Black Alliance for Peace Welcomes Amnesty International’s Report on Genocide in Gaza

For Immediate Release

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December 5, 2024 — The Amnesty International report unambiguously recognizing the barbaric assault on the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine and Gaza specifically as a genocide is a welcome departure from many of the tentative and unprincipled allusions to genocide without calling it genocide issued by a number of other human rights organizations and United Nations bodies, including the International Criminal Court.

According to Ajamu Baraka, director of the Black Alliance for Peace’s forthcoming “North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, “The deliberate, systematic degradation and dehumanization of Palestinians resulting in the physical destruction of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children have all occurred right before the eyes of the world. As we watched the wholesale obliteration of their cities, refugee camps, hospitals, civilian infrastructure, cultural and religious sites, food storage facilities and schools, the starvation policy, blockage of medical supplies, murdering doctors and medical workers, torture chambers where prisoners are raped and tortured to death, the Western world not only turned away from the horrific suffering of Palestinians but rationalized and cheered it on. That is why we say that the racist crimes of the fascists in Israel are also the crimes of the “collective West,” who fled to protect the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people,”

The Amnesty International report states that the government of Israel “imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” These actions by the Israeli regime correspond precisely with three of the definitions of genocide reflected in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; “a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

However, something significant about the Amnesty report is that it concludes that the actions by the Israeli authorities did not merely “appear to be genocidal” or “be perceived to be corresponding to genocide,” but declares definitively that there was “genocidal intent.”

“Palestinians are human and have human rights, but the vaulted “responsibility to protect” asserted by the liberal Western human rights industry and Western states was not executed to protect Palestinians. Why? The Black Alliance will say what the report and others will not say. The genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States is supported because the Palestinians have been racialized as non-white, and, therefore, “killable.” This crime is the crime of the century and makes all who did not actively oppose it, rationalized it, or voted for it, morally complicit” says Mr. Baraka.

The Black Alliance for Peace “North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights will launch on December 10, 2024.

Banner photo: Woman standing amidst rubble (courtesy Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)