Public Intellectual and Professor of International Law
Saturday, November 4, 2023 6:00 pm
Via Zoom
This lecture will explore Edward Said’s continuing influence by way of legacy in several domains of thought and action, including the 21st-century challenges of ‘being a public intellectual’; the persisting relevance of Orientalism; the current phase of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights.
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Quran burnings point to broader anti-immigrant bias: former UN Rapporteur
A surge in Quran burnings by far-right extremists triggers concern over anti-immigrant sentiment and freedom of expression, with a former UN special rapporteur calling it ‘an assertion of a broader anti-immigrant, anti-non-European right-wing bias’.
REUTERS ARCHIVEThere is a ‘strong case’ for prohibition of such acts that ‘serve no possible constructive purpose,’ says Richard Falk / Photo: Reuters Archive.
A recent wave of the desecrating of the Quran, Islam’s holiest book in Sweden and Denmark is “an assertion of a broader anti-immigrant, anti-non-European right-wing bias that has grown to be quite politically strong,” according to a former UN special rapporteur.
“There’s no legitimate purpose by allowing groups to burn the holy scriptures of another religious faith,” Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, said in a video interview.
“It seems to me to serve…no possible constructive purpose. And I think there is a strong case for (such acts to be) prohibited.”
In recent months, far-right extremist groups have desecrated and burnt several copies of the Quran in Denmark and neighboring Sweden, drawing fierce condemnation from Muslims around the world and calls for measures to stop such acts.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on July 25 that terms all acts of violence against holy books a violation of international law.
‘Is it hate speech?’
About the line between freedom of expression and actions that may be considered offensive to religious beliefs, Falk said they could fall under the umbrella of “free speech” but could be linked to a “formation of violent behaviour” in some cases.
On the question of limits to freedom of speech in cases where, for instance, it threatens security, he said: “Yes, it could be (limited) in certain contexts if it could be argued to be a threat to security”.
He said various European countries “have a less permissive view (than the US) of freedom of speech and are more concerned with prohibition of hate crime”.
“Therefore, this kind of act could be prohibited under the broad prohibition against hate speech, which exists, I know, in the UK and Germany, for instance,” he said, adding that the same may not be the case under Scandinavian laws.
Quran burnings could be “alleged to be hate speech,” said Falk, but it also depends on the precedent within a particular country or region.
Falk said that countries could pass laws to prevent attacks on holy books, emphasising that they “would have considerable international support at this point.”
“Because there is a recent UN resolution … that does say it’s contrary to international law, to burn or otherwise destroy,” he said.
Threat of violence
Muslims around the world are concerned that these increasing attacks on the Quran could lead to more violence against the community itself.
With book burnings having been one of the main Nazi campaigns in the lead-up to the Holocaust, Falk warned that “democratic societies have to be vigilant against the repetition of this kind of genocidal behaviour because it obviously can be repeated.”
“It has, to a certain extent, been repeated recently in Myanmar, where the Muslim minority … was subjected to what many observers have defined as genocidal,” he said, referring to the plight of the Rohingya community.
[Prefatory Note: The post below is a modified text of an August 2, 2023 interview by the Iranian journalist, Javad Heiran-Nia. The text containing my responses was published in the periodical, Tahrir Bazaar [link: < https://www.tahlilbazaar.com/news/235594/Professor-Falk-China-s-influence-in-the-Persian-Gulf-has-worried>] The focus is upon the regional dialogue scheduled for September 2023 between Iran and Iraq and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), formed in 1981. It is a notable recent breakthrough by way of a new series of diplomatic initiatives to replace tensions with stability in the Middle East, and in the process gaining political independence from U.S./Israel hegemony. This development also reflects the increased involvement of China in the region, most strongly evident in promoting normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia and by creating the political space to give Saudi Arabia and OPEC the self-confidence needed to set oil production and pricing on the basis of national interests rather than in response to international pressures exerted by oil-importing countries.]
1. It is planned to hold a meeting this September at the initiative of the Secretary General of the United Nations with the participation of the foreign ministers of eight countries of Iran and Iraq and GCC members. The Secretary General’s initiative for regional dialogue is included in UN Security Council Resolution 598, which led to the end of the Iran-Iraq war. What is your assessment of this meeting?
It is notable that SC Res. 598 adopted in 1987 has not yet been implemented more than 35 years later. In view of the intervening conflicts, especially the Gulf War in 1991 and the US/UK in 2003 attack on Iraq, which was undertaken without UN authorization and in violation of the UN Charter this long delay is hardly surprising. Violations included recourse to international sanctions, non-defensive force, ‘shock and awe’ tactics. regime-changing intervention, prolonged occupation, denial of sovereign rights, failed state-building, it is notable that this old conflict resolution and war prevention resolution is being revived in this new serious, seemingly stability-seeking spirit. At this stage it is difficult to anticipate what will result from the September meeting because of the diverse motivations of the direct participants and attitudes of such leading influential international actors as the U.S. and China have not been disclosed. The willingness of the eight participating states to agree to hold an exploratory regional dialogue that includes Iran and Iraq is itself an encouraging development, suggesting that Israel, as well as the United States’ has less regional leverage in 2023 than previously for several interrelated reasons.
It is worthy of comment that the forthcoming regional dialogue is structured in a way that brings Iran and Iraq into conversation with Gulf countries rather than the entire Arab Middle East or the region as a whole. Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen have been excluded (along with Israel), and presumably were never invited. This diplomatic framework with its ad hoc sponsorship can also be understood as substituting the regional and sub-regional actors for the U.S. and even China as a preferred path to realizing a ‘comprehensive, just, honorable, and durable’ peace specified long ago in this Security Council initiative that was original a response to the long destructive war between Iraq and Iran. What lies behind such an extensive wording of peaceful relations in the contemporary setting has not been publicly disclosed at this point. It will become clearer in the course of the conference in September provided transcripts of the meetings are released or at least. a concluding Declaration is issued, the assembled foreign ministers meet with the media before and after the event, and most significantly agree to meet again or to keep meeting periodically.
The fact that it is a meeting of foreign ministers, and neither lower-level national representatives nor higher-level heads of state, suggests a rather strong commitment to the event by the participating governments. At the same time, there is no expectation that this single dialogue event, no matter how successful the meeting and upbeat the Declaration, will itself produce immediate or spectacular results. It is best conceived as a promising beginning of a long overdue process of reconciliation and coexistence.
Iran stands to gain most from the event, and an ensuing process, as it is definitely a step toward reintegration into the normal politics and economics of the region and away from continued isolation. Saudi Arabia may also gain increased credibility for its recent efforts to pursue a more independent regional diplomacy, which at times has departed rather pointedly from the policies preferred by the U.S. Or maybe this event is favored because it somewhat balances and offsets Riyadh’s long rumored move toward a normalization of its relations with Israel. At this point, such conjectures should not be taken too seriously. The fact that the conference is taking place at all is a hopeful breakthrough considering the conflictual atmosphere of recent decades in the Middle East, particularly in interactions with Iran. A major unknown involves the extent to which non-participating regional and extra-regional actors will exert obstruct proceedings from behind the scenes.
2. After the improvement of the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia, improvement in the relations between Iran and other Arab countries can be seen. To what extent can creating a mechanism for regional dialogue be successful in such an atmosphere?
This UN sponsored conference seems definitely to parallel recent inter-governmental diplomacy that began normalizing Iran’s relationship with the Arab World after decades of tension and hostile engagement as in the course of the Syrian War that began in 2011. The September conference can also be contextualized in relation to declining U.S. hegemonic ambitions, capabilities, and strategic priorities in the region, and a slowly shifting geographic emphasis on attaining stability. A further consideration is the interplay between Israel’s search for diplomatic normalcy with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, and this Iran/Iraq/Gulf move toward normalization of relations as a foundation for achieving internal cohesion and stability.
Also relevant is the rise of other regional concerns on the part of the U.S. and others, including non-political challenges within the region encouraging replacing conflictual relations with. cooperative ones on a priority basis. Severe stresses are already being experienced throughout the Middle attributable to severe global warming, which has brought record heat impairing health and even threatening future livability within the region. Responsible statecraft of regional actors needs more than ever to focus its problem-solving capabilities on these new threats to wellbeing arising out of rising instabilities between modernizing economies and the natural habitat. In this sense, militarism and warfare become expensive distractions from too longed delayed efforts to achieve national and human security given the greatly altered ecological and political conditions in the contemporary world.
3. Following the reduction of America’s presence in the region, diplomacy in the region regarding important security issues for the countries of the region has increased. Do you evaluate this process as tactical or strategic?
It seems to me that caution is in order about present and near future regional roles of major non-Middle East actors. Not only are political differences being reexamined under present conditions, but also the prospect of achieving peaceful coexistence as between the Gulf monarchies and the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite their continued adherence to antagonistic traditions of Islamic theology and practice. Another uncertainty concerns whether recent American preoccupations elsewhere in the world, especially Ukraine and Taiwan, have given Saudi leaders the confidence needed to keep engaging with Iran and others beyond its borders giving priority to its national interests. Also relevant is whether prolonged suffering from regional hostility and an international sanctions regime has increased Iran’s interest in the potential benefits of dialogue, especially if it is allowed to be a stepping-stone toward reconciliation and relations based on common interests and mutual benefits. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have likely been negatively affected by their antagonistic involvements in the political turmoil in Yemen, which may partly underlie their joint willingness to substitute stability for conflict as the cornerstone of their future national security.
4. China’s participation in the region – although it does not have a wide military and security aspect at the moment – what effect will it have on regional trends?
The increased diplomatic activism of China contrasts with the essentially militarized diplomacy practiced previously by the United States in the region often openly in support of Saudi and Israeli goals, as in Yemen or with respect to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. I believe China’s surprisingly skillful effort to achieve a dialogue between Riyadh and Tehran has created confusion in Washington. Should the U.S. attempt to reassert its hegemonic ambitions through coercive diplomacy or should it pursue its own version of normalizing and stability-oriented diplomacy in the region? To what extent is China motivated by its concerns relating to energy security and assurances of access to Gulf oil? And to what extent is China sending the U.S. Government a message to the effect if it intrudes on the traditional Indo-Pacific preoccupations of China, then China will reciprocate by intruding in areas where there has been a strong U.S. presence.
As I consider the Ukraine War to be partly about geopolitical alignments after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, much will depend on whether global security maintains its unipolar structure that emerged after the Soviet implosion in 1992 or reverts to some new type of bipolarity (perhaps China/Russia v. NATO/India) or transitions to forms of multipolarity that seek a greater reliance on cooperative global problem-solving for the sake of national, and even more, human security.
5. To what extent can commercial relation and economic interdependency be used for regional dialogues?
I believe that robust commercial relations under most conditions produce positive forms of economic interdependency, which in turn strengthens processes of conflict-resolving dialogue. Such a momentum also builds the political foundations for increases in trade, investment, tourism, cultural exchanges in the common interest, yielding mutual benefits. And yet such economic dimensions cannot be assumed as necessarily having these positive effects. It depends on the perceive balancing of complex interests and often contradictory perceptions, as well as the presence or absence of geopolitical pressures. It is difficult to generalize about such matter, which always depend on contextual factors, which are constantly in flux.
For reasons suggested earlier, regional and global developments currently support stabilizing diplomacy and the expansion of mutually beneficial economic relations among countries that have spent the last half century or more in unproductive, costly, dangerous conflict. The impact of such developments on relations with Israel, especially considering that the current internal ferment in that country remains a great, yet relevant, unknown. If the extremist Netanyahu government manages to hold onto power it may try to distract attention from internal confrontations by restoring national unity by recourse to actions that deliberately increase regional tensions, especially with Iran, backed by inflammatory claims that Israel’s national security is at stake. It is questionable whether this old diversionary game will work under present conditions, but moves in that direction could be dangerous nevertheless. Also, dangerous and posing regional and extra-regional challenges would be the implementation of annexationist and one-state visions on the part of the apartheid, settler colonial, Jewish exclusionary state of Israel.
[Initiallly published In CounterPunch on April 26,2023, later substantially modified.]
If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’
At first glance ‘rule-governed’ seems to be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America since 1823 to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a more Atlanticist perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’
Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, 2 March, 2022, in a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions including China and India) although without comparable support at the UN for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The coercive diplomacy was left essentially to NATO members, varying according to their perceived security interests, but generally following Washington’s lead in failing to seek a ceasefire and a negotiated political compromise.
What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is far less clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek peaceful settlements of all international disputes.
The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the contrasting international response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch their ‘wars of choice,’ while reserving accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended impunity benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy and double standards that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.
These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises(1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).
Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).
These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.
This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaged in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference took ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.
Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.
The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.
The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict to prevent the forcible reunification of Korea.
It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than in conflictual manner.
However unlikely it now seems, it is possible that the Ukraine War will yet be remembered for producing a transition in outlook and behavior of global rivals in the direction of nonviolent geopolitics, multipolarism, and. multilateral global problem-solving. Arguably, China is currently showcasing the benefits of an increasingly activist form of geopolitics that seems intent on facilitating conflict resolution and peaceful relations, seeking a multipolar structure of world order that is not averse to demilitarizing international relations.
On behalf of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth), we co-convenors extend a warm invitation to your members, affiliates and others in your network to a webinar (flyer attached) on The Rising Danger of Nuclear Warwith Daniel Ellsberg. Responding to his keynote address will be Richard Falk and Zia Mian –this Friday 21 April. It is a notable occasion to have this opportunity to listen to this live statement by Daniel Ellsberg on these themes as his own extraordinary life of dedication and witnessing approaches its end.
LA 2.00 pm Mexico City 3.00 pm New York 5.00 pm Buenos Aires 6.00 pm London 10.00 pm
SHAPE was initiated some months ago with a CALL to individuals and groups around the world. It seeks to build a community of individuals and groups sharing this sense of urgency about the present historical situation, dramatized by the dual challenges of the prolonged Ukraine War, generating dangerously escalating tensions between Russia and the United States and the worsening prospects of responding adequately to climate change. SHAPE has previously arranged two prior successful webinars. We regard this event as our most ambitious and significant event and hope you will be with us.
In this spirit, we urge you to join with over 4,000 other to read and ENDORSE our Call, which is attached together with a link for its endorsement. The poster for the webinar is also attached.
Joe Camilleri, Professor of International Relations Emeritus, LaTrobe University, Melbourne
Chandra Muzaffar, Director of JUST, Malaysia
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton Univeristy
[Prefatory Note: A modified version of this post was published in CounterPunch on April 5, 2023, and written prior to the shocking attacks by Israeli armed police on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque; further escalation may result during the days ahead if ultra-religious Jews go ahead with plans for incursions at Al-Aqsa in the course of the Passover holidays. As usual, governments in the West and the main media platforms insufficiently depict and condemn Israeli violence or the rockets fired from neighboring Lebanon as well as Gaza in response to the violation of Palestinian rights of worship producing disproportionate Israeli artillery and air strikes.]
More than ‘Democracy’ is at Stake in Israeli Protests
Israeli police violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque directed at Palestinian worshippers in the midst of Ramadan on the nights of April 5 and 6 is a serious violation of international arrangements in Jerusalem to protect Muslim holy sites, none more sacred than Al-Aqsa. It interfered with prayer rituals important to hundreds of worshippers allowed entry, producing mass arrests, denials of entry to the mosque, and beatings of unarmed Palestinians. These incidents are of the same criminal quality as the settler destruction of the village of Huwara (near Nablus), and a reminder that Netanyahu is unwilling or unable to control these violent excesses of Israeli extremists acting in this manner with encouragement from leading members of his cabinet.
There are two interwoven conflicts currently playing out in Israel, but neither,
despite the Western liberal spin, relates to a supposedly threatened demise of Israeli democracy. Such a concern presupposes that Israel had been a democracy until this recent wave of extremism arising from the new Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s commitment to ‘judicial reform.’ A euphemism hiding the purpose of such an undertaking, which was to limit judicial independence by endowing the Knesset with the powers to impose the will of a parliamentary majority, if needed, to override Israeli court decisions by a simple majority and, in addition, exercise greater control over the appointment of judges. Certainly, these were moves toward institutionalizing a tighter autocracy in Israel as it would modify some semblance of separation of powers, but it was in no way a nullification of democracy as best expressed by legal guarantees of equal rights enjoyed by all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religious persuasion.
Israel, as a Jewish State that confers by its own Basic Law of 2018 the inalienaable right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people and asserts ethnic supremacy at the expense of the Palestinian minority within its own borders of more than 1.7 million persons undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy, at least with reference to the citizenry as a whole. As well, Palestinians have long endured discriminatory laws and practices on fundamental issues that over time have led the governance policies of the country to be widely and convincingly identified as an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid is operative in both the Occupied Palestine Territories and Israel itself. If the idea of democracy is stretched beyond reasonable limits, it is possible to regard Israel as an ethno-democracy or theocratic democracy, yet these terms are vivid reminders that to view Israel as a ‘democracy’ is itself a political oxymoron.
Since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has denied equal rights to its Palestinian minority. It has even disallowed any right of return to the 750,000 Palestinians who were coerced to leave during the 1947 War, and are entitled by international law to return home, at least after combat has ceased. The current bitter fight between religious and secular Jews centering on the independence of Israel’s judiciary is rather remote from most Palestinian concerns and is regarded as an intramural Jewish squabble. Such a view reflects the Palestinian disillusionment with Israel’s justice system. Since 1948, Israel’s highest courts have consistently supported Israel’s most internationally controversial moves, including ‘unlawfully’ restricting Palestinians, establishing Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, denying the right of return, upholding the separation wall of occupied territory, collective punishment, annexation of East Jerusalem, house demolitions, and prisoner abuse.
On a few occasions, most notably with respect to reliance on some torture techniques used against Palestinian prisoners the judiciary has shown slight glimmers of hope that it might address Palestinian grievance in a balanced manner, but after more than 75 years of Israel’s existence and 56 years of its occupation of Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 this hope has effectively vanished.
Nevertheless, Israel’s control of the political narrative that shaped public opinion allowed the country be to be legitimized, even celebrated by hyperbolic rhetoric as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ and as such, the one country in the Middle East with whom North America and Europe shared values alongside interests. In essence, Biden reaffirmed this canard in the text of the Jerusalem Declaration jointly signed with Yair Lapid, the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, during the American president’s state visit last August. In its opening paragraph these sentiments are expressed: “The United States and Israel share an unwavering commitment to democracy…”
Prior to Israel’s election last November that resulted in a coalition government regarded as the most right-wing in the country’s history, the U.S. government and diaspora Jewry seemed intent on ignoring the deepening civil society consensus that Israel was guilty of inflicting an apartheid regime to maintain its ethnic dominance that was subjugating and exploiting Palestinians living in Occupied Palestine and Israel. Apartheid is outlawed by international human rights law, and treated in international law as a severe crime, widely viewed as second only to genocide. Notable opponents of the extreme racism of South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and John Dugard have each commented that Israeli apartheid treats Palestinians worse than the cruelties that South Africa inflicted on their black African majority population. South African apartheid was condemned at the UN and throughout the world as internationally intolerable racism. Allegations of Israeli apartheid have been abundantly documented in a series of authoritative reports: UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (2017), Human Rights Watch (2021), B’Tselem (2021), Amnesty International (2022). Despite these condemnations, the U.S. Government and liberal pro-Israel NGOs have avoided even the mention of the apartheid dimension of the Israeli state, not daring to open the issue for debate by attempting to refute the allegations. As Dugard pointed out when asked what was the greatest difference between fighting apartheid in South Africa and Israel, he recently responded: “..the weaponization of antisemitism.” This has been borne out in my own experience. There was considerable conservative opposition to anti-apartheid solidarity initiatives with respect to South Africa but never the attempt to brand activists as themselves wrongdoers, even ‘criminals.’ The IHRA definition of antisemitism that conflates harsh criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews has given Zionists a powerful punitive tool by which to deflect pro-Palestinian activism by branding adherents as antisemites.
From these perspectives, what is at stake in the protests, is whether Israel is to be treated as an illiberal democracy of the sort fashioned in Hungary by Viktor Orban, diluting the quality of the procedural democracy that had been operative for Israeli Jews since 1948. The new turn in Israel gestures toward the kind of majoritarian rule that has prevailed for the last decade in Turkey, involves a headlong slide toward outright an intra-Jewish autocracy in Israel. Yet we should note that in neither Hungary nor Turkey have governance structures of an apartheid character emerged, although both countries have been serious issues involving discrimination against minorities. Turkey has for decades has rejected demands from its Kurdish minority for equal rights and separate statehood, or at least a strong version of autonomy as well as upholding human rights. These instances of encroachment on basic human rights in Turkey and Hungary have at least not occurred within a framework of settler colonialism that in Israel has made Palestinians strangers, virtual aliens, in their own homeland where they have resided for centuries.
Racism is not the only reason to dissent from the democracy-in-jeopardy discourse, dispossession may be the even more consequential one. If native people were to be asked whether they worried about the erosion or even the abandonment of democracy in such settler colonial ‘success stories’ as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. the question itself would have no current existential relevance to their lives. Native peoples were never meant to be included in the democratic mandate that these encroaching settler communities adopted so proudly, while being contemptuously indifferent to the exclusion of native peoples. Their tragic fate was sealed as soon as the colonial settlers arrived. It was in each instance one of marginalization, dispossession, and suppression. This indigenous struggle for ‘bare survival’ as distinct peoples with a viable culture and ways of life of their own making is one of several scandals of modernity. The destruction that was so produced amounts to what Lawrence Davidson has called ‘cultural genocide” in his pathbreaking book of 2012, which even then included a chapter condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian society.
Underneath the encounter among Israeli Jews, which allegedly discloses a chasm so deep as to threaten civil war in Israel lies the future of the settler colonial project in Israel. As those who have studied ethnic dispossession in other settler colonial contexts have concluded, unless the settlers manage to stabilize their own supremacy and limit international solidarity initiatives, they will eventually lose political control as happened in South Africa and Algeria under very different schemes of settler domination. It is this sense that the Israel protests going on need to be interpreted as a double confrontation. What is explicitly at stake is a bitter encounter between secular and ultra-religious Jews the outcome of which is relevant to what the Palestinians can expect to be their short-run fate going forward. There is also the implicit stake between those who favor maintaining the existing apartheid arrangements resting on discriminatory hegemony but without necessarily insisting on territorial and demographic adjustments and those who are intent on using violent means to extinguish the Palestinian ‘presence’ as any sort of impediment to the further purification of the Jewish state as incorporating the West Bank, and finally fulfilling the vision of Israel as coterminous with the whole of the ‘the promised land’ asserted as a biblical entitlement of Jews as proclaimed by the mainstream Zionist optic.
It is a mystery where Netanyahu, the pragmatic extremist, stands, and perhaps he has yet to make up his mind. Thomas Friedman, the most reliable weathervane of liberal Zionism weighs in with the claim that Netanyahu for the first time in his long political career has become an ‘irrational’ leader that is no longer trustworthy from the perspective of Washington because his tolerance of Jewish extremism is putting at risk the vital strategic relationship with the U.S. while discrediting what has long been an illusion of reaching a peaceful resolution of the conflict by diplomacy and the implementation of a two-state compromise. Such tenets of a liberal approach were deliberately rendered obsolete by the scale of Israeli settlements and land-grabs beyond the 1948 green line, which itself confined Palestinian hopes to only 22% of Palestine as it was under the British mandate and UN Partition Plan.
Politically, Netanyahu needed the support of Religious Zionism to regain power and obtain support for judicial reform to evade being potentially held personally accountable for fraud, corruption, and the betrayal of the public trust. Yet ideologically, I suspect Netanyahu is not as uncomfortable with the scenario favored by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benezel Smotrich as he sometimes pretends. It allows him to shift blame for dirty deeds in dealing with the Palestinians. To avoid the dreaded South African outcome, Netanyahu seems unlikely to oppose another final round of dispossession and marginalization of the Palestinians while Israel embarks on the completion of a maximal version of the Zionist Project. For now Netanyahu seems to be riding both horses, playing a moderating role with respect to the Jewish fight about judicial reform, while winking slyly at those who make no secret of their resolve to induce a second nakba (in Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), a term applied specifically to the 1948 expulsion. For many Palestinians the nakba is experienced as an ongoing process rather than an event limited by time and place with highs and lows.
My guess is that Netanyahu, himself an extremist when addressing Israelis in Hebrew, has still not decided whether he can continue to rise both horses or must soon choose which to ride. Having appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to the key positions vesting control over Palestinians and as the chief regulators of settler violence it is pure mystification to consider that Netanyahu as going through a political midlife crisis or finding himself a captive of uncongenial coalition partners. What he is doing is letting it happen, blaming the religious right for excesses, but not unhappy with their tactics of seeking a victorious end of the Zionist Project.
Liberal Zionists should be deeply concerned about the degree to which these developments in Israel give rise to a new wave of real antisemitism, which is the opposite of the weaponized IHRA kind that Israel and its supporters around the world have been using as state propaganda against critics of state policies and practices. These targeted critics of Israel have no hostility whatsoever to Jews as a people and feel respectful toward Judaism as a great world religion. Rather than respond substantively to criticisms of its behavior, Israel has for more than a decade deflected discussion of its wrongdoing by pointing a finger at its critics and some institutions, especially the UN, International Criminal Court, and the Human Rights Council where allegations of Israeli racism and criminality have been made based on evidence and scrupulous adherence to existing standards of the rule of law. Such an approach, emphasizing the implementation of international law, contrasts with the irresponsible Israeli evasions of substantive allegations by leveling attacks on critics rather than either comply with the applicable norms or engage substantively by insisting that their practices toward the Palestinian people are reasonable in light of legitimate security concerns, which was the principal tactic during their first decades of their existence.
In this sense, the recent events in Israel are dangerously portraying Jews as racist criminals in their behavior toward subjugated Palestinians, done with the blessings of the government. The unpunished settler violence toward Palestinian communities has even been affirmed by relevant government officials as in the deliberate destruction of the small village of Huwara. photo-recorded aftermath of settlers dancing in celebration amid the village ruins, is surely a kind of Kristallnacht, which of course is not meant to minimize the horrors of Nazi genocide, but unfortunately invites comparisons and disturbing questions. Such impressions are rendered even more plausible by harrowing photos of Israeli police beating Al_Aqsa worshippers. How can Jews act so violently against a vulnerable native people living amongst them, yet denied basic rights? And will not this kind of grotesque spectacle perversely motivate neo-Nazi groups and rightists throughout the world to castigate all Jews? In effect, Israel by both cheapening the real menace of antisemitism in this IHRA process of attaching the label where it doesn’t belong and at the same time arousing hatred of Jews by documented renditions of their inhuman behavior toward a people forcibly estranged from their native land. By so acting, Israel is making itself vulnerable in a manner potentially damaging to Jews everywhere, which is an inevitable global spillover from this inflammatory campaign of the Netanyahu government to victimize even more acutely the Palestinian people, aiming at their total submission, or better their substantial departure from their own homeland.
[a whimsical poem to celebrate the love legacy of Saint Valentine, written by Marianne Moore 63 years ago, published in The New Yorker on Feb. 13, 1960, dedicated by me to all of us who love poetry and dare to love love on Valentine’s Day 2023.]
An initiative to address the multiple crises that have brought us to the brink of the precipice.
Ukraine – Rethinking Global Security
This, our second webinar to be held on 22/23 February 2023, draws lessons from the Ukraine war and sets new pathways to global security.
REGISTER HERE
Moderator
Professor Joseph Camilleri
Professor Emeritus, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; Convener, Conversation at the Crossroads
Speakers
Professor Richard Falk
Emeritus Professor of International Law, Princeton University; Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London
Professor Kishore Mahbubani
Founding Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
Dr. Kate Hudson
General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) academic and author
Wei Yu
Codepink, Coordinator “China is Not Our Enemy” campaign
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar Former Professor of Global Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang; President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)
Paulina Chan
Programming Director, Canada China Forum
Thursday 23 February, 2023
London: 8:00 Paris / Algiers: 9:00 Cairo: 10:00 Moscow: 11:00 Ankara: 12:00 New Delhi 13:30 Kuala Lumpur / Shanghai: 16:00 Tokyo: 17:00 Melbourne 19:00 Fiji 20:00 Auckland 21:00 Honolulu: 22:00 Los Angeles / Vancouver: Midnight (Wednesday)
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 