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U.S. Nazi War Criminal Prosecutor: Israel Is Obligated to Stop Hamas' Genocide

(Jerusalem Post) Michael Starr - Israel and much of the world have a legal obligation under international law to stop the genocidal intent of Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, former U.S. Justice Department Office of Special Investigations director Eli Rosenbaum said in an interview on May 15. Rosenbaum, a veteran of 38 years in Department of Justice war crimes investigatory departments, explained that "Israel has a legal obligation under international law as a signatory of the [1948] Genocide Convention. The treaty obligates all signatory nations not just not to commit genocide and punish it, but to prevent it." Hamas' indiscriminate targeting of civilians regardless of age or gender during the pogrom, and the nature of the murders, were indicative not just of genocidal intent, but of genocidal acts, he said. "Hamas intentionally carried out an attack that was so gruesome, so far beyond what anyone could have imagined in terms of cruelty, attacks that rivaled and even exceeded the cruelty seen at the hands of Nazi forces in World War II. And I feel fairly well qualified to opine on that, having studied and investigated and prosecuted Nazi cases for some 40 years." The accusation of genocide by Israel during the war is an "obscene falsehood," according to Rosenbaum. The crime of genocide requires not just an outcome of mass death over the course of war but the intent "to destroy a population in whole or in part. It is not simply a matter of casualty numbers." He noted that in World War II, aerial bombing by the British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force "killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people. No one would say that the Allies committed genocide against Germans. That's just absurd. Germany started a war." Rosenbaum said that Israel did not target civilians. On the contrary, genocidal intent was disproven "because of the extensive measures they've taken to try to protect civilians, despite the best efforts of Hamas to maximize civilian casualties in Gaza. Israel is taking measures to protect civilian life in Gaza that no military has ever taken in any war. It causes Israeli casualties." "In addition to the fact that the accusations are fundamentally false, I think they're also racist....The unstated assumption is that thousands of men in Gaza who took part in these attacks, for some reason can't be held to even minimal standards of decent and humane conduct with respect to other innocent human beings....Every single death in Gaza of Palestinians and hostages is the doing of Hamas. They are responsible, morally and legally, for all of those deaths." Regarding calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, he said, "The Allies did not say to the Germans in January of 1945, 'Well, this is a very destructive war, a lot of people are dying on both sides. We'll call it off now. You all can stay in power in Berlin, and you can have four battalions of SS mobile killing units, and we'll just see what happens down the road.'" The Allies had, as the Israelis have now, a moral obligation to finish the fight in the face of the supreme crime of genocide, Rosenbaum said.
2024-05-21 00:00:00
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