Geneva, July 9 - Academics and human rights activists affirmed today a longstanding implied principle in their lines of work, namely that an activity or policy unremarkable under any other circumstances becomes the epitome of evil when attached to Israel’s military or security apparatus.
Executives at Amnesty International and related groups, scholars of international law, and United Nations officials made separate but related statements today to clarify what they acknowledged they should have made explicit decades ago, to forestall confusion and complications: when the IDF does a thing, that thing becomes a crime against humanity, regardless of how normal or innocuous the thing in any other context.
The statements come amid growing frustration that some observers still fail to grasp the core axiom. “We’ve been assuming this as self-evident for years,” admitted a senior EU diplomat. “Every time we say ‘proportionality’ we really mean ‘Jews aren’t allowed to defend themselves.’ It’s time we said it plainly: the thing doesn’t matter. Who does the thing does.”
Un Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese explained that the principle undergirds NGO and international discourse about Israel. “We have updated our working definition of war crimes to include the following: breathing, standing, casting a shadow, using gravity, and emitting carbon dioxide. These acts, when performed by other armed forces, are neutral. When performed by the IDF, they constitute collective punishment.”
As such, she elaborated, media reports must ignore Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian, or other actions that, if perpetrated against anyone other than Israel, unless and until Israel responds, and the the story becomes Israel’s actions, with mention of the enemy action that provoked Israel’s move relegated to paragraph 28, if it appears in the report at all. If it does appear, extensive treatment of the alleged impact of Israel’s action on noncombatants, children, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other innocents must precede that mention, and must certainly precede any Israeli statement on the incident.
A coalition of NGOs released a joint report titled Normalcy is Violence that lists dozens of newly designated atrocities. Among them: the IDF’s use of regular atmospheric pressure to “crush Palestinian aspirations,” soldiers walking on dirt (“stealing indigenous soil one footprint at a time”), and the deployment of standard sunlight (“Zionist solar aggression that blinds and burns”).
The statements came amid a flurry of other denunciations of Israel for the continuing genocide in the Gaza Strip that has become so harsh, it has increased the Palestinian population by thousands since it began in October 2023, after in began in 1967, but actually it began in 1948, or maybe it was 1896 we’re not sure but we promise it’s the worst crime in history except for the next thing Israel does, which will be the worst crime in history.
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