Posted: Sunday, August 10, 2025. 8:47 am CST.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize News.
By Assad Shoman: It is now impossible to deny that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and, increasingly, in the West Bank as well.
Jews have been among the first to say so. As early as 13 October 2023 Raz Segal, an Israeli Holocaust and genocide studies scholar, described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide.[1] Dozens of other Jewish scholars have agreed.
Segal reminds us that from the birth of the Zionist entity ethnic cleansing was the norm: “Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel”.[2]
A SETTLER COLONIAL PROJECT
Ilan Pappé, another prominent Israeli Jewish historian, has described the genocide not as beginning in October 2023, but as “an incremental policy of elimination or genocide”.
“The root of the violence in Palestine,” insists Pappé, is the evolvement of Zionism in the late 19th century into a settler colonial project … [whose objective] is to eliminate the native population …
“Therefore, the only scenario in which a settler colonial project can end its violent treatment of the indigenous people is when it ends or collapses.[3]
Pappé is not alone in thinking that the Zionist state must disappear if the genocide is ever to be stopped. Michael Sfard, a noted Jewish legal scholar whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, writes: “Israel is a racist state, it supports ethnic cleansing, devours its critics, harbors contempt for its non-Jewish citizens and shows no compassion for its innocent civilians who have been taken hostage [4];
WORSE THAN ISRAEL’S BRUTALITY
But if there is anything worse than the horrendous brutality of the state of Israel it is the total complicity in that savagery by the United States of America, Britain and all the so-called “free world” or “Western” states.
If they had not allowed Israel to demolish the whole structure of human rights even before the cement was dry on the newly built edifices of international human rights law, and if the USA had not supplied Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of armaments along with diplomatic cover giving it absolute impunity, the genocide could not have happened.
With today’s communications systems everybody knows that the Israeli crimes and the gleeful sadism with which they proclaim and celebrate them make the Zionist State NO DIFFERENT from the Nazi regime that carried out a genocide during the Second World War.
That war ended with the Western powers establishing a new international system of law and rights. But Israel has been systematically dismantling that system. It has defied all UN resolutions, all ICJ opinions and rulings, shredded the UN Charter, broken every international law and all that with the complicity of the same Western powers that set up the system.
And so it took South Africa, the country that had suffered decades of oppression from white supremacists, to step up and defend the system of law and rights and take Israel to the ICJ for the crime of Genocide.
In January 2024 the ICJ ruled that there was a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide and ordered it to stop the massacres,[5] and in November 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC) found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel’s Prime Minister and Défense Minister bear criminal responsibility for the “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.[6]
THE COMPLICITY OF WESTERN STATES AND MEDIA
But Israel ignored these orders, and the Western powers have done all in their power to oppose the work of these institutions that are fundamental to the defence of international law and human rights. They have sanctioned judges of the ICC and Francesca Albanese[7], threatened governments and outlawed their own citizens that protest the genocide.
And Western media has collaborated fully with the genocide. Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, writes: “The facade of Western civilization as a beacon of moral superiority has crumbled… Journalism, once a noble profession, now serves empire and erases the voices of the oppressed… The media’s silence is not neutrality—it’s collaboration…
Western journalists echo official lies while Palestinian journalists are assassinated for telling the truth”.[8] Some 250 Palestinian journalists have been deliberately killed by Israel in 20 months, many with their families. Israel has targeted and killed more journalists, health and education workers, and UN workers that anyone else in any war ever.
THE SILENCE OF THE CARIBBEAN
The Caribbean is a region that has suffered heavily at the hands of white supremacist states, from the abomination of the slave trade and slavery to colonialism and exploitation. But in the face of the settler colonialism and Apartheid, even genocide, of Israel it has remained largely silent.
An article in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner castigates regional governments: “CARICOM, forged in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, offers nothing but timid gestures and tepid prose. CARICOM’s statement issued on July 11 … is a failure of moral and political courage …To speak in platitudes while children die beneath drones is not neutrality—it is complicity. …Where are the calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions? Where are the demands to sever relations with an entity that bombs hospitals and starves civilians?”[9]
It is true that Belize, and particularly the government of Prime Minister John Briceño, has done more than any in the Caribbean: in November 2023 Belize became only the second country, after Bolivia, to suspend relations with Israel; it joined the ICJ Advisory Opinion case on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, and the case brought by South Africa against Israel for the crime of Genocide.[10] It even participated in the inaugural meeting of the Hague Group formed to create coordinated action to enforce international law and halt the genocide in Gaza.
Belize subsequently withdrew from the Hague Group, partly because it felt so isolated in relation to the CARICOM countries, none of whom had stepped up and made clear their opposition to the Genocide.[11]
But finally, there now seems to be more movement in the Caribbean. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines recently joined 11 other countries at a Hague Group meeting in Colombia and agreed concrete measures to stop the Genocide.
TIME FOR ACTION
I have been told that Israeli soldiers with the blood of Palestinian children on their hands visit Belize for rest and recreation between bouts of killings, a matter that needs investigating. The Israelis that are perpetrating crimes against humanity enter Belize freely without a visa.[12]
Military service is compulsory for all Israeli citizens, so it is very likely that any Israeli visitors between the ages of 18 and 40 are child murderers that have participated in the daily massacres taking place in Palestine that we see on our screens every day. Surely this is unacceptable, and our relevant authorities must be asked to stop this immediately. And if they come, we must make them know that baby killers are not welcome here.
A group of Caribbean peoples movements is calling on CARICOM governments to stop making useless declarations about a two-state solution and instead to respect the right of the Palestinian people’s self-determination to decide their own future, and to take specific measures to stop the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.[13]
Here in Belize we must find out if those baby killers are having fun in Caye Caulker or Placencia and prosecute them, as is our duty under the Genocide Convention, and stop others from coming. We must ensure that ships carrying the Belizean flag do not transport armaments to the rogue state of Israel, and deflag them if they do. We must take all possible measures, especially along with other CARICOM countries, to STOP THE GENOCIDE.
The ICJ declared in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of certain parts of Palestine is illegal and that they must GET OUT. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel get out by September 18 2025. Israeli is refusing to comply and instead is stealing more land. This is setting a terrible precedent. It is as if after the ICJ rules that Belize is sovereign from the rivers Sarstoon and Hondo to the sea, Guatemala were to seize land, island and sea and nobody stops them.
Israel is tearing up the UN Charter, the Conventions to prevent and punish Genocide and Apartheid, the Geneva Conventions establishing the rules of international humanitarian law, and nobody is stopping them. Belize has a legal obligation in international law to do everything possible to stop a genocide in progress. Belizeans must decide how they will go about complying with that obligation.
We would do well to recall the words of W, E. B. DuBois: “The hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs”.[14]
[1] https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
[2] As in footnote 1.
[3] https://www.newarab.com/opinion/end-gaza-genocide-uproot-source-all-violence-zionism
[4] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/thanks-to-its-regime-israel-is-losing-the-justification-for-its-existence/00000195-1416-d00a-adfd-7cd7ea380000
[5] https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
[6] https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu
[7] Francesca Albanese, hero to the Global South and all who value justice, is UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. She has issued several heavily documented reports proving Israel’s genocide and was sanctioned by the USA when she published a report (From economy of occupation to economy of genocide) showing the complicity of mostly US capitalist firms and how they profit greatly from the genocide: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session59/advance-version/a-hrc-59-23-aev.pdf
[8] For an in-depth interview with Hedges, go to https://www.egyptindependent.com/in-fiery-interview-us-journalist-chris-hedges-calls-out-americas-support-of-genocide-in-gaza/
[9] https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/focus/20250803/jalil-dabdoub-beneath-shadows-rose-hall-caricom-leaders-guilty
[10] https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
[11]Guyana did make submissions to the ICJ Advisory Opinion and important interventions at the UN Security Council while it was a member.
[12] https://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=15537
[13] https://docs.google.com/document/d/19ykNtKhnbdhTidRvJqgvDZkf5TM9QFbCJdKuWFWARcQ/edit?tab=t.0
[14] Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk
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The post Assad Shoman says “Stop the Genocide” against Palestinians appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
Posted: Sunday, August 10, 2025. 8:47 am CST. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Breaking Belize
The post Assad Shoman says “Stop the Genocide” against Palestinians appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
