On genocide – Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Der Spiegel:

‘Itamar Mann’s grandfather owned a legal practice in Berlin until the Nazis banned him from working. He emigrated to Palestine in 1936, thus escaping the Holocaust – before then spending the rest of his life seeking reparations from Germany for the sufferings of his clients. Itamar Mann’s father worked as a defense attorney in Israel. Itamar Mann himself became an international law expert. The 45-year-old is a professor and teaches at the University of Haifa. He joined a video interview from a garden in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin. He has been in the German capital for the last year on a research grant from the Humboldt Foundation.
It is a sad irony, says Itamar Mann, that here, on German soil – and, as a recent development, as a German citizen – he would utter the following sentence: "I am becoming increasingly convinced that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza."’

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‘Will what’s taking place in Gaza ultimately be seen as the latest catastrophe in a series with the Holocaust and the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica? In Rwanda, at least 800,000 people were slaughtered in 1994, most of them belonging to the Tutsi minority. In Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb troops took control of the UN Safe Area in Srebrenica and murdered more than 8,000 people, the majority of them Muslim men and boys.’

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‘Back to Itamar Mann in Berlin. Is it not absurd, Mr. Mann, that Israel is now suspected of committing genocide? Of course, he says calmly. "Those who have participated in genocide become illegitimate actors and are thus forbidden to speak in the public sphere. And indeed, for some, this is precisely what the accusation is aimed to serve – delegitimizing Israeli and possibly Jewish voices as such." It cannot be ignored, he says, that the accusation of genocide against Israel is frequently cloaked in anti-Semitic rhetoric. "But we cannot allow this to prevent us from making sound moral and legal judgments and calling it genocide when that is what we are seeing take place.”’

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‘This intent is clearest when an extermination plan exists, such as in the Nazi’s Wannsee Protocol from 1942 on the "final solution of the Jewish question.” If there is no blueprint and no clear orders, genocidal intent must be proven by evidence. The judges of the ICJ have set a high hurdle for that evidence: Genocidal intent must be the "only reasonable inference” in light of the evidence. That was the bar used in the judgment against Serbia and Montenegro in 2007 – where the judges ruled that it had not been met. As such, the court did not rule that Serbia’s war on the whole was genocide, but it did find that the massacre in Srebrenica met that standard.’

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‘Contributing to those misunderstandings is the recognition of various genocides by governments and parliaments. Germany, for example, has officially determined that the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I, the killings of the Herero and Nama in the colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia) in the early 20th century and the mass murders of Yazidis in Iraq in the 2010s were all instances of genocide. Other countries have declared the crimes committed by China against the Uighurs and the slaughter perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to constitute genocide. U.S. President Donald Trump has recently begun speaking of a genocide against white citizens of South Africa.’

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‘"I was one of the first in Germany to say that Israel was committing war crimes,” Talmon says. "And now, I say: But it falls legally short of genocide. Many people don’t understand that. Am I on the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis?” In the political debate, he says critically, accusations of genocide are used to demonize the other side. For him, the complaint filed at the ICJ by South Africa is an attempt to enforce morality by means of law.
Talmon may have another reason for his position: He is one of Myanmar’s counsel in the ICJ proceedings. As such, he has an interest in a narrow interpretation of the Genocide Convention.
Of himself, he says he is a "black letter lawyer,” one who hews strictly to precedent and shies away from adopting legal interpretations based on what the law might be in the future. As such, he strongly believes: "It will not be possible to prove genocide in Gaza in the legal sense.”’

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‘"Few morel consequences follow from a judgment that a state did not commit genocide during the war,” says Janina Dill. The war crimes took place, nonetheless. It is therefore perhaps not so important what the court might one day decide. Rather, the important part is that this debate takes place now.’

Read the article here.

It’s important that the debate takes place now. For the victim this is a not very comforting, but better than nothing I believe.

More important, what will be the consequences of this debate?Will Israel be a pariah for decades to come? What will be the consequences for the Jewish people in the diaspora? What will remain of Gaza? Will there be a Palestinian state?

What will remain of the international order if all that can be done against genocide is to report it? Unlike some Serbian and Bosnian and Kosovan war criminals it’s doubtful that any Israeli will ever face justice in The Hague.

History is still written by the victors. We will see who the victors will be.