Elizabeth Warren Believes There Is “Ample Evidence” Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
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During an event at a mosque last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren said in response to a question about whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that [the International Court of Justice] will find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.”
At a Q&A at a Wayland mosque last week, @SenWarren is asked if she thinks that Israel is committing a genocide.
“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they will find that it is genocide,” she says, adding that she’s trying to get “past a labels argument” pic.twitter.com/mxqBP6oTlH
— Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford) April 8, 2024
The dam is breaking on President Joe Biden’s unabashed support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal Israeli regime. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signed a Congressional letter addressed to Biden demanding the United States stop shipping offensive weapons to Israel, and to condition future aid on its adherence to international law. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for new elections in Israel. Bush Administration advisors are even going on TV and saying his fecklessness on Gaza has proven Joe Biden to be a fundamentally weak and callous president.
Biden has responded to this rising Beltway crescendo of complaints, as he finally did what presidents do and pressured Israel to open up aid routes to the most desperate areas of northern Gaza threatened by famine. He has also repeated his administration’s hollow “ceasefire” trope that his National Security Council advisors watered Vice President Kamala Harris’s famed speech down to, but it is not a deviation from his policy he has pursued this entire time.
What Biden is pushing for is not an immediate ceasefire the way the demand was made at the United Nations, but a conditional agreement to a cessation of hostilities for six weeks, like the one he helped broker for four days back in November. The political nature of this word is clear in its usage by the administration now, especially when contrasted to the word’s absence in the official White House remarks on the agreement last year.
A ceasefire, as the world has demanded it, means all the shooting stops right now. Period.
That is not remotely close to the policy that Biden is pursuing, and just because the United States abstained from a vote on it at the United Nations does not mean the State Department is substantively changing its policy. Besides, the Biden Administration has long since proven it does not look at the United Nations as a governing body that has any real sway over this crisis anyway.
Biden is only now using the word ceasefire as a desperate attempt to get everyone to stop yelling at him, but thinking that there is a political solution to this policy problem he has created for himself is a big reason why he’s in this mess in the first place.
This is clearly an attack on civilians like Warren asserted. Hamas is a secondary target at best, especially since we know that Israel has “kill zones” where they shoot everyone on sight and call who they killed a terrorist.
Calling it a genocide, however, is a bit trickier. Genocide is a legal term with an extremely high bar, and as someone without a law degree, I feel woefully unequipped to speak to that terminology in the de jure legal context in which the International Court of Justice is considering it. Elizabeth Warren, however, is a lawyer, and her assertion that the ICJ will view it as a genocide gives that notion credibility.
The de facto definition of this being a genocide is rooted in the fact that it is very clearly an ethnic cleansing campaign as proven by the words of Israeli politicians, with one of the end-goals seemingly being to create beachfront property for cretins like Trump’s former senior foreign policy advisor Jared Kushner. Legally it may be difficult to speak to whether this is a genocide—but logically it is one—rooted in what our eyes and ears are telling us.
Legalese has a tendency to muck up political debates because de jure and de facto definitions do not always align, but a Harvard Law professor saying that this case brought in front of the International Court of Justice meets the exceedingly high bar for genocide with “ample evidence” is good enough to sunset this technical legal debate for me as Splinter Editor-in-Chief.
Warren had an opportunity to backtrack on her words, as the local outlet GBH News was sent the following statement by a Warren spokesperson afterwards. While the Senator distanced herself a little bit from her rhetoric, she still defended the fundamental position she staked out, and levied some serious accusations if you read between the lines of it.
In a Q&A, Senator Warren commented on the ongoing legal process at the International Court of Justice, not sharing her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza. In January, the ICJ found that it is “plausible” that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention. As the senator said at the mosque, what is far more important than any label that comes out of this legal process is the question of whether it should be the policy of the United States to support Israel’s actions in Gaza.Senator Warren believes that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his right-wing war cabinet have created a massive humanitarian disaster in Gaza and have not taken reasonable steps to protect civilians. As she said at the mosque, “It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend it to your will; it is wrong to drop 2000-pound bombs in densely populated civilian areas.”
The Senator has worked with her colleagues in Congress to push for a ceasefire, for the return of hostages, for the conditioning of aid to Israel, for free flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and for movement toward a two-state solution.”
The implication in Warren’s belief that there is “ample evidence” Israel is committing genocide and her assertion that “it is wrong to drop 2000-pound bombs in densely populated civilian areas” and that we must “condition aid to Israel” is that the United States is legally liable for Israel’s genocide.
We’re the ones supplying those bombs, after all. Joe Biden even authorized more shipments of them to Israel the same day they murdered seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.
Anyone asserting that this is not a genocide is simply just trying to win an argument based on arcane legal technicalities (and a Harvard Law professor believes they would lose that debate anyway), but one look at the tens of thousands of dead women and children created by Israel proves otherwise. That a high-profile Democratic politician like Elizabeth Warren feels comfortable declaratively speaking in terms that many in the administration still believe to be taboo just proves how isolated Joe Biden is from the party he claims to represent.