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Militarism and Genocide in Gaza: The Bloody Signature of Western Decline

9 Oct

[Prefatory Note: The text of an interview with an independent Turkish journalist, Naman Bakac, published in Turkey on Sept. 26, 2024. Somewhat modified for this online publication.]

1.Almost all fundamental rights and principles are clearly being violated in the Palestinian territories: from the right of Palestinians living in occupied lands to self-determination, to the right of representation, which leads to the murder, imprisonment, and exile of their freely elected representatives; from the right to shelter as tents are deliberately bombed, to the right to food as Palestinians are deliberately left to starve; from sexual abuse of prisoners to torture, and from there to the right to housing as homes are demolished. However, international law and the community have been unable to prevent these violations to date. What legal texts are missing to stop these systematic violations? Which institutions are absent? If legal texts, legal institutions, and decision-making mechanisms cannot resolve this, what other tools and methods should be activated to prevent these systematic violations of rights?

Response: The Palestinian ordeal is not a consequence of the shortage or inadequacy of legal norms or mechanisms for their enforcement. The primarily obstacle to imposing adverse consequences in reaction to gross and transparent Israeli criminality is one of political will, especially on the part of dominant states in the Global West and to a lesser extent on the part of leading Arab neighbors, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Egypt.

It is only countries from the Global South that have been willing to have recourse to the existing international judicial procedures, the ICJ and ICC. The ICJ, the judicial organ of the UN, has a strong reputation for political independence and persuasive interpretation of international law, and its pronouncements are influential, even if they are procedurally cumbersome, often take years from start to finish., lack enforcement capabilities or mandates, and have a mixed record of compliane.

The ICC is a more recent institution, and nor part of the UN System. It does fill a serious gap in the legal coverage accorded to accountability for individuals accussed of committing serious international crimes. The ICC is further weakened by the failure of several leading states to become parrties to the Rome Statute, which is the legal framework governing ICC activities. The ICC also has never achieved legitimacy in the Global South because of its early image of being mainly preoccupied with crimes of leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, which was responsible for its West-centrric reputation. The ICC has seemed reluctant to hold accountable individuals associated with powerful states in the Global West, which include countries in Westernn Europe, North America, and currently Israel. By recommending the issuance of arrrest warrants to three top Israeli leaders (somewhat offset in political messaging by simultaneously making a reccomendation of arrrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders, the ICC prosecutor made a gesture to challenge geopolitical impunity. So far the ICC sub-chamber that has the sole responsibility to issue arrest warrants has not yet acted. It has give to suspicion that the ICC is stalling in its treatment of these controversial recommenndations, due to reliable reports of pressure by Israel and allies to delay its decision, or better, reject the prosecutor’s recommendation on a variety of contrived grounds centering of the dual grounds of Israel not being a member of the ICC and it would be wrong to appear to criminalize a reasonable Israeli claim of self-defence.

The secondary obstacle is the degree to which World Order continues to be based on a hybrid arrangement of hybrid and contradictory relations of law to power: the majority of states are subject to international law in the area of peace and security, while a few, including the UN P5 (and their strategic friends) occupy a position that allows such governments to privilege strategic interests if these clash with legal obligations in UN settings. This hierrarchy is indirectly acknowledged by the veto power allowing the most dangerous states in 1945 to paralyze UN responses to their criminality and even to that of their friends and allies.

The Western support for Israeli genocide is itself criminal, as complicity is criminalized in the Genocide Convvention, but it is virtually exempt from critical scrutiny at the UN or elsewhere. A domestic court in the US has had been the cite of a judicial action to stop the Gaza Genocide brought by a çivil society organization, Center for Constitutional Rights, relying on a Universal Jurisdiction rationale. It has been so far been blocked in this legal pursuit by a dubious internal doctrine that views US foreign policy initiatives as not subject to adjudication due to a so-called Political Questions doctrine. This doctrine rests on an anachronistic view of the Separation of Powers that views Foreign Policy as belonging exclusively in the Executive Branch of Government, and therefore is not subject to judicial scrutiny. This overlooks the growth of international legal authority as a constraint on national behavior even if conducted as foreign policy.

2.Despite the world witnessing, in an unprecedented way, one of the most brutal massacres in history, with live footage, after Gaza can we still talk about international humanitarian law, international human rights, or the Pax Americana order established after World War II? Doesn’t the “Rule of Law in the Global Village,” the title of one of your books, come to an end after Gaza? Or should the path of reform regarding the United Nations, international law, and world order, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been advocating for years, be built?

Response: Although the first-order implementation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, annd Pax Americana failed at the governmental and international institutional level, their existence was important in awakening çivil society to the gross injustices and crimes that have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. Changes in the public discourse are important, as well, branding Israel, Israeli leaders, and complicit governments as perpetrators of genocide in a particularly overt and sadistic manner. By such reasoning Israel should be sanctioned for violating the Genocide Convention, its leaders be criminally proscecuted, and complcit governmentss be at least censured. This should make Israel and its supporters leading candidates for çivil society pressure to impose boycotts, to express moral and legal outrage, and to suspend Israel from participation within the framework of legitimate sovereign states until a dynamic of peace and reconciliation takes the place of war and genocide. Israel is guilty of unspeakable crimes and a defiance of respect for the norms of civilized behavior. Such an assessment is not meant to excuse Hamas, and its allies, for its alleged atrocities, although provoked and of a dramatically smaller impact than Israel’s post October 9th behavior.

Civil society is a court of last resort that becomes relevant, as here, when the established processes of law are unavailable, or worse, defied. In this regard, the established of the Gaza Tribunal Project to express opposition to what Israel and the West have done since October 7 and to give voice to the disappointment of citizens of conscience around the world that the normative structure of world order, including the UN, could not protect the vulnerable, essentially innocent and much abused Palestinian civilian population and respond to Palestinian grievances with respect to basic rights.

3.You have written more than 10 books on world order, global order, and international law. You also served for many years as the North America Director of the “World Order Models Project.” In nearly 100 years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as you put it, “the genocide is a continuation of the Apartheid in Palestine.” What kinds of gaps has the Palestinian genocide exposed in the world order paradigm? What truth has it revealed about the foundation upon which the world order is built? After Gaza, what kind of world order and international legal order do you foresee to prevent humanity from experiencing genocides like Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Gaza again? What is your belief and hope in this regard?

Response: If world order persists in its present form it seems almost inevitable that gruesome repetitions of genocide and other severe atrocities in the future. To transform the structures of authority now entrusted with the management of global security ensures a continuation of behavioral patterns that produce genocide, apartheid, aggression, and are responsible for many economic and ecological crimes will require an unprecedented movement from below by peoples organized through çivil society activism, insisting on a framework of law that has the capacity and will to enforce compliance on the strong as well as the weak. Such a development, admittedly utopian, alone could do away with geopolitics whose defining characteristic is a manageriall approach to global security that treats law and morality as irrelevant when in conflict with strategic interests of the Great Powers, and is by practice as well as theory iss dedicated to geopolitical rivalry that reduces law and morality to the level of propaganda and a policy instrument in the foreign policy toolbox useful to denounce the behavior of adversaries yet irrelevant as a constraint..

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others and being attenntive to what is happening. In this period of global interactive intensity it is especially important to learn from those who speak from other cultural spaces. Listening does not means abdicating judgment, but it does require making the effort to respond knowledgeably, which does a constant effort to detect and purge the subtle biases of your educational, discursive, and personal background. This is most difficult for we Americans who are trapped between their ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking, risks, harns, and solutions. We have entered an historical period of unprecedented species hazard, and most national elites are continuing blandly as if ‘business as usual’ was their job description. In some cases, even worse is to acknowledge in rhetoric the dangers that are intensifying, and then acting as if these fundamental challenges do not necessitate profound changes in how we think, feel, and act both individually and collectively.

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others, especially those who speak from other cultural spaces, and making the effort to respond, which requires learning to address the subtle biases of your own  educational and personal background. I have found this to be most difficult for Americans who are trapped between their claims of ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking and solutions. This is a time of unprecedented species hazard.    

4.As you know, Palestinian territories before 1967 were occupied by Israel. Regarding the occupied territories, the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, Turkey, the United Nations, and some Islamic countries are advocating for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders and for a two-state solution. Does this mean that the lands that Israel seized before 1967 through terror, violence, and Nakba are being accepted? Doesn’t this imply that the forced displacement of Palestinians before 1967, and the massacres and raids carried out by Jewish militias in Palestinian villages, are either ignored or legitimized? How do you assess the period from 1917 to 1967 in terms of international legal principles, the global legal order, and the founding mission of the United Nations? Moreover, since Israel does not accept the two-state solution, how is it that international law, institutions, and countries continue to accept it?

Response: I share your overall assessment of an exceedingly llimited willingness to redress the historic wrongs initially inflicted on the Palestinian people by way of a pre-Holocaust colonialist move on the part of the UK, known to the world as the Balfour Declarration, which was the source of the two original wrongs embedded in the Zionist Project, culminating in the Holocaust and its aftermath: first, an Orientalist disregard of non-Western societal wellbeing. It took the form of solving the problems in Europe caused by antisemitism and Jewish presence by encroaching on the sovereign rights of a non-consenting Muslim majority resident population in Palestine. And secondly, a Zionist resolve based on a politically self-serving biblical interpretation that created a Jewish entitlement to make Palestinians persecuted and unwanted strangers in their existential homeland. By such a logic the surviving native peoples in almost every part of the world dispossessed of their land and sovereignty rights would have an unassailable right to their indigenous pre-modern forms of sovereignty.

Given this background, the UN played its own part in furthering the Western-centric solution in the years after World War II, by way of proposing ‘partition’ of Palestine in a period dominated by the sense of guilt of the liberal democracies and effective propaganda by the Zionnist Movemennt  as well as superior military training, weaponry, and tactics in the 1948 War. For the post-1945 period, Israel emerged as as an expansionist nuclear-armed ‘settler colonial state’ that existentially rejected the co-existence, partition, compromise solutions as put forth in a biased framework controlled by the US, a most partisan intermediary. Israel for public relations reasons pretended to go along with this global consensus while acting to undermine it by its settlements, coercion, land-grabbing, and oppressive apartheid regime of control after 1967. During this process liberal Zionism, the UN, Western countries withheld criticism of Israel’s transparently defiant behavior, and continued their stubborn ineffectual adherence to the mantle of internationalism by way of the two-state mantra dismissing Palestinian resistance and even gestures of accommodation as forms of ‘terrrorism’ to be rejected in practice, colliding with the hidden Zionist vision of later became known as ‘Greater Israel.’ In the interim Israel became useful to the West. It lent muscle and diplomacy to the Euro-American regional priorities of retaining access to Gulf energy reserves at acceptable prices and resisting the spread of Islamically oriented nationalism.

The Gaza Genocide was the latest chapter in the struggle revealing political alignments in unexpected ways: the unity of the Western liberal democracies in their complicit response to such criminality; the passive response of Israel’s most prominent Arab neighbors, prompted by fear of Israel, hostility to Iran, and the links between governing elites and non-Middle East geopolitical actors, mainly the US. Given the size and extremism of the Israeli settler movement, especially in the West Bank, it seems politically naive and irrelevant to advocate a two-state solution even if it requires a Palestinian willlingnesss to swallow pre-1967 territorial and resource injustices and land-grabbing. Overall, the story of the West in the Middle East is a shameful chapter in the long narrative of Western encroachment on the most basic rights of non-Western peoples.   

5.While reading your book on “Humane Global Governance,” which is still in the idea phase and gives you hope, I couldn’t quite distinguish whether humanity or religion is the central focus of globalization. Despite your claim that globalization and secularism are in crisis, do you believe that religion should be utilized or that a humane globalization should be grounded in religion? Since your book also includes the chapter “Why and to What Extent Religion?” let us ask: Why is religion a dynamic factor in your model?

This question poses one aspect of why prescriptive writing about the geopolitical management of global security and relations among dominant states is so contingent on historical circumstances that evolve over time. In certain times and situations religion seems to have emancipatory potential and in others its theocratic governance and exclusionary policies seems dystopian. The same extremes can be observed in the role of secularity as national and global phenomena, which has given rise to visions of peace and justice but by way of geopolitical ambition and technological innovation has caused widespread conquest, exploitation and corruption in what was widely considered a post-colonial world following a wave of successful anti-colonial struggles. I have written of ‘colonialism after colonialism’ as best capturing the excesses of Western militarism and capitalism in this period between the end of the Cold War and the Gaza Genocide. It raises a new haunting question ‘What comes next for specific nations and for humanity as ideal and reality?’

6.In your book “Globalization and Religion,” you briefly address a very intriguing question as a chapter title. I would like to ask you to elaborate on it. The question in the book, if I may quote directly, is: “Does the Western secular state have a future?” If so, why? If not, why not?

Response: This kind of fundamental question requires a book if I were to attempt a comprehensive assessment. A brief response refers to the anti-democratic and regressive trends toward autocratic governance at home and anti-internationalism in foreign policy. Whereas ecological threats and technological developmentss are posing increasing threats of catastrophic futures, political agendas of leading governmennts are preoccupied with the short-term satisfactions and frustrations of the citizenry in the face of growing inequality and of governing elites in terms of geopoliticall rivalry and a stagnancy or worse for Western middle class life styles and expectations. It amounts to shifting ecological and technological problem-solving to future generations that will only survive if new political agendas are enacted under the influence of strengthened structures of global governance that are neither secular nor theocratic, but normative in a radical values-driven format of global-democacy-to-come. Such a benevolent future would depend on governmental elites renouncing narrow militarized forms of security.    

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Why International Law Matters even if Israel Refuses to Comply with ICJ Priovisional Measures Ruling

17 Jan

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a much modified set of responses to questions posed by Mohamed Elmenshawy a journalist working at Al Jazeera Arabic from Washington  1/10/2024). Question 9 below has been added to deal with Western media bias as illustrated by three opinion pieces published on 1/17/2024.]

1. How should we interpret the South Africa allegation that Israel’s military operations in Gaza violate the country’s obligations under the United Nations Genocide Convention and that its actions constitute genocide?

Israel’s military operations have lasted more than three months, but from almost their very outset objective observers felt confronted by ‘a text book case’ of genocide as the military onslaught was systematically and openly aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable and inflicting severe suffering on innocent civilians in flagrant violation of basic rules of international law. Such a military campaign was proclaimed in these extremist terms by Israel’s top political and military leaders and consistently exhibited in practice by the sadistic tactics relied upon by Israel’s armed forces. Disregarding official language that called for turning Gaza into ‘a parking lot’ or ‘emptying Gaza of all Palestinians’ or posing a choice of ‘leave or die’ disclose a stunning defiance of the criminal prohibition against the crime of genocide. Israel overlooks the fact that it was a party to the Genocide Convention, which pledged respect for this unconditional limitation on state behavior, meaning that neither self-defense nor anti-terrorism could provide a legally credible basis for Israel’s behavior toward Gaza since October 7. In addition, Israel twists the facts and evidence as in its presentation to ICJ, by contending that the Hamas attack was the real occasion of genocide and that it is Israel that is defending itself against a genocidal adversary.


2.      What happens if South Africa wins at the ICJ?

We cannot know how Israel and the United States, and other countries would respond, but we can offer an informed opinion that draws on Israeli allegations against South Africa, insisting that the mere bringing of a legal dispute alleging the reality of genocide in Gaza amounts to a blood libel against the Jewish people, and in the more guarded secular language of the US State Department that the South African initiative is ‘meritless’ as it lacks an acceptable legal basis in fact. The US is likely if necessary to use its veto power in the Security Council and disregard any General Assembly resolution that called for compliance with whatever Provisional Measures the ICJ decrees, as it is authorized to do under Article 41(1) of the Statute governing its operations.

If this anticipated sequence of evasive or defiant non-compliance occurs, it will likely lead to large and sustained protests throughout the world, including in the North American and former European countries that have lent Israel varying degrees of support and initially gave their full-throated  approval to Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack. The rising opposition to Israeli behavior in Gaza is posing serious destabilization threats of adverse political consequences in some countries, typified by the widespread labeling of Israel as ‘a pariah state’ in some settings, and to a dramatic escalation in the nature and militancy of global solidarity initiatives throughout the world including recourse to sports and cultural boycotts, and calls for an arms embargo and international sanctions. This civil society activism has the potential leverage to transform the discursive approach to the underlying conflict of many governments in the Global South and possibly in Israel and its governmental supporters. This happened to the surprise of many in South Africa, although under very different circumstances.


3.      What happens if South Africa loses at the ICJ?

Israel would undoubtedly gloat, celebrating a lawfare victory, and demeaning critics of Israel’s tactics in its Operation Swords of Iron as hysterical antisemites. It would also lead Israel and the US to feel vindicated by the refusal to follow the global majority favoring an early ceasefire.

Those supporting the South African initiative would likely react with a mixture of perplexing confusion and outright anger at this disappointing outcome at the ICJ. How could the highest court in the world look at such overwhelming evidence so well presented to the Court by the South African legal team, and decide perversely and unprofessionally. Assuming even a split reaction to a majority decision in which the Global West stood behind Israel and rejecting the views of those adopting the perspectives of the Global South, the Court’s stature as a legal tribunal deserving the utmost respect of UN member states would be drastically reduced, temporarily at least.

There is a middle ground based on a highly technical and legalistic jurisdictional argument put forward by Israel at the ICJ hearings to the effect that any action by the Court would be ‘premature’ as there was a failure to establish that a ‘legal dispute’ between the parties existed prior to when the application to the Court was submitted. This argument was refuted by the South African team at the ICJ January hearings, but it could relieve the Court, or some of its judges, of the duty to resolve the awkward dilemma at the core of South Africa’s request for Provisional Measures, which pits legal propriety against political expediency.

In some respects, the most significant result of a negative decision or even a technical evasion would be widespread disappointment producing a probable reaction in world public opinion to the effect that the World Court is out of touch with the flow of history, and in light of this, a dramatic increase in global solidarity initiatives along BDS lines will occur exhibiting surging transnational activism. The growing belief that only civil society activism has any prospect of terminating this terrible humanitarian ca such as has been unfolding in Gaza this in which the primacy of geopolitics disregards law and morality when strategic interests are at stake.

In a sense, whether South Africa’s request that the Court issue Provisional Measures to stop the genocide succeeds or fails might not make a big immediate difference as to the substantive impact of its decision. If the Court grants the South African request Israel will almost certainly refuse to comply which will produce civil society anger and coercive actions in response to Israel’s non-compliance. Whereas if the request is rejected, an angry populist response would also escalate civil society engagement and add to present hostility toward Israel in many parts of the world. In the latter case some of the frustration would be directed at ICJ as a flawed or politicized institution, whereas if its positive decision is ignored, most of the frustration would be expressed as anger toward Israel and the US. In other words, win or lose, the implementation of the norms of the Genocide Convention are subject to formal nullification by what has afflicted the whole UN system when it comes to enforcement—the primacy of geopolitics in determining the presence or absence of a sufficient political will on the part of actors with requisite capabilities to achieve enforcement of authoritative judicial decisions. The prospect of geopolitical obstruction in response to the South African initiative dooms orderly compliance in the event that the ICJ grants the request for Provisional Measures to stop Israeli violence until a decision of the merits is forthcoming on the allegation of the crime of genocide.

4.      Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli military is the “most moral army in the world”, Do you agree with him? why?

This was never more than a highly inflated claim made by Israel’s formidable hasbara, or simply. the message transmitted by its state propaganda machine and repeated throughout the Global West by Israel support groups. The Goldstone Report of a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission undertaken after the 2008-09 massive land/sea/air attack on the essentially helpless people of Gaza contains hard evidence of a series of war crimes relating to Israel’s tactics and weapons. It should be appreciated that Israel has a special obligation in Gaza to protect the civilian population, accentuated by its status as the Occupying Power, and hence subject to the legal constraints contained in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. It should be remembered that years before the current encounter, even conservative international visitors, for example, David Cameron, referred to Gaza as ‘the largest open air prison in the world.” It is hardly surprising that individuals driven from their homes and homeland decades ago, then denied a right of return, and finally permanently  ‘imprisoned’ for no crime where they kept on what a prominent government advisor called ‘a subsistence diet,’ would at some point risk everything to achieve a jail break, what Norman Finkelstein termed ‘a slave revolt.’ From a legal and moral point of view, to the extent validated by independent sources, the Hamas attack on October 7 included war crimes, and unlawful hostage-taking, and should be repudiated, although part of a legitimate act of resistance against prolonged oppressive occupation.

Looked at less legalistically and more strategically, Israel has since 1967 used Gaza as a valuable experimental combat area where it could demonstrate the efficiency of its counter-terrorism capabilities a warning to its enemies and as a sales pitch to other governments helpful in winning customers for its robust arms industry, including in relation to innovations in tactics, weaponry, and training. It also wanted to show hostile countries in its neighborhood that it would retaliate against provocations with disproportionate force. It formulated such an approach in the Dahiya Doctrine back in the early 1980s, a mode of thinking that justified the destruction of a poor neighborhood in south Beirut that was known to be a Hezbollah stronghold enjoyed populist support. It is this Dahiya Doctrine, in a geometrically magnified form, that underlies the security justification for Israel’s horrifying response to the attack of October 7th, and to the extent that Israel response is deemed by a growing number of observers as an instance of genocide making a mockery of attempts to continuing to portray Israeli armed forces as ‘the most moral in the world.’ Morality does not mix well with official assertions from political leaders and military commanders that the Palestinians as a people are sub-human and deserve to be treated as such. The whole international movement to protect human rights rests on the foundation of human equality, and the universality of the legal entitlement to human dignity.  

5.    How does the war on Gaze affect the respect and prestige of International Law?

The short-term, yet insufficient, answer will be greatly influenced by how the ICJ handles the South African request for Provisional Measures, and whether the states of the world, particularly Israel and the UN, exhibit defiance or respect for the outcome. Also relevant is the degree to which civil society is favorably impressed by the ICJ response to the South African request, including its prompt delivery. A positive result will have some redeeming effects on street-level perceptions of international law around the world, and act persuasively to support the view that even when states refuse compliance and the UN is helpless to act, international law can be useful for advocates of justice through legality.

If we broaden the optic beyond the legal assessment of the violence of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it becomes obvious that Israel has long openly violated international humanitarian law during its period of Gaza occupation that started with its victory in the 1967 War. Among many unlawful policies, Israel can be charged with during this period when it had the added obligations associated with being the Occupying Power in relation to Occupied Palestine, the most blatant are collective punishment, establishment of Jewish settlements in occupied territory, claims of sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, appropriation of water and other resources in the West Bank, failure to withdraw from territories occupied during the 1967 War or to fulfill in good faith the primary duties as specified in the 4th Geneva Convention to protect the Palestinian people subject to its administrative authority as the Occupying Power. Israel also refused to heed the near unanimous ICJ Advisory Opinion of 2004 challenging the construction of a separation wall on occupied Palestinian territory. In general, Israel has defied international law whenever compliance would seriously interfere with its national policies and strategic priorities as pertaining to the Palestinian people. At the same time Israel invokes international law whenever it could be used to justify its actions or complain about Palestinian resistance. Its pathetic lines of argument January 11th ICJ Hearings on the South Africa initiative sought to invert the facts and evidence by casting itself in the role of the victim of Hamas genocide rather than its perpetrator.

By such manipulations, International Law is reduced to brazen lawfare, that is, International Law becomes a policy instrument in the toolkit tool of partisan national behavior, essentially a mode of propaganda to bolster self-serving legal arguments upholding national claims and denunciation of behavior by adversaries. This kind of manipulation undermines the ideals of law as constituting a set of constraints that rest on the formal authority to regulate the behavior of all sovereign states in ways that achieve mutual benefits by way of peace and justice. This kind of legal framework for action is what the UN Charter ambiguously offered the world in 1945. The geopolitical tensions of ensuing years made the UN generally helpless to implement these central war prevention goals, and often marginalized the UN in war/peace contexts.

6.      Israel is not a member state of the International Criminal Court? Could its leader be persecuted under its jurisdiction?

In theory, the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute a leader of a sovereign state if the alleged international crime was committed within the territory of a party to the Rome Statute governing its operations. In practice, However, such a proceeding would require that the ICC to obtain physical control over the individual and this would normally depend upon the voluntary cooperation of the national state of the accused persons belong to a state that is not a party.  States that are ICC parties governing the operations of the International Criminal Court are under a treaty obligation to cooperate with the ICC, including during the investigative and any resulting arrest phases of a legal process. The accused person or persons must also be present in the courtroom in the unlikely event that there is a prosecution.

Israel does not need to be a party of the Rome Statute governing the authority of the ICC if the tribunal finds that it possesses valid legal authority to proceed with an investigation and possible indictment of Israeli political and military leaders charged with responsibility for crimes in Occupied Palestinian Territory, which would include Gaza. The ICC after a variety of delays did formally decide in 2021 in a Chamber consisting of three judges that it could proceed to consider Palestinian allegations of Israeli crimes committed on the territory of Occupied Palestine subsequent to 2014. Palestine had become a non-voting Member of the UN in 2012, and on the basis of this qualification as ‘a state,’ later a party to the ICC treaty framework as set forth in the Rome Statute. The present prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, has shown little interest in proceeding as permitted. This sloth is in sharp contrast to the haste displayed with respect to allegations against Putin for crimes in Ukraine associated with the 2022 alleged aggression.

7.      What is South Africa is seeking to achieve of such a case?

It is always hard to depict the motives for a controversial legal initiative of this kind, and in this instance the objectives may be less clear than the motivations. Post-apartheid South Africa has associated the Palestinian struggle for basis human rights with its own struggle against an apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela famously said, “our freedom will not be complete until the Palestinians are free.” In a sense, genocide should in some instances be regarded as the consummation of apartheid. It is the almost invariablle characteristic of the final stages of a settler colonial project, which is probably the best way to understand what is happening in Gaza, and to appreciate the bad memories that analogous developments generated in South Africa.

South Africa may also be motivated by recollections of the role played by governments in the Global West in relation to its own earlier struggle that was long insensitive to the oppressive racist rule because it was strategically linked to apartheid South Africa in the Cold War Era. Palestine has been victimized and Israel shielded and enabled by the American-led commitment to its strategic interests in the Middle East as reinforced by pro-Israeli domestic lobbying and donor leverage in relation to government policy and media presentations.

Many of those who work on the South African initiative or were supportive of its effort to appeal to the ICJ to stop the Gaza genocide have been quoted as saying world to the effect, “I have never been so proud to be a South African or of our government.”


8.      U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Israel being referred to the (ICJ) for alleged genocide during its war in Gaza, calling the claim “meritless.”, What do you make of the Biden Administration position?

As suggested in earlier responses, the primacy of geopolitics in US foreign policy leads to the subordination of international law whenever compliance clashes with strategic interests. To call the South African initiative ‘meritless’ in light of the copiously documented genocidal practices, policies, and exterminist language of Israel’s top leaders defies reality as embodied in the provisions of the Genocide Convention, which calls upon parties to prevent and punish the commission of genocide by others as well as to refrain themselves from such behavior. To not exempt ‘genocide’ from geopolitics is in my judgment itself a sign of national decadence at a time when the global public good desperately needs expressions of respect for all peoples inhabiting the planet.

There are two points to observe: (1) the contrast between the US impassioned allegations of violations by its adversaries, China and Russia, and its unconditional support for accused international friends and allies is a stunning display of irresponsible statecraft; (2) the moral hypocrisy associated with such brazen double standards, severely undermines the authority of international law by treating equals unequally, and opportunistically.

The US is paying a high reputational cost at home and internationally by standing with Israel in opposition to the South African effort, which enjoys support all over the world, because it is seeking to bring an ongoing and transparent genocide to an end. This initiative by way of the ICJ was undertaken only after several attempts in the UN Security Council and General Assembly were blocked, diluted, or were unheeded principally due to US leverage exerted on behalf of Israel. It shines a bright light on the significant relevance of complicity crimes to this horrifying ordeal being inflicted on the civilian population of Occupied Palestine.

9. How important is the mainstream media bias in the US? In relation to the perceptions of genocide in Gaza? And to claims of liberal democracy, which include media independence, which has become crucially important to assessing American foreign policy?

I found it shocking that the NY Times published on January 17th no less than three opinion pieces by Jewish authors, unbalanced by a single Palestinian or principled critical voice. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli former peace negotiator, yet for many years a critic of what I would call the maximalist Zionist approach to ending the Israel/Palestine struggle over territory and statehood. In this latest piece Levy fails to use the word ‘genocide,’ yet helpfully pronounces as dead the two state solution long rejected by Israeli leadership yet to this day embraced as US policy. Levy strongly suggests that the US call it quits with respect to this zombie peace diplomacy and adopt a more realistic approach that limits its goals to the advocacy of the protection of Palestinian human rights for all those living beneath an Israeli one state version of ‘the river to the sea.’ Levy correctly notes the relevance of Israel’s “categorical rejection of Palestinian statehood” by reference to the guidelines of the Netanyahu pre-October 7th guideline setting forth its view that ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.’” This is a typical kind of peace perspective that would fall within the comfort zone of many liberal Zionists, but it is hardly an approach to peace and justice based on UN guidelines, the views of even moderate Palestinian advocates of a political compromise, of even an attempt to allocate rights according to international law.

The Levy piece was a reasonable expression of opinion but juxtaposed with adjoining pieces by Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman it contributed to my impression of extreme bias. The Stephens piece was so extreme, in my view, as to make it unpublishable in a responsible media platform. I suspect it would have been summarily rejected if submitted by someone unconnected with the newspaper rather than by one of its regular opinion writers. Its title accurately foretells its essential message: “The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity.” Stephen’s vitriolic prose is directed at the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, which was based on a scrupulous legal argument setting forth in a 94 page carefully crafted report supporting its application for Provisional Measures to stop the ongoing ‘genocide’ until the tribunal decides the allegations on their merits. Stephens’ piece had the audacity to normalize the dehumanizing language used by the Israeli leadership in describing the ferocity of their violence in Gaza. Stephens seems willing to endorse the position that the alleged barbarism of the Hamas attack of October 7 allowed Israel to engage in whatever violence would serve their security without engaging legal scrutiny. At this point Israel has killed at least 23,000 Palestinians mostly innocent, long abused civilians, which in Stephens’ view not genocide but a side-effect of war and self-defense.

Indeed, the piece goes on to argue that China’s abuse of the Uyghurs or the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia or Soviet Gulag conditions were the real stuff of genocide, and went unpunished, while Israel is being maliciously singled out for these delegitimating charges of genocide solely because the perpetrators are Jewish. It is a shameful line of argument put forward in a slick tone of moral superiority and legal indifference. There is much room for debate surrounding these events, but to characterize recourse to the preeminent judicial body with a conservative legal tradition ‘a moral obscenity’ is itself ‘a moral obscenity.’ It goes beyond the pale of responsible editorial filters, sure to be present if a Palestinian author wrote more plausibly that Israel’s defense of its behavior before this very court was ‘a moral obscenity.’

The third opinion piece was written by its chief pontificator, Thomas Friedman. It reported an interview with Antony Blinken a day earlier at the Davos World Economic Forum. It was more civil that Stephens but as provocative, and as always, self-important. Friedman started by contextualizing Israeli behavior sympathetically as partly expressive of a trauma induced by the Hamas attack, without a word of sympathy for a Palestinian outburst of resistance after 50 years of abusive occupation and 15 years of a punitive total blockade. Blinken was portrayed as a tireless representative of the US Government doing his diplomatic best to limit Israeli tactics who declared he was heartbroken by the tragic ordeal being experienced by the Palestinians. No reference was made to Blinken’s earlier offers of direct participation by the US military in the Israeli response and not a word of criticism of Israeli dehumanizing statements, tactics, or evident ethnic cleansing goals. He seemed for most of the 100+ days of Israeli violence as entirely comfortable carrying out his role as enabler-in-chief of the Israeli ongoing genocide. Such a role entails legal accountability for serious, ongoing complicity crimes, and not the celebration of a man doing a professional duty that brought him great grief. It is illuminating to appreciate that to slow the velocity of genocide, even if such an intention is conceded, is still genocide.

What makes this show of media bias particularly disturbing is the refusal to consider that most non-Westerners have little doubt about the nature of Israel’s guilt in relation to the commission of this ‘crime of crimes.’ This perception has nothing to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, and everything to do with the stark clarity of Israel’s formal intentions and the visible nature of its tactics that is entering its fourth month. A further damning fact is that this is the most transparent genocide in all of human history as nightly TV brings its daily occurrence before the eyes of virtually the whole world.  The horror of previous genocides, including the Holocaust, have been largely disclosed after the fact, and even then were largely understood by way of abstraction and statistics, as well as the grim tales told by survivors or research done long after the fact, and later through films and books.

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What Israel Wants? Why Genocide?

16 Nov

[Prefatory Note: Stasa Sallacanin, an independent journalist posed a series of questions on October 29, 2023. I have modified my responses to take account of recent developments and to offer a more readable text. As the genocidal assault on Gaza continues in the face of rising calls for a ceasefire and a negotiated peace, Israel remains defiant and the US stands firm in support of Israel’s supposed goal of destroying Hamas as a presence in Gaza, but also seems intent on mounting an ethnic cleansing crusade, with a West Bank focus, but a Gaza subtext. Some of these elements are addressed in the post below.]

Q 1: While Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and has the capacity to severely damage its operational abilities, the question remains what is the future of Palestinian armed resistance?

In my judgment, Israel is inflicting important, but temporary, damage on the operational ability of Hamas to carry out military attacks against Israel, but in the disproportionate and indiscriminate manner of doing so it will exact heavy costs. Not only will Hamas’ support surge among the Palestinian people and globally, but the severe humanitarian catastrophe that has befalled the civilian population has already greatly strengthened the will of the Palestinians to mount armed resistance in the future. In addition, global mobilization in civil society will increase, as will UN efforts and even Global West governments to find a solution to the conflict that is more sympathetic with Palestinian grievances and aspirations than before October 7.

As the earlier anti-colonial wars revealed, the colonial side can dominate the combat zones, winning every battle, killing large numbers of the native population, and destroying their sources of livelihood, and yet go on to experience political defeat in. the end. This was the experience of France and the United States in Vietnam and Algeria. Despite. innovations in weaponry and tactics political defeat and frustration was subsequentially experienced by colonial actors and imperial interventions in a series of countries that lacked military capabilities to defend their territory against such external intrusions: Afghanistan, Iraq after 2003, Libya and Syria after 2011, the so-called ‘forever wars’ in which the state-building and neoliberal objectives sought through  military intervention and major state-building undertakings were not realized, despite huge expenditures of funds. Despite this dismal record of relying on military means to achieve political objectives, the Global West, especially the United States, along with Europe and Israel, mindlessly continues to ‘securitize’ disputes and conflicts rather than shifting tactics or adopting a more detached view of the outcome of internal power struggles in foreign countries. Part of this failure to adapt to the diminishing agency of military superiority in North/South settings reflects the interests and influence of arms dealers in the private sector, as augmented by a compliant Congress and a militarized bureaucracy in the American case.

Israel resembles the US in these respects, although with more overt racist overtones, as articulated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the current crisis. It seeks to justify its violence by insisting that Arabs, as epitomized by Hamas, only understand  ‘pressure,’ which in actuality has. been expressed by recourse to genocidal devastation. Israel and the US both subscribed to the reductive assessments of Raphael Patel’s The Arab Mind (1973). Somewhat ironically, Hamas leaders explained and justified the October 7 attack, somewhat more plausibly, by relying on the same reasoning. They claimed that armed attack was the only way to remind Israel that the Palestinians were still present and would not allow themselves to be erased by diplomatic fiat.

Q: Israel launched a ground invasion on Gaza to dismantle Hamas. Will new Palestinian armed groups continue to emerge and fight Israel and how successful they will be, considering the fact, that Israel will learn from its past mistakes and recent intelligence failure?

It is almost a sure thing that Hamas, whether under another name or not, will survive this Israeli onslaught, emerging stronger, smarter, and more resilient than previously in the period after the present encounter ends. Despite the high international reputational costs as related to the legitimacy of its claims, Israel’s genocidal assault has put its apparent victory strategy further from attainment than before.

Israel is likely to face that moment of truth that confronts all settler colonial projects—either the native population is exterminated or driven to outer margins of societal life, or it will eventually prevail. This has been the pattern since 1945 when it became apparent that indigenous nationalism could outlast the military might of the colonizers if they stood their ground and were prepared to accept shocking levels of casualties and devastation. Palestinian steadfastness has long been evident even as constantly challenged by Israeli apartheid and harsh policies and practices.

Israel will, of course, endeavor to fix the hard-to-believe failures of surveillance and border security that made the Hamas attack possible, if indeed the official narrative holds up, and current suspicions of a false flag operation put to rest. We would expect Israel to make other tactical shifts in its structures of apartheid control over a hostile Palestinian population that is more likely, as suggested above, to be mobilized, resentful, and resistant than ever.

In the background are questions about whether the Israeli security lapse was a side-effect of the Netanyahu extremist coalition’s calculated efforts to make the West Bank unlivable for Palestinians, and become a settler controlled mini-state under the sovereign control of a Greater Israel that may have further territorial goals on its policy agenda. Or this West Bank priority was coupled with an assurance of the economic benefits of an estimated $500 billion value to be realized by developing the oil and gas fields off the Gaza coast.

The only potentially winning strategy for Israel is extensive ethnic cleansing by way of forced displacement beyond the borders—the Sinai solution, and for the Palestinians a second nakba. So far Egypt has resisted pressures to enter such a Faustian Bargain, but the end-game scenario is yet to be played out. There are rumors of Israeli offers to draw down Egypt’s international indebtedness in exchange for allowing the entire Gaza Palestinian population to live in Sinai, which would facilitate Israel’s thinly disguised ambition to incorporate the West Bank into its territory as well as reap the anticipated economic benefits of reoccupying  and possibly resettling Gaza in the absence of a Palestinian presence..

Q 3: Moreover, do you think that Hamas attack/resistance could inspire armed resistance, even among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and Gaza in the future or conversely, if Hamas fails, do you expect the weakening of armed resistance?

As earlier responses suggest, the Israeli response to the Hamas attack  has already inspired resistance politics among the Palestinians, including among exile and foreign refugee communities, and further discredited the quasi-collaborative political groups aligned with Fatah as exemplified by the West Bank framework of governance and international representational status, the Palestinian Authority the sole surviving  now seriously disabled child of the defunct Oslo Diplomacy that has paralyzed the Palestinians for more than 20 years while giving the settlers time to consolidate, expand, and augment their movement. The pre-October 7 Netanyahu coalition government greenlighted settler violence, and associated lang grabbing and thinly disguised efforts to escalate a strategy seemingly intent on maximum Palestinian dispossession.

Q 4: However, would you agree that any military solution cannot bear any sustainable long-term results and that the lack of a political solution will only generate the emergence of new armed groups?

Yes, that is an accurate probable future unless Israel takes drastic steps to realize its victory scenario.  I believe the current leadership of Israel will, if it can, before the Gaza crisis is resolved move rapidly to implement an ethnic cleansing version of a ‘final solution’ of its Palestinian problem. How the world, especially the Global West responds, will determine whether such an outcome will actually succeed, or whether the future will exhibit what now seems impossible, the realization of Palestinian rights of at least partial self-determination, most likely in an unstable two-state outcome as proposed back in 2002 by the Arab countries meeting in Mecca and generally endorsed by governments throughout the world, although  it seems unimaginably difficult to implement given the certain extreme opposition of more than half a million settlers in the West Bank.

Another likely result of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is the emergence of secular militancy to avoid perceived regional threats of political Islam and religious warfare that will be rationalized as counterterrorism along the propagandistic lines of ‘Hamas is our ISIS..’ The French president, Emmanuel Macron, carried the idea a step further by proposing ‘a new axis of evil’ composed of hostile Islamic governments and non-state actors in the Middle East. I suspect that policy wonks have already started rereading and updating Samuel Huntington’s 1993 vision of ‘a clash of civilizations.’ It follow from this perspective that such an approach will take center stage in forthcoming phases of regional politics more than 30 years after these ideas were first circulated in Huntington’s famous and influential Foreign Affairs article.

Q 5: In the occupied West Bank, a plethora of new Palestinian armed groups have emerged in response to repressive Israeli policies. Do you think that their factions and influence will spread to Gaza once the military action against Hamas is over and in case Hamas is defeated?

It is quite possible, but I think their main focus will be resistance to Israel’s attempt to gain sovereign control over the West Bank to the extent possible. Gaza in my view despite the genocidal ordeal inflicted on the Gazans remains almost a sideshow for militant Zionists who joined with Netanyahu in implementing patterns of extremist governance of the West Bank that were operationalized as soon as their authority was formalized at the start of 2023.

In effect, Gaza is distracted attention from the remaining critical goals of the maximal Zionist Project and Israeli extremes of violence are intended to deliver a warning to Palestinians on the West Bank to get out or face an eventual firestorm. Whether such thinking is part of why Israeli government allowed the security lapse to occur or it was the Hamas attack an opportunity seized upon by the Netanyahu leadership in the course of carrying out its violent and vengeful retaliatory attack. Another possibility is that the settlers, and allies in government somewhat autonomously saw the Israeli response in Gaza as creating an opening for their cleansing campaign in the West Bank.

Q 6: The poll, conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, also showed that 52% of the Palestinians believe that the armed struggle against Israel is the most effective means to end the Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state. Twenty-one percent said they supported achieving these goals through negotiations, while 22% preferred the “popular resistance.”  In addition, when asked what has been the most positive or the best thing that has happened to the Palestinian people since the Nakba in 1948  the largest percentage (24%) said it was the establishment of Islamic movements. So, will this percentage even grow after the war, and will new resistance groups be influenced by Islamic movements or they will focus and try to refocus on other matters and perhaps try to overcome political divisions within a deeply fragmented Palestinian bloc? 

As of now, the Islamic groups, especially Hamas, have dominated Palestinian resistance to the extent that recourse to armed struggle has characterized resistance, and this will likely become even more the case after the Israeli guns finally fall silent in Gaza. Yet I would suppose that in the next phase of struggle, assuming Israeli ethnic cleansing schemes do not succeed in erasing or marginalizing Palestinian resistance, there will emerge new political formations that are neither Islamic nor the opposite. In other words, Palestinian resistance is overdue for an integrative politics of unity without sectarian or ideological dogma being allowed to get in the way of the overriding goal of gaining leverage needed to achieve a sustainable and just peace. Israel has resorted to a variety of means, including its early funding of Hamas when it was most overtly antisemitic as well as targeted assassinations and imprisonment of potentially unifying Palestinian political leaders, including the harassment and possible murder of Arafat, and timely assassinations of those seeking a just and sustainable peace that stood in the way of Israel following through to the full realization of the Zionist vision. Prominent among such casualties were the Swedish mediator Count Folke Bernadotte murdered by the Zionist terrorist group Lehi in 1948 and even an Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the first period of the Oslo Accords that for years looked as though it might yield an accommodation based on a political compromise between Israel and Palestine.

Only If and when Israel becomes a pariah state, its national leaders might at last consider the option of emulating the South African surprising turn as adapted to Israel’s circumstances. The leaders in Pretoria surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and agreeing to a transition to a multi-racial constitutional democracy with equal rights for all. It seems like a dream at present to suppose that something similar will happen in Israel, but in history dreams happen but only if made by the dedicated struggles and sacrifices of martyrs.

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.A New Cycle of Gaza/Israel Violence

22 Nov

[Prefatory Note: What follows is a slightly modified interview conducted by Daniel Falcone on the theme of ‘The Renewal of Violence—Gaza/Israel’ in Jacobin, Nov. 2019. This latest cycle of transborder violence initiated by a targeted assassination of a well-known military commander in Islamic Jihad in Gaza, leading to a rocket barrage directed at southern and central Israel, followed by many air strikes and artillery shells fired at Gaza targets. Whether this latest cycle of violence has ended as of now is difficult to assess, and it should not be confused with the violence at the Gaza Fence as a result of weekly demonstrations of Palestinians at the Gaza fence in the course of the Great March of Return, a civil society initiative (later joined by Hamas as unarmed demonstrators) that has continued since March 30, 2018, a remarkable exhibition of sumud on the Palestinian side and of excessive lethal force—where no imminent threat existed—on the Israel side.]

 

A New Cycle of Gaza/Israel Violence

 

 

Q: how has the mainstream press been treating this renewed violence?

 

Mainstream media, as well as even the UN, is treating this renewal of violence in a highly misleading way as if the only truly valid issue is whether a sovereign state, in this case Israel, has the right to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism. The events unfolding between Israel and Gaza are misrepresented in two principal ways: by treating Israel as defending itself without taking account of the deliberate surrounding provocations on Israel’s part; and by using language in media coverage to weight perceptions of readers to believe that Israel as a state is fully entitled to use force to uphold security as opposed to its terrorist adversary that has no rights whatsoever except to be hunted down. This is a perversion of law and justice as the Palestinians are treated as interlopers in their own homeland while the Israeli settler colonial authority is being regarded as the sole legitimate political authority in the whole of Palestine. In the case of Gaza, to resist sustained, severe, collective, and comprehensive punitive deprivations and lawlessness inflicted on the helpless, occupied Gaza people seems an intrinsic right, or at the very least a highly relevant circumstance that deserves to be taken into account. In the background is more than twelve years of blockade, condemned by many world leaders, and even the prior UN Secretary General.

 

The immediate context of this latest cycle of violence was the targeted killing of Baha Abu-Ata along with his wife, on November 12th while they were sleeping in their home in a Gaza apartment building. Abu-Ata was a member of Islamic Jihad, a military commander, alleged to have been responsible for past rocket attacks on Israel, and supposedly engaged in planning further launches. After the assassination 200 rockets were fired from Gaza as a response, causing no serious casualties. Israel immediately responded to the rockets with several days of drone missile strikes, air and military assaults, killing 34 Palestinians, wounding more than 80. As far as is known, no Israelis have so far killed or injured by the Palestinian rockets, although that by itself does not make their use ‘legal.’ Israel’s response raises many international law questions of proportionality with respect to the use of force, collective punishment, and as significantly, issues of provocation, the timing of the assassination of Abu-Ata and associated violence quite possibly a Netanyahu a final failed gesture designed to break the Israeli electoral impasse in his favor. The media utterly failed to connect the outbreak of violence with the underlying desperation and vulnerability of the Gazan population of about two million, with the domestic pressures in Israel to break the impasse that has blocked the formation of a new government, and the months of frustration with the Israeli killings at the Gaza border to demoralize the demonstrators taking part in The Great March of Return. This truly heroic, almost totally nonviolent phenomenon of Palestinian is where the msm should be if they were doing their job.

 

Jonathan Ofir, well known as an Israeli activist and musician living in Denmark, gives a radically different, and more humanly sensitive rendering of this Gaza violence that contrasts with what continues to be disseminated by TV and print: “What Israel reserves for itself is the right to conduct seasonal massacres in the uninhabitable concentration camp called Gaza, when it sees fit.” This is admittedly strongly emotive language that could be as misleading as the msm approach unless better contextualized. What is more to the point from a legal/moral/humanitarian perspective is that Gaza is a territory ‘occupied’ by Israel since 1967, and not a foreign country. Hence, Israel’s behavior is subject to the Geneva Conventions, especially Convention IV governing belligerent occupation. Israel rejects these international law constraints altogether, unilaterally invoking its right to defend itself by periodically launching massive attacks on Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014. Israel also completely avoids the primary duty under Geneva IV to protect a civilian population living under its occupation, which renders its reliance on self-defense under international law an absurdity when the adversary is the occupied society itself.

 

The blog writer and regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada, Maureen Claire Murphy, assesses Israel’s violence in the larger context of the relationship between Israel and Palestine: “Abu-Ata and Palestinian fighters in Gaza like him are resisting a cruel and illegal siege, a half-century of military occupation, and more than 70 years of forced displacement and dispossession.” There is no indication that Murphy is defending the Gaza rocket responses, but is she rather relying on the relevance of context in correctly grasping the respective behavior of these antagonists. Until we have some awareness of this broader context, our understanding of the isolated incident cannot be properly interpreted, and feeds hegemonic constructions of political reality that produced one-sided commentary at the expense of a victimized people. In this regard, msm in relation to the Palestinian national struggle seems to act as if its main function was quite the opposite–to ignore on principle the context of Palestinian violence no matter how relevant. By so doing, Israel can be portrayed as the hapless victim of primitive rockets that are mainly symbolic Palestinian efforts to exhibit their spirit of resistance in frustrated response to a wider pattern of oppressive and unlawful governance. There is no reason to deny that the threat, however remote, posed by these rockets does produce great anxiety in Israeli communities living near the Gaza border, and is unacceptable because of its inherent indiscriminateness. Without minimizing Israel security concerns, it should be recognized that far worse anxiety is the continual reality experienced by the entire population of Gaza, and for many years. Until this wider pattern of Israeli dereliction of its duties under international humanitarian law is brought into view, we are reading thinly disguised propaganda, sophisticated fake news, that confers impunity on the militarily strong side in this struggle, and excessive accountability on the weaker side. Such a pattern is an obvious perversion of justice.

 

These concerns about media coverage vary from issue to issue and even context to context. The Israel/Palestine context is distinctive in several respects with regard to slanting the news in Israel’s favor. It is respectable in America to be an outspokenly pro-Zionist journalist, while being even neutral is viewed as sufficiently discrediting to keep you off the air, and daring to be critical of Israel sends often results in an intense professional pushback. Marc Lamont Hill discovered this when a rather balanced speech given at the UN was distorted by Zionist groups in ways that managed to induce his abrupt dismissal as a CNN consultant without even the courtesy of a right of response. This enveloping reality of bias exerts pressure to present the news as shaped by the Israeli and American governments, and an entourage of think tank and ‘expert’ apologists. Even an irresponsible Zionist extremist like Alan Dershowitz is welcomed as a respectable network guest on talk shows while a media appearance by Noam Chomsky is a rarity, and if it occurs it is treated as giving space to a dissenter, normally offset by a second guest who adheres to the party line. This informal mode of censorship is reinforced by the powerful and feared AIPAC lobby that has a watchdog reputation as ending the political careers of those few in Congress who over the years are perceived as somewhat critical of Israel or even cautiously supportive of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights.

 

When well-funded lobbies, think tanks, websites, and wealthy donors exist on one side of a national policy debate and there are no comparable countervailing forces that effectively represent the other side create a dangerous atmosphere with respect to public discourse. The side with the power and funding—as they say, ‘follow the money’—controls, marginalizes, and discredits other viewpoints, and punishes for all to observe those who get too far out of line. In regard to Israel, this has been reinforced, at least since 1967, by the consensus that the US ‘special relationship’ with Israel is a strategic alliance that is vital for upholding American strategic interests in the Middle East. The corporatized media of this era is almost as responsive to Pentagon briefings as it is reflective of pro-Israeli access and influence when it comes to this central symbolic conflict of the post-Cold War, post-apartheid era.     

 

Q:  From where is it possible to get reliable information on issues such as the legal status of Gaza violence?

 

There is no mainstream answer to such a question in the West, which is itself a rather remarkable breakdown of journalistic standards. This unhealthy state of affairs is reflected also in the one-sided political debate now dominating the American media during battle for the Democratic Party nomination. Without exception, the candidates seeking the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party become shy, or worse, when it comes to criticizing Trump’s unabashedly pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian record. As the recent Gaza incident illustrates, even the most progressive among the candidates are silent or mindlessly repeat the mantra about Israel’s right to defend itself. None dare say ‘end the blockade,’ ‘treat Hamas as the elected government of Gaza,’ and ‘uphold the obligations of international humanitarian law’ if what is at stake is ending this Gaza violence, and in the process, actually making Israelis more secure, not less. If one among the candidates dared speak plainly, a blacklisting pushback would assuredly quickly follow, particularly if viewed as someone with current popular support such as Sanders or Warren.

 

When it comes to finding the best media coverage available, I would suggest reading the digitized media widely and selectively, as well as what is written by Al Jazeera and other regional media outlets in the Middle East, including even the Israeli press, which is far more open than the American. I receive a far better sense of the unfolding struggle between Israel and Palestine can be found in Haaretz, or even The Jerusalem Post, than from the New York Times or the Washington Post, and this by itself says a lot. Is there anyone in the msm as critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people than Gideon Levy or Amira Hass? There are occasional progressive treatments of these issues to be found in more obscure publications such as The Nation, London Review of Books, and Le Monde Diplomatique. I suppose the most independent analysis, but it is in the form of periodic reports, and not event oriented or lively reading, is to be found in the biennial reports of the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, currently Michael Lynk.  

 

A selective reading of online journalism that gives a more informed and balanced picture of the violent interactions between Israel and Palestinian resistance, especially refraining from automatically equating Palestinian resistance with terrorism in the struggle by the Palestinian people to secure their rights. In contrast, Israel’s reliance on excessive and often indiscriminte force, especially in seeking to intimidate and humiliate the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza should properly be considered as state terrorism. This Israeli violence has over the years been responsible for immeasurably more suffering, death, and anxiety that has the armed aspects of Palestinian resistance. Israel’s refusal to act humanely and to minimize political violence is nowhere more evident than in its responses to The Great March of Return since March 30, 2018 where weekly largely nonviolent protests demanding implementation of the long denied and unambiguous Palestinian right to return to their places of family residence and national homeland have not been met by any Israeli effort to achieve an accommodation, but rather have encountered unabasheds reliance on lethal force in the form of live sniper ammunition, causing Palestinian deaths and injuries almost every Friday for more than 80 weeks. Even ‘reliable’ journalism has not given this remarkable societal initiative in Gaza and Israel’s response the commentary and attention it deserves. This, too, is part of the context that thoughtful and balanced media coverage should be informing its readers about.    

 

Q: Is the political end game for Israel domestically in this latest surge in killing related to election squabbling?

 

Of course, politicians never acknowledge political motivations for their military aggressiveness in election periods. The impasse in Israel at present is unprecedented, and accentuated by the seeming desperation of Netanyahu to retain the immunity of his office to avoid facing serious corruption and fraud charges. Against such a background, it seems reasonable to be suspicious of why Israel resorted to this high profile targeted killing at this time, knowing it would produce a violent response from the Palestinians, and that such a response would provide Israel with a political climate supportive of a more deadly and less focused Israeli assault on Gaza. This turn would lead to more Palestinian rockets being launched toward Israel from Gaza, and although most would likely be intercepted by the Iron Dome, and even when they get through,  without so far causing casualties, it would still be treated as an occasion on which to raise Israeli fears and swing public opinion in Netanyahu’s direction. After all, whatever else, Netanyahu is looked upon as the unwavering guardian of Israeli security interests over the last decade. His opponent in the rivalry to lead government, Benny Gantz, adds to the anti-Gaza frenzy by also invoking as a positive credential his own bloody past record as an IDF commander in earlier Gaza operations. It is an unfortunate reality that politicians in Israel regard such militarist reputations as adding to their qualifications for political leadership, and the public goes along. This also means that it is politically helpful to ignore international law and civilian innocence in the course of displaying Israeli ruthless dominance whenever dealing with Palestinian oppositional activities, even if they take a nonviolent form.  

 

 

Q: What is the political end game for Israel internationally and how does it relate to a simultaneous raid on Syria?

 

It is Israel’s apparent hope that with Trump in the White House, this is the time to push for an end to the conflict that achieves their main political goals. This means declaring an Israeli victory in the struggle, coupled ideally with an acknowledgement from the Palestinians of their decision to give up their struggle for rights. In exchange, an incentive of a better day to day life is given to the Palestinians, what is sometimes called ‘an economic peace.’ This is coupled with a warning of worse-to-come if the Palestinians refuse to bow down. As the Great March and robust global BDS Campaign demonstrate, such a wish for an Israeli one-state solution is highly unlikely to receive formal blessings even from the weak Palestinian international representation now provided by the Palestinian Authority. It is also evident that strenuous Zionist efforts to demonstrate  that criticism of Israel is ‘the new anti-Semitism’ exhibits a recognition in Israel and Zionist circles that such a moral/legal challenge from below (as compared to diplomacy from above) poses a threat to Israeli ambitions that has become more formidable in the last few. years than armed struggle or military confrontation.

 

What seems to be happening, although not widely noticed, is that the core of the struggle to achieve a political compromise based on the equality of Jews and Arabs will shift from intergovernmental diplomacy, including at the UN, to Palestinian resistance initiatives and global solidarity efforts, both political undertakings of people not governments or international institutions. The two-state solutions has surely died alongside Oslo diplomacy, except in the mouths of diplomats who need to keep saying something. And yet an authoritative one-state alternative that is reflective of Palestinian and Israeli rights has not been born. Until such a birth takes place there may be temporary ceasefires and pauses in the violence but nothing resembling genuine peace.

 

To establish peace, Israel will have to make a major decision to accept a coexistence of equals with the Palestinian people. This also means dismantling its apartheid matrix of control that has been fragmenting the Palestinian people (as occupied, as refugees and exiles, as discriminated minority in Israel) ever since 1948. This kind of solution can only occur if pressure from within and without mount to the point that Israelis recalculate their interests, coming to the unexpected conclusion that they are better off living in real peace with Palestinians rather than hoping to keep them permanently confined in a variety of iron cages. The South African managers of their apartheid regime came to such a startling conclusion 25 years ago. It has already taken Israeli leaders far longer, with no good end in sight. We should never foreclose a benign future achieved through resistance and solidarity. This more hopeful scenario might begin to unfold if more of the media began fulfilling its own claims of offering trustworthy and objective reportage, especially on controversial issues of war and peace. Not only would this help resolve the Israel/Palestine struggle, it would restore confidence that a responsibly informed society would more often take the side of peace and justice, and compel their leaders to do the same, or face short career horizons.

 

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