Professor Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation, who has published extensively on genocide, is interviewed in a 24-minute segment on the Islam Channel.
Image by hosny salah from Pixabay
Professor Green discusses how genocide can be understood as a process and Israel's impunity from international courts as well as the abuse of the environment in Palestine that has taken place as a result of settler colonialism.
“The international courts of justice and criminal courts, while valuable, symbolically are not going to address this genocide in any meaningful way. International law and international legal order has failed the Palestinians at every step of the way. We can't expect the international courts, the lawyers that service them and the United Nations which support them will punish Israel as that's not going to happen.
"International law is something of a red herring - yes, Israel breaches international law consistently but does so with utter impunity. The dehumanisation of Palestinians and targeting healthcare workers fits the international definition of genocide but the definition is not enough. Geocide unfolds over years and frequently decades. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians was established in 1917, with the Balfour Declaration.
"The convention doesn’t capture this but genocide has to be understood as a process. It's a process which begins with dehuminisation and it ends with erasure. And in between and often concurrent are a number what we genocide scholars see as recognisable phases as litmus testing violence. Violence without consequence is impunity and this emboldens perpetrators to commit further violence.”
Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation and Co-Director the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London.