Iqbal Jassat’s condemnation of International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan’s arrest warrants against Hamas leaders is steeped in misinformation, conspiracy theory and hateful ideology.
Khan’s arrest warrant against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh may have its problems, but if Jassat believes in any sort of impartiality or rational pursuit of law and justice, he should not be condemning the indictment of Hamas leaders.
The charges against the Hamas leadership all have firm basis in reality, with footage published by Hamas itself corroborating mountains of witness and forensic evidence.
It is clear by the footage published by Hamas on October 7th that murder, torture, sexual violence, cruel treatment, and attacks on dignity did occur. To state otherwise is pure misinformation and lies. The footage of all these acts is readily available online.
Al Jazeera, despite its overtly biased view of the conflict, couldn’t help but showcase the atrocities that Hamas performed – even if it tried to brush past scenes of Hamas fighters stomping on people’s faces while chanting religious slogans, a woman being molested while she screams for help, and the blatant slaughter of clearly unarmed civilians. That is some of the more digestible footage. The parading of a naked 22-year-old Shani Louk, as her beaten and violated body was carried through the Gazan streets is another image that clearly shows the breadth of Hamas’ evil.
The other charges of hostage taking is clearly true. And the charge of extermination, effectively attempted genocide, is also corroborated by Hamas’ charter itself, which calls for the extermination of Jews.
Jassat accuses Khan of being biased against Palestinians for charging the Hamas leadership. This is a very unreasonable accusation. With all of the crimes under Hamas’ belt, not charging them would be an affront to justice, law and order. Khan charging both Israeli and Hamas leaders in a single action seems like the definition of impartiality and lack of bias.
The accused Hamas leadership, without a fraction of a doubt, oversaw and perhaps even personally participated in the crimes they have been charged. Jassat may reject the overwhelming evidence all he wishes, perceiving it as “Israeli propaganda”, but that doesn’t change how damning the evidence is against Hamas’ supposed innocence.
What needs to be addressed is Jassat’s insistence that Hamas is a mere freedom fighting organisation opposing oppression and “Zionist colonialism”.
He paints Hamas as fighting a “legitimate struggle for freedom and justice”. This cannot be further from the truth.
No struggle for freedom and justice involves rape and torture. Hamas’ methods since its rise to power, and most notably on October 7th, of targeting innocent civilians, while placing their own people in harm’s way as human shields, belies a clearly evil modus operandi that pays no heed to morality.
Jassat’s insistence that Hamas should be compared to Mandela and Sisulu is, frankly, offensive. Mandela and Sisulu never oversaw the systematic rape of civilians to fight Apartheid.
No perceived struggle for freedom over any oppressor justifies such evil. And even then, Hamas’ struggle is not even morally justified.
History (modern and ancient), genetics, and archaeology all point to Israel being the legitimate homeland for the Jewish people. Palestine, on the other hand, is a colonial fabrication. The name given to the region by Romans in an effort to mock their Jewish adversaries, and adopted later by the British, the true coloniser of the region.
Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years, being kicked from their homes and exterminated. The Holocaust was just the harshest of all genocides against the Jewish people and made it clear that the Jewish people needed a polity to defend their right to exist.
Zionism is not some bogeyman concept like how the fallacious and Nazi-inspiring conspiracy theories make it out to be. It is simply a recognition that for Jews to survive, they need to have their own nation. And while it is easy for cultures and religions with dozens of their own nations to tell the Jews to go elsewhere, why should they?
Jews have inhabited the land of Israel for thousands of years. They didn’t arrive out of the blue in the 20th century. Jews returned over a period of a thousand years to their homeland. The Ottoman Empire invited Jews to resettle their homeland as they faced persecution in Medieval Europe. Russian Jews fled pogroms in Russia in the 19th century and came to settle again in Israel. And there were countless Jews who never left their holy land.
Shouldn’t the simple fact that Jerusalem holds the most important sites for Judaism show the inescapable connection that Judaism has to that land? Not to mention how without Judaism, there would never have been any Islam or Christianity to fight over the holy land to begin with.
Up until 1948, Jews peacefully lived in communities scattered throughout the region. Newer settlers purchased their land from Ottoman and Arabic landowners. Violence wasn’t sparked by Jews, but by Arabs who did not want to share the region with Jews. The Nakba and the Arab-Israel war of 1948 wasn’t caused by Jewish Israelis, but by Arab powers refusing to live alongside Jews.
If Arab armies hadn’t told Arabs to evacuate their homes on the eve of the war, then there would have been no Nakba. Plenty of Arabs did not evacuate but chose to remain in Israel. They became Israeli citizens, with far more rights than any Jew can expect to receive in any Arab state.
Lastly, Jassat’s assertion that Gaza has been starved since 2006 as a part of an Israeli blockade is pure misinformation. Gaza shares a border with both Israel and Egypt. How can it be blockaded by purely Israel? Why not blame Egypt as well? And no such blockade existed except under wartime.
Up until October 7th, Israel allows the vast majority of medical permit applicants from Gaza to enter Israel and receive treatment. A far greater number than many other countries afford their neighbours. Record numbers of Gazans were able to seek economic opportunities and employment in Israel, and Israel actively subsidised the development of Gaza.
There was no blockade in any meaningful sense. If a monitored border is a blockade, then almost every country on Earth is blockading its neighbour.
Jassat’s view of Israel, its history and the current conflict are incredibly skewed and biased. I urge readers to seek balanced information, and to look at their own genuine sense of morality and justice before taking his blatant misinformation and hate of Israel as anything substantial.
PETRVS
“Violence wasn’t sparked by Jews, but by Arabs who did not want to share the region with Jews.” Are you for real, bro? Google “Irgun” and “Stern”, two overtly violent organisations that existed for the sole purpose of violently expelling the indigenous Arabs and the British colonial authorities from Palestine. The creation of Israel was attended by violence on all sides, and to try to force it into a simplistic self-defence paradigm is grossly dishonest or ignorant.
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Who attacked who first?
PETRVS
Do you even appreciate how playground you sound? “But he started it!” Not to mention ignorant. If you think the official commencement of the 1948 war was the first instance of hostilities, then please go and read some more.