In a New York Times interview published last weekend, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that among the “slogans” used when criticizing Israel, “the one that bothers me the most is genocide.” He went on to say: “Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”
Schumer’s statement directly conflicts with the actual definition of genocide provided by the international Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
Last December, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports which unequivocally concluded that Israel has been engaging in genocide in Gaza. “But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality,” author Norman Solomon wrote this week, charging that Schumer is among the large majority of Congress members whose “silence and denials scream out complicity.”
Now, Solomon added, “renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.”
Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” With the two-month ceasefire broken by Israel days ago, Solomon notes that the Israeli military is again “using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians.”
Available for interviews:
NORMAN SOLOMON, solomonprogressive@gmail.com
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and national director of RootsAction.org. His latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” includes an afterword about the Gaza war.