“Text-Book Case of Genocide”: Top U.N. Officials Resigns and Denounces Israeli Assault on Gaza

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

In this holiday special, we spend the rest of the hour with the dissenters: two top officials, Craig Mokhiber at the United Nations and Josh Paul at the State Department. They both recently resigned from their jobs to protest the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

We begin with Craig Mokhiber, longtime international human rights lawyer who served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He had worked at the United Nations since 1992 and lived in Gaza in the 1990s. He recently resigned his post and accused the United Nations of failing to address what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza.

In a letter addressed to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, Craig Mokhiber wrote, quote, “In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules,” Mokhiber said.

Craig Mokhiber went on to write, “What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities,” unquote.