The Left-Wing Allies of Israel felt abandoned by the Progressive Jews

The Attack of Oct. 7 on the Jenin Refugee Camp: Israeli Insistence that the Islamic Jihad Rocket was Charged with a Violation of the State of Israel

The friends of those who were killed in the attack on Oct. 7 were people who were related to me. The friends who were killed in Gaza were my friends. My heart is broken for those who are searching for their loved ones, or trying to bring them home, as well as for those who are grieving and trying to bring them home.

It is often difficult to know what is happening in the war between Israel and the Palestinians in real time. This was true before social media and before the rise of X, which is now referred to as misinformation, troll and hysteria. But today countless people are plugged into a frantically churning news cycle, trying to instantly metabolize a conflict that is a hall of mirrors in the best of times and is now careening toward a possible regional war, with all the propaganda and mass panic that entails. The catastrophe is putting people in danger.

We are the people who know that the answer is peace because we are in the soil of this land. The only way we can fulfill our responsibility to the nation of our youngest ones — and to ourselves — is to recognize the nation of Palestine and the nation of Israel and to establish a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel.

I didn’t take Israel’s insistence that an Islamic Jihad rocket caused the accident at the hospital seriously because it has previously blamed the deaths on Palestinians. In May of last year, the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Israeli officials said she was either shot by a Palestinian or by an Israeli soldier aiming at a Palestinian gunman. The official Israeli line was disputed by a New York Times investigation. It was found that there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot and that the bullet that killed her came from the direction of an Israeli military convoy.

The rush to judgment on Tuesday night will continue to haunt us all. The allegation of a massacre in Jenin was made a long time ago, and according to The Guardian, it will live on in memory and myth. The Guardian was incorrect about the size of the death in Jenin. The narrative that Israel perpetrated a massacre at Al-Ahli will soon be taken to a whole new level, thanks to the amateur forensics of the internet.

Still, cracks have begun to emerge among the Democratic coalition. Younger and more liberal voters prefer to care about the Palestinian cause more than older generations, a result of a split that occurred in the last two decades. Some American Jews are more critical of Israel than their ancestors were, and have joined groups such as If NotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace that have protested in the US Capitol, calling for a cease-fire.

The terror attacks by Hamas evoked memories of the Holocaust and anxiety about being attacked in the United States. And they were taken aback to discover that many of their ideological allies not only failed to perceive the same threats but also saw them as oppressors deserving of blame.

Many of the most inflammatory comments on social media came from progressive groups that rushed to justify the Israeli attack by skipping a moment of mourning.

The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a slogan that leaves no place for Israel to exist in its own land.

The Los Angeles Democrat Socialists: How the dehumanization of the Los Angeles Jewish community has affected the standing of the Jews in the U.S.

“I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way,” said Nick Melvoin, 38, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board who is now running for Congress and keeps a framed picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. The dehumanization of the group is how that happens. It hit us like a ton of bricks because we were warned about it.

The most rattling episodes have occurred on college campuses or on social media, where statements from small organizations have been amplified across the globe. During a worldwide conflict, those statements have taken on a totemic status, raising suspicions that they are about to cause a shift in the standing of Jews in America.

Eric Spiegelman, a lawyer and podcast producer in Los Angeles who has serves on municipal boards, was enraged by the protest in New York City promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America after the attack. He sent letters to the city of Los Angeles urging them to condemn the organization and label it a hate group. The D.S.A. has since backed away from the protest and apologized “for not making our values explicit.”

“It’s like, I belong to this political organization that believes in three things: affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and the wholesale murder of Jews,” said Mr. Spiegelman, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he condemned local leaders who are affiliated with the group. “Two out of three ain’t bad!”

Eva Borgwardt, political director of IfNotNow, said that anyone dehumanizing Israelis has no representation in the US government, while many federal officials have been dehumanizing Palestinians for decades.

And Hamas’ attacks, brutal killings and kidnapping of Israelis, clearly constitute war crimes, says Hathaway, coauthor of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.

Civilians often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time — near, for example, what is presumed by combatants to be a legitimate military target. In international humanitarian law, the principle of proportionality applies, which is a gray area for military decision-makers.

The Geneva Convention has been agreed to by 196 states and serves as the international standard on the treatment of civilians, as well as prisoners of war and sick and wounded soldiers.

Kenneth Roth is a professor at the School of Public and International Affairs and the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “I think it’s important to stress that these [rules] are not the concoctions of human rights groups. These are not idealistic, pacifist rebels. These are the rules that the militaries themselves adopted for themselves,” he says.

The militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, along with Islamic Jihad, which is a small group of extremists, have carried out attacks against Israel.

Israel, like the United States and Russia, is not among the 123 states that are party to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The Palestinians, however, joined in 2015, so the ICC has jurisdiction over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A United Nations-established body known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, says it has begun “collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes committed by all sides” since the start of the conflict following the Hamas attacks.

The same international humanitarian law that applies to Israel Defense Forces soldiers applies to Hamas, says Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor and founder and director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges.

An attack wouldn’t be proportional if civilian casualties, death or damage from the attack are excessive and the military advantage is great, says Tom Dannenbaum.

The Gaza Strip is densely populated and presents a huge challenge for the Israeli military. Fighting Hamas fighters in urban areas who don’t wear uniforms makes their challenge even more difficult.

“It can be difficult for the attacker to distinguish between a combatant and a noncombatant. But that difficulty does not absolve the attacking party from the duty always to distinguish between combatants who can be targeted and noncombatants who cannot be,” Roth says.

The International Criminal Court: How to prosecute a criminal officer and the civilian population in the case of a war crime, and who gets held accountable?

In recent days, the Israeli Defense Force ordered Gazans to flee the north of the territory as a reprisal for Hamas’ attack on Israel, in anticipation of a ground assault.

That could be seen as a humanitarian gesture, “but it has been done in a wholly inhumane way, because to order 1.1 million people to evacuate in the course of a few hours is obviously impossible,” Roth says. It’s cruel and it causes panic.

“If civilians are prevented or held back from getting medical supplies or care, that could be a war crime as well, because that could amount to a collective punishment,” according to Traves.

If a military force is going to wash its hands of responsibility, it can’t just warn the population to leave.

“People’s status doesn’t change regardless of whether or not they comply with that warning,” he says. “So if they don’t move, if they remain in that location, their civilian status endures and has precisely the same weight in the context of proportionality as it would have absent the warning.”

Many humanrights activists and journalists collect a lot of documentation and evidence that could be important in the future.

The International Criminal Court encourages it’s members to bring criminal suspects to the court at the national level.

“It defers to genuine national prosecutorial efforts. It is not the same as the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, which had primary jurisdiction. So the International Criminal Court actually encourages national governments to prosecute their own offenders.”

Israel exercised universal jurisdiction to try a Nazi officer in the case of war crimes during World War II. That trial was broadcast around the world.

“In any conflict in the world, you can’t have the expectation that you will prosecute everybody,” Travesí says. You have to make a choice. You have to do some selection and prioritization of cases.”

Source: What is a war crime, and who gets held accountable? Here’s what you need to know

Why Vladimir Putin didn’t travel to South Africa for the BRICS summit last summer? A case of the ICC and the South African state party

“That’s the reason that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin did not travel to South Africa for the BRICS summit this summer,” he says, referring to the international meeting of emerging economies that took place in Johannesburg in August. “South Africa would have had an obligation to arrest him, because there was an arrest warrant from the ICC — and South Africa is an ICC state party.”