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

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[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 4^th 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 20^th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to typical 21^st 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: Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Israel, Palestine