Global Justice in the 21st Century

[Prefatory Note: The post below are my modified responses to questions posed by the Quds News Agency, a Palestinian youth journalistic network. The Iran War was widely rationalized after the fact as ‘a war of choice’ as if recourse to war continues to be a discretionary option in the 21st century. Iran’s resilience also suggests that non-defensive warfare is becoming a lose/lose venture in many contemporary situations, as well as radiating harm far beyond the national boundaries of the sovereign space that is the geographic locus of the combat zones, a sign of how interconnected the world has become with respect to reliable supply chains.]

1. The Zionist regime is facing serious crises within the occupied territories, including internal disputes, reverse migration, lack of security, and psychological problems. As you know, the Zionist regime, in addition to the war with Iran, is also heavily involved in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. The Zionist regime violates the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon on a daily basis. How do you evaluate these ceasefire violations and crises?

Israel, as led by the Netanyahu coalition adheres to an extreme version of Zionist ideology, which is committed to ethic supremacy for Jews, denial of Palestinian statehood in their own homeland, while pursuing expansionist river to the sea territorial goals by recourse to apartheid and genocide, with an outcome in Gaza of ecocide. Israel has been consistently defiant of international law as embodied in the 4^th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation as well as authoritatively enunciated by the International Court of Justice in a series of strong, highly professional legal assessments, supported by a large majority of the participating judges, including several from countries whose governments are complicit in many of Israel’s crimes.

Israel is paying an increasing reputational cost and pushback for these policies flagrantly in violation of international humanitarian law and universally shared ethical values. Israel has succeeded apartheid South Africa in becoming the leading pariah or rogue state in the world. Yet shamefully it continues to retain unconditional support from many Western liberal democracies, most prominently from the United States Government in an increased contested policy domains in which pro-Israel support is opposed by an emergent majority of the American people. In recent months it has been losing support from major European countries that had been complicit supporters of its genocide in Gaza.

Another way of viewing these developments is to observe that Palestine has already won the Legitimacy War for the high legal and moral ground in this encounter between the Zionist movement and the ancestral majority Arab population. In recent settler colonial situations the winner of the symbolic Legitimacy War has generally taken precedence over the battlefield military superiority of the colonial power. The French learned this lesson in Indochina and Algeria. The United States has unfortunately failed to learn a similar lesson from its experience in the Vietnam War. There is every indication that the Zionist leadership of Israel pays no attention to the relevance of the Legitimacy War in its policy calculations or to the outcomes of most political conflicts in the post-colonial world, where nationalist resistance has politically outlasted coercive foreign encroachments on territorial sovereignty that inflicts devastation and massive casualties but fails to overcome resistance until it finally withdraws in the face of combat fatigue and a rise in opposition in the metropole.

I believe that Israel faces a dismal future unless, as now seems unlikely, it repudiates Zionism, becomes a normal secular state, and respects international law and morality, and upholding with sensitivity in the context of the long suppressed Palestinian inalienable right of self-determination.

It is significant that genocidal settler movements enjoyed considerable political success prior to the adoption of the Genocide Convention of 1948 under the shadow of the Holocaust. The most spectacular examples are the breakaway white British colonies, above all, the United States, but less dramatically and more ambiguously, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that remained members of the British Commonwealth, yet dispossessed native populations with equal or even greater fury.

• Many international analysts and experts believe that the United States and Israel failed to achieve their goals in the war against Iran, and Iran emerged as a new superpower. What is your opinion? To what extent do you consider Iran to be the winner of this war?

Iran is emerging from this aggressive war initiated by the US, joined by Israel, stronger and more respected, feared regionally and globally. Iran is hardly ‘a superpower’ except in the sense of showing great resolve in resisting foreign, geopolitically motivated intervention, and yet surviving decades of punitive actions by Israel and the United States. This makes Iran so far ‘the winner’ in this war started on Febuary 28th by its unexpected ability to completely frustrating the aggressors states in their efforts to gain a painless victory by devastating Iran sufficiently by its ‘shock and awe’ tactics to produce a qick political surrender. Additionally, for the second time in a year Iran has endured devastating violations of its territorial sovereignty causing severe losses to the people of the country as well as unwarranted harsh sanctions. The deliberate assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab causing an estimated 200 deaths at the outset of the war highlight the experience of a militarily one-sided war in which the aggressors are only indirectly and marginally subject to military retaliation. Such combat tactics underscored the unwillingness of the aggressor states to conduct their military operations in a manner that would facilitate a diplomatic off ramp from its gross miscalculations of Iran’s will to resist and capacity to inflect discrediting harm to the region and the entire world by its defensive option of closing the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic.

This unanticipated closure of Strait of Hormuz demonstrated the extent of miscalculation on the part of the aggressor states, causing widespread hostility to the war in the U.S., especially severe for the poor everywhere and countries dependent on supply chain reliability from the Gulf region for their energy and fertilizer needs. Such an economistic combat tactic by Iran has somewhat evened the balance in the struggle, although the United States and Israel have been spared retaliatory devastation and even major economic harm. It is likely that the outcome of the Iran War will send Western war planners to revise the tactics relied upon by the geopolitical pursuit of strategic interests.

• Some media outlets are reporting on the Zionist regime’s moves to drag the United States into war against Iran again. What is your assessment? Will the US and Israel war against Iran resume again?

In the context of autocratic leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu it is hazardous to predict what course the future will take in relation to Iran. Trump has exhibited an inability to admit political defeat and has often managed to conceal his setbacks by wildly exaggerated claims of success as he did in the early days of the Iran War. He seems to have confused exaggerated early US reports of devastating losses inflicted on Iran’s military capabilities with a victorious political outcome. When the Iranians refused to play along, demonstrating retaliatory capabilities by strikes against US military bases in the region, and later by the Hormuz closure, Trump reacted with genocidal threats and crude expletives. When Iran still showed no signs of wavering, Trump backed off, but did not cease his bluff diplomacy by pretending the war was over and it ended with an American victory. At the same time, incoherently Trump continued to utter threats directed at Iran coupled with derisive comments about their diplomatic proposal to end the war permanently. Trump is a typical display of childlike pique called Iran’s politely conveyed proposal ‘totally unacceptable,’ and insultingly discarding it as ‘garbage.’ Quite characteristically, Trump offer no counter-proposal in accord with diplomatic protocol rather in a rhetoric associated with master/slave hierarchical relations.

Where this will lead is impossible to forecast, although the present stalemate does not make me hopeful about what lies ahead.

With respect to Netanyahu the situation is somewhat different. Since the October 7 attack on Israel border villages, Israel has pursued a policy of absolute security for itself, no matter the costs to other societies in the Middle East. Such a policy has led to sustained genocide in Gaza, unrestrained settler violence in the West Bank, the Gazafication of southern Lebanon, and an insistence on the pursuit of its own goals in Iran as distinct, and more farreaching, than those of the US. Israeli goals seek regime change in Tehran, the total abandonment of Iran’s nuclear program, and an end to positive relations with regional pro-Palestinian Islamic movements in the region.

From the experience in Gaza, we should at least learn that Israeli ceasefires operate, at best, as temporary deescalation moves rather than signaling the end of violence. I would be happily surprised if Israel refrains from resuming its war against Iran, with or without the US, which seems improbable so long as Iran emerges as a stronger regional actor than it was before February 28^th.

If genuine peace is to replace Western hegemony in the Middle East it must include a process of genuine denuclearization starting with Israel, and concluding with the establishment of a multinational nuclear free zone throughout the Middle East, with compliance monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Accompany this imperative step would be the establishment of a regional framework that gave due participation to Palestinian representation and established mechanisms promoting regional development.

Tags: Gaza, Iran, Israel, Nuclear Weapons, Palestine, Politics, United States, war