The problem of accepting Bernie Sanders.

Nearly two years after the terrible atrocities in Gaza, Senator Bernie Sanders finally realized genocide as genocide. In an editorial published on its website on the Senate in the United States, he wrote: “The intention is clear. The conclusion is inevitable: Israel commits the genocide in Gaza.”

As with recent recent statements – from the United Nations and the International Association of Geninium Scholars – this urgency came too late. But worse, it came within the framework of a very problematic framework. Sanders chose to start his operation by mainly indicating that “Hamas started it”. This not only elevates the blame on the victims, but it also erases eight decades of looting, looting and ethnic cleansing.

This frame is more than just moral bankruptcy; It is a legal matter that is not legally relevant and puts a dangerous precedent that any operator or colonizer who resists must put their weapons or face the same fate of Gaza. All persecuted population whispered that their survival does not depend on international or human law, but on their ideal presentation of those who seek to erase them.

The 1948 genocide agreement defines genocide as “any of the following actions committed with the intention of destruction, in whole or in part, a national, racial, racist or religious group.” The five prohibited actions extend through the spectrum of the Palestinian experience in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and historic Palestine: the killing of the group members, causing serious physical or mental harm, which intentionally creates calculated cases to achieve physical destruction, impose measures to prevent births, and transfer a population.

The legal framework does not descend any exceptions, does not provide the star marks. There is no condition that reads “unless you think that the other side started it.” There is no paragraph about the relative genocide. There is no sub -section that explains when the genocide may be justified or understood.

Sanders admits that “Israel’s right to defend itself”, and in reality it does not own it in this case. Under international law, the state cannot simultaneously exercise control over an area, then attack it for claiming that it is “foreign” and pose a threat to national security.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed that in 2004 it was in its ruling on the wall of the apartheid, which was Israel in the occupied West Bank. The International Court of Justice considered that Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which allows the state to practice self -defense, does not apply to Israel in the event of an alleged threat from the Palestinians because it occupies it.

Israel has maintained the only and absolute control of the Gaza border, the air field, and territorial waters since 1967. For decades, it has controlled what would happen and what comes out, who lives and who dies. She has no “right to defend herself” against a people that fully occupy it.

What Sanders and others also reject is that international law gives Palestinians the right to resist the occupation. The decision of the United Nations General Assembly 37/43 confirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle for independence, regional integrity, national unity and liberation from foreign hegemony and foreign occupation through all available means, including armed struggle.”

This does not justify the targeting of civilians. The Palestinian resistance, like resistance, must be compatible with international law and the distinction between fighters and civilians. But this means that the resistance itself is not illegal by its nature, and it cannot be used to justify the genocide in response.

When Sanders begins his confession to the genocide “but Hamas”, he is not only the victim. It deprives the Palestinians that international law gives them rights, while asserting Israel’s rights that international law is explicitly denied.

Therefore, the introduction to the genocide in Gaza with “but Hamas” is dangerous. It indicates that the people’s right to exist is free of genocide is conditional on their “ideal behavior”, their full Islam, and tame them for their repression. This logic would justify the retroactive effect of all colonial genocide in history. The peoples of Hero and Nama resisted German colonialism in Namibia. Does that genocide justify? The indigenous Americans fought the European settlers. Is this legitimacy to the extermination of the sentence? The Jewish people in the Nazi Europe occupied by the weapons took place in the Warsaw Jewish uprising and various resistance groups. Was this justification for detention camps and gas rooms?

Finally, by entering an argument “but Hamas”, Sanders also wipes more than a century of history.

The current genocide did not start on October 7, 2023. It represents another escalation and the most extreme of a project that began in the late nineteenth century with the arrival of the Zionist settlers to establish a Jewish state with the largest possible number of Jews, and a fewer number of Palestinians. Nakba of 1948 witnessed that the Zionist forces expel 750,000 Palestinians, more than 50 percent of the indigenous Palestinian population, from their homes, destroying more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns and seizing 78 percent of Palestine historically. More than 15,000 Palestinians were killed between 1947 and 1949.

Over the next seven decades, Israeli governments have never stopped plans to purify the remaining ethnic Palestinians and realize the Greater Israeli vision that extends from the Sinai to the Euphrates. Israel did not suddenly become genocide on October 7, 2023; It was a long crime in making.

However, there are still people like Sanders who choose to blame the Palestinians for their extermination.

Genocide is called a “crime of crimes” for some reason. It represents the recognition of humanity that some lines can never be crossed, some actions can never be justified, regardless of context or provocation. The moment we start in exceptions, the moment we say “but they started”, we made it to concern the life of one group more than another group.

History will judge us whether we can see the genocide of what it is, without the signs of the star, without exceptions, without the comfortable lies that allow strong sleep while children come out to death or increase cutting. If we fail to understand this basic fact, we not only fail the Palestinians. We fail in all occupied persons, colonialists and persecutions whose resistance may one day be informed of their extermination.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.