[Prefatory Note: With some embarrassment, and a bit of pride, I publish Margaret Crane’s interview in two sessions. I was intrigued by her newsletter on ageing, and thought that being asked about what it means to be this old I would learn something about my current state of mind and of being-in-the-world. My embarrassment stems from my realization that this is something in the order of what prompted Norman Mailer to title his 1959 book, Advertisements for Myself. I suppose this is a way of hiding self-consciousness by being ‘up front’ about it.]
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He Calls Himself a Citizen Pilgrim. I Call Him a Moral and Intellectual Hero.
Nonagenarian Richard Falk’s Long, Fruitful Post-Retirement
Jan 04, 2025
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At 94, Richard Falk is busier than at any other point in his life.
If you’re already familiar with Falk’s singular achievements, you’ll recognize the towering figure you know and admire—or profoundly disagree with. No matter which way you lean on Falk and the causes he has championed over the years, the following overview of his life, based on two interviews I conducted with him this past December, may offer new insights, along with a sense of what’s possible in very old age.
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Having taught international law and international relations at Princeton for four decades, Falk became an activist during the Vietnam War period, and he hasn’t stopped fighting for human rights, social justice, and the health of the planet since then.
Our paths crossed briefly during the early 1990s. I was an environmental activist myself, driven by outrage at the harm our species was inflicting on the systems that sustain life on Earth. Looking back at my younger self, I realize that I was long on passion and short on knowledge. At the behest of a fellow activist, I read a few articles by Falk, Murray Bookchin, and other prominent ecology-minded thinkers. They helped me understand what was at stake and embrace a more holistic view of the world: the ways in which war, poverty, the ecological crisis, capitalism, and geopolitics were interconnected.
I was stunned by Falk’s moral and intellectual force and humbled by his principled analysis of world affairs. And I still am.
As a prominent academic at an elite institution who dared to voice a radical critique of the West, and the U.S. in particular, he was as courageous as they come. His critique started with the Vietnam War and culminated in his opposition to Zionism and support for Palestinian rights. “I received plenty of pushback from Princeton alumni,” he told me. They, along with many in the human rights establishment, charged him—a secular Jew from New York City—with antisemitism. Their denunciation only grew sharper after he retired from Princeton in 2001, especially once he became the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, a position he held from 2008 to 2014.
He also made me aware of reports issued this December by two major human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both have called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza genocide. That view is no longer the exclusive province of American college students across the nation’s campuses. Now, it’s being promulgated by the very establishment that viewed Falk as an outlier and possibly an extremist a short time ago. After all, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the international courts were originally conceived to denounce the human rights practices of the enemies of the West—not the West itself—so it’s significant that Israel’s actions have prompted them to such strong criticism of Israeli policy and, by implication, Western arms shipments.
Back to the Future
From Gandhi to Thoreau, and from Martin Luther King, Jr. to John Lewis and Wangari Maathai (the late Kenyan environmental activist and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize), men and women of principle are often vilified by those whose interests are tied up with the established order. As I see it, one thing these men and women have in common is a kind of prescience—an ability to see the world as it could and should be, before the basis for such a world has become visible to sufficient numbers of people to effect change in the present.
Falk is one of those utopian thinkers.
In 1971, he authored his first book: This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival, which was selected by the magazine Foreign Affairs as one of the six most influential books published in the 20th century on global issues. The environmental crisis was barely on anyone’s radar, if memory serves, much less climate change. Pure prescience.
Falk has also formulated a critique of the nation-state, one that isn’t “realistic” but, once again, peers into a future that isn’t discernible to the pragmatically minded, which is most of us.
In a 2018 interview with Patrick Lawrence published in The Nation, he contrasted the relative weakness of the UN with the kind of globalism he believes is urgently needed.
If the human species is to thrive in the future, he told Lawrence, “you need mechanisms for protecting the global interest and the human interest, as distinct from the national interest”—especially in light of climate change, nuclear weapons, and other global threats.
He continues, “We’ve relied on the notion that leading states are surrogates for the promotion of the global public good, but that clearly doesn’t work when either geopolitical security interests are at stake, as they are with nuclear weapons, or large economic interests are at stake, as is the case with climate change.” I’d like to add AI as yet another threat that needs to be defanged and opposed outright, difficult and challenging as that may be. In adding this dreaded technology to Falk’s list of global threats, I hereby join the ranks of utopian thinkers as a citizen who still believes that a better world is possible.
Top Achievements
My purpose here is not to replicate Falk’s CV, and anyway, that would be impossible and, in a way, purposeless. If you’re interested in learning more about his long history of achievement, take a look at the video taken when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 2023.
Here are just a few. He has written 75 books. He has garnered umpteen honorary degrees, along with a doctorate from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. And he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times.
During our first interview, he mentioned these in passing, and only when I pressed him for examples. He was much prouder of the pilgrimages he made to North Vietnam in 1968 and to Iran (with former US attorney general Ramsey Clark) shortly after the ouster of the shah. The point was to start a process of dialogue and unofficial diplomacy, and to show that alternatives to war, and war-mongering, were possible.
As we delved into his past, he surprised me by saying that his proudest moment ever was the opportunity to try out for the New York Giants at age 17. (He would have preferred the Dodgers, his favorite baseball team.) Falk was quite the athlete, obviously. He continued to engage in sports, including tennis and squash, even through his 80s.
The Poem
On his 94th birthday, Falk posted a poem on his blog, Global Justice in the 21st Century. I’ve been one of his subscribers for several years, but (she said shamefaced) I don’t always read it. However, I couldn’t resist reading his birthday poem.
Here are a few lines from the first stanza:
For these last years I felt
It was strange to be still alive
When so many around me were dead.
Stranger to receive and give love
While the planet burns
And untamed demons prowl.
Here are a few from stanza II:
Yet despite the carnage
Roses bloom guarded by thorns
Gardenias retain their addictive aroma…
…The joys of loving and being loved never age. (Italics mine.)
And here’s stanza IV in its entirety:
When slaves break their chains
And patriots of the earth become
Warriors gardeners poets engaging
In a fight worth winning for the sake
Of those we love and learn from
So long as the trusted soul breathes its light
While the body is busy with the work of dying
Life remains a precious gift of god.
In tears and fully aware that he might not remember me, I decided to write to him and request an interview. And, mirabile dictu, he said yes.
Old Age
When we spoke, he described the tension he experiences between “personal contentment and public gloom.” While not exactly content, I’ve decided to borrow that formulation as I, along with many people I know, grapple with how to live our lives while finding the best ways to deal with the demons who now dominate our institutions, as well as some of those who voted for them (the ones who are prone to violence).
He mentioned another source of tension, implied in his poem: the relatively rapid ageing of the body vs. the much slower ageing of the spirit. That may be why so many older adults say they feel young. Our spirits are indeed much younger than our hearing loss and arthritic joints may indicate.
Falk is also a winner of the genetic lottery, what with his robust health, athletic prowess, and stunning intelligence. While most of us may never be able to match these qualities or receive these gifts of god, we can find hope and inspiration in his story.
The Inglorious Present
Falk said he could never have imagined that Netanyahu’s speech before the US Congress would receive 59 standing ovations. Nor could he have imagined the second coming of Trump. Trump and Musk represent “exploitative capitalism, leading to a personalist politics of dictatorship,” he said. With the help of social media, “they have also stoked a politics of resentment” among a large swath of an alienated electorate.
It disturbs him to ponder our country’s low tolerance for self-scrutiny and claims of American innocence and exceptionalism.
Not that Biden gets a free pass. Falk finds the outgoing president’s remarks about America’s supposed greatness banal and unfounded.
His Life Goes on in Endless Song
Not literally, of course, but gloriously.
Mainly, Falk enjoys working. Work—perhaps better framed as purposeful activity—has helped him live better and longer, he believes.
His younger friends and former students have kept him involved in the kinds of projects he has always favored. He’s president of The Gaza Tribunal—“a people’s tribunal to document what has been happening for more than 15 months and galvanize global efforts to stop the genocide.”
He’s also one of three conveners of Saving Humanity and Planet Earth. (Did I mention that he’s a big-picture, utopian thinker?)
And he co-edited a book, just published, titled Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience, which includes essays by a distinguished group of contributors.
How is it possible for a 94-year-old to take on so many projects? How can he claim to be busier than at any other time in his life? And how has he managed to avoid the physical and mental setbacks that plague so many people 10, 20, and sometimes even 30 years younger than he is? There’s something mysterious at work here, and one day, biologists will be able to unveil at least some of its underlying aspects.
In the meantime, I’m delighted to have connected with him, back in the early 1990s and this past December. Thanks to his example, I’ll never downplay this phase of my life again.
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 
On Taking Controversial Public Positions: A Reflection
18 AprOn Taking Controversial Public Positions: A Reflection
Not long ago a cherished friend directed a remark at me during a dinner with several other friends: “You keep sticking your neck out. I used to do that, but I don’t do it anymore.” At the time, I listened, unsure whether it was a rebuke—‘isn’t it time to grow up, and stop exposing yourself to ridicule and behind the back dismissals’—or merely an observation. on different ways of growing old. I am still unsure, but it made me think.
It had never occurred to me to stop signing petitions or writing blogs that staked out controversial positions, sometimes with provocative language. It seemed. like an extension of my ideas about global civic responsibility in a democratic society,a matter of trusting and acting upon the dictates of conscience and the affectionsof solidarity. I didn’t start making my views known in public spaces until my mid-30s at the onset of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In recent years, aside from periodic writing on my blog, I am mainly responding to requests for support of activist and academic initiatives by kindred political spirits or sympathetic journalists.
I suppose that a certain level of public notoriety followed my period as UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine during the period between 2008 and 2014. During those years I was under quite frequent attack by Zionist zealots, often operating under the misleading camouflage of NGO auspices with such anodyne names as UN Watch or NGO Monitor. It was defamatory and malicious, but it left an imprint in the mud. For those who know me best the main accusations didn’t make sense. I was clearly neither an ‘anti-Semite’ nor ‘a self-hating Jew.’ I suppose it was empirically accurate to consider me as an ‘anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist extremist,’ although I don’t think of myself in this way. True, my views on Israel/Palestine and the Zionist Project were overwhelmingly in support of the Palestinian national struggle for basic rights, including the right of self-determination, but this also represented my understanding of the application of relevant rules of international law and morality. I also came to believe that the Zionist insistence on ‘a Jewish state’ was the source of legitimate Palestinian resistance, and to quell this resistance Israel resorted to the establishment of apartheid structures of discriminatory separation and domination, the elements of apartheid as an instance of a crime against humanity (as specified in Article 7 of the Rome Statute governing the operations of the International Criminal Court). I never thought of reaching such conclusions as sticking my neck out. I thought expressing these views while holding the UN position was an aspect of doing my unpaid job. This represented my sense of professional duty, including the recognition of the importance of civil society activism devoted to obtaining global justice.
Back at Princeton, especially after my visit to Iran in early 1979 during the last stage of the revolution, and the pushback I received after publishing an opinion piece in the NY Timesexpressing my hopes and concerns about the future of the Islamic Republic, I did myself, partly as a gesture of self-irony, adopt the metaphor of sticking my neck out, attributed this move to my love for giraffes, their grace, absence of vocal chords, and strong kick. The giraffe became my totem, and my home was soon filled with carved and ceramic giraffes acquired during my trips to Africa. A friend with gifts as a woods craftsperson even made me a life-sized replica of a baby giraffe, which was slightly taller than I, and provided a vivid reminder of this identity that dominated my Princeton living room for many years. Yet, strangely, after moving to California I never thought about sticking my neck out until my friend reminded me, and led me to think about whether I am frozen in patterns of behavior apt only for those who are young or middle aged. The question for me is not whether we should stop caring after 80, but only whether it is unseemly for the elderly to keep acting. Or perhaps having chosen ‘retirement’ from Princeton implies that I should stop actingas if I care, and leave the future to those young enough to have a more significant stake in what is happening and where it is leading.
A related kind of feedback from someone even closer was along the same lines, but could be classified as ‘a loving rebuke.’ It was the insistence that I was ‘obsessed’ with Israel/Palestine, and I should move on to other concerns as bad or worse than the Palestinian ordeal, with the example given of the horrifying persistence of the Yemen War with atrocities an almost daily occurrence. Here, I resist more than I reflect. Yet this is a matter of heart as well as head. From both sides, as my loving friend also insisted that she was saving my reputation from being permanently mired in mud, telling me I was smearing my own legacy by continuing to speak out critically of Israel and Zionism.
I have long believed that outsiders have much blood on their hands in relation to evolution of Palestine and Israel ever since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Beyond this, the United States had the leverage, responsibility, and opportunity for decades to make a political compromise happen, but refused to explore such an option evenhandedly. Instead, the U.S. Government, especially after 1967, subsidized Israel’s militarization to the point where it has become a substantially autonomous and affluent regional power, and yet continues to receive more than $3.8 billion per year, proportionately to population far more than any other country. A compromise might have accommodated Palestinian basic grievances sufficiently to produce a sustainable peace, although it would still have required the Palestinian people to swallow a large dose of injustice taking the form of outside forces imposing an alien political template on their future, which is the essence of colonialist expansion.
During the Trump presidency with its unseemly responsiveness to Netanyahu’s wishes, the situation facing the Palestinian people has further deteriorated in rather dramatic ways: the American embassy has been moved to Jerusalem, the Golan Heights have been formally annexed following a green light from Washington, unlawful settlement building has accelerated, funding for essential UNRWA education and health services have been cut to zero, and even the pretension of the near universal international commitment to the two-state solution has been pointedly abandoned. Waiting for ‘the deal of the century’ seems likely to be either a matter of waiting for Godot or an ultimatum disguised as a peace plan demanding Palestinian surrender to Israeli one-statism.
And there is the outrage of a well-funded campaign to brand supporters of BDS and justice for the Palestinians as anti-Semites. This was never done during the global anti-apartheid movement after it adopted a BDS approach to South African apartheid. Why is Israeli apartheid being treated so differently? With amoral opportunism, debasing Jewish memories of the Holocaust, Zionist zealots, with money and encouragement from Tel Aviv and wealthy diaspora donors, are distorting reality by using Nazi genocidal tactics against Jews to intimidate those seeking justice for both peoples. What is as bad is the degree to which most of the governments of the West go along with this smear campaign even altering the definition of anti-Semitism to conform with these lamentable tactics. To get the fuller picture this use of anti-Semitism as a smear tactic confuses the threats associated with the return of real hatred of Jews as embedded in the scary second coming of fascism with diaspora Jews again cast in the role of the unassimilable other, a degenerate enemy of the global wave of ultra-nationalism.
With this understanding, I can no more turn away from the Palestinians than those closest to me. It would represent a tear in the fabric of the life and love I have lived and affirmed. It is, for better or worse who I am and who I will always be. It may dim my image in the mind of many decent people of liberal persuasion, but I value self-respect and personal sovereignty more than the conditional affection of others. Having written in this vein, I also wish to affirm my identity as a Jew, and my realization of the desperation ignited by the Nazi experience. Yet such an experience could as easily have been tinged with compassion rather than a racist willingness from its very origins of an intention to displace, dominate, and victimize the majority long-term residents of Palestine. Offsetting this intention by reference to a Jewish biblical or historical entitlement has neither legal nor moral weight in my opinion.
Having so far affirmed continuity of belief and practice, there is something to be said in favor of discontinuity, breaking old habits inspired by giraffes running across an African savannah or overcoming obsessions even if morally inspired and intellectually justified. Choosing discontinuity has something to do with learning how to age so that the inner self takes command. The Hindu tradition emphasizes stages of life, to be a house-holder or family person until the age of 60, and after that go forth alone to nurture spirituality generally long marginalized by the pressures of ordinary life, if not dormant. Thinking along such lines, may make my defense of continuity of engagement seem shallow, if not wrong or at least exhibiting a stubborn streak.
Having so pondered and reflected, I am no nearer to closure. It feels inauthentic to abandon unfulfilled commitments, and yet to reconcile myself to being nothing more than a pale projection of my past seems a defeat. At least, this semi-meditation has made me more knowingly confused, and I share it on my blog because I feel that the dilemmas of ageing confront us all at some point, and are rarely faced clearly in Western culture, often inducing various degrees of denial, depression, and feelings of lost relevance and disengagement. I have chosen activism to the end, both continuing with sports to the limit of my ability and to honor the political commitments of a citizen pilgrim (dedicated to a journey to a desired and desirable political community that functions now only as an imaginary, yet has the ambition to become a political project) to the best of my ability.
Tags: Activism, Aging, Giraffes, Zionism