Israel authorizes deportation as a crime against humanity
Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court specifies that “deportation or the forcible transfer of population” constitute a “crime against humanity”, when committed “as part of a widespread OR systematic attack direct directed against any civilian population, with the knowledge of the attack.”
Under Article 7.2(a) the expression “attack directed against any civilian population” means a “course of conduct the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack.”
Under Article 7.2(d) the expression “deportation or forcible transfer of population” means the “forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.”
Under a new Israeli military order, the Israeli IDF has now been authorized to commit a “crime against humanity”, as defined in the Rome Statute.
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2010/04/12/israeli-hypocrisy-holocaust-remembrance-day
Israeli hypocrisy this Holocaust Remembrance Day
By Dan Nolan in Middle East on April 12th, 2010
A new Israeli military order set to come into place allowing the mass deportation of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.
Today is Holocaust Remembrance day. At 10am Israel came to a virtual standstill, sirens wailed across cities, traffic stopped as Jews here and abroad pause to reflect on the worst genocide in history.
Adolf Hitler’s evil plans started with discrimination against Jews based solely on their religion before moving them through mass deportations to concentration camps before finally seeking to exterminate them.
A total of 6 million Jewish men, women and children died in mankind’s darkest hour.
The world, and in particular Israel, rightly continues to remember these horrific events of 60years ago to ensure it never happens again. But there is increasing concern about whether the tragic lessons of the Holocaust were fully learned by Israel itself?
Tomorrow, April 13, 2010, a new Israeli military order comes into place allowing the mass deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.
Any Palestinian or foreigner living in the West Bank without the appropriate id permit (receipt of which is controlled by Israel) can be deported within 72 hours or even jailed for up to 7 years.
Those Palestinians lucky enough to have escaped the open-air prison that is Gaza to now live in the West Bank maybe the first targeted and sent back.
The vague wording of the law has concerned Israeli human rights groups so much that 10 of them have signed a letter to Defence Minister Ehud Barak begging him to rescind it.
The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz first broke the story and its editorial today is compelling reading, saying:
“The right of all Palestinians to choose where to live in the West Bank or Gaza marks a very low threshold for defining their human rights. Implementing this new military order is not only likely to spark a new conflagration in the territories, it is liable to give the world clear-cut proof that Israel’s aim is a mass deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank.”
Palestinian leaders say the move is devoted to racism and “paves the way for an ethnic cleansing operation.”
As Israeli’s well know, the Holocaust started with human rights violations which turned into mass deportations and ended in genocide.
Is it not time that those who support a state born of the single most traumatic event of the 20th century do everything in their power to never impose anything that resembles their own suffering on another oppressed people?
No doubt those who love Israel so much they cannot see its faults will attack this blog as being anti-Semitic.
But hopefully on a day that remembers the horrors of the past, just maybe Israel can start to rectify the wrongs of the present.