GAZA TRIBUNAL PROJECT: Opening Remarks and Sarajevo Program, May 26-29, 2025

Opening Remarks, Richard Falk, Sarajevo Public Session of Gaza Tribunal, 26 May 2025

Members of the Gaza Tribunal, Ladies and Gentlemen, Persons of Conscience Throughout the World, and Rector Ahmed Yildirim. It is my honor to welcome you to the opening day of the Sarajevo Public Session of the Gaza Tribunal. It is with great regret that I am not physically present in Sarajevo. I wish that I could be with you in person, but an unforeseen family accident disrupted my travel plans.

The purpose of the Gaza Tribunal is to add credibility to the torment and outrage of people throughout the world and do are part to bringing the Gaza ordeal of death and devastation to an end. Among our goals is to motivate nonviolent action performed with a goal of exerting pressure on Israel to desist from genocide. We commit ourselves to this goal in the name of our common humanity.

We are most grateful to the International University of Sarajevo, and particularly Rector Yildirim for hosting our presence on this historic campus. We are of course mindful of Sarajevo’s and Bosnia’s recent past and its symbolic relevance to the tragic fate that has befallen the Palestinian all of whom have are living as permanent refugees or as persecuted strangers in their own homeland. In the spirit of solemn acknowledgement, we should pay homage today 30 years after the willful massacre of 8,000 male Bosnians at Srebrenica for no reason other than their nationality and religion.

In the present period already lasting more than 19 months the eyes and ears of the world have been exposed to daily atrocities victimizing the besieged crowded, impoverished, and tiny Gaza Strip. Earlier genocides, including the Holocaust, were mostly known in retrospect by way of survivor stories and reconstructed images of the horrors experienced by the victims. This was a macabre contrast to the devastation of Gaza reported by the hour in words and images. Day after day the unspeakable suffering of Palestine’s remarkably resilient and resisting people disoriented persons of conscience by its transparent spectacles of evil. This impact was worsened by being brought to human awareness in real time.

Shamelessly, Israel made little attempt to hide its genocidal intentions or disguise its genocidal tactics. Its leaders and pro-government activists openly declared their goals as killing and maiming Palestinians, whether by bombs or by way of terrifying refusals to allow Gazans to obtain desperately needed food and medical supplies. Its leaders on some occasions sought to justify their behavior be referencing Biblical stories of genocide. Presumably, this was done to provide a hallowed religious precedent for their current operations in Gaza of mass extermination. Israel’s minimum goals were to induce large-scale departures from Occupied Palestine to places as distant as possible from their homeland that has been rendered virtually uninhabitable by repeated bombardment and artillery shelling. The genocidal cast of mind accompanying the military onslaught was manifest. Prominent Israeli citizens and government officials openly compared the mentality accompanying the killing Palestinians to that experienced while killing of cockroaches. Some high-profile Israelis even advocated dropping a nuclear bomb on the densely populated and totally vulnerable people of Gaza. Despite some pretensions to the contrary, the Israeli hostages held by Hamas did not restrain Israel’s violence or move the government toward accepting a permanent ceasefire even after the fury of its campaign went on month after month without achieving its purported original objective of destroying Hamas.

The pleas and warnings of the world’s leading moral authority figures went unheeded by Israel or its supporting governments. These including dedicated pleas from Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV as well as from the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and several Nobel Peace Prize winners. These varied revered voices were defiantly scorned by Israel’s government and citizenry, and the massacres in Gaza continued unabated, and even spread to the West Bank.

The UN despite making a variety of responses has not been able to stop the killing, let alone protect the victimized people of Gaza, even its children, women, disabled, and elderly comprising an estimated 70% of Palestinian casualties. The UN has been blocked from taking decisive action by the diplomatic complicity of the North American and European liberal democracies. It has become obvious to all that the UN lacks the independent political will, authority, and capability to override the kind of geopolitical and material impunity given to Israel by the US. As the Israeli rogue behavior persisted the peoples of the world, including in the countries whose governments were openly aligned with Israel, mounted increasingly militant protests. However, the governments that could have made a difference watched the carnage of bodies and rubble pile up without making moves to stop it, and this sadly includes the governments of Israel’s Arab neighbors whose peoples ardently supported the Palestinian liberation struggle while their regimes remained passive. In many instances even maintained positive economic and political links with Israel belying their pretenses of neutrality or verbal opposition.

It is against this background that Gaza Tribunal was established some months ago, launched in London in November of 2024. Since then working with dedication to prepare as well as possible for this public session in Sarajevo. The undertaking can be grasped from the appended ambitious Program of the Tribunal that will unfold over the next four days.

The GT draws inspiration from prior peoples tribunals, most especially from the Russell Tribunal addressing the unlawfulness of US intervention in the Vietnam War, from the Iraq War Tribunal that was prompted by the 2003 regime-changing aggression that brought chaos and misery to the Iraqi people, and from the tireless work of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal of Rome that sponsored and organized comparable civil society inquiries into the leading injustices in the world. This legacy of earlier peoples tribunals had a common core rationale for coming into existence. This rationale also defines the mission of the Gaza Tribunal and can be explained concisely: It is the failure of organized international society to respond to severe injustices by enforcing international law and holding perpetrators and accomplices accountable. In short, these tribunals arise when the governments of leading states and inter-governmental institutions fail or neglect to address severe injustices, especially bearing on war and peace. In essence, people only act in response to international issues when the established order exhibits its moral and legal depravity from the perspective of justice.

It needs to be appreciated that the funding and organization of a people’s tribunal is a daunting challenge for ordinary citizen. Its inherent posture of radical opposition to governmental policy will be rejected harshly by establishment elites, including the corporate media, and often give rise to punitive reactions. That is to say, the reality of the Gaza Tribunal was a project not lightly undertaken by its principal organizers or by participating activists.

Gaza is the leading example, as well as a metaphor for the dying of settler colonialism, and is thus perceived as a dagger struck to the heart of anti-colonial national liberation. It prompted a few countries of the Global South to have recourse to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, hoping to find formal and authoritative judicial support for their well-documented allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity. Even this progressive reliance on a ‘law and order approach’ turned out to be of little practical benefit in stopping the genocide. The near unanimous rulings and decisions of the ICJ proved to be as unenforceable as were the prior General Assembly ceasefire resolutions. And thus the genocide continue, perpetrators retain de facto impunity, and the complicit governments have the audacity to seek control over day after negotiations.

Yet for opponents of Israel’s policies even these disappointing realities of judicial futility are helpful in this context because authoritative pronouncements of relevant law add symbolic force to the claim that Israel and its supporters have been driven from the high moral and legal ground despite their commanding influence over public discourse by virtue of hasbara manipulations and sympathetic major Western media outlets. Further, since 1945 the side in political conflicts that wins the main legality battles also wins the legitimacy war that informally adjudicates right and wrong. These symbolic victories have turned out to be historically relevant to shaping political outcomes. From the Vietnam War forward the side with military superiority has rarely controlled political outcomes in anti-colonial warfare, however much death and devastation it inflicts in trying for victory. Whether Palestinian resilience, extraordinary as it is,  has the capability to withstand the relentless pressure of Israeli genocide insulated from the enforcement of legal obligations by geopolitical protection, and prepared for by decades of apartheid governance and ethnic cleansing that encountered hardly any pushback from the UN aside from contributions to Palestinian victories in the battlefields of the legitimacy war.

In the coming days we will try to vindicate the establishment of the Gaza Tribunal by striving to add our efforts to rising global opposition to the brutal crimes of a continuing genocide. Can we do otherwise? Only two days ago Israel’s IDF reportedly knowingly targeted the home of two doctors married to one another. The IDF allegedly acted on the basis of surveillance technology that conveyed the knowledge that the house was full of children. While the mother, Alaa de-Najjar, a pediatrician was on duty at the nearby Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, her home was bombed and nine of her ten children were killed by the fire caused by the explosion. The nine bodies of her children were brought to her at the hospital, while her husband critically wounded by the bomb and the singly surviving child, aptly named Adam, were struggling to stay alive. Can any of us rest while such barbarous behavior goes on and on?

Desperate for an end to this genocide I hope many will join me in calling for ‘the gravitas of awakened people’ to do what governments have failed to do, namely, to do all in our power to bring this Palestinian ordeal to an end

We are gathered here in Sarajevo to respond as effectively as we can to what is being increasingly identified as ‘the moral challenge’ of our time. The Gaza ordeal has cast its dark shadow across the entire planet. Our endeavor is to make the experience of the Gaza Tribunal a glimmer of light, an expression of hope against hope.

GAZA TRIBUNAL PROJECT, MAY 26-29, 2025, Sarajevo, Bosnia

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Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics