Those with eyes to see and ears to hear – including this author, as it happens – have known it for a very long time already.

Yet the findings of the United Nation’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (hereafter: the UN Commission) that have just been published and detailed in a long report are still of great importance: Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinians.

To any unbiased, intellectually honest and morally normal reader – no matter his or her politics – the report, the product of two years of “painstaking” fact-gathering and legal analysis, leaves no doubt that Israel’s actions in Gaza have matched four of the five ways of committing genocide listed in the foundational and binding 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as well as the 1998 Rome Statute: Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Under international law, even one of these actions is sufficient to be charged with genocide.

The UN Commission report, of course, converges with what AP has called a “rising chorus” of belated yet direly needed acknowledgements of the single greatest crime yet committed in our century, including from: the International Association of Genocide Scholars (the “world’s leading” such association according to the BBC), the Israeli NGO’s B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), and now even US Senator Bernie Sanders, who used to struggle tooth and nail to unforgivably deny this genocide as long as he could.

More generally, by now 43........

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