The State of Israel is on trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the crime of all crimes: genocide. Though, from the US media you would not know it. In January, the ICJ accepted the South African case against Israel, recognizing that Israel is plausibly committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. While a final determination of genocide by the court may take several years, as a provisional measure, the ICJ ordered that Israel must prevent genocide from occurring and allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza — neither of which Israel has abided by.

As I am writing this, over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been massacred by Israel, and by the time this gets published, several thousand more Palestinians will likely be murdered. The death count does not end here; there are an additional 8,000 Palestinians declared missing, presumably buried under the rubble and unable to be dug out. Among the civilians killed, 72% are women (8,400) and children (12,300). The nearly 40,000 Palestinians killed constitute 1.7% of the total population, and if you include the injured, the total number of casualties constitutes 4.8%. Israel is also starving Palestinians to death through a blockade of food aid, and Palestinians are reportedly eating animal feed and grass to survive. According to former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Andrew Gilmour, killing at this rate has not been witnessed since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Gaza has now been turned into the world’s largest death camp.

In its current genocide, Israel has broken multiple world records: it has achieved the highest number of journalists (95), United Nations workers (160), and healthcare workers (627) killed in a conflict. The magnitude of its urbicide in terms of its scale and intensity has been compared to the Allied bombing of Dresden, the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo, or the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the first month alone of Israel’s war on Palestinians, Israel dropped the equivalent of two Hiroshima nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip. It has dropped tens of thousands of bombs since then.

More than 50% of the Palestinian built environment in Gaza has been completely destroyed, including 360,000 homes (82% of all homes), 392 educational facilities (including all universities), 23 of the 35 hospitals (with 12 still partially functioning), 267 mosques and churches, more than 200 cultural and heritage sites, and 123 ambulances. As a result, 1.8 million of 2.3 million Palestinians are internally displaced within the Gaza Strip, many living in tents and many seeking shelter in the last refuge of Rafah, where Israel is now making plans for a massive ground invasion. It is estimated that it will take three years just to remove the rubble before any reconstruction can even begin.

Moreover, this is the first genocide in human history to ever be livestreamed, and we can all see it play out right before our eyes with the click of a button. Anyone who does not recognize that Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part is either living in a cave or a genocide denier.

The U.S. response has been to deny and demonize Palestinians and provide diplomatic cover and more weapons for Israel to continue its genocide. The Biden administration has denied the deaths of Palestinians, denied that genocide is even plausible, and denied the humanity of the Palestinian people. The U.S. has promoted some of the most despicable Islamophobic lies and Israeli propaganda that can only make it complicit in the ongoing genocide. The story of the 40 beheaded babies of whom President Joe Biden said he saw pictures was a lie. The systematic mass rape, as reported by the New York Times, during the Oct. 7 attack is being highly disputed. The veracity of the claims and the credibility of the journalists who reported on the story are now being questioned by multiple media outlets. The NYT itself canceled its renowned “The Daily” podcast on the story in January because its own editors questioned the credibility of the story. The U.N. report that was released in March was not investigative since it was fed information by the Israeli government and could only conclude that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israeli claims. Thus far, Israel has denied the U.N. Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights to conduct an investigation into these allegations. The Hamas Pentagon that was alleged by Israel to be under Al-Shifa Hospital was another lie. As acknowledged by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, it was, in fact, the Israelis who built bunkers under the hospital in the 1980s when Israeli settlers were living in Gaza. And the small cache of weapons Israel “found” in the hospital, especially behind an MRI machine, was most likely fabricated, according to several international media outlets. 

Employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) participating in the Oct. 7 attacks has also been disputed, as Israel has yet to submit any evidence for this claim to the U.N., U.S., or any other international body. Furthermore, Reuters has reported that, according to an UNRWA report, Israel got this “evidence” through tortured confessions of Palestinian detainees. That Hamas is using “human shields” is another lie. Israel has shown that it can do targeted killings, but it has chosen not to. Instead, Israel has indiscriminately bombed the entire Gaza Strip, which is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, using a U.S.-supplied arsenal of 2,000 lb. “dumb bombs.” Moreover, Israel using the phrase “human shield” is a catch-all to justify the carte-blanche bombing of the entire Gaza Strip, including hitting civilians, who are the majority of those killed. Israel calling all Palestinians that it kills either terrorists or human shields is racist, dehumanizing, and tries to justify killing on a mass scale. As for the manufactured dispute over who bombed Al-Ahli Hospital early on in the war, it does not even matter anymore because since then, Israel has bombed every hospital in Gaza. Another lie is that Israel’s priority is to save the captives in Gaza. Along with Netanyahu’s complete disregard for the demands of the captives’ families and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explicitly stating that the captives are “not the top priority,” the Israeli military has killed Israeli captives in Gaza even when shirtless, waving a white flag, and speaking Hebrew.

What we do know, however, is that the Israeli military has routinely used the Hannibal Directive — or a derivative of it — where Israel kills its own citizens to prevent them from being taken by an enemy, which led to the deaths of many Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. One of the survivors of the Oct. 7 attack, Yasmin Porat, describes a scenario in Kibbutz Be’eri where nearly a dozen Israeli captives were killed by Israeli forces, indicative of the possible use of this directive, to Israeli State Radio. Investigative reports conducted by Al Jazeera and Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth conclude that a version of the Hannibal Directive was ordered, which resulted in many Israeli civilian deaths on Oct. 7.

Furthermore, the Biden administration has vetoed a ceasefire resolution three times in the United Nations Security Council, bypassed Congress twice to fast-track $250 million worth of munitions to Israel in December, and cut its funding to UNRWA. In protecting its settler-colonial client state in the Middle East, the US has become a pariah state. The last United Nations General Assembly vote on a ceasefire resolution was 153 in favor to 10 against. In the latest ICJ case against Israel, in which the court will make a determination on the legality of Israel’s military occupation, it is the US and Fiji standing together in defense of what the entire international community has deemed an illegal military occupation. The nickname “Genocide Joe” will haunt Biden and his legacy well after he is six feet under the ground.

In similar fashion, the Washington University administration’s response has been disappointing. Chancellor Martin’s statements to the community, unfortunately, have promoted white supremacist narratives and have been in support of systemic racism against Palestinians. He has called for us to be civil when we talk about an ongoing genocide. The racist, Zionist hate against anyone in support of Palestinians on campus is palpable, especially if they are people of color or Muslim. The fear of administrative reprisals, which are based on a white supremacist logic, has silenced many from speaking out against genocide. Chancellor Martin acknowledging the humanity and the plight of the Palestinians in his next statement would be a start in the right direction to correct this. Acknowledging the currently unfolding genocide would also be nice!

Palestinians have been resisting a 140-year-old white settler-colonial Zionist project (which is informed by an antisemitic ideology) that seeks to erase, colonize, Judaize, and militarily occupy the indigenous Palestinians (the Palestinian Arab Muslims, Christians, and Jews who are the original descendants of the ancient Hebrews from 2,000 years ago) and the land of Palestine. The first act of genocide that Israel committed against Palestinians was in 1948, in what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe — though the Nakba should not be understood as a singular temporal event, but rather an ongoing process for Zionism to achieve its ultimate goal of creating an ethno-religious state, and as a result expelling all Palestinians and evidence of their existence from the land.

My extended family in the West Bank has lived through the Nakba every day through Israel’s illegal military occupation. In the 1990s, Israeli soldiers physically occupied their home for many months. During this time, Israeli soldiers slept in their house, ate their food, used their bathroom, and used their roof as a surveillance/sniper post. My aunt was forced to serve them tea and coffee whenever they demanded it. And almost a year ago to the day, 400 illegal Israeli settlers marched down from the hilltop into their village chanting “death to the Arabs,” terrorizing my family and everyone in the village by setting cars and homes on fire, breaking shop windows, shooting and beating Palestinians, and graffitiing the Star of David as well as hate speech on mosques and homes. The Jewish Israeli commander for the area described it as a pogrom.

The silencing of talk about genocide or about Palestinians has led to an inhumane normalization of genocide on campus. The very word “Palestinian” has become a dirty word. This silencing sends the message that the existence of Palestinians is not worth recognizing and, in fact, it implies it is best to demonize Palestinians through Orientalist or War on Terror tropes or by calling them antisemites because they refuse to quietly disappear. The political climate at Washington University reflects the political climate in most of America, and it is not surprising that Palestinians have recently been compared to insects by America’s favorite liberal Zionist, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal declaring Dearborn, MI the jihad capital of America in an opinion piece, or the fact that Palestinian Americans have been shot, stabbed, and run over in hate crimes across the country in recent months.

I call on Chancellor Martin and the Board of Trustees to show exemplary leadership and take a moral and ethical stand against genocide. There are not two sides to genocide, and silence is complicity. If Washington University really wanted to be a national leader in standing against hate and white supremacy, the Board of Trustees would publicly announce the university’s divestment from the current fascist government of Israel. That is, cease the Israel Institute program and all study abroad programs to Israel, divest from Zionist organizations, and divest the endowment from Israel bonds and Israeli companies until the current failed state of Israel is ready to abide by international norms, the rule of law, and allow everyone to be equal from the river to the sea.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated on 3/27/24 to fix a minor error.