‘Annihilation’ of Palestinians began with the Balfour Declaration, say international experts

Israel has entered the “annihilation phase of genocide,” over 40 leading state crime scholars, including major public intellectual figures said in a statement this week. Israel’s actions in Gaza and historic actions against the Palestinian people fit both legal and criminological definitions of the crime of genocide.

Citing Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention, signatories to the letter, which includes professors and experts from the UK and US, argued that Israeli policy meets the definition of genocide: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Citing also senior Israeli politicians and military officials, the statement said that there is explicit intent to commit genocide. President Isaac Herzog was one many mentioned in the list. He declared that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, denying their basic humanity. Israel’s announcement of a state of “total siege” of Gaza, cutting off water, food, electricity and medical supplies, amounted to a clear statement of intent to commit genocide.

Such dehumanising rhetoric, argued the group, mirrors language used in genocides like Rwanda and Myanmar to justify the mass killing of a targeted group. While not constituting conclusive legal evidence, these quotes contribute to an intensifying climate of extremism in Israel that enables grave crimes against Palestinians. The overt denial of Palestinians’ humanity by officials at the highest levels is a dangerous indicator of the genocidal process unfolding.

“Empirically we know that genocide unfolds over years and frequently decades,” the experts said in the statement. “Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians did not begin on October 7, 2023. For Palestinians the genocide process began in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, when Britain ‘gifted’ their country to European Zionists looking for a Jewish homeland. It materially took form in the 1948 war, which led to the creation of the State of Israel. During this catastrophe (the Nakba) thousands of Palestinians were killed and 750,000 were driven from their homeland, forever denied a right of return by the Israeli state”.

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The genocidal process continued with “decades of dispossession, occupation, structural violence, forced eviction and apartheid discrimination have followed,” the group added.

What we are witnessing now is the dénouement of the Israeli state’s genocide of the indigenous Palestinians. What we are seeing is a second Nakba.

The statement also emphasised that genocides require complicity from more powerful actors. They accuse the US and other nations of enabling Israel’s crimes through military aid and shielding Israel from accountability. Mainstream media and public intellectuals provide further complicity through propaganda campaigns.

It further noted that only sustained public condemnation and disruption by global civil society can end Israeli apartheid and genocide. With world governments unwilling to intervene, grassroots solidarity offers the best hope for Palestinians’ human rights.

Last month over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies signed a separate public statement warning of the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.