Professor Richard Falk (Jew): Maintaining the Unlawful Siege of Gaza is a Crime Against Humanity!
- Professor Richard Falk (Jew): Maintaining the Unlawful Siege of Gaza is a Crime against Humanity!
by Richard Falk and Kourosh Ziabari, Iran Review, via http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Interview with Richard Falk by Kourosh Ziabari
As the dust surrounding Israel’s one-month aggressive incursion into the beleaguered Gaza Strip begins to settle, the international law experts, UN officials, scholars and intellectuals are reviewing and examining the different aspects of the massive onslaught in which some 1,900 Palestinians were killed and thousands of others became homeless and dispossessed.
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A high-ranking UN official believes that Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Gaza Strip are discriminatory and criminal according to the principles of international law.
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As noted by Prof. Richard Falk, Israel’s policies and practices against the subjugated nation of Palestine are overtly apartheid and should be condemned by the International Criminal Court.
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Maintaining that “apartheid is authoritatively considered one form of crime against humanity,” Prof. Falk said that apartheid policies don’t necessarily need to resemble the system of racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1999, but “what is necessary for the crime to be committed is systematic discrimination against a specific group identified by reference to ethnicity, race, religion, and encoded into its governing structure.”
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Prof. Falk believes that “the maintenance of the unlawful blockade of goods to and from Gaza is well established as a form of collective punishment of the occupied civilian population of Gaza, and a flagrant violation of the most fundamental obligation of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law.”
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Richard Falk is a world-renowned professor of international law and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. He was appointed to the position in 2008 and replaced Prof. John Dugard, with whom Iran Review conducted an exclusive interview last week. For his outspoken criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people, Falk was harshly criticized by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
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Falk started his teaching career at Ohio State University and Harvard in the late 1950s. He moved to Princeton University in 1961 and became the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice there. In 1985, he was made a Guggenheim Fellow and retired from teaching in 2001.
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On the recent massive military operations into the Gaza Strip by Israel which was coded “Operation Protective Edge”, Iran Review spoke to Prof. Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. The following is the text of the interview.
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Q: A number of political commentators and legal experts have argued that the policies of Israel in the Occupied Territories resemble those of apartheid, violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination and are in breach of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Do you agree with this analogy? Can we trace the footsteps of apartheid in the policies and practices of the Israeli government?
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A: By the 1973 Convention and the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, apartheid is authoritatively considered one form of ‘crime against humanity.’ It does not depend on establishing a ‘resemblance’ to the racist structure that existed in South Africa during its apartheid period. What is necessary for the crime to be committed is systematic discrimination against a specific group identified by reference to ethnicity, race, religion, and encoded into its governing structure. This discrimination is multi-faceted in the West Bank as between Israeli settlers who enjoy civil rights and the rule of law and the indigenous Palestinians who are without rights and the rule of law, and have been subject to an oppressive military administration that has endured for more than 47 years in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settler only roads, the separation wall, checkpoints, and insecure residence permits, especially in Jerusalem are some of the expressions of this overtly discriminatory regime that would seem to qualify as a massive instance of the international crime of apartheid. The multiple Israeli laws discriminating against the Palestinian minority of 1.5 million living in pre-1967 Israel has also been described by some as ‘apartheid,’ but the case is not as clear.
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Q: The United States and its European allies usually justify Israel’s military operations in the Occupied Territories and its time-to-time incursions into the Gaza Strip as “self-defense”, claiming that Israel simply responds to the rockers fired into the Israeli cities by Hamas. They never talks of the necessity for Israel to adhere to the principles of proportionality and distinction. Is the massive killing of civilians, mostly children and women, police officers, who by the virtue of international law are considered as civilians in the wartime, and other non-combatants justifiable as a practice of self-defense?
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A: First of all, an unbiased timeline of the three major Israeli military attacks on Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014 were each provoked by Israeli acts calculated to induce Hamas retaliatory rockets. As well, the maintenance of the unlawful blockade of goods to and from Gaza is well established as a form of collective punishment of the occupied civilian population of Gaza, and a flagrant violation of the most fundamental obligation of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. As such, it is a continuing provocation of the people of Gaza and its governing authority. The reliance on indiscriminate rockets is a violation of the law of war, despite the very limited damage being caused. Taken in isolation, such threats to Israeli security could justify defensive measures in response, but would also require Israel to seek non-military means to uphold their security.
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Hamas has indicated its readiness for a permanent truce if Israel lifts the blockade and negotiates withdrawal from occupied Palestine, and it has done its part in the past to maintain several temporary ceasefire arrangements, which have been broken by Israeli acts of aggression. Leaving these concerns aside, it is also clear that the three major Israeli assaults on Gaza have each been grossly disproportionate in the scale of violence and indiscriminate in their scope of destructiveness or worse, targeting forbidden structures, including residences, hospitals, mosques, schools, UN facilities. In effect, Israel has no legitimate claim of defensive force, and the force that it has deployed violates international criminal law. Additionally, Hamas has a right of resistance, but must exercise this right in accordance with international humanitarian law, and its requirement that force be limited to military targets.
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read more!
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“In 2001, Dr. Ariella Oppenheim, of Hebrew University, a biologist, published the first extensive study of DNA and the origin of the Jews. Her research found that virtually all the Jews came from Khazar blood. Not only that but Oppenheim discovered that the Palestinians—the very people whom the Jews had been persecuting and ejecting from Israel’s land since 1948—had more Israelite blood than did the Jews. In sum, the vast majority of the Jews were not Jews; some of the Palestinians were. Some of the Palestinians even had a DNA chromosome which established that they were “Cohens”—workers at the ancient Temple and synagogues of the Jews.” – Quote
- Mr. Benjamin Freedman, a Jewish industrialist born in New York, wrote in the Economic Council Letter published there of October 15 1947: “These Eastern European Jews have neither a racial nor a historic connection with Palestine. Their ancestors were not inhabitants of the Promised Land. They are the direct descendants of the people of the Khazar Kingdom. The Khazars were a non-Semitic, Turko-Mongolian tribe.” Mr. Freedman was challenged, unwisely, by a Zionist objector; he invited his challenger to go with him to the Jewish room of the New York Public Library. There they could together examine the Jewish Encyclopedia volume I pp. 1-12, and the published works of Graetz, Dubnow, Friedlander, Raisin and many other noted Jewish historians, which, as well as other non-Jewish authorities, “establish the fact beyond all possible doubt”.’
~ Somewhere South of Suez (1950) pp349-350.”
– - See also:
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The “Jews” Are Not The Seed of Abraham! How The Racial Hoax of The “Jews” Was Finally Exposed !
Zionist Claim to Israel Unfounded ! Ashkenazi Jews are NOT Descendents of Israel !
New DNA Research Confirms That Modern Khazarian “Jews” Are Not the Descendants of Ancient Isrealites or The Seed of Abraham!
The End of The LIE ! 90+% of Modern Jewry are Non Semitic Ashkenazi Khazars! Not Real Jews! Not Descendents of 12 Tribes of Israel !
New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine! Koestler’s Khazar History Vindicated ! Zionists Design Myth of Jewish Genome to Usurp Palestine!
Debate on European Jews’ Origin Settled? Koestler’s Khazarian Theory Vindicated !
Ashkenazis ‘Self Styled’ Jews Are NOT the Descendants of the Ancient Israelites!
Benjamin Freedman: Ashkenazi Khazars Self Style “Jews” Are Not Semitic And Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !
The 13th Tribe of Khazaria! Ashkenazi Khazars Are Not The Jews of The Bible!
Modern Ashkenazi Jews are not the Jews of the Bible!
New Genetic Research Confirms Koestler’s “Khazar” Theory! Ashkenazi Jews Are Not The Jews of The Bible !
Ashkenazi Jews are Turkic Khazars! They Are Not The Israelites of The Bible! Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !
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