Israeli ex-PM admits Israel committing genocide

The genocide deniers are running out of road

Israel has no moral or operational limit to the extermination of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.

That’s according to the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who himself perpetrated war crimes against the Palestinian people, in a devastating piece written for Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Let’s go through what he’s written, and why this is so important.

Olmert says:

The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success. Never since its establishment has the State of Israel waged such a war. The criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel's history in this area, too.

Brushing aside his airbrushing of generations of Israeli crimes, it should be noted that Olmert was a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party for over three decades, from 1973, the year it was founded, until 2006. He then went off to join Kadima, which was presented as a so-called ‘moderate’ party, despite being led by Ariel Sharon, a right-wing war criminal.

He goes on:

Recent operations in Gaza have nothing to do with legitimate war goals. The government sends our soldiers – and the military obeys – to wander around Gaza City, Jabalya and Khan Yunis neighborhoods in an illegitimate military operation. This is now a private political war. Its immediate result is the transformation of Gaza into a humanitarian disaster area.

He goes on to say that he has, until this point, rebutted accusations made against the IDF and the Israeli state in terms of conduct in Gaza “including accusations of genocide and war crimes.”

Indeed, he says he put himself forward for interviews for Western media outlets, and said:

More than once, in interviews, I disappointed those who invited me when I firmly claimed that Israel was not committing war crimes in Gaza. Excessive killings — yes, an unimaginable number of uninvolved victims, including children, women and the elderly — did occur, but, I argued firmly and with self-convincing conviction, in no case was an order given by a decision-maker at the political level to harm civilians in Gaza without Distinction.

The large number of uninvolved civilians killed in Gaza was unreasonable, unjustifiable, unacceptable. But all of them, I said on every media channel in the world, were the result of a brutal war.

Olmert is in fact saying here that he actually used his position and authority to push back at those of us who have, from the start of the genocide, emphasised that Israel was (and is) committing heinous war crimes on a daily basis. That’s because of the overwhelming evidence and indeed the public repeated statements of genocidal and criminal intent by Israeli leaders. Olmert engaged in atrocity denial, in the face of all the facts, and should be made to account for that.

That doesn’t mean what should be regarded as a confession of Israeli crimes isn’t important.

He says: “This war should have ended by early 2024. It continued without justification, without any clear goal and with no political vision for the future of Gaza and the Middle East in general.” He also says that he had argued that the Israeli army did not operate an “order or instruction or directive from military top brass to hit civilians indiscriminately.” Because he was absolving the Israeli state of intent, he says that as he understood at the time “no war crimes had been committed.”

Crucially, he says that while “Genocide and war crimes” are terms he had resisted:

In recent weeks I've been no longer able to do so. What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We're not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it's the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.

A little note here. Before this appeared in the English version of Haaretz, it was published in the original Hebrew. It was widely translated as either “a war of extermination” or a “war of annihilation”. But Haaretz have here translated it as “war of devastation”.

Whatever the most accurate translation, it is clear from the article that Olmert is admitting to genocide. Not least, here, that he says he is no longer able to rebut charges of genocide, referring to the killing of civilians which is “indiscriminate”, “limitless” as well as “criminal.”

And this isn’t because of a breakdown in discipline, he says, but because of a policy directed by Israel’s leadership. This is a crucial admission, because this former Israeli prime minister, who has knowledge of running the Israeli state machinery, of directing the Israeli army and has insider understanding of Israeli politics, is no fringe figure in Israeli society, but a politician who emerged from the Israeli Right.

He is telling the world that Israeli is deliberately waging a war of extermination against civilians at the direction of the Israeli government.

He goes on:

First, starving out Gaza. On this issue, the position of senior government figures is public and clear. Yes, we've been denying Gazans food, medicine and basic living needs as part of an explicit policy. Netanyahu, typically, is trying to blur the type of orders he's been giving, in order to evade legal and criminal responsibility in due course. But some of his lackeys are saying so outright, in public, even with pride: Yes, we will starve out Gaza. Because all Gazans are Hamas, there's no moral or operational limitation on exterminating them all, over two million people.

Here, this former Israeli prime minister makes clear the Israeli state is deliberately starving Gaza, which is a grave war crime and indeed forms the central basis of the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. He also makes clear - as the repeated statements by Israeli leaders and officials have made very plainly clear - that no distinction is made between the civilian population of Gaza and Hamas, that is military targets.

And when he says “there's no moral or operational limitation on exterminating them all, over two million people” he could not be clearer. That’s genocide. The Genocide Convention state that genocide are “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

He goes on:

‏Israeli media channels, each for their own reasons (some of which are understandable), are trying to moderate the picture of what is happening in Gaza. But the picture seen in the world is much broader, and above all, shocking. It is impossible to be even-handed and indifferent to it. It is no longer possible to ignore and shake our heads as if the world's reaction to what is happening there is simply a widespread outbreak of anti-Semitism, because after all, everyone hates us and everyone is anti-Semite.

He refers to the evidence for the “shocking” plight for Gaza that the world has access to, and also refers to the malicious and false use of antisemitism to shut down any scrutiny of antisemitism. He also notes European leaders he describes as friends of Israel breaking ranks to condemn its murderous behaviour.

He goes on to say “we keep on slaughtering Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, too.” He says that a declaration by the head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, “saying that Palestinian villages must be destroyed, is a declaration of genocide.” He further makes the point that the pogroms taking place in the West Bank are not isolated incidents. He says:

When a Palestinian village burns down, and quite a few already have, they'll tell us that the perpetrators are a small, violent group that does not represent settlers. This is a lie. They are many.

This is also a crucial admission. He emphasises that the murderous pogroms in the West Bank - chronically underreported by the Western media - are not isolated incidents, but system and enjoying wide support amongst the settlers. And he also notes genocidal intent there.

He says it is not “possible to ignore” the behaviour of “some Israeli military units” including what he describes as the “special forces, where the best and most daring soldiers serve.” He says there are “too many incidents of cruel shooting at civilians, of destruction of property and homes, even when this should not happen.” He goes on to discuss There is too much looting and theft from homes, about which in many cases Israeli soldiers have boasted. Some have gone as far as posting about their antics online. Israelis are committing war crimes.”

He’s referring to a phenomenon which can be observed from the very start of the genocide, in which Israeli soldiers boastfully and ecstatically post their war crimes online. Al Jazeera, it must be noted, broadcast an entire documentary about this October.

Look: on one level it’s frankly ridiculous that we even have to engage in a debate about whether the Israeli army is waging a war of extermination against the Palestinian people and committing the most depraved imaginable war crimes. It’s like arguing about whether the earth is flat or not, except it’s about death on an unimaginable mass scale.

But what’s important now is we build an absolutely undeniable consensus that these war crimes and indeed genocide is taking place, both to stop the West facilitating this abomination - for example through arms sales and diplomatic support - and to get accountability and justice for those who helped facilitate the genocide, not just in Israel, but across the West.

I would note that for saying the sorts of things this Israeli former prime minister has said, people have been threatened, deplatformed, silenced, sacked, arrested, and even faced with deportation.

It should also be noted how little media coverage Olmert’s comments have received. A former Israeli prime minister is accusing his country of the worst possible crimes - and this doesn’t qualify for major headlines?

It also exposes Western leaders - because an Israeli politician who cannot be dismissed is detailing crimes they have armed and facilitated, and continue to do so. Olmert’s testimony adds to the case of criminal liability against Western leaders.

We should note that when Olmert was Israeli prime minister, he committed war crimes in Gaza in the 2008/2009 onslaught. In fact he even declared;

We've said that if there is rocket fire against the south of the country, there will be a severe and disproportionate Israeli response to the fire on the citizens of Israel and its security forces.

Outright coming and committing to a “disproportionate” response is itself a confession of war crimes. The point is that even this former Israeli prime minister has come out and said what is undeniable.

And the cracks continue to emerge. The German state, which has a history of committing genocide, of course the Holocaust, the industrialised extermination of the Jewish people, as well as Roma and others classed as undesirable, and of course in Africa with the Herero and Nama genocides, and it’s continuing that theme by having backed and facilitated Israel’s genocide.

Well now its new right-wing Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a militant pro-Israel politician, says he could “frankly no longer understand the goal of what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza strip”.

To harm the civilian population in such a way as has increasingly been the case in recent days can no longer be justified by a fight against Hamas terrorism.

It is absurd that the German leader believes that Israel’s atrocities have only emerged “in recent days” - clearly a tack that Western states intend to take - but again, it shows it is all falling apart for the pro-Israel lobby.

Indeed the German foreign minister warned the Israeli government not to weaponise antisemitism to bounce Germany into “forced solidarity”.

Meanwhile, the Belgian foreign minister has said that “my personal opinion is that this is very close to genocide. I don’t know what other horrors have yet to occur before that word can be used”.

One day, of course, it will be seen as absurd that anyone could have denied that this was anything other that genocide. And it will be asked how, given the overwhelming evidence of both intent and action, anyone could possibly have denied it was genocide.