 a Call by Palestinian Universities on Gaza and the future that is calm, clear, strong, persuasive, and sensible, but will not be heeded in Tel Aviv or Washington without an unrising by people representing civil society/ |
https://www.birzeit.edu/en/news/unified-call-justice-and-freedom-palestine
[Prefatory Note: Responses to questions posed by ODVV (Organization for Defending Victims of Violence). The ODVV website is www.odvv.org. At the moment many prayers call fervently for a permanent ceasefire, but the future is suspended in doubt, and the pre-pause Israeli genocidal onslaught casts a dark shadow over all of humanity. Many innocent lives in Gaza stilll remain in jeopardy if the pause or truce is not converted into a ceasefire and emergency relief on a large scale. My responses waver between fears of a resumed Israeli military operation and hopes of confronting day after issues of post-genocidal economic reconstruction and scenarios of political transformation.]
1.Horrible media outlets focus on the access to food and other essential items for the Gaza civilians. What do you think of the starvation of civilians and children as a tool for war?
Policies of war combatants that deliberately focus on starvation or denial of access to food as a tactic or tool of war are guilty of war crimes. It is usual for such tactics to be disavowed by their perpetrators as collateral damage with no intention to target civilians of any category. If the targeting appears deliberate, continues in similar patterns disregarding predominant civilian targeting, and inflicts heavy civilian casualties, as has been the case with respect to the Israeli attacks in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attack, it is viewed as criminal activity. The fact that the October 7 itself included severe war crimes does not in any way justify Israeli conduct in a retaliatory mode that is disproportional or criminal. Starvation intentionally directed at civilians is unconditionally prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and an inherent war crime, which if repeated or continuous can be prosecuted as a Crime against Humanity or even Genocide if the instrument of starvation seems to be used for the purpose of destroying a racial, ethnic, or religious group in whole or in part.
2.How do you see the limitation of access to electricity, water, medicine, and hygiene items to be affecting people’s and children’s lives?
In the context of Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza such restrictions, applied to an impoverished population without qualification, are genocidal examples of aggravated war crimes explicitly prohibited by provisions of the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. Israel as the Occupying Power does not right enjoy any right of self-defense against an Occupied People, and is under a pervasive duty to protect the civilian population under all circumstances. Israel’s implementation of its government order totally cutting off Gaza’s access to food, fuel and electricity has contributed to the destruction of medical system, imperiling the entire population of Gaza, killing many children and women, as well as men, and the cause of widespread suffering of all Gazans, including children at women.
Specific provisions are found in the Geneva Convention that confirm this assessment. Article 6 indicates the full reach of the protective legal duties of the Occupying Power to the civilian population under their control. The text of this provision underlies the commitment of International Humanitarian Law to the protection of civilians:
ART. 6. — “The present Convention shall apply from the outset of any conflict or occupation mentioned in Article 2.
In the territory of Parties to the conflict, the application of the present Convention shall cease on the general close of military operations.
In the case of occupied territory, the application of the present Convention shall cease one year after the general close of military operations; however, the Occupying Power shall be bound, for the duration of the occupation, to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory, by the provisions of the following Articles of the present Convention: 1 to 12, 27, 29 to 34, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 59, 61 to 77, 143.”
Protected persons whose release, repatriation or re- establishment may take place after such dates shall meanwhile continue to benefit by the present Convention.”
In addition, because so responsive to inquiry as to the status of starvation under international humanitarian law, the partial texts of Article 55 & 56 is reproduced below:
ART. 55. — “To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”
ART. 56. — “To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.“3.Over the decades, the world has witnessed a multitude of various rounds of attacks on Gaza, with no achievements, in your opinion, what is the reason for the inability of the international community to address the gross violations of human rights by Israel?
3.We have witnessed the dreadful attack on Gaza Hospital, what do you think of the air raids that seem to be indiscriminately targeting the places that are supposed to serve as civilians’ sanctuary in wartime?
The wording of the question suggests the confusion surrounding this important dimension of the most serious allegations of ‘indiscriminate targeting’ when contrary to the literalness of the alllegations, the targets are obviously being selected and targeted by Israel’s precision weaponry against just such legally protected sites and civilians, including hospitals, refugee camps, sick and wounded patients, forced civilian evacuees compelled by Israel mandatory order to leave their homes in the north of Gaza for the southern portion of the strip. The entire military operation against Gaza is seemingly intended to create an ethnic cleansing phenomenon comparable to the forced dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians. This happened in the final phases of the 1948 War known to Palestinians as the Nakba (or catastrophe)
4.The message that the Palestinians were receiving from pressure against them by Israel including building settlements and killing civilians in Gaza is that Israel is against the two-state solution question. So, it’s a big question mark on the two-state solution. Do you think that a two-state solution is still a valid solution and can be a way to get out of this deadlock and war? or do you believe that these current incident events have also brought this solution to a dead end?
This is a puzzling time for those thinking about a benevolent future for both Palestinians and Israelis. At the moment external voices that are seeking a permanent ceasefire, including the UN Secretary-General, as well as many longtime Jewish supporters of Israel, continue to act as if a two-state is the best and only feasible solution despite seemingly formidable obstacles that are being overlooked. The first set of obstacles is the extensive and militant settler phenomenon, which has been consistently viewed at the UN and most international venues as being in direct violation of Article 49(6) of Geneva IV. There are currently about 250 settlements spread around the West Bank and as many as 500,000 settlers who would resist by force any arrangement calling for their relocation in pre-1967 Israel (as did the 2005 ‘Disengagement’ from Gaza). The second obstacle is the known opposition of Likud leadership, including Netanyahu, to meaningful forms of Palestinian statehood, most dogmatically and openly by Netanyahu’s coalition partner, the Religious Right Party, as most prominently represented in the current so-called ‘uniity government’ by Ben Gvir and Smotrich. A possible third obstacle relates to the likelihood of a Palestinian refusal to accept an inferior form of statehood involving permanent demilitarization, Israel’s retention of West Bank settler enclaves, and some West Bank land transfers to Israel.
A sustainable peace depends on political arrangements based on equality between the two peoples as well as upholding the dignity of other minorities (Druze, Bedoin). If this skepticism about a two-state solution seems to imply a single state it would highlight the principal obstacle that would doubtless come from Zionists who remain deeply committed to a Jewish supremist state and to a lesser extent from Palestinians demanding the full right of return of the five million or more Palestinian refugees and involuntary exiles living in camps or spread around the world. Given the depth of resentment that is associated with events since October 7 even a confederal union of the two peoples is hardlly even thinkable under present conditions. At the same time, to restore the former status quo seems impossible given the devastation of Gaza, underscored by the lingering prospect of mass homelessness affecting the entire populaton of northern Gaza. Innovative solutions involving federation or confederation with either Lebanon or Egypt seems also non-viable at this point, although given the absence of a feasible peace arrangement are making the advocacy of innovative solutions the least bad of plausible day after options.
5.Considering the scope and intensity of the destruction of the civilian infrastructure and the blockade which is imposed on Gaza, in your opinion, what strategy should be implemented to firstly end the siege of Gaza (permanently and not return to the pre-conflict situation that practically turned Gaza a prison) and secondly, what should be done to heal this 75-year-old wound which was created since the establishment of Israel?
These are difficult questions for which there may no satisfactory answers to long as Israel is governed by such an extreme government and continues to enjoy the support of the US and strongest members of the EU. I think that even these governments supporting Israel throughout the horrifying genocidal spectacle feel increasing pressure from their own citizenry to find a more humane future for the people of Gaza and all of occupied Palestine, and in this sense, that the devastation wrought by Israel has backfired as a strategy that coupled security concerns with expansionist ambitions, although it is too soon to be confident of such an assessment.
I think the first priority after a permanent ceasefire is established would be to secure the withdrawal of Israel armed forces from Gaza, followed by an emergency international relief effort that gave priority to rebuilding destroyed residential neighborhoods and family residences, as well as the despatch of some form of international peacekeeping force, whether under UN auspices or otherwise. The forced evacuations together with intensity of bombardment has destroyed over 76% of the residences in northern Gaza. Of course, the rebuilding of hospitals and the repair of damage to UN structures, mosques and churches, and refugee facilities should also be included by international donors in their effort to meet this gigantic challenge of devastation at a time of cold weather and overcrowding.
More difficult by far is to end the iron grip on Gaza that has been maintained in different cruel forms ever since 1967. A first step would be a demand by the UNSC, and possibly such other intergovernmental groupings as the BRICs, to lift the blockade imposed in 2007 and agree with a Palestinian unity governance council on mutually administered border controls and an international protection force to monitor arms inputs ideally to both Gaza and Israel. It is virtually certain that these steps could not be taken until the certain political preconditions were met. Of vital political, perhaps indispensable, importance in day after contexts would be the replacement of the Netanyahu government by a new coalition with a commitment to a sustainable peace.. Hopefully a new Israeli leadership committed to finding a neutral framework for negotiating a genuine political compromise that must finally give recognition to the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
These ideas may seem utopian at present, but they represent the only practical alternative to the sort of exterminist politics that Israel has so far relied upon in responding to the October 7 attack, which were immediately seized upon as an opportunity by the Israeli government to carry out the expansionist final phases of the Zionist Project, which included sovereign control and Palestinian dispossession in the West Bank and overall international erasure of the Palestinian people and extinguishing any remaining statehood expectations. Destroying Hamas was never the entire, and perhaps not the main, rationale for the disproportionate Israeli response, and may have also been motivated by the perceived need of the Tel Aviv leaders to divert attention of Israelis and the world from the inexcusable security failures of the Israeli government that allowed Hamas to plan and carry out its October 7 attack. For Israel to achieve the political space required to fulfill the maximalist Zionist vision required several development: the demonization of Hamas, the exaggeration of future security threats facing Israel, and the genocidal onslaught that inflicted undeserved and horrifying punishment upon 99% innocent and previously victimized Gaza civilians while distracting attention of the world to the wider policy agenda of the Tel Aviv leadership. In thinking about the future it is helpful to separate the humanitarian urgency of funding livable conditions for the people of Gaza from a politics that aimed at the transformation of the underlying conflict. Yet to leave the political track to the parties would invite future tragedies arising from the contradictory goals inherent in settler colonialism and those of a national movement of resistance in a post-colonial setting.
In response to inquiries I am providing the link to my lecture honoring the legacy of Edward Said on Nov. 4, a time of genocide in Gaza.
[Prefatory Note: The post below is a modified version of an opinion piece published in CounterPunch on November 24, 2023. The ‘pause’ or ‘truce’ as it frequently called, in Western media is detached from the genocide that preceded and closely linked to the Hamas Attack of October 7th, which is characterized as ‘terrorism’ whereas Israeli genocidal violence is treated as Israel defending itself or less approvingly as an excessive and disproportionate recourse to violence that seemed to focus its fury on target inflicting massive casualties on Palestinian civilians. Sustained warfare almost inevitably produces suffering for the innocent, often minimized as ‘collateral damage,’ but the Israeli campaign has seemed to aim at maximize acute suffering of the whole of civilian Gaza. If this is not ‘terrorism,’ public language serves as a tool to validate the priorities of the powerful while casting the actions of its adversary as pure evil, distorting expectations about a reasonable outcome.]
The ‘humanitarian pause’ started on November 24 after elaborate negotiations between adversaries who must interact despite an atmosphere of intense hostility and bitter resentment. The pause now often referred to as a ‘truce’ is supposed to last for four days, but is thought likely to be extended if Hamas can be induced to release additional hostages. Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and leaders of Israel’s unity government repeatedly pledge to renew their ‘war’ when the pause ends, and resume pursuing its earlier objectives in Gaza until all are achieved.
We in the public, are not told very clearly about the attitude of Hamas toward the pause but we can imagine that any relief from Israel’s devastating 24/7 attacks brings welcome relief, yet is accompanied by a sense a continuing resolve on the part of the Hamas leadership to resist Israel’s oppressive occupation of Gaza, and its preferred outcome that seems to include substantial ethnic cleansing in the form of permanent forced evacuation of more than half of the 2.3 million Palestinians from northern Gaza leaving what remains of the Palestinian in the previously overcrowded southern Gaza to be utterly dependent on UN relief efforts for the necessities of life including housing and daily needs. If funding becomes available on more that a subsistence level of ‘bare existence’ it will undoubted come, not from Israel, but from those ‘humanitarian’ governments, guilt-ridden by their positive entanglement with Israel’s genocidal onslaught, especially if it resumes in a few days.
We know something about ‘the fog of war,’ the hidden motivations and the confused perceptions, the devious methods and justifications, and the subtle unacknowledged change of goals, but most of us trust the specious clarity of mainstream media and ‘never-wrong’ leaders despite the ‘discourse fog,’ that is, the partisan use of language and ‘facts’ by opinion-maker twist ‘the hearts and minds’ of viewers and readers. Even when, as during this period since October 7th, the events and images are so rending and so extreme if regarded from a humane angle, there is a deliberate, unacknowledged, perhaps automatic tendency, to create perceptions of ethical symmetry between antagonists and indulge ‘war is hell’ reactions in which both sides are locked in a death dance.
In all respects, going back to before the establishment of Israel as a state and member of the United Nations in 1948, Israel has worked hard to neutralize criticism based on law and morality, by itself occupying the high moral ground based on empathy for the victimization of Jews, on the myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ on the romanticizing of the kibbutzim and ‘making the desert bloom,’ on the Orientalist reductive distortions of ‘the dirty Arab’ or the Arab mind that only can be tamed to behave properly by ‘pressure,’ a coded word that acts as a synonym for genocide in the context of the Israel Operation of Iron Swords (Biden implicitly chooses these tropes and partial truths to cast Hamas into a realm of outer darkness while staying mum about moral and legal accountability on the Israeli side), on the master premise of modernist world order that deifies the state and demonizes its victimized adversaries that is in denial about the minor premise of rights of resistance that rose up to defeat the superior military forces at the disposal of the imperial Global West. The Palestinian ordeal epitomizes the confluence of these and other adverse features of political life during the last hundred years to produce an appalling human catastrophe made worse because it has unfolded so transparently and exposed the pathetic weakness of moral scruples if clashing with strategic interests of onlooking political leaders.
The rhetoric of ‘humanitarian pause’ is illustrative of a media disinformation campaign designed to affirm certain attitudes and stigmatize others. For instance, the Israeli pledge to resume the war after this brief interlude of relative calm rarely includes critical comments on the sinister nature of this commitment to reengage Hamas by recourse to genocidal warfare victimizing the entire population of Gaza. In contrast, when released hostages report humane treatment by their captors this is either belittled or altogether ignored, whereas if released Palestinian prisoners were to make analogous comments about how they enjoyed Israeli prisons their words would be highlighted. We can only imagine the harsh response of Western media outlets to Russia’s participation in a comparable pause in the Ukraine War, dismissing any humanitarian pretensions by Moscow as cynical state propaganda, and insisting with righteous indignation that the pause be transformed into a ceasefire unless the war was going well for the Ukrainians. A critical media would feast over the double standards and moral hypocrisy, but that presupposes what doesn’t any longer exist, an independent media on global issues.
Unless properly addressed the whole provenance of ‘humanitarian pause’ is misunderstood. Remember that Israel’s political leaders went ahead with such an alternative only when it was made clear that Israel had no intention of converting the pause into a longer-range ceasefire, to be followed by ‘day after’ negotiations as to the viability of continuing occupation and a new agreement as to governance arrangements for Gaza and the role to be played by Hamas. Rather than sustaining their statist cult by dismissing Hamas as ‘terrorists’ the security of Israel would almost certainly be dramatically enhanced by treating Hamas as a legitimate political entity, which although guilty of violations of international law, is far less guilty than Israel if an objective comparative evaluation is made, and some account is taken of Hamas’ long-term ceasefire diplomacy summarily rejected by Israel, although a preferable security alternative than the decades of cross-border violent eruptions that kill, deepen enmity, and solve nothing.
In retrospect, I understand better the rationale behind this apparently genuine Hamas efforts, which I received first-hand contact with as a result of my extended conversations with Hamas leaders living in Doha and Cairo while I was UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories a decade ago. Israel could not take seriously what appeared to be beneficial from its security perspective of such Hamas initiatives or the 2002 Arab Peace Proposal issued in Mecca. Both Hamas and the Arab proposal conditioned peace on withdrawal from the Occupied Territory of the West Bank, which has long been in the gun sights of the settler wing of the Zionist Project, and consistently privileged over Israeli security by its leaders, long before Netanyahu’s Coalition Government made this unmistakably clear when it took over in January of 2023. Israel never convincingly accepted the internationally presumed notion that a Palestinian state would include the West Bank and have its capital in East Jerusalem, despite gesturing at various times in such a direction, but always framed in a manner that was so one-sided as to ensure Palestinian rejection, although the Palestinian leadership did their cause no good by failing to put forward a counter-offer or make a stronger effort to achieve unity as between the PLO and Hamas so long as the liberation struggle was not resolved.
It is this unwillingness to take account of the master/slave structure of a prolonged, abusive occupation that renders plausibility to the both sides’ narratives embodying the delusion that Israel and Occupied Palestine are formally and existentially equal as profoundly misleading. Such narratives equate, or invert, the Hamas attack with the Israeli genocidal onslaught that followed, regarding the former as ‘barbaric’ while the latter is generally sympathetically or at least neutrally described as Israel’s reasonable and necessary entitlement to defend itself. Variations of such themes are integral to the apologetics of former US mediating officials such as Dennis Roth or liberal Zionist casuists such as Thomas Friedman.
A final observation relates to the inappropriateness of the word ‘humanitarian’ if the object is to understand and express the motivations of Israel. Of course, Israel seeks both security for its Jewish citizens, including the settlers, but when forced to choose between security and territory it has consistently opted to pay the costs associated with fulfilling the territorial goals of the Zionist Project. The current unity government of Israel only accepted the pleas of the hostage families and succumbed to pressures from Washington after its several security services and military commanders gave reassurances that Hamas could not take tactical advantage of the pause, and that the Israel campaign could resume within the pre-pause unrestrained parameters after it was over. In other words, the pause was politically motivated as a way of allowing Israel to seem responsive to domestic and external humanitarian pressures without the slightest show of responsiveness to the governments throughout the Global South that called for a ceasefire to halt genocide and by the enraged protesters in city streets in all parts of the world. The ‘humanitarian pause’ as the deal has been presented is totally an initiative rooted in the Global West, admittedly with support from a scattering of autocratic governments elsewhere. We do not know why Hamas went along with such a plan, but a safe conjecture is that it sought some days of relief from Israel’s tactics of devastation and may have wanted to reduce its responsibilities of caring for children and injured or elderly hostages under such dangerous circumstances.
As the ‘humanitarian pause’ goes into effect, it is bound to create surprises and impart a greater understanding of the ‘fog of humanitarianism.’ What it should not do is to induce complacency among those who honor the fundamental commitment of the Genocide Convention to do all in their power to prevent the onset or continuation of the crime of crimes and to take steps to punish its most prominent perpetrators.
[Prefatory Note: A revised version of responses to questions below posed by Mohaddeseh Pakravan o Mehr News Agency, and published in the Tehran Times on Nov. 18, 2023]
1-How do you assess the international developments taking place around the Gaza war? Can the support of the United States and some European countries to the Israeli regime be justified?
There are two broad responses to this question. The first distinguishes between the Global West, including several EU countries, especially the US that are supportive enablers of Israel and the Global South in which there is present on every continent widespread opposition to the genocidal violence of the Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attack.
The second line of response is to distinguish between the people in the countries supporting Israel and their governments. Even in the United States and Western Europe, street protests and demonstrations, as confirmed by public opinion polls, suggest that the people are calling for, even demanding, a Gaza ceasefire while governments continues to abstain or even continue to endorse Israel’s military operations despite its daily atrocities, although the support for Israel is expressed in a less unqualified way verbally as the Hamas attacks recedes from consciousness and as Palestinian bodies pile up, especially those of infant children.
The Israeli justification for unleashing this tsunami of violence against an entrapped civilian population was initially expressed in the vengeful language of its leaders in response to the Hamas attack. Such an outrageous embrace of violence failed to produce any dissenting comments from official circles in the Global West. Later Israel and supporters put forward somewhat more standard justifications based on its claimed right to defend itself, which seems to imply that Israel is exercising its international law right of self-defense, but the vague language used may be a deliberate attempt to gain greater latitude than is associated with the scope of self-defense under international law. Israel seems to be issuing itself a license for an unlimited recourse to punitive violence which is not permissible under international law. In any event, Israel’s disproportionate, indiscriminate, and grossly excessive violence that is further aggravated by the targeting of such protected sites as hospitals, mosques and churches, crowded refugee camps, UN buildings, and schools throughout Gaza. Such behavior discredits any Israeli defensive security justifications both legally and morally.
There are additional problems with Israel’s onslaught being carried out against the civilian population of Gaza under the glare of journalistic coverage and TV cameras. Because Israel remains the Occupying Power in Gaza it is subject to the legal framework set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation, and possesses a primary duty that is spelled out in the provisions of the treaty to protect the wellbeing and rights of the occupied population. It has no right of self-defense as the concept is understood in international law, or set forth in the constraining language of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which presupposes a prior sustained armed attack across an international border by a foreign actor, and not just a single incident of the sort caused by Hamas, an actor internal to Israel’s de facto domain of sovereign authority, although limited by its duties in relation to the administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has been Israel’s responsibility since the end of the 1967 War.
In 2005 for a variety of reasons associated with a pragmatic approach to national interests, Israel implemented a ‘disengagement’ plan in Gaza, which included withdrawing its troops and security forces from occupied Palestinian territories to Israel proper and dismantling the unlawful settlements that had been established in Gaza between 1967 and 2005. Israel contended that these moves of disengagement ended its responsibilities under international humanitarian law as the Occupying Power. This view was rejected by the UN and the weight of assessment by international jurists because Israel retained effective control over the borders, including the entry and exit of persons and traded goods, as well as exerting its authority to impose continuing control of Gaza’s air space and coastal waters, including a highly restrictive blockade since 2007, confining the identity of Hamas to that of ‘terrorists’ despite its success in internationally monitored election in 2006. Israel made no secret of its policy of keeping the population on what governmental officials called ‘a subsistence diet’ as periodically reinforced by major military incursions luridly described by Tel Aviv as ‘mowing the lawn.’ Such genocidal tropes anticipate the behavior and language relied upon in the ongoing all out attack on Gaza.
From 1967 until the present there have been resistance initiatives undertaken by the Palestinians in Gaza, including the Intifada of 1987, the Great March of Return in 2018, and rocket launches that did minimal damage and always were either in response to Israeli provocations or followed by disproportionate Israel air strikes. Even after its disengagement plan was put in operation the people of Gaza were subjected to a variety of serious forms of collective punishment as prohibited by Ariticle 33 of Geneva IV. The overall conditions of Gaza led prominent international observers to describe Gaza ‘the world’s largest open air prison,’ a damning indictment of Israel’s dereliction of its duties as Occupying Power.
By way of open diplomacy and by concerted recourse to back channel efforts Hamas from the time of its election victory in 2006 put forward a variety of proposals for an extended ceasefire for as long as 50 years, but Israel showed no interest in exploring such a prospect.
During this period UN Special Rapporteurs chosen by the Human Rights Commission in Geneva reported on Israeli violations of human rights, making various policy recommendations that were never carried out due to geopolitical leverage exerted to insulate Israel from legal accountability.
2-Although the Israeli regime is clearly violating international law, international organizations including the United Nations have failed to take a decisive practical measure against Tel Aviv. Why cannot such organizations take serious measures to stop Israeli crimes?
In the last years i=of World War II the founders designed the UN to be weak regarding the management of power and strategic rivalry, giving a veto power in the Security Council to the winners in the war, presumed then to be the most powerful and dangerous countries in the world. This view seemed to reflect accurately power hierarchies as of 1945. In one respect it was confirm by the fact of the first five nuclear powers were the same five countries given this privileged status in the UN System.
Such an arrangement was also expressed by making the General Assembly’s authority expressly limited to making recommendations and specific fact-finding initiatives despite it being the UN political organ most representative of the peoples of the world. It is made clear in numerous provisions of the Charter that the Organization formally defers to the primacy of geopolitics in a large variety of situations that occur within the UN, including the selection of the Secretary-General, the amendment of the Charter and reform of the UN, the enforcement of International Court of Justice decisions, and the implementation of policy recommendations from the various entities comprising the UN System. This means in practice, the UN can only be effective when P5 reach agreement, and paralyzed when disagreement is fundamental as it is with respect to the present unfolding genocide victimizing the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, and less directly the whole of the Palestinian presence in both the entire occupied territories and Israel itself.
Even if the Security Council reaches an agreement, the UN does not. possess the capabilities to implement its decisions without the voluntary provision of funds and personnel for peacekeeping and humanitarian undertakings, which presupposes the presence of a supportive political will. The UN can be effective, perhaps too effective, if a Security Council resolution as was the case in 2011, which authorized a limited intervention in Libya. The use of force was implemented by NATO capabilities in a manner that greatly exceeded what the Security Council, producing a regime-changing intervention, angering countries that had abstained and undermining trust among the P5, as well as causing chaos in the country that has lasted up to the present. In the Libyan case the UN allowed itself to be geopolitically manipulated by NATO seeking to legitimize its regime-changing mission that violated Libya’s sovereign rights.
3- How successful do you see the Zionist-affiliated world stream media in justifying the Israeli regime’s brutal attacks on civilians in Gaza?
The global media, by and large, did provide credibility for the initial phases of the Israeli response. It became harder to do this as the narrative about the Hamas attack of October 7 receded in time and the Israeli attack took on such visibly vicious characteristics of disproportionate violence and genocide, given an explicit transparency by the statements of numerous Israeli leaders including Netanyahu and the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. Gallant issued a notorious decree denying the people of Gaza food, fuel, and electricity and comparing the beleaguered Palestinian civilians to ‘human animals’ who deserved to be treated “accordingly”, a dehumanizing language confirming genocidal intent. Such intent was manifest in the repeated attacks on prohibited targets, producing high casualties including among children, sick and disabled Palestinians, health and aid workers, and those sheltering in UN buildings and hospitals. Israel completely abandoned the canons of responsible statecraft and made no effort to uphold the duties of an Occupying Power. Even before this eruption the UN was seeking guidance from the ICJ and a specially constituted Commission of Inquiry as to whether the UN should formally terminate Israel’s status as Occupying Power and call for Israel’s withdrawal to its former borders from the three Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. It should be remembered that an unanimous Security Council Resolution, 242, anticipating a temporary occupation followed by such a withdrawal. Such thinking was shaped by the view that international law prohibited the acquisition of foreign territory by forcible means. It should also be appreciated that Israel was deemed an apartheid by a wide range of respected civil society human rights civil society non-governmental organizations, which is a serious crime that is continuous as embedded in the structure of Israel’s system of oppressive control of the Palestinian people in their distinct circumstances.
4-What Should Muslim leading countries do to stop Israeli crimes?
This is the most important challenge faced by Muslim majority countries since the end of the Cold War. In essence, the governments of Muslim countries should feel obligated to do more than call for a ceasefire, but they should certainly at least do this, and have yet to do. More is needed by way of punitive and substantive action in the form of boycotts and sanctions, censure for genocide to halt and oppose the Israeli war machine. More is also needed as to the future, ideally accountability for Israel, major reconstruction aid and pressure for a just peace that realizes the Palestinian right of self-determination. This is a. moment of truth for the entire world, and it could become a turning point for a better future for humanity, but only if actions taken are done to oppose Israel’s genocidal campaign in a spirit of urgency, sacrifice, sufficiency, and a re-humanizing solidarity. We cannot let ourselves, wherever located, become resigned to a toxic fate for the Palestinians imposed by Israeli criminality. Better to heed the words and slogans of the enraged masses in the streets of cities throughout the world than resign ourselves to the rhetoric of governmental leaders that condemns but stays on the sidelines. Of course, worse than a failure of commitment to take action in opposition to genocide and Palestinian victimization, is the continuing unwillingness of leading Western countries to show concern for acute and massive patterns of victimization except with respect to the hostages seized by Hamas in the course of their attack that combined armed resistance with terrifying criminal acts of violence inflicted on innocent Jewish civilians as well as on Israeli military forces.
From a Western perspective it may be relevant to reconsider the Huntington contention that after the Cold War the West would face a challenge from the Islamic world, what he labeled ‘a clash of civilizations’ along the faultlines where Muslim majority countries are in direct contact with Western states. It is notable that the Hamas allies in Gaza are all Muslim, and the allies of Israel are European or whit settler colonial countries.
[Prefatory Note: Stasa Sallacanin, an independent journalist posed a series of questions on October 29, 2023. I have modified my responses to take account of recent developments and to offer a more readable text. As the genocidal assault on Gaza continues in the face of rising calls for a ceasefire and a negotiated peace, Israel remains defiant and the US stands firm in support of Israel’s supposed goal of destroying Hamas as a presence in Gaza, but also seems intent on mounting an ethnic cleansing crusade, with a West Bank focus, but a Gaza subtext. Some of these elements are addressed in the post below.]
Q 1: While Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and has the capacity to severely damage its operational abilities, the question remains what is the future of Palestinian armed resistance?
In my judgment, Israel is inflicting important, but temporary, damage on the operational ability of Hamas to carry out military attacks against Israel, but in the disproportionate and indiscriminate manner of doing so it will exact heavy costs. Not only will Hamas’ support surge among the Palestinian people and globally, but the severe humanitarian catastrophe that has befalled the civilian population has already greatly strengthened the will of the Palestinians to mount armed resistance in the future. In addition, global mobilization in civil society will increase, as will UN efforts and even Global West governments to find a solution to the conflict that is more sympathetic with Palestinian grievances and aspirations than before October 7.
As the earlier anti-colonial wars revealed, the colonial side can dominate the combat zones, winning every battle, killing large numbers of the native population, and destroying their sources of livelihood, and yet go on to experience political defeat in. the end. This was the experience of France and the United States in Vietnam and Algeria. Despite. innovations in weaponry and tactics political defeat and frustration was subsequentially experienced by colonial actors and imperial interventions in a series of countries that lacked military capabilities to defend their territory against such external intrusions: Afghanistan, Iraq after 2003, Libya and Syria after 2011, the so-called ‘forever wars’ in which the state-building and neoliberal objectives sought through military intervention and major state-building undertakings were not realized, despite huge expenditures of funds. Despite this dismal record of relying on military means to achieve political objectives, the Global West, especially the United States, along with Europe and Israel, mindlessly continues to ‘securitize’ disputes and conflicts rather than shifting tactics or adopting a more detached view of the outcome of internal power struggles in foreign countries. Part of this failure to adapt to the diminishing agency of military superiority in North/South settings reflects the interests and influence of arms dealers in the private sector, as augmented by a compliant Congress and a militarized bureaucracy in the American case.
Israel resembles the US in these respects, although with more overt racist overtones, as articulated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the current crisis. It seeks to justify its violence by insisting that Arabs, as epitomized by Hamas, only understand ‘pressure,’ which in actuality has. been expressed by recourse to genocidal devastation. Israel and the US both subscribed to the reductive assessments of Raphael Patel’s The Arab Mind (1973). Somewhat ironically, Hamas leaders explained and justified the October 7 attack, somewhat more plausibly, by relying on the same reasoning. They claimed that armed attack was the only way to remind Israel that the Palestinians were still present and would not allow themselves to be erased by diplomatic fiat.
Q: Israel launched a ground invasion on Gaza to dismantle Hamas. Will new Palestinian armed groups continue to emerge and fight Israel and how successful they will be, considering the fact, that Israel will learn from its past mistakes and recent intelligence failure?
It is almost a sure thing that Hamas, whether under another name or not, will survive this Israeli onslaught, emerging stronger, smarter, and more resilient than previously in the period after the present encounter ends. Despite the high international reputational costs as related to the legitimacy of its claims, Israel’s genocidal assault has put its apparent victory strategy further from attainment than before.
Israel is likely to face that moment of truth that confronts all settler colonial projects—either the native population is exterminated or driven to outer margins of societal life, or it will eventually prevail. This has been the pattern since 1945 when it became apparent that indigenous nationalism could outlast the military might of the colonizers if they stood their ground and were prepared to accept shocking levels of casualties and devastation. Palestinian steadfastness has long been evident even as constantly challenged by Israeli apartheid and harsh policies and practices.
Israel will, of course, endeavor to fix the hard-to-believe failures of surveillance and border security that made the Hamas attack possible, if indeed the official narrative holds up, and current suspicions of a false flag operation put to rest. We would expect Israel to make other tactical shifts in its structures of apartheid control over a hostile Palestinian population that is more likely, as suggested above, to be mobilized, resentful, and resistant than ever.
In the background are questions about whether the Israeli security lapse was a side-effect of the Netanyahu extremist coalition’s calculated efforts to make the West Bank unlivable for Palestinians, and become a settler controlled mini-state under the sovereign control of a Greater Israel that may have further territorial goals on its policy agenda. Or this West Bank priority was coupled with an assurance of the economic benefits of an estimated $500 billion value to be realized by developing the oil and gas fields off the Gaza coast.
The only potentially winning strategy for Israel is extensive ethnic cleansing by way of forced displacement beyond the borders—the Sinai solution, and for the Palestinians a second nakba. So far Egypt has resisted pressures to enter such a Faustian Bargain, but the end-game scenario is yet to be played out. There are rumors of Israeli offers to draw down Egypt’s international indebtedness in exchange for allowing the entire Gaza Palestinian population to live in Sinai, which would facilitate Israel’s thinly disguised ambition to incorporate the West Bank into its territory as well as reap the anticipated economic benefits of reoccupying and possibly resettling Gaza in the absence of a Palestinian presence..
Q 3: Moreover, do you think that Hamas attack/resistance could inspire armed resistance, even among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and Gaza in the future or conversely, if Hamas fails, do you expect the weakening of armed resistance?
As earlier responses suggest, the Israeli response to the Hamas attack has already inspired resistance politics among the Palestinians, including among exile and foreign refugee communities, and further discredited the quasi-collaborative political groups aligned with Fatah as exemplified by the West Bank framework of governance and international representational status, the Palestinian Authority the sole surviving now seriously disabled child of the defunct Oslo Diplomacy that has paralyzed the Palestinians for more than 20 years while giving the settlers time to consolidate, expand, and augment their movement. The pre-October 7 Netanyahu coalition government greenlighted settler violence, and associated lang grabbing and thinly disguised efforts to escalate a strategy seemingly intent on maximum Palestinian dispossession.
Q 4: However, would you agree that any military solution cannot bear any sustainable long-term results and that the lack of a political solution will only generate the emergence of new armed groups?
Yes, that is an accurate probable future unless Israel takes drastic steps to realize its victory scenario. I believe the current leadership of Israel will, if it can, before the Gaza crisis is resolved move rapidly to implement an ethnic cleansing version of a ‘final solution’ of its Palestinian problem. How the world, especially the Global West responds, will determine whether such an outcome will actually succeed, or whether the future will exhibit what now seems impossible, the realization of Palestinian rights of at least partial self-determination, most likely in an unstable two-state outcome as proposed back in 2002 by the Arab countries meeting in Mecca and generally endorsed by governments throughout the world, although it seems unimaginably difficult to implement given the certain extreme opposition of more than half a million settlers in the West Bank.
Another likely result of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is the emergence of secular militancy to avoid perceived regional threats of political Islam and religious warfare that will be rationalized as counterterrorism along the propagandistic lines of ‘Hamas is our ISIS..’ The French president, Emmanuel Macron, carried the idea a step further by proposing ‘a new axis of evil’ composed of hostile Islamic governments and non-state actors in the Middle East. I suspect that policy wonks have already started rereading and updating Samuel Huntington’s 1993 vision of ‘a clash of civilizations.’ It follow from this perspective that such an approach will take center stage in forthcoming phases of regional politics more than 30 years after these ideas were first circulated in Huntington’s famous and influential Foreign Affairs article.
Q 5: In the occupied West Bank, a plethora of new Palestinian armed groups have emerged in response to repressive Israeli policies. Do you think that their factions and influence will spread to Gaza once the military action against Hamas is over and in case Hamas is defeated?
It is quite possible, but I think their main focus will be resistance to Israel’s attempt to gain sovereign control over the West Bank to the extent possible. Gaza in my view despite the genocidal ordeal inflicted on the Gazans remains almost a sideshow for militant Zionists who joined with Netanyahu in implementing patterns of extremist governance of the West Bank that were operationalized as soon as their authority was formalized at the start of 2023.
In effect, Gaza is distracted attention from the remaining critical goals of the maximal Zionist Project and Israeli extremes of violence are intended to deliver a warning to Palestinians on the West Bank to get out or face an eventual firestorm. Whether such thinking is part of why Israeli government allowed the security lapse to occur or it was the Hamas attack an opportunity seized upon by the Netanyahu leadership in the course of carrying out its violent and vengeful retaliatory attack. Another possibility is that the settlers, and allies in government somewhat autonomously saw the Israeli response in Gaza as creating an opening for their cleansing campaign in the West Bank.
Q 6: The poll, conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, also showed that 52% of the Palestinians believe that the armed struggle against Israel is the most effective means to end the Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state. Twenty-one percent said they supported achieving these goals through negotiations, while 22% preferred the “popular resistance.” In addition, when asked what has been the most positive or the best thing that has happened to the Palestinian people since the Nakba in 1948 the largest percentage (24%) said it was the establishment of Islamic movements. So, will this percentage even grow after the war, and will new resistance groups be influenced by Islamic movements or they will focus and try to refocus on other matters and perhaps try to overcome political divisions within a deeply fragmented Palestinian bloc?
As of now, the Islamic groups, especially Hamas, have dominated Palestinian resistance to the extent that recourse to armed struggle has characterized resistance, and this will likely become even more the case after the Israeli guns finally fall silent in Gaza. Yet I would suppose that in the next phase of struggle, assuming Israeli ethnic cleansing schemes do not succeed in erasing or marginalizing Palestinian resistance, there will emerge new political formations that are neither Islamic nor the opposite. In other words, Palestinian resistance is overdue for an integrative politics of unity without sectarian or ideological dogma being allowed to get in the way of the overriding goal of gaining leverage needed to achieve a sustainable and just peace. Israel has resorted to a variety of means, including its early funding of Hamas when it was most overtly antisemitic as well as targeted assassinations and imprisonment of potentially unifying Palestinian political leaders, including the harassment and possible murder of Arafat, and timely assassinations of those seeking a just and sustainable peace that stood in the way of Israel following through to the full realization of the Zionist vision. Prominent among such casualties were the Swedish mediator Count Folke Bernadotte murdered by the Zionist terrorist group Lehi in 1948 and even an Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the first period of the Oslo Accords that for years looked as though it might yield an accommodation based on a political compromise between Israel and Palestine.
Only If and when Israel becomes a pariah state, its national leaders might at last consider the option of emulating the South African surprising turn as adapted to Israel’s circumstances. The leaders in Pretoria surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and agreeing to a transition to a multi-racial constitutional democracy with equal rights for all. It seems like a dream at present to suppose that something similar will happen in Israel, but in history dreams happen but only if made by the dedicated struggles and sacrifices of martyrs.
[Prefatory Note: This converssation with Daniel Warner and Matthew Stevenson was published online by CounterPunch on October 8, 2023. It dealls with the interrplay between Trump the person and Trumpism the phenomenon, a right-wing populist ursurge in the US and also many other places. The conversation took place a month before the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel and Israeli onslaught that has followed. This direct attack on the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza has sent shockwaves around the world, and brought severe tensions to the state/society relations in the Global West. It is a time when the most powerful country on earth, at least militarily deserves a better choice than looming presidential campaign pitting Biden against Trump. It gives a certain attractiveness to independent candidates. Cornel West is the person mosst qualified to be the next president of the US, but is given no chance. Such is life in 2020s putting the human future in jeopardy as never before.]
BY RICHARD FALK, DANIEL WARNER AND MATTHEW STEVENSON
This is an edited transcript of the latest CounterPunch podcast featuring Matthew Steveson, Daniel Warner and Richard Falk. You can listen to it here.
Matthew Stevenson: The three amigos are back together, but only in the same world. Richard, you’re in Turkey. Daniel, you’re in Geneva, and I’m in Slovakia, of all places.
For this episode, we wanted to discuss the rubric: “On Loving Trump”. Richard, you’re the coiner of the phrase “On Loving Trump.” What did you have in mind when you came up with such a title?
Richard Falk: Well, I think principally what to me is mystifying about the continuing popularity that Trump enjoys, despite all the heinous things that he has done while president and since being president, and the degree to which he challenges the constitutional consensus that had always, at least since the Civil War, kept the U.S. together as a country and as a citizenry.
He’s a radical figure who comes out of an opportunistic extreme right that has a frightening fascist lineage. Let me add one point: which is that Trump is an exaggeration, in my view, of a global phenomenon observed recently in a variety of cultural settings, the emergence of autocratic leaders that enjoy widespread support from their population. So we could have chosen to focus on alternate themes to highlight something analogous to the passion gripping the U.S. : “On Loving Modi” or “On Loving Orbán or “On Loving Putin”. All of these leaders engendered a level of popular support that defied the political imagination that supposedly emerged out of the Enlightenment’s insistence on rationality in all spheres of public life.
Daniel Warner: I think Richard has made an excellent point. I would develop it along the following line. President Biden talks about a historical moment, an inflection point where democracies versus autocracies compete around the world. One of the things to look at is not only the growth of autocracies or the extreme right-wing in the United States, but why democracies are failing. I include in this, obviously, the United States, which is supposed to be the leader of the free world. Why is it that the Democratic Party, for example, or in other countries, left-wing socialist parties, are not doing better?
Part of the success of Trump and the autocratic governments around the world is the failure of other forms of government at this time in history, especially those that are self-proclaimed democracies. On the one hand, we can say we’re mystified by Trump’s success. On the other hand, we can lament why democracies are failing and losing popular support.
“…demagogues are dominating the political space…”
Richard Falk: I think that what Danny has said about the loss of support on the part of the left and for the governing process is correct. But I think there’s also something missing, if we don’t acknowledge that this is not just a matter of normal political support—there is some kind of emotional underpinning that makes Trump invulnerable to the normal pitfalls of a political leader. And that’s a problem with the citizenry, and it’s a recurrent problem for democracies. It’s illuminated by inquiring why ancient Athens abandoned democracy, and why the leading thinkers of the time, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, felt that the ordinary public or the citizenry had become too vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues. And what we’re doing, in a way, is living in an era where demagogues are dominating the political space.
Matthew Stevenson: Richard, can I ask you and Danny: Are we living with them because the voice of the people has selected them? Meaning that the democracy is functioning, it’s just functioning in a way that none of us admire? Or is it that they have managed to subvert the normal workings of a democracy and have rigged the ballots?
Richard Falk: Well, I can say a word about that: It’s not the voice. It’s the heart. It’s the appeal that this kind of leader, at this time, has to the deep emotional wellsprings of human identity that somehow connects them not with the kind of figures that a modern society descended from the kinds of Enlightenment rationality and affirmation of science and devotion to truth-telling would have anticipated. There’s something else going on that’s very fundamental, that’s more connected with religion, in a way, than politics. And that’s what I think makes it very hard to know how to counter effectively.
Daniel Warner: I think Richard has touched on the emotions of politics and how, in his first comment he talked about manipulation. In terms of Trump and his followers, there is an enormous animosity toward a certain form of elitism, whether you call it bi-coastal or you call it the “degree gap” between those who are college-educated and those who are not. Richard goes back to Athens, Aristotle, and Plato. In a sense, democracy is based on an openness to citizens voting. And the citizens don’t necessarily have to be graduates of Princeton University.
There is a disconnect between those in urban areas today and those in rural areas; those who are college-educated or have advanced degrees and those who may be high school graduates. I think when Richard talks about religion, he’s talking about emotions and animosity toward a certain elite, whether it be Georgetown or Harvard, et cetera. Biden, who has tried to present himself as kind of the average Joe, middle-class Joe, University of Delaware Joe, has not succeeded in touching that part of the population. Trump, somewhat to his credit, has touched an emotional nerve with a large part of the population.
There is that animosity against an elite which is fundamental, certainly in the United States. You think of Franklin Roosevelt, for example, who was able to touch a large part of the population. I come back to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State. With all their degrees, they remind me of “the best and the brightest” under presidents John F. Kennedy and certainly under Lyndon Johnson who didn’t understand much about Vietnam. It seems to me that Blinken and Sullivan are part of a certain elite that doesn’t present itself well to the general population and is not able to communicate with Trump’s followers.
“…between the Enlightenment and oligopoly…”
Matthew Stevenson: There are two sides to the Trump followers. There’s the side of extreme wealth, which he does represent, and then there’s the underclass, if you want to call it that, the disenfranchised—as a second side. But I would ask both of you to consider this: that Trump, rather than being an aberration, is a consistent pattern of American history. In the Constitutional Convention [1787], the divide was between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson—what Richard would call on the side of the Enlightenment. And on the other side, there were John Adams, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, who really did want there to be an oligopoly to run the country—there was no secret there.
And if you look at the Constitution, you don’t need to be Charles A. Beard to see that the Constitution was drafted for those with extreme wealth—slaveholders were defended, capital more than rights were enshrined in the Constitution. And if you look at those two twin elements of American Constitutional history—between the Enlightenment and oligopoly…. Yes, Trump is extreme. Trump is extreme, in his criminal conduct. But Trump’s not the first politician to try to steal an election; that was done successfully in 1876. And Trump is not the only one to rally the extremes. We had Huey Long in the 1930s. So my question is, are we romanticizing the American past to draw a line under Trump when in fact this is what we’ve always had for 247 years?
Richard Falk: Well, I do think you’re right that there is a kind of structural continuity that you can trace back to the making of the Constitution and the early experience of being a post-colonial country and incorporating very fundamental injustices into this structure. But what I think is, and that’s why I keep stressing that this is not a matter of the mind as much as of the heart, that there is a passion that transcends this urban-rural divide and the educated-and-uneducated class divisions and eludes rational analysis and argumentation. There is present a quality that seems to me possessed by this kind of leader at this moment in history where the species itself is in jeopardy, that through climate change, through the risk of nuclear war, there has developed a kind of disorientation that flourishes because it is maintained in part by the passion that leaders like Trump can generate. And it’s a kind of macro-denialism that is leading in a very destructive direction for American society and for a number of other societies, as a paucity of leaders seem adequately responsive to this demanding new world historical situation. And that’s what I’m trying to identify. And that’s why I talked about not just supporting Trump, but something more that remains elusive that gives his worldview a toxic potency. And this something else, however, it is understood, has the potential of being a pathway to a fascist dictatorship.
Daniel Warner: I think that the fact that the three of us—one is in Geneva, one is in Slovakia, and one is in Turkey—indicates that we could be identified as “globalists”. And the question of identification, Richard, I think is crucial to this particular moment. We are living in a moment of complex interdependence. That’s a reality, it’s a technological reality, it’s a financial reality. And the question is, how do people react to that globalist reality?
To a large extent, those who are nationalist and passionately nationalist are saying that they are against globalism and globalists. So to take the story of the bi-coastal, rural and urban on another level, there also is a need for identity because certain people are worried and feel lost in the situation of globalism and complex interdependence. So to say I am an American, I am Polish, I am Hungarian, in a sense, is a reaffirmation of an identity that gives a sense of security in the face of growing realization of the global actuality that’s taking place. I think that, to some extent, answers part of Richard’s question about why there’s such a strong belief in Trump I think people are worried. Identity politics comes to the fore when people feel insecure.
Matthew Stevenson: I agree, Danny, but I also think that there are globalist sides of Trump’s philosophy, in that, for example, denying climate change means “I can use the atmosphere any way I want, and nobody should be able to tell me what I should be able to do with my patch of air.” And the side of Trump that I find disquieting, leaving aside the obvious criminality, is the nativist side of Trump, which I would say comes out of the 19th century—the Immigration Restriction League, the Know Nothing party. It comes out of all these strange cultish groups in American history. Trump is one of them. And Trump’s followers, in effect, are not dissimilar to some of the utopians who found some sort of redemption in slavery. They might have found it in economic isolation, you tell me. But the anger in Trump, I would say, is a nativist anger: anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, pro-slavery. And that, to me, is the origin of Trump’s political philosophy.
Richard Falk: Can I briefly react to that by saying that your remarks suggest to me that what Trump has managed to do is to create a Jonestown for America; in other words, a cult that encompasses the society. And it has, as you point out, these elements that have always been in the broader picture, but they’ve been marginalized. By and large, he’s brought them to the center partly for the reasons that Danny and I have been mentioning.
At this point I would like to call our attention to a famous remark of Antonio Gramsci that I don’t have the exact words for… but the gist of what Gramsci said is this: “In times of transition, morbid things happen.” And what we are experiencing, I think, is a stunted transition from a state-centric world to a globally coherent world. But the transition is encountering extraordinary resistance from regressive ultra-nationalism that expresses itself by extreme cruelty and hostility to migrants and to those that would breach these national divisions. We’re living amid uncertainty and contradiction of a depth that has never before been the experience of humanity conceived as a species rather than as a series of distinct communities.
“…how is it that we can calm the ardor…”
Daniel Warner: Let me ask Matthew and Richard a question. If we can reach a consensus that throughout American history there have been tendencies that have been in the background and then come to the fore. If we accept my comment about insecurity and Richard’s about globalization, how is it that we can calm the ardor of those people who are so nationalistic and so insecure about globalization and the change from the international to the global? Because if insecurity leads to this identity and potentially to fascism, how do you deal with that? If we ignore the 75 million who voted for Trump the last time and maybe more will vote this time, we’re being undemocratic.
If it’s an emotional problem, Richard, what are we going to do about it? We can’t ignore it. Perhaps we could ignore it in Hungary or Poland, but within the United States, it’s such a threat to the system. How do you deal with this emotional situation today?
Richard Falk: Well, if you accept the premise that you’re dealing with a form of love, we have no instruments to counter that. The Enlightenment mindset is irrelevant. That’s why I feel rather gloomy about the future. And I think Biden is one sign of the bankruptcy of opposition to a situation that is characterized by the uber emotion of love. It’s a distorted love and has deforming impacts, but it is not going to be countered by Enlightenment rationality or by material social protection measures. A new Roosevelt wouldn’t be able to handle this kind of passion unless maybe if there was some deep crash of the economy, one might have a new set of parameters to deal with that. But short of that, I don’t see any signs that there is a neutralizing force in America or many other places to deal with this emergent autocratic fascistic passion.
Matthew Stevenson: What I find extraordinary in looking at Trump from a distance is he really doesn’t have a very consistent ideology himself. I don’t think he’s read six books since he finished the 11th grade, and he probably didn’t even finish The Old Man and the Sea.
The problem I have with Trump is, on one hand, his form of fascism is an economic fascism, in that he looks at the presidency, at government, as a way to enrich himself and his corporate cronies. I don’t think he has national aspirations of an imperial colonial side. He might. But I think rather he looks at the world and says: How am I, Donald Trump and my few followers, Jared and a few others, going to make money out of this situation? Which to me sounds like some of the businessmen in Rome, around Mussolini in the 1920s, who didn’t really care what Mussolini did or said or stood for, as long as they made money out of it.
And so, Danny, I’d like to come back to your dichotomy between elites and non-elites as the division point, but since to me, Trump is what Richard is describing as a coup d’état of a cult. Yes, 75 million people did vote Republican in the last presidential election.
I don’t think all 75 million people believe everything Trump believes, any more than everybody who voted for Biden agrees with everything Biden will do or has done.
Let me ask you: is Trump’s fascism of an international character where he wants to make alliances with North Korea and Putin against Ukraine and Europe and the Global South? Or is it just a get-rich-quick scheme?
Daniel Warner: I think, Matthew, there’s a little bit of both. But the argument is Richard’s point, and I’ll come to that about the difference between the international and the global and Richard’s gloom. I mean, I’m amazed at what’s going on in New York at the United Nations. After all, the Secretary-General is more a secretary than a general. There is a certain moral leaning behind the UN charter. There’s a certain moral role for the UN. It doesn’t have an army. And yet here we have a meeting where the leaders come, and talk about various issues. Climate change is coming up, and yet four of the five members of the Security Council, permanent members did not have their leaders in New York. I think this is part of a movement where there is little leadership in the global community.
If we’re moving technologically, and financially, away from nationalism to something larger. The problems of pandemics and climate change are global. There is no pretense for the moment at any form of global leadership or moral leadership. Richard for years has talked about some kind of a global assembly. We’re getting further and further away from that at the same moment the problems are becoming more and more global.
“…there’s a feeling of a ship without a rudder…”
Richard Falk: Yes, I completely agree with this series of comments that Danny just made. I think part of the disaffection from the UN, I’m pretty sure Biden also wouldn’t have gone to speak at the General Assembly if the UN wasn’t headquartered in New York City and if he wasn’t the ‘host’ of this gathering. There is a helplessness on the part of these supposed leading governments and there’s a feeling of a ship without a rudder. And I felt that ever since 2003 when the U.S. acted unilaterally in Iraq and later to some extent in Afghanistan and Syria; the UN has demonstrated its irrelevance when it comes to war prevention. And what the U.S. has tried to do in this post-Ukraine period is to revive the UN, or more accurately to revitalize the UN as an instrument of its foreign policy, to rally countries against Russia, to compromise the veto, and to do various things that will make it more of a policy instrument than a community generating framework where countries that disagree can at least communicate with each other.
I regard these developments as a low point for the UN and a high point for groups like the G7 and the BRICS coalitions that are emerging outside the framework of the UN and purporting to address a similar world-order agenda. That should be central to what the UN is preoccupied and committed to doing and receive the funding that would enable it to carry out its mission as set forth in the Charter. This was part of the Secretary General’s complaint to the effect that the UN has a voice but it has insufficient funding and it is impossible to change the world without material capabilities.
Matthew Stevenson: I think you’re right, Richard, in that the United States, maybe when John Quincy Adams was president, had the ability to be the counterweight to some of these negative trends in the UN and other bodies. But if you start about 1848 with the Mexican-American War and go through to the Spanish-American War up to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and stops in between, the United States, for whatever reasons, probably economic, ceded that moral high ground to bring others behind the idealism that was present when the Constitution was drafted in 1789.
Now, Trump is in lockstep with so many of these other strong men in North Korea, Russia, India—that’s his peer group. And they don’t want to hear about the issues that everybody else feels are weighing on their soul—inflation, climate change, whatever they are. And you asked Richard, what can we do?
To me, the hope is somehow to allow the empowerment of what I consider a natural majority in the United States. A natural majority is not for the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court; nor is it for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican Party; and it’s not for the Senate of Mitch McConnell.
The problem is that Americans cannot vote for the government that it both wants and deserves.
Richard Falk: I wonder about that. That’s an overly optimistic reading, I think. And we should remember that Biden is creating an atmosphere of moral hypocrisy on the fundamental issues that we’re talking about. He stresses his friendship with Modi and is very ambivalent about the horrible things that Netanyahu is associated with. How can one talk credibly about an alliance of democracies when you are so fundamentally hypocritical? It’s an alliance against China, and to say any country that is willing to join that alliance, including Saudi Arabia, a very repressive, non-democratic country, is welcome to be in that alliance.
And so the ideological roots of democracy are themselves not credible as a posture that opposes Trump. So Trump is the real thing when you look at it this way. And he did earlier have a vision of bypassing Europe and forming a new geopolitical alignment with China and Russia, which might have avoided the Ukraine crisis, I’m not sure, or at least handled it very, very differently. And so we’re in a period where the either-or of American politics leaves one with very little foundation for genuine hope.
“…it can happen here…”
Daniel Warner: I mentioned the United Nations because I’m trying to see if we don’t want to love Trump, we should want to love something. We can love our families, we can love our friends. But in a larger sense, in a moment of uncertainty and insecurity, we’re looking for certain places we can believe in and even love, if you want to use that word.
The United Nations, the international community, the charter of the United Nations, human rights, we could go on. They’re not out there. And that’s why I asked the question about where we could look for something positive. I do think that lots of people are not going to vote in the United States this time, perhaps not even thinking that, well, if Trump gets elected, does it make that much difference?
So I think there is not only gloom out there. I would say that people are turning more to their own needs, family needs, and financial needs. The whole concept of being part of a larger audience, a democratic audience, a larger part of a global marketplace, is losing whatever appeal it might have. It’s interesting to watch the paradox that at the same time the world becomes complex and interdependent, we are going back to a certain form of tribalism. Trump and the cult of Trump are an example of that return to a kind of simplistic, primitive tribalism that we thought we had overcome or that technologically demands a larger response.
Matthew Stevenson: Well, at the risk of becoming the closet optimist in this conversation, which is not my normal role in most conversations, let me posit the slightly positive side, which is, I think that Trump’s election in 2016 was an anomaly. They happen in American politics. His was an anomaly. Hillary Clinton, for whatever reason, had a lot of negatives that people didn’t want to vote for. Leave that aside. He didn’t win in 2018, he didn’t win in 2020, he didn’t win in 2022. Or his proxies. I don’t think he will win in 2024, at least.
If he does win, however negative you’ve been, you can be more negative.
But I would also say, Danny and Richard, that I do see hope in younger generations, our children, your children, everybody’s children, when you see some of the things that they’re willing to tackle—climate change, inequality, economic distribution into the Global South—and they’re devoting their lives to these causes, not simply just attending a rally here and there. At some level, that generation has to be heard.
It’s not being heard by the Bidens and by the Supreme Court and by the Senate and by Trump. And that’s to the detriment of all of us. And they’re not being heard in many countries beyond the United States, not being heard in India, Israel, Korea, you name it. But I do think in that in the younger generation, there is eloquence and there’s optimism. Optimism may be the wrong word. There’s at least a path that they’re willing to commit themselves to.
Daniel Warner: Matthew, I completely agree, and I’m impressed by the people, the young people, who are doing what you said. The question is the relationship between what they’re doing and politics. We started with the notion of Biden and democracy. Democracy has a cultural background to it and it also has a very simple administrative one. The question is how these young people cannot only do what they’re doing, but also get involved in a democratic process, political party, et cetera. And that seems to me to be complicated today.
Richard Falk: Just to add a word to that, the political party that is in opposition to Trump is not something that is attractive to these idealistic younger people. So they have to create their own new organizing framework and mobilize support, which is possible to make happen. Lots of unpredictable things have happened in our lifetimes, so we shouldn’t discount that. And I would share the view that the younger generation is more attuned to how the world needs to work if it is to overcome these challenges that are confronting society and are being met by mediocre or worse, leadership in the principal countries of the world.
“…is there a book that you might recommend?”
Matthew Stevenson: Let’s end on a literary note, since you’re both big readers. Let’s each of us recommend to our listeners and readers who’ve been with us on this dialogue a book that you’ve read that you think might be worth adding to the commentary on the subjects we’ve been discussing today.
Danny, you mentioned The Best and the Brightest, which is a show in and of itself about the making of foreign policy in Vietnam. But is there another book that you might recommend to our listeners?
Daniel Warner: Well, I was rereading Stanley Hoffmann’s Duties Beyond Borders. I was working on how little is going to humanitarian assistance today and how much money is being spent militarily. I think it’s important when we see the people fleeing the Global South, the desperation, and how here in Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross has a considerable budget deficit. It seems to me that Duties Beyond Borders is a good book to reread.
Richard Falk: Stanley Hoffmann, I agree with that, and there are a lot of books of that sort I would like to recommend. But I think for Americans, maybe this book that was written ten years or so ago with the title What’s the Matter with Kansas? [the author is Thomas Frank] is a good place to begin because it focuses on this phenomenon of people voting against their own material interests, and it raises questions about how the society is organized and how the capitalist mystique has led people to be distracted through these cultural issues like abortion and gay rights and other things that grant primacy to values over interests. We haven’t talked about that, but I think that’s all part of the alienation that is in some sense, one of the sources for “Loving Trump”—that he provides some kind of overview of the good society which is really a caricature and what it really embraces is a coherent, regressive vision of a bad society. But it’s something that engenders this kind of widespread love and devotion.
Matthew Stevenson: I am going to suggest the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, which was about the 1936 election—it’s fiction—but it results in not Roosevelt’s landslide win over Alf Landon, but the election of a fascist American senator who is very Trump-like in his depiction by Sinclair Lewis. And it is a quite a long novel, I would say, more than 400 pages about how the United States—at least in a fictional sense, and I would say in a current sense—pushed along by MAGA-like Republicans did embrace a native form of fascism. It might not have been Mussolini on his Rome balcony, but it had all the elements. Sinclair Lewis’s novel ends not on a pessimistic note, in the sense that the fascism burns itself out like some wildfire in the West. But the Lewis thesis is, don’t think that you’re above the descent into the anarchy which so many other countries have descended into, because, as he implies in his title, it can happen here.
Matthew Stevenson: I think we’ve reached the end of our allotted time. Gentlemen, one last wrap-up. Let’s end with Richard, who brought us the topic: “On Loving Trump”. Danny, you go first. I’ll go second. And Richard will go third. Any last word that you like to add?
Daniel Warner: Well, I think that the three of us continuing to talk in spite of the fact that we’re spread out around the world is an indication that we shouldn’t be all too gloomy.
Matthew Stevenson: Since I’m here in Prešov, which is in eastern Slovakia, I will quote David Lloyd George, who was one of the architects of world peace at Versailles and, in theory, on the side of angels, at least in some tellings of history. Not so much my telling of history…. At Versailles, when they were talking about Slovakia with Woodrow Wilson and whomever, David Lloyd George asked out loud: “Who are the Slovaks? I can’t quite seem to place them.” So it tells you that our leaders have limitations if we expect too much direction from the top.
Richard Falk: I certainly agree with that parting sentiment and I’d say that we can’t know the future but we can struggle to create the future we believe in. And if that message is widely enough disseminated it might generate a new kind of political energy that could reframe politics in the United States and elsewhere.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB. He is the author of numerous books, including Public Intellectual: Memoir of a Citizen Pilgrim and This Endangered Planet. He divides his time between the United States and Turkey.
Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva, where he served for many years as Deputy to the Director of the Graduate Institute. He lives in Geneva.
Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, and The Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. A recent book, about traveling in France and the Franco-Prussian wars, is entitled Biking with Bismarck. His new book is: Our Man in Iran. He lives outside Geneva.
[Prefatory Note: A slightly updated and modified interview on Gaza with Zeynep Busra Conkar, an Associate Producer of TRT World, published October 30, 2023, an important Turkish media platform. A link to a short audio excerpt: https://twitter.com/trtworld/status/1719078356577075573]
TRT: Israel’s bloodlust shows international law is ‘a manipulated series of norms.’ Renowned International Law Professor Richard Falk says Western leadership becomes “self-righteous” to enforce international law “when it’s in their interest” while in other cases, they remain silent. TRT Introduction to Q & A follows.
”Many objective observers have noted that how Israel is using force against Gaza constitutes an ongoing case of genocide, which is itself considered the most serious of international crimes and deserves to be stopped by a consensus of inter-governmental action at the UN to stop this kind of extreme violent abuse of state power,” Falk said.
As the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict enters its 24th day, claiming the lives of over 9,800 people – 8306 Palestinians and 1538 Israelis – Tel Aviv refuses to de-escalate or even allow ‘a humanitarian pause’ in its military operations and instead resorts to massive disproportionate and indiscriminate violence on the besieged and defenseless people of densely populated Gaza, striking at targets such as hospitals, medical convoys, refugee camps, religious buildings, UN facilities, schools, and in the process ordering a cruel and impractical forced evacuation of 1.1 Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza, treating those unable or unwilling to leave as aligned with the ‘terrorists,’ that is, Hamas.
The scale of devastation caused by Israeli bombings in Gaza is horrifying. A small enclave of an estimated 2.3 million Palestinians navigating perilous waters over the past 16 years to survive in the face of a comprehensive and punitive economic and social blockade since 2007 proclaimed by Israeli officials as designed to keep Palestinians on ‘a subsistence diet,’ that is ‘a bare life.’ Gaza has in the last weeks once again been subjected to collective punishment on a gigantic scale– further aggravated by Israel’s scandalous targeting of prohibited sites and by through the alleged use of incendiary phosphorus bombs in densely populated civilian areas. Such practices consist of numerous war crimes.
In moments like this, when a staggering death toll of civilians, half of whom are children, isn’t significant enough even to lead the international community to use the same condemnatory language and criticism it has employed against Russia in the course of the Ukraine conflict in far less anguishing circumstances. Western leadership fails once again to convince the world that conformity to its recently much-touted “rules-based order” bears any relationship to either the UN Charter or international law. It exhibits a calculus of friends and enemies, with the former allowed to coerce as they wish, even in monstrous ways.
TRT WORLD: Will Tel Aviv ever be held accountable for the crimes it has committed in Gaza? Considering over 56 years of occupation, an apartheid regime, and countless human rights violations in Palestine, in what ways have the global powers, especially the US, colluded with the Israeli state and enabled near-genocidal violence against Palestinians?
RICHARD FALK: No effective legal remedies have been available to the Palestinians. The UN should take far more responsibility for implementing its own resolution passed in 1947, the so-called partition plan, while disregarding Palestinian their inalienable right of self-determination, at least promised the Palestinian people a state of their own in historic Palestine. The UN also failed to implement Security Council Res. 242 adopted unanimously after the 1967 War, which called for the withdrawal of the Israeli military presence established by military conquest. Since then, the UN has been blocked in the Security Council by US and sometimes European vetoes; the rest of the UN can authoritatively report on and identify legal and moral wrongdoing doing harm to the Palestinian people, but it lacks the capability to implement its findings without a Security Council decision. The General Assembly is limited to making recommendations based on 2/3s majority,support; even the International Court of Justice’s binding decision requiring Security Council action to compel enforcement. So, the remedies provided by the international legal community in this situation are ineffective if a major geopolitical actor, in this case, the United States, is determined not to shield Israel from accountability to international law. The Palestinians have had law on their side ever since 1948, and yet their subjugation to Israel’s patterns of lawlessness that have gone unchallenged for these many decades.
The UN has policy mechanisms available if a supportive political will exists to use them effectively. In the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War it agreed in the Security Council on UN responsibility in situations of precisely the kind present in Gaza, framed as a new norm known as Responsibility to Protect of R2P. It was partly discredited in its first major test in Libya when the NATO countries converted a limited R2P humanitarian mandate in 2011 into a regime-changing intervention that resulted in the execution of the longtime leader and left the country in a worse condition than the one it had undertaken to overcome. Without the political will asserted in manner consistent with the UN Charter ‘effective’ UN action can worsen the situation of a vulnerable and endangered civilian population.
In its decades long occupation, Israel has never hesitated to use excessive force, and the global powers have neither pressured Tel Aviv to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories due to its dismal record as the Occupying Power with a duty to protect civilians under its administrative control nor has Israel been warned to stop using violence in ways that violate international humanitarian law.
TRT: Shouldn’t the international community’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ also apply to Palestine?
RAF: Well, of course. As previously suggested, I believe the international community should have taken R2P action to protect the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation long ago or at the very least debated its relevance. The genocidal onslaught since Oct 7 is so far past the point where it is rationally possible to treat the abuse of Palestinian rights as a matter of internal Israeli security and as somehow a reasonable response to the Hamas attack. The international community has failed miserably so far to offer vital protect an acutely vulnerable, abused, and endangered people. If geopolitics could be put aside, the extreme suffering of Gazans offer the UN an ideal situation where a robust international peace force established in accord with R2P could intervene in ways that might stop the Israeli onslaught, and even made capable of maintaining peace and protecting the Palestinians over time. R2P empowers the UNSC to protect a vulnerable population, and of all the vulnerable peoples in the world, the Palestinians are the ones now most in need of international forcible protection. It is an emergency that has already inflicted a humanitarian catastrophe on the entire population of Gaza, but the continuation of this devastating onslaught will compound the criminality of the attack and the suffering of the people.
But without the political will of all five permanent members of the Security Council, the UN cannot do anything, even rhetorically, that will effectively curtail Israeli violence. Operationalizing R2P is impossible given the arrogant insistence of the Israeli government that we are now witnessing, whose context is much broader than any claimed right of retaliation against the Hamas attack.
TRT: What about the international media? To what extent is it responsible for dehumanizing Palestinians and justifying Israeli human rights abuses, which many argue amount to war crimes?
RAF: Well, the international media is polarized on this cluster of issues; the Western media and especially in the US and UK, have been one-sided in their approach to the ongoing violence, basically vindicating Israel’s position that it is entitled to use whatever means at its disposal to destroy Hamas and hunt down and kill its leaders who perpetrated the Oct 7 attack. But the daily images on TV of Israeli violence against women, children, and injured people. and the extreme Palestinian suffering that has resulted has somewhat lifted the veil of state propaganda, what Noam Chomsky hears ago in the Cold War context delimited as ‘indoctrination in a liberal society.’
In my view, this grant of discretion to Israel is incompatible with the international humanitarian law arrangement by which Gaza was designated as an occupied territory, and Israel as the Occupying Power. The innocent civilian population of Gaza is estimated to be 2.3 million people, 76 percent of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees basically forced by Zionist forces to leave their homes in the villages of southern Gaza in 1948 and denied their international legal right of return, which they and their descendants have tried to challenge over the years by peaceful means without any success, and often with Israeli violent suppressive action. It’s one of the areas where international law is not implemented because of the regressive myth that legal rights created by geopolitical actors who prove unwilling to implement such rights as the Palestinian people enjoy. People thus victimized by Israel, which enjoys the extra-legal form of impunity, have law on their side but lack any remedy that might provide the protection that should be given.
TRT: If the UN can support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and the Western powers can wholeheartedly support the Ukrainian cause, why not the same response on Palestine? Are we facing a crisis of morality or the legality of human rights is being applied on a case-by-case basis, depending on the skin colour and religion of the oppressed?
RAF: Well, there’s no question about the existence of big differences in the treatment by the Global West of the Russian attack on Ukraine and the Israeli attack on the people of Gaza. These NATO exhibits double standards and moral and legal hypocrisy; in other words, Russia is held accountable, and Israel is given impunity. This suggests that international law isn’t a framework for regulating states on some basis of equality as integral to the rule of law, but it is a manipulated series of norms that serve the purposes and often the contradictory and clashing strategic interests of geopolitical actors. When it is in their interest to enforce international law, these states become very self-righteous about their behavior in condemning the violators. But if it’s in their interest to support the violations of international law, then they will either be silent or, in this case, lend unconditional and mostly, but not totally, indirect support to the government and country that is violating international law in a most extreme fashion. Such a dualistic approach to international law functions both a weapon of aggressive lawfare to be useful against adversaries and a policy instrument of legalistic evasion to be deployed on behalf of strategic partners and ‘friends’ further undermining any claim of international law to be authoritative, and deserving of respect, especially in the domain of peace and security. Enemies are sought to be punished when international law is violated, while strategic allies are inoculated with an impunity serum.
TRT: The UN was originally established to promote peace and security, protect human rights, and uphold international law. Have the founding states of the UN undermined the institution because of power politics, or was the UN always meant to be an institution that serves the best interests of a select few members of the Security Council?
RAF: That is a very important and often overlooked question. The UN was designed to be weak in this regard; otherwise, the veto power given to the five most powerful countries in the world makes no sense who happened to be the winners in World War II and later were the first five country to develop nuclear weapons. The effectiveness and the importance of the veto is to confer on these most dangerous and powerful states an unrestricted option to ignore the UN Charter and ignore other international legal obligations whenever the proposed Security Council action clashes with its strategic interests. There was no willingness on the part of leading governments to create a strong, independent, and suitably empowered war prevention global institution when the UN was established, despite the aspirational language of the UN Charter and especially its preamble as expressive of public expectations that governments will try their best to establish an organization that is entrusted with enough capabilities to secure peace for the peoples of the world.
TRT: Israel has always misused the term self-defense to validate its bloodletting approach to security, but does bombing towns and neighborhood’s into smithereens qualify as self-defense in the face of a few hundred gun-toting militants?
RAF: The scope of self-defense is very contested in international law, so you can find legal authorities to support different interpretations of what is allowed. But it’s not allowed to use high levels of force to target a hostile civilian population. Israel has been guilty over the years, but spectacularly in Gaza in the last weeks, of using military force in a variety of ways that under any conditions, whether or not justified and rationalized, would not be permissible as exercises of self-defense, and thus would constitute war crimes. Beyond this it is questionable whether Israel can even validly rely on self-defense in Gaza, which is an Occupied Territory subject to the constraints of Geneva IV.
Israel as the Occupying Power; cannot rightfully claim to be defending itself against itself. It’s a real puzzle how the international discourse has accepted this misapplication of the idea of self-defense, which makes no sense in the setting of belligerent occupation of an adversary society in whole or part.
TRT: Should Israel be put on trial for war crimes in the International Criminal Court? If yes, what steps need to be taken? If not, why not?
RAF: The answer is the absence of political will to prosecute Israel and the relative passivity and political weakness of the International Criminal Court when it comes to holding major Western states legally accountable. This makes effective use of the ICC a remote possibility in relation to Israel, although it would have made sense if international law was capable of regulating lawless state behavior without deferring to the preferences of geopolitical actors. It is true that neither Israel nor the United States are parties to the Rome Statute and are, therefore, not active in the affairs of the International Criminal Court. But the court’s authority is such that if Palestine, which is a party to the statute, has credibly alleged that it is the victim of crimes committed on its territory, then the ICC is empowered to investigate, indict and prosecute.
And I fervently hope that some effort will be made in the aftermath of the present outbreak of unrestrained violence to strengthen the ICC in relation to geopolitics. It would be naive to become optimistic about achieving any sort of accountability by Israel’s leaders even in the face of what continues to unfold as a textbook case of genocide. That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be desirable to submit to the ICC evidence and allegations of Israeli criminality, which by their nature would be convincing to many organs of public opinion and civil society activists. Mere submission plays this important role in what I identify as the domain of symbolic politics, where establishing or challenging the legitimacy of certain claims produces significant political effects.
TRT: Would you like to add anything else on this topic?
This is a crisis moment for the world, for the peoples of the world, and for the UN as well as for the governments that have the responsibility and capability to oppose international crimes at this level of severity. Many objective observers have contended that Israel is using force against Gaza in ways that constitute an ongoing genocide, which is itself considered the most serious of international crimes and should produce a consensus among government and a call for action by the UN to stop this kind of extreme abuse of state power that is generating one of the most flagrant instances of genocide since 1945.. We should become aware that genocide prevention is a legal and moral obligation of all government and a collective responsibility. Until such time as international institutions can provide effective international law the peoples of the world have a valuable opportunity to contribute to a law-governed world by way of constituting a Peoples Tribunal on Genocide Prevention in Gaza or on Israel’s War Against the People of Gaza. It should be recalled that the treaty addressing genocide widely ratified, including by the antagonists in the Gaza violence and its diplomatic encounters, is titled Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951).
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EWS (Richard Falk) ZOOM
EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE
THE ENDURING LEGACIES OF EDWARD SAID
Richard Falk
Public Intellectual and Professor of International Law
Saturday, November 4, 2023 6:00 pm
Via Zoom
This lecture will explore Edward Said’s continuing influence by way of legacy in several domains of thought and action, including the 21st-century challenges of ‘being a public intellectual’; the persisting relevance of Orientalism; the current phase of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights.
Click here or scan the QR code for the Zoom link
eclinfo@aucegypt.edu I tel 20.2.2615.1628/1630
[Prefatory Note: This post was published in Middle East Eye on Nov 3, 2023 with the title “Israel-Palestine war: Israel’s endgame is much more sinister than restoring ‘security.'”]
\\Can Crimes of Resistance ever justify Genocide? The Tragic Reality of Gaza
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was recently pilloried by Israel because he stated a truism, observing that the 7 October Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum”.
Guterres was calling the world’s attention to Israel’s long record of severe criminal provocations in occupied Palestine, which have been occurring ever since it became the occupying power after the 1967 war.
The occupier, a role expected to be temporary, is entrusted in such circumstances with upholding international humanitarian law by ensuring the security and safety of the occupied civilian population, as spelled out in the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Israel reacted so angrily to Guterres’s entirely appropriate and accurate remarks because they could be interpreted as implying that Israel “had it coming” in view of its severe and varied abuses against people in the occupied Palestinian territories, most flagrantly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
After all, if Israel could present itself to the world as an innocent victim of the 7 October attack – an incident that was itself replete with war crimes – it could reasonably hope to gain carte blanche from its patrons in the West to retaliate as it pleased, without being bothered by the restraints of international law, UN authority, or common morality.
Indeed, Israel responded to the 7 October attack with its typical skill in manipulating the global discourse that shapes public opinion and guides the foreign policies of many important countries. Such tactics seem almost superfluous here, as the US and EU swiftly issued blanket approval for whatever Israel did in response, however vengeful, cruel or unrelated to restoring Israeli border security.
Guterres’s UN speech had such a dramatic impact because it punctured Israel’s balloon of artfully constructed innocence, in which the terror attack came out of the blue. This exclusion of context diverted attention from the devastation of Gaza and the genocidal assault on its overwhelmingly innocent, and long-victimised, population of 2.3 million.
Extraordinary lapses
What I find strange and disturbing is that, despite the consensus that the Palestinian fighters’ attack became feasible only because of extraordinary lapses in Israel’s supposedly second-to-none intelligence capabilities and tight border security, this factor has rarely been discussed since that day.
Instead of the morning after being filled with vengeful fury, why wasn’t the focus within Israel and elsewhere on taking emergency action to restore Israeli security by correcting these costly lapses, which would seem to be the most effective way to assure that nothing comparable to 7 October could happen again?
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage for the latest on the Israel-Palestine war
I can understand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reluctance to stress this explanation or advocate this form of response, as it would be tantamount to a confession of his personal co-responsibility for the tragedy traumatically experienced by Israel at its supposedly impenetrable border.
But what of others in Israel, and among its supporting governments? Undoubtedly, Israel is in all likelihood devoting all means at its disposal, with a sense of urgency, to close these incredible gaps in its intelligence system, and to beef up its military capabilities along Gaza’s comparatively short borders.
It is not necessary to be a security wonk to conclude that dealing reliably with these security issues would do more to prevent and deter future Palestinian fighters attacks, than this ongoing saga of inflicting devastating punishment on the Palestinian population of Gaza, very few of whom are involved with the military wing of Hamas.
Genocidal fury
Netanyahu has lent further plausibility to such speculation by presenting a map of the Middle East without Palestine included, effectively erasing Palestinians from their own homeland, during a September UN speech, where he spoke of a new peace in the Middle East amid the prospect of Israel-Saudi Arabia normalisation. His presentation amounted to an implicit denial of the UN consensus on the two-state formula as a roadmap for peace.
Meanwhile, the genocidal fury of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack is enraging people across the Arab world, and indeed the world over, even in western countries. But after more than three weeks of merciless bombardment, total siege and mass forced displacement, Israel’s discretion to unleash this torrent of violence on Gaza has yet to be challenged by its western supporters.
The US in particular is backing Israel at the UN, using its veto as needed in the Security Council, and voting with almost no solidarity from major countries against a ceasefire at the General Assembly. Even France voted for the General Assembly resolution, and the UK had the minimal decency to abstain, both likely reacting pragmatically to the populist pressures mounted by large and angry street demonstrations at home.
It has also been forgotten in reacting to Israel’s tactics in Gaza that from day one, the extremist government has initiated a shocking series of violent provocations across the occupied West Bank. Many have interpreted this undisguised unleashing of settler violence as part of the endgame of the Zionist project, aimed at achieving victory over the remnants of Palestinian resistance.
There is little reason to doubt that Israel deliberately overreacted to 7 October by immediately engaging in a genocidal response, particularly if its purpose was to divert attention from the escalation of West Bank settler violence, exacerbated by the government’s distribution of guns to “civilian security teams”.
The Israeli government’s ultimate plan seems to be to end once and for all UN partition fantasies, lending authority to the Zionist maximalist goal of annexation or total subjugation of West Bank Palestinians. In effect, as morbid as it seems, the Israeli leadership seized the occasion of 7 October to “finish the job” by committing genocide in Gaza, under the guise that Hamas was such a danger as to justify not only its destruction, but this indiscriminate onslaught against the whole population.
My analysis leads me to conclude that this ongoing war is not primarily about security in Gaza or security threats posed by Hamas, but rather about something much more sinister and absurdly cynical.
Israel has seized this opportunity to fulfill Zionist territorial ambitions amid “the fog of war” by inducing one last surge of Palestinian catastrophic dispossession. Whether it is called “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” is of secondary importance, although it already qualifies as the predominant humanitarian catastrophe of the 21stcentury.
In effect, the Palestinian people are being victimised by two convergent catastrophes: one political, the other humanitarian.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 