Israeli Cultural and Environmental Genocide in Iran

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Most of the world’s attention, in cataloguing Israeli genocide in Gaza and now Iran, concerns the mass slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of human beings; along with the wholesale destruction of everything enabling life.  In Gaza, Israel has murdered 75,000, the majority civilians, by the conservative account of the Gaza ministry of health.  But based on a recent Lancet study, I found that number is closer to 130,000; or 7% of the total population.  All of this affirms a major standard of determining a genocide: mass murder and the effort to physically eradicate an entire people.

But lost in the hailstorm of Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have systematically reduced it to a total ruin, are equally horrific categories of genocide: a health system repeatedly bombed, medical personnel systematically murdered and imprisoned, journalists assassinated, Schools reduced to rubble, mosques turned into ruins, worshipers murdered in  churchyards.

Israel committed the same crimes during the 2009 Lebanon war, when it bombed oil facilities, contaminated acquifers, caused a power plant oil spill (80 miles of beaches polluted, $200-million in damage) and burned agricultural fields. These were the tactics of multiple wars dating back to 2006.  All of this is not a bug, but a feature of Israeli war-fighting strategy. It is the Middle East version of Curtis LeMay’s carpet bombing of Dresden, Japan’s rape of Nanjing, the Biblical extermination of the Amalekites, and the bombing of Hiroshima.  It is far beyond shock and awe. It is sheer terror.

Ecocide

Over the past two weeks, Israel has reproduced this strategy in its war on Iran.  Israel has taken its air attacks to an entirely new level of cruelty: environmental catastrophe.  It launched a massive assault on the country’s energy infrastructure; in particular its oil facilities.  In Tehran alone, a city of 10-million, it bombed oil storage tanks causing massive fires, smoke, and finally Black acid rain, which rained down on the city.  Despite official warnings to residents to remain indoors, those with families to feed could not avoid going into the streets to find provisions and perform other critical tasks.

They did so at considerable risk to their health.  This environmental disaster will cause enormous damage to human organs, in particular the lungs.  Just as Black lung disease in miners causes the eventual collapse of breathing function and death, the Israeli attack will be felt for decades to come in premature death and potential birth defects among pregnant women. One public health expert called the attacks “chemical warfare”:

The attack on the oil depots could be construed as chemical warfare, which violates international law, because the aggressors…knew the hazards the civilians…would face, Cleetus said.

This is not a corollary to Israel’s main goal of destroying Iran’s energy capability.  This is meant as a deliberate punishment against the Iranian people.  A suffocating squeeze around the neck to demand capitulation in the face of immense Israel-US might.  The message: give up and we will kill you,turn your country into a wasteland and make life not worth living. In other words: this is environmental genocide, also known as ecocide.

Culturcide

In recent days, Israeli attacks also wrought incalculable damage on multiple religious institutions throughout the country. They included Golestan, a famed Iranian mosque, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  It is a wonder of religious architecture rivaling Notre Dame, the Taj Mahal, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Angor Wat.  Dropping a bomb on these edifices is an act of cultural genocide (culturcide).

An expert on Iranian religious shrines describes the impact:

The shockwave appears to have impacted the ceremonial sections of the palace complex, which also contain the most extravagant decorations, Babaie said, noting damage to the Ayvan-e Takht-e Marmar or Hall of the Marble Throne. These areas contained elaborate ayeneh-kari, or mosaic mirror decorations.

“The shattered mirrors, and mosaic mirror-work, the chandeliers, and gilded and painted wood frames of glass and mirrors; these scatter all over the site as seen in images after the bombings,” Babaie wrote. She compared the ornate room to Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

As a museum, Babaie said, the palace holds a collection of “the greatest artistic outputs of hundreds of years of art history of Iran” and of photography that showcases Iran’s early adoption of the technology.

Another scholar added: “These manuscripts, many of which include lavish paintings and illumination, represent the cultural, artistic, and intellectual heritage of Islam and Iran stretching back centuries…”

Israel and the US have systematically bombed other religious sites throughout the country.  Nor is this an unintended consequence of Israel’s general war strategy: bombings which inadvertently strike such shrines.  A single such attack might not qualify as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”  But a widespread pattern of such assaults does qualify as genocide.

Neither the US military nor IDF have acknowledged which is responsible:

It was unclear if it was U.S. or Israeli strikes that caused the damage. The Pentagon did not provide comment. The Israeli Defense Forces said it was “unfamiliar” with claims of damage to UNESCO sites.

It seems unlikely the US would wreak such havoc on multiple religious sites in multiple cities. Israel, on the other hand, has deliberately done so in numerous previous conflicts.  In fact, it has plowed a path of religious desecration throughout the region.  1,000 mosques have been razed to the ground in Gaza. In fact, there is not a single one left standing.  Gaza is a model, proof of concept. Iran is its replication.

Other nations waging similar campaigns against their enemies will offer Israel as justification for their own crimes.  This in turn will further normalize cultural genocide as a standard feature of modern warfare.

Other examples of Israeli religious terrorism: in Jerusalem, police have fired tear gas, destroyed Qurans, and pillaged Al Aqsa mosque. On Haram al Sharif, Israeli settlers are in advanced stages of planning to raze this third holiest shrine of Islam and replace it with the Third Temple. Within 1948 Israel, Judeo-terrorists have burned down ancient Christian churches and damaged monasteries.  They also routinely assault and spit on priests in the Old City.

This is part of Israel’s war on religion. Its apocalyptic battle between the God of Israel and the sons of Ishmael.  As I noted above, there’s also no love lost with Christianity.

In defining these crimes as genocide, there is the issue of intent.  There must be a pattern of actions which establish intent, through commission of crimes which fall within categories of genocide.  The attack on Golestan, taken in context of widespread Israeli attacks on religious shrines, establishes such intent.  Israel and its apologists argue vehemently that there cannot be intent, because Israel does not deliberately target such religious institutions.  However, denials do not constitute proof. Actions do. In this case, the repeated attacks on sacred edifices establishes and confirms the crime.

Why are the holy artifacts of western religion more valuable than those of Islam?  Why would the desecration of Notre Dame in an air attack enrage humanity, while an F-35 turning an ancient Iranian religious shrine into rubble elicits no similar outrage?

While it is right and fitting that we denounce such crimes, and demand accountability from international judicial bodies like the ICC and ICJ, a cynical part of me insists on playing Devil’s advocate: does any of it matter?  If we perform the painstaking and absolutely essential work of documenting these crimes in hopes that a time will come when the world will muster the courage to hold the criminals accountable–will it?  Have Israel, the US, Russia and other defiant states who’ve shredded international humanitarian law, rendered this work meaningless?  In this new Age of Impunity, do these standards retain any meaning?  Do they have any usefulness?  Any power?  Can we ever retrieve them from the historical dustbin to which they’ve been confined by the malefactors?  Or are we consigned to a perpetual hell on earth, Hobbes “war of all against all.”

The distinguished Israeli human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard, recently opined on this subject. Clearly, he was troubled personally by the prospect that his entire career is overshadowed by the powerful judicial system which normalizes Israeli apartheid.  He may win a battle for a particular individual Palestinian client, while losing the war.  To all of this frustration he responds, that if his clients believe there is efficacy if using the legal system to redress their grievances, he will fight for them and find meaning and value in that.

Similarly, as an independent journalist documenting Israeli crimes, I’ve long lost the belief that my work can impact the structural apartheid and cruelty of Zionism, Israeli apartheid and genocide.  I can only document its crimes with my own “still small voice.”  It is not be mighty. It will not topple governments. But it must suffice. Dayenu.