Palestine is in a situation in which it is being destroyed by Israel by what is called either ethnic cleansing or genocide, some definitions of which appear below.
It doesn't really matter what it is called, the result as perpetrated by Israel is that more and more Palestinians are dying every day and more and more of Palestine is being occupied by Israel as it creeps towards total occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by concentration camp methods - starvation, demoralisation, brutal occupation and other methods which can only be described as annihilation.
The worst aspect of what Israel is doing is that it is supported through thick and thin by the USA, by the EU, by the UK and by other countries around the world where the cristian zionists are as fanatical as - or even more fanatical than jewish zionists.
The outcome is genocide/ethnic cleansing by so many of the world's "democracies".
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Defining Genocide - from infoplease:
After learning the extent of
Nazi atrocities against the Jews in World War II,
Winston Churchill called it "a crime that has no name." Despite history's numerous precedents, the word
genocide
did not exist until legal scholar Raphael Lemkin originated the term
in 1943. As as an internationally sanctioned, legal definition,
genocide was not accepted until 1951.
Naming the Crime
As a consequence of the
Nuremberg trials, in which top Nazi leaders were tried for "
crimes against humanity," the
United Nations drew up a treaty defining and criminalizing genocide. Called
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it was adopted by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and came into effect on January 12, 1951.
The U.N. Treaty
The treaty defines genocide as the destruction of "a national,
ethnic, racial, or religious group." Whereas the Nuremberg trials were
conducted by an international military tribunal and specified that
"crimes against humanity" related to war crimes, the 1951 U.N. Treaty
encompasses war and peace:
Article I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide,
whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under
international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of
the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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Ethnic cleansing - from Encyclopaedia Brittanica
War crime
Ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation
or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic
groups. Ethnic cleansing sometimes involves the removal of all physical
vestiges of the targeted group through the destruction of monuments,
cemeteries, and houses of worship.
The term ethnic cleansing, a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian phrase etnicko ciscenje,
was widely employed in the 1990s (though the term first appeared
earlier) to describe the brutal treatment of various civilian groups in
the conflicts that erupted upon the disintegration of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia. These groups included Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia, and ethnic Albanians and later Serbs in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The term also has been attached to the treatment by Indonesian militants of the people of East Timor,
many of whom were killed or forced to abandon their homes after
citizens there voted in favour of independence in 1999, and to the
plight of Chechens who fled Grozny and other areas of Chechnya following Russian military operations against Chechen separatists during the 1990s. According to a report issued by the United Nations
(UN) secretary-general, the frequent occurrence of ethnic cleansing in
the 1990s was attributable to the nature of contemporary armed
conflicts, in which
civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure are not simply by-products of war,
but the consequence of the deliberate targeting of non-combatants….
[I]n many conflicts, belligerents target civilians in order to expel or
eradicate segments of the population, or for the purpose of hastening military surrender.
Ethnic cleansing as a concept has generated considerable controversy. Some critics see little difference between it and genocide. Defenders, however, argue that ethnic cleansing and genocide
can be distinguished by the intent of the perpetrator: whereas the
primary goal of genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or
religious group, the main purpose of ethnic cleansing is the
establishment of ethnically homogeneous lands, which may be achieved by
any of a number of methods including genocide.
![Buchenwald [Credit: H. Miller—Hulton Archive/Getty Images]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v6EoS8vDKyEDE8kSfhhvt2BsZahpM5FAOWV_-0w9u58zOp1ha_eHrfpaeraG2vx2wnzxxuv00Efmy9fmglNGpyMIa-xTRT0ZY1Ye9dEBeuBlTrgsJs7DyjodOVeTjw7e64y99l6q0f2g=s0-d)
Another
major controversy concerns the question of whether or not ethnic
cleansing originated in the 20th century. Some scholars have pointed to
the forced resettlement of millions of people by the Assyrians in the
9th and 7th centuries bc as perhaps
the first cases of ethnic cleansing. Among other examples cited are the
mass execution of Danes by the English in 1002, attempts by the Czechs
to rid their territories of Germans in the Middle Ages, the expulsion of
Jews from Spain
in the 15th century, and the forced displacement of Native Americans by
white settlers in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Others
argue that ethnic cleansing, unlike earlier acts of forced resettlement,
is the result of certain uniquely 20th-century developments, such as
the rise of powerful nation-states fueled by nationalist and
pseudoscientific racist ideologies in conjunction with the spread of
advanced technology and communications. Examples of ethnic cleansing
understood in this sense include the Armenian massacres by the Turks in 1915–16, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s, the expulsion of Germans from Polish and Czechoslovak territory after World War II,
the Soviet Union’s deportation of certain ethnic minorities from the
Caucasus and Crimea during the 1940s, and the forced migrations and mass
killings in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda
in the 1990s. In many of these campaigns, women were targeted for
particularly brutal treatment—including systematic rape and
enslavement—in part because they were viewed by perpetrators as the
“carriers,” biologically and culturally, of the next generation of their
nations. Because many men in victimized populations left their families
and communities to join resistance groups once violence began, women
and children were often defenseless.
![Karadžić, Radovan [Credit: Healthy Life Magazine/AP]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vl2pgG73GyIeTsSrf1LHfcORRzlJnFVTbpWyj-GEEU1NqBR18JOTIXt8EjvSWFIfwYrAryPT4kI0E70KUpZeRz_TXfAF01FTPzvl6M0JgYl-CXZr6ajFpxoF85rR8FI6_qf-r7wQX9=s0-d)
The
precise legal definition of ethnic cleansing has been the subject of
intense scrutiny within various international bodies, including the UN,
the two ad hoc international tribunals created in the 1990s to prosecute
violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda [ICTR], respectively), and the International Criminal Court
(ICC), which began sittings in 2002. In 1992, in reference to the
hostilities in Yugoslavia, the UN General Assembly declared ethnic
cleansing to be “a form of genocide,” and in the following year the
Security Council, citing widespread and flagrant violations of
international humanitarian law within the territory of the former
Yugoslavia, established a tribunal to investigate allegations of war
crimes and crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing. In its
examination of the capture of the town of Kozarac by Bosnian Serbs, the
ICTY described the ethnic cleansing that took place there as the process
of rounding up and driving “out of the area on foot the entire non-Serb
population.” In a subsequent case, the tribunal recognized similarities
between acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing, noting that both involve
the targeting of individuals because of their membership in an ethnic group.
The significant difference between the two remains, however: whereas
ethnic cleansing aims to force the flight of a particular group,
genocide targets the group for physical destruction.
The
establishment of the ICC reinforced the links between ethnic cleansing
and other offenses such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
In its finalized text on the elements of the crimes in the court’s
jurisdiction, the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal
Court made clear that ethnic cleansing could constitute all three
offenses within the ICC’s jurisdiction. Genocide,
for example, was defined as an act that may include the systematic
expulsion of individuals from their homes; the threat of force or
coercion to effect the transfer of a targeted group of persons was
recognized as an element of crimes against humanity; and the “unlawful
deportation and transfer,” as well as the displacement, of civilians
were recognized as elements of war crimes.
Despite continuing controversies over its definition, the concept of ethnic cleansing has become firmly anchored within international law. It remains to be seen how mechanisms to prevent and deal with ethnic cleansing will develop and be implemented.
