Promoting Falsehoods: A Challenge to JEP Columnist Susana Rowles’ Article
My aim today is to dismantle the main points of what she wrote and explain why so much of it was downright wrong
Jersey Evening Post columnist, Susana Rowles, having read JEP Editor Andy Sibcy’s interview with Natalie Strecker last week, (for full disclosure a close friend of mine), following her arrest on terrorism charges wrote in this Weekend Essay a piece titled: “A challenge to claims printed in the name of free speech.”
Susana Rowles is an entrepreneur working in ed-tech. Born in Portugal she has spent most of her life in the UK and moved to Jersey in 2018 with a “keen interest in local politics” writing regularly in the paper. In the Weekend Essay she boldly writes:
‘Throughout the article, the interviewee expressed a number of falsehoods. From stating that the Palestinians are being subject to apartheid, that we are witnessing a genocide, that Israel is a “settler colonial state” and that Palestinians are being dehumanised. These accusations are not new, but they are false.’
The above points being the main thrust of her piece, which is reproduced at the end for the record, leads me to no other option than to address each of these supposed falsehoods one by one.
“Gazans are not being subjected to apartheid”
Rowles, whether being disingenuous or just ignorant, focuses her argument solely on Gaza in her assertion that there are no “Palestinians being subject to apartheid”, totally ignoring the West Bank and continuing a long history of erasing Palestinians and their plight.
The well-respected Jerusalem-based non-profit organisation, B’Tselem, whose stated goals are to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, published a report in January titled: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”. In it, the report declared that the Israeli regime:
“implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians.”
Further, the report states that all Palestinian territories are subjected to various forms of apartheid under the Israeli regime:
Israel accords Palestinians a different package of rights in every one of these units — all of which are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens. The goal of Jewish supremacy is advanced differently in every unit, and the resulting forms of injustice differ: the lived experience of Palestinians in blockaded Gaza is unlike that of Palestinian subjects in the West Bank, permanent residents in East Jerusalem or Palestinian citizens within sovereign Israeli territory. Yet these are variations on the fact that all Palestinians living under Israeli rule are treated as inferior in rights and status to Jews who live in the very same area.
Amnesty International, which is headquartered in the UK, is one of the world’s leading human rights organisations with more than ten million members and supporters around the world. It declares on its website that “No government is beyond scrutiny. We uncover the truth. We hold human rights violators to account.”
In February 2022, Amnesty released a report titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians, a look into decades of oppression and domination.” Their investigation evidenced that Israel “imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis.” and that this amounts to “apartheid as prohibited in international law”.
They further state in the report that laws, policies and practices are intended to “maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians” that has left them “fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity”. Rowles instead states, in contradiction to Amnesty International, that Israel’s policies towards its Arab population have been “inclusive” and that it is “the only state in the Middle East where Jews and Arabs coexist.”
- Adalah, Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights
- Breaking the Silence
- B’Tselem
- Combatants for Peace
- Gisha, HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual
- Haqel: In Defence of Human Rights
- Human Rights Defenders Fund
- Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs
- Parents Against Child Detention
- Physicians for Human Rights Israel
- The Public Committee Against Torture In Israel
- Yesh Din
Rowles applies the obvious comparison of South Africa in arguing why it is not an apartheid system for Palestinians. However, it is no surprise that South Africa was the country to bring claims of genocide against Israel to the international court. Nelson Mandela himself was a strong advocate of Palestinian liberation, stating: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” and also said that he felt “at home amongst compatriots” when visiting the Gaza Strip in 1999.
Rowles says Strecker should not “bandy around words” like apartheid. Yet Desmond Tutu, who worked with Mandela and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-apartheid activism, wrote in 2014: “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed.”
Former South African politician, Andrew Feinstein, who also worked under Mandela and Tutu has described the Palestinian apartheid regime as more brutal than South Africa due to Israel not being dependent on Palestinian labour:
“And that is one of the reasons why Israel has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. They don’t want them, they don’t need them. And that has made Israeli apartheid far more brutal than anything we saw or experienced in South Africa”
Finally, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice has itself found Israel’s measures in the West Bank, that imposes and maintains a separation between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, are a breach of Article 3 of the UN treaty prohibiting racial discrimination. Article 3 obligates governments to prevent, prohibit, and eradicate all racial segregation and apartheid.
When the world’s highest court, numerous human rights organisations, including in Israel itself, as well as those who lived and fought against apartheid South Africa declare Israel as an apartheid regime, then really who are we to argue and know better?
“Israel is not committing genocide”
Rather than being a falsehood, this is now the widely accepted view of what’s taking place in the Gaza Strip. Rowles argues that Israel “takes measures to minimise civilian harm”, an audacious claim considering that after “365 days of devastation”, according to the Geneva based Euro-Med Monitor, 9 out of every 10 Palestinians killed are civilians, with a third of casualties being children, equating to over 16,000 killed.
89% of Gaza’s hospitals have also either been destroyed or damaged, with 96% of the population now facing food insecurity. 75% of the population have been infected with contagious deceases and Israel is estimated to have dropped 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, far surpassing that of the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.
Despite these horrendous statistics after a year, Raz Segal, an Israeli expert in modern genocide was saying as early as October 2023 that “we’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent” and that “this is indeed a textbook case of genocide”. His assessment being based on statements like that from Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari saying of Israeli strikes, rather than minimising civilian harm, that “The emphasis on damage and not on accuracy.”
In January this year, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai released a 124 page report, which you can read in English here, (also updated this month) titled “Bearing Witness” with 1,400 footnotes detailing evidence of Israel’s genocide. Israeli newspaper Haaretz called it “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew… of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza… a shocking indictment…”
Amos Goldberg, an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, wrote an opinion piece in April titled “Yes, it is a genocide”. Goldberg in his piece makes the point that historically, “self-defence is not incompatible with genocide, but is usually one of its main causes, if not the main one.”
This month, Goldberg gave a statement when Led By Donkeys unfurled an enormous banner in Parliament Square in London with his quote “YES, IT’S A GENOCIDE” written on it. He said at its unfurling:
“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.
And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.”
Omer Bartov, a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide wrote in the Guardian in August this year:
‘I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”
I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.’
UN experts in October told the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in October that it is: “important to call a genocide a genocide”. Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967, said the international community must recognize what is happening in Gaza as a genocide and that it is not simply war crimes and crimes against humanity that the Palestinians are experiencing — “they have experienced those through their entire life,” she said, but the current situation is different
“what’s happening today is much more severe because of the technology, the weaponry and the impunity.”
In November, a UN Special Committee found Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war. The UN report raised serious concerns about Israel’s use of AI-enhanced targeting systems in directing its military operations, and the impact it has had on civilians, particularly evident in the overwhelming number of women and children among the casualties, stating:
“The Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard of its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths”
An Amnesty International investigation also concluded in December that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza and continues to commit genocide in the Gaza strip, with Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, stating:
“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them”
In November, a retired British surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza gave testimony to MPs of the parliamentary International Development Committee. As the BBC reported, his evidence was considered “profound and deeply chilling” by the Committee Chair, he told MPs:
“What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area and then the drones would come down. The drones would come down and pick off civilians — children.”
There is also an in-depth one-hour 20-minute feature-length investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit that exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves. It’s clear that this is now the most documented genocide in history:
“Israel is not a ‘settler colonial state’”
The general understanding of colonialism is that it is a system in which one group of people dominate over another and uses the subjugated group’s resources for its own benefit. Colonialism can take many forms, but the charge levelled against Israel is one of a specific variety: settler colonialism.
The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute defines “settler colonialism” as having the additional criterion of “the complete destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures by the settler’s own in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants.”
According to Rowles in her piece, it is antisemitic to label Israel as a settler colonial state. Despite this, Jewish Israeli historian and political scientist, Ilan Pappe, who wrote the seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, argues that the idea that Zionism is settler colonialism is not new, and that the Jewish settlers followed “the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements, that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled.”
Further, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, Dr. Francesca Albanese, published a report in October titled “Genocide as colonial erasure”. In it she makes clear that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognised the “racial segregation and apartheid”, and protecting the “right to self-determination of the Palestinian people”, concluding that the occupation constitutes an act of aggression, in all but name, deriving in part from its “settler colonial nature”.
In the report’s Conclusions and Recommendations to the UN General Assembly, it states that the world watches the “first live-streamed settler-colonial genocide” and that the “current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated and prosecuted”.
David Lloyd, who holds a B.A., M.A., and a PhD in Literature and Colonialism from Cambridge University, put forward in a 2012 academic paper that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is an: “exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism and whose unfolding follows a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism”
As Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University and author of “A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion”, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, writes:
“It’s vitally important that Israel be understood as a settler-colonial state because it would be impossible to understand the current conflict in Gaza without understanding its settler-colonial context.”
In defending Israel’s right to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland with the argument that the Jewish people have a “historical and spiritual connection to the land”, which has no legal basis under international law, Rowles raises the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that “recognised the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land”. However, she leaves out the key point that Arthur James Balfour stated that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This renders the Balfour Declaration somewhat null and void today, but what right did Britain have to make such a Declaration anyway?
That Palestinians are being dehumanised
Rowles gives a good summary of dehumanisation in her piece: “dehumanisation is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities, leading to discrimination, violence, or — here we go — genocide. It involves portraying others as less human, which can justify harmful actions against them.”
In the above-mentioned report, “Bearing Witness” by Israeli historian Lee Mordecai, he dedicates a significant section of the report to evidence the dehumanisation of Palestinians, my emphasis added:
‘dehumanization has proceeded from the top of the Israeli state. Israel’s Prime Minister has described the conflict as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle”, stated that “this war is civilization against barbarism” and defined the war as a battle against the Biblical Amalek in both a speech and in a letter he sent to IDF soldiers. The Bible directs to annihilate Amalek completely: men, women, children and livestock. Israel’s President has stated that Israel did not distinguish between militants and civilians, “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”. He also personally wrote a message on an artillery shell to be shot into Gaza. Israel’s Minister of Defense has described the Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals”. At least five other government ministers have made similar statements as late as May. Israel’s National Security minister told Border Police troops they should shoot terrorists even if the terrorists do not threaten them, against procedure. The minister of Social Equality and Women’s Advancement asserted that she was proud of the ruins in Gaza and that every baby there, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did. In late March, she stated that Israel’s was fighting against the Amalekites “of our times” in explicit context of the religious obligation to exterminate Amalek. A ruling party MP has stated on TV that he was told “it is clear that we need to destroy [or annihilate, depending on translation of דימשהל] all Gazans”. Other politicians have done the same. Israel’s Ambassador to the UK justified the destruction of Gaza because “every school, every mosque, every second house” was connected to a tunnel Hamas was using and therefore a legitimate target. In March, a former general described the people in three areas from which Israel retreated (Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon) as “human animals”. As late as mid April, Israel’s Finance Minister stated that “There are 2 million Nazis in Gaza who want to slaughter, rape and murder every Jew”. In early May, a Likud official stated that “there are no uninvolved [civilians] there, you have to go in and kill, and kill, and kill”. In mid June, Israel’s Foreign Ministry placed an ad that claimed that “there are no innocent civilians there [in Gaza]”’
In wider Israeli society, Mordecai writes that in the first month of the war, there were some “18,000 calls to flatten, erase or destroy Gaza on Hebrew Twitter” and that in November, 90 Israeli doctors signed a letter calling to bomb hospitals in Gaza and earlier in April that 42% of Israeli Jews claimed that Israel should not follow international humanitarian law. In November 2023, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, uploaded on its official X page a video of Israeli children singing a song celebrating their country’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
When 10 soldiers were arrested in July this year for the brutal gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner that was caught on video, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, responded by demanding: “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”. The rape wasn’t the issue, the exposing of it was.
And National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has argued that any action — even gang rape — is permissible if it is undertaken for the security of the state, such is the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Then there are the many examples of IOF soldiers parading around in Palestinian women’s underwear of the homes they invade, posting photos and videos of themselves “toying with lingerie found in Palestinian homes, creating a dissonant visual record of the war in Gaza as a looming famine intensifies world scrutiny of Israel’s offensive.”
Other points in Rowles’ piece are dedicated to blaming Hamas, throwing around the charge of antisemitism and condemning terrorism, as she writes: “For me, and I think for most people, supporting terrorism is a line that must never be crossed, and those who cross it may not find themselves vindicated, ever.” Rowles may be shocked to learn that her defence of what Israel is doing in Gaza may mean she herself crosses that line in future if the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 and its definition is ever applied fairly to Israel’s ongoing actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Rowles writes that “Israel does what we would expect any other country to do — protect its citizens and rescue its hostages” and that it is “Hamas who refuses to return the hostages”. Yet again this simply does not square with the reality, Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected plans that would have freed the hostages, with Haaretz writing in May this year that Netanyahu hoped Hamas would reject the ceasefire offer and when they didn’t, he turned to sabotage, doing everything he could to “torpedo Israel’s last and best chance at bringing the hostages home.”
The Guardian reported that the original deal on the table involved “freeing children, women and elderly and sick people in exchange for a five-day ceasefire, but the Israeli government turned this down and demonstrated its rejection with the launch of the ground offensive.”
The Times of Israel also reported that this sabotaging of a ceasefire and hostage deal has led to many Israelis blaming Netanyahu for the current situation, with mass demonstrations and Reuven Hazan, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, stating “What he cares about is his political survival. His political survival with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich doesn’t allow him to end the war and bring back the hostages.”
It doesn’t help that the hostages have also been mistakenly killed by the Israel’s own defence forces, either through miliary strikes or by being shot despite putting out an ‘SOS’ sign written with leftover food.
Without a sense of irony, Rowles writes that “the misinformation surrounding this specific issue has deepened societal divides, and we must continue to challenge biases and stereotypes.” Hopefully this piece of mine goes some way towards that laudable purpose of challenging biases and stereotypes. Still, it’s tiring that even today, despite the most documented genocide in history, people are still writing that it is not even taking place, or that no apartheid is happening or even that Palestinians are not being subjected to dehumanisation at all.
When people dismiss international law, UN legal experts, numerous human rights organisations, Israeli genocide and holocaust experts, as well as the world’s highest courts, it does leave you to question who the real extremists are and where that approach ends as this “specific issue” tears at the very fabric of our societies and threatens our freedoms. However, it’s only through openly speaking out and challenging such views that seek to intimidate us into silence that we can remind ourselves that we are still free. A privelage in such times, not to be squandered.
