Israel and the US have destroyed human rights via the Gaza genocide
Plus the UK, Germany and 60 other countries identified by Francesca Albanese - the final nail in the coffin of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide and Torture Conventions.
An illustration by Michael Joiner for 360info using a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt holding up a large-scale reproduction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In my new article on my website, Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights, marking Human Rights Day and the 77th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, as well as the adoptions of the Genocide Convention 77 years ago and the Torture Convention in 1984, I reflect on how this ought to be a time when our mainstream media and our politicians should publicize these commitments, and ask “probing questions about the extent to which the post-WWII struggles to prevent genocide and torture and to defend fundamental human rights are being observed or are being flouted, and what both the aspirations and their frequent betrayals say about us as societies.”
Instead, however, fundamental human rights are chronically endangered, for one particular reason — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, fully supported and facilitated by countries headed up by the US, the UK and Germany, but also, as UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese identified in a recent report, by 60 other countries worldwide, most, but not all, in the west, providing military, political and economic support.
As I explain in my article, “Over the last 26 months, the scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza has been unprecedented — nothing less than a nakedly genocidal effort to erase the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and to murder as many Palestinian civilians as possible.”
I add, “Everything and everyone has been a target — every home, every hospital, every school, every aspect of the infrastructure of civil society that, as the Genocide Convention recognizes as a hallmark of genocidal intent, constitutes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
A recent photo, on X, of the grotesque extent of the destruction in Gaza.
And while the Genocide Convention has been flouted so horrendously, so too has the Torture Convention, with Israel’s crimes in their sprawling prison system for Palestinians dwarfing the US’s crimes in its brutal “war on terror.”
In her report, Francesca Albanese called for urgent intervention to support the Palestinians, but what is on the table instead is continued Israeli aggression, and Trump’s shameful “Peace Plan”, which whitewashes Israel’s genocide and torture, and sidelines the Palestinians instead of recognizing that the only viable route to peace is via Palestinian self-determination and independence.
Otherwise, as I conclude, “If Israel and its complicit partners in genocide win, there will be nothing left to protect further atrocities taking place anywhere that brute force can prevail. We need human rights at least as much now as we did 80 years ago, when the UN was founded in the ashes of the Second World War, and those of us who care about our common humanity must be prepared to fight for it, or face an even darker future.”
Last chance for Christmas merch
If you want books or CDs as last minute Christmas gifts, all three of my books — The Guantánamo Files, The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion — are still in print, and also available are the three CDs by my band The Four Fathers — Songs of Loss and Resistance, How Much Is A Life Worth? and Love and War. I’d also be particularly delighted if you bought, for yourself, or as a gift, the download of my new online single, ‘O Palestine’, with all the proceeds going to support the excellent work of the Sameer Project on the ground in Gaza.
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