Hi. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven.
AM as cease fire negotiations with Hamas stall Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnia, who was expected to hold a security.
Cabinet meeting to finalize a new plan for Gaza. Netnya, who has been calling for a full military takeover of Gaza, that that plan is highlighting a rift in Israel's government. The security meeting has been postponed. Military officials are warning it would be dangerous and costly and risk further isolating Israel on the international stage. This all comes as the International Court of Justice is still weighing South Africa's genocide
case against Israel. According to the Health ministry in Gaza, the death toll has now surpassed sixty one thousand people today. Israeli American scholar and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Batov on what constitutes a genocide and why only a new paradigm can save Palestinians and Israelis alike. It's Thursday, August seventh. Omer I thought we could start with the ICJ,
the International Court of Justice. It's currently considering the question of whether or not Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. So, as a scholar of genocide, can you tell me exactly what that means?
So, the ICJ is considering genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention of nineteen forty eight, and that's the only definition of genocide that actually matters in this case and in any case of international law. And that definician says that genocide are acts committed with the intent to destroy a particular group, and that can be an ethic group, a racial group, a religious or a national group in whole or in part as such. So what that means is that in order to find that genocide
is happening, you have to show two things. You have to show that there's a clear intent to destroy a group, and secondly, that this intent is being implemented to the extent that people who are subjected to genocide are not subjected to it as individuals, but as members of the group, because the goal is not to kill all the people, or name other people, or harm all the people, but rather for that group to be destroyed as such.
And so do you think that Israel's actions now meet that definition?
Well, I think Asrael's actions have met that definition, at least as far as I could tell by May of twenty twenty four, and the way I saw it because I about it's already in November twenty three and I wrote an op ed in the New York Times, and at the time I argued that it appeared that Israel was engaged in war crime and crimes against humanity, and that there had been general side of statements by leaders of Israel in the immediate aftermath of October seventh.
We are putting a complete siege on Gaza, no electricity in Muzzlim, no food, no water, no gas. It's all closed with fighting animals, and are acting accordingly.
But these could have been interpreted as simply people were very really outraged by what happened on October seventh, and so you could expect, especially in the political climate and Israel, for people to make very strong statements. They appear to have a general size of content, and they could also have been seen as insight went to soldiers. So in that piece at the time I said that this could develop into genocide, that my intent was to warn to
stop things before it happens. By May of the following year of twenty twenty four, is very defense for US as the IDEA decided to move into Rufa, which is the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, in which about half of the population of Gaza was concentrated a million people.
Israel says it plans to proceed with its planned military operations in the southern city of Rafa, that despite two separate International Court rulings this week condemning Israel's actions as well as the attacks by Hamas.
And at that point, because the IDEA wanted to move into Rufa, it moves all those people, a million people to another area along the beach so west of there, to the Mawasi area, and then went to Rafa and destroyed it. And BIOLOGUSI was the standard. And at that
point I started examining the following. What is the relationship between the statements that were made by these politicians and generals immediately after the massacre and the official war goals, and the official war goals were to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages.
I've set three war goals. The first is to release the hostages, the second is to destroy Hamas, and the third is to ensure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel in the future.
And it appeared to me by then that the ideas was not then and is not now actually engaged in an attempt to destroy Hamas and release the hostages, but rather to systematically destroy Gaza so as to make it entirely and inhabitable for its population, and to the extent that it's possible to remove it from the Gaza strip altogether.
And as well as the country was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust for which the of genocide was created, so many people in Israel think that it's impossible that the country could ever commit a genocide or be found guilty of doing that. So what would a finding like this, What would it do to the country, What would it mean for Israel and for its government?
So you know, this is the sort of the paradox and the outrage of the whole thing. For many people, I think, and for me too, the fact that Israel is now engaged in what appears to be a generocide or action is an outrage. It's a scandal because it does fly in the face of everything that you would have wanted to believe in. We have a kind of belief that people learn from genocide and the lesson that you would draw from having been a victim of one is to do everything you can to avoid that from
happening right or from participating in one. And in fact that Israel. For many years, the Holocaust became something else. It became a warning of imminent danger, not only something to remember and commemorate and research, but also a clear and imminent danger that behind every threat to Israel, whether real or perceived, whether major or minor, behind the corner
Auschwitz was lurking. And that created a state of mind where the Holocaust is actually a license to violence against others, rather than something that would prevent you from ever contemplating carrying a genocide out like.
This, after the break the two very different futures ahead for Israel and Palestine, let's talk a little about what might come next. For Israel. It's still experiencing significant support from powerful allies. So while that is the case, what does the future of the country look like?
Yeah, it's hard to say. You know, I'm a story and I look back, but I think the future is bleak. I can think of two scenarios. Basically, one is likelier than the other. The first is that this at some point will end it's actually not a war at all what is happening in Gaza now because there's no organized resistance to what the idea of is doing. It's just a campaign of demolition and ethnic cleansing. But this may
end at some point. But if Israel is unable to come to terms with this, if the international community just sits back, what this has done to Israeli society itself, quite apart from destroying Palestinian society, is that Israel is becoming increase seemly violent within its own borders. It will become, I think, a fore blown apartheid state. It's become increasingly authoritarian.
There's a great deal of police violence, not only against Palestinians but also against protesters, against people who oppose the government, and I think it will become a pariah state. It won't be able to survive as such for very long. It will implode. What will happen then is hard to say.
So that's the dire scenario. There is another scenario, which is that Israel will be forced because there's no internal dynamic in Israel now to force this change, but that Israel will be forced by pressures from outside, from its
own allies. For its own good, to change the political paradigm, not out of anti Israeli, sentimental anti Semitism or any of that, but rather to save it from its own demons, to change the political paradigm, and to seek out a waigh for seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews who live in that area to share that space, rather than to try using bombs to resolve this dispute between them.
Can you tell me a bit more about what that pressure could look like? As you've said, you're historians, so what moments in history can we draw from in thinking about this.
You cannot expect the country that's carried out genocide against another group too simply after some years to say, Okay, we're really sorry about it and we won't do it again. There has to be much more of a process. One of course, is the example of South Africa. And South Africa is important here because South Africa, no one, I mean most people anticipated that apartheid would collapse into a bloodbath, and that's not what happened. So I would not want
to idealize South Africa now. It's not an ideal place. But the way that apart the Aparthe regime fell was a combination of several factors. Two of the most important were first, huge pressure on South Africa and second that there were people there who could take up this leadership and lead their own nation to a distant future. And that too is crucial. There's a moment in which you need those people and you need to support them, you need to stand behind them. And in the case of
South Africa, the international community played a huge role. And again, I mean, if you think about what happened in nineteen forty five in Europe, the Allies could have come into Europe, into Germany and destroyed it because it thoughts out such a terrible war. There could have been a politics of retribution and destruction and mass arrest and even genocide, and they could have done that. And instead the institute the Marshall Plan and rebuilt Germany. And that's why you became
what it is today. And so you can see that vision and generosity and understanding that you cannot go back to the past, that you must build something new actually can work. It's not just some kind of you know, liberal pipe dream. It has actually worked in the past, and it could work in the Middle East as well. Most people, most is rarely Jews and most Pedestinians don't want to live in this kind of reality that they're
living in now. They don't love it. They would like to see a different future, but nobody is offering it to them.
Yeah, for something like that to work, you need outside pressure, but you also need people within those countries to be willing to push for that kind of change. So how do you see that happening? Given the state of the relationship between Israel and Palestine.
There is a group of Pedestinians and Jews, Israeli Jews who have been thinking now for several years, since started before October seventh, of a different way of rethinking this. Because so many politicians always say, well, we'll support the two state solution, it's a kind of fig leaf to saying, well, we'd like to see something, and the two state solution as it is now seen is not going to happen.
This group is thinking about the creation of a consideration between Israel and Palestine, two sovereign states that would be in consideration with each other. They would have open borders, and they would make a distinction between citizenship and residents, so that people could be citizens of one state and live in the other, but they would vote and be
politically active in the state of their nationality. There is a lot of creative thinking behind that, and I think that countries like Australia, like Norway, like Germany can actually help the people who are trying to put together these plans, who are trying to advertise them to the rest of the world, together with pressure on Israel itself. I'm trying
to be hopeful. Of course, this is not something that would happen tomorrow, but if they were international assistants, combined with real pressure on its role, with economic pressure, so that people would know that if they continue on this path, they will become increasingly isolated, I think something at least we can see that not as the opportunity that Israeli policymakers saw October seventh as, which was the opportunity to destroy Pedestinian existence in Gaza, but rather as an opportunity
to change entirely the relationship between Jews and Pedestinians in that region.
Oma, thank you for your time, Thank you very much. Also in the news today, US President Donald Trump indicated he would not interfere with possible Israeli plans to occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Asked about reports of a potential military takeover of Gaza, Donald Trump stated it was pretty much up to Israel, saying his administration's focus
was on increasing food access to Palestinians. And An indigenous group has launched an appeal to prevent the construction of a stadium that would be used for the twenty thirty two Olympics in Brisbane. It follows the Queensland government fast tracking legislation to override fifteen environmental and Heritage Acts in
order to build the stadium. The Yugara Mrganjin Aboriginal Corporation lodged a protection application with the federal government, saying the site contains stories, ancient trees and possible ancestral remains and Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.
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