Omer Shatz has accused 8 far-right figures of incitement to genocide: ‘the prosecutor should not wait until everyone is dead’
France-based Israeli lawyer Omer Shatz has submitted files to the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing eight Israeli officials of incitement to genocide against the Palestinians. Israel has killed more than 200,000 people in Gaza so far, most of them women and children, maiming many more, and continues to bomb refugee camps after supposedly agreeing a ceasefire this week.
The eight are Israeli president Isaac Herzog, PM Benjamin Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant, defence minister Israel Katz, retired General Giora Eiland, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir and television journalist Zvi Yehezkeli.
Shatz’s 170-page submission took him and eight of his International Law in Action students at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences a year to prepare. It accuses the eight of having “publicly and directly incited others to commit genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza” and tells ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan that he “should not wait until everyone is dead”.
The dossier contains examples of the genocidal statements uttered on an almost-daily basis by Israeli leaders, for example Eiland –“These people will perish in Gaza… [the women] are all the mothers, sisters or wives of the Hamas killers” and “Gaza is very similar to Nazi Germany.”
Israeli prosecutors have refused to prosecute any of the eight accused despite the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), United Nations and others that Israel is (or in the case of the ICJ, is plausibly) committing genocide, so Shatz is invoking ‘complementarity’, the principle under the Genocide Convention giving jurisdiction to the ICC if an accused’s home legal system fails to take action.
Shatz notes that on 24 November, “the [Israeli] government’s legal adviser informed the Supreme Court of his intention not to pursue a criminal investigation, in defiance of the ICJ’s order”, clearly bringing the complementarity provision into play.
The lawyer says he feels “obligated, as a Jew, to do this” and is “consumed, as an Israeli” by Israel’s crimes and impunity:
I see that all Israeli lawyers are so afraid to speak out about Gaza, that I feel obligated, as a Jew, to do this. I think I have to have this role, in Europe too.
Shatz lived in Israel until 2014 and says he left the country after losing a Supreme Court case against Yoav Gallant. Shatz said that as Israel was slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza in its 2014 so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’ he warned the Supreme Court judges:
You will see, in ten years, there will be a genocide.
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Omer Shatz will have his F’book account closed, will be refused coffee at Starbucks, will have his HSBC account closed and be called an anti-Semite by the political party that I was pleased to leave once its idiotic mask-wearing membership voted an arch-z*onist, socialism-hating, Keir Starmer, its leader.
Reinforces the point that opposing Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing is not even anti-israeli, let alone antisemitic – something lost on our neanderthal Police. We should be jailing Jews, Zionists and MPs who oppose protests, not pandering to them.