[Prefatory Note: The interview conducted by Daniel Falcone was published under in CounterPunch on May 11, 2025 with the title On Genocide and Gazan Resilience is reproduced here unmodified except for the title. To call attention to question of ‘What comes next for the Palestinian people and Gaza,’ sometimes phrased as ‘the day after’ is an increasingly haunting question. A return to some version of Oslo Dipmomacy (as incorporating the global endorsement of ‘the two-state’ solution) is not an acceptable outcome for the Palestinians and obviously contradicts the embrace of an Israeli s one-state solution). The time has come for the Palestinian people, including about six million refugees who have for decades been denied their entitlement to a ‘right of return’, to be treated as integral to a sustainable peace and a central requirement of fulfilling their inalienable right of self-determination. Another fundamental issue relates to Palestinian representation, which should reflect the collective wishes of the Palestinian people living under occupation and some form participation by the Palestinian refugee communities. To legitimate such an outcome process requires circumventing ‘the primacy of geopolitics’ within the UN and global society in general, or its benevolent transformation.]
In this exclusive interview, renowned international law scholar and former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk engages with educator and journalist Daniel Falcone to examine the moral, political, and historical dimensions of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. The conversation is anchored by a viral social media post from Tam Zandman, a young Israeli who denounced what he described as the genocidal destruction of Palestinian life. Falk contextualizes Zandman’s testimony within the broader framework of Israeli state violence, addressing the normalization of moral indifference, the complicity of Western governments and media institutions, and the ideological underpinnings of the Zionist project, particularly its “Greater Israel” aspirations.
Drawing on a range of sources, including Noam Chomsky’s critiques of state terrorism and Mohammed Omer Almoghayer’s memoir On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza, Falk explores the systemic erasure of Palestinian voices, the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism to suppress legitimate criticism, and the enduring spirit of Palestinian resistance, or sumud, in the face of profound destruction.
Daniel Falcone: On April 10, 2025, Gaza-based journalist Motasem Dalloul commented on a widely circulated social media thread, describing it as “a shocking thread by [an] Israeli youth [that] discloses the reality about the genocide [that] has been going on in Gaza for 17 months.” In your view, how does this fit within the historical context of what you have described as “speaking a substantial truth about Israeli moral numbness and genocidal sentiments?” Could you elaborate on how such discourse reflects broader hegemonic narratives and state violence? The language around the topic was rather stark and reminded me of Chomsky’s analysis of Alan Dershowitz’s assertion in 2006, that called for the targeting of Lebanese civilians.
Richard Falk: Dalloul’s comments on Tam Zandman’s powerfully unrelenting condemnation of Israel’s real reason for what he calls the flattening of Gaza is moving and significant. Zandman’s words were written, as you observe, by a young self-described ‘citizen of Israel’ who emotionally explores the psycho-political infrastructure of Israel’s prolonged genocidal attack on the captive, totally vulnerable Palestinian population of Gaza. His Cri de Coeur arises from manifestly intense convictions and an anguished internal vantage point within Israel. What gives these words from Israel their quality of originality is their humanistic grounding, which contrasts with intense ethnic nationalism of Israeli mainstream dialogues, and even more the sub-conscious drive to destroy the Palestinian existence. The public show of Israeli moral concerns has been concentrated upon the fate of a small number of October 7 hostages mainly Israeli Jews.
Such a preoccupation has been accompanied in Israel by indifference, or worse, toward the fate of the Palestinians, including ‘Palestinian hostages’ seized without charges since the Hamas attack and severely abused in Israeli prisons. These personal tragedies are reduced to statistics of so-called ‘prisoner exchange’ releases that are part of ceasefire diplomacy devoted to pauses in the violence with Hamas commitments to release an agreed number of hostages. Seizing innocent civilians and holding them hostage is a war crime whether they are Israeli or Palestinians and this is true whether called ‘hostages’ or ‘prisoners.’ As with other aspects of media presentation, such one-sided labeling is itself a dimension of media complicity in covering up the one-sided sense of grievance with respect to Israeli captives held by Hamas.
What is most distressing to Zandman is that public discourse emanating from Israel about retaliation against barbarism, counterterrorism against Hamas, security concerns, and the recovery of hostages, obscures the grotesque clarity of the widespread pre-October 7 Israeli societal wish that was passionately in favor of the devastation of Gaza and the elimination of its people. For Zandman, this was for most Israelis, something worth pursuing for its own sake. It needed no pretext, much less a legal or moral rationale given this embrace of necro politics in Israel.
In keeping with such a background, the Netanyahu government made little effort to explain and justify recourse to genocide by claiming a ‘just cause’ when addressing Israelis. Such explanations were superfluous internally, and their articulation seem designed to strengthen external support from Diaspora Jews and the governments of liberal democracies in the West, especially the US, that desired a smokescreen of morality and legality to give a shred of legitimacy to the Israeli response.
Beyond this, Israel and its leaders were wary of condemnation by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, not because they felt misunderstood, but because they deeply resented being internationally labeled as guilty of criminal behavior, especially of genocide, which challenged their insistence that only Jews were victims of mega-genocide, warranting a special recognition from others, identified as The Holocaust or Shoah. This concern about an external reputation is what led to Israel’s worldwide campaign of weaponized anti-Semitism to demonize its critics and proclaim its innocence, essentially a politics of diversion.
We are left with two bewildering issues: Firstly, is Zandman correct in his attribution of a toxic and lethal dehumanization of the Palestinian people that favorably disposed toward genocide, and would have been supportive of its enactment with the pretext of responding to the Hamas attack? In a sense, this is an empirical question that is difficult disentangle from the unpopularity of the Netanyahu government, the secular opposition to the rise of the religious right in Israel, and a tendency to go along with whatever the government proposed in the name of security. In essence, we might never know whether Zandman was fearlessly reporting an accurate account of the Israeli collective mentality with respect to the Palestinian people or was expressing his own acute frustrations about the refusal of Israel’s post-October 7 response to respect the constraints of law and morality.
Yet, without a doubt, his strong feelings are reactions to repressive responses to Israeli dissenters in this period as compared to the moral struggles evident about Jews in the Diaspora, who exhibit internal tensions, and need the comfort zone of the ‘two sides’ sensibility that has emerged in the West, including the media, to the effect that Hamas is guilty of a terrorist assault and deserves to be destroyed — and the view that Israel in its reacting, exceeded the limits set by law and morality. Both sides are hence responsible, and ‘day after’ arrangements should reflect this symmetry rather than reflect the asymmetric relevance of the pre-October oppressive governance in Gaza.
Israeli oppression was expressed in many ways, including a punitive blockage in place since 2007, massive military incursions in 2008-09, 2012, & 2014, the widespread assessment by respected human rights civil society organizations (including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) of the imposition of an apartheid regime throughout occupied Palestinian territories, and the endgame of the Zionist Project — taking the form of Greater Israel and involving the annexation of the West Bank, and the establishment of a territorial buffer zone.
Secondly, did the more than 18 months of a genocidal assault on Gaza alter Palestinian prospects for achieving basic rights in a negative or positive fashion? The negative argument arises from heightening the costs for Palestinians of remaining resident in Occupied Palestine or in Israel, as well as extending hegemonic control of such neighboring countries like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and extending its military reach with respect to Iran. It also, despite the prolonged extreme genocide, retained the diplomatic support and strategic partnership of the complicit governments in the West, especially in confronting ‘the clash of civilizations’ dimensions of the conflict in which Israel has done the dirty work of the containment of radical Islamic influence in the Middle East. Such developments are viewed as safeguarding Western access to the energy resources of the region as well as providing security for commercial navigation and naval operations.
I wonder about your reference to Chomsky’s reaction to Dershowitz’s indirect endorsement about what became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, which underlay Israel’s deliberate recourse to disproportion and indiscriminate responses to any show of armed resistance in Lebanon and elsewhere. As such, it was both descriptive of Israel’s approach to its ‘security’ ever since its establishment in 1948, as well as being an early sign of the drift toward the Gaza genocide that has unfolded since October 7. Dershowitz has twisted and turned over the decades in his all-out effort to validate each-and-every Israeli use of force.
Daniel Falcone: While this analysis sheds light on the moral discourse surrounding Gaza, it risks being incomplete without addressing the situation in the (“Gazafied”) West Bank and the broader vision of the Zionist project, particularly the “Greater Israel” endgame you mention. Additionally, there seems to be limited recognition of Palestinian resistance and the enduring spirit of sumud (or “steadfastness”). How do these dimensions, territorial ambition, structural occupation in the West Bank, and the resilience of Palestinian resistance, further contextualize the discourse of moral numbness and the hegemonic violence you’ve described?
Richard Falk: In line with your initial question, I consider the wider issues associated with Zandman’s statement that pertain to the future of the West Bank and uncertainties about how developments pertaining to the devastation of Gaza since October 7 affect the Zionist endgame that appear to aim at establishing ‘Greater Israel’ (formally incorporating the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and now at least northern Gaza into the state of Israel), moves repudiating the two-state solution and further sustained by compliant regional adjustments in Lebanon, Syria, and most of all, Iran.
The issues raised in your question about how Palestinian resistance and sumud have been affected inevitably raise concerns about the limits of Palestinian resilience. Given the ongoing and prolonged fury of the Israeli violence, which continues to disregard even the most minimal limits of law and morality, the question is how much longer Palestine can maintain an active resistance mode of steadfastness, proportionate to their commitments not to leave their Palestinian homelands.
The destruction of remaining hospitals and safe zones has left international public opinion dazed and numb, which has been partially expressed by media complacency about reporting the underlying humanitarian emergency and daily atrocities, including the total prohibition of any delivery of food to starving. In food insecure Gaza, many are reduced to eating pet foods and native grass, while being reliant on polluted drinking water. The Trump/Musk continuous assaults on constitutional democracy in America, the incitement of a dangerous trade war, and the saga of a cruel campaign against pro-Palestinian immigrants and visa-holders, dominate Western news cycles ever since Trump reentered the White House for the start of a second term as president. As the peoples of the world have mobilized to condemn, by protesting what is going on in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Middle East, most governments avert their gaze either out of indifference or feelings of futility.
The level of suffering, the hopelessness of living amid rubble and disrupted ecological viability are posing a more serious test of sumud and resistance than even the nakba of 1948 when an estimated 750,000 Palestinian were driven from their homes and homeland, and permanently denied a right of return while witnessing from afar the bulldozing of their villages. Gaza became the home to many of these displaced from villages and towns in southern Israel, constituting a majority refugee population in Gaza numbering an estimated 75% of the whole.
This background helps explain why it is Gaza among the occupied Palestinian territories that has generated over the years the most formidable resistance initiatives, ranging from missile salvos that did little damage in Israel but gave rise to acute anxiety in the southern regions of the country, instigating the first intifada of 1987 mounting a formidable nonviolent collective challenge to the unlawful Israeli refusal to implement the Palestinian right to return to their pre-war homes in what had become Israel, and finally, the mounting in Gaza of the Great March of Return in 2018 that symbolized the refusal of Gazan refugees to submit any longer to Israeli captivity. Yet until after October 7, Israel had not avowed genocidal intentions, implemented in the most totalizing and sadistic manner, while enjoying the sustained backing of the US and its most powerful European partners.
The message that this genocidal assault communicated to the Palestinians is that the world was either helpless or afraid to stop this one-sided massacre generally misdescribed as a ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas. Israel sought to convince enough Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, to heed the ultimatum directed at the Palestinian, and implicitly conveyed to the world: ‘leave or we will kill you.’
Zandman’s emotional outburst is a reaction to the Israeli mindset that endorses the flattening of the Palestinian reality, but there is no expression of concern about the cruel choice facing the Palestinian people as a result of this destruction of viable conditions of life in Gaza: sustain resistance amid continuous violence in a destroyed habitat lacking life support of food, water, medicine or seek the relative normalcy of life, although as an unwanted and feared refugee, likely denied human rights in the host foreign country. Yet despite the hardships, offering Palestinians a greater possibility of rescuing surviving children and families from enduring what must appear to many as a hopeless future, makes further steadfastness to the land seem increasingly suicidal.
Most Palestinians, whether in Gaza or elsewhere are not prepared even now to admit political defeat after a century of struggle that destroyed their dreams and made even hope of better days increasingly seem like a desperate act of will bordering on a collective death wish. Even if forced to leave, the Palestinian will to resist is likely to persist, although in more covert forms, possibly including a revival of armed struggle tactics by scattered militia groups as an alternative to being resigned to realities too overwhelming to confront any longer. The Palestinians face the danger of what might be described as ‘resistance fatigue,’ which if it emerges should be accompanied by an appreciation of a remarkably sustained narrative of Palestinian perseverance and heroic struggle against a ruthless and ideologically empowered adversary with its own narrative of historical and ethnic entitlement.
Daniel Falcone: You’ve suggested that this analysis should be read alongside Mohammed Omer Almogheyer’s recent publication with OR Books, On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza: Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed. Could you clarify how this work contributes to or deepens our understanding of the dynamics we’ve discussed, particularly in relation to Palestinian resistance and the lived experience of loss under the pressures of occupation and systemic violence? What does this reflection on everyday life before destruction offer to the broader conversation about moral responsibility and the overall historical narrative?
Richard Falk: As you suggest, Zandman shares his alienating experience as an Israeli, reacting with bitterness and moral outrage at the surrounding consensus in the country for carrying out an extremist’s genocide in Gaza, and welcoming the occasion of retaliation as dispensing with the need of Israel to construct a justifying rationale or make a public display of shame and regret. At the same time, Zandman does not attempt an assessment of the Palestinian posture of resistance in its many forms, or whether their complementary ideas about Israel and Israelis are infused with their own ‘flattening’ scenarios. My experience of knowing many Palestinians, including several Hamas leaders, has exhibited a surprisingly non-vindictive contrast, fervently seeking paths forward for both peoples without showing signs of waiting for an opportunity to give way to ‘a revenge syndrome.’ Of course, history teaches us that to whom evil is done internalize the trauma, but never forget, and are often scarred in ways that do erupt in hostile incidents, even can erupt as well-organized collective forms of violence.
In my experience, the greatest sources of anti-Semitism in our world are hard-core Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians, both defaming in their attitude toward Jews who challenge the excesses of the Zionist Project, and not Palestinians who despite their prolonged and abusive subjugation retain a surprising degree of empathy for Jews as a people and Judaism as an ancient religion.
On this basis, I urge people to read Mohammed Omer Almoghayer’s newly published On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza; Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed. The book gives an unforgettable account of what made even growing up in Occupied Gaza such a fulfilling human experience. Despite poverty, abuses, humiliations, and periodic military incursions, Gaza’s modes of resistance rested on the satisfactions of community, family closeness, friendships, weddings, the delights provided by landscapes and beachfronts, as well as sharing meals, helping those in need, thirsting after normalcy, walking along the coast, falling in love.
Given these everyday pleasures, brought to life in these pages by Almoghayer’s gift of storytelling and his deep reverence for Gaza’s ancient heritage as kept alive in makeshift museums and current recourse to art and culture — it is notable that despite decades of Israeli dominance, Palestinian cultural expression is still seen through books, public intellectuals, and artworks, far more internationally known and admired than that any produced in Israel during the same period. This is partly because Israel was not provoked to reactive creativity by the conditions of its existence to concentrating their creative energies in the arts. Talented Israelis were more intent on pushing the modernist boundaries of technological innovation, especially as it could be applied militarily.
Almoghayer, long known to the outside world as one of Gaza most trustworthy and fearless journalists, is at the same time very sensitive to the hardships imposed on the people of Gaza due to the punitive blockade imposed in 2007 and extending far beyond security concerns to include such civilian items as chocolate, pasta, artistic and fashion materials, and basic building materials. Such hardships included keeping Gazans ‘on a diet’ so that they could go on living, yet only at subsistence levels. As well, Israel restricted harshly Palestinian entry and exit from Gaza contributing to its prison atmosphere. Much Israeli recrimination toward Gazans resulted from the political strength shown by Hamas in the 2006 elections and the success of Hamas in defeating coup efforts by the collaborationist Fatah (aided by Washington) to take control of the Gaza governing process.
I initially encountered Almoghayer during my first year as the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Israeli Human Rights Violations in Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967. It occurred in 2008 after Almoghayer received the coveted Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in an overseas ceremony. On his return home to Gaza, he was brutally beaten by border security personnel not only for winning the award, but more so for bringing to light Israeli human rights abuses in his role as a young journalist in Gaza. I recommended that the UN censure Israel for this high-profile human rights violation, but nothing came of it, and Almoghayer went on with his journalistic career that included academic writing on issues that touched on the Palestinian future in an edited book on the failures of Oslo diplomacy. Almoghayer’s courage as a witness never inhibited him from truthful yet risks reportage.
The book is also a personal memoir. What should raise Western eyebrows is his harrowing negative account of a scary experience with IS (Islamic State) terrorists who seized Almoghayer, threatening his life if he didn’t join their extremist movement and torturing him while holding him in captivity. When finally released, Almoghayer makes clear that it is this kind of tactics and extremism that casts a darker shadow over the Palestinian struggle than does the abusive Israeli occupation and should have no influence whenever Palestinians get the chance to exercise their inalienable right of self-determination.
Almoghayer has not given up hope despite the rubble, the trauma, and the terrifying ordeal. In a stirring epilogue that squarely faces the reality of a Palestinian catastrophe far worse than the terrible 1948 nakba. Despite all, he believes Palestinian sumud will triumph by achieving at some future unspecified time a democratic outcome by establishing a viable sovereign state of their own, premised on mutual and equal respect for the human rights of the contending ethnicities. He does not pronounce upon whether it should be one state for the two peoples or separate states, but its legitimacy will depend on the realization of equality and dignity for all citizens and residents. If you read only one book on Palestine and the worldview of Palestinians read On the Pleasures of Living in Palestine perhaps in conjunction with one Palestinian film, From Ground Zero.
Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City. Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 