In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.
Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?
Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.
The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.
Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.
The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.
In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]
This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.
Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?
Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.
Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.
The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.
Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”
Daniel Falcone:Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?
Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’
Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.
As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.
Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?
Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.
The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.
Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.
Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.
Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.
[Prefatory Note: Interview text of responses to question]s posed by Naman Bakaç, an idependent journalist in Turkey. The interview was published by FOCUS, an independent online media platform. The link can be found at the link below:
https://www.fokusplus.com/roportaj/prof-dr-richard-falk-bm-ve-kuresel-hukuk-filistin-halkinin-haklarini-koruyamadi?s=09 ] 1. Let’s start with your book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience,’ whichyou co-edited with Ahmet Davutoğlu and was published in June 2025. The bookincludes articles by more than 30 politicians, academics, diplomats, intellectuals, andstatesmen from 17 countries. Who are the contributors in this book? What motivationsled to the creation of this book? What message do you aim to convey to the globalpublic through this book?
Response: As we explain in the Preface, the contributors were selected from a much larger group of distinguished signatories of a Declaration of Conscience, drafted by the former Prime Minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu and myself, and issued in late 2023 not long after the October 7 events. The Hamas-led attack was designed to be an anguished protest against the failure of governments and the UN to bring what seemed to us almost from its outset to be a transparent genocide carried out in real time and by digital technology brought to the awareness of the eyes and ears of the world. The issuance of our Declaration was met with unexpected enthusiasm from frustrated citizens in many countries that resulted in the private funding of a conference in London on 27 March 2024.
By coincidence, the conference was held the day after the International Court of Justice made its historic initial interim rulings in response to requests from South Africa that had submitted a legal dispute with Israel as to whether Israeli violence was of a nature that violated the International Convention on Genocide, as well as whether Israel was legally obliged to stop obstructing the international delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population of Gaza. Naturally, we were encouraged by these ICJ rulings to the effect that Israeli indiscriminate violence against the civilian population of Gaza coupled with the Israeli official decrees prohibiting entry of food, fuel, and water made allegations of genocide ‘plausible.’
As well, the ICJ in a second near unanimous judicial ruling ordered Israel to stop interfering with the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid. These ICJ rulings encouraged us to continue our effort to mobilize civil society on the basis of a justice-driven interpretation of law to engage with this unfolding human tragedy through the activation of nonviolent solidarity initiatives.
If a single message emerges from such a multi-authored book gathering between its pages distinguished public personalities from around the world
with diverse perspectives on global issues, yet united in condemning the genocide, it is this: when the existing normative order of rules, procedures, and institutions established by governments and international institutions, especially those falling within the UN System, fails to meet an urgent challenge to peace and human rights, it is time for the peoples of the world to act in resolute opposition.
In our search for participants, we wanted to focus on people whose view were similar to ourselves who were not presently holders of high positions in governments or inter-governmental institutions but were widely respected as moral authority figures. Our influence and ‘weapons’ were of the mind, heart, and spirit that were best expressed by engaged citizenship, trust in the guidance of conscience, and existential belief in the power of people in the service of truth. We hope our book conveys that message, which includes the conviction that conscience in extreme situations demands action as well as rhetorical utterances. Words unsupported by action in the face of genocide is an unacceptable form of silence. We regard our efforts as playing a small but determined part in an emergent global solidarity movement of people in support of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, above all, the right of self- determination.
From the London Conference devoted to exploring the implications of the Gaza Declaration, the idea of a book emerged as a matter of course, encouraged by a publishing commitment by Clarity Press. Our intention was to have this varied collection of writings exhibit both shared values and diverse policy judgments, and stimulate creative solidarity actions throughout the world, thereby confirming the view that the Gaza Genocide is not just an urgent challenge to all of humanity, but is also a test of whether the peoples of the world can develop moral agency to challenge dark challenges to the human future.
As far as the book is concerned, I think the range and quality of the contributions exceeded our expectations, although admittedly its impacts on human behavior remain unknowable, and even after 21 months such initiatives have not extinguished the need for intensifying activism in support of the Palestinian struggle.
2. In December 2023, you published a text calling for international justice and conscience conference on Palestine was held in London. Could these civil initiativesyou undertook out of a sense of responsibility turn into a global civil movement to enforce international law and order? Has it already turned into one? Can wesay that, while the UN and international law have failed in the face of the Gazagenocide, you are moving from words to action with this civil movement? Afterall, the unifying theme of the London Conference was that words are not enoughand action is imperative., which included some of the names in your new book.
Response: Although we were motivated to make what contribution we could to change the political atmosphere sufficiently to stop the genocide, we had no illusions that our pleas for humane politics would be heeded in the short run. Yet we felt that silence in its two forms was unacceptable, that is, refusing to name the violence of the Israeli response as ‘genocide,’ given its clear intentionality as further exhibited in its actions. Since naming gave rise to various forms of punitive pushback, especially in Europe and North America during the months after October 7, to name the violence ‘genocide’ was not only a word but became an action in defiance of Zionist worldwide efforts to treat evidenced- based criticism of Israel as a hateful form of antisemitism. As the genocide has persisted now for more almost two years genocide as the accepted descripted term has been somewhat normalized even in the mainstream media. It is still true that few governmental or officials in international institutions of the West speak of ‘genocide’ even when condemning the prolonged Israeli violence, and even UN top officials while highly critical of Israel’s behavior continue to refrain from characterizing the violence in Gaza as genocide.
It is notable that Francesca Albanese, the fearless UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine has been admirably forthright when it coming to naming, devoting three of her semi-annual official reports to different facets of genocide, including the depiction of the Zionist Project as a prime instance of ‘settler colonialism’ and complicit behavior of supporting governments and profit-making corporations as integral to Israel’s criminal responsibility for genocide. It is not surprising in view of this that Ms. Albanese has been singled out by the US Government and sanctioned in her personal capacity, being denied entry to the US and having her American assets frozen, a vindicative response to truthful witnessing on behalf of the public good, illustrative of UN functioning with courage and effectiveness despite contrary systemic pressures according to the high ideals of the Preamble to the UN Charter.
As indicated in my response to your first question, the confinement of criticism of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza to words of condemnation are insufficient in the face of prolonged and transparent genocide, with cruel and aggravating tendencies for more than 22 months. Action must be proposed and acted upon, whether the actors are governments, institutions, civil society activist, or individuals and collectivities of
various sorts. The political suicide of Aaron Bushnell in 2023, an American airman in front of Israel’s embassy in Washington is illustrative of an extreme humanistic sacrifice or self-martyrdom, an enactment of the repudiation of genocide as well as a desperate appeal to others to take action aimed at stopping the genocide. The action of Madleen Freedom Flotilla mission undertaken by Greta Thunberg and other brave and dedicated activists is another example of anti-genocidal activism, with an emphasis on both highlighting and circumventing Israel’s disruptions of the international delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid, an initiative that combines a care-giving gesture in the context of the humanitarian emergency in Gaza with an unspoken yet powerful appeal to others to engage actively, given their personal situation, in a variety of ways that involves truth-telling and solidarity with the victimized population of Gaza.
The importance of conscience as a motive for political action is gives rise to expressions of bravery in situations of risk without knowing whether controversial utterances will engender a response from those hitherto on the sidelines that might grow into a movement with transformative capabilities valuable for their own sake. In that sense, opposing genocide in Gaza is both an intrinsic reaction of conscience and a distinct action that has political goals of motivating others to join the struggle.
In retrospect, it is obvious that from feeble solidarity initiatives early on, a civil society movement of many distinct parts has grown to the point where Israel’s legitimacy as a state is increasingly drawn into question, both symbolically and substantively. One manifestation of this solidarity trend is the intensity of growing calls for Israel’s suspension from UN activities, as well as proposals for arms embargoes, denial of visas to Israeli citizens, boycotts of cultural and sporting events, solidarity fasts and cutting diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.
Even though Israel has continued to follow its lawless, abusive path, its behavior and identity has been slowly delegitimized by public discourse even in the most influential civil society media platforms of the West, reflecting the symbolic defeat of Israel when it comes to controlling the high normative ground of law and morality. As I have argued in the past the side that wins the Legitimacy War fought over symbolic entitlements of legality and morality tends to prevail politically in the end despite being defeated on the battlefield due to inferior military capabilities. The Palestinians of Gaza, with the help of global supportive solidarity and Palestinian resistance and sumud, have clearly won the Legitimacy War despite the tragic costs paid by participants in such anti-colonial liberation struggles. As with other anti-colonial uprisings, the uncertainty is whether the Palestinians have the national stamina to gain the fruits of such a victory, that is, national liberation embodying the realization of the ultimate human right, that of self-determination. Israel under the sway of Zionist ideology and the Masada Complex seems prepared to pay a far higher price in blood, treasure, and reputation than have been other recent settler colonial projects to exterminate opposition its goals of eliminating resistance by the native or homeland residents.
3.The Israel-Iran war raises many questions as to what kinds of changes will it bring to the regional and global order? What do you think is the real reason behind Israel targeting Iran after Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen? What do you think are the geopolitical and the political goals of the Israel-US duo?
Response: Israel has made clear in its foreign policy pronouncements that it seeks to prevent any country in the region from becoming strong or bold enough to challenge Israel’s military preeminence. Its extension of the Gaza combat zone to several Middle Eastern countries signals its resolve to eliminate or severely weaken any Islamic non-state movement that is aligned with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, the exercise of its long-denied rights of self-determination and perceived in Tel Aviv to pose a challenge to Israel’s strategic and hegemonic ambitions. The inflamed atmosphere caused by the prolonged genocide in Gaza give rise to a context in which rising global discontent with Israel create incentives to strike at its actual and imagined regional adversaries.
Iran above all is singled out as Enemy No. 1, in part to divert attention from the grim happenings in Gaza and the West Bank, to carry out its long-time strategy of remaking the Middle East to its liking, and to address Iran’s supposed security threat centered on its potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. The Israeli justifications involve preempting security threats before they can materialize or striking disproportionately (along the lines of the Dahiya Doctrine) in response to behavior perceived as hostile to the Zionist game plan that features the minimization of a Palestinian presence within an enlarged reconfigured Israel that erases Palestine from the map of what Netanyahu likes to call ‘the New Middle East’ or ‘Greater Israel.’ Such ambitions would compel the massive physical displacement and psychological marginalization of Palestinians. It also seeks to coerce the most defeatist representatives of Palestine to agree to the surrender of national political goals, including the most basic rights embodied in international law, especially in relation to human rights.
The 12-day Iran War exemplifies this approach, with the proclaimed goal of eliminating, or at least substantially delaying, Iran’s alleged threat to acquire nuclear weapons. A secondary rarely openly acknowledged goal is to stimulate a restive Iranian opposition to seize the moment to launch a campaign to achieve regime change in Tehran. Underlying these, is an unspoken third goal of renewing fear of Israel’s deterrent capabilities and preventive war mindset in a potentially hostile post-Assad Syria feared to emerge as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East. The attack on Iran also created an opportunity that came to fruition to involve the US directly in the coercive administration of Middle East politics. Israel’s dependence on US supplementing its initial attacks by enlisting B2 planes that the US alone possessed delivering Blockbuster Bombs on underground Iranian nuclear sites demonstrated the strength of Israel’s leverage in Washington and the limits of Israel’s purported military dominance in the Middle East.
The Israel/US duo in the region has two imperial objectives. The first is assuring friendly governments control the energy resources of the region. The other is to
contain the spread of Islam beyond the vital civilizational fault lines in the Middle East. This second goal helps explain the blind eye that the Western liberal democracies turned toward the prolonged genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza while actually exhibiting complicity in the commission of this crime. This crime simultaneously denied the right to life, right to peace, and a rebuff of fundamental individual and collective legal entitlements of national self- determination to all peoples.
4.You previously served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. Prof. Michael Lynk, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine between 2016 and 2022, recently stated at Boğaziçi University’s conference ‘Rethinking International Law after Gaza’ that international law alone cannot ensure Palestine’s liberation and that there must also be international resolve. What concrete proposals do you have for establishing the resolve to implement the principles and decisions ofinternational law?
Response: I share Michael Lynk’s view about the inability of international legal authority to be self-enforcing in situations of defiant non-compliance that Israel has manifested in all aspects of its relations with the Palestinian people and most dramatically over the course of more than 22 months of a genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza and the devastation of physical infrastructure of Gazan society casting doubt of its viability as a place fit for human habitation. This is especially the case, as here, where the violator enjoys geopolitical support from the US and the European Union. There are several steps that can be taken on levels of policy and others of a more systemic character.
Civil Society Solidarity Initiatives. There are variety of ways that people can act to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps when the UN and organized normative order fails, as it has in Gaza, and more generally with regard to protecting the basic rights of the Palestinian people. The struggle against the South African apartheid regime illustrates the impact of civil society activism in the struggle to combat racist criminality. Such initiatives as the BDS movement, featuring nationalist boycotts of cultural and sporting events by refusals to perform in South Africa and mounting pressure to exclude participation by South African performers and athletes elsewhere contributed to anti-apartheid struggle, as well as seeking to discourage new investments and to divest from past investments, and sanctions by way of arms embargoes and other punitive actions were expressions of moral outrage directed at the South African regime, and although unacknowledged, are widely thought to have contributed to the unexpected and sudden decision by South African leaders to abandon apartheid, free Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and arrange
free elections of all South African inhabitants to select a new leadership and establish a constitutional structure based on racial equality and human rights for all.
There are a variety of other solidarity initiatives that can be mentioned: waging a Legitimacy War to control public discourse, with the winner controlling the high ground of law and morality; exertions of a variety of pressures on media and government in complicit countries; protests by global voices of conscience demanding arms embargoes; individual actions such as tax refusal and self- martyrdom in protest.
Collective Governmental Coalition. The Hague Group, originally formed by states of the Global South, provides a venue for opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide, including a statement of purpose and the recommendation of action-oriented measures intended to exert pressure on Israel in relation to its behavior in Occupied Palestine. The Hague Group met in Bogotá at an emergency meeting at the joint invitation of Colombia and South Africa. A Declaration signed by the 30 participating governments and the adoption of a commitment to impose a series of anti-Israeli measure by 12 of the participating states. The event is an important indication of the emergence of the Global South from a period of post- colonial passivity and suggests a revival under altered circumstances of the Bandung Spirit, which challenged the preoccupations of the Cold War by giving priorities to liberation struggles and development priorities, and projecting a different conception of global security and international legitimacy at the UN and elsewhere.
UN Reform. There are variety of UN Reforms that would enhance respect for international law and enforcement/accountability prospects. The most promising reforms to achieve a more effective UN that seek to serve global public interests with respect to war prevention and global security include the following: empowerment of the General Assembly via implementation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution and Responsibility to Protect (R2P), direct enforcement without recourse to Security Council of ICJ judgments; elimination or curtailment of the right of veto in the Security Council and in other decision points in the UN System; expediting ICJ proceedings in emergency situations; renaming ‘Advisory Opinions’ of ICJ as ‘Authoritative Legal Judgments;’ adding layers of protections to the work of Special Procedures to ensure political independence and immunity from defamation and sanctions. Seldom discussed is the enhancement of status of UN Special Rapporteurs, including more explicit responsibilities of the UN Secretariat to offer protection extending to disallowing defamatory attacks by NGOs within UN arenas of appraisal such as the Human Rights Council. Vesting increased war prevention authority in the office of the Secretary General.
New Pedagogical Paradigm. Legal education is deficient in its approach to international law, especially in relation to core public order issues of conflict, human rights, and development. It focuses on the vocational preparation of students to be practicing lawyers within the confines of nation states. International law is seen as a discretionary subject at the margins of the law school curricula and is not well understood even within democratic societies governed in accord with constitutional commitments to uphold the ‘rule of law.’
A pedagogy of international law that would be more supportive of a global normative order that was more geared to the realization of values associated with peace, justice, and sustainable development would view legal education as a vital source of civic education in relation to engaged citizenship. The goals would be to require all graduates of law schools and other law programs to grasp the relevance of an effective just world order to human interests in overcoming global challenges.
Educational reform would also include course offerings on the history of international relations. Courses would feature critiques of ‘political realism’ that continues to be the shared operational code of planners and advisors that shape the worldviews and foreign policy of almost all leading governments. The ‘group think’ of foreign policy elites create an atmosphere in which strategic ambitions and security calculations take precedence, limiting international law in its regulative role to policy settings in which mutuality is seen to exist. With respect to global security context the propaganda role of international law tends to be paramount, serving as a foreign policy instrument for mobilizing opposition against international enemies while dismissing international law when its constraints are violated by the national government or its allies. Law is not law that treats equals unequally as was the Global West’s appeal to international law when dealing with Russia’s attack on Ukraine and its dismissal when responding to more serious allegations of genocide made against Israel.
5.What kind of global order and international law was built after World War II such that no power, mechanism, legality, or institution can stop Israel’s genocidal, expansionist, and occupationist policies? If this inability continues, what kind of globalorder and international law awaits us? As an experienced scholar who has conductedacademic and field studies in international law and practices for more than 40 years,and who has written books on the legitimacy of global order, legality, and the futureof international law, how do you think the global order and international law will beshaped after Gaza? What kind of world order awaits us? How would you name thisnew order? Is it similar to past versions of Pax America?
Response: To some extent the last part of my response to the prior question anticipates your concerns here. As suggested, the overriding of international law by the political realist control of foreign policy results in world order being shaped by power rather than by the restraints and procedures of law and the guidelines of ethics and justice, at least in relation to global security and war/peace issues. More specifically, what emerged from World War II was not a genuine war prevention or global security framework as pledged in Preamble to the UN Charter. Instead, the international normative order deliberately marginalized the UN, and international law generally, although with certain potentially significant exceptions. The global normative order that has evolved since 1945 was designed to give the winners in the war against fascism freedom of action to pursue their strategic interests exempt from the rule of law and international law by virtue of a right of veto given to the five winners that also turned out to be the five countries allowed to acquire nuclear weaponry.
Such a great power hegemonic world system was also evident in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, which only prosecuted German and Japanese military and political officials, that is, the crimes of the losers in the war. No legal scrutiny led to investigations, much less prosecutions of the major crimes of the winners, including indiscriminate strategic bombing and the use of atom bombs against two Japanese cities despite their scant military importance. A great liberal show was made of the limited due process offered to these surviving high officials of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, but the one-sidedness of the legal proceedings made a mockery of claims that a new of international criminal justice had commenced at the war crimes trials. A further irony is that the agreement to establish these tribunals were set by the Allied Power in London on August 8, that is on the day between dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a second bomb on Nagasaki, a historic display of humanitarian insensitivity by the self-righteous winners of World War II.
A second phase of such a hegemonic normative order emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union bringing the Cold War to an end in the early 1990s with victory by the West. To fill the geopolitical vacuum that existed, the US proceeded to project its power throughout the planet by becoming the first ‘global state’ enabled by a network of hundreds of foreign military bases, naval units in every ocean, and an aggressive space program to safeguard dominance on earth. By so acting, the US ignored the possibilities at the end of the Cold War of achieving nuclear disarmament, demilitarization, a justice-oriented approach to global policy, and prosperity resting on an ecologically resilient approach to economic and social development. This missed opportunity for global reform has generated chaos, violent conflict, wasted resources, widening wealth/income gaps, the rise of chauvinistic autocratic rule in many leading countries, and dangerous levels of ecological instability affecting adversely global warming and food security.
Pax America is most accurately interpreted as an historic period of post-colonialism that is best described as US dominated Western imperialism.’ It is also illuminating to regard the interval between the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 as an enactment of Pax America, with less Pax and more America. It featured US armed interventions with the goal of achieving regime- change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by lengthy occupations committed to state-building along capitalist, constitutional lines at great expense, and disappointing outcomes given the motivations of the intervenors. Dubbed ‘wars of choice’ and ‘forever wars’ these attempts to impose Western models of pollical and economic structures and alignments in accord with the postulates of neoliberal globalization were not only carried out with scant attention to the constraints of international law but resulted in political failures. The US experience in the Vietnam War is paradigmatic: enduring political defeat despite battlefield dominance.
6.While the people of Gaza are living through a live genocide under bombs, hunger,diseases, and blockade, as a theorist in the field of global order and international law,how do you think this genocide can be resolved by Netanyahu and Hamas? Hamasand Netanyahu are not stepping back from their core arguments. How can thisdeadlock be overcome? What is your concrete proposal?
Response: To begin with, Netanyahu and Hamas are not equal or symmetrically situated. Israel enjoys total military control of the political space and enjoys material and diplomatic support from the NATO members of the UN Security Council, as well as the backing of these countries in the West on such legal and moral issues as whether Israeli use of force should be viewed as ‘genocide’ or ‘self-defense.’ All ‘two sides’ approaches to the Israel/Palestine past, present, and future are tainted by their tacit acceptance of master/slave structures of interpretation and advocacy. Hamas has few cards to play when it comes to diplomatic negotiations. The only obvious one, and it is tenuous and contingent, is the retention of Israeli hostages taken on October 7, some alive, some dead. In addition, Israel’s leaders have manifested on many occasions that the return of the hostages is not a high priority justifying significant concessions.
The only just way to manage conflict resolution is to balance a long-term ceasefire against an assured path to meaningful realization of the long deferred Palestinian right of self-determination in a form that is not another instance of Israeli/US ‘breadcrumb diplomacy,’ exchanging Israeli territorial expansion for a demilitarized Palestinian Bantustan put forward as the fulfillment of ‘the two-state solution.’ Palestinian representation must be legitimate and endowed with agency at any day-after
diplomatic process seeking reconciliation. From a detached perspective, for a variety of reasons, a single secular state with equal rights for both peoples seems like the only durable justice-driven solution, but it is up to Israeli and Palestinians to arrive awhat now appears a ‘utopian’ solution.
7.Since October 7, 2023, if we ask you to analyze the stances and actions of the following actors in the face of Netanyahu, Hamas, and the genocide, what picture would you paint for us? The Mahmoud Abbas Government, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey
. Response: —Mahmoud Abbas Government: At its best, a pragmatic adjustment to the victimization of the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, privileging a matter of getting on with daily life as well as possible, while continuing to represent Palestine in international negotiations and endorse to the ‘two state solution’; at its worst, collaborating with Israel in maintaining security on the West Bank, supporting anti-Hamas tactics of Israel including the punitive blockade on Gaza imposed in 2007 in reaction to the unexpected Hamas electoral victory the prior year; failure to win support from most Palestinians living in foreign countries as refugees or exiles; by and large, the Ramallah government operates within the comfort zone of Israel and United States, as does settler violence land-grabbing; in my judgment the Abbas government is not playing a satisfactory role of international representation of the Palestinian resistance focused on the exercise of basic rights, especially the inalienable right of self- determination;
—Egypt: In keeping with the behavior of other Arab governments Egypt has verbally criticized Israeli behavior in Gaza, but has carefully refrained from engaging in any act that might provoke hostile reactions by Israel; in this sense, Egypt has remained nervously on the sidelines, although resisting pressures to date to accept large numbers of Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza; Egypt as aligned with the US and Saudi Arabia exhibits hostility to Hamas as an extension of its domestic antipathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood within its own borders. Compared to Nasser’s Egypt the current government has lost popular support and regional respect, especially in civil society circles of influence;
—Qatar: As a small country hosting a major US military base and vulnerable to hostile action by other Gulf monarchies, Qatar has few choices, although it has maneuvered skillfully to give itself the unique position of being the Switzerland of the Middle East, useful to all sides in the multidimensional conflicts that have brought chaos and misery to many countries in the region; Qatar’s leaders have been careful to appear neutral in relation to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, although it has long provided a
safe haven for top Hamas leaders living in exile, and extended hospitality to other Palestinian notables, such as Azmi Bishara, no longer to feel secure in Israel; in the current high profile Gaza ceasefire negotiations only Qatar was considered suitable, providing security and facilities;
—Turkey: Only Turkey has played effectively a somewhat contradictory role. On the one side Turkey, as much as any government in the region aside from Iran is second to none in the fierceness of its denunciation of Israel’s behavior in Gaza since October 7, with its top leadership in Ankara not hesitant to categorize Israel’s violence as ‘genocide’ and to provide a domestic setting supportive of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, including such initiatives as the Gaza Peoples Tribunal scheduled to have its final session in Istanbul at the end of October; at the same time, Turkey seeks to maintain good economic and political relations with the European Union and the United States. The Turkish government has also been criticized, and accused of moral hypocrisy, due to its failure to shut down the pipeline supplying Israel with oil sent from Azerbaijan and supposedly vital for its war effort.
8.In your book translated into Turkish as ‘Globalization and Religion: Humanitarian Global Governance,’ you list several reasons for your new idea of ‘Humanitarian GlobalGovernance’ as follows: ‘Part of the appeal of religion is an antidote to thehomogenizing effects of out-of-control consumerism and pseudo-universalism.’ You also state, ‘I have never gotten along well with the morality or knowledge system ofscientific humanism in my approach to law and politics.’ Could you elaborate on yourperspective that religion serves as an antidote? Also, why do you not get along wellwith scientific humanism? Which paradigm do you currently align with in yourapproach to law and politics?
Response: The book’s title and central idea are unfortunately mistranslated. In English the key word is ‘humane,’ not ‘humanitarian, which has a different meaning and resonance. Humanitarian or humanitarianism refers to acts of relief, undertakings designed to mitigate human suffering, or simply acts of kindness toward those in need. ‘Humane’ refers to a worldview animated by love, justice, fairness to all human beings, and an affirmation of the spiritual dimensions of reality. It can be coherently brought to reality or nurtured by certain patterns of governance that reflect shared societal values often transmitted by way of organized religion, but more often betrayed by repressive and corrupt governance and by despiritualized religious institutions and practices. My ambivalence toward ‘scientific humanism’ is a consequence of its epistemological stance, which devalues spirituality in all its forms, substituting rationality and scientific validation of knowledge.
These understandable reactions to the shortcomings of
religion led to the liberation of superstition and marginalization of metaphysical abstractions (such as ‘God’) from the workings of society, leading to the substitution of the Enlightenment view of knowledge and to the rise of modernity in the West with its vision of progress reliant on dynamic technological innovation. What was sacrificed in the process was a sense of human community including the ethics of empathy and a politics of compassion, as well as the denial of spirituality. The aspirations of a ‘humane’ approach is to restore the virtues of the pre-modern without losing the benefits of modernity as conditioned by the extension of human rights, the curtailment of militarism and nuclearism, and care for ecological stability.
To reorient modernity to overcome these dangerous deficiencies is what I intend by the stress on a ‘humane’ worldview. It calls for an ethics and politics of moderation, enlivened by spiritual awareness and practices, reflecting a realistic appreciation of global challenges. Among governance frameworks, the most congenial for me is that of ecologically conditioned varieties of democratic socialism in a global setting finally inclined toward denuclearization and demilitarization, as well as the repudiation of predatory capitalism and the kind of excessive individualism that arises when the market is entrusted with the promotion of human wellbeing in all its facets.
This article appears in the August 1, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
lPrefatory Note: An interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute on array of topics. Published in the August issue of Execuitve Intellligence Review}
Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University. He is a prolific author who has written extensively on international law and the United Nations. From 2008 to 2014 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The interview was conducted on July 23, 2025 by EIR’s Michael Billington. Subheads have been added.
Mike Billington: Welcome. This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m very pleased to once again have the opportunity to do an interview with Professor Richard Falk. Professor Falk is a professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University. He is also the former United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in Palestine and the Occupied Territories. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation, in which he published a recent article on the issues that we’re going to discuss. He’s the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which we will also discuss. Welcome, Professor Falk, and thank you for joining us.
Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
Prof. Richard Falk: Thank you, Mike, for having me. Glad to be with you again.
Billington: In your article in The Nation on July 15, which was titled “Sanctioning Francesca Albanese—Marco Rubio Tramples on the Law, Justice and Truth,” in that article, you review the heroic role of Francesca Albanese as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, which is a position you held from 2008 to 2014, in two three-year terms. In the article you denounced the sanctions imposed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Ms. Albanese. What is the background to this situation?
Prof. Falk: Well, the background, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, relates to the arrest warrants that the International Criminal Court issued some months ago, to arrest, for crimes, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and the former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. In February of this year the U.S. imposed sanctions on the four judges that participated in the endorsement of the prosecutors’ recommendation that the arrest warrants be issued. The ICC was sanctioned through the denial of entry to the U.S. to these individuals and their immediate families, and their assets that were within the U.S. were frozen. The ostensible reason that the U.S. government gave for sanctioning Francesca Albanese was that she, in her last report, which has the title “From the Economics of Occupation to the Economics of Genocide,” singled out 48 American and international corporations that were profiting from the genocidal policies being pursued by Israel, and recommended that the ICC investigate and possibly prosecute individuals associated with these companies.
The reason, I think, for the linkage to the ICC in her case, was that the Trump executive order that originally was issued after the ICC arrest warrants, implicated the ICC in imposing these arrest warrants against Israel, in violation of America’s U.S. political interests. This was backed up by the claim that, because the U.S. and Israel are not members of the ICC—they’re not parties to the Rome Statute setting up the ICC—they’re not subject to its authority, and therefore the ICC and the prosecutor and these judges were overreaching their authority.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, whom Prof. Falk characterizes as “the world’s leading candidate for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.”
Francesca’s recent report really didn’t have very much to do with the ICC, except for that recommendation at the end. But it was a kind of a link to the executive order that gave at least the appearance of being a legal foundation for sanctioning her. Rubio, in his statement, made clear that that was not the only grievance that they had against her. He made a statement that she was maliciously associated with anti-Semitism and did harm to U.S. and Israeli economic and political interests, and in fact, accused her of engaging in economic warfare. It was a quite intemperate statement for a prominent U.S. official to make. And it represented, I think, a long term campaign by Zionist NGOs and by Israel to get rid of her, or at least to discredit her in a kind of distinctive and punitive manner. That was the attempt.
It had the exact reverse effect. Because now she’s, I suppose, the world’s leading candidate for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. And she’s even being mentioned as the ideal candidate to be the first woman Secretary-General of the United Nations. So, it is an interesting polarization between this kind of satanic image of her misdeeds, and the sense of praise for what she has accomplished in the course of being a Special Rapporteur of the UN at a difficult time, when the UN itself has proved to be unable to do anything effective to stop the genocide.
Billington: Right. You yourself wrote an article calling on Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, rather than the sanctions that she had been given by Rubio and the U.S.
Prof. Falk: I also added that a President respectful of the rule of law and international justice, would have requested Rubio’s resignation after making such an outrageous action.
Billington: I was going to add to that there’s a petition now circulating which has well over 300,000 signatures calling on Francesca Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What do you think will be the impact of that, if she actually gets that award or if she gets appointed as the Secretary-General of the UN, as you mentioned?
Prof. Falk: As far as the Nobel Peace Prize is concerned, I’ve tried to warn people not to have the appearance of a campaign on her behalf for the Peace Prize, that will hurt her prospects. I’ve been nominated a few times myself, and I know from the committee in Oslo that they are very put off by the sense that they’re giving the award in response to a campaign on behalf of a candidate. So, I wish this petition wasn’t being circulated because they’re quite capable of reaching their own independent assessment, and they might well react to the feeling that they don’t want to seem to be succumbing to political pressure to give her the award.
Acts Destructive of Justice
Billington: You state in the article that you had in The Nation that the sanctions being imposed are “contrary to international law and morality.” In general, what does this say about the fact that the U.S. role in the world is now increasingly seen as an imposer of sanctions and dictates, rather than any kind of policy for supporting development and progress?
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very concrete instance of punishing a person that should be given an honorific recognition for her bravery and trustworthy reporting under a very difficult situation. So, it’s symbolic of a broader spectrum of acts destructive of justice and world order, of which the U.S. had taken pride in establishing after World War Two. It was established with certain notable deficiencies, but it did respond to public pressure for a war prevention and global security framework that would be more in keeping with the global public interest of peoples, and less an instrument of either capitalist expansion or militarist domination. Unfortunately, after the Cold War, the U.S. chose this path of promoting its national economic and geopolitical interests at the expense of the public good.
Billington: Francesca Albanese was a featured speaker at a meeting that took place in what’s called The Hague Group in Bogotá, Colombia, over this last week. This is a group of over a dozen countries that are led by South Africa and Colombia to address the question of the Palestine genocide and the question of statehood for Palestine. I’d like to read a short excerpt from her presentation there, about which I’d like to hear your comment. She said that “Each state should immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel…. I mean, cutting ties with Israel as a whole…. And to consider first and foremost what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught.” She also said there’s a revolutionary shift going on in the mood of the world. “We are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority,” often called the Global South. “…I say the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics…. Millions are watching, hoping for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us. Principled states must rise to this moment….” And “Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter … as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today, more than ever, neoliberal tyranny.” Do you have anything you’d like to add to that?
A Glimmer of Light in a Dark Sky
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very eloquent and idealistic vision of a different world order, with values that are much more in keeping with the well-being of humanity as a whole and more conducive to the promotion of peace and justice in the world. They do give a kind of a glimmer of light in a dark sky. There have been several such glimmers of light recently. And they do have the potential, far from the certainty, but the potential of a change in the political atmosphere and in the way in which global security and war prevention and development policies are pursued. It involves curtailing the impact of predatory capitalism and militarist geopolitics. That will not happen without overcoming the entrenched commitment of the established order to things as they are. And we have a very unimpressive set of global leaders in the important countries of the world at this time of global challenge.
A more skeptical response to what Francesca has said would be to criticize the short term, performance orientations of the elites of the world, both the corporate elites and the political elites. Corporate elites thinking of the profit, near-term term profits, political elites thinking of their re-election or their legacy, but in a manner that doesn’t address the fundamental issues that confront the world at this time, ranging from climate change to mass poverty, to very severe forms of continuing political violence in many places, and of course, to the centrality of this ongoing genocide that has been a challenge to even the political language that is used by the U.S. government and other supporters of Israel, which present the most transparent genocide as if it were a routine exercise in justifiable self-defense. That involves, I think, one of the worst Orwellian reversals of reality that has occurred in my lifetime. And it is at the cost of this massive, prolonged suffering endured by all Palestinians, but most especially those living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Billington: You mentioned other glimmers of hope of a major change like this. Do you want to comment on any of the other glimmers you were thinking of?
Prof. Falk: One of the other glimmers is the victory of Zoran Mamdani in the New York mayoralty primary, which defied pollsters and political conventional wisdom that a Muslim progressive had no chance politically to prevail. He was outspent 10 to 1. And he evoked this sense, that also Francesca was projecting, that there is another possibility, another set of possibilities for how one copes with the problems of equity, fairness and the issues that are on the top of the political and economic agenda.
What we see in response is the backlash from the darker forces that are bipartisan in character, both the Democratic and Republican establishments. The two-party system wants no part of the political ownership of a man [with] Mamdani’s kind of revolutionary politics. But at least in this arena, one encounters the sense that there could be an alternative. But it’s only a glimmer of light at this point. It has to be reinforced by a popular movement of people and the engagement with the ongoing conflicts, especially Gaza and Ukraine, in ways that bring a more stable future to world politics and allow the focus to be placed more on what people need to lead a decent life, and what the world and the planet needs to be ecologically resilient under growing threats of instability.
Objectives of the Gaza Tribunal
Billington: You are also the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which was founded at a conference in Sarajevo in May. The resolution which was signed there by the founders, including yourself, condemned the failure of the UN, the growing public protests and leading governments, whose actions have thus far not stopped the ongoing genocide by war and starvation of the Palestinian people. What is the purpose of this Tribunal, and what do you think has been the impact in its founding?
Prof. Falk: I was asked to be the president by some sponsors in Türkiye of this undertaking, and they convinced me that it was a worthwhile undertaking. I’m not normally very comfortable in quasi-administrative roles and also not very confident in them, but I was unsuccessful in persuading them to seek an alternative to myself. And I thought it was important. I’ve participated as a judge in past people’s tribunals and found them to be a useful way of narrating a conflict in a manner that is progressive and free from media manipulations and government control and self-censorship and so on.
And in the context of the Gaza situation, the formation of such a tribunal takes place after the formal system exhibited an inability to enforce international law. It did some positive things, such as the International Court of Justice’s response to the South African submission that Israel was, in carrying out its policies in Gaza, was violating the International Convention on Genocide. It was very professional and juridically impressive in responding to that submission by issuing some interim orders that acknowledge the plausibility of alleging genocide, and condemned Israel’s disruption of international delivery of humanitarian assistance.
A mother in Gaza cries for her four-year-old daughter, who lost her life due to starvation and lack of treatment, brought about by Israel’s genocide policy against the Palestinians.
These interim rulings were directed to Israel, but were defied, as expected, and so an enforcement gap was made clear that the ICJ could declare authoritatively the law, but its enforcement, if a state such as Israel refused to voluntarily comply, and was subject to the veto of the only part of the UN system that had enforcement capabilities and authorities, the Security Council, that meant that the UN was paralyzed in dealing with enforcement or accountability or complicity.
The objective of the Gaza People’s Tribunal is to close these gaps, or at least to exert pressure on these gaps, by activating people in civil society to exhibit solidarity initiatives that support the Palestinian struggle, by both placing pressure on governments to stop supplying arms, to cut diplomatic relations, to do various things that would indicate more than a verbal commitment to end this genocide.
It is shameful that the Arab governments that could exert decisive pressure have proved to be passive or even indirectly supportive of Israel’s tactics in Gaza. So, the two main objectives of the Tribunal are stimulating activism by civil society individuals and other collective actors, NGOs and so on. And the second one is to document in an objective and comprehensive way the crimes that have been committed centering on the genocide, which, even if the ICJ eventually comes with a favorable decision, will not be rendered for a couple of years at best.
So, this promises a quicker result and a result guided more by the pursuit of justice than a legalistic conception of wrongdoing. In other words, a formal court is bound by the technical rules of a legal process. And that means impartiality and due process for the accused side. This Tribunal starts with the premise of Israeli guilt, and it makes no attempt at appraising the arguments advanced by Israel in an objective manner. But it does try to treat the evidence available to it as objectively as possible, and to proceed along the line, somewhat similar to what the Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has done in her three genocide reports, to create an archive that is authoritative as to the criminality of the Israeli policies. So, it’s action oriented and archival, stimulated, archivally ambitious, and has involved a good many highly qualified people.
A Jury of Conscience
Billington: You plan a follow-up meeting in October. What are your plans or your expectations for that event?
Prof. Falk: Let me preface this by saying the launch [of the Gaza Tribunal] was in London a few months before the Sarajevo meeting. The Sarajevo meeting tried to assemble a series of reports that addressed these two sets of objectives, and it will be an input into the final session in Istanbul, which will feature a jury of conscience, again trying to distinguish itself from a court of law. It is not. It is motivated by morality as much as by the attempt to identify and apply relevant law. Law is not irrelevant, but it isn’t the controlling criteria of how one assesses behavior in this sort of context, and it tries to be representative of all parts of the world and has members of its broader advisory council that come from different countries. The jury of conscience will also try to be representative and not composed of jurists alone, but of persons who have reputations as moral authority figures.
Billington: You have particularly protested the use by governments and by the press of calling anybody who protests the horror going on in Gaza as “anti-Semitic” or “supporters of terrorism.” What do you think about those repeated accusations?
Prof. Falk: I think they are a shamefully effective means of deflecting attention in the media and in the public from the message and trying to get people to talk about the credibility of the messenger. It somewhat works, reflecting the maxim that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Most people, and even the media, are sufficiently uninformed that they’re easily susceptible to this kind of manipulation. In the case of the use of this so-called weaponization of anti-Semitism against political figures, like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and the three special rapporteurs on Palestine prior to Frances Francesca Albanese, there’s utterly no truth to the accusation that these individuals have any record or attitudes that are hostile to Jews as people. They are hostile to Zionism as an ideology that has made the Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. And that’s something that has also been manipulated in the press to a great degree, where the reality of Israel is fused with the ideology of Zionism.
I grew up in a Jewish home myself in New York City, but in an atmosphere of anti-Zionism. and I guess I’ve maintained that kind of identity throughout my life. I was a close friend of Edward Said, who was one of the principal Palestinian advocates of a just peace and an outcome that recognized the Palestinian rights, but also didn’t favor the forced displacement of Jews that were already in Israel. It did presuppose the dismantling of a Zionist set of rationales for the way in which Israel was governed, which involves, even prior to the genocide, a clear commitment to an apartheid structure, which is also a serious international crime, and was validated by such human rights NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
I also collaborated with Virginia Tilley in a study sponsored by the UN Commission for the Middle East, on how to interpret the allegations of apartheid in terms of Israel’s policies and practices. That’s all part of the pre–October 7th [2023] reality that was effectively erased after the Hamas attack in such a way as to validate this reaction as if it came in a political vacuum—as the UN Secretary-General pointed out, and paid the price of being declared persona non grata in Israel even though he has refrained, as have many high officials in Europe and the UN, from using the G word.
Truth Is Getting Out
Billington: Speaking of the growing Jewish resistance to this Zionist genocidal policy, you probably saw this article by Dr. Omer Bartov, the professor at Brown University, which was published in The New York Times, which we were all quite surprised that The New York Times allowed such a thing to get through their strict restraint on any truth. But anyway, they did run this article, and he pointed out that the Israeli policy is clearly genocide. He said that not only is he Jewish, but he grew up in a Zionist family, that he lived in Israel for a long time, he served in the IDF and that he has spent his life teaching and researching war crimes and the Holocaust, so he recognizes genocide when he sees it, and this is it.
You probably know also that even the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has declared that the building of a so-called “humanitarian city” is nothing but an excuse for building a concentration camp, which, of course, in Israel brings up very powerful images for people who lost many of their family in Nazi concentration camps. Do you think there is a shift going on in getting the truth out, getting this narrative out?
Prof. Falk: Yes. I think there is a normalization of language, which includes even The New York Times being somewhat receptive to using illuminating terminology rather than obfuscating terminology, which they had been using, describing this as a war, or as a “justifiable defensive response” to the isolated attack on October 7th. But you should take note of the fact that today, the lead editorial in TheNew York Times by Brett Stevens, a militant or ultra-Zionist, has the descriptive headline: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide.” It is an intelligent but highly selective way of saying that Israel is engaged in a traditional war scenario, and that bad things happen in wars, but this has nothing to do with trying to kill Palestinians because they’re Palestinians. The casualty totals would be much higher if that was the Israeli objective, he claims. They could kill many more people with the technology that they have and the absence of any meaningful capability to resist, which very seldom is taken note of in the West. This is the most extreme of asymmetric conflicts, where one side is totally vulnerable, and the other side just decides what it wants to destroy and faces no meaningful resistance.
The Fascist Roots of Zionism
Billington: Just the fact that such a headline would be published demonstrates that they’re increasingly frantic about the fact that the world does recognize that this is genocide. So, thou dost protest too much, as they say.
You used the term “political Zionism.” What do you mean by that term?
Prof. Falk: I mean that it is an ideology that started in the 19th Century and was a reaction to European anti-Semitism and a biblically rooted idea that Jews would flourish again if they could recover Palestine and make it into a Jewish promised land. They proceeded, in their early stages, under secular leadership. Very antagonistic actually, to diaspora Jews, while quite pragmatic in their dealing with the Nazi leadership in the early years.
They shared with the Nazis, before the Final Solution was adopted by the Nazis, a shared objective of removing Jews. Zionists wanted to coerce emigration to what was then Palestine, and the early Nazis wanted to exclude as many Jews as possible, a kind of ethnic cleansing, and even made favorable economic arrangements with Zionists to allow those who agreed to emigrate to take their property with them, to liquidate their real property and take the liquid assets with them. So there’s a long collaboration, a kind of ruthless pragmatism.
Zionists were responsible for blowing up a synagogue in Iraq in order to again persuade Jews that they had no future if they didn’t come to Israel. And several of the European countries helped give the Zionist militias weapons and training. So, there was a kind of joint project, orientalist in its character. The residents of Palestine, the Arab residents, were never consulted. This was partly a British colonial policy that wanted to divide and rule Palestine after World War One, the famous Balfour Declaration. Balfour himself, who was Foreign Secretary of the UK, was known to be an anti-Semite and welcomed the idea of Jews migrating to Israel, and supported not a state, but a homeland.
The tactics of political Zionism from the beginning have been to take what they could get at any given time, but not regard it as a satisfaction of their project. In other words, it was the pursuit of so-called salami tactics where you proceed by small steps toward the ultimate objective. In my view, their response to October 7th was their attempt to pursue the end game of the Zionist political project, which the Netanyahu coalition, which came to power several months before October 7th, made rather clear: that their objective was to promote the settler militancy on the West Bank with the objective of annexation, and to secure the erasure of Palestinian political identity and goals.
Netanyahu came before the UN General Assembly several weeks before October 7th and waved a map at the delegates which showed what he called the “new Middle East” with no Palestinian entity acknowledged. Therefore, I think October 7th in the broader context of what was called, even by Washington, the most extreme Israeli government ever to govern, was [used to justify] this kind of onslaught on Gaza as a way of terminating any Palestinian expectations of statehood or of continued resistance.
It’s well known that Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership had several very reliable warnings of the impending Gaza attack, including from Washington, months before the event, and that this was either deliberately ignored, or certainly not responded to with any kind of typical Israeli security preoccupations.
Lord Balfour’s visit to Binyamin, Palestine, in 1925. Sitting from left to right: Vera Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann, Balfour, Nahum Sokolov. Standing: British Mandate officials and PKA officials.
Billington: This all goes back to Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father, who worked with Jabotinsky. That whole history was covered extensively in a book by one of the leading members of your Gaza Tribunal, Avi Shlaim.
Prof. Falk: He’s a professor at Oxford.
Billington: My associate, Harley Schlanger, has written an extensive report on the book by Avi Shlaim, which we published in the Executive Intelligence Review, which goes into that whole history, and touches on the role of Bibi Netanyahu’s father and Jabotinsky and others in doing what you described. So this is very important.
Prof. Falk: Fascism, particularly in Italy, was a powerful influence on the Jabotinsky view, which in a certain sense was realistic in viewing the fact that the Palestinians would not just abandon their own nationalism. And either Israel would have to face a continuing challenge, or it would have to erect an Iron Wall and have the Palestinians effectively behind that wall.
Billington: Right. The resolution of the Gaza Tribunal states that “self-determination is a universal rule not subject to exception and binding on all states.” But obviously this is not being followed, not being honored. How do you account for that and what has to be done?
Prof. Falk: I think that the liberation of the Palestinian people depends on the realization of their basic rights that have long been denied. The aspiration for self-determination has a certain legal and moral foundation, in being endorsed by the UN General Assembly and being the subject of an important General Assembly resolution which talks about cooperation and friendly relations among states, and affirms not only the right of self-determination, but also the right of a people to struggle with weapons if necessary, to achieve these rights. So, there is a right of armed resistance to a situation characterized widely now as colonialism or settler colonialism.
Pictured here, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Betar leaders in Warsaw, Poland, circa 1939. Betar is a right-wing youth movement that arose at that time and adopted special salutes and uniforms influenced by fascism. Bottom left is Menachem Begin, future Prime Minister of Israel.
I think that’s a very important background reality. Of course there is resistance to its fulfillment in various settings, most prominently now in Gaza, but also in Kashmir, Western Sahara and other places in the world. There’s been a lot of discussion of the rights of the people in Chechnya in Russia, and in Xinjiang Province in China; Puerto Rico and Hawaii in the U.S. context. So, there are many unresolved issues of self-determination. It’s also somewhat confused by a second principle in international law, which is that the rights of self-determination cannot be achieved by the coercive fracturing of existing states. That really confuses the issue.
The last thing I would mention or call attention to is that both of the covenants of human rights, which are the basic instruments for the protection and an articulation of human rights, have as their common Article 1 the inalienable right of self-determination of a people. So, it has a real rootedness in the evolution of international law, post 1945.
Are We No Better than Animals?
Billington: On another subject, you have worked with our mutual friend Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder of JUST International, based in Malaysia. Recently, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who just turned 100 years old by the way, a week or so ago, issued a very powerful statement which goes after the question—it’s based a lot on Palestine—but it’s basically going after the collapse of civilization that we’re living through. Let me read a short section from this and get your response. He starts by saying, “For centuries we have been ridding ourselves of barbarism in human society, of injustices, of the oppression of man by man.” He goes on about that, but then he says: “But can we say we are still civilized? Now, over the last three decades especially, we have destroyed most of the ethical values that we had built up. Now we’re seeing an orgy of killing. We’re seeing genocide being perpetrated before our own eyes, where the genocide is actually being promoted and defended, perpetuated by the so-called great leaders of our civilization, by a great nation, the United States of America…. I feel ashamed. We should feel ashamed in the eyes of the animals we consider to be wild. We are worse than them…. I hide my face, I am ashamed. Civilization is no more the norm.” Your thoughts on that?
Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very strong and powerful statement. I had the pleasure of meeting Mahathir some years ago, and he has very strong, impressive convictions, and he’s not afraid to express them in relation to what he feels is the abusive behavior of the West. He’s controversial, of course, in Malaysia itself. He’s harsh toward his own opposition within Malaysia. The present Prime Minister of Malaysia [Anwar Ibrahim] is a former protégé, but also became an adversary of his. So he’s a very interesting figure and one of the few great leaders that is still alive at that age, and active at that age, which I can only envy.
But I think that he overstates to some extent the degree of what was being done before this most recent period, since the end of the Cold War. The 30 years he refers to was also characterized by barbarism of various sorts, not least of which was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—of which this is the 80th anniversary year, and one that was exempt from legal scrutiny because it was perpetrated against an Asian country. If it had been used against, say, European cities, there’s no doubt that they would have been punished as war criminals, the surviving leaders, and the nuclear weapons might well have been prohibited as permissible weaponry, that is now in the possession of at least nine sovereign states that are very reluctant to give them up—give up that weaponry—because it gives them a hegemonic relationship to the non-nuclear countries.
Iran has just recently paid the price of not having nuclear weapons. That Iran war, the 12-day war that supposedly was trying to destroy the enrichment facilities of Iran, was a clear case of aggression under the UN Charter and under disgraceful double standards. Israel is a country that acquired nuclear weapons covertly, with the help of the liberal democracies of the West that championed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. When it comes to Iran, they ignore that much-worse behavior on the part of Israel. This was an issue in the Kennedy Presidency in the early 1960s. So, the idea that the West was somehow not responsible for very destructive and unjust policies during the Cold War era is, I think, somewhat misleading, in the degree to which the Vietnam War was fought in a way that has certain resemblances to what’s happening in Gaza: high technology capabilities being used against a low technology society with no adequate means of defending itself or retaliating.
The apartheid system in South Africa, the vestiges of colonialism—there were many things in the post 1945 period that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that were quite reprehensible from the perspective of law, morality and justice. So, I welcome Mahathir’s statement because of its general sentiments, but I think it overstates the situation that has emerged in the last period.
Viability of a Two-State Solution
Billington: Right. So, as I’m sure you know, on July 28 and 29, the UN General Assembly will be holding a session, delayed from an earlier planned meeting in June which was disrupted by the Iran war. The new session will address the call for a two-state solution for the Middle East. The meeting was called by France and Saudi Arabia. We issued a statement by the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review called “A Two-State Solution, Not a Final Solution.” Of course, we are not the only people to make references to the Nazi regime and their Final Solution to what’s taking place today in Gaza, but it’s worth recalling.
In our proposal, we are calling for what’s called the Oasis Plan. This is a proposal first issued by Lyndon LaRouche in the 1970s. He had been looking at this throughout his life, to create a massive water and power development plan in the region, centered on Gaza, but extending throughout the broader region as the only basis for creating a situation which will actually address the needs of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, based on the concept that only by addressing the lack of water, and creating an abundance of water and energy, can we create the equality needed for a Palestinian state and the Israeli state to coexist. Your thoughts on that?
Prof. Falk: Well, I think it made more sense in the 1970s than it does today, in my judgment, because I don’t see either side agreeing. The one thing the Israelis and Palestinians seem to agree about is the non viability of a two-state solution. The Israelis don’t want Palestinian statehood of any kind. And the Palestinians don’t want to have a Bantustan emerge out of a supposed solution that is drafted without their consent and participation, which has been there a lot from the beginning.
Every step, including the Balfour Declaration, the UN Partition Plan [for Palestine, 1947], and the various negotiations, have all been carried out without meaningful Palestinian participation. To expect the Palestinians to accept a demilitarized state for themselves in collaboration with Israel, which remains a regional superpower, is, again, I think, quite unrealistic.
Israel, unless it sheds its Zionist mantle, is certainly unwilling to demilitarize, and it’s unwilling to have any Palestinian entity legitimately militarized. So, I’m much more sympathetic with an equally difficult resolution to put into practice with the Edward Said vision of a single secular state based on human equality and premised on a thorough commission of reconciliation, which addresses the history of grievances of the Palestinian people. I feel that has at least a glimmer of a chance of making the transition from this horrifying spectacle of one sided genocide, to a sustainable, durable peace.
Billington: The idea of the Oasis Plan— It’s pretty clear that what you just said is true, that as long as you have this genocidal policy being dominant in Israel, nothing’s going to happen of use. But the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference coming up at the UN, to put on the table the fact that there is a solution; that if both sides work together on an actual development policy, what the Pope [Paul VI] once described as “the new name for peace is development,” that if you have a joint plan that addresses the actual needs of transforming the region— Obviously China knows they could get involved with their Belt and Road process, to do the kind of thing they’ve done to transform their deserts into blossoming agricultural regions. They could be part of this. The Belt and Road could be part. And the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference, a discussion about the only real solution that exists.
UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek. Courtesy of the ICJ
Vusimuzi Madonsela (right), South African Ambassador to the Netherlands, and Dr. Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of the Republic of South Africa, addressing the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, Jan. 26, 2024.
Let me add that you brought up the question of reconciliation. I’m sure you know Dr. Naledi Pandor, the former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation in South Africa, who took Israel to the International Court of Justice over the genocide. She has been participating in our Schiller Institute conferences. In an interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in February, she said the following about the Oasis Plan and linked it to the question of South Africa’s history. She said: “I think the Oasis Plan presents a set of very useful proposals that could be looked at by groupings that are in contention as the basis for further discussion, from our own experience as South Africa, having agreed 30 years ago that we would enter into negotiations with those who had oppressed us for many, many decades. We know that once you get around the table, it is the former oppressed who must determine what future they would like to see.”
So, this addresses the question you brought up, but in a way which locates the need for a policy on the table to demonstrate that there are solutions, and that, as Helga has said in her Ten Principles, the fact that the lack of development is the cause of poverty in almost every case, but it is also true that this is due to man. And since it’s due to man, it’s also reversible; it can be corrected. We have to put that into people’s heads, that these are issues that can be resolved. There are solutions. It’s only the lack of will to solve these issues. That has to be the basis for our discussion worldwide. Do you want to say anything more on that?
A Positive Solution Invites Discussion
Prof. Falk: I think that in a situation which I would characterize as desperate, I think that’s a constructive initiative which deserves to be tested. I am a little bit skeptical of whether the elites representing those that will meet at this UN conference will be receptive. But at least, as you suggest, putting a solution on the table invites discussion.
Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader, who has been held as a political prisoner by Israel since 2002.
There’s a second problem of who will decide who represents the Palestinians at that table. There’s a grave doubt as to the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as the appropriate representatives of the Palestinian people at this time. Remember that when the South African elite made its decision to entertain the sort of discussion that former Minister Pandor refers to, they agreed to release Nelson Mandela from prison, and he had a stature that enabled him to provide a legitimate representation. The only possible person that could do that in the Palestinian situation is Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison on multiple criminal charges, which are not thought to be valid. If Israel had any interest in really coming to a mutually beneficial solution, it would at least consider releasing Barghouti from prison. He seems to be the only person capable of unifying Palestinian representation.
Billington: Do you see any glimmer of hope, as the term you used, that in fact, he will be released, perhaps in one of these prisoner exchanges?
Prof. Falk: I think the South African precedent was coupled with a political affirmation that Mandela was released in a context which looked forward to a transformation of the South African governing structure. And I think just releasing Barghouti in a prisoner exchange without endowing him with a show of Israeli confidence that they are prepared to negotiate with him and to respect him, will not be very fruitful.
There’s another Barghouti—it’s a big family—Mustafa Barghouti, who’s an opposition figure living in Palestine, living in the West Bank. But I don’t think he has the same charismatic potential that Marwan Barghouti has. He’s very respected. He has a somewhat similar background, actually, to Mahathir. They were both doctors, medical doctors originally, and went into politics. He’s involved with our Gaza Tribunal. We’ve tried to involve Palestinians who seem to be more representative of their real aspirations than the Ramallah group under Muhammad Mahmoud Abbas, which was a sort of creature of the Oslo diplomacy, given legitimacy by the West, but never by the Palestinians. They’ve collaborated, the Palestinian Authority so-called, has collaborated with Israel and the U.S. in security arrangements on the West Bank. So they’re viewed with considerable suspicion. They’re also extremely anti-Hamas. They were pushed out of Gaza by Hamas. The PLO was quite corrupt there. I don’t know the full merits of the conflict, but it’s quite complicated.
Billington: Right. I appreciate this very much. We will definitely get this discussion widely circulated, especially going into this meeting at the UN on the 28th and 29th of July, which we’re committed to making a turning point, using the Hague Group work in Colombia and the work you’re doing with the Gaza Tribunal and other developments that are taking place. Do you have any sort of final thoughts you’d like to convey to our audience?
Prof. Falk: I think you’ve covered the ground. We didn’t say much about Ukraine, but I think I found it a fruitful exchange.
Billington: Well, we can do another discussion if you’d like to touch on the obviously still very sensitive and very dangerous situation around Ukraine and the question of whether there will actually be a reconciliation between the U.S. and Russia or not. It’s certainly not clear that there will be, given the rather volatile attitude coming from the U.S. Presidency at this point, which seems to change every five minutes. But perhaps we can have another discussion if you’d like to go into the broader issues.
Prof. Falk: Yes. Let’s wait a couple of weeks and see how things work out. It’s possible that the Oasis Plan would have more traction at this point with Ukraine and Russia. Or trilateral, some sort of trilateral adaptation.
Billington: We certainly think that the Russia-China cooperation and how that led into the BRICS and the process which the BRICS represents as an alternative to the horror that’s being implemented by almost the entire Western leadership at this point is extremely important. We don’t want to see this break down into two “blocs.”
We have to figure out a way of getting the Western leaders to recognize their own fate is dependent upon their collaboration with China, especially, and with Russia strategically as well as economically. And if they do recognize that before the whole Western financial system collapses, as it’s heading right now, then we have a chance of a new global architecture which recognizes both the security and the development of every single country—which is, obviously, what you and what Francesca Albanese and others are promoting.
The point is that we have to change the direction of civilization as a whole if we’re going to get out of this unfortunate rapid descent into the threat of global war and even a nuclear war.
Prof. Falk: I completely share that view.
Billington: So, yes, let’s consider a second discussion, which could look broader. And thank you very much for this.
[Prefatory Note: The post below is in two parts, both interviews published in the Italian weekly, Il Manifesto. The first addresses the Gaza dimension of the current Palestinian ordeal now extended to the West Bank and drawing worldwide negative attention by induced mass hunger and water scarcity. These severe civilian hardships resulting from Israeli criminality have given rise to a variety of protest activities, governmental denunciations, yet continue to gain unconditional support by the United States and the UK, while drawing some mild critical drawbacks from formerly supportive France, Canada, and Germany but without stoppage of trade or flows of vital supplies to Israel. The second part in the form of an early comment on the short Iran War, initiated by Israel, joined by the US to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s nuclear sites, dramatized by the US reliance on ‘blockbuster bombs’ of 30,000 pounds to destroy nuclear facilities built deep underground. Their initial US and Israeli claims of victorious results have been watered down by growing doubts of how much damage was actually done to Iran’s nuclear attacks. A further setback for the attackers is the widespread speculation that Iran might now decide to develop nuclear weapons unless Israel would agree, which seems highly doubtful, to dismantle their nuclear arsenal and agree to a nuclear-free monitored Middle East. These texts are slightly modified for updating and clarity.]
Patricia Lambroso Interview Questions, Richard Falk Responses, Il Manifesto (5/20/25)
1. The Gaza Peoples Tribunal (civil society tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, political leaders, governments, protest activism around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?
Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders and supported by the liberal democracies of the West. The ICJ accepted jurisdiction to address tje submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as amounting to genocide. The ICJ then also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the international delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked all UN enforcement and ceasefire efforts by exercising its right of veto. It is more accurate to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council each of whom was vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings. The ICJ should not be blamed, it should instead be vested with enforcement powers to ensure the effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled and shaped by the winners of World War II in 1945 to preserve their habitual entitlement that gave precedence to strategic interests when challenged by international law.
The ICJ also issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza that is legally regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[‘Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”’] The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War justified terminating Israel’s administrative authority and physical presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza, and within no more than a year. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligations by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment, and not to view implementation with the ruling as merely ‘advisory.’ This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack.
Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, and the ICC unlike the ICJ is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil.
Attention should also be given to an ‘Accountability Gap’ of impunity that is supplementary to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC for advocating proceedings allegedly exceeding the lawful authority of the tribunal. It simultaneously imposed sanctions on the four ICC judges that facilitated the arrest of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants. Beyond this the US officially threatened future action in the event of any new effort to take action contrary to the political and economic interests of the US, Israel, and other allies.
Also relevant for analyzing the UN disappointing response to Israel’s prolonged genocide is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC. These tribunals have thus far refrained from directly examining allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. It is up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement. In early July 2025 the UN Special Rapporteur of Occupied Palestine, Francesco Albanese, was also sanctioned for her attribution of legal responsibility to corporations for continuing their profitable relations with Israel in the face of genocide. She accompanied this assessment with a recommendation that the ICC initiate investigations with an eye toward prosecutions. Known as a dedicated and brave human rights defender, the sanctions generated widespread protests, including calls for awarding Albanese the Nobel Peace Prize and demands that the sanctioning Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, resign. This is highly unlikely to happen so long as the US treats its alliance with Israel as superior to its obligations as a law-abiding member of international society.
It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct and a settler colonial occupation making Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is important. It exerts often unacknowledged influences on many governments, the tone and substance of media coverage, and breadth and depth of civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide, as has been the experience of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more 21 months.
Disregarding international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings repudiated, the outcomes of legal controversy can exert a defining influence on public perceptions of legitimacy, that is, in the dynamics of configuring of the legal and moral high ground in an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of ‘political realists’ who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, relative military capabilities are no longer reliable predictors of which side will prevail in an armed political struggle. This should have been the core message derived by the United States from the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet went on to lose the war. This pattern was repeated in most colonial wars fought during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to many 21st century conflict situations, especially in nationalist resistance to foreign intervention, regime change and state rebuilding projects, settler colonial stabilization repressive policies and practices.
The Gaza Peoples Tribunal was formed in2024 with this background in mind. It was conceived exclusively as an initiative of global civil society with the dual objectives of helping swing the balance in the Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestine as well as encourage nonviolent solidarity initiative supportive of the Palestinian struggle. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after the attack on Israeli border villages on October 7, resisted in the months that followed repeated calls for an Israeli ceasefire. Israel also rejected the option of complying with international law defying ICJ and ICC rulings. Such postures amid an r extremely one-sided conflict gave rise to an intensifying moral outrage among the peoples of the world, and eventually among more and more governments, especially in the Global South. The GPT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the relevance of international law and world politics in its several dimensions bearing on the situation in Gaza. The compilation of testimony and documentation will be presented to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons of diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written short substantive reports. The distinctiveness of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal (as compared to the ICJ and ICC) is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics. GPT makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors of opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. In past peoples tribunals when such a defendant actor is invited to present a defense, it has always been rejected, presumably because the overall outcome of the judicial process is predetermined.
The GPT does not attempt to mimic judicial tribunals that operate technically and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, seeking to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War. GPT prides itself on being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to stimulate solidarity on the level of action. The GPT relies on a variety of civil society initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also supports a range of nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participants; arms, trade, and investment embargoes; protest activity of all varieties, including act of civil disobedience expressive of the conscience of engaged citizens.
2. The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust is weaponized by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?
Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There are two principal lines of explanation. The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, are acutely sensitive to this allegation. The governments and citizenry of such countries have unfortunately adopted the view that to overcome the disgraces of their past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the ‘never again’ renunciation of genocide pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim.
The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy and Western civilizational superiority, a reenactment of the Crusades under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is situated on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect enacting ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington.’ In this sense, the real ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the regional encroachment of the white and secular West. For opposite reasons to the Western alliance with Israel, Iran regards Israel as its principal adversary.
3. Trumptouring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?
Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May visit to the Gulf States has had adverse consequences for Gaza, but their exact nature remains obscure beyond giving Israel further time to impose its will on the helpless Palestinian civilian population. On one side, it could have been the first stage of a more transactional US relationship with Israel than the kind of unconditional support given during the Biden presidency.
In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might have resulted in a greater willingness to forego the dangerous attack on Iran, and a greater readiness to seek a negotiated solution to Western objections to their nuclear program. Such a course of action would been a challenge to Netanyahu’s Israel. It might even have shaken Israel confidence in receiving unlimited support for their preferred endgame scenarios in Gaza. It might also encourage Netanyahu to lend support, which he has recently done, to Trump’s patently surreal candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, supposedly among his narcissistic phantasies, and concretely allow Israel to get on with the genocidal assault on Gaza, and bury once and for all the zombie two-state endgame that while delusional, subverts Israel’s manifest ambition to terminate the Zionist Project triumphalist solution with a single Israeli one-state incorporating the whole of mandate Palestine.
In retrospect, judging by what has happened since, the trip to the Middle East seems to have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with the Gulf monarchies and yet give Netanyahu all the support that he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders share Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas for the sake of their repressive stability. Many of these Arab regimes might in the future be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a common counter-terrorism orientation. This posture might prove compatible with Israel’s coerced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, persons to be ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where the hope is that in time they will give up their dreams of liberating Palestine.
Israel has in recent months increasingly lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza to cruel extremes of starvation and by making aid distribution sites into death traps. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including an increasing proportion of citizenries of the once liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip momentarily sidelining Israel diplomatically, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of Gideon’s Chariot, the name given Israel’s latest military operation in Gaza has not led to a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations. It is uncertain at this time whether maintaining harmony with Israel, despite the continuing genocide, strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that these demeaning ties with Israel, including complicity with Israel’s resolve to control ‘the day after negotiations’ will continue come what may in Gaza, a sad commentary on the suppression of liberal values whenever upholding the rule of law and minimal morality stand in the way of ideological and strategic goals, including civilizational unity. With the political advent of MAGA Trumpism liberal pretensions within the US have been buried as deep underground as Iran’s nuclear sites and seemingly as indestructible.
R. Falk Comment for Il Manifesto on US Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities 6/22/25, in response to request by Patricia Lombroso
Once again, the world is moving once again closer to the brink of major war in the Middle East, with Israel doing most of the dirty work relative to Western post-colonial imperialism under the joint Israel/US auspices. The US actively joined Israel’s unprovoked aggression to the extent that Israel needed its help to complete a military operation against Iran’s nuclear sites. The US and Europe keep continuing to evade scrutinizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and give Israel a totally free hand of impunity to embark upon either the mass forced departure of Palestinian from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. even from pre-1967 Israel itself, or a plan B of constructing death camps in the devastated city of Rafah to confine Palestinian survivors in Gaza. The immoral audacity of Israel is exhibited by naming such morbid arrangements as constituting ‘a humanitarian city.’
To complete the mission of destroying or significantly delaying the completion of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities, Israel needed more than US complicity as it lacked blockbuster bombs and B-2 bombers (alone capable of delivering such massive bombs) to destroy or heavily damage Iranian deep underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz, and its surface nuclear site at Isfahan. It remains undetermined whether Israel used the pretext of a nuclear threat posed by Iran as a justification for its post-October 7 policy of mounting devastating military attacks throughout the region to destroy hostile movements and weaken potential adversary states such as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. In the Iran unprovoked attacks, part of the incentive for striking in June 2025 was undoubtedly to divert attention from the growing international opposition from its continuing genocidal policies in Gaza, most recently including luring starving Palestinians to supposed humanitarian food distribution sites, which acted as horrifying death traps.
An irony is that these June 21 US attacks on three main nuclear facilities gave Iran an airtight international law argument for the validation of claims to retaliate by relying upon its right of self-defense against the prior Israel and United States acts of aggression that violated Iran’s territorial sovereignty. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, vowed to retaliate and did so to a limited extent that penetrated Israel’s layered defenses sufficiently to discredit its claims of invulnerability to air and missile attack. It remains uncertain whether Khamenei’s warning will be fully carried out at some future time in the event that the present ceasefire arrangement lapses, Israel again provokes, and combat resumes.
As a result, the threat of war between Iran and Israel as supported strongly by the US and rather weakly by the European Union casts a dark shadow of potential war throughout the region at this time. The outbreak of war probably depends on whether Iran is perceived to possess deterrent capabilities taking the form of launching a sufficiently effective attack on US strategic assets, especially against its minimally defended numerous military bases spread around the region. Prior to the ceasefire the Iranian response was measured and cautious, designed to demonstrate that it possessed the military capabilities to inflict heave damage on any adversary in the future. Iran’s show of force was undertaken despite a near certain expectation of an even a more devastating US attack. Such a response would likely be accompanied by a direct and explicit promotion of regime change in Tehran promoted by mobilizing internal opposition forces, encouraged by pledges of substantial external material encouragement, and even carrying out an assassination of Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khamenei. It is quite possible that Israel will keep pushing tactics designed to promote Iranian regime change although on an ambiguous basis of deniability and covert support for the internal Iranian opposition.
A political complexity facing Iran from a legal perspective arises from the reality that US strategic targets in the region are concentrated in Arab countries currently at peace with Iran. The governments of such states would have a self-defense claim against Iran for forcibly violating their territorial sovereignty. It could also lead to questions in the US about the costs of maintaining its Middle Eastern force structure. It also could lead Arab government to question whether their security and stability is being reliably upheld by the acceptance of visible American military assets on their sovereign territory. Such questioning would almost certainly accompany a Second Arab Spring in the region should it take place.
Whether the world would continue to stand aside while the US and Israel, in apocalyptic interaction with Iran, plunge the world into a new world war is uncertain. This uncertainty exists despite the likely results of threats and even uses weapons of mass destruction. With Trump and Netanyahu calling the shots, there is the prospect of a dramatic further expansion of the combat zone, with few policy guard rails to discourage nuclear threats and their implementation. There is much public pressure in the US to wage wars of choice in a politically acceptable manner that avoids ‘boots on the ground’ so as to minimize American casualties, thereby weakening citizen opposition to wars disconnected with direct threats to national sovereignty. This option of relying on missiles, bombers, drones has made it tempting for the US/Israel leadership to gamble on mounting a credible threat to secure its desired outcome in Iran even, if necessary, by demonstrating the willingness to use nuclear weapons if needed to achieve its strategic objectives. Stumbling into an unwanted nuclear Armageddon may not be expected by war hawks, and certainly not wished for, but the stage is being set for such a catastrophic future. As scholarship has shown, the world was extremely lucky to escape nuclear war back in 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might not be as lucky this time when much less prudent leaders than Kennedy and Khruschev are in control of warmaking by the antagonistic governments of current geopolitical actors (US, China, Russia).
We should not forget that while this Iranian drama plays out, Israel is freed from media and governmental scrutiny as its war machine speeds up the Zionist master plan of completing the work of Palestinian erasure, Israeli leaders have been increasingly emboldened to proclaim their preferred solution to the conflict by way of a one supremist Jewish state that has now become a de facto political reality. It remains somewhat obscured by the remarkable continuing Palestinian resilience and resistance. Israel has made no secret of its priority as a sequel to genocide, which is the forced disposition of Palestinians living under occupation as a repetition of earlier instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Nakba, 1948; Naksa, 1967) or its grisly alternative of confining Palestinians to a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ currently under construction. The Trump presidency has given many blessings to this Israeli vision of victory over the struggle of Palestinians to sustain their struggle no matter the extremity of the human suffering.
Whether Israel has been decisively weakened by the steady erosion of its legitimacy through its defiance of the most basic norms of international law, by repeated condemnations in sharply worded UN General Assembly resolutions reflecting the views of a majority of the world’s people and governments, and by a hostile turn of world public opinion remains to be seen. It will also be reflected on how civil society in the West responds, facing at present repression at home and impunity-free defiance by Israel.
A decisive question for those seeking a denuclearized Middle East is when will the awkward issue of dismantling Israel’s long hidden nuclear weapons arsenal is at last put on the diplomatic agenda for all to see. It has been one of the geopolitical triumphs of the US and Europe to keep Israel’s opposition to a nuclear-free Middle East from affecting the approach to regional stability and world peace. The major Arab countries and Iran have long favored regional denuclearization, but such a goal has been effectively thwarted by Israel and its closest allies.
[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of an interview with Lawrence Davidson, Stephen Zunes, and myself on the wider meanings to be attributed to the aggressive attack of June 13, 2023 by Israel and the US on Iran’s nuclear sites in response to contested claims by Israel of a rising Iranian threat of crossing the line, and becoming a nuclear weapons-possessing state. This latter claim was initially denied by Tulsi Gabbard the US Director of National Intelligence, but altered after being overridden by the White House and Pentagon in explaining their partnering with Israel in the Iran War. Under prodding from Trump a ceasefire was established and so far respected by Israel and Iran with warnings from both governments that if conditions change, a resumption of hostilities will occur. On the Israeli side it was never clear whether additional to the priority of destroying Iran’s nuclear program, it was also seizing the opportunity to promote and assist a movement for regime change from within. Iranians seem divided as to whether the Tehran government enjoyed widespread support during the attack or whether secular opposition forces in Iran were encouraged to renew their attempt to escalate opposition. The text below was published by CounterPunch on July 1 as edited by Daniel Falcone, a highly respected independent journalist.]
Hegemony, Escalation & Resistance: US Foreign Policy Toward Iran
A Conversation with Leading Analysts
In this latest and extensive discussion on US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, CounterPunchfeatures international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson, and legal expert and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk, to explain the fundamental dynamics of US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Trump administration.
This conversation addresses several key themes, including: the continuity of US imperialism in the region, the strategic use of Israel as a proxy power, the decline of democratic accountability in war-making decisions, the erosion of international law and human rights discourse, the challenges facing civil society in resisting militarism, and the need to construct a more ethical and consistent framework for evaluating foreign policy.
Daniel Falcone: Can you explain the ways that Trump and American foreign policy toward the Middle East and Iran has continued its colonial path in distributing hard and soft power to the region? What might escalation look like?
Lawrence Davidson: Despite the isolationist mood of a segment of Trump’s supporters, the assumption among most of the “ruling economic class” is still that the U.S. must assert control over markets and resources. Thus, there is no reason to expect a significant diminishment in overseas adventures (though as explained below, how these are prioritized in the U.S. is a function of lobby power).
Indeed, Trump’s rather disgusting mimicking of Mussolini and Hitler by asserting unilateral claims to the Panama Canal, Greenland and even Canada is just a modern twist, albeit an embarrassing one, on U.S. colonialism.
Stephen Zunes: The bombing of Iran is the logical extension of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy which essentially made the case that the United States would not tolerate regional powers challenging its hegemony in important regions like the oil-rich Middle East. After the overthrow of Saddam in Iraq in the 2003 U.S. invasion and the ouster of Assad in Syria by his own people last year, Iran is the only recognized state to resist effective U.S. control of the entire region.
When we think of the obsession U.S. policy makers have had with Cuba for the past 65 years and with Nicaragua and Chile in previous decades due to their resistance to U.S. domination, it’s not surprising that a large, relatively powerful, and resource-rich country like Iran would become such a focus. And, given the reactionary and authoritarian nature of the regime, its isolation in the region, and its unpopularity among its own people, it has become a perfect foil.
Let’s remember that Trump was never antiwar; he just opposed other people’s wars. He has always believed in war making to advance U.S. hegemony. His claims of being antiwar were as disingenuous as his claims he would stand up against Wall Street—he recognized that it was the best way to win over white working-class voters who had seen how Democratic hawks like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden supported sending their kids to die in Middle Eastern conflicts.
Israel and its supporters are useful allies in implementing this policy, but they are not the source of it. Given the Iraq debacle, Israel has been utilized as a surrogate in a manner similar to the ways in which the U.S. tried to use the Shah in the 1970s, advancing U.S. interests through wars without sacrificing American lives. Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran make it so the United States only needs to intervene directly in extraordinary circumstances, such as in delivering 30,000-pound bombs safely from a high altitude.
As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”—a disturbing description in that it conjures up how, during the Middle Ages and other times in European history, the ruling class used some Jews to do the “dirty work” (i.e., money-lenders, tax collectors) so they could later be scapegoated rather than allow the masses to go after those who really had the power. Using Israel to attack the West’s enemies in the Middle East follows this pattern. Already, we are hearing some war critics insist that “the Zionists” are somehow forcing an otherwise reluctant United States and Europe to support wars of aggression rather than recognizing Israel’s role as that of a proxy for Western imperialism, a chorus which will likely increase should the United States be dragged down in an ongoing military conflict with Iran.
Washington has long acknowledged Israel’s role of a surrogate. President Biden has stated that “If it weren’t for Israel, we’d have to invent them.” Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig referred to Israel as our “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
If the goal was simply to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which was the focus of the Obama administration, Trump would not have abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA, or “the Iran nuclear deal.”) By pulling out and reimposing sanctions, Trump effectively provoked Iran into enriching uranium to a degree that could someday potentially lead to weaponization and thereby provide a pretext for war. The actual goal, therefore, has been to weaken Iran as much as possible, and Israel was quite willing for its own reasons to play along as well. Indeed, Israeli air strikes have gone well beyond targets related to its nuclear program and Washington has supported them in doing so.
I met with then-Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Tehran in 2019. He explained how it took nearly a decade of posturing and two years of intense negotiations to create the JCPOA, signed by seven governments and endorsed by the United Nations. He noted how he met with then-Secretary of State John Kerry no less than 50 times to go over the draft line by line. The idea that Trump could impose an even more restrictive agreement simply by demanding it was at best naïve and more likely just an excuse to go to war. Indeed, nuclear talks had resumed and were ongoing when the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Iran began. Neither the United States nor Israel wanted them to succeed.
The U.S. bombing of Iran, therefore, is not ultimately about nuclear policy or about Israel. It’s about hegemony. Thus, there is a serious risk of escalation. The United States has 40,000 troops within a couple hundred miles of Iran, easily within range of not just Iranian missiles, but drones and other weaponry. Iranian proxy militia in Iran could target U.S. bases.
The U.S. Navy is just off the Iranian coast, which could also be targeted, and the Iranians could attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, crippling the world oil supply and threatening the global economy. Trump, meanwhile, explicitly threatened to unleash “a tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days” if Iran retaliates. It’s possible that Iran’s military capabilities have been damaged enough to limit their response, but it is hard to imagine that Saturday’s night air strikes are the end of U.S.-Iranian fighting.
Richard Falk: To gain perspective on the present alarming situation, I begin my response by taking note of the US foreign policy response to the Suez Operation of Israel, UK, and France during the Eisenhower presidency in 1956. This was both the first, last, and only occasion on which the US Government adopted a position that distanced itself from a colonialist initiative in the Middle East or anywhere. It was represented the only foreign policy challenge in which the US gave priority to its legal commitment to uphold the UN Charter even when its constraints were inconsistent with its geopolitical alignments both with its NATO partners and Israel since the end of World War II and remains so fifty years later. It was particularly impressive at the time because Nasser’s Egypt was hostile to the West and a harsh critic of Israel statehood at the expense of Palestine, and beyond all this was on friendly terms with the Soviet Union at a time of rising Cold War tensions.
In a superficial sense, the US response to the Suez Operation demanding withdrawal from Egyptian territory was consistent with its leadership in the UN after North Korea attacked South Korea or at least seemed so at the outset of the Korean War as the defense of South Korea was given legal authorization by the UN, including the Security Council. This was only possible because the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN at the time because of its refusal to seat China’s Peoples Republic as representing China, and could not cast its veto to block UN support for South Korea. The Soviet Union learned its lesson, returned to the Security Council, and never again boycotted the Organization. Yet the Korean precedent is quite different as the US tends to resort to a legalistic approach whenever its adversaries violate Charter norms on the use of international force, and no time else. North Korea as a hard-core Communist country was an adversary and for this reason prappeals to the UN appeals by the West, similar to the US immediate reaction to the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. Both in the Korean and Ukrainian wars recourse to force was provoked by the West-oriented governments, especially the US, but covered up by influential international media platforms.
It is notable that the deep state, and its visible manifestations in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington think tanks, faulted this US response in 1956 because it mistakenly adhered to international law at the cost of weakening its alliance relations, which was interpreted to mean weakening strategic national interests that were associated with the central issue of unconditionally opposing the Soviet Union and all direct and indirect extensions of its influence beyond its geopolitical borders. This post-mortem critique of US statecraft prevailed, and the US Government never again sacrificed its strategic interests out of deference to international law or the UN in the Middle East, or elsewhere. In the early stages of Israel’s existence it meant balancing relations with Israel as a settler colonial exception to decolonizing historical worldwide trends against the pragmatic priority of securing for the West assured access to Gulf oil at stable prices, which meant a maximum effort to minimize Soviet influence even at the risk of major warfare and also a maximum effort to avoid antagonizing the anti-Israeli stance of Arab governments during the remainder of the 20th century.
Long before the Suez Crisis the colonialist penetration of the region was introduced in a somewhat disguised Orientalist form by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British Foreign Secretary pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine without even a pretense of consultation with the resident Arab population of post-Ottoman Palestine. The Balfour Declaration represented an expression of overt colonialist arrogance to solve European problems associated with antisemitism at the sacrifice of Palestinian rights of self-determination undertaken without any show of concerns about the impassioned grander ambitions of the Zionist Movement that went far beyond establishing a non-governing homeland in a foreign sovereign state even at this early stage. British motivations included a typical application of the divide and rule tactics of colonial governance through encouraging Jewish immigration as a check on rising Palestinian nationalism. It backfired as anti-colonial nationalism flourished, the Zionist Movement shifted its focus from gratitude to Balfour to the adoption of armed struggle against the British colonial administration in Palestine. The legacy of these several varieties of colonialism policy was to inflict on post-1945 Middle East life a continuous series of wars, prolonged tensions that solidified Israeli autocratic rule dependent on the US, and worst of all, the embodiment of the Zionist domination of the Israeli state which entailed systemic human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, culminating in apartheid and genocide, and the establishment of a sophisticated and ruthless settler colonial state that made Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland, victimized by a lethal fusion of apartheid and genocide.
This balancing of strategic interests was tested, and reaffirmed in the context of the 1967 War in which Israel lost its identity as a strategic burden worth protecting for a variety of political reasons to become a highly valued partner in ensuring Western control of the region despite the formal independence achieved by Arab national movements in the MENA region that included the North African states. From this time forward to the present the US never challenged Israel’s use of force in the region, including its flagrant violations of the Geneva Conventions in its administration of the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza occupied by force during the 1967 War. There was a naive attempt to find a solution to the Israel/Palestinian conflict by way of the framework set forth in Security Council Resolution 242 adopted shortly after the war end, which wrongly anticipated Isreal’s early withdrawal from these Palestinian territories after minor border adjustments. As we now know more than half a century later this withdrawal never happened and was probably never contemplated by the Zionist leadership that held sway in Tel Aviv. Given this unfinished nature of the expansionist Israeli agenda as marching in lockstep with the imperial nature of the US approach to the Middle East.
The result was a gradual normalization of these realities that achieved a bipartisan consensus second in solidity only to the anti-Communism of the Cold War. In effect, the US became the replacement for the UK and France colonial management of Western political and economic interest in the Middle East, whose policies were increasingly at odds with support for international law, UN majority sentiments, and the essential decolonizing ethos of national self-determination. The growing dependence of Gulf Arab governments on stabilizing relations with the US became evident in the aftermath of the 1973 War in which the temporary prohibition of oil sales to the West gave rise to long lines at US gas stations and reactive scenarios of US intervention dramatized on the cover of a leading national magazine with an image of American commandos parachuting in Gulf airspace to take over the production and distribution of oil and natural gas to the West. Subsequently, the leading Arab governments and the US, and even Israel, informally made a mutual accommodation, acknowledging a Palestinian right to statehood, but turning a blind eye to Israel occupation settlement policies designed to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, dismissed by Palestinian liberation politics as ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ or a new version of South African bantustans.
Daniel Falcone: What do you foresee the role of civil society and intergovernmental organizations in the coming days and weeks regarding Iran?
Lawrence Davidson: There will be some protests and much analysis. However, it may be that the die is cast. It will be a hard sell to make international law and human rights effective guides for state behavior. If the historical record is predictive, they will not again serve as guides until we experience some sort of sobering catastrophe.
As to Iran specifically, its war of attrition with Israel will continue. Despite the spin of U.S. reporting, Israel will be the first to face a real crisis. This will force the U.S. back into the war–in order to halt Iranian attacks. The Zionist lobby will insist on this. The Zionists will not draw any of the obvious lessons from the Iranian attacks.
Stephen Zunes: Unlike the Bush administration and its allies in the media, who put great effort into convincing Americans to support the war on Iraq, Trump has put little energy into convincing Americans to support war on Iran. His speech Saturday evening seemed largely improvised and lasted only four minutes. It’s as if the U.S. has become so deindustrialized they can’t even manufacture consent anymore.
On the positive side, polls prior to the U.S. bombing showed overwhelming majorities opposing the United States entering the war, with barely 15% supporting it. Unlike the first couple years of the Vietnam War and the first several months of the Iraq War, we don’t have to work to get most Americans on our side. They already are. Even some pro-Israel groups (i.e., J Street, New Jewish Narrative) have come out against war with Iran, demonstrating there are divisions even among Zionists.
Unfortunately, American civil society is badly distracted simply in defending itself from an increasingly authoritarian state and the havoc it has unleashed against minorities, immigrants, education, the environment, and government itself. Mobilizing against a war, particularly one that does not involve American ground troops, in the face of all the other political crises could be challenging. Furthermore, unlike the 1980s when activists were inspired to defend a promising if imperfect socialist experiment in Nicaragua against a U.S. assault, Iran is a decidedly reactionary regime which most of its own people would like to see toppled (albeit not by a foreign power).
Little can be expected from intergovernmental organizations either. There is obviously the threat of a U.S. veto of anything the UN Security Council would try to offer. More generally, Iran is seen in the region and beyond as a something of a pariah state, so few nations, particularly in the West, can be expected to stick their necks out in defense of international law, even if Iran’s grievances are valid.
Richard Falk: If interpreting this question as pertaining to Europe and North America, as well as Israel and Palestine, it is anticipated that anti-war civil society organizations will be very active in opposing the attacks on Iran’s nuclear program and its facilities devoted to enrichment of uranium. If the war goals are extended to regime change by Israel and supported by the US such opposition might be expected to grow. Trump’s foreign policy identity was established by opposition to any future US involvement in ‘forever wars’ and state-building undertakings (that failed at great expense most spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan) by invoking a neo-isolationist foreign policy sloganized as ‘America First,’ while being sustained by militarist domestic rule and neo-fascist ideology incorporating unconditional support for whatever Israel undertakes, however, unlawful, cruel, and risky.
In the context of the evolving unprovoked aggressive war against Iran, civil society and the UN are confronted by an almost total inversion of the posture taken in the Suez Crisis. With respect to Iran, the violation of UN Charter red lines designed to uphold war prevention commitments, the US and the West dismissive attitude toward the relevance of international law in the event of recourse to non-defensive warmaking. Here the rationalization for Israel’s aggression, addressed sympathetically in Western media, is based on alleged threat perception relating to an apprehended Iranian possession of nuclear warheads. A more reasonable view of the nuclear dimension of national security would situate the threat on Israel’s side of the bright red line.
After all Israel has a covertly acquired nuclear weapons arsenal of 300-400 warheads as facilitated by Western secret assistance and as purged from the periodic nonproliferation review program agendas. While Iran is a generally complying party to the NPT Israel has never joined, and has rejected efforts to establish a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, a proposal ardently supported in the past by both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Sich a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East was repeated rejected by Israel and its Western backers. It would at least readjust the international debate if NGOs and the UN brought these realities into the light of day. As it is, the nuclear path chosen by North Korea would serve as a national security tutorial on the benefits of proliferation in the Nuclear Age. Despite hostility to North Korea and its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, its nuclear program and nuclear weapons arsenal were never attacked. In contrast, Libya, Ukraine, and now Iran have been presumably attacked because they lacked a nuclear retaliatory capability. The lessons to be drawn are ominous.
Beyond the nuclear dimension, it would be important to understand that US support for Israel in relation to Iran is partly based on a racist containment rationale that carried into practice Samuel Huntington’s 1990s anticipation of a ‘clash of civilizations’ along the faultlines of the Middle East separating Islam from the white West. From this perspective Israel is integral to Western post-colonial imperialism, manning the frontline of Islamic containment, and doing the dirty work of the West backed up by the US to the extent necessary. Iran to an extent conspired by vowing to destroy Zionist governance in Israel and encouraging street chants along the lines of ‘death to Israel, death to America.’
Daniel Falcone: To what extent does domestic political pressure, such as lobbying from interest groups or bipartisan consensus, limit the critical reassessments of the US war machine?
Lawrence Davidson: I don’t think that the elected leaders of the U.S. consciously say to themselves, “We are colonialists and that is our path.” True, they are racists: personified in a series of recent elected leaders such as Reagan, the Bush boys, Biden and now Trump. But remember in many ways Trump and the others are “us.”
After all, these horrific “leaders” were all elected by an appreciable subset of the US population. But once elected they were all enveloped in a system wherein policy is the product of dominant interest groups. The most dominant one, in terms of foreign policy, is the Zionists.
It has been over 80 years since the U.S. government as such has overseen its own Middle East policy, The Zionist lobby is in charge, because that is how our modern system works. The same special interest domination is to be found in the foreign policy toward Cuba, and, for that matter, the domestic policy toward gun control, abortion, etc. Each has its own dominant lobby. Want to change policy? Well, it is insufficient to change the leader or the party. One must destroy the relevant special interest.
Stephen Zunes: When U.S. intelligence reports reiterated that Iran was not in fact working to building nuclear weapons, instead of taking the Bush administration approach of rewriting the intelligence to conform with his policy, Trump simply insisted that it was wrong. He even repeated the long-bunked argument that Iran was responsible for a thousand American deaths in Iraq. There hasn’t, therefore, been much pressure from the military and traditional national security establishment to go war. Unfortunately, few Democratic leaders in Congress have challenged the Trump administration’s talking points either.
As with Israel/Palestine, there is a huge gap between the views of Democratic voters and their elected officials. Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other Democratic leaders came out in support of Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, insisting it was for “self-defense.” Their repeated mantra that “Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon” without simultaneously demanding a return to the JCPOA would seem to indicate an openness to military solutions over diplomatic ones, apparently believing that Obama’s approach (a binding international treaty Iran already agreed to that would make it physically impossible for Iran to ever build a nuclear weapon) is inadequate while Trump’s approach (make war, even if it doesn’t actually prevent them from doing so) is somehow more valid.
Given how most Congressional Democrats have had no problem with Netanyahu’s criminal warmaking in Gaza, it’s not surprising that Trump thought he could get away with launching an illegal war as well. Fortunately, he is getting some pushback from even the more hawkish Democrats, though primarily as a result of his refusal to abide by the War Powers Act, or even the U.S. Constitution, in ordering the attack without the required consent or even notification of Congress. It is questionable whether Congress will follow through with any concrete action, such as impeachment, which would be quite appropriate.
Certainly, AIPAC and some other pro-Israel groups, including rightwing Christian evangelicals, have been pressuring for war with Iran for years, but their clout primarily has been with Congress, not the executive branch, and Congress has largely been frozen out of the decisions regarding Iran. There is little indication that they were decisive in Trump’s decision to join the war. Meanwhile, the calls and emails to Congress this past week have been overwhelmingly negative, serving as a reminder of the public mood and potentially laying the groundwork for a more proactive Congress on foreign affairs in the face of years of consolidation of power in the executive branch.
Richard Falk: There is a rather unnoticed paradox that underlies US foreign policy in the Trump Era. On the one side Trump’s coercive maneuvers are opening the gates to the collapse of democracy and the onset of an American variant of fascism. On a second side, Trump as the overt and in-your-face autocrat seems captive to Zionist pressures as mounted by well-funded pro-Israeli lobbying by AIPAC, by the distinct worldview of Christian Evangelists that fuses unconditional support for Israel with exclusionist antisemitic motivations similar to the attitudes that underlay the Balfour Declaration, and by far right politics that admired Israeli Prussianism while demeaning the Global South. On a third side, private sector profitability among arms producers benefits from US engagement in foreign wars and regime change undertakings are seen as opportunities rather than costly misadventures. On a fourth side, group think in foreign policy advisory elites and the Potomac River think tanks exclude from their ranks even realist voices such as those of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt who counsel prudence and a more nationalist and restrained conception of foreign policy. These factors in various ways obstruct critical reassessments of US militarist foreign policy, generating the amazing stability of bipartisan pro-Israel policy even when American arms are used to commit atrocities and Crimes Against Humanity.
This gives rise to curiosity about the American deep state, centered in the CIA bureaucracy. Does it share the group think version of a realist US foreign policy, or is it more critical along Mearsheimer/Walt modes of thinking? It is beyond reasonable horizons of hopefulness to imagine that deep state operatives favor a more law-oriented, justice-driven US foreign policy agenda. Yet it might be deep state rising concerns about long-range global challenges, including unwanted, catastrophic recourse to nuclear war and global warming calamities of climate change, to favor a more cooperative approach to inter-governmental relations to achieve functional adjustments that if left unattended spell almost certain doom for the country, and even planet. Such a viewpoint if at all present among deep state regulars will surely draw lessons from the maladroit approach being taken by the US to Middle Eastern stability and global problem-solving. It is hard to estimate whether deep state insulation from special interest lobbying tends to produce a more knowledge-based approach to foreign policy or whether its orientation is as shortsighted as its elected leaders whose views are much affected by populist mood swings. Of course, Trump is an extreme instance of policy driven by political intuition, and contemptuous of experts and time-honored constraints on the exercise of power, above all recourse to war.
Daniel Falcone: Given the battered state of global human rights discourse and international law, how can scholars and citizens alike construct a more ethical and consistent framework for evaluating foreign policy?
Lawrence Davidson: I don’t have a very optimistic answer to this question. Most people are very local in their understanding of the world–local geographically and in temporal terms. In the face of this, it is our job to keep the memory and potential of international law and human rights alive. In this regard I think Richard Falk is a great example.
Stephen Zunes: I never imagined back during my radical youth, with my idealist view of building a progressive egalitarian society, that I would today be fighting what may be a losing battle simply to save the liberalism of my parents’ generation—the belief that, through the establishment of the United Nations system, the nations of the world could prevent future aggressive war and that most of the world’s governments, at least among the liberal democracies, would recognize their obligation to uphold international law. In reality, as we have seen in the case of Iraq and subsequently, the U.S. government, often with bipartisan support, can get away with making war on countries on the far side of the world that are no threat to us. We have also seen how both the Trump and Biden administrations are willing to formally recognize the illegal annexation of territories seized by military force. By contrast, even Reagan was willing to support UN Security Council resolutions opposing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan region and supporting Western Sahara’s right to self-determination.
Discourse on human rights and international law in Washington has swung way to the right in recent decades. The bipartisan support for Israel’s war on Gaza strongly suggests that if today’s Democrats were in power in the 1980s, they would have supported the death squads in El Salvador, the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, and the genocidal war on the indigenous peoples in Guatemala. They would have probably attacked the International Court of Justice, other UN agencies, and Amnesty International for addressing human rights abuses by U.S. allies, as they have done in the case of Israel.
Yet the American public, if polls are to be believed, feel even stronger about protecting human rights and the rule of law than ever. The double standards regarding Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals (and Iran’s attack on the Israeli hospital in Beersheva), for example, in light of the destruction of dozens of Palestinian hospitals in Gaza, are so flagrant that millions of Americans who might have used these other atrocities to embrace U.S. policy now respond with appropriate skepticism. The inadmissibility of expanding territory by force, used to justify U.S. support for Ukraine, rings hollow in light of U.S. recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and Morocco’s illegal annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara.
Previous presidents at least pretended to care about human rights and international law, even if required extreme verbal gymnastics and flagrant double-standards to do so. Trump, by contrast, doesn’t ever pretend to care about them.
This provides an opening for civil society to demand a renewed commitment to the international legal order, particularly given how the U.S. refusal to live up to these commitments have generally not ended well, e.g. Iraq. Indeed, if the United States, with its enormous military, economic, and diplomatic power, can refuse to play by the rules, why should anyone else? If the moral and legal arguments are not compelling enough, an enlightened utilitarianism, recognizing how U.S. failure to live up to these standards has provided an opening for despots and terrorists, might spark a renewed commitment to human rights and international law.
Richard Falk: It is crucial that both scholars and citizens point to the Western abandonment of the war prevention and global security aspirations of the architects of the post-1945 world order. This abandonment began, of course, far earlier than the period since the Soviet collapse in the tactics deployed by both sides in the Cold War, involving state terror to defend spheres of interest and eliminate hostile political actors and movements. The embrace of Israel’s genocidal retaliation to the events of October 7 brought these geopolitics of lawless violence to a transparent climax accompanied by an unattended humanitarian emergency and now followed by the launch of an aggressive war against Iran. Despite rising civil society concerns the UN was kept on the sidelines, and Western offialdom has refrained from naming Israel behavior as ‘apartheid’ followed by ‘genocide,’ indeed selectively punishing those who shouldered burdens of talking truth to power. In the post-attack Iran context, the corporatized media gives ample outlets for Israeli spokespersons and advisors while virtually silencing global voices of conscience that bring to the fore concerns about war, law, justice, and human rights. Much of this recent weakening of democracy proceeds from what appears to be entirely voluntary self-censorship.
Given the depth of global challenges, these unheard voices have a vital message that relates to species wellbeing, and possibly survival. It adds up to the imperative of a restorative push for global normative reform. The priorities of such a renewal of the global normative agenda could begin by focusing on denuclearization, empowerment of the UN General Assembly, the elimination of the Security Council veto, and decreeing compulsory recourse to the International Court of Justice at the behest of either party to an international dispute as well as the relabeling of ICJ ‘Advisory Opinion’ with new language implying ‘Authoritative Judicial Rulings.’
Timeline
1917: Balfour Declaration 1940s–Present: Zionist lobby dominates U.S. Middle East policy; U.S. loses independent control in the region 1945+: U.S. becomes dominant Western power in the Middle East 1956: Suez Crisis – U.S. briefly prioritizes international law over alliances 1967: Israel captures Palestinian territories in Six-Day War Post-1967: Security Council Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal 1970s: U.S. uses Iran’s Shah as a regional proxy 1973: Yom Kippur War and oil embargo reshape U.S.–Gulf relations 1980s: Reagan era begins; rise of lobby-driven and racially-coded policy 1980s: U.S. backs right-wing forces in Latin America 1990s: “Clash of Civilizations” frames West vs. Islam narrative 1990s–2000s: Bush administrations follow lobby-led foreign policy 2002: U.S. National Security Strategy asserts dominance in Middle East 2003: U.S. invades Iraq, removes Saddam Hussein 2003–2011: Iraq War and other ‘forever wars’ destabilize the region 2000s–2020s: Special interests shape U.S. policy on Cuba, guns, abortion, and war 2015: Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) is signed 2016–2020: Trump promotes ‘America First’ while backing Israeli militarism 2016–2024: Trump claims on Panama, Greenland, Canada; foreign interventions continue 2018: Trump withdraws from JCPOA, reimposes Iran sanctions 2019: Zunes meets Iran’s FM Zarif; nuclear diplomacy resumes 2020: Biden elected; continues lobby-influenced Middle East policy 2022: U.S. cites UN Charter to oppose Russia, exposing selective legalism 2024: Assad ousted in Syria; Iran becomes last major anti-U.S. holdout 2024–2025: Israeli strikes on Iran escalate; civil society protests 2025: U.S. joins bombing of Iran amid elite consensus and public dissent
The Gaza Peoples Tribunal at the end of its first public assembly in Sarajevo issued a Declaration that expresses our commitment to peace and justice for the Palestine people in their struggle to realize their basic rights, above all their inalienable right to self-determination.
We are inviting likeminded friends to read and endorse the Sarajevo Declaration and to share the link with others who might join our solidarity initiative at this critical time.
This is the link:Here is the link to the Change.org where you find the text of the Declaration and endorser information
[Prefatory Note: I publish here my foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy’s pathbreaking book on the right of resistance. Murphy provides readers with a comprehensive framework for thinking about resistance to public authority in a variety of settings without the controversial baggage of commentaries on such salient cases as Palestine, Ireland, Kashmir. Exempt from direct consideration is also self-defense instances of resistance, which are not treated except historically, and then as matters of the security rights of sovereign states rather than human rights. It may disappoint some readers that none of these three classic instances of popular resistance is discussed in the text and hence not even referred to in the index. The author fruitfully conceptualizes the right of resistance as a human right that has a universal, if amorphous, resonance in international law and in the constitutional foundations of legitimate national governance in all parts of the world.
The manipulation of language in the context of the October 7 lethal attack on Israeli border villages by political forces living under a punitive siege in Gaza imposed in 2007 in response to a Hamas victory in internationally monitored elections held the prior year and supplemented by Hamas prevailing in an intra-Palestinian power struggle with its rival, the Palestine Liberation Organization (linked to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority that shares partial administrative, collaborative control over the West Bank with Israel). It is widely believed that Hamas’ rise was due to its advocacy and practice of a politics of resistance in contrast to the politics of accommodation pursued by the Palestinian Authority and PLO.
October 7 is so pivotal for an appreciation of the contradictory agenda of Israel and the Palestinian people. On the side of the established order favored by governments and elites in the West and resting on the geopolitical primacy of the Global West in the Middle East, the attack on Israel was a terrorist disruption of order executed in a barbaric manner. On the side of the Palestinians and much of the post-colonial Global South, the attack was perceived as a justifiable action of resistance to a settler colonial project that had long denied Palestinian rights, above all, Palestine’s inalienable right to self-determination as enshrined in Article 1 of both human rights covenants that frame recourse to resistance by reference to law. The commission of violations by the resisters during the attack were commingled with Israeli official justifications for an extreme response, articulated ‘legally’ as ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ or simply as an appropriate claim of self-defense or as ‘counterterrorism.’ It not surprising that in the ensuing six months influential media platforms of the West accepted the Israel approach, decontextualizing Israel’s pre-October 7 behavior toward the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular. Only after months of devastating attack on Gaza did this simplistic portrayal of the attack begin to be challenged by referencing the historical background, civil society protest activity, daily atrocity images and witness testimony, genocidal tactics and intentionality, and by disclosure of territorial ambitions and an ethnic cleansing agenda. At this stage, only the firmest defenders of Israel’s conduct, forgo the rhetoric of genocide in describing the attacks, thereby subverting Western official posture of punishing the use of the word genocide as a hate crime, a mainstream taboo. An encroaching Palestinian right of resistance rarely is even considered. Instead, even peace-oriented groups often limit their goals to achieving a non-judgmental ceasefire.
A careful application of Murphy’s way of analyzing the role of resistance claims and practice would produce a more balanced, less propagandistic and geopolitical tinged, battle of words as between terrorist violence and resistance, and between the security of sovereign states and the human rights of people considered both individually and collectively. The Ukraine War and the recently commenced Iran War are further illustrations of the degree to which mainstream normative discourse on armed struggle is not deployed as a source of objectively interpreted legal norms and principles in conflict situations but rather used as a policy instrument to condemn the actions of adversaries and lend protective support to friends and partners. Thus, Russia is condemned, without any account of NATO provocations, while Israel is given the benefit of the doubt despite its unprovoked aggression and its unacknowledged yet widely known, arsenal of nuclear weaponry.
To gain a deeper, more constructive understanding of these and other issues, Shannonbrooke’s guidance is indispensable. Her book is available at all the usual places.]
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Foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy, The Human Right to Resist in International and Constitutional Law, Cambridge University.
As I read this jurisprudentially fascinating and exceptionally learned book, the media was consumed by its daily accounts of the massive military operation conducted by Israel against the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. It was a gruesome story rationalized on one side as self-defense against Hamas cast as a terrorist organization that carried out a barbaric attack on October 7, 2023, and as such, could be legitimately situated outside the protection that international law by setting limits on the violence of warfare, although compliance was often problematic. On the other side, criticism mounted that what was being called self-defense would be better understood if interpreted as a deliberate and unabashed recourse to genocide by Israel whose slaughter of Gazans that amounted to a humanitarian catastrophe affecting the whole of the Palestinian people. By and large, political leaders in the West endorsed Israel’s shocking response to the horrific Hamas attack on 22 villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the death of an estimated 1,400 Jewish civilians and soldiers, as well as the seizure of an estimated 240 hostages, severe war crimes committed by Hamas that seemed to qualify as crimes against humanity.
In contrast, were exceptionally large and aggressive public demonstrations in cities around the world, including in the United States, UK, and other governments whose governments were giving unconditional support to Israel. These street protests were denouncing the scope, targeting, intensity, severity of Israel’s response as amounting to the crime of crimes, genocide, although the milder events in the West tended to confine their demands to calls for an immediate ceasefire, which Israel and the United States opposed at the UN and in its diplomatic stance. Both views, however contradictory their political outlooks seem, were connected by invoking law to justify and explain their impassioned partisanship. A reading of Shannonbrooke Murphy’s timely and conceptually brilliant book, while itself demanding a reader’s sophisticated and dedicated attention, is the most illuminating treatment of these and kindred issues of how law can be used in good faith to uphold a politics of armed resistance while at the same time putting strict limits on the legally grounded human right of people to resist various forms of oppressive conditions. It is an unusual situation, but far from unprecedented, for law to exist in certain respects but still lacking sufficient clarity to offer definitive guidance to parties in conflict as to what is behaviorally permitted and what is not, enabling the more powerful actors to engage in lawfare as part of its strategic approach.
Murphy does not examine specific cases of conflicts between the forces of order and the rights of resistance in trying to depict and improve upon the conceptual landscape that throughout history has surrounded this inherently controversial set of issues. Instead, she considers resistance from the perspective of human rights law as it currently functions in international law and constitutional law, while presenting a learned and relevant account of historical antecedents in the work of past celebrated jurists and other normative sources of reflection on the dual role of law in prohibiting and permitting resistance. A prominent feature of the human right to resist is that it functions as a right of exception to the normal duty to obey. It is a matter of varying circumstances that give rise to resistance in a variety of context because existing arrangements of governance are harming individuals, groups, and peoples in socially unacceptable ways, often reflecting changing or evolving societal values. Such a potential role for positive law affirms that the contested behavior in addition to being morally and politically deplorable, can be further stigmatized as sufficiently legally deplorable as to vindicate the existence and exercise of the human right of resist. Domestic law typically wrestles with such issues at the level of the individual or group. These issues may be features of governance (for instance, colonialism, apartheid) of characteristics of civil society (for instance, homophobia, racial and religious prejudice, patriarchy).
Such a human right to resist became prominent in the United States in the 1960s due to the refusal of individuals to comply with the legal obligation to serve for a limited period of time in the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. Western democracies had previously wrestled with this issue during World War II, generally granting individuals and groups such a right if it derived from religious convictions and was directed against all wars, or warfare as such. During the Vietnam War an increasing number of secularly motivated young Americans developed a legal argument that became known as ‘selective conscientious objection’ in which justification for the refusal to join the armed forces was based on moral/legal/political objections to this particular war in Vietnam. Revealingly, as the Vietnam War became more unpopular with the citizenry over time, courts in the U.S. looked with greater favor on this once novel secular rationale for conscientious objection. To be more attuned to Murphy’s conceptual clarity, this set of issues of political propriety is addressed as a ‘cognate’ notion that influences but is distinct from the penumbra of the ‘human right of resistance.’ In such a spirit, Murphy subtly balances positivist concerns with achieving as much conceptual precision as possible against the importance of retaining enough flexibility to enable law to evolve as societal values and circumstances change. Her jurisprudential stance favors codification efforts that take sensitive account of changing conditions and societal values while recognizing the benefits of achieving maximum conceptual precision and stability with regard to prevailing expectations about the content of the human right to resist.
The originality of this learned discussion of the human right to resist, which should be of particular interest to common law countries such as the United States, is the decision of the author not to address specific cases of collective resistance such as the Irish or Palestinian struggle for human rights, including some form of self-rule or even the radical forms of opposition to Nazi genocide. In this sense, Murphy’s jurisprudentially impressive study can be fruitfully read as a complement to Noura Erakat’s fine Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). What Erakat gains by way of readability and context is somewhat offset by her fully acknowledged substantive sympathies that become part of the policy analysis that underpins her critique of the ways international law has failed the Palestinian people. In this same sense, what Murphy, despite the lucidity of her prose, loses by way of readability is fully redeemed by a fundamental rethinking, with partisan undertones, of what is at stake when a right of exception is given to individuals, groups, and peoples to violate the law legally, but within a secondary framework of authoritative legal limits.
I am a great admirer of both works, but for different, yet interlinked reasons. In Erakat’s case because I share her compelling concern for delegitimizing Palestinian victimization via lawfare, while in Murphy’s case because I am made far more aware of the complexity of the issues involved in legalizing resistance, taking account of its continuing evolution and persisting conceptual gaps, and explicating and exploring linkages to other kindred issues that bear centrally on limiting the power of the state. These linkages pertain both to incorporating the right to resist authority into domestic constitutional texts and by way of applicable international human rights standards that have evolved into moral aspirations to become legal obligations. In this latter instance, for instance, such crimes as apartheid and genocide are not conceptually insulated from legal accountability by invoking claims of unlimited sovereignty over territorial governance or by constitutional provisions that accord superiority to domestic sources of law whenever clashes with international law are present.
In one important respect, Murphy’s positivist presentation of issues associated with resistance legality takes our attention away from the political contexts of enforcement. We could end up with an admirably coherent conceptual framework but with a useless, or even regressively opportunistically legalistic approach to various categories of grievances emanating from those who are deemed as class adversaries or international rivals. The authority of law has radically uneven limits in its functioning within and among sovereign states. For instance, such ‘legal’ developments as the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials accepted the taint of ‘victors’ justice’ because of foreclosing inquiry, much less accountability, into the crimes of the victors. Even more consequential for evolving a humane global rule of law was the right of veto inserted into the UN Charter, thereby both hampering and tainting the operations of the United Nations. International law is weak when it comes to vital issues because its implementation tends to be disrupted by and subordinated to the primacy of geopolitics, which rests protection of rights on such unreliable restraints as imposed by deterrence threats and prudence, if at all. This results in major resistance claims being manipulated to reflect the interest and policy priorities of powerful states and domestic elites. What is evident is that the selective implementation of human rights law in general creates images of moral hypocrisy and double standards as diluting the authority of and respect for international legal discourse. True, some creative tension has emerged internationally due to the collapse of European colonialism, although Israel is a reminder of what colonialism meant for oppressed native peoples and is expressed by the establishment of counter-hegemonic legal arenas, including among jurists as exemplified by TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship reflecting the Global South’s experience of the hegemonic uses of international law relied on by colonial Europe in exploiting the resources and dehumanizing non-Western peoples. Resistance to colonialism has in the post-colonial era of international relations inspired the determined effort to generate support for a counter-hegemonic approach to international and constitutional law, which is expressed by
the transnational bonding of Global South jurists in the TWAIL enterprise.
Shannonbrooke Murphy is fully aware of the incompleteness of a purely positivist focus on the human right to resist, while here setting for herself this already Herculean challenge of conceptual clarification. Her contributions to contemporary jurisprudence are profound, and rendered in ways that permit and encourage diverse inquiries into other bodies of human rights pertaining to a range of topics, including rights of self-defense, freedom of expression and freedom of religion in relation to such sensitive policy questions as recourse to war, rights of secession by ethnic or religious minorities, as well as the more sensitive personal issues of gender parity and identity. Let the legal architects produce responsive blueprints. Let the debates begin!
Fifty or so years ago a British graduate student at the Yale Law School, Rosalyn Higgins, who like me fell under the charismatic influence of Myres McDougal in studying international law, but was troubled by the subjectivity and seeming ideological bias of a jurisprudential approach that gave legal hegemony to the Cold War values prevalent in the West. I was also troubled, but on different grounds. I questioned the jurisprudential necessity for such an ideological bias and instead sought a contextually sensitive approach to law that was guided by the type of secular humanism that infuses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the UN Charter.
Professor Higgins, who later became a distinguished judge at the International Court of Justice, organized a conference in London to explore these rifts between the British and American approaches to law. Without the benefit of Murphy’s conceptual mapping, I found the conference most intriguing because of the gathering of fine legal scholars for such an unusual conversation, yet intellectually unrewarding as it merely reproduced the tensions between a British insistence that the subjectivity of the New Haven School of International Law undermined the authority of law and the American claim that law without a political and ethical context is artificially cut off from reality. If we were to arrange such a meeting in the future, I would insist that Shannonbrooke Murphy’s book be required background reading believing that both sides could valuably learn from it. Also, I cannot imagine a better beginning for an advanced course in either human rights, resistance claims, or the interplay of international and constitutional law than by assigning this demanding, yet remarkably imaginative, erudite, and rigorously conceptualized contribution to an improved understanding of the interactions between law, resistance, and human rights in a variety of substantive contexts.
[Prefatory Note: the post below is the text of an interview published in Italian in Il Manifesto on 6/7/2025. The interview was conducted by a journalist friend, Patricia Lambroso. It appears here in somewhat modified form, and is devoted to questions about the Gaza Tribunal.]
1. The GAZA Tribunal (civilian tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, leaders and governments around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?
Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders. The ICJ accepted its jurisdiction to resolve a submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as genocide, although a definitive ruling on violations of the Genocide Convention would not be available for some years in the future.
The ICJ in 2024 also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked impulses toward UN enforcement by its right of veto and its dismissive attitude toward recourse to the ICJ, supporting Israel claim to be acting in self-defense.
It is more accurate to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the three NATO Permanent Members of the Security Council each of which is vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings in the event of a refusal of voluntary compliance by the losing party. The ICJ should not be blamed. Instead it should be given enforcement powers to ensure the enhanced effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be mainly associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled by the winners of World War II in 1945 that acted to safeguard the primacy of geopolitics. In part this design defect was a reaction to the perceived failure to recognize this primacy in the design and operation of the League of Nations, resulting in the non-participation or exclusion of several key countries in the organization, and its failure to avoid developments that culminated in the outbreak of World War II.
The ICJ issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza as supposedly regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”] The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War required terminating Israel’s administrative presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligation by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment. This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack. Israel has given not the slightest sign that it would comply with this crucial Advisory Opinion main conclusion ordering the withdrawal of Israel’s presence from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, presumably relying on the supposedly ‘advisory’ nature of the ICJ authority in relation to UN requests for guidance on ‘legal disputes.’
Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, which is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil. This outcome gives attention to an ‘Accountability Gap’ as a supplemental weakness of international to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed personal sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor and any officials that participated in the issuance of arrest warrans by the ICC allegedly for exceeding its lawful authority. The US also threatens to sanction anyone attached to the ICC who tries in the future to facilitate the detention of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants.
Also relevant is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC that has so far refrained from directly examine allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. The single effort to raise complicity issues was undertaken by Nicaragua that submitted a complaint that Germany was violating international law by supplying arms to Israel. A final decision has yet to be rendered, although the ICJ rebuffed the allegation Germany on the grounds that its supply of arms to Israel was too small to be capable of constituting a violation of the Genocide Convention. It seems to be left up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is now integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement.
A final structural weakness of the judicial enforcement of international law by way of the UN System is what might be termed ‘a temporal lag,’ the long lapse of time between a submission and a final decision in situation where the victims of behavior need and deserve expedited relief. There must be an emergency procedure that allows the ICJ to reach a decision within days and weeks, even if later in the proceedings it is revised or even reversed.
It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct but that is a misinterpretation. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes of international institutions are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is nevertheless important. Its outcomes exert influences on many governments, media coverage, and civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law help achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide. The victimization of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more than 19 months has severely delegitimized. It is now widely viewed throughout the world as a pariah state whose behavior in Gaza has created the ‘moral crisis of our time’ for all peoples and governments Israel. Many argue that Israel’s defiant refusal to abide by international law and to respect the authority of the UN should result in its suspension from UN participation until Palestinian self-determination is achieved. Israel has responded to these proposed initiative principally by way of weaponizing antisemitism claiming that its opponents are motivated by ‘Jew hatred’ rather than the motives that they claim. This line of Israel defense has grown ineffective even in countries with the most complicit governments. And yet Israel’s daily actions continue after all this time to be unimpeded, because of the absence of the political will needed to mount an ad hoc protective intervention to alleviate the humanitarian emergency and provide safety for the surviving Gazan population.
A public dismissal of international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings geopolitically nullified, the outcomes of legal controversy exert an influence on discursive perceptions of legitimacy, that is, on the shaping of the legal and moral high ground in relation to an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of political realists who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, military capabilities no longer are the best predictors of which side will prevail to defeat settler colonial arrangements in political struggles for self-determination. This should have been the lesson learned by the United States from its involvement in the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet lost the war. Thus pattern has been repeated in most colonial wars during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to typical 21st century conflict situations, but the lesson remains unlearned. This is so because the defeats incurred are profitable for private sectors arms producers that wield great influence in the Global West, particularly in the United States.
The Gaza Tribunal was formed against this background. It was conceived as a project of global civil society in the conduct of a Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestinian people. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after October 7, resisted repeated UN calls for an Israeli ceasefire as well as defied the ICJ and ICC rulings, provoking a rising sense of moral outrage among the peoples of the world. The GT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the significance of international law in its several dimensions relevant to the situation in Gaza. The results will be presented in October of this yeard to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons with diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, moral authority, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written responses. This result of the Gaza Tribunal is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics, and makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors ample opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. The GT does not mimic judicial tribunals that operate within strict technical limits and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, and hopes to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War, proudly acknowledges itself as being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to prove itself relevant on the level of action. The GT relies on a variety of civil society solidarity initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also encourages nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participation; arms, trade, and investment embargoes; and protest activity of all varieties.
2 The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust is weaponized by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?
Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There exist two principal lines of explanation for this stance so contrary to the values proclaimed from the rooftops by liberal societies in the West . The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany is acutely sensitive to this allegation and politically has unfortunately opted for the view that to overcome its past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the renunciation of genocide in the pledge pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, here the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, here genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim. The Srebrenica genocide of 1995 tested the pledge because the events in Bosnia tested whether ‘never again’ was ethnic or geographical, of relevance only if Europe was the scene.
The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy, a reenactment of the Crusade under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington’ fatalistic warning that the end of the Cold War was not a gateway to global peace, but rather a shift in conflict patterns from Communism to Islamism. In this sense, the emergent ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the white and secular West, and which also happens to regard Israel as its principal enemy. In this sense, the opposition to the West from the Iranian perspective is anti-imperial and political, more than it is civilizational, although its deep roc ots are difficult to disentangle from the historical interaction, especially vivid memories of a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 that forcibly restored the autocratic modernizing monarchy to the Pahlavi throne.
3. Trumptouring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?
Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Gulf States will have consequences for Gaza, but their nature remains obscure at this time. On one side, it could be the first stage of a more transactional relationship with Israel than the kind of blind support given during the Biden presidency. In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might result in a greater willingness to forego an attack on Iran, and more readiness to seek a negotiated solution with Tehran as to their nuclear program, a course of action disquieting to Israel, and shaking Tel Aviv’s confidence in unlimited support for their preferred endgame in Gaza. It might also encourage the US Government to seek to strengthen Trump’s patently absurd candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, reportedly high among his narcissistic phantasies. As strange as it seems, this image of Trump as a peacemaker concretely express incentives and exert real pressure on Israel to stop finally the genocidal assault on Gaza. It might even push the US to back a two-state endgame that subverts Israel’s obvious ambition to terminate the Zionist Project by annexing the West Bank on its way to establishing an Israeli one-state.
Even more radical would be a shift away from further tolerance of Israel’s secret acquisition on a nuclear weapons capability achieved with Western complicity to a position of backing regional denuclearization, but the long silence makes even this sensible contribution seem utopian as far as the prospects of its adoption is concerned. But which of the nine nuclear powers has shown less respect for international law and the constraints of the UN Charter than Israel when it comes to the use of force?
Contrariwise, May trip to the Gulf energy-rich monarchies may have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with these Gulf regimes and yet give Netanyahu what he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders want Hamas destroyed as much as do the Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv, and could be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a shared counter-terrorism orientation that might prove compatible with the forced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where it is falsely assumed by advocated that in time those displaced by the second Nakba event will stop dreaming of and disengage from struggles to liberate Palestine from the clutches of settler colonialism, no matter how long it takes. Israel has lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza beyond the outer limit of decency by recourse to deliberate tactics of prolonged starvation. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including the citizenries of the liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip sidelining Israel diplomatically, at least for the moment, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of the Gideon’s Chariot, Israel’s new military operation, may signal a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations or turn on whether maintaining harmony with Israel strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that US support for Israel to remain unaffected in the near future as the levers of Zionist influence (e.g. AIPAC, donor deference) are still strong in the United States
Trump’s second term as US President has been mercurial, with lots of bobbing and weaving more bearing resemblance to a boxer’s opening round in which the point is to feel out the opponent rather than to land decisive punches. The pragmatism of the deal or the inflexibility of firm commitments premised on images of world order and national interest as reflective of hard power calculations in a world of states that political realists perceive as divided among friends, enemies, and those that don’t count.
In the case of Israel, this early rhythm of Trump’s second term is notable mainly for its uncertainty, contrasting with the tight brotherly embrace of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who tried from time to time to adjust this image ever so slightly by gestures of humanitarian concern that Netanyahu seemed to misconstrue as serious US efforts to constrain Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. As the quickly faded red line in Gaza illustrated Biden’s gentle warnings to Israel were mainly for show in response to public relations concerns arising in the US in response to the American protest activity and liberal media criticisms of Israel’s behavior in Gaza that struck more and more observers as ‘genocide,’ although most influential media platforms shied away from calling a spade a spade, that is, naming Israel’s Gaza violence as genocide. This inhibition on any governmental naming of the crime persists under Trump and is combined with the intensification of the repressive campaign inherited from Biden to treat support for the Palestinian pursuit of their basic rights and criticisms of Israeli excesses as ‘antisemitism,’ as a ‘hate crime against the Jewish people.’ Siding with the victim of flagrant crime is transformed by the magic of language into itself being the crime. This turn of phrase also offers Trump a pretext for advancing his generalized attacks on knowledge-based policy making of experts and reflecting scientific research as typified by elite universities, which are themselves epitomized by Harvard. Trump’s moves against Harvard involving defunding of research and challenging the immigration status of foreign students amount to an pedagogical assault on the accepted modern learning paradigm flavored by appeals to xenophobia rampant among the MAGA base. This campaign is vintage Trump, who combines his trust in belief-based action as fused with professions of ultra-nationalism.
Trump, despite shifts against Israel in US and European civil society sentiments never wastes words by making even the slightest display of empathy for the extrem suffering of the Palestinian people. He seems almost pathologically dazzled by prospects of access to the extreme wealth and geopolitical grandeur of the Gulf monarchies, carried to absurd extremes by proposing a US takeover of Gaza with the surreal promise of establishing ‘the Riviera of the Middle East,’ which included a proviso undoubtedly comforting to Tel Aviv that the reconstruction plan would be preceded by the forced departure of its surviving Palestinian population. It remains unclear to this day whether Trump was seeking a deal in which the financial burden would be shifted to the Arab world while the political administration of post-genocide Gaza, purged of Palestinians, would be entrusted to US administrative supervision, which is a double gain for Israel (no Palestinians, no UN).
As such, more than his predecessors Trump seemed at first to support unconditionally even Israel’s regional game plan of eliminating or weakening by military means potential threats to its future security by states and movements in its region. Despite likely swerves on the road ahead Trump seems at this stage determined to avoid Israeli distractions from the pursuit of his own separate primarily transactional goals in the Middle East that are of a primarily economistic character. Trump’s transactional mindset can be reduced to the pursuit of national gains with respect to trade and investment as awkwardly combined with corrupt personal and family enrichment schemes.
Above all such a course of action presupposes the US being not too overtly seen as aiding and abetting Netanyahu’s resolve to complete the Zionist Project of establishing an Israeli one-state solution that displaces Palestinians from the land and Palestine from maps of the Middle East. It should be noted that long before October 7 and years prior to Netanyahu extremist coalition that assumed governing authority at the start of 2023 the Israeli Knesset formally enacted into law the claim of exclusive Jewish supremacy without the slightest adverse reaction from Washington. [Israel’s Basic Law of 2018]. Netanyahu was Prime Minister at the time heading a less extreme governing leadership in Israel, yet committed to Israel sovereignty from the river to the sea, achieved by relying on a long tradition of patient reliance on salami tactics, taking small steps toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project.
What the new 2023 Netanyahu team brought to the table was an acceleration of this consensus ‘solution’ to Palestinian resistance and resilience by disclosing its endgame agenda of violent dispossession and provocation. Trump will face a foreign policy dilemma of either opposing the revival of the UN-backed two-state negotiated solution or siding with Israel, concluding that the time has come to legitimize Israel’s one-state genocidally engineered outcome that included permanent statelessness for the Palestinian people, which entailed repudiating their inalienable right of self-determination.
The most revealing near-term regional measure of geopolitical affinity with Israel is whether American foreign policy chooses to normalize relations with Iran by reaching agreement about its nuclear program or eventually goes along with, and possibly even joins, Israel’s strong push for a major miliary strike aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran’s large-scale long-range missile response, and possibly sparking regime change in Tehran. Iranian diplomacy seems flexible about accepting enrichment limits and international inspection, although a recent UN inspection concluded that Iran was heightening its enrichment output to near weapons’ grade uranium, presumably devising its own weak form of deterrence to the overt threats to its security constantly being made. Trump seems likely to be tempted, for regional and geopolitical reasons, to explore options for an agreement with Iran, especially if it looks like a win for Washington’s diplomacy. If this is only speculatively accurate Trump would come to resent Israel’s effort to discourage ending Iran’s isolation without first getting rid of its anti-Israeli government. If Israel is antagonized in its regional security plan of neutralizing hostile threats by weakening the unity and capabilities of all Middle East actors, movements as well as states, an open break could occur, however improbable that now seems.
There are many unknowns that will impact upon regional developments, not least of which is Trump’ susceptibility to embarking on drastic changes in policy maneuvers as he or his entourage of submissive advisors perceive and juggle their options. Nevertheless, there are reasons at this time to accord serious attention to contrasting normalization and warmaking scenarios. The world is experiencing the dawn of a new phase of international relations in a less unipolar world order marking a terminal phase of international history best understood as ‘the aftermath of the Cold War’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the transitional uncertainties are shifts in geopolitical alignments, alliance relationships, and financial hierarchies. The yet undefined yet ascendant roles and ambitions of China and Russia, and possibly India, are likely to challenge the prior era of undiluted US geopolitical primacy. A major uncertainty is whether the US will adapt to multipolarity or seek at great cost to perpetuate its post-Cold War dominance that it achieved from 1992 to 2022. To do the latter would mean focusing on nullifying the geopolitical challenges of not only Russia and China, but also a more activist and coherent Global South. It would also mean sacrificing the wellbeing of Americans, the ravages of climate change, allowing public indebtedness to reach untenable levels, and letting the national infrastructure to deteriorate even further.
A related uncertainty is whether this new phase of multipolarity would be more conflictual or more cooperative than the world order of the past three decades. Would the less unified West embark upon an all-out worldwide Cold War as was done in the years after 1945 in greatly altered global circumstances? Or would it seek some form of geopolitical collaboration that prepared the way toward problem-solving cooperative relations within reconfigured geopolitical spheres of interest that accorded primacy to political tradition and geographic proximity. The reinvention of viable 21st century spheres of influence and agreed fault lines should preoccupy ‘the best and the brightest’ among foreign policy gurus in the US, Russia, and China.
It is untested whether Trump’s leverage over Netanyahu is sufficient to induce Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the return of the hostages. It is partly a matter of how much Trump is prepared to weaken US domestic support in the US for his presidency in Zionist and Evangelical circles by putting visible pressure on Israel to discontinue its genocidal policies in Gaza, coupled with the Gazification of West Bank policy. Trump currently appears far more concerned about avoiding open war with Iran than stopping the violence in Occupied Palestine. Of course, Trump is the most quixotic leader on the present world scene, and so it may be that he is personally offended by Netanyahu’s refusal to do what he proposes on behalf of wider US strategic interests in the region, and would be prepared to accept an open break with Israel, which would have unpredictable impacts on the governability of the US.
At odds with such transformative prospects for world order are the concrete indications that even give Trump’s ambivalence toward Netanyahu’s approach he is complicit in its recent unfolding. It takes the form of insinuating an American presence in a politically motivated humanitarian aid plan that is managed by an American private security company (SRS) that provides mercenaries to oversea the distribution centers for the dispensing of aid. The whole scheme is disguised by deceptive language of humanitarianism. Even if it ran according to its announced plan, it would bypass the neutral auspices of UN-administered aid as bolstered by international civil society humanitarian aid as well as explicitly collect surveillance information designed to track Palestinian aid recipients. So far, this relief effort directed as alleviating a humanitarian emergency has made ‘starvation’ the lesser of evils when compared to the massacres of those lured to the distribution centers, and then killed and wounded in large numbers by drones, tank fire, and indiscriminate shooting of helpless Palestinians caught by the cruel lure of food. Although the Israeli Occupation Forces deny the allegations, they have confirmed by numerous eye witnesses and journalists on the ground. It seems a particularly grotesque extension of the genocide to kill randomly starving civilians who
Lost their lives while desperately seeking food and aid for their families.
Turning to Netanyahu, the question is how much pressure would be needed to produce a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza. Over the course of almost two years Netanyahu has been notably stubborn and unyielding in response to critics at home and internationally, including in the US. He might expect that Trump would give Israel a bright green light to complete the end game of the Zionist Project by depopulating and partially occupying
Gaza and annexing all or most of the West Bank. Also at issue is whether Netanyahu’s caving into Trump pressure on Gaza would result in the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition government, and subject Netanyahu to resumed fraud prosecutions in Israel.
In the end I think the safest prediction is a compromise, whereby a long-term ceasefire, less than permanent, is agreed upon coupled with renewedsupport for Israel’s expansion of the settler presence in West Bank (22 new settlements have been approved by the Knesset at the end of May) and accompanying annexationist moves. The whole outcome in Gaza may depend on how seriously Israel is about launching a strike designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program as balanced is the Trump quest for a more advantageous deal than was negotiated in 2015 while Obama was president.
In the background is the weakening support for Israel among the governments in western Europe partially reflecting the loss of Israeli support in civil societies around the world, including the US and Canada. Whether these countries and others will back up this recent wave of criticism with censure and sanctions is at this time unknown as is how this conjecture of a weakening of western support for Israel will impact US policy. Will it make Trump more or less insistent on backing Israel and move Netanyahu to become somewhat receptive to a ceasefire/hostages deal as a prelude to ending the Gaza ordeal. The weeks ahead will contain signs as to which way the wind is blowing both in the region and internationally. At present, the overall situation is in flux aggravated by these two leaders who are temperamentally autocratic, but one bends with the wind and the other is as rigid as brainless robot.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
