Global Justice in the 21st Century

[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.    

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, ICC, ICJ, international law, Israel, Palestine