where it is not. Any individual, media corporation or government agency that denies the Palestinian genocide must be held accountable.
The systematic and relentless slaughter of Palestinians that began after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, and continues apace to this day, marks the culmination of generations of genocidal violence, which eminent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has called an incremental genocide.
We saw this in moments such as the 2018-19 Great March of Return – long before the 7 October Hamas attack – when Israeli forces killed hundreds of Palestinians as they protested near the Gaza fence. There are countless other examples of indiscriminate Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians.
Day of memorial
In honour of the Nakba, 15 May should be designated as Palestinian Genocide Commemoration Day, with countries around the world holding memorial ceremonies to mark the systematic and still-unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel in their historic homeland.
Scholars, historians, archivists and other professionals must come together to create a digital museum to officially document the Palestinian genocide and ethnic cleansing, cataloguing the litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli settler colony.
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The documentation of the Palestinian genocide must include the aggressive complicity of the US and Europe, plus Australia and Canada, in enabling and empowering Israel by arming and diplomatically protecting it. The US and Germany in particular, and their corporate media, must be held accountable and consistently publicly shamed for their roles. Schools of journalism worldwide should carefully analyse each instance of genocide denial in western media.
In the US, the genocidal Zionists gathered at Trump’s royal court have weaponised antisemitism, and they consistently abuse the existence of this pernicious form of racism to frighten, silence and persecute anyone who dares to speak the truth about the Palestinian genocide. Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff and protege of the late xenophobic gadfly David Horowitz, has recently upped the ante in his pathological hatred of immigrants who might defy the manufactured Zionist consensus.
Learning from the way in which genocidal Zionists have weaponised the suffering of Jewish people, the Holocaust and the antisemitism that animated it, the fact of the ongoing Palestinian genocide must become a platform for global opposition to any and all acts of mass violence.
The memory and moral authority of the Palestinian genocide is not a cause for ethnic nationalism, as Israel has done with the Holocaust. It should be a platform for a global uprising against any form of ethnic cleansing, with a natural alliance emerging among the victims and survivors of the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
