Global Justice in the 21st Century

[Prefatory Note: this post is an expanded version of my responses to questions posed by aTurkish journalist, Murat Sofuoğlu, who quoted me rather extensively in his excellentInterpretative article published on Oct. 15, 2026  in TRT World with the title, “How Israel’sPolicies Exposed Zionism’s Racist Foundations.” The linked issues of the continuing Gaza ordeal(now temporarily removed from primary Western governmental policy concerns) withprospects for a durable and just peace, the future of Zionism, Trump’s Board of Peace, andlegitimated Palestinian representation as determined by Palestinians. This revision offers amore detailed analysis of a renewed interest in the inherent properties of Zionism as a politicalideology and its connections with Israel as a sovereign state with rights and obligations underinternational law with regard to prohibitions on racism and apartheid.]

1. The UK Green Party has recently labeled Zionism as a racist ideology. What do you think about it?

The UK Green Party formal labeling of Zionism as an ‘ethnonationalist project’ is a significant reminder that Israel’s high standing in Western liberal democracies is now problematic, including even among those governments that supported Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, and even among its citizenry. At the same time, it still remains controversial for these complicit government to lessen the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign state. At the Green Party gathering the vote was surprisingly close, 1022-813, and the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, made a point of publicly rejecting the resolution.

The Green Party leadership, including 5 MPs, sensitive to the controversial nature of its position, tabled a motion strongly reconfirming the pro-Palestinian political commitments of the Green Party as including Palestinian self-determination, Palestinian liberation, right of return, BDS, and a full arms embargo. These pro-Palestinian positions were linked to Green Party support of universal human rights, with explicit mention of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation. The motion ended with rather the mystifying words of a hopeful future: “There is no conflict between the rights of Palestinian people and rights of Jewish people.” After over a century of bloody conflict, how can one explain reconcile such a transcendent sentiment with such a forthright condemnation of Zionist racism as embodied in fundamental policies, practices, and laws of Israel, and currently facing no signs of the internal weakening of or challenges to Israel’s adherence to Zionist ideology.

The global debate about whether the state of Israel should be equated with Zionism has  long been intense and inconclusive, although less so since 2023. At the global level issues about Israeli racism were provoked by the controversial and bitterly contested adoption on November 10, 1975 of General Assembly Resolution 3379 (‘Zionism is racism’), adopted by a vote of 72-32, with 35 states abstaining. It was overwhelming supported by the countries of the Global South, unanimously by Muslim majority countries. Latin American governments were somewhat split in voting on 3379, but it was overwhelmingly and angrily opposed by the Euro-American Atlanticist countries.

The resolution remained a thorn in Israel’s side even though it did alter the Israeli approach to its Palestinian minority,  was withdrawn in 1991 after President George H.W. Bush insisted that 3379 be revoked. Informed commentary explains the timing of this unusual pressure to withdraw a validly adopted UN resolution as a response to Israel’s demand that such action was a precondition to its willingness to take part in the 1991 Madrid Conference alongside the PLO participation. The Madrid event was treated as a breakthrough in peacemaking efforts in the Israel/Palestine struggle helped set the stage for bilateral negotiation subsequently arranged  within the 1993 Oslo framework. The manner chosen to revoke 3379 can be seen as a comprise. It definitely reflected Israel’s leverage and pragmatic approach to a diplomatic mode of conflict resolution by way of a negotiated peace within a political process that its main ally, the United States, would oversee in its role as intermediary. Yet the absence of any principled expression of regret for the past adoption of 3379 and an explicit exoneration of Israel as not guilty of past or present charges of racism keeps the issue in a state of flux of being neither dead nor alive.

This reluctance of the General Assembly to acknowledge that it had been wrong to single  out Israel in 1975 with a formal UN accusation of Zionist racism may have prompted one of the more effective and respected UN Secretary Generals, Kofi Annan, to volunteer an factually baseless apologetic comment about the supposed past UN susceptibility to antisemitism in its relation to Israel: “The actions of the United Nations on the issue of antisemitism have not always been worthy of its ideals. It is deplorable that the General Assembly adopted in 1975 a resolution which assimilated Zionism with racism and I welcome this later effort to take it back.” We may never know whether Annan’s comment reflected his moral beliefs or were his way of accommodating geopolitical pressures.

The timing of this turn to diplomacy in 1991 can be partly interpreted as responses to the then recent transformative abandonment of apartheid by a racist South African government that surprised the world by unilaterally opting for constitutional democracy and ethnic equality. What occurred by way of a governmental initiative in South Africa, was hoped to be achieved in a form satisfying to Israel and the PLO. This peacemaking diplomacy somewhat dubiously presupposed a ‘two-state solution’ based on the ceasefire boundaries of the 1948 War, which reinterpreted the UN Partition Resolution in favor of Israel, allocating 78% of Ottoman/Mandate Palestine to Israel, and the remaining 22% to Palestine. Why the PLO ever accepted this one-sided allocation of land rights as between the parties is one of several mysteries of that period, which gave rise to a public aura of hope that seemed genuinely committed to political compromise and a negotiated mutually accepted peace accord. The U.S. used its influence to persuade Palestinians to defer consideration of other grievances, especially the Israeli settlement movement that was carried out in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation and its insistence that the Palestinian state be permanently demilitarized. These one-sided features of the interaction between Israel and representatives of the Palestinian people were either an example of hard bargaining by Israel or a way of confronting Palestine with such a bad deal as it had no alternative than to refuse, which would give Israel an excuse to continue with its unilateralist approach to the future of the relationship between itself and Palestine. Important Palestinian intellectuals, most notably Edward Said, rejected what he perceived as a diplomatic charade that entrapped Palestine and allowed Israel to proceed with the Zionist vision of a solution. Said blamed Arafat for not standing up more firmly to the U.S. in the performative aspects of its role as partisan mediator.

I think there is abundant evidence to document allegations of Israeli racism throughout the whole of Israel’s existence, as carried to genocidal extremes in its behavior since 2023. In the period after the 1991 revocation of 3370 a series of independently research studies that documented systemic Israeli racism as a form of apartheid, and as such in violation of international law as set forth in widely ratified international treaties. In collaboration with Virginia Tilley I prepared a research report that was commissioned by the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) and publicly released in 2017. The principal conclusion of our Report was that Israel had imposed a racist regime that discriminated against non-Jewish minorities in violation of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid (adopted at the UN in 1973 by a vote of 91-4, with 26 abstentions; the four opposed votes were cast by the U.S., Portugal, UK, and South Africa). The underlying International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination is also relevant to a legal assessment of racism,. [Falk & Virginia Tilley, “Israeli Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” 2017]

The ESCWA report was followed by detailed confirmatory reports prepared by Human Rights Watch, 2021, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, 2021, and Amnesty International, 2022.] The release of our Report with its UN imprimatur (but also containing a pro-forma disclaimer, informing readers thata the report was reflective of the views of its authors, but not necessarily of the UN)provoked an angry counterattack at the UN, led by Israel and strongly supported by the U.S., including a thinly veiled threat from the U.S. Representative at the UN of financial repercussions for the UN if the report was not repudiated and withdrawn. The Director of ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, resigned on principle in protest, to Guterres caving to U.S. pressure in relation to our report. This move on her part was widely appreciated throughout West Asia. Despite taking great offense at being labeled an apartheid state, Israel itself virtually acknowledged this main allegation in the ESCWA  Report for its own reasons a year later. The Knesset adopted the 2018 Basic Law

proclaiming Jewish preeminence in Israel and vesting the right of self-determination to be

and as a nationalist add on, designated Hebrew as Israel’s only official language.

Guterres should have learned that even mild challenges to Israel would result in a nasty backlash from the wildly over-reaction by Israel to his banal truism ‘October 7 did not occur in a vacuum.’ The Israel representative angrily dismissed the comment while demanding Guterres’ resignation. Guterres weathered that storm in 2018, but

learned the wrong lesson. Namely, that it was prudent for him to do what it takes to keep on the good side of the United States, which automatically extends to Israel, but that prudence would destroy his reputation as a dedicated, principled international servant, a voice of conscience for the entire world. Not only Guterres but other UN secretaries general did not responsibly live up to the role, eroding the moral authority of the UN, and shifting moral trust to such global voices of conscience as Pope Leo XIV.

To our regret, the ESCWA Report was immediately ordered to be officially withdrawn by the recently elected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, a sign of individual and institutional weakness that was to be repeated by Guterres in several settings involving Palestine. The most serious of these lapses was his failure to affirm and stand up the competence and contributions of the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, especially after she was sanctioned in 2025 by the U.S. Government. She was sanctioned for her courageous fully analyzed and fact-based assessments of Israeli genocide, and specifically for her recommendation in report as Special Rapporteur that the ICC investigate named corporations to assess whether their profitable operations in Gaza during the genocide constituted the criminal complicity under the Genocide Convention. Guterres as well showed his colors by bowing low in deference to the perverse Trump 20-Point Peace Plan even though its main administrative innovation, the Board of Peace, deliberately marginalized the UN role. in Israel exclusively belonging to the Jewish people,

Despite this Israeli and US irate reactions against formal efforts to brand Israel as racist, the accusation again surfaced widely in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide initiated in response to the October 7 Hamas attack. In this altered atmosphere of Israel’s genocide and regional warmongering, the racist character of Zionist Israel again became a prime target of civil society accusations. The British Green racist labeling of Israel should be appraised in this light. It seems definitely in keeping with a widespread revived call for reinstating the 1975 resolution or a sequel coupled with a bypassing of the 1991 revocation. The racism attributed to Israel by the UNGA Resolution seemed fully vindicated by Israel’s genocidal statements referring to Palestinians as ‘human animals’ along with other epithets as well as the combat tactics of IDF violence in Gaza, and seems to justify the restoration or replacement of 3379, ideally supplemented by a revised text that takes account of the developments between 2023 and 2026, with a reassertion of pre-October 7 racism. A new UN initiative is essential to avoid a growing impression that when a UN censure is directed at Israel, no matter how much it conforms to fact and law, as well as implement UN Charter principles, it necessarily falls short of implementation due to the sanitizing shadows of weaponized antisemitism.

The Israeli reaction to 3379 back in 1975 was, as might be expected, vigorously denied by Israel’s representive at the UN, Chaim Herzog: “For us the Jewish people this resolution based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance is devoid of any moral and legal value. For us, as Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Herzog followed his diatribe performatively by tearing the paper in half on which the text of the resolution was written. It comes as no surprise that Israel had predictable allies, including the American UN Representative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan who asserted on Israel’s behalf an Orwellian repudiation of 3379: “The United Nations is about to make antisemitism international law.” Such language implies that the allegations against Israel were not a response to its treatment of the Palestinians, but was merely an excuse for demeaning a Jewish state, and in the process, the UN itself.

It was during the last three years that the fusion of Zionism as ideology and Israel as a sovereign state openly merged their identity and resorted to the weaponization of antisemitism as a tactic in the practice of ‘the politics of distraction,’ designed to shift attention from the substance of the message to the character of the messenger. This fusion facilitated defaming critics of Zionism, including Jewish critics, as antisemites and self-hating Jews. As a personal aside, it happens that my father and many of his friends in the postwar climate of New York City in the immediate aftermath of World War II welcomed Israel as a safe haven for the Jews but opposed and feared the consequences of a partition approach that neglected the rights and wellbeing of the resident majority population and an accompanying Zionist vintage Orientalist claim of Judaism having a far superior sense of entitlement to the land in dispute than was possessed by the residential Arab majority population. In a sense, their position manifested their beliefs that a Zionist Israel was doomed to self-destruct.

The plausibility of seeking a revival of the 1975 condemnation of Israel’s racism reformulated in light of the genocidal violence of the past three years would certainly seem an appropriate reassertion of UN moral leadership that would somewhat compensate for its ill-considered recent endorsement of Trump’s Gaza diplomacy as expressed in the shameful UN Security Council Resolution 2803 unanimously adopted in November 2025. A critical repudiation of the Trump approach at the UN seems unlikely. Perhaps, more likely is a reconsideration by Arab governments of the prudence and propriety of the Abrahamic Accords normalizing relations of regional actors with Israel that was a diplomatic initiative undertaken in 2020 with great fanfare during the final weeks of the Trump’s first term as the American president. Even prior to Israel’s response to October 7, this diplomacy of normalization seemed premature due to the failure to defer such reconciliatory steps until the most serious of Palestinian grievances were addressed.

To remove any ambiguity about the unrepentant complicity of the United States in relation to the genocide, Trump announced just nine days prior to the Israeli elections on October 27, 2026 of his unqualified ‘complete and total support’ for Netanyahu’s reelection pointing to his success as ‘a warrior’ and compatibility as ‘a partner’ in the war against Iran. It was the first time an American president has made such a public endorsement of candidate in an Israeli election. We can wait and see whether Trump’s endorsement helps or hurts his election prospects.

2. Is there a real global trend that Zionism has been increasingly identified as an aggressive ideology since October 7?

It is reasonable to conclude that Zionism has been seriously discredited by Israel’s response to the October 7^th attack, not only by the detailed findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine and further substantiated by the extensive report of UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, who happens to be this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner. The U.S by sanctioning of ICC and UN officials, the denial of visas to Palestine Authority officials seeking to attend this year’s General Assembly debate session has not only proclaimed United States complicity with Israel’s genocide as a continuing reality, but has  deepened the perception of Zionism as an aggressive ideology abhorrent to many countries in the world as made visible by the walkout of many delegations when it came time for Netanyahu to address the 2026 GA session. The events of the last three years have delegitimized Israel as a sovereign state, and this perception has not been weakened, at least among civil society activists, by the Trump ‘peace’ diplomacy that rewards the perpetrator and further punishes the victim.

Additionally, the perception that Israel is dominated by its steadfast  adherence to a supremist version of Zionism, delegitimizes Israel further and gives an unintended accuracy to judgments that regard anti-Zionism as identical now with anti-Israel attitudes in the form of a highly critical stance toward Israel’s approach to the Palestinian people. To take the further step as is often taken by militant supporters of Israel intent of weaponizing antisemitism who allege that being critical of Israel, especially if it is portrayed as holding Israel to higher standards than apply to other alleged wrongdoing states, is antisemitism. This weaponizing of antisemitism as a policy tool to discredit and intimidate good faith critics has the unfortunate effect of also allowing genuine Jew haters political space to escape repudiation or enables their participation as respectable partners in bewildering mergers of antisemitic advocates with ultra-right pro-Israeli politics surging in influence especially in Europe that is currently facing a series of populist challenges to public order in leading states, most dramatically France.

It is totally inappropriate and defamatory to discredit the reputation of good faith and credible critics as antisemites because they document Israeli criminality and often insist that the only way for Israel to retrieve its legitimacy as a state and UN member is to repudiate or drastically revise its statist adherence to Zionism. This raises the further question of whether Zionism is susceptible to reconciliation with contemporary standards of international humanitarian law. At present, there are few signs of political will in Israel favorable to such humanizing reforms of Zionism, and thus sadly racism aggravated by ethnic cleansing and Israel’s repudiation of credible criticism from former supporters seems to reflect a persisting Israeli pro-Zionist consensus, portending a dismal future for itself and for Palestinians: For Israel to continue down the post-2023 path chosen and for Palestinians to experience a new phase of their ordeal of resilience and resistance to the colonial Orientalism of the Balfour Declaration that began more than a century ago.

3. What is Zionism? Is it really a racist ideology?

An objective historical study of Zionism would have no responsible alternative to the conclusion that the seeds of racism were present when the Zionist Movement was founded by Theodor Herzl and a few others toward the end of the 19^th Century, leading to international meetings of the World Zionist Congress in 1897. It should be appreciated that Zionism started as a  movement among Jews mainly ti counter the racism embedded in European antisemitism, which had Christian roots and reached its climax during Nazi rule in Germany during the 1930s, culminating in the Holocaust in the last years of the war. The early Zionist articulated movement priority was to gain support for a Jewish national homeland situating in Palestine. In retrospect it appears that Zionist expressions of good intentions and reassurances with respect to human rights and coexistence with the resident majority Palestinian population were tactical public relations efforts by the early secular leaders rather than serious political commitments by dedicated Zionists, many of whom were also motivated by religious sentiments and Jewish cultural traditions. Under cover of the 1948 War the Zionist militias immediately pursued a highly coercive massive ethnic cleansing operation, generating 750,000 Palestinian refugees and reinforced by a refusal to fulfill international refugee law requirements of upholding a right of return. Instead, Israel destroyed the homes of most refugees by bulldozing hundreds of Palestinian villages. The Atlanticist alliance and the global public were silent about the Nakba, giving Zionism a free pass to establish Israel as they proposed, an indulgence influenced by the recently revealed magnitude and horrors of the Holocaust. Public support also was generated by early idealist kibbutz experimentation in communal living that was widely perceived as a sign of Israel social creativity and idealism.

Despite the British mandate in Palestine between the two world wars there was scant awareness of the suffering caused by this forcible, unlawful displacement of Palestinians from their homes and homeland in 1948. In the interim Israel solidified its relations with the United States especially after the 1967 War, achieving impressive success in its development of  formidable military capabilities and general developmental progress. Over the years, expanded explicit embrace of strategic ambitions with respect to the acquisition of territory, the elimination of unwanted Palestinians, and a warmongering approach to its national security that increasingly was fused with its U.S. partnership and hegemonic policy toward neighbors.

Zionism also had its own racist outlook independent of its connections with Israel and Judaism  that derived from its European origins that included an assumed Orientalist version of Western cultural superiority and a disregard of the rights of inferior non-Europeans, especially as embedded in Islamic majority countries of the MENA region. It pursued its vision of a Jewish state in a highly pragmatic, step-by-step fashion, advancing toward its goals by stages whose features were dictated by political calculations of viable policy options. Important stages included the Balfour Declaration of 1917pledging support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland (not a state) in Palestine, a country which the UK administered after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I by relying on its standard colonial logic of ‘divide and rule’ to bi-national political communities.

The next stage was the Nazi rulership in Germany that initially made a sanctuary for Jews compatible with Hitler’s prime antisemitic goal of reducing the Jewish presence and influence in Europe. This stage was followed by the rise of Arab anti-colonial nationalism and Zionist led anti-British nationalism that persuaded Britain to turn the future of embattled Palestine over to the UN with its customary recommendation of partition when in colonial retreat, which was followed disastrously in this instance. The Mandate period witnessed a dramatic increase in  Jewish immigration increasing its presence in Palestine from under 10% prior to the Balfour Declaration to more than 30% in 1947 when the partition resolution was adopted  In the aftermath of World War II Orientalist attitudes combined with liberal guilt associated with allowing Hitler to get away with extreme forms of antisemitism provided the political foundations for a Zionist settler colonial project to establish a Jewish state within the boundaries of mandate Palestine. Israel appeared to accept the partition as a solution but never giving up its long game determination to achieve unified Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, and maybe beyond. The Palestinians, were at first supported in their grievances and aspirations by their Arab neighbors, especially the refusal to give away half their country without the UN feeling obliged to obtain their consent to such a rupture of their territorial integrity. The conflict over land and rights deepened and persisted, punctuated by a series of wars won by Israel and climaxing with the violence unleashed in the last three years in retaliation for long deferred resistance militancy by the oppressed Palestinian population of Gaza.

At the same time as the secular leadership of the Zionist movement invoked the Bible. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared ‘let the Bible be our sword.’ Through the years religiously motivated ranks of Zionism rose in influence, and in time championed their undisguised refusal to share ‘the promised land,’ favoring cruel and dehumanizing treatment of the Palestinians, hoping for their voluntary departure but increasingly willing to use whatever tactics, including genocide, would help achieve racial purification. Israel gradually pu aside the willingness to partition Palestine into separate states. With its mastery of public discourse in the West Israel succeeded in persuading most people and many governments that a peaceful outcome was tried and failed, and the priorities of Israeli security deserve respect as the Palestinians had no appetite for a peaceful resolution of the conflict over sovereignty and land rights. Israel piously explained its rejection of diplomacy by claiming ‘we have no partner for peace.’ Further impartial investigation suggests that it was the Palestinians who had no partner for peace, claiming quite reasonably to have been misled by the pretensions of the Oslo Diplomacy in the 1990s.

In the end, a narrative responsive to realities of this long struggle has to overcome Israel’s skillful management of public discourse surrounding its behavior and motivations and that of its adversaries, which is given undeserved influence by mainstream media, many governments, and even civil society. We know somewhat about ‘the fog of war,’ but very little about ‘the fog deployed by state propaganda.’ We do realize that as of late 2026 the vivid portrayals of Gaza genocide has lifted some of the fog, at least temporarily, but far from totally.

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[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of remarks I made as President of the International Gaza Tribunal at the opening of the Palestine Day observance organized by the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum and the munipality of Konya in Turkey on October 2, 2026. It is my most coneptually ambitious attempt to distinguish the role of a traditional legal tribunal, here associated with the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial organ of the United Nations, and the International Gaza Tribunal seeking to gain control of symbolic battlefields in the Legitimacy War decisively won by Palestine in post-October 7th encounters, and now continuing beneath the shadows cast be the Trump ‘peace’ diplomay. It is my impression that the public discourse ignores this distinction between these two parallel approaches to law and justice]

Good morning and welcome to all of you attending this important timely event dedicated to the observance of Palestine Day in this beautiful Turkish city of Konya. Speaking personally, it is my great  honor  to offer some preliminary remarks and participate together with Professors Penny Green and Hilal Elver as representatives of the International Gaza Tribunal (IGT) at this opening session  of the Palestine Day Conference organized by the Islamic Cooperation Youth Forum (ICYF) held here in historic and vibrant Konya, a city that both exemplifies modern Turkey and retains the mystical charm of Rumi’s spirituality.

The three of us were encouraged to take the lead in establishing the International Gaza Tribunal with the objective of producing an objective, fact-based confirmation from the perspectives of law and morality to allegations and perceptions that Israel’s retaliation to being attacked from Gaza on October 7, 2023 constituted genocide. A further reason for turning to civil society activism was the disappointment with the failures of the established international public order to stop Israel from continuing its violent assault, failing even to reach consensus even to pause the violence much less reach an enforceable judgment of Israel’s behavior given the complicity of leading Western countries, above all the United States.

This civil society initiative of the IGT can also be justified symbolically as an expression of frustration  that neither the UN nor Western geopolitical political actors possess the capability or political will to establish  a permanent ceasefire after an entire  year of observing unchecked Israel’s violence mainly directed at Gaza’s helpless, long victimized civilian population and infrastructure. The IGT  has existed for over two years, its energies focused on the goals of giving public discourse a definitive, comprehensive, and fact-based rationale  for treating Israel’s violent retaliation as a case of transparent genocide. This genocidal narrative was often better understood in real time by the peoples of the world than by their political leaders entrapped be a web of foreign policy alliances and a bad habit of political realism that encourages deference to power rather than the promotion of justice. Thanks to journalistic courage in the face of Israeli targeting and obstruction of honest reportage and digital means of transmission the eyes and ears of the public encountered the realities of genocide and reacted with an increasing outrage. In fulfilling its truthtelling mission the IGT is profoundly grateful to the Islamic Cooperative Youth  Forum (or ICYF) for its sponsorship and support from the outset of our efforts, and never once interfering with the ground rules of IGT independence that were mutually  agreed upon as the basis of our coordinated efforts.

In this context, the Turkish Contact Group (TCG) led by his excellency, Taha Ayhan, reinforced our motivations with its insistence that we undertake this challenging undertaking underpinned by our overriding commitment to uphold the public interests of humanity as a whole by raising global voices of conscience in reaction to genocide. It was the intention of ICYF as well as in the mind and hearts of those who we persuaded to join this undertaking as advisors, scholars, experts, and witnesses that it was vital to add this solidarity initiative to the struggle of the people of Gaza for the basic rights of the Palestinian people including taking into account the plight of the several million Palestinian refugees coercively expelled from their homes and homeland in 1948, a loss magnified by the demolition of several hundred birthright Palestinian villages that were part of their shared anguished memories of displacement over the course of decades. Anyone who has visited a Palestinian refugee camp will understand what I am talked about. Any one who has visited Gaza or the West Bank will be convinced that the Israeli intention is to make Occupied Palestine unlivable to the extent that a second Nakba could be propagandized as ‘voluntary.’

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IGT participants were in agreement that Israel was depriving Palestinians of their inalienable right of self-determination, which in the course of many anti-colonial struggles became the most sanctified dimension of international human rights law in the historical period following the end of World War II. As an initial corrective to state propaganda and widespread media self-censorship IGT sought to sound a civil society alarm in reaction Israel’s genocidal response to the Gaza attack of October 7th, 2023. The IGT commitment is not only critical of the genocide but remedial, seeking a liberated future for the resumed pursuit of Palestinian national destiny in a format accepted by authentically chosen representatives of the Palestinian people. And in the immediacy of present challenges associated with the persistence of dire emergency life-threatening conditions in Gaza to establish secure supply lines of humanitarian relief. In violation of the terms of October 10, 2025 ceasefire international relief efforts continue to be consistently and unlawfully disrupted by Israel’s genocidal combat tactics and territorial expansionism that persist under the protective cover of Trump’s Peace Plan. Unlike its propagandistic pretentions this plan is not about peace, much less justice. It is about choosing a different approach to its initial objectives. In response, a final goal of IGT, subsequent to the Tribunal sessions, is to influence present and future public education about the existential horrors that resulted from Israel’s recourse to genocide which exposed the moral hypocrisy of the liberal democracies and impotence of the UN. In efforts to disseminate the results of the IGT experience we hope to refute state propaganda and corporate media in the West, the latter long silent about Israel’s crimes and muted about the pre-October 7^th context of Gaza oppression accurately depicted as ‘incremental genocide,’ or a more subtle form of annihilistic approach to achieve Palestinian erasure. In effect, it more instructive to view post-October 7 Israeli behavior as one of continuity rather than of discontinuity as propagandists would have us believe. This necessitates also a reinterpretation of the Gaza attack as one of legitimate resistance rather an outburst of terrorists fanatics as our political masters wanted us to believe. In passing that does not exonerate the attackers recourse to violations of international humanitarian law if established by convincing evidence.  

As a matter of its own stimulus, the Turkish Contact Group had been inspired by the example of the Russell Tribunal of the mid-1960s which was the first international peoples’ tribunal. This Tribunal was organized and led by two of the most famous public intellectuals of the day, Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, and gathered other intellectuals from a diversity of backgrounds, witnesses, experts, and survivors of the unlawful intervention and interference in the prolonged nationalist struggles of the Vietnamese people for territorial sovereignty and decolonizing political independence. It seems relevant to note that if a researcher seeks an accurate portrayal of the legal controversies associated with the Vietnam War, they have no more helpful starting point that the proceedings of the Russell Tribunal. The same is true for the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005.

My own role in accepting this TCG challenge and throughout the entire process has been guided and helped by my very loyal wife Hilal Elver, herself a distinguished international figure associated particularly with the analysis of food security and the right to food that is intended to apply to everyone under all conditions. This fundamental right has been so devastatingly abused by Israel in the context of its increasingly unlawful occupation of Palestine and especially Gaza (as confirmed by the ICJ Advisory Opinion of July 17, 2024, endorsed by a large majority in a General Assembly Resolution). Israel has deliberately and openly violated ceasefire obligations even during the period of the past year which it had previously formally agreed upon. Israel has shockingly continued to induce systemic starvation in Gaza as a combat tactic, producing famine conditions, thereby becoming a component of its continuing genocidal assault in the pursuit of its altered objective that has shifted its central locus from the elimination of Hamas to the elimination of Palestinians, or put differently, from a supposed counterterrorist military operation to an underlying completion of extending Israel’s territorial sovereignty to the whole of mandate Palestine, and in the process, embodying the Zionist vision of ‘Greater Israel.’

The IGT was from its beginning a controversial and complex undertaking. We felt from the outset that our efforts to be taken seriously and acquire respect as a legitimate civil society initiative must be, as already suggested, an autonomous and activist instrument of civil society opposition to this most serious form of statist wrongdoing. Doing our best to gain public respect explains why we put such a stress on our politically independence of any government and an accompanying rejection of ‘dark money’ funding by donors with vested economic or political interests in the underlying struggle.

Those of us planning IGT also held strong conviction that a peoples’ tribunal operated differently as an investigative and judgmental process than did traditional national and international tribunals that are the creations of governmental and intergovernmental initiatives of sovereign states with an overwhelming assignment of determining guilt or innocence. Because of adopting the terminology of traditional tribunals in our references to witnesses, testimony, and evidence this distinction tends to get lost, making past peoples’ tribunal were easy to dismiss in mainstream public discourse as ‘juridical imposters,’ and of course by Israel’s most unapologetic supporters as antisemitic leftism. Such tribunals as the IGT  make themselves vulnerable to accusations of pretending to be lawmaking institutions of parallel competence and authority to traditional courts, which they are certainly not. IGT tried to be careful about labeling its undertaking in ways that minimized confusions of this type of faulty perceptions that made such projects routinely subject to misinterpretation and dismissal in the past. Being clear about this issue of institutional identity required us to be open to self-education as it is often easier to imitate what exist than to innovate on behalf of what is appropriate.

Despite these cautionary words, IGT took respectful account of the parallel efforts of traditional tribunals, particularly of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that has indirectly  contributed to the  credibility of IGT  by their preliminary findings supportive of our central contention that genocide was not some radical left, populist smear of Israel’s legal right to defend itself and uphold its security in the wake of an armed attack emanating from Gaza. The ICJ, of course unintentionally, reinforced the IGT project by its authoritative assertion that the violence in Gaza is an instance of ‘plausible genocide.’ These dramatic words are tentative as the word ‘plausible’ suggests, and awaits a final legal clarification by the ICJ that is not expected to occur before late 2027 when it issues its final decision. Even this preliminary finding of the ICJ was so widely reported that it removed much of the organized prior stigma associated with naming the violence in Gaza as ‘genocide,’ This ICJ approach definitely contributed positively to the credibility of IGT efforts. The increasing public outcry and delegitimation of Israel as a rogue state illustrates how deeply the language of public discourse matters in situations where the established world order fails to perform in accord with widespread societal moral expectations.

We regarded the actions of the ICJ as a validation of the distinctively legal dimension of the perspective adopted by the International Gaza Tribunal, which we also believed should not be even identified as an exclusively Palestinian initiative. We wanted the IGT to be seen and to act as a transnational initiative of individuals and groups throughout the world that were motivated by their global conscience as animated to act in response by universally shared values. In this central sense it was essential that IGT retain its autonomy as an entity transmitting the voices of conscience and principles of justice much more than being content to be a subsidiary vehicle for the deliberations and analysis of strictly legal interpretations of Israel’s conduct, which was beyond the orbit of its formal attributes.

We attempted with some success to make clear that IGT was a very different institutional framework than that associated with traditional judicial undertakings tied directly or indirectly to the post-Westphalian international system. IGT is a tribunal that is formed by and appeals directly to civil society for its novel means of ‘enforcement’ and hopes that by stimulating  societal activism it will augment pressures on governments and the United Nations to enforce international law. This goal includes challenging the propriety of complicity on the part of the Western liberal democracies who were providing indispensable military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel despite the genocidal character of its violence as openly and vividly enunciated, and virtually acknowledged, by Israel’s leaders immediately after October 7,  including Prime Minister Netanyahu and now former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, among others. IGT also seeks to encourage activists throughout the world to mobilize solidarity initiatives sensitive to time, place, and a just and durable peace for the Palestinian people. To be sure, in inter-governmental settings, such as the UN, Netanyahu portrays Israel as the victim of genocide rather than its perpetrator, and in this manner of declaring itself a victim rather than a perpetrator, Israel  sought to discredit the ICJ by its limited responsiveness to allegations of violations of the Genocide Convention as set forth in the South African submissions with supplemental support from other governments, almost all in the Global South.

The IGT recognized that it lacked the strictly legal authority or institutional prestige of the International Court of Justice, but we also believe that IGT had important advantages over traditional modes of judicial inquiry even when functioning at their best, which are rarely acknowledged. This affirmation of the ICJ law-declaring role agrees itsa judicial behavior is professionally competent and does not exhibit any kind of weakness as has been exhibited in other parts of the UN Systemic role in discharging their prime function of interpreting international law as jurists, and not as subordinate agents of geopolitical actors performing as puppeteers.

We believe that it is helpful to recognize that the  IGT, despite this lack of formal legal authority, has several advantages compared to traditional international tribunals. These advantages are particularly relevant to any appraisal of the Gaza genocide from legal or moral perspectives:

— first of all, IGT is much quicker than the ICJ in reaching conclusions and making recommendations. The IGT rendered its judgment within a single year after the completion of its organizational framework. The world continues to wait for a final decision from the ICJ, although its jurisdiction to pronounce on South Africa’s contention that Israel’s violence in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention was accepted in December 2024.

In other words, the wheels of formal legal institutions turn too slowly to be of much  practical and direct help to a people victimized by genocide even if, as was not the case here, that its judgments when finally rendered, were then promptly and effectively enforced. Such a judgment by a judicial institution is still important for the development of international law and for pedagogy exhibiting a less politicized approach to such contested behavior than during the unfolding of the events themselves when nationalist media and state propaganda tended to dominate public discourse even in countries where freedom of dissent and expression are respected;

–a second advantage of the IGT is the scope of what can be legitimately considered by the two types of tribunals. A formal court operates in accorded with a limited jurisdictional mandate set by the character of the submissions associated with a legal dispute that allows it to go forward at the ICJ. A traditional judicial structure generally relies on technical rules and procedures to minimize its encroachment on politicized issues that seek to clarify the particular features of the genocide. The main job of the ICJ is to decide whether or not Israel was rightly or wrongly accused of genocide. A peoples’ tribunal is unlimited in the discretion of its organizers to set the limits on the scope of inquiry and is openly politicized from its origins.

IGT’s basic commitment was to consider truthfully, wisely, and courageously all aspects of what is broadly conceived as genocide rather than confine judicial inquiry to a precisely defined conception associated with a submission specifically linked to one or more provisions of the Convention to Prevent and Punish Genocide, an international treaty negotiated and adopted at a UN venue. There exists an inevitable ambiguity between the South African conception of genocide as a specific crime, the crime of crimes as set forth in the Genocide Convention as drafted and adopted after World War II in 1948 following the definitional innovation of the word ‘genocide’ by Rafael Lemkin, and the IGT conception that is broader and more flexible. The Nuremberg Judgment avoided making any reference to ‘genocide’ in its approach to Nazi criminality, presumably because of its avoidance of retroactive or ex post facto lawmaking, although genocidal behavior had a long history prior to the Holocaust, that is, before the descriptive word existed. In contrast to the ICJ the IGT conceived of genocide as patterns of historical behavior that occurred long before the legal treaty entered into force, familiarly illustrated by the treatment of native peoples in a variety of colonizing settings. The experience of the Armenian minority in Turkey during World War I, and, of course, the Holocaust as the climax of Nazi extreme antisemitism are leading examples of ‘genocide’ before genocide, that is, before the Genocide Convention entered into force.

–a third and perhaps most crucial institutional advantage arose from the IGT presuming the guilt of Israel in relation to allegations of genocide, which relieved a peoples’ tribunal of the arduous task of providing adequate opportunities for the accused government to defend itself against such allegations. Avoiding the artificiality of a focus on whether or not Israel was guilty as charged avoided the distracting influence of a traditional court’s central task of affirming or rejecting genocidal allegations. It needs to be appreciated that a peoples’ tribunal never undertakes the hard work of fundraising and organization unless it is convinced both that the guilt of the accused party is overwhelmingly confirmed by the evidence and of the inability of the system of world public order, including the UN, to take meaningful action to condemn, prevent, and punish acts deeply objectionable to the conscience of morally inclined persons and politically motivated activists. As a result, rather than inquiring as to guilt or innocence, which as argued is the presupposed motive of the undertaking in cases involving severe international crimes, the IGT was able to focus on the elements of genocide, and to rest its judgment on the moral and justice implications of the genocidal policies of Israel and recommendations as to proper remedial responses. As such, IGT mission is dramatically different from that of a judicial procedure based on the Universal Jurisdiction of national courts or the Statute of the ICJ.

I am trying highlight the flexibility of the IGT that was brought into existence to give urgent attention to every aspect of the genocidal assault on Gaza that seems to affect notions not only of law but of justice and elementary morality, as well as the destructive effects of  a humanitarian emergency. Its performance should be tested by whether its portrayal of the broader landscape of genocide was instructive and motivating, not by whether its pronouncement had much bearing on the narrower ICJ challenge of deciding whether Israel should be exonerated or not of legally framed charges of genocide.

With these considerations in mind, the conclusions reached by the IGT were rendered not by ordinary citizens guided by a presiding judge in a typical jury trial, but by a group of expert informed observers whose belief as to Israel’s legal accountability for genocide were foreknown and acted as qualifications for service rather than being seen as disqualifying signs of bias. In contrast, the ICJ had no need of any kind of jury as its positivistic task was confined to serving as interpreters of the applicable law, nothing more or less. It is fundamental to draw this distinction between traditional judicial inquiry limited to existing legal constraints and a tribunal primarily guided by the dictates of global conscience.

This background enabled the IGT to express outrage with respect to the policies pursued by Israel but also by the several complicit states that acted as an allies of Israel by providing material, diplomatic, and intelligence sharing support. The testimonies and findings of the IGT Jury of Conscience acted as an essential corrective to the way in which Israel and the Euro North American alliance were justifying their support for Israel as an expression of its right of self-defense and military necessity in the course of a war.

The importance of the IGT approach was fortified by recent disclosures challenging earlier decontextualizing accounts of October 7 in a variety of incriminating ways. It has become increasingly apparent that the Israeli government at the highest level received multiple concrete warnings of an impending Hamas attack from highly reliable sources and ignored these warnings internally. Netanyahu has even been recently accused by Israeli security officials of not reporting these reports to responsible Israeli military and intelligence officials, reinforcing suspicions that Israel sought a pretext for its genocidal retaliation.

In other words, the context of October 7^th should be subjected to an impartial international investigation to determine whether Israel’s retaliation was made to seem a reasonable response to a prior Palestinian armed attack. If current suspicions are validated it would offer a further indication that the IGT inclusion of pre-October 7 Israel abusive occupation needed exposure. resistance by the people of Gaza. The fact that the West overwhelming uncritically treated the attack as completely unprovoked terrorism causing havoc and death in Israel rather than giving any attention to the Palestinian contention that the happenings of October 7^th were overdue expression of resistance by a captive population.

I believe those involved with the IGT are proud of their contributions to its performance. The IGT proceedings are destined to become a historical document and archive that offers an objective picture and a comprehensive understanding of the main various dimensions of the Gaza genocide. A traditional court is professionally restricted in what it can and cannot do, and its findings when eventually made public by a final judgment. The decision will be long respectfully studied in international law classes, which will likely be beneficial, even if accompanied by the recognition that the ICJ is helpless when it comes to enforcement, or in addressing such matters as complicity, accountability, and reparations. My view is that the ICJ and IGT are parallel initiatives with each deserving study and respect.

The operations of IGT has also partially compensated for the broken promise of the architects of the post-1945 global public order that governments and their leaders would be hereafter held individually accountable for breaches of international criminal law by the operations of the International Criminal Court. It was intended to overcome the impressions left by the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials that only the policies and practices of the losers in the war would be legally scrutinized, while the crimes of the winners were allowed to go into history books as gigantic instances of impunity.

We are not done with the work of IGT which completed its formal work October 2025 at the end of Istanbul session, which has most unfortunately did not coincide with an end of the genocide. The new one-sided ceasefire phase of genocide that started on October 10, 2025 has prolonged the genocidal ordeal. The revised Israeli political agenda of genocide appears to have as its strategic objective the coerced permanent displacement of a large percentage of the surviving Gazan population, what amounts to a second Nakba or an intensified renewal of an ethnic cleansing campaign now extended from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel enjoys a somewhat free hand by the distractions of and preoccupations with the Iran War and with Israel’s regional warmongering.

The public attention given to Gaza in this period has been dominated by the perverse Trump diplomacy that rewards the perpetrator of genocide and punishes the victim, the Palestinians being even excluded from any role in shaping the future of their own homeland, including in relation to its contemplated reconstruction.

This further perversion of justice has been symbolically underwritten by the shocking behavior of the UN which in Security Council Resolution unanimously adopted in November 2025 that affirmed undivided UN support the Trump so-called peace plan even though it had this underlying orientation of allowing the perpetrators and enablers of genocide to escape accountability but given the an unbelievable mandate to shape the future of Gaza.

The Palestinians, of course, are not confused about these distortions of Trump diplomacy in the way that governments and the UN have been enticed into backing  this diplomatic travesty.

The reputation of the UN is further blackened and by the support for the Trump Gaza plan, that has been articulated on several occasions by the current Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. Although condemnation would be appropriate, even silence given the weakness of the UN could be sympathetically appreciated.

So, we have now a situation that again challenges civil society to clarify the moral and legal realities arising from the gradual loss of leverage experienced by proponents of the Trump diplomacy as combined with the unlivable conditions in Gaza being reinforced by continuous violations of the cease-fire that was supposedly the starting point of a genuine peace process. Let me conclude by saying that the International Gaza Tribunal has done and is doing what it can to disseminate the results of its deliberations and findings and is currently preparing a book that will summarize this effort. To date the IGT has received very encouraging feedback from a variety of sources all over the world.

We who seek justice for the diverse peoples inhabiting the planet and are anguished by the suffering and devastation that genocide has produced in Gaza must not relax our vigilance at this time.