In order for Canada to confront Israeli occupation, it must confront itself

Warning: This article contains disturbing details of sexual violence

In a landmark decision on Friday, the International Court of Justice ruled by a majority that the Israeli presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is unlawful and that Israel must end the occupation “as rapidly as possible.” Israel must also cease all new settlement activity, remove all settlers from the occupied territories and pay reparations for all damages incurred from acts which have taken place within the OPT since 1967.

Importantly for Canada, the Court also ruled that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the [OPT] and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the [OPT].”

This is a crushing moral and rhetorical blow to the Canadian government and its indefensible support for Israel as it continues to carry out a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

As the Israeli regime continues its brutal campaign of collective punishment of Palestinians, the scale and tempo of both war crimes and crimes against humanity which are being committed are difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend.

Famine conditions are spreading across the Gaza Strip, as the flow of humanitarian aid has been deliberately reduced in order to starve the population. According to the latest figures, “96 percent of the population is facing acute food insecurity at crisis level or higher (IPC Category 3+), with almost half a million people in catastrophic conditions (IPC Category 5).” The destruction of crops, farms, as well as nearly all of Gaza’s small fleet of fishing boats, means that Palestinians have no independent food systems upon which they can rely for subsistence.

The “Gaza Aid Pier” which was constructed by the US military, has delivered a barely significant amount of aid into Gaza, and is now being permanently dismantled. In June, there were multiple eyewitness reports which indicated that Israeli special forces had used the “aid pier” as part of a raid into the Nuseirat refugee camp which resulted in numerous civilian casualties.

Systematic destruction of water infrastructure and the disabling of the sewage system in Gaza have resulted in the spread of infectious diseases and skin ailments. Recent tests carried out by UNICEF have confirmed the presence of poliovirus within sewage samples; polio had previously been nearly eradicated from the planet, with wild strains being detected primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Thousands of Palestinians are held in “administrative detention” facilities without charge, subject to torture, starvation, and immense psychological abuse. One eyewitness account described scenes of systematic rape by military personnel, including “cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.” According to the Palestinian prisoner advocacy group Addameer, nearly 10,000 people are currently held in some form of detention by the Israeli regime.

The numerous massacres carried out by Israeli forces – most recently an airstrike on the Al-Mawasi refugee camp in Khan Younis killed 90 and injured 300 others – follow a disturbing pattern in which a particular area is designated as a “humanitarian safe zone” before that area is bombed, using US-made weapons such as the 2,000 pound JDAM or the smaller GBU-39.

The Biden administration has authorized the supply of more 500lbs bombs to Israel, while restricting some larger munitions, citing “concerns” about their use in Gaza, much of which has already been reduced to an apocalyptic ruin. The bombing of Gaza has surpassed the destructive power of any similar campaign in the last century, including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima which was committed by the United States.

The Israeli military has utilized an artificial intelligence platform, codenamed Lavender, in order to analyze data on Palestinians and automatically select bombing targets based on questionable parameters, often without human intervention. According to Israeli military sources, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

Palestinians now live in an increasingly technocratic nightmare, with quadcopter drones constantly flying overhead, some mounted with machine guns which fire on people below without warning. Receiving appropriate medical care following an attack is virtually impossible, as the healthcare infrastructure has been systematically destroyed by Israeli forces. Nearly 200 United Nations aid workers have been killed, which is the highest death toll in the history of UN operations.

Knowledge of all of these details has come at a horrific cost, as over 100 journalists have been killed, some the victims of targeted murders.

This violence, repression, and outright terrorism of the Israeli occupation is part and parcel of the collective punishment of the Palestinian people, seeking to pressure them into abandoning their support for the various resistance groups which are currently fighting Israeli occupation forces.

The reality of Israel as an apartheid state, in which one racial group maintains dominance over another by various means, has taken on global implications and a renewed push for the recognition of the State of Palestine and for the support of the Palestinian right of national self-determination.

The hypocrisy of Canada’s support for the Israeli regime has received widespread, prolonged attention, including in New Brunswick, as protests and demonstrations have called on government officials and private entities to sever their ties with Israel.

As Canada continues to grapple with the denial of its own history with regard to the genocide of Indigenous peoples who inhabit the land upon which the nation was founded, and the structural realities that reveal this genocide to be an ongoing process, confronting the deep-seated institutional racism which exists at the highest levels of the Canadian government remains a significant barrier to any official consideration for the human rights of Palestinians.

Ryan Hillier is a writer and settler living on the banks of the Petkootkweăk.