Archive | June, 2025

Signing and Spreading The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal

23 Jun

The Gaza Peoples Tribunal at the end of its first public assembly in Sarajevo issued a Declaration that expresses our commitment to peace and justice for the Palestine people in their struggle to realize their basic rights, above all their inalienable right to self-determination.

We are inviting likeminded friends to read and endorse the Sarajevo Declaration and to share the link with others who might join our solidarity initiative at this critical time.

This is the link:Here is the link to the Change.org where you find the text of the Declaration and endorser information

https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8

With solidarity sentiments,

Richard Falk

Ambivalence Toward Resistance as a Human Right: Matters of Law and Policy

16 Jun

[Prefatory Note: I publish here my foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy’s pathbreaking book on the right of resistance. Murphy provides readers with a comprehensive framework for thinking about resistance to public authority in a variety of settings without the controversial baggage of commentaries on such salient cases as Palestine, Ireland, Kashmir. Exempt from direct consideration is also self-defense instances of resistance, which are not treated except historically, and then as matters of the security rights of sovereign states rather than human rights. It may disappoint some readers that none of these three classic instances of popular resistance is discussed in the text and hence not even referred to in the index. The author fruitfully conceptualizes the right of resistance as a human right that has a universal, if amorphous, resonance in international law and in the constitutional foundations of legitimate national governance in all parts of the world.

The manipulation of language in the context of the October 7 lethal attack on Israeli border villages by political forces living under a punitive siege in Gaza imposed in 2007 in response to a Hamas victory in internationally monitored elections held the prior year and supplemented by Hamas prevailing in an intra-Palestinian power struggle with its rival, the Palestine Liberation Organization (linked to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority that shares partial administrative, collaborative control over the West Bank with Israel). It is widely believed that Hamas’ rise was due to its advocacy and practice of a politics of resistance in contrast to the politics of accommodation pursued by the Palestinian Authority and PLO.

October 7 is so pivotal for an appreciation of the contradictory agenda of Israel and the Palestinian people. On the side of the established order favored by governments and elites in the West and resting on the geopolitical primacy of the Global West in the Middle East, the attack on Israel was a terrorist disruption of order executed in a barbaric manner. On the side of the Palestinians and much of the post-colonial Global South, the attack was perceived as a justifiable action of resistance to a settler colonial project that had long denied Palestinian rights, above all, Palestine’s inalienable right to self-determination as enshrined in Article 1 of both human rights covenants that frame recourse to resistance by reference to law. The commission of violations by the resisters during the attack were commingled with Israeli official justifications for an extreme response, articulated ‘legally’ as ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ or simply as an appropriate claim of self-defense or as ‘counterterrorism.’ It not surprising that in the ensuing six months influential media platforms of the West accepted the Israel approach, decontextualizing Israel’s pre-October 7 behavior toward the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular. Only after months of devastating attack on Gaza did this simplistic portrayal of the attack begin to be challenged by referencing the historical background, civil society protest activity, daily atrocity images and witness testimony, genocidal tactics and intentionality, and by disclosure of territorial ambitions and an ethnic cleansing agenda. At this stage, only the firmest defenders of Israel’s conduct, forgo the rhetoric of genocide in describing the attacks, thereby subverting Western official posture of punishing the use of the word genocide as a hate crime, a mainstream taboo. An encroaching Palestinian right of resistance rarely is even considered. Instead, even peace-oriented groups often limit their goals to achieving a non-judgmental ceasefire.

A careful application of Murphy’s way of analyzing the role of resistance claims and practice would produce a more balanced, less propagandistic and geopolitical tinged, battle of words as between terrorist violence and resistance, and between the security of sovereign states and the human rights of people considered both individually and collectively. The Ukraine War and the recently commenced Iran War are further illustrations of the degree to which mainstream normative discourse on armed struggle is not deployed as a source of objectively interpreted legal norms and principles in conflict situations but rather used as a policy instrument to condemn the actions of adversaries and lend protective support to friends and partners. Thus, Russia is condemned, without any account of NATO provocations, while Israel is given the benefit of the doubt despite its unprovoked aggression and its unacknowledged yet widely known, arsenal of nuclear weaponry.

To gain a deeper, more constructive understanding of these and other issues, Shannonbrooke’s guidance is indispensable. Her book is available at all the usual places.]

*************############%%%%%%%%%

Foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy, The Human Right to Resist in International and Constitutional Law, Cambridge University.

As I read this jurisprudentially fascinating and exceptionally learned book, the media was consumed by its daily accounts of the massive military operation conducted by Israel against the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. It was a gruesome story rationalized on one side as self-defense against Hamas cast as a terrorist organization that carried out a barbaric attack on October 7, 2023, and as such, could be legitimately situated outside the protection that international law by setting limits on the violence of warfare, although compliance was often problematic. On the other side, criticism mounted that what was being called self-defense would be better understood if interpreted as a deliberate and unabashed recourse to genocide by Israel whose slaughter of Gazans that amounted to a humanitarian catastrophe affecting the whole of the Palestinian people. By and large, political leaders in the West endorsed Israel’s shocking response to the horrific Hamas attack on 22 villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the death of an estimated 1,400 Jewish civilians and soldiers, as well as the seizure of an estimated 240 hostages, severe war crimes committed by Hamas that seemed to qualify as crimes against humanity.

In contrast, were exceptionally large and aggressive public demonstrations in cities around the world, including in the United States, UK, and other governments whose governments were giving unconditional support to Israel. These street protests were denouncing the scope, targeting, intensity, severity of Israel’s response as amounting to the crime of crimes, genocide, although the milder events in the West tended to confine their demands to calls for an immediate ceasefire, which Israel and the United States opposed at the UN and in its diplomatic stance. Both views, however contradictory their political outlooks seem, were connected by invoking law to justify and explain their impassioned partisanship. A reading of Shannonbrooke Murphy’s timely and conceptually brilliant book, while itself demanding a reader’s sophisticated and dedicated attention, is the most illuminating treatment of these and kindred issues of how law can be used in good faith to uphold a politics of armed resistance while at the same time putting strict limits on the legally grounded human right of people to resist various forms of oppressive conditions. It is an unusual situation, but far from unprecedented, for law to exist in certain respects but still lacking sufficient clarity to offer definitive guidance to parties in conflict as to what is behaviorally permitted and what is not, enabling the more powerful actors to engage in lawfare as part of its strategic approach.

Murphy does not examine specific cases of conflicts between the forces of order and the rights of resistance in trying to depict and improve upon the conceptual landscape that throughout history has surrounded this inherently controversial set of issues. Instead, she considers resistance from the perspective of human rights law as it currently functions in international law and constitutional law, while presenting a learned and relevant account of historical antecedents in the work of past celebrated jurists and other normative sources of reflection on the dual role of law in prohibiting and permitting resistance. A prominent feature of the human right to resist is that it functions as a right of exception to the normal duty to obey. It is a matter of varying circumstances that give rise to resistance in a variety of context because existing arrangements of governance are harming individuals, groups, and peoples in socially unacceptable ways, often reflecting changing or evolving societal values. Such a potential role for positive law affirms that the contested behavior in addition to being morally and politically deplorable, can be further stigmatized as sufficiently legally deplorable as to vindicate the existence and exercise of the human right of resist. Domestic law typically wrestles with such issues at the level of the individual or group. These issues may be features of governance (for instance, colonialism, apartheid) of characteristics of civil society (for instance, homophobia, racial and religious prejudice, patriarchy).

Such a human right to resist became prominent in the United States in the 1960s due to the refusal of individuals to comply with the legal obligation to serve for a limited period of time in the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. Western democracies had previously wrestled with this issue during World War II, generally granting individuals and groups such a right if it derived from religious convictions and was directed against all wars, or warfare as such. During the Vietnam War an increasing number of secularly motivated young Americans developed a legal argument that became known as ‘selective conscientious objection’ in which justification for the refusal to join the armed forces was based on moral/legal/political objections to this particular war in Vietnam. Revealingly, as the Vietnam War became more unpopular with the citizenry over time, courts in the U.S. looked with greater favor on this once novel secular rationale for conscientious objection. To be more attuned to Murphy’s conceptual clarity, this set of issues of political propriety is addressed as a ‘cognate’ notion that influences but is distinct from the penumbra of the ‘human right of resistance.’ In such a spirit, Murphy subtly balances positivist concerns with achieving as much conceptual precision as possible against the importance of retaining enough flexibility to enable law to evolve as societal values and circumstances change. Her jurisprudential stance favors codification efforts that take sensitive account of changing conditions and societal values while recognizing the benefits of achieving maximum conceptual precision and stability with regard to prevailing expectations about the content of the human right to resist.

The originality of this learned discussion of the human right to resist, which should be of particular interest to common law countries such as the United States, is the decision of the author not to address specific cases of collective resistance such as the Irish or Palestinian struggle for human rights, including some form of self-rule or even the radical forms of opposition to Nazi genocide. In this sense, Murphy’s jurisprudentially impressive study can be fruitfully read as a complement to Noura Erakat’s fine Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). What Erakat gains by way of readability and context is somewhat offset by her fully acknowledged substantive sympathies that become part of the policy analysis that underpins her critique of the ways international law has failed the Palestinian people. In this same sense, what Murphy, despite the lucidity of her prose, loses by way of readability is fully redeemed by a fundamental rethinking, with partisan undertones, of what is at stake when a right of exception is given to individuals, groups, and peoples to violate the law legally, but within a secondary framework of authoritative legal limits.

I am a great admirer of both works, but for different, yet interlinked reasons. In Erakat’s case because I share her compelling concern for delegitimizing Palestinian victimization via lawfare, while in Murphy’s case because I am made far more aware of the complexity of the issues involved in legalizing resistance, taking account of its continuing evolution and persisting conceptual gaps, and explicating and exploring linkages to other kindred issues that bear centrally on limiting the power of the state. These linkages pertain both to incorporating the right to resist authority into domestic constitutional texts and by way of applicable international human rights standards that have evolved into moral aspirations to become legal obligations. In this latter instance, for instance, such crimes as apartheid and genocide are not conceptually insulated from legal accountability by invoking claims of unlimited sovereignty over territorial governance or by constitutional provisions that accord superiority to domestic sources of law whenever clashes with international law are present.

In one important respect, Murphy’s positivist presentation of issues associated with resistance legality takes our attention away from the political contexts of enforcement. We could end up with an admirably coherent conceptual framework but with a useless, or even regressively opportunistically legalistic approach to various categories of grievances emanating from those who are deemed as class adversaries or international rivals. The authority of law has radically uneven limits in its functioning within and among sovereign states. For instance, such ‘legal’ developments as the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials accepted the taint of ‘victors’ justice’ because of foreclosing inquiry, much less accountability, into the crimes of the victors. Even more consequential for evolving a humane global rule of law was the right of veto inserted into the UN Charter, thereby both hampering and tainting the operations of the United Nations. International law is weak when it comes to vital issues because its implementation tends to be disrupted by and subordinated to the primacy of geopolitics, which rests protection of rights on such unreliable restraints as imposed by deterrence threats and prudence, if at all. This results in major resistance claims being manipulated to reflect the interest and policy priorities of powerful states and domestic elites. What is evident is that the selective implementation of human rights law in general creates images of moral hypocrisy and double standards as diluting the authority of and respect for international legal discourse. True, some creative tension has emerged internationally due to the collapse of European colonialism, although Israel is a reminder of what colonialism meant for oppressed native peoples and is expressed by the establishment of counter-hegemonic legal arenas, including among jurists as exemplified by TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship reflecting the Global South’s experience of the hegemonic uses of international law relied on by colonial Europe in exploiting the resources and dehumanizing non-Western peoples. Resistance to colonialism has in the post-colonial era of international relations inspired the determined effort to generate support for a counter-hegemonic approach to international and constitutional law, which is expressed by

the transnational bonding of Global South jurists in the TWAIL enterprise.

Shannonbrooke Murphy is fully aware of the incompleteness of a purely positivist focus on the human right to resist, while here setting for herself this already Herculean challenge of conceptual clarification. Her contributions to contemporary jurisprudence are profound, and rendered in ways that permit and encourage diverse inquiries into other bodies of human rights pertaining to a range of topics, including rights of self-defense, freedom of expression and freedom of religion in relation to such sensitive policy questions as recourse to war, rights of secession by ethnic or religious minorities, as well as the more sensitive personal issues of gender parity and identity. Let the legal architects produce responsive blueprints. Let the debates begin!

Fifty or so years ago a British graduate student at the Yale Law School, Rosalyn Higgins, who like me fell under the charismatic influence of Myres McDougal in studying international law, but was troubled by the subjectivity and seeming ideological bias of a jurisprudential approach that gave legal hegemony to the Cold War values prevalent in the West. I was also troubled, but on different grounds. I questioned the jurisprudential necessity for such an ideological bias and instead sought a contextually sensitive approach to law that was guided by the type of secular humanism that infuses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the UN Charter.

Professor Higgins, who later became a distinguished judge at the International Court of Justice, organized a conference in London to explore these rifts between the British and American approaches to law. Without the benefit of Murphy’s conceptual mapping, I found the conference most intriguing because of the gathering of fine legal scholars for such an unusual conversation, yet intellectually unrewarding as it merely reproduced the tensions between a British insistence that the subjectivity of the New Haven School of International Law undermined the authority of law and the American claim that law without a political and ethical context is artificially cut off from reality. If we were to arrange such a meeting in the future, I would insist that Shannonbrooke Murphy’s book be required background reading believing that both sides could valuably learn from it. Also, I cannot imagine a better beginning for an advanced course in either human rights, resistance claims, or the interplay of international and constitutional law than by assigning this demanding, yet remarkably imaginative, erudite, and rigorously conceptualized contribution to an improved understanding of the interactions between law, resistance, and human rights in a variety of substantive contexts.

Richard Falk

Yalikavak, Turkey

November 6, 2023

.’    

Tags: , , , , , , ,

What Future for US/Israel Relations? Justifying the Gaza Tribunal, Addressing US Complicity

7 Jun

Tri

[Prefatory Note: the post below is the text of an interview published in Italian in Il Manifesto on 6/7/2025. The interview was conducted by a journalist friend, Patricia Lambroso. It appears here in somewhat modified form, and is devoted to questions about the Gaza Tribunal.]

1. The GAZA Tribunal (civilian tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, leaders and governments around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?

Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders. The ICJ accepted its jurisdiction to resolve a submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as genocide, although a definitive ruling on violations of the Genocide Convention would not be available for some years in the future.

The ICJ in 2024 also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked impulses toward UN enforcement by its right of veto and its dismissive attitude toward recourse to the ICJ, supporting Israel claim to be acting in self-defense.

It is more accurate  to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the three NATO  Permanent Members of the Security Council each of which is vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings in the event of a refusal of voluntary compliance by the losing party. The ICJ should not be blamed. Instead it should be given enforcement powers to ensure the enhanced effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be mainly associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled by the winners of World War II in 1945 that acted to safeguard the primacy of geopolitics. In part this design defect was a reaction to the perceived failure to recognize this primacy in the design and operation of the League of Nations, resulting in the non-participation or exclusion of several key countries in the organization, and its failure to avoid developments that culminated in the outbreak of World War II.

The ICJ issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also  resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza as supposedly regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”]  The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War required terminating Israel’s administrative presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligation by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment. This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack. Israel has given not the slightest sign that it would comply with this crucial Advisory Opinion main conclusion ordering the withdrawal of Israel’s presence from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, presumably relying on the supposedly ‘advisory’ nature of the ICJ authority in relation to UN requests for guidance on ‘legal disputes.’

Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, which is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil. This outcome gives attention to an ‘Accountability Gap’ as a supplemental weakness of international to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed personal sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor and any officials that participated in the issuance of arrest warrans by the ICC allegedly for exceeding its lawful authority. The US also threatens to sanction anyone attached to the ICC who tries in the future to facilitate the detention of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants.

Also relevant is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC that has so far refrained from directly examine allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. The single effort to raise complicity issues was undertaken by Nicaragua that submitted a complaint that Germany was violating international law by supplying arms to Israel. A final decision has yet to be rendered, although the ICJ rebuffed the allegation Germany on the grounds that its supply of arms to Israel was too small to be capable of constituting a violation of the Genocide Convention. It seems to be left up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is now integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement.

A final structural weakness of the judicial enforcement of international law by way of the UN System is what might be termed ‘a temporal lag,’ the long lapse of time between a submission and a final decision in situation where the victims of behavior need and deserve expedited relief. There must be an emergency procedure that allows the ICJ to reach a decision within days and weeks, even if later in the proceedings it is revised or even reversed.

It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct but that is a misinterpretation. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes of international institutions are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is nevertheless important. Its outcomes exert influences on many governments, media coverage, and civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law help achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide. The victimization of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more than 19 months has severely delegitimized. It is now widely viewed throughout the world as a pariah state whose behavior in Gaza has created the ‘moral crisis of our time’ for all peoples and governments Israel. Many argue that Israel’s defiant refusal to abide by international law and to respect the authority of the UN should result in its suspension from UN participation until Palestinian self-determination is achieved. Israel has responded to these proposed initiative principally by way of weaponizing antisemitism claiming that its opponents are motivated by ‘Jew hatred’ rather than the motives that they claim. This line of Israel defense has grown ineffective even in countries with the most complicit governments. And yet Israel’s daily actions continue after all this time to be unimpeded, because of the absence of the political will needed to mount an ad hoc protective intervention to alleviate the humanitarian emergency and provide safety for the surviving Gazan population.

A public dismissal of international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings geopolitically nullified, the outcomes of legal controversy exert an influence on discursive perceptions of legitimacy, that is, on the shaping of the legal and moral high ground in relation to an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of political realists who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, military capabilities no longer are the best predictors of which side will prevail to defeat settler colonial arrangements in political struggles for self-determination. This should have been the lesson learned by the United States from its involvement in the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet lost the war. Thus pattern has been repeated in most colonial wars during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to typical 21st century conflict situations, but the lesson remains unlearned. This is so because the defeats incurred are profitable for private sectors arms producers that wield great influence in the Global West, particularly in the United States.

 The Gaza Tribunal was formed against this background. It was conceived as a project of global civil society in the conduct of a Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestinian people. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after October 7, resisted repeated UN calls for an Israeli ceasefire as well as defied the ICJ and ICC rulings, provoking a rising sense of moral outrage among the peoples of the world. The GT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the significance of international law in its several dimensions relevant to the situation in Gaza. The results will be presented in October of this yeard to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons with diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, moral authority, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written responses. This result of the Gaza Tribunal is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics, and makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors ample opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. The GT does not mimic judicial tribunals that operate within strict technical limits and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, and hopes to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War, proudly acknowledges itself as being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to prove itself relevant on the level of action. The GT relies on a variety of civil society solidarity initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also encourages nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participation; arms, trade, and  investment embargoes; and protest activity of all varieties.     

2 The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust  is weaponized  by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?

Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There exist two principal lines of explanation for this stance so contrary to the values proclaimed from the rooftops by liberal societies in the West . The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany is acutely sensitive to this allegation and politically has unfortunately opted for the view that to overcome its past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the renunciation of genocide in the pledge pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, here the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, here genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim. The Srebrenica genocide of 1995 tested the pledge because the events in Bosnia tested whether ‘never again’ was ethnic or geographical, of relevance only if Europe was the scene.

The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy, a reenactment of the Crusade under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington’ fatalistic warning that the end of the Cold War was not a gateway to global peace, but rather a shift in conflict patterns from Communism to Islamism. In this sense, the emergent ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the white and secular West, and which also happens to regard Israel as its principal enemy. In this sense, the opposition to the West from the Iranian perspective is anti-imperial and political, more than it is civilizational, although its deep roc ots are difficult to disentangle from the historical interaction, especially vivid memories of a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 that forcibly restored the autocratic modernizing monarchy to the Pahlavi throne.

 3. Trump touring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?

Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Gulf States will have consequences for Gaza, but their nature remains obscure at this time. On one side, it could be the first stage of a more transactional relationship with Israel than the kind of blind support given during the Biden presidency. In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might result in a greater willingness to forego an attack on Iran, and more readiness to seek a negotiated solution with Tehran as to their nuclear program, a course of action disquieting to Israel, and shaking Tel Aviv’s confidence in unlimited support for their preferred endgame in Gaza. It might also encourage the US Government to seek to strengthen Trump’s patently absurd candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, reportedly high among his narcissistic phantasies. As strange as it seems, this image of Trump as a peacemaker concretely express incentives and exert real pressure on Israel to stop finally the genocidal assault on Gaza. It might even push the US to back a two-state endgame that subverts Israel’s obvious ambition to terminate the Zionist Project by annexing the West Bank on its way to establishing an Israeli one-state.

Even more radical would be a shift away from further tolerance of Israel’s secret acquisition on a nuclear weapons capability achieved with Western complicity to a position of backing regional denuclearization, but the long silence makes even this sensible contribution seem utopian as far as the prospects of its adoption is concerned. But which of the nine nuclear powers has shown less respect for international law and the constraints of the UN Charter than Israel when it comes to the use of force?

Contrariwise, May trip to the Gulf energy-rich monarchies may have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with these Gulf regimes and yet give Netanyahu what he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders want Hamas destroyed as much as do the Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv, and could be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a shared counter-terrorism orientation that might prove compatible with the forced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where it is falsely assumed by advocated that in time those displaced by the second Nakba event will stop dreaming of and disengage from struggles to liberate Palestine from the clutches of settler colonialism, no matter how long it takes. Israel has lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza beyond the outer limit of decency by recourse to deliberate tactics of prolonged starvation. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including the citizenries of the liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip sidelining Israel diplomatically, at least for the moment, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of the Gideon’s Chariot, Israel’s new military operation, may signal a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations or turn on whether maintaining harmony with Israel strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that US support for Israel to remain unaffected in the near future as the levers of Zionist influence (e.g. AIPAC, donor deference) are still strong in the United States

Tags: , , , ,

Trump v. Netanyahu: Transactional or Ideological?

2 Jun

Trump’s second term as US President has been mercurial, with lots of bobbing and weaving more bearing resemblance to a boxer’s opening round in which the point is to feel out the opponent rather than to land decisive punches. The pragmatism of the deal or the inflexibility of firm commitments premised on images of world order and national interest as reflective of hard power calculations in a world of states that political realists perceive as divided among friends, enemies, and those that don’t count.

In the case of Israel, this early rhythm of Trump’s second term is notable mainly for its uncertainty, contrasting with the tight brotherly embrace of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who tried from time to time to adjust this image ever so slightly by  gestures of humanitarian concern that Netanyahu seemed to misconstrue as serious US efforts to constrain Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. As the quickly faded red line in Gaza illustrated Biden’s gentle warnings to Israel were mainly for show in response to public relations concerns arising in the US in response to the American protest activity and liberal media criticisms of Israel’s behavior in Gaza that struck more and more observers as ‘genocide,’ although most influential media platforms shied away from calling a spade a spade, that is, naming Israel’s Gaza violence as genocide. This inhibition on any governmental naming of the crime persists under Trump and is combined with the intensification of the repressive campaign inherited from Biden to treat support for the Palestinian pursuit of their basic rights and criticisms of Israeli excesses as ‘antisemitism,’ as a ‘hate crime against the Jewish people.’ Siding with the victim of flagrant crime is transformed by the magic of language into itself being the crime. This turn of phrase also offers Trump a pretext for advancing his generalized attacks on knowledge-based policy making of experts and reflecting scientific research as typified by elite universities, which are themselves epitomized by Harvard. Trump’s moves against Harvard involving defunding of research and challenging the immigration status of foreign students amount to an pedagogical assault on the accepted modern learning paradigm flavored by appeals to xenophobia rampant among the MAGA base. This campaign is vintage Trump, who combines his trust in belief-based action as fused with professions of ultra-nationalism.

Trump, despite shifts against Israel in US and European civil society sentiments never wastes words by making even the slightest display of empathy for the extrem suffering of the Palestinian people. He seems almost pathologically dazzled by prospects of access to the extreme wealth and geopolitical grandeur of the Gulf monarchies, carried to absurd extremes by proposing a US takeover of Gaza with the surreal promise of establishing ‘the Riviera of the Middle East,’ which included a proviso undoubtedly comforting to Tel Aviv that the reconstruction plan would be preceded by the forced departure of its surviving Palestinian population. It remains unclear to this day whether Trump was seeking a deal in which the financial burden would be shifted to the Arab world while the political administration of post-genocide Gaza, purged of Palestinians, would be entrusted to US administrative supervision, which is a double gain for Israel (no Palestinians, no UN).  

As such, more than his predecessors Trump seemed at first to support unconditionally even Israel’s regional game plan of eliminating or weakening by military means potential threats to its future security by states and movements in its region. Despite likely swerves on the road ahead Trump seems at this stage determined to avoid Israeli distractions from the pursuit of his own separate primarily transactional goals in the Middle East that are of a primarily economistic character. Trump’s transactional mindset can be reduced to the  pursuit of national gains with respect to trade and investment as awkwardly combined with corrupt personal and family enrichment schemes.  

Above all such a course of action presupposes the US being not too overtly seen as aiding and abetting Netanyahu’s resolve to complete the Zionist Project of establishing an Israeli one-state solution that displaces Palestinians from the land and Palestine from maps of the Middle East. It should be noted that long before October 7 and years prior to Netanyahu extremist coalition that assumed governing authority at the start of 2023 the Israeli Knesset formally enacted into law the claim of exclusive Jewish supremacy without the slightest adverse reaction from Washington. [Israel’s Basic Law of 2018]. Netanyahu was Prime Minister at the time heading a less extreme governing leadership in Israel, yet committed to Israel sovereignty from the river to the sea, achieved by relying on a long tradition of patient reliance on salami tactics, taking small steps toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project.

What the new 2023 Netanyahu team brought to the table was an acceleration of this consensus ‘solution’ to Palestinian resistance and resilience by disclosing its endgame agenda of violent dispossession and provocation.  Trump will face a foreign policy dilemma of either opposing the revival of the UN-backed two-state negotiated solution or siding with Israel, concluding that the time has come to legitimize Israel’s one-state genocidally engineered outcome that included permanent statelessness for the Palestinian people, which entailed repudiating their inalienable right of self-determination.

The most revealing near-term regional measure of geopolitical affinity with Israel is whether American foreign policy chooses to normalize relations with Iran by reaching agreement about its nuclear program or eventually goes along with, and possibly even joins, Israel’s strong push for a major miliary strike aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran’s large-scale long-range missile response, and possibly sparking regime change in Tehran. Iranian diplomacy seems flexible about accepting enrichment limits and international inspection, although a recent UN inspection concluded that Iran was heightening its enrichment output to near weapons’ grade uranium, presumably devising its own weak form of deterrence to the overt threats to its security constantly being made. Trump seems likely to be tempted, for regional and geopolitical reasons, to explore options for an agreement with Iran, especially if it looks like a win for Washington’s diplomacy. If this is only speculatively accurate Trump would come to resent Israel’s effort to discourage ending Iran’s isolation without first getting rid of its anti-Israeli government. If Israel is antagonized in its regional security plan of neutralizing hostile threats by weakening the unity and capabilities of all Middle East actors, movements as well as states, an open break could occur, however improbable that now seems.

There are many unknowns that will impact upon regional developments, not least of which is Trump’ susceptibility to embarking on drastic changes in policy maneuvers as he or his entourage of submissive advisors perceive and juggle their options. Nevertheless, there are reasons at this time to accord serious attention to contrasting normalization and warmaking scenarios. The world is experiencing the dawn of a new phase of international relations in a less unipolar world order marking a terminal phase of international history best understood as ‘the aftermath of the Cold War’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the transitional uncertainties are shifts in geopolitical alignments, alliance relationships, and financial hierarchies. The yet undefined yet ascendant roles and ambitions of China and Russia, and possibly India, are likely to challenge the prior era of undiluted US geopolitical primacy. A major uncertainty is whether the US will adapt to multipolarity or seek at great cost to perpetuate its post-Cold War dominance that it achieved from 1992 to 2022. To do the latter would mean focusing on nullifying the geopolitical challenges of not only Russia and China, but also a more activist and coherent Global South. It would also mean sacrificing the wellbeing of Americans, the ravages of climate change, allowing public indebtedness to reach untenable levels, and letting the national infrastructure to deteriorate even further.

A related uncertainty is whether this new phase of multipolarity would be more conflictual or more cooperative than the world order of the past three decades. Would the less unified West embark upon an all-out worldwide Cold War as was done in the years after 1945 in greatly altered global circumstances? Or would it seek some form of geopolitical collaboration that prepared the way toward problem-solving cooperative relations within reconfigured geopolitical spheres of interest that accorded primacy to political tradition and geographic proximity. The reinvention of viable 21st century spheres of influence and agreed fault lines should preoccupy ‘the best and the brightest’ among foreign policy gurus in the US, Russia, and China.

It is untested whether Trump’s leverage over Netanyahu is sufficient to induce Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the return of the hostages. It is partly a matter of how much Trump is prepared to weaken US domestic support in the US for his presidency in Zionist and Evangelical circles by putting visible pressure on Israel to discontinue its genocidal policies in Gaza, coupled with the Gazification of West Bank policy. Trump currently appears far more concerned about avoiding open war with Iran than stopping the violence in Occupied Palestine. Of course, Trump is the most quixotic leader on the present world scene, and so it may be that he is personally offended by Netanyahu’s refusal to do what he proposes on behalf of wider US strategic interests in the region, and would be prepared to accept an open break with Israel, which would have unpredictable impacts on the governability of the US.

At odds with such transformative prospects for world order are the concrete indications that even give Trump’s ambivalence toward Netanyahu’s approach he is complicit in its recent unfolding. It takes the form of insinuating an American presence in a politically motivated humanitarian aid plan that is managed by an American private security company (SRS) that provides mercenaries to oversea the distribution centers for the dispensing of aid. The whole scheme is disguised by deceptive language of humanitarianism. Even if it ran according to its announced plan, it would bypass the neutral auspices of UN-administered aid as bolstered by international civil society humanitarian aid as well as explicitly collect surveillance information designed to track Palestinian aid recipients. So far, this relief effort directed as alleviating a humanitarian emergency has made ‘starvation’ the lesser of evils when compared to the massacres of those lured to the distribution centers, and then killed and wounded in large numbers by drones, tank fire, and indiscriminate shooting of helpless Palestinians caught by the cruel lure of food. Although the Israeli Occupation Forces deny the allegations, they have confirmed by numerous eye witnesses and journalists on the ground. It seems a particularly grotesque extension of the genocide to kill randomly starving civilians who

Lost their lives while desperately seeking food and aid for their families.

Turning to Netanyahu, the question is how much pressure would be needed to produce a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza. Over the course of almost two years Netanyahu has been notably stubborn and unyielding in response to critics at home and internationally, including in the US. He might expect that Trump would give Israel a bright green light to complete the end game of the Zionist Project by depopulating and partially occupying

Gaza and annexing all or most of the West Bank. Also at issue is whether Netanyahu’s caving into Trump pressure on Gaza would result in the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition government, and subject Netanyahu to resumed fraud prosecutions in Israel.

In the end I think the safest prediction is a compromise, whereby a long-term ceasefire, less than permanent, is agreed upon coupled with renewedsupport for Israel’s expansion of the settler presence in West Bank (22 new settlements have been approved by the Knesset at the end of May) and accompanying annexationist moves. The whole outcome in Gaza may depend on how seriously Israel is about launching a strike designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program as balanced is the Trump quest for a more advantageous deal than was negotiated in 2015 while Obama was president.

In the background is the weakening support for Israel among the governments in western Europe partially reflecting the loss of Israeli support in civil societies around the world, including the US and Canada. Whether these countries and others will back up this recent wave of criticism with censure and sanctions is at this time unknown as is how this conjecture of a weakening of western support for Israel will impact US policy. Will it make Trump more or less insistent on backing Israel and move Netanyahu to become somewhat receptive to a ceasefire/hostages deal as a prelude to ending the Gaza ordeal. The weeks ahead will contain signs as to which way the wind is blowing both in the region and internationally. At present, the overall situation is in flux aggravated by these two leaders who are temperamentally autocratic, but one bends with the wind and the other is as rigid as brainless robot.

Tags: , , , ,