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A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness
Reports on Israel’s Genocide in Palestine

By Francesca Albanese

Edited by Mandy Turner and Lex Takkenberg

Preface by Mandy Turner and Lex Takkenberg

Foreword by Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk

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A devastating indictment against international complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine

• Description
• Author Biography
• Contents
• Additional information

‘Albanese has spoken truth with unflinching clarity in a world largely silent in the face of a holocaust, carrying out her mandate with integrity and defiance that honours both the law and the human conscience. This book is a formidable indictment of injustice and demonstrates what it means to stand alone against power’
Susan Abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World

Israel’s genocide in Palestine and the complicity of powerful Western states is undermining international human rights and the UN system. The United States has imposed sanctions on lawyers, UN experts, and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bully and intimidate them into silence. One prominent example is UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has played an important role in documenting Israel’s atrocities and those who profit from its oppression of Palestinians.

This book compiles Albanese’s indispensable and damning reports on Israel’s conduct in Palestine since October 2023. First outlining the case that this period should be understood as a genocide, Albanese goes on to explain how the ongoing violence fits into a longer history of Israel’s settler colonialism, and finally presents a devastating indictment against the international corporations that treat mass killing and destruction as a business opportunity.

The volume also features a reflection by Albanese on the current state of affairs; revelations by her predecessors Richard Falk, John Dugard, and Michael Lynk of their experiences as UN special rapporteurs; and a preface by Lex Takkenberg, a 30-year veteran of UNRWA, co-authored with scholar Mandy Turner.

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The ebook is free to download from the Pluto Press website indefinitely, with request for a donation to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. All royalties from sales of the book will be donated to UNRWA.

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The book’s title is a variation on a line from a poem by the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. It is a metaphor for hope and strength even in the darkest of times. 

The cover features a painting ‘Children of Gaza Dreaming of Peace’ from Malak Mattar, a Palestinian artist from Gaza

Address: Pluto Press, New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
T: +44 (0) 208 348 2724 E: pluto@plutobooks.com
Company nr: 4770976 / VAT nr: GB 830307563

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: This interview was conducted on behalf of Fayn Press by an independent Turkish journalist, Semin Gumusel, on August 19, 2025. It was published initially in Turkish and can be found at link:  https://www.fayn.press/prof-richard-falk-gazzeyi-yalnizca-halklarin-direnisi-kurtarabilir/

The English version posted below has been somewhat modified, mainly for style and some updatijng.]

Q<How can Israel and Netanyahu be stopped at this moment?

That is a question that has haunted the world for the past two years, and worried peace and justice activists for a much longer time. The most obvious issue is to how to persuade the US government and EU countries to withdraw their support in response to Israel’s abusive occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. It remains crucial for any hope of an adequate, if belated, international response to the Gaza genocide for European countries do more than just step back but encourage the imposition of collective sanctioning measures through the UN or by a coalition of the willing. It is of even greater relevance to bring pressure on the US Government to stop shielding Israel and to join in a genuine effort to overcome the current famine that is threatening death by starvation to most of the surviving Palestinian population trapped in Gaza.

The political atmosphere regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza has changed over the course of the last five months, that is, after Israel broke the ceasefire on March 13 of this year. A much larger segment of the public, including in previously complicit countries, is increasingly disturbed by Israel continuing genocide, especially by the cruelty of inducing deliberate starvation, the manipulation of the humanitarian aid, and perhaps most of all by converting the food distribution centers into killing fields. The overall impression produced by Israel’s tactics is one of death of innocent people and destruction of their habitats and cultural heritage with a ferocity that is unprecedented in human history. Prior genocides were never before as widely and vividly witnessed around the world in real time. The Israeli response to October 7 has been exposing the eyes and ears of the entire world to daily images of atrocities, as well as the complicity of the Western liberal democratic governments and the feebleness of UN genocide prevention efforts. This represents a moral collapse by Western governments and reveals the deficiencies of international law and the UN in the face of clashes between humanitarian concerns and strategic interests. If this dynamic results in Israeli post-genocide occupation of Gaza and the expulsion and repression of surviving Palestinians, this tragic failure of moral internationalism will be completed. Such a result will keep reviving memories of generations to come with graphic descriptions of this appalling behavior that was tolerated and significantly enabled by the West, particularly by the former European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies. The work of documentary and fictional filmmaking will undoubtedly preserve and disseminate this dark and scandalous chapter in human history.

We who are alive now cannot evade responsibility for taking what action we can that is directed at securing Palestinian rights as well as resisting Israel’s crimes. The urgent question before the world is ‘how to translate opposition to this ongoing experience of criminality into effective action of opposition given existing emergency conditions?’ The humanitarian emergency can only be address by an immediate response of sufficient magnitude. We have little time to plan and intervene protectively if we are serious about engaging to save the surviving Gazan population of an estimated two million persons, most of whom have already been severely malnourished and traumatized by almost two years of relentless wholesale onslaught conducted with minimal constraint.

What has been happening in Gaza should not be treated as a ‘war,’ which presupposes a somewhat symmetrical struggle between two sides. The conflict unfolding in Gaza is more accurately portrayed as a ‘massacre’, or even provocatively as ‘a military hunting expedition.’ It is so one-sided in its characteristics, with one side having its choice of options as to the most hyper-modern weaponry and targets, and the other side vulnerable and helpless, with few options other than to seek shelter and pray to survive. To use the language of war for such a conflict is to normalize Israel’s behavior by raising technical questions of the law of war as to whether it has exceeded the limits of ‘self-defense’ or ‘military necessity.’ Such issues can be argued indefinitely by lawyers for and against, thereby minimizing the horror that is transpiring.

Language matters as it allows advocates of abhorrent behavior to hide the true nature of their true motivations that account for the tactics deployed to destroy the identity, livelihood, memories, and lives of an entire people and at the same time engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the land of its native population. The recourse to force of this intensity and duration given the context cannot be explained by reference to Israeli security or even revenge, but only by reference to territorial ambitions and depopulation that long infused the Zionist Project, which has delayed implementation until an opportunity was present,.

In the case of Gaza there’s a special feature that this violence is concentrated in a tiny area occupied after the 1967 War and subject to international humanitarian law with Israel being a provisional occupying power that has now been declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to have flagrantly abused its authority and role from the perspective of international law. This most respected international tribunal in a near unanimous judgment concluded that Israel was legally obligated to withdraw its military presence and political administration altogether from occupied Palestinian territories and allowed it a year to do so. The year expired on July 19, 2025, although extended to September by General Assembly resolution. Given the refusal of Israel to comply, this authoritative judicial opinion instructed the UN and its Members in their individual capacities to take steps to implement Israel’s withdrawal. What is now established is that Israel no longer has any legitimate foundation for exercising control in either Gaza or the West Bank, and has itself become an unlawful, as well as an abusive occupant. Israel not only refuses to comply with the ICJ decision. Instead, Israel has defiantly announced plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank, directly violating an important legal constraint found in the 4^th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation and signaling an intention to make its presence in the West Bank permanent and irreversible. So far there are no signs at the UN or elsewhere that there exists a sufficient political will to do anything that would really make Israel feel obliged to comply.

There are some symbolic gestures that have been recently made by several important European countries including Germany, France, Britain, and others reacting to the official confirmation of famine in Gaza and the reports of children and others dying of starvation. But in terms of stopping an extremist leader like Netanyahu and the Zionist movement that has captured control over the governing process and the citizenry in Israel, and there is little indication that anything in the short term can or will be done to mitigate the suffering in Gaza, or to avert what seems to be worse to come. There is a slender hope that the increasing pariah or rogue status of Israel will induce an unexpected willingness of Israel’s leaders to compromise the further pursuit of maximalist goals in exchange for a pledge to normalize Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Middle East, a revival of the Abraham Accords initiated in the last year of Trump’s first term as the US president.  

People have started advocating, including here in Istanbul, the authorization and formation of a UN armed protective force that would intervene at the invitation of Palestine with sufficient capabilities to protect the Gazan population perhaps by a peacekeeping presence deployed at the borders between Israel and Gaza, as well as between Israel and the West Bank. It is doubtful that this will happen so long as the U.S. and Israeli opposition remains as unrelenting as in the past 22 months. Indeed, Netanyahu in early September signaled Israel’s rejection of any post-genocide idea of Palestinian statehood by expressing anger. His defiant words were coupled with threats of annexation to carry to completion the Zionist end game of Palestinian political erasure despite its diplomatic recognition by as many as 150 states, including the most important NATO members aside from the United State

At the same time, it may be the best hope aside from an Israeli course correction, and it’s certainly worth exerting public pressure that might make Israel do something radically inconsistent with its behavior before and after October 7. History is full of surprises, good and bad, reflecting the inability of the human species to know the future, despite its amazing technocratic sophistication and thus forced to live with uncertainty on every level of human existence. But uncertainty is no excuse for passivity in the presence of evil. What seems a phantasy hinged to Israel’s willingness to change its behavior by accepting an arrangement committed to enforcing international law and accepting a stable and just peace that would also promise the political as well as the physical reconstruction of Gaza is neither probable nor impossible.

Such a scenario, however remote it now appears, is what we should struggle to achieve at this point even though most self-confident experts would dismiss its relevance as an idle utopian fantasy and move on to plan some incremental feasible face-saving adjustment that would not attempt to address the underlying maladies associated with prolonged apartheid governance and genocidal practices and policies.

Q>If genocide cannot be stopped what is the outcome Israel seeks? When do you think Israel will stop this military operation increasingly labeled as ‘genocide’ in public discourse?

In my view Israel’s undertaking was not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all by security considerations. Israel had ample capabilities to address whatever security threats existed after October 7, and assuming that Israel didn’t let the attack happen so as to have the pretext for such a response, it would merely be a matter of enhancing border security, well within Israel’s defense capabilities. Israel received warnings that this attack was coming. Including a New York Times front page story about the degree to which Netanyahu had been made aware of the preparations in Gaza for launching this attack. As well, the Egyptian intelligence reportedly warned Netanyahi  in the days before the attack. The world deserves an international investigation of the October 7 events, including what preceded and what followed, to obtain a better grasp of what motivated Israel to act as it has.

Ordinary persons should at least entertain the possibility that Israel wanted the pretext for initiating such a large-scale response that it would begin the end game for the Zionist project, which means grabbing as much land as they could acquire in terms of what was in some sense withheld from Israel by the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. The Israeli made no secret of wanting to have one Israeli state with Jewish supremacy and allowing only the Jewish people as having a right of self-determination. This is set forth in Israel’s Basic Law adopted by the Knesset in 2018. As Israel has no constitution, the Basic Law is the highest form of legislation and the most difficult to amend and repeal. It internalizes and acknowledges the apartheid regime Israel has long relied upon to deal with Palestinians living in Israel or in the occupied territories or even as refugees. It has been complemented by episodic seizures of Palestinian land and periodic expulsion of Palestinians.

On the West Bank there’s been an increasing spillover from the Gaza violence, mainly evident in the upsurge of settler violence directed at making life unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank and encouraging a movement among the many militant settler communities that are very well represented in the Netanyahu coalition to annex the West Bank and to occupy substantial if not the whole of Gaza and in the process to find ways to remove as many Palestinians as possible, either by forced expulsion or by some kind of ‘voluntary’ arrangement with another country that would accept them, possibly being bribed to do so by economic incentives. Several African countries have been talked about in this way but so far none have been persuaded to accept an influx of Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homeland.

But Israel and specifically the Zionist movement has always been animated by the idea of a single colonized Israel state that has the characteristics of a settler colonial undertaking. Such a project has been pursued at the very moment that colonialism has collapsed elsewhere in the world. Hence, it hardly surprising that there’s more resistance from the Palestinians to a historical attempt to engage in a new colonial undertaking during what is often referred to as a post-colonial era.

This persistent resistance of Palestinians has given rise to a vicious circle linking resistance to more and more severe repression taking the form of apartheid. No matter what its name Israel has devised a system of racial domination and exploitation that is based on ethnicity not on class but on identity determined to be either Jew or non-Jew. Aside from Israel’s resolve to exert discriminatory submission on the part of the Palestinians, its ambitions are more extensive, involving land and racial purification that depends on a continuous process of ethnic cleansing.

And when apartheid doesn’t succeed in achieving the ends that are being sought there has been a strong tendency of settler colonial movements to embrace a logic of genocide of varying degrees of severity depending on circumstances in each instance. Recourse to genocide often came about because it seemed the only way that the settler colonial undertaking could find stability and achieve homeland security. All settler colonial settler states have commenced their existence with an often unconsciously constructed apartheid-like structure, which if resisted over a long period would tend to transition to genocide or in a few instances the abandonment of the project. The US and Canada illustrate a transition to genocide, Algeria and South Africa illustrate a transition to withdrawal after resistance from within and without seemed to formidable to ignore.

As such what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories is not a new phenomenon, it happened in all the white British breakaway colonies Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand. They each experienced this sequence of apartheid followed by genocidal policies to marginalize the native peoples within their territories, and if long stabilized, by rituals of apology without the slightest intention of redressing legitimate grievances of surviving descendants of the victimized native population.

One has to understand that against the background of several centuries of history, genocide has never been effectively stopped by the international community. Even the Holocaust in Germany was tolerated until Hitler launched a war against Poland and then attacked the Soviet Union. It was only then that Germany was delegitimized as a sovereign state. Even during World War II, the allied powers notoriously refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, although some historians question this interpretation of Allied conduct with regard to the Nazi genocide.

In the background of the Gaza genocide is the extensive experience that countries in the West have had of consolidating the ambitions of dominant racial elites by any means unless there exists within or without some sufficient strategic interest with the ability and will to stop them.

A final thing aspect of this approach to Gaza is to mention at least that after the Cold War, Islam became the next enemy of the Global West. It is relevant to take note of the striking fact that all the countries that were complicit with Israel’s genocidal behavior are from the white West and all the countries and movements that support the Palestinian struggle come from the Global South or from governments or movements originating in Islamic neighbors of Palestine. In other words after the end of the Cold War, there emerged in the faultlines of the Middle East an inter-civilization struggle for land, energy reserves, trade routes, and hegemonic status.

Q>So we shouldn’t wait patiently for the international community to act.  International organizations and geopolitical actors have never acted effectively to stop this or any previous genocide. History tells us almost everything we need to know, or does it?

The organized international community has never been designed or empowered to stop genocide. It has always in the past reacted after the fact. With digital communications this could change but obstacles to fashioning effective responses remain.  If enough agitation arises in civil society it might effectively bring pressure on some governments to change their policies so as to support an anti-genocide protective intervention under international auspices, and act to provide an implementing capability. This might require the coordinated imposition of sanctions with demands for consent to deploy armed blue helmet protective forces.

This happened in a limited way regarding Apartheid South Africa which was strategically allied with the UK and the US. But the internal politics of these two countries turned so strongly against apartheid that these governments, despite their  conservative governments under the leadership of Thacher and Reagan, complied with the wishes of their citizens rather than pursued their strategic interests. The Israeli case is different as Zionist lobbies, especially AIPAC,  continue to be effective in asserting leverage over US policy toward Israel.

Q> Is it possible for the completely different Gaza plan to what Trump proposed in his promotional video- Gaza riviera – on social media to come true? A plan where Gaza is fully emptied, and Palestinians leave their land…

We’re living at a time of radical uncertainty so that what seems impossible may become actualized in ways that it’s currently difficult to anticipate. The crystal ball used to predict the future is even foggier than usual. We are destined to live in an atmosphere of ambient uncertainty with respect to future developments, but this does not relieve us from responsibility to struggle for what we believe is right and just. Precisely because a benign future is not foreclosed, as engaged citizens dedicated to a humane future our responsibility to act on behalf of justice is an imperative of moral conscience.

Reinforcing this general idea of political responsibility are concrete factors.Trump is sufficiently narcissistic, unpredictable, and impressionable that he could launch a major campaign to prove that this vision of a Middle East Riviera comes at least partially into being. It now seems unlikely because it’s not wanted by any of the relevant actors and it seems reminiscent of the the imperial side of the colonial era. Such a proposal poses an awkward question for advocates: ‘by what possible right has the U.S. to take over a territory with which it has not had any relevant historical connection or prior reasonable claim. Trump has made similar bizarre threats about American ambitions to exert sovereignty over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and undoubtedly others will be added to this notorious list.

Q>Netanyahu thinks he’s winning. Is he really winning, Israel is really winning?

No. Without doubt Israel prevails on the battlefield they have no opposition, they kill lots of people, they destroy lots of structures, disrupting the life and heritage of Gaza in a totalizing manner. At the same time, they basically lost what the onslaught set out to achieve beyond the devastation of Gaza. Recourse by Israel to this level of violence was supposed to exterminate Hamas, yet after two years of horrifying violence Israel finds itself with no choice but to negotiate with Hamas and to reach a deal to achieve a ceasefire and hostage exchange. In the background, of course, is Israel’s insistence on excluding Hamas from any governance role in Hamas, an extreme case of rewarding the main wrongdoer and further punishing the devastated victim.

Beyond this, there are all sorts of civil society and even governmental pushbacks by former supporters, including a flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Even Israeli tourists are subject to angry protest. They have recently been denied the right to get off tourist ship in the harbors of Greek islands. More and more Israeli applicants are denied visas in an increasing number of places. IDF soldiers are facing threats of criminal prosecutions in several countries that have universal jurisdiction.

The whole legitimacy of a Zionist Israel is very much in doubt and its legitimacy challenged at this point. There are moves afoot to suspend Israel participation in UN activities or even to expel Israel from the UN. Several prominent Israelis are beginning to talk in a very strong way at least domestically against Netanyahu not only because of the failure to obtain the release of the remaining hostages but for broader issues of behavior that has ruined the reputation the whole idea of a a Jewish democratic state.

This Gaza genocide is the worst thing that has befallen diaspora Jews since Hitler. It brings authentic antisemitism rather than the fake weaponized antisemitism that is relied upon by the Zionist networks around the world to discredit Israel’s critics including of Jews such as myself. I was somewhat victimized this fake version of antisemitism while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, but not in the serious way Francesca Albanese has been. However ethically inappropriate, it is the tactic Israel devised to divert attention from critical messages of unlawful behavior to the fake antisemitism attributed to the messenger to undermine his or her credibility.

Israel earlier in its answered substantive criticisms but it became so obvious that it was violating the rights of the occupied Palestinian people in numerous ways that it began adjusting its approach. Although reckless and disreputable the tactic was quite effective as a diversionary tactic. Fortunately, its overuse has weakened these fake accusations, and made the practice understood to be defamatory in unacceptable ways, especially in international arenas.

Q>How will history record the world’s silence and it’s allowing all this to happen?

Of course, much will depend on the eventual political outcome that remains unclear, especially whether what emerges from such a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza leads to ‘Greater Israel’ and realizes Netanyahu’s vision of ‘the new Middle East’ or whether Israel faces such pressures on its economic viability and political legitimacy that it renounces the apartheid features of Zionism, and moves finally towards a genuine accommodation with Palestine that acknowledges the Palestinian right of self-determination. The unexpected transformation of racist South Africa from an apartheid structure of governance to a constitutional democracy is an instructive and hopeful precedent. It should also lead us to understand that at this stage Israel has yet to win or Palestine to lose. The conflict and struggle goes on even though future Palestinian prospects for a justice-driven peace have never seemed bleaker. As earlier expressed, the ‘certainties’ of the present are often transformed in unanticipated way as the realities of the future unfold.

If Israel prevails and manages to normalize its relations in the Middle East and with the world and is again accepted as a legitimate sovereign state, recollections derived from the events of the past two years may be airbrushed to an extent that their gruesome realities become marginalized in the public imagination as became the fate of native peoples in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. I do not see this as happening, at least not in the near future, unless there is an upheaval in Israel that drastically changes the outlook of Zionism or repudiates Zionism altogether, and I do not see this happening, although it remains a less remote possibility than it did two years ago.

Evaluating the future perception of this post October 7 experience is also difficult currently. Israel’s leadership was warned by various friendly governments of an impending Hamas attack, yet appears to have chosen to let it happen so as to have a pretext for a violent response. In fact, Israel instantly over-reacted without taking any account of the context or its complacency about border security. We should remind ourselves that the context included a harsh blockade of Gaza since 2007 that induced widespread misery, periodic Israeli military incursions causing devastation, and a refusal even to respond to Hamas diplomatic initiatives for a long-term ceasefire lasting up to 50 years. The Zionist Project made political use of the October 7 attack to launch its endgame based on territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinian occupied territories and adjustments by way defusing the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ set to explode at some point due to higher Palestinian than Jewish fertility rates. The solution was to be found by way of ethnic cleansing which meant coercing the departure of as many Palestinians as possible. In effect, carrying out the last stage of any durable settler colonial project by Israel presupposes provoking a second Nakba of mass expulsion on the long suppressed Palestinian nation that despite all has remained resilient and resistant.

If Israel succeeds, as now seems likely, it will not bring peace but lead to new forms of Palestinian resistance. This will be viewed as the greatest failure of modern times to bring an end the colonial era in a civilized manner. It will be objectively seen as one of the cruelest abuses in history, made worse by the material and psychological support given to Israel’s prolonged genocide by the Western liberal democracies that had so proudly championed the development of human rights and genocide-prevention after World War II. It will be looked back upon from many perspectives, including as a sequel to the Cold War in which Israel safeguarded the Middle East for Western exploitation and continuing encroachment, as well as containing the spread of the kind of radical Islam favored by Iran. In the process the West sacrificed commitments to international law and global justice for the sake of geopolitical priorities and Western racial cohesion. It also exhibited unabashed moral hypocrisy by invoking international criminal law to bash Russia for its border-crossing attack on Ukraine while shielding Israel from compliance with the rulings of the most respected international tribunal. In this process international law was doubly damaged first by backing Israel’s Gaza campaign and secondly by making clear that international law was to be taken seriously only as a policy and propaganda instrument to be reserved for use against adversaries and rivals, but to be evaded in the event of unlawfulness by friends and allies.

Q<Could you please tell us about the Gaza Tribunal that you’re the president? Who launched it? Who are the members? And what is your aim?

To respond adequately, would require a long response. I will be brief and encourage those interested to read ‘The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal’ for a more detailed account of the perspective of our effort. https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8 [See text of Declaration, attached]

A group of sponsors, affiliated with the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (ICYF), a civil society organization affiliated with the Conference of Islamic Cooperation and possessing UN credentials, approached Hilal Elver and myself to accept this role of organizing a civil society tribunal devoted to documenting and increasing pressure on Israel and its supporters to stop the genocide, and possessed the funding needed to make it happen. We on our part insisted on political independence and full respect for our identity in the shaping of the work of the GT, which emphasized our resolve to operate as a civil society initiative that had no connections with governments or with active politicians and diplomats. GT is administered by a Steering Committee, and its members include Palestinian NGO representatives, public intellectuals and civil society activists, former UN Special Rapporteurs and former UN officials, and retired diplomats.

We believed such an initiative justified as neither the UN nor states acting individually or collectively were able to end the genocide or impose sanctions on Israel. Our standpoint was informed by the failure of Israel to comply with international law or the ruling of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as supplemented by the failure of the UN to close the enforcement and accountability gaps, principally due to the right of veto possessed by Israel’s leading supporters in the Security Council.

The undertaking of the GT is to expose three gaps in a workable system of global governance: enforcement of law, accountability of perpetrators and complicit actors, and the refusal of states and their institutions to heed the global public interests and adapt national interests as needed. GT also aims to establish a documentary record of the genocide free from media manipulation and self-censorship in the format of an archival record that will be published in due course. The purpose to the extent possible is to insulate public discourse from state propaganda and special interests, particularly in the domain of the arms industry. The overriding immediate goal of GT is to legitimize civil society activism in the face of continuing Israeli criminality and the humanitarian emergency threatening the future of Palestinians in Gaza, and more recently in the West Bank. Such a goal also involves opposition to efforts to suppress peaceful protest activity and punish critics of Israel as has been happening in North America and many European countries.

To be clear this is a peoples tribunal, not a conventional court of law. This will be evident in the final session of the GT in Istanbul (Oct 23-26, 2025) by the centrality of a Jury of Conscience, charged with arriving at a final verdict and preparing a written judgment. This framing signals an emphasis on justice rather than on the more technical approaches to law applied by governmental and inter-governmental courts. Ironically, the GT by encouraging people to act both to exert pressure on governments and by participating in solidarity initiatives has more enforcement capabilities than do traditional capabilities in this kind of situation.

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: This interview was conducted on behalf of Fayn Press by an independent Turkish journalist, Semin Gumusel, on August 19, 2025. It was published initially in Turkish and can be found at link:  https://www.fayn.press/prof-richard-falk-gazzeyi-yalnizca-halklarin-direnisi-kurtarabilir/The English version posted below has been somewhat modified, mainly for style.]

Q<How can Israel and Netanyahu be stopped at this moment?

That is a question that has haunted the world for the past two years, and worried peace and justice activists for a much longer time. The most obvious issue is to how to persuade the US government and EU countries to withdraw their support in response to Israel’s abusive occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. It remains crucial for any hope of an adequate, if belated, international response to the Gaza genocide for European countries do more than just step back but encourage the imposition of collective sanctioning measures through the UN or by a coalition of the willing. It is of even greater relevance to bring pressure on the US Government to stop shielding Israel and to join in a genuine effort to overcome the current famine that is threatening death by starvation to most of the surviving Palestinian population trapped in Gaza.

The political atmosphere regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza has changed over the course of the last five months, that is, after Israel broke the ceasefire on March 13 of this year. A much larger segment of the public, including in previously complicit countries, is increasingly disturbed by Israel continuing genocide, especially by the cruelty of inducing deliberate starvation, the manipulation of the humanitarian aid, and perhaps most of all by converting the food distribution centers into killing fields. The overall impression produced by Israel’s tactics is one of death of innocent people and destruction of their habitats and cultural heritage with a ferocity that is unprecedented in human history. Prior genocides were never before as widely and vividly witnessed around the world in real time. The Israeli response to October 7 has been exposing the eyes and ears of the entire world to daily images of atrocities, as well as the complicity of the Western liberal democratic governments and the feebleness of UN genocide prevention efforts. This represents a moral collapse by Western governments and reveals the deficiencies of international law and the UN in the face of clashes between humanitarian concerns and strategic interests. If this dynamic results in Israeli post-genocide occupation of Gaza and the expulsion and repression of surviving Palestinians, this tragic failure of moral internationalism will be completed. Such a result will keep reviving memories of generations to come with graphic descriptions of this appalling behavior that was tolerated and significantly enabled by the West, particularly by the former European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies. The work of documentary and fictional filmmaking will undoubtedly preserve and disseminate this dark and scandalous chapter in human history.

We alive now cannot evade responsibility for taking what action we can that is directed at securing Palestinian rights as well as resisting Israel’s crimes. The urgent question before the world is ‘how to translate opposition to this ongoing experience of criminality into effective action of opposition given existing emergency conditions?’ The humanitarian emergency can only be address by an immediate response of sufficient magnitude. We have little time to plan and intervene protectively if we are serious about engaging to save the surviving Gazan population of an estimated two million persons, most of whom have already been severely malnourished and traumatized by almost two years of relentless wholesale onslaught conducted with minimal constraint.

What has been happening in Gaza should not be treated as a ‘war,’ which presupposes a somewhat symmetrical struggle between two sides. The conflict unfolding in Gaza is more accurately portrayed as a ‘massacre’, or even as ‘a military hunting expedition.’ It is so one-sided in its characteristics, with one side having its choice of options as to the most hyper-modern weaponry and targets, and the other side vulnerable and helpless, with few options other than to seek shelter and pray to survive. To use the language of war for such a conflict is to normalize Israel’s behavior by raising technical questions of the law of war as to whether it has exceeded the limits of ‘self-defense’ or ‘military necessity.’ Such issues can be argued indefinitely by lawyers for and against, thereby minimizing the horror that is transpiring. Language matters as it allows advocates of abhorrent behavior to hide the true nature of their true motivations that account for the tactics deployed to destroy the identity, livelihood, memories, and lives of an entire people and at the same time  engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the land of its native population. The recourse to force of this intensity and duration given the context cannot be explained by reference to Israeli security or even revenge, but only by reference to territorial ambitions and depopulation that long infused the Zionist Project, which has delayed implementation until an opportunity was present,.

In the case of Gaza there’s a special feature that this violence is concentrated in a tiny area occupied after the 1967 War and subject to international humanitarian law with Israel being a provisional occupying power that has now been declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to have flagrantly abused its authority and role from the perspective of international law. This supreme international tribunal in a near unanimous judgment concluded that Israel was legally obligated to withdraw its military presence and political administration altogether from occupied Palestinian territories and allowed it a year to do so. The year expired on July 19, 2025, and given the refusal of Israel to comply, this authoritative judicial opinion instructed the UN and its Members in their individual capacities to take steps to implement Israel’s withdrawal. What is now established is that Israel has no legitimate foundation for exercising control in either Gaza or the West Bank, and has itself become an unlawful occupant. Israel not only refuses to comply with the ICJ decision but has announced plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank, directly violating an important legal constraint found in the 4^th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. So far there are no signs at the UN or elsewhere that there exists a sufficient political will to do anything that would really make Israel feel obliged to comply.

There are some symbolic gestures that have been recently made by several important European countries including Germany, France and the UK reacting to the official confirmation of famine in Gaza and the reports of children and others dying of starvation. But in terms of stopping an extremist leader like Netanyahu and the Zionist movement that has captured control over the governing process and the citizenry in Israel, and there is little indication that anything in the short term can or will be done to mitigate the suffering in Gaza, or to avert what seems to be worse to come. There is a slender hope that the increasing pariah or rogue status of Israel will induce an unexpected willingness of Israel’s leaders to compromise the further pursuit of maximalist goals in exchange for a pledge to normalize Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Middle East, a revival of the Abraham Accords initiated in the last year of Trump’s first term as the US president.  

People have started advocating, including here in Istanbul, about forming a UN protective force that would intervene with sufficient capabilities to protect the Gazan population perhaps by a peacekeeping presence deployed at the borders between Israel and Gaza, as well as between Israel and the West Bank. It is doubtful that this will happen so long as U.S. and Israeli opposition remains as firm as in the past 22 months.

At the same time, it may be the best hope aside from an Israeli course correction, and it’s certainly worth exerting public pressure that might make Israel do something radically inconsistent with its behavior before and after October 7, but history is full of surprises, reflecting an inability to know the future and thus forced to live with uncertainty on every level of human existence. But uncertainty is no excuse for passivity in the presence of evil. What seems a phantasy hinged to Israel’s willingness to change its behavior,  accepting an arrangement committed to enforcing international law and accepting a stable and just peace that would also promise the political as well as the physical reconstruction of Gaza is neither probable nor impossible.

Such a scenario is what we should struggle to achieve at this point even though most self-confident experts would dismiss its relevance as an idle utopian fantasy, and move on to plan some incremental feasible face saving adjustment that would not attempt to address the underlying maladies.

Q>If genocide cannot be stopped what is the outcome Israel seeks? When do you think Israel will stop this military operation increasingly labeled as ‘genocide’ in public discourse?

In my view Israel’s undertaking was not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all by security considerations. Israel had ample capabilities to address whatever security threats existed after October 7, and assuming that Israel didn’t let the attack happen so as to have the pretext for such a response, it would merely be a matter of enhancing border security, well within Israel’s defense capabilities. Israel received warnings that this attack was coming. Including a New York Times front page story about the degree to which Netanyahu had been made aware of the preparations in Gaza for launching this attack. As well, the Egyptian intelligence reportedly warned Netanyahi  in the days before the attack. The world deserves an international investigation of the October 7 events, including what preceded and what followed, to obtain a better grasp of what motivated Israel to act as it has.

Ordinary persons should at least entertain the possibility that Israel wanted the pretext for initiating such a large-scale response that it would begin the end game for the Zionist project, which means grabbing as much land as they could acquire in terms of what was in some sense withheld from Israel by the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. The Israeli made no secret of wanting to have one Israeli state with Jewish supremacy and allowing only the Jewish people as having a right of self-determination. This is set forth in Israel’s Basic Law adopted by the Knesset in 2018. As Israel has no constitution, the Basic Law is the highest form of legislation and the most difficult to amend and repeal. It internalizes and acknowledges the apartheid regime Israel has long relied upon to deal with Palestinians living in Israel or in the occupied territories or even as refugees. It has been complemented by episodic seizures of Palestinian land and periodic expulsion of Palestinians.

On the West Bank there’s been an increasing spillover from the Gaza violence, mainly evident in the upsurge of settler violence directed at making life unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank and encouraging a movement among the many militant settler communities that are very well represented in the Netanyahu coalition to annex the West Bank and to occupy substantial if not the whole of Gaza and in the process to find ways to remove as many Palestinians as possible, either by forced expulsion or by some kind of ‘voluntary’ arrangement with another country that would accept them, possibly being bribed to do so by economic incentives. Several African countries have been talked about in this way but so far none have been persuaded to accept an influx of Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homeland.

But Israel and specifically the Zionist movement has always been animated by the idea of a single colonized Israel state that has the characteristics of a settler colonial undertaking. Such a project has been pursued at the very moment that colonialism has collapsed elsewhere in the world. Hence, it hardly surprising that there’s more resistance from the Palestinians to a historical attempt to engage in a new colonial undertaking during what is often referred to as a post-colonial era.

This persistent resistance of Palestinians has given rise to a vicious circle linking resistance to more and more severe repression taking the form of apartheid. No matter what its name Israel has devised a system of racial domination and exploitation that is based on ethnicity not on class but on identity determined to be either Jew or non-Jew. Aside from Israel’s resolve to exert discriminatory submission on the part of the Palestinians, its ambitions are more extensive, involving land and racial purification that depends on a continuous process of ethnic cleansing.

And when apartheid doesn’t succeed in achieving the ends that are being sought there has been a strong tendency of settler colonial movements to embrace a logic of genocide of varying degrees of severity depending on circumstances in each instance. Recourse to genocide often came about because it seemed the only way that the settler colonial undertaking could find stability and achieve homeland security. All settler colonial settler states have commenced their existence with an often unconsciously constructed apartheid-like structure, which if resisted over a long period would tend to transition to genocide or in a few instances the abandonment of the project. The US and Canada illustrate a transition to genocide, Algeria and South Africa illustrate a transition to withdrawal after resistance from within and without seemed to formidable to ignore.

As such what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories is not a new phenomenon, it happened in all the white British breakaway colonies Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand. They each experienced this sequence of apartheid followed by genocidal policies to marginalize the native peoples within their territories, and if long stabilized, by rituals of apology without the slightest intention of redressing legitimate grievances of surviving descendants of the victimized native population.

One has to understand that against the background of several centuries of history, genocide has never been effectively stopped by the international community. Even the Holocaust in Germany was tolerated until Hitler launched a war against Poland and then attacked the Soviet Union. It was only then that Germany was delegitimized as a sovereign state. Even during World War II, the allied powers notoriously refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, although some historians question this interpretation of Allied conduct with regard to the Nazi genocide.

In the background of the Gaza genocide is the extensive experience that countries in the West have had of consolidating the ambitions of dominant racial elites by any means unless there exists within or without some sufficient strategic interest with the ability and will to stop them.

A final thing aspect of this approach to Gaza is to mention at least that after the Cold War, Islam became the next enemy of the Global West. It is relevant to take note of the striking fact that all the countries that were complicit with Israel’s genocidal behavior are from the white West and all the countries and movements that support the Palestinian struggle come from the Global South or from governments or movements originating in Islamic neighbors of Palestine. In other words after the end of the Cold War, there emerged in the faultlines of the Middle East an inter-civilization struggle for land, energy reserves, trade routes, and hegemonic status.

Q>So we shouldn’t wait patiently for the international community to act.  International organizations and geopolitical actors have never acted effectively to stop this or any previous genocide. History tells us almost everything we need to know, or does it?

The organized international community has never been designed or empowered to stop genocide. It has always in the past reacted after the fact. With digital communications this could change but obstacles to fashioning effective responses remain.  If enough agitation arises in civil society it might effectively bring pressure on some governments to change their policies so as to support an anti-genocide protective intervention under international auspices, and act to provide an implementing capability. This might require the coordinated imposition of sanctions with demands for consent to deploy armed blue helmet protective forces.

This happened in a limited way regarding Apartheid South Africa which was strategically allied with the UK and the US. But the internal politics of these two countries turned so strongly against apartheid that these governments, despite their  conservative governments under the leadership of Thacher and Reagan, complied with the wishes of their citizens rather than pursued their strategic interests. The Israeli case is different as Zionist lobbies, especially AIPAC,  continue to be effective in asserting leverage over US policy toward Israel.

Q> Is it possible for the completely different Gaza plan to what Trump proposed in his promotional video- Gaza riviera – on social media to come true? A plan where Gaza is fully emptied, and Palestinians leave their land…

We’re living at a time of radical uncertainty so that what seems impossible may become actualized in ways that it’s currently difficult to anticipate. The crystal ball used to predict the future is even foggier than usual. We are destined to live in an atmosphere of ambient uncertainty with respect to future developments, but this does not relieve us from responsibility to struggle for what we believe is right and just. Precisely because a benign future is not foreclosed, as engaged citizens dedicated to a humane future our responsibility to act on behalf of justice is an imperative of moral conscience.

Reinforcing this general idea of political responsibility are concrete factors.Trump is sufficiently narcissistic, unpredictable, and impressionable that he could launch a major campaign to prove that this vision of a Middle East Riviera comes at least partially into being. It now seems unlikely because it’s not wanted by any of the relevant actors and it seems reminiscent of the the imperial side of the colonial era. Such a proposal poses an awkward question for advocates: ‘by what possible right has the U.S. to take over a territory with which it has not had any relevant historical connection or prior reasonable claim. Trump has made similar bizarre threats about American ambitions to exert sovereignty over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and undoubtedly others will be added to this notorious list.

Q>Netanyahu thinks he’s winning. Is he really winning, Israel is really winning?

No. Without doubt Israel prevails on the battlefield they have no opposition, they kill lots of people, they destroy lots of structures, disrupting the life and heritage of Gaza in a totalizing manner. At the same time, they basically lost what the onslaught set out to achieve beyond the devastation of Gaza. Recourse by Israel to this level of violence was supposed to exterminate Hamas, yet after two years of horrifying violence Israel finds itself with no choice but to negotiate with Hamas and to reach a deal to achieve a ceasefire and hostage exchange. In the background, of course, is Israel’s insistence on excluding Hamas from any governance role in Hamas, an extreme case of rewarding the main wrongdoer and further punishing the devastated victim.

Beyond this, there are all sorts of civil society and even governmental pushbacks by former supporters, including a flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Even Israeli tourists are subject to angry protest. They have recently been denied the right to get off tourist ship in the harbors of Greek islands. More and more Israeli applicants are denied visas in an increasing number of places. IDF soldiers are facing threats of criminal prosecutions in several countries that have universal jurisdiction.

The whole legitimacy of a Zionist Israel is very much in doubt and its legitimacy challenged at this point. There are moves afoot to suspend Israel participation in UN activities or even to expel Israel from the UN. Several prominent Israelis are beginning to talk in a very strong way at least domestically against Netanyahu not only because of the failure to obtain the release of the remaining hostages but for broader issues of behavior that has ruined the reputation the whole idea of a a Jewish democratic state.

This Gaza genocide is the worst thing that has befallen diaspora Jews since Hitler. It brings authentic antisemitism rather than the fake weaponized antisemitism that is relied upon by the Zionist networks around the world to discredit Israel’s critics including of Jews such as myself. I was somewhat victimized this fake version of antisemitism while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, but not in the serious way Francesca Albanese has been. However ethically inappropriate, it is the tactic Israel devised to divert attention from critical messages of unlawful behavior to the fake antisemitism attributed to the messenger to undermine his or her credibility.

Israel earlier in its answered substantive criticisms but it became so obvious that it was violating the rights of the occupied Palestinian people in numerous ways that it began adjusting its approach. Although reckless and disreputable the tactic was quite effective as a diversionary tactic. Fortunately, its overuse has weakened these fake accusations, and made the practice understood to be defamatory in unacceptable ways, especially in international arenas.

Q>How will history record the world’s silence and it’s allowing all this to happen?

Of course, much will depend on the eventual political outcome that remains unclear, especially whether what emerges from such a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza leads to ‘Greater Israel’ and realizes Netanyahu’s vision of ‘the new Middle East’ or whether Israel faces such pressures on its economic viability and political legitimacy that it renounces the apartheid features of Zionism, and moves finally towards a genuine accommodation with Palestine that acknowledges the Palestinian right of self-determination. The unexpected transformation of racist South Africa from an apartheid structure of governance to a constitutional democracy is an instructive and hopeful precedent. It should also lead us to understand that at this stage Israel has yet to win or Palestine to lose. The conflict and struggle goes on even though future Palestinian prospects for a justice-driven peace have never seemed bleaker. As earlier expressed, the ‘certainties’ of the present are often transformed in unanticipated way as the realities of the future unfold.

If Israel prevails and manages to normalize its relations in the Middle East and with the world and is again accepted as a legitimate sovereign state, recollections derived from the events of the past two years may be airbrushed to an extent that their gruesome realities become marginalized in the public imagination as became the fate of native peoples in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. I do not see this as happening, at least not in the near future, unless there is an upheaval in Israel that drastically changes the outlook of Zionism or repudiates Zionism altogether, and I do not see this happening, although it remains a less remote possibility than it did two years ago.

Evaluating the future perception of this post October 7 experience is also difficult currently. Israel’s leadership was warned by various friendly governments of an impending Hamas attack, yet appears to have chosen to let it happen so as to have a pretext for a violent response. In fact, Israel instantly over-reacted without taking any account of the context or its complacency about border security. We should remind ourselves that the context included a harsh blockade of Gaza since 2007 that induced widespread misery, periodic Israeli military incursions causing devastation, and a refusal even to respond to Hamas diplomatic initiatives for a long-term ceasefire lasting up to 50 years. The Zionist Project made political use of the October 7 attack to launch its endgame based on territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinian occupied territories and adjustments by way defusing the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ set to explode at some point due to higher Palestinian than Jewish fertility rates. The solution was to be found by way of ethnic cleansing which meant coercing the departure of as many Palestinians as possible. In effect, carrying out the last stage of any durable settler colonial project by Israel presupposes provoking a second Nakba of mass expulsion on the long suppressed Palestinian nation that despite all has remained resilient and resistant.

If Israel succeeds, as now seems likely, it will not bring peace but lead to new forms of Palestinian resistance. This will be viewed as the greatest failure of modern times to bring an end the colonial era in a civilized manner. It will be objectively seen as one of the cruelest abuses in history, made worse by the material and psychological support given to Israel’s prolonged genocide by the Western liberal democracies that had so proudly championed the development of human rights and genocide-prevention after World War II. It will be looked back upon from many perspectives, including as a sequel to the Cold War in which Israel safeguarded the Middle East for Western exploitation and continuing encroachment, as well as containing the spread of the kind of radical Islam favored by Iran. In the process the West sacrificed commitments to international law and global justice for the sake of geopolitical priorities and Western racial cohesion. It also exhibited unabashed moral hypocrisy by invoking international criminal law to bash Russia for its border-crossing attack on Ukraine while shielding Israel from compliance with the rulings of the most respected international tribunal. In this process international law was doubly damaged first by backing Israel’s Gaza campaign and secondly by making clear that international law was to be taken seriously only as a policy and propaganda instrument to be reserved for use against adversaries and rivals, but to be evaded in the event of unlawfulness by friends and allies.

Q<Could you please tell us about the Gaza Tribunal that you’re the president? Who launched it? Who are the members? And what is your aim?

To respond adequately, would require a long response. I will be brief and encourage those interested to read ‘The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal’ for a more detailed account of the perspective of our effort. https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8 [See text of Declaration, attached]

A group of sponsors, affiliated with the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (ICYF), a civil society organization affiliated with the Conference of Islamic Cooperation and possessing UN credentials, approached Hilal Elver and myself to accept this role of organizing a civil society tribunal devoted to documenting and increasing pressure on Israel and its supporters to stop the genocide, and possessed the funding needed to make it happen. We on our part insisted on political independence and full respect for our identity in the shaping of the work of the GT, which emphasized our resolve to operate as a civil society initiative that had no connections with governments or with active politicians and diplomats. GT is administered by a Steering Committee, and its members include Palestinian NGO representatives, public intellectuals and civil society activists, former UN Special Rapporteurs and former UN officials, and retired diplomats.

We believed such an initiative justified as neither the UN nor states acting individually or collectively were able to end the genocide or impose sanctions on Israel. Our standpoint was informed by the failure of Israel to comply with international law or the ruling of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as supplemented by the failure of the UN to close the enforcement and accountability gaps, principally due to the right of veto possessed by Israel’s leading supporters in the Security Council.

The undertaking of the GT is to expose three gaps in a workable system of global governance: enforcement of law, accountability of perpetrators and complicit actors, and the refusal of states and their institutions to heed the global public interests and adapt national interests as needed. GT also aims to establish a documentary record of the genocide free from media manipulation and self-censorship in the format of an archival record that will be published in due course. The purpose to the extent possible is to insulate public discourse from state propaganda and special interests, particularly in the domain of the arms industry. The overriding immediate goal of GT is to legitimize civil society activism in the face of continuing Israeli criminality and the humanitarian emergency threatening the future of Palestinians in Gaza, and more recently in the West Bank. Such a goal also involves opposition to efforts to suppress peaceful protest activity and punish critics of Israel as has been happening in North America and many European countries.

To be clear this is a peoples tribunal, not a conventional court of law. This will be evident in the final session of the GT in Istanbul (Oct 23-26, 2025) by the centrality of a Jury of Conscience, charged with arriving at a final verdict and preparing a written judgment. This framing signals an emphasis on justice rather than on the more technical approaches to law applied by governmental and inter-governmental courts. Ironically, the GT by encouraging people to act both to exert pressure on governments and by participating in solidarity initiatives has more enforcement capabilities than do traditional capabilities in this kind of situation.

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

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August 15, 2025

Richard Falk – Daniel Falcone

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Image courtesy of Al Jazeera.

In contemporary conflict the “weaponization of information” or “targeting of journalists” shows a pattern of squashing dissent. Analysts like Martin Libicki and John Arquilla argue how information itself becomes a battlefield in what they call noopolitik. The U.S. and Israel are historically accustomed to exploiting land, sea and air. Manipulating the information space is also nothing new. +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham indicated that Israeli intelligence, or Aman, formed Legitimization Cells to preempt Gaza journalists as Hamas members when Palestinian reporting was spot on, although the press with a political affiliation is commonly accepted elsewhere in the world.

In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.

Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?

Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.

The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.

Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.

The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.

In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]

This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.

Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?

Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.

Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.

The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.

Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Daniel Falcone: Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?

Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’

Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.

As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.

Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.

The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.

Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.

Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.

Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.

For Further Reading:

Abraham, Yuval – +972 Magazine

Albanese, Francesca – UN Human Rights Council

Davidson, Lawrence – To the Point Analysis

El-Ad, Hagai – B’Tselem

Falk, Richard and Tilley, Virginia – UN ESCWA report, …The Question of Apartheid (2017)

Levy, Gideon – Haaretz

Loewenstein, Antony – Middle East Eye

Mansour, Sherif – Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

Morayef, Heba – Foreign Policy

Paul, Ari – FAIR, The Battleground

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Nassar, Tamara – The Electronic Intifada

Pappé, Ilan – Al Jazeera, The Guardian

Shakir, Omar – Human Rights Watch

Turfah, Mary – Los Angeles Review of Books

Zunes, Stephen – The Progressive

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: Interview text of responses to question]s posed by Naman Bakaç, an idependent journalist in Turkey. The interview was published by FOCUS, an independent online media platform. The link can be found at the link below:

https://www.fokusplus.com/roportaj/prof-dr-richard-falk-bm-ve-kuresel-hukuk-filistin-halkinin-haklarini-koruyamadi?s=09 ]
1. Let’s start with your book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience,’ which you co-edited with Ahmet Davutoğlu and was published in June 2025. The book includes articles by more than 30 politicians, academics, diplomats, intellectuals, and statesmen from 17 countries. Who are the contributors in this book? What motivations led to the creation of this book? What message do you aim to convey to the global public through this book?

Response: As we explain in the Preface, the contributors were selected from a
much larger group of distinguished signatories of a Declaration of Conscience,
drafted by the former Prime Minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu and myself,
and issued in late 2023 not long after the October 7 events. The Hamas-led
attack was designed to be an anguished protest against the failure of
governments and the UN to bring what seemed to us almost from its outset
to be a transparent genocide carried out in real time and by digital
technology brought to the awareness of the eyes and ears of the world. The
issuance of our Declaration was met with unexpected enthusiasm from
frustrated citizens in many countries that resulted in the private funding of a
conference in London on 27 March 2024.

By coincidence, the conference was
held the day after the International Court of Justice made its historic initial
interim rulings in response to requests from South Africa that had submitted
a legal dispute with Israel as to whether Israeli violence was of a nature that
violated the International Convention on Genocide, as well as whether Israel
was legally obliged to stop obstructing the international delivery of
humanitarian aid to the civilian population of Gaza. Naturally, we were
encouraged by these ICJ rulings to the effect that Israeli indiscriminate
violence against the civilian population of Gaza coupled with the Israeli official
decrees prohibiting entry of food, fuel, and water made allegations of
genocide ‘plausible.’

As well, the ICJ in a second near unanimous judicial
ruling ordered Israel to stop interfering with the delivery of urgently needed
humanitarian aid. These ICJ rulings encouraged us to continue our effort to
mobilize civil society on the basis of a justice-driven interpretation of law to
engage with this unfolding human tragedy through the activation of
nonviolent solidarity initiatives.

If a single message emerges from such a multi-authored book gathering
between its pages distinguished public personalities from around the world

with diverse perspectives on global issues, yet united in condemning the
genocide, it is this: when the existing normative order of rules, procedures,
and institutions established by governments and international institutions,
especially those falling within the UN System, fails to meet an urgent
challenge to peace and human rights, it is time for the peoples of the world to
act in resolute opposition.

In our search for participants, we wanted to focus
on people whose view were similar to ourselves who were not presently holders of high
positions in governments or inter-governmental institutions but were widely
respected as moral authority figures. Our influence and ‘weapons’ were of the
mind, heart, and spirit that were best expressed by engaged citizenship, trust
in the guidance of conscience, and existential belief in the power of people in
the service of truth. We hope our book conveys that message, which includes
the conviction that conscience in extreme situations demands action as well
as rhetorical utterances. Words unsupported by action in the face of genocide
is an unacceptable form of silence. We regard our efforts as playing a small
but determined part in an emergent global solidarity movement of people in
support of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, above all, the right of self-
determination.

From the London Conference devoted to exploring the implications of the
Gaza Declaration, the idea of a book emerged as a matter of course,
encouraged by a publishing commitment by Clarity Press. Our intention was to
have this varied collection of writings exhibit both shared values and diverse
policy judgments, and stimulate creative solidarity actions throughout the
world, thereby confirming the view that the Gaza Genocide is not just an
urgent challenge to all of humanity, but is also a test of whether the peoples
of the world can develop moral agency to challenge dark challenges to the
human future.

As far as the book is concerned, I think the range and quality of the
contributions exceeded our expectations, although admittedly its impacts on
human behavior remain unknowable, and even after 21 months such
initiatives have not extinguished the need for intensifying activism in support
of the Palestinian struggle.

2. In December 2023, you published a text calling for international justice and
conscience conference on Palestine was held in London. Could these civil initiatives you undertook out of a sense of responsibility turn into a global civil movement to enforce international law and order? Has it already turned into one? Can wesay that, while the UN and international law have failed in the face of the Gazagenocide, you are moving from words to action with this civil movement? Afterall, the unifying theme of the London Conference was that words are not enough and action is imperative., which included some of the names in your new book.  

Response: Although we were motivated to make what contribution we could to
change the political atmosphere sufficiently to stop the genocide, we had no
illusions that our pleas for humane politics would be heeded in the short run. Yet
we felt that silence in its two forms was unacceptable, that is, refusing to name
the violence of the Israeli response as ‘genocide,’ given its clear intentionality as
further exhibited in its actions. Since naming gave rise to various forms of
punitive pushback, especially in Europe and North America during the months
after October 7, to name the violence ‘genocide’ was not only a word but
became an action in defiance of Zionist worldwide efforts to treat evidenced-
based criticism of Israel as a hateful form of antisemitism. As the genocide has
persisted now for more almost two years genocide as the accepted descripted
term has been somewhat normalized even in the mainstream media. It is still
true that few governmental or officials in international institutions of the West
speak of ‘genocide’ even when condemning the prolonged Israeli violence, and
even UN top officials while highly critical of Israel’s behavior continue to refrain
from characterizing the violence in Gaza as genocide.

It is notable that Francesca Albanese, the fearless UN Special Rapporteur for
Occupied Palestine has been admirably forthright when it coming to naming,
devoting three of her semi-annual official reports to different facets of genocide,
including the depiction of the Zionist Project as a prime instance of ‘settler
colonialism’ and complicit behavior of supporting governments and profit-making
corporations as integral to Israel’s criminal responsibility for genocide. It is not
surprising in view of this that Ms. Albanese has been singled out by the US
Government and sanctioned in her personal capacity, being denied entry to the
US and having her American assets frozen, a vindicative response to truthful
witnessing on behalf of the public good, illustrative of UN functioning with courage and effectiveness despite contrary systemic pressures according to the high ideals of the Preamble to the UN Charter.

As indicated in my response to your first question, the confinement of criticism of
Israel’s onslaught on Gaza to words of condemnation are insufficient in the face of
prolonged and transparent genocide, with cruel and aggravating tendencies for more than 22 months. Action must be proposed and acted upon, whether the actors are governments, institutions, civil society activist, or individuals and collectivities of

various sorts. The political suicide of Aaron Bushnell in 2023, an American airman in front of Israel’s embassy in Washington is illustrative of an extreme humanistic sacrifice or self-martyrdom, an enactment of the repudiation of
genocide as well as a desperate appeal to others to take action aimed at
stopping the genocide. The action of Madleen Freedom Flotilla mission
undertaken by Greta Thunberg and other brave and dedicated activists is
another example of anti-genocidal activism, with an emphasis on both highlighting and circumventing Israel’s disruptions of the international delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid, an initiative that combines a care-giving gesture in
the context of the humanitarian emergency in Gaza with an unspoken yet
powerful appeal to others to engage actively, given their personal situation,
in a variety of ways that involves truth-telling and solidarity with the victimized population of Gaza.

The importance of conscience as a motive for political action is gives rise to expressions of bravery in situations of risk without knowing whether controversial utterances will engender a response from those hitherto on the sidelines that might grow into a
movement with transformative capabilities valuable for their own sake. In that
sense, opposing genocide in Gaza is both an intrinsic reaction of conscience and
a distinct action that has political goals of motivating others to join the struggle.

In retrospect, it is obvious that from feeble solidarity initiatives early on, a civil
society movement of many distinct parts has grown to the point where Israel’s
legitimacy as a state is increasingly drawn into question, both symbolically and
substantively. One manifestation of this solidarity trend is the intensity of
growing calls for Israel’s suspension from UN activities, as well as proposals for
arms embargoes, denial of visas to Israeli citizens, boycotts of cultural and
sporting events, solidarity fasts and cutting diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.

Even though Israel has continued to follow its lawless, abusive path, its behavior and
identity has been slowly delegitimized by public discourse even in the most influential
civil society media platforms of the West, reflecting the symbolic defeat of Israel
when it comes to controlling the high normative ground of law and morality. As I
have argued in the past the side that wins the Legitimacy War fought over
symbolic entitlements of legality and morality tends to prevail politically in the end
despite being defeated on the battlefield due to inferior military capabilities. The
Palestinians of Gaza, with the help of global supportive solidarity and Palestinian
resistance and sumud, have clearly won the Legitimacy War despite the tragic costs
paid by participants in such anti-colonial liberation struggles. As with other anti-colonial
uprisings, the uncertainty is whether the Palestinians have the national stamina
to gain the fruits of such a victory, that is, national liberation embodying the realization of the ultimate human right, that of self-determination. Israel under the sway of Zionist ideology and the Masada Complex seems prepared to pay a far higher price in blood, treasure, and reputation than have been other recent settler colonial projects to exterminate opposition its goals of eliminating resistance by the native or homeland residents.

3.The Israel-Iran war raises many questions as to what kinds of changes will it
bring to the regional and global order? What do you think is the real reason
behind Israel targeting Iran after Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen? What do
you think are the geopolitical and the political goals of the Israel-US duo?

Response: Israel has made clear in its foreign policy pronouncements that it seeks to prevent any country in the region from becoming strong or bold enough to challenge Israel’s military preeminence. Its extension of the Gaza combat zone to several Middle Eastern countries signals its resolve to eliminate or severely weaken any Islamic non-state movement that is aligned with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, the exercise of its long-denied rights of self-determination and perceived in Tel Aviv to pose a challenge to Israel’s strategic and hegemonic ambitions. The inflamed atmosphere caused by the prolonged genocide in Gaza give rise to a context in which rising global
discontent with Israel create incentives to strike at its actual and imagined
regional adversaries.

Iran above all is singled out as Enemy No. 1, in part to divert attention from the grim happenings in Gaza and the West Bank, to carry out its
long-time strategy of remaking the Middle East to its liking, and to address Iran’s
supposed security threat centered on its potential acquisition of nuclear
weapons. The Israeli justifications involve preempting security threats before
they can materialize or striking disproportionately (along the lines of the Dahiya
Doctrine) in response to behavior perceived as hostile to the Zionist game plan
that features the minimization of a Palestinian presence within an enlarged
reconfigured Israel that erases Palestine from the map of what Netanyahu likes
to call ‘the New Middle East’ or ‘Greater Israel.’ Such ambitions would compel the massive physical displacement and psychological marginalization of
Palestinians. It also seeks to coerce the most defeatist representatives of Palestine to agree to the surrender of national political goals, including the most basic rights embodied in international law, especially in relation to human rights.

The 12-day Iran War exemplifies this approach, with the proclaimed  goal of
eliminating, or at least substantially delaying, Iran’s alleged threat to acquire
nuclear weapons. A secondary rarely openly acknowledged goal is to stimulate a restive
Iranian opposition to seize the moment to launch a campaign to achieve regime
change in Tehran. Underlying these, is an unspoken third goal of renewing fear
of Israel’s deterrent capabilities and preventive war mindset in a potentially hostile post-Assad Syria feared to emerge as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East. The attack on Iran also created an
opportunity that came to fruition to involve the US directly in the coercive administration of Middle East politics. Israel’s dependence on US supplementing its initial attacks by
enlisting B2 planes that the US alone possessed delivering Blockbuster Bombs on
underground Iranian nuclear sites demonstrated the strength of Israel’s leverage in Washington and the limits of Israel’s purported military dominance in the Middle East.

The Israel/US duo in the region has two imperial objectives. The first is assuring
friendly governments control the energy resources of the region. The other is to

contain the spread of Islam beyond the vital civilizational fault lines in the Middle
East. This second goal helps explain the blind eye that the Western liberal democracies turned toward the prolonged genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza while
actually exhibiting complicity in the commission of this crime. This crime
simultaneously denied the right to life, right to peace, and a rebuff of
fundamental individual and collective legal entitlements of national self-
determination to all peoples.

4.You previously served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. Prof. Michael
Lynk, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine between 2016 and
2022, recently stated at Boğaziçi University’s conference ‘Rethinking International
Law after Gaza’ that international law alone cannot ensure Palestine’s liberation
and that there must also be international resolve. What concrete proposals do
you have for establishing the resolve to implement the principles and decisions of international law?

Response: I share Michael Lynk’s view about the inability of international legal authority to be self-enforcing in situations of defiant non-compliance that Israel has
manifested in all aspects of its relations with the Palestinian people and most
dramatically over the course of more than 22 months of a genocidal assault on
the civilian population of Gaza and the devastation of physical infrastructure of
Gazan society casting doubt of its viability as a place fit for human habitation.
This is especially the case, as here, where the violator enjoys geopolitical support
from the US and the European Union. There are several steps that can be taken
on levels of policy and others of a more systemic character.

Civil Society Solidarity Initiatives. There are variety of ways that people
can act to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps when the
UN and organized normative order fails, as it has in Gaza, and more generally
with regard to protecting the basic rights of the Palestinian people. The struggle
against the South African apartheid regime illustrates the impact of civil society
activism in the struggle to combat racist criminality. Such initiatives as the BDS
movement, featuring nationalist boycotts of cultural and sporting events by
refusals to perform in South Africa and mounting pressure to exclude
participation by South African performers and athletes elsewhere contributed to
anti-apartheid struggle, as well as seeking to discourage new investments and to
divest from past investments, and sanctions by way of arms embargoes and
other punitive actions were expressions of moral outrage directed at the South
African regime, and although unacknowledged, are widely thought to have
contributed to the unexpected and sudden decision by South African leaders to
abandon apartheid, free Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and arrange

free elections of all South African inhabitants to select a new leadership and
establish a constitutional structure based on racial equality and human rights for
all.

There are a variety of other solidarity initiatives that can be mentioned: waging a
Legitimacy War to control public discourse, with the winner controlling the high
ground of law and morality; exertions of a variety of pressures on media and
government in complicit countries; protests by global voices of conscience
demanding arms embargoes; individual actions such as tax refusal and self-
martyrdom in protest.

Collective Governmental Coalition. The Hague Group, originally formed by
states of the Global South, provides a venue for opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide,
including a statement of purpose and the recommendation of action-oriented
measures intended to exert pressure on Israel in relation to its behavior in
Occupied Palestine. The Hague Group met in Bogotá at an emergency meeting
at the joint invitation of Colombia and South Africa. A Declaration signed by the
30 participating governments and the adoption of a commitment to impose a
series of anti-Israeli measure by 12 of the participating states. The event is an
important indication of the emergence of the Global South from a period of post-
colonial passivity and suggests a revival under altered circumstances of the
Bandung Spirit, which challenged the preoccupations of the Cold War by
giving priorities to liberation struggles and development priorities, and projecting a
different conception of global security and international legitimacy at the UN and elsewhere.

UN Reform. There are variety of UN Reforms that would enhance respect for
international law and enforcement/accountability prospects. The most promising
reforms to achieve a more effective UN that seek to serve global public interests
with respect to war prevention and global security include the following:
empowerment of the General Assembly via implementation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution and Responsibility to Protect (R2P), direct enforcement without recourse to
Security Council of ICJ judgments; elimination or curtailment of the right of veto
in the Security Council and in other decision points in the UN System; expediting
ICJ proceedings in emergency situations; renaming ‘Advisory Opinions’ of ICJ as
‘Authoritative Legal Judgments;’ adding layers of protections to the work of
Special Procedures to ensure political independence and immunity from
defamation and sanctions. Seldom discussed is the enhancement of status of UN
Special Rapporteurs, including more explicit responsibilities of the UN Secretariat
to offer protection extending to disallowing defamatory attacks by NGOs within
UN arenas of appraisal such as the Human Rights Council. Vesting increased war prevention authority in the office of the Secretary General.

New Pedagogical Paradigm. Legal education is deficient in its approach to
international law, especially in relation to core public order issues of conflict,
human rights, and development. It focuses on the vocational preparation of
students to be practicing lawyers within the confines of nation states.
International law is seen as a discretionary subject at the margins of the law
school curricula and is not well understood even within democratic societies
governed in accord with constitutional commitments to uphold the ‘rule of law.’

A pedagogy of international law that would be more supportive of a global normative order that was more geared to the realization of values associated with peace, justice, and sustainable development would view legal education as a vital source of civic
education in relation to engaged citizenship. The goals would be to require all
graduates of law schools and other law programs to grasp the relevance of an
effective just world order to human interests in overcoming global challenges.

Educational reform would also include course offerings on the history of
international relations. Courses would feature critiques of ‘political realism’ that
continues to be the shared operational code of planners and advisors that shape
the worldviews and foreign policy of almost all leading governments. The ‘group
think’ of foreign policy elites create an atmosphere in which strategic ambitions
and security calculations take precedence, limiting international law in its
regulative role to policy settings in which mutuality is seen to exist. With respect
to global security context the propaganda role of international law tends to be
paramount, serving as a foreign policy instrument for mobilizing opposition
against international enemies while dismissing international law when its
constraints are violated by the national government or its allies. Law is not law
that treats equals unequally as was the Global West’s appeal to international law
when dealing with Russia’s attack on Ukraine and its dismissal when responding
to more serious allegations of genocide made against Israel.

5.What kind of global order and international law was built after World War II such
that no power, mechanism, legality, or institution can stop Israel’s genocidal,
expansionist, and occupationist policies? If this inability continues, what kind of global order and international law awaits us? As an experienced scholar who has conducted academic and field studies in international law and practices for more than 40 years,and who has written books on the legitimacy of global order, legality, and the future of international law, how do you think the global order and international law will beshaped after Gaza? What kind of world order awaits us? How would you name this new order? Is it similar to past versions of Pax America?

Response: To some extent the last part of my response to the prior question
anticipates your concerns here. As suggested, the overriding of international law by
the political realist control of foreign policy results in world order being shaped by
power rather than by the restraints and procedures of law and the guidelines of
ethics and justice, at least in relation to global security and war/peace issues. More
specifically, what emerged from World War II was not a genuine war prevention or
global security framework as pledged in Preamble to the UN Charter. Instead, the
international normative order deliberately marginalized the UN, and international law
generally, although with certain potentially significant exceptions. The global
normative order that has evolved since 1945 was designed to give the winners in the
war against fascism freedom of action to pursue their strategic interests exempt from
the rule of law and international law by virtue of a right of veto given to the five
winners that also turned out to be the five countries allowed to acquire nuclear
weaponry.

Such a great power hegemonic world system was also evident in the war
crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, which only prosecuted German and Japanese
military and political officials, that is, the crimes of the losers in the war. No legal
scrutiny led to investigations, much less prosecutions of the major crimes of the
winners, including indiscriminate strategic bombing and the use of atom bombs
against two Japanese cities despite their scant military importance. A great liberal
show was made of the limited due process offered to these surviving high officials of
Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, but the one-sidedness of the legal proceedings
made a mockery of claims that a new of international criminal justice had commenced
at the war crimes trials. A further irony is that the agreement to establish these
tribunals were set by the Allied Power in London on August 8, that is on the day
between dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a second bomb on Nagasaki, a
historic display of humanitarian insensitivity by the self-righteous winners of World
War II.

A second phase of such a hegemonic normative order emerged from the collapse of
the Soviet Union bringing the Cold War to an end in the early 1990s with victory by
the West. To fill the geopolitical vacuum that existed, the US proceeded to project its
power throughout the planet by becoming the first ‘global state’ enabled by a network
of hundreds of foreign military bases, naval units in every ocean, and an aggressive
space program to safeguard dominance on earth. By so acting, the US ignored the
possibilities at the end of the Cold War of achieving nuclear disarmament,
demilitarization, a justice-oriented approach to global policy, and prosperity resting on
an ecologically resilient approach to economic and social development. This missed
opportunity for global reform has generated chaos, violent conflict, wasted resources,
widening wealth/income gaps, the rise of chauvinistic autocratic rule in many leading
countries, and dangerous levels of ecological instability affecting adversely global
warming and food security.

Pax America is most accurately interpreted as an historic period of post-colonialism
that is best described as US dominated Western imperialism.’ It is also illuminating to
regard the interval between the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the
Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 as an enactment of Pax America, with less Pax and
more America. It featured US armed interventions with the goal of achieving regime-
change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by lengthy occupations committed to
state-building along capitalist, constitutional lines at great expense, and disappointing
outcomes given the motivations of the intervenors. Dubbed ‘wars of choice’ and
‘forever wars’ these attempts to impose Western models of pollical and economic
structures and alignments in accord with the postulates of neoliberal globalization
were not only carried out with scant attention to the constraints of international law
but resulted in political failures. The US experience in the Vietnam War is
paradigmatic: enduring political defeat despite battlefield dominance.

6.While the people of Gaza are living through a live genocide under bombs, hunger, diseases, and blockade, as a theorist in the field of global order and international law, how do you think this genocide can be resolved by Netanyahu and Hamas? Hamas and Netanyahu are not stepping back from their core arguments. How can this deadlock be overcome? What is your concrete proposal?

Response: To begin with, Netanyahu and Hamas are not equal or symmetrically
situated. Israel enjoys total military control of the political space and enjoys material
and diplomatic support from the NATO members of the UN Security Council, as well as
the backing of these countries in the West on such legal and moral issues as whether
Israeli use of force should be viewed as ‘genocide’ or ‘self-defense.’ All ‘two sides’
approaches to the Israel/Palestine past, present, and future are tainted by their tacit
acceptance of master/slave structures of interpretation and advocacy.
Hamas has few cards to play when it comes to diplomatic negotiations. The only
obvious one, and it is tenuous and contingent, is the retention of Israeli hostages
taken on October 7, some alive, some dead. In addition, Israel’s leaders have
manifested on many occasions that the return of the hostages is not a high priority
justifying significant concessions.

The only just way to manage conflict resolution is to balance a long-term ceasefire
against an assured path to meaningful realization of the long deferred Palestinian right
of self-determination in a form that is not another instance of Israeli/US ‘breadcrumb
diplomacy,’ exchanging Israeli territorial expansion for a demilitarized Palestinian
Bantustan put forward as the fulfillment of ‘the two-state solution.’ Palestinian
representation must be legitimate and endowed with agency at any day-after

diplomatic process seeking reconciliation. From a detached perspective, for a variety
of reasons, a single secular state with equal rights for both peoples seems like the
only durable justice-driven solution, but it is up to Israeli and Palestinians to arrive awhat now appears a ‘utopian’ solution.

7.Since October 7, 2023, if we ask you to analyze the stances and actions of the
following actors in the face of Netanyahu, Hamas, and the genocide, what picture
would you paint for us? The Mahmoud Abbas Government, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey

.
Response: —Mahmoud Abbas Government: At its best, a pragmatic adjustment to
the victimization of the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories of East
Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, privileging a matter of getting on with daily life as
well as possible, while continuing to represent Palestine in international negotiations
and endorse to the ‘two state solution’; at its worst, collaborating with Israel in
maintaining security on the West Bank, supporting anti-Hamas tactics of Israel
including the punitive blockade on Gaza imposed in 2007 in reaction to the
unexpected Hamas electoral victory the prior year; failure to win support from most
Palestinians living in foreign countries as refugees or exiles; by and large, the
Ramallah government operates within the comfort zone of Israel and United States, as
does settler violence land-grabbing; in my judgment the Abbas government is not
playing a satisfactory role of international representation of the Palestinian resistance
focused on the exercise of basic rights, especially the inalienable right of self-
determination;

—Egypt: In keeping with the behavior of other Arab governments Egypt has verbally
criticized Israeli behavior in Gaza, but has carefully refrained from engaging in any act
that might provoke hostile reactions by Israel; in this sense, Egypt has remained
nervously on the sidelines, although resisting pressures to date to accept large
numbers of Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza; Egypt as aligned with the US
and Saudi Arabia exhibits hostility to Hamas as an extension of its domestic antipathy
toward the Muslim Brotherhood within its own borders. Compared to Nasser’s Egypt
the current government has lost popular support and regional respect, especially in
civil society circles of influence;

—Qatar: As a small country hosting a major US military base and vulnerable to hostile
action by other Gulf monarchies, Qatar has few choices, although it has maneuvered
skillfully to give itself the unique position of being the Switzerland of the Middle East,
useful to all sides in the multidimensional conflicts that have brought chaos and misery
to many countries in the region; Qatar’s leaders have been careful to appear neutral in
relation to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, although it has long provided a

safe haven for top Hamas leaders living in exile, and extended hospitality to other
Palestinian notables, such as Azmi Bishara, no longer to feel secure in Israel; in the
current high profile Gaza ceasefire negotiations only Qatar was considered suitable, providing security and facilities;

—Turkey: Only Turkey has played effectively a somewhat contradictory role. On the
one side Turkey, as much as any government in the region aside from Iran is second
to none in the fierceness of its denunciation of Israel’s behavior in Gaza since October
7, with its top leadership in Ankara not hesitant to categorize Israel’s violence as
‘genocide’ and to provide a domestic setting supportive of the Palestinian struggle for
basic rights, including such initiatives as the Gaza Peoples Tribunal scheduled to have
its final session in Istanbul at the end of October; at the same time, Turkey seeks to
maintain good economic and political relations with the European Union and the
United States. The Turkish government has also been criticized, and accused of moral
hypocrisy, due to its failure to shut down the pipeline supplying Israel with oil sent
from Azerbaijan and supposedly vital for its war effort.

8.In your book translated into Turkish as ‘Globalization and Religion: Humanitarian Global Governance,’ you list several reasons for your new idea of ‘Humanitarian Global Governance’ as follows: ‘Part of the appeal of religion is an antidote to the homogenizing effects of out-of-control consumerism and pseudo-universalism.’ You also state, ‘I have never gotten along well with the morality or knowledge system of scientific humanism in my approach to law and politics.’ Could you elaborate on your perspective that religion serves as an antidote? Also, why do you not get along well with scientific humanism? Which paradigm do you currently align with in your approach to law and politics?

Response: The book’s title and central idea are unfortunately mistranslated. In English the key word is ‘humane,’ not ‘humanitarian, which has a different meaning and resonance. Humanitarian or humanitarianism refers to acts of relief, undertakings designed to mitigate human suffering, or simply acts of kindness toward those in need. ‘Humane’ refers to a worldview animated by love, justice, fairness to all human beings, and an affirmation of the spiritual dimensions of reality. It can be coherently brought to reality or nurtured by certain patterns of governance that reflect shared societal values often transmitted by way of organized religion, but more often betrayed by repressive and corrupt governance and by despiritualized religious institutions and practices.
My ambivalence toward ‘scientific humanism’ is a consequence of its epistemological
stance, which devalues spirituality in all its forms, substituting rationality and scientific
validation of knowledge.

These understandable reactions to the shortcomings of

religion led to the liberation of superstition and marginalization of metaphysical
abstractions (such as ‘God’) from the workings of society, leading to the substitution
of the Enlightenment view of knowledge and to the rise of modernity in the West with
its vision of progress reliant on dynamic technological innovation. What was sacrificed in the process was a sense of human community including the ethics of empathy and a
politics of compassion, as well as the denial of spirituality. The aspirations of a
‘humane’ approach is to restore the virtues of the pre-modern without losing the
benefits of modernity as conditioned by the extension of human rights, the curtailment
of militarism and nuclearism, and care for ecological stability.

To reorient modernity to overcome these dangerous deficiencies is what I intend by
the stress on a ‘humane’ worldview. It calls for an ethics and politics of moderation,
enlivened by spiritual awareness and practices, reflecting a realistic appreciation of
global challenges. Among governance frameworks, the most congenial for me is that
of ecologically conditioned varieties of democratic socialism in a global setting finally
inclined toward denuclearization and demilitarization, as well as the repudiation of
predatory capitalism and the kind of excessive individualism that arises when the
market is entrusted with the promotion of human wellbeing in all its facets.

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