SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth: Statement on Gaza Ordeal

25 May

[Prefatory Note: SHAPE is an international network of persons sensitive to the imperatives of human unity and the guardianship of the natural habitat in accordance ecological wisdom that illuminates paths of resilience and adaptation. In this era of predatory capitalism, imperial geopolitics, and surging fascism we as a leaspecies need to think, feel, and act differently to avoid catastrophe, and do so in a spirit of urgency. Please distribute this statement and contact us if you wish to endorse and join our efforts.]

In the name of humanity, the barbarism in Gaza must stop

Over the last eighteen months the world has witnessed undiluted militarised cruelty targeting the entire population and the supportive natural habitat of Gaza – with not so much as an ounce of mercy or compassion, let alone justice, or sensitivity to issues of ecological viability.

No one has been spared in this onslaught: not civilians, not children, women or the elderly, not humanitarian workers or UN personnel overseeing the distribution of aid, not homes, schools, places of worship, or hospitals.

No logic can begin to explain or justify this genocidal policy of indiscriminate maiming and killing, or the calculated and systematic starvation of the already traumatized Palestinian population. These and other unspeakable atrocities leave us with just two words to describe the conduct of the cabal presently ruling the State of Israel: pure evil

Faced with such vicious behaviour, humanity has but one option: to call out the evil and take appropriate action to put an end to such outrageous conduct.

In the name of humanity we therefore call on all peoples and governments to:

  1. Terminate all transactions with the State of Israel that relate to military capabilities until a just and lasting peace settlement has been reached, which gives effect to the inalienable right of Palestinian self-determination. This embargo should include:
  2. A ban on the export of all weapons and dual-use equipment as well as ammunition, whether supplied directly or through a third party
  3. A ban on the import of all Israeli weapons and military technology
  4. A cessation of all other forms of military cooperation, including joint operations/exercises/logistics and communications initiatives, intelligence cooperation and sharing, and expert exchanges and visits
  5. A ban on all financing arrangements designed to facilitate the above activities.
  6. Break diplomatic relations with the State of Israel until a complete and durable ceasefire has been established across all the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  7. Seek the exclusion of Israeli participation in international cultural and sporting events and call for national boycotts of foreign and domestic cultural and sporting happenings until a complete and durable ceasefire has been established across all the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  8. Apply maximum pressure on those governments that have been Israel’s primary backers, notably the United States, Britain and Germany, to cease forthwith any support of Israel’s inhuman conduct in Gaza and Palestine as a whole.
  9. Support and financially contribute to the Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction formally adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in March 2025, and to this end call for an immediate UN-sponsored international summit, open to all supportive governments, relevant regional organisations and sympathetically disposed civil society, philanthropic and business organisations. The reconstruction process in Gaza and the proposed international summit should be mindful of Palestinian rights, especially the right of self-determination as applicable to all developments pertaining to Israeli Occupied Palestine.
  10. Encourage nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, both individual and collective action of the sort that proved helpful in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. A mobilized people can change history, and bring political evil to an abrupt end, especially where, as is the case in Gaza, a severe humanitarian emergency exists.

Such measures on the part of states need to be complemented and reinforced by resolute, collective action at the UN General Assembly. A special session of the General Assembly should be urgently called to denounce the heinous crimes being committed in Gaza and the West Bank and the constant threats to cleanse Palestine of its people by measures of forced displacement.

The General Assembly should consider and adopt a series of resolutions which demand:

  1. An immediate ceasefire in all parts of Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and adjacent areas
  2. The establishment of  a UN peacekeeping contingent of sufficient strength to monitor and supervise the ceasefire and deter in timely fashion actions that would lead to a renewal of violence
  3. The unimpeded flow of water, food, fuel and medicines to Gaza
  4. Strong measures designed to protect humanitarian aid workers, health and medical personnel, and agencies and institutions engaged in the running of hospitals, clinics, kitchens and other essential services  
  5. Decisive measures to enable journalists and media personnel to carry out their duties in safe and secure environments.   

We also request the world’s religious organisations to issue a call addressing from a spiritual and ethical perspective the evil of genocide as it continues to unfold in Gaza. They are uniquely placed to set forth the ethical criteria that should govern an agreement on the cessation of all military hostilities in the Occupied Territories and the creation of just and durable peace in Palestine. 

Since October 2023, millions have exposed and protested against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They have succeeded in raising the level of global public awareness even though their cries for humanity and justice have thus far gone unheeded. The complicity of the rich and the powerful have stood in the way.

People of good will everywhere must now redouble their efforts in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They must peacefully and resolutely unite their voices and work closely together for as long as it takes.

A powerful global dialogue for a just peace in Palestine that brings together people of diverse social, cultural and religious background is a primary ethical imperative of our time. So is accountability, which means punitive action against leaders of the State of Israel and the complicit enabler governments, including imposing obligations to pay reparations to the victimised population of Gaza and contributions to the funding of reconstruction.

Issued on behalf of SHAPE and its Coordinating Committee by

Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, Dr Chandra Muzaffar and Professor Emeritus Joseph Camilleri

SHAPE Co-Conveners

22 May 2025

Email: savinghumanityandplanetearth@gmail.com

Website www.theshapeproject.com/

Tags: , , , ,

Richard Falk, Foreword to Haidar Eid, Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza

16 May

[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of foreword to a very special book on the Palestinian Ordeal, written in the form of short pieces from 2009 to the present. Banging on the Walls of the Tank, is especially illuminating by its portrayal of the contrast between the Israeli oppressive occupation before October 7 and after. It underscores a contrast between the earlier Israeli approach as ‘incremental genocide’ as opposed to ‘accelerated’ genocide after the Hamas attack. Copies of this book may be ordered from Amazon, and other booksellers. Eid is in the best traditions of journalism, scholarship, and engaged citizenship].

The Political Is Inevitably Personal

I have read many discerning and moving books on Palestine over the last fifty years but none has spoken to me as forcefully and persuasively as this short volume of opinion pieces written by Haidar Eid from 2009 to the present. The prophetic insight of these dispatches and their cumulative impact offer readers a vivid Palestinian narrative of tragic suffering and the heroic resistance of the Gazan population to Israel’s occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, as well as a pervasive Israeli reliance on collective punishment of Palestinians. 

Banging on the Walls of the Tank, a reliable interpretation not filtered and distorted by Western mainstream media,should be read by all those in the West who seek to understand the bitter realities of the Israel/Palestine struggle. Almost every page is enlivened by the author’s uncannily memorable formulations of the true and awful nature of the Palestinian plight, which was desperate long before the horrifying real-time genocide that has unfolded in the form of daily atrocity spectacles ever since October 7. In his readable style and with the skill of a trustworthy storyteller, Eid offers insights rooted in his direct experiences as a Gaza refugee, expositor of Palestinian steadfastness, resistance activist, witness, and survivor.

Contextualizing October 7

These dispatches, written since 2009 in response to the evolving bloody tactics and criminality of the Israeli occupation, are both an anticipation of the October 7 attack and a condemnation of the Israeli genocidal response. An aspect of the originality and significance of Eid’s presentation is ti convincingly demonstrate that Israel has harbored an apartheid ideology and practice from the time of its birth. This is long before the most influential human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) dared issue reports, as they did in 2021, that fully documented the allegations that Israel was systematically applying apartheid policies and practices to administer the occupation. Israel also relied upon discriminatory internal regulatory laws to subjugate all Palestinians who were directly subject to Israeli sovereignty, including those living in post-1948 Israel as citizens. These domestic laws were supplemented by exclusionary nationality laws and practices relied upon by Israel to deny Palestinian refugees a right of return as bestowed by international law and confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 (11 Dec 1948) while at the same time granting birthright Jews an unlimited rights of return no matter whether they had any link to Israel or not.

Eid’s dissent from pro-Israeli orthodoxy in Europe and North America extends to his important assessment that Israel’s supposed “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 was deceptively presented to the world as a move toward peace. What was not told was that this Israeli unilateral initiative was coupled with Israeli administered border control that effectively imprisoned 2.3 million Gazans in their own homeland. Such confinement was later cruelly reinforced by a punitive siege that converted Gaza into what became known as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. The impact over time of these oppressive conditions are characterized by Eid, borrowing from historian Ilan Pappe,[1] as “incremental genocide.” This importantly demarcates the “before” and “after” of October 7 as one of continuity rather than as totally discontinuous, coming out of the blue, as Israel, followed by the West, desperately wants us to believe up to this day. It is obvious that Israel devoted much attention to decontextualizing October 7 to avoid the implications of the pre-October 7 realities of apartheid and incremental genocide so persuasively delineated by Eid being taken into account when evaluating the Hamas attack.

Eid is writing as a victim/survivor/activist as well as a journalist/intellectual of the before and after of the Gaza ordeal. For him, the sixteen months of direct, undisguised genocide that has preoccupied the world to an unprecedented degree was nothing fundamentally new but rather an intensification of what Gazans had been experiencing ever since 1967 in more attenuated forms. There is no doubt that incremental genocide would be virtually impossible to establish in a court of law as a distinct crime because of the difficulty of proving genocidal intent as compared to criminalizing what followed after October 7 as a violation of the Genocide Convention. The numerous undisguised assertions by Israel’s top leaders easily met the rigorous legal standards of genocidal intent insisted upon by objective jurists. These words of genocidal incitement were combined with the crude, often sadistic, Israeli Defense Forces combat tactics relied upon to bring its helpless Palestinian adversary agonizingly close to the brink of extinction.

The Israeli discourse on October 7 also points its finger at Hamas, seeking its complete delegitimation by treating its attack as pure “terrorism,” justifying an exterminist response, and relieving Israel of pressure to obey the laws of war in its response. Eid challenges this Israeli rationalization by regarding the attack as both a justifiable and a legitimate form of resistance, especially in view of the context, which includes the Netanyahu performance at the UNGA a few weeks earlier during which he displayed a map with no Palestinian entity, an erasure of Palestine alongside the presumed establishment of Greater Israel. By taking these factors into account, Eid produces a revisionist view of October 7 that is more realistic and reflective of the values at stake.

There is a deeper significance to the way Eid establishes the context accounting for October 7. His approach is a necessary antidote to the Western hegemonic discourse, which denounced any assertion that the Palestinian attack was justifiable resistance to the provocative criminality of apartheid, several terrifying militarily inflicted massacres, and sixteen years of a cruelly punitive blockade whose constraints on imports could not be plausibly justified as a security measure while guaranteeing the misery of Palestinian lives in Gaza. Eid’s book should be read as a corrective to the disgraceful performance of a mainstream media in the West that excluded all considerations of context from its evaluation of the events of October 7 and declared justificatory acceptance of Israel’s claimed entitlement to act in self-defence, echoing its coverup of overt recourse to genocide as nothing other than a necessary “security operation.” This is a deliberate attempt to banish the word “genocide” from use in Western public discourse and mainstream media when reporting on Israel’s totally dominant military capabilities in executing its indiscriminate rampage against the completely helpless civilian population of Gaza. Despite this effort to restore the discipline of pro-Israeli discourse, describing the Israeli violence as “genocide” has been gradually normalized in many societal and media venues, but not yet all.

Failures of Implementation: International Law and Universal Moral Standards

This linkage between what daily occurs on the ground in Gaza and the broader issues of toxic dysfunction that have long poisoned the Palestinian experience exposes the willful impotence of what Eid generously terms the “international community,” as if there was one.  It is intolerable for Eid that outsiders, whether governments, international institutions, media, or even individuals, remain spectators, or worse, render aid and comfort to the perpetrators and their accomplices in carrying out this “crime of crimes.”  Along the way, Eid acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust against Jews was similarly internationally tolerated, especially by the Western liberal democracies that have, since 1945, alleviated their guilt at the expense of the Palestinians, who pay for moral shortcomings for which they had no responsibility. Two massive wrongs never make things right; rather, as the poet Auden teaches, “those to whom evil is done / do evil in return.”[2]

Israel’s official occupation policy after 1967 stressed putting the people of Gaza “on a diet,” with just enough food to avoid death by starvation but not enough to enable nutritional health. Eid emphasizes the long denial of the right of return enjoyed by refugees after 1948 as affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 194. Any process of satisfying the requirements of international law would also necessitate the dismantling of the apartheid regime of control and ethno-religious claims of a Jewish supremist state.

Eid’s Vision and Its Enemies

As Eid articulates his vision of a benevolent future for the Palestinian people, he sets forth its simple but far-reaching governance implications: A single secular state for both peoples from the river to the sea with equal rights for all resident ethnicities. For Eid, this is the one and only solution, an indirect repudiation of the two-state delusion as well as his complete rejection of an Israeli one-state apartheid Greater Israel.

Eid does far more than relate the horrors of incremental genocide. He condemns not only the Israeli perpetrators but severely incriminates their complicit supporters who supplied weaponry and funding that sustains the mighty military capabilities of Israel and give diplomatic credence to it is flagrant defiance of international law. This is more than critique, it is also a rejection of the only pathway Eid envisions as leading to peace with justice for the Palestinians, and even Jews. Such a solution, which will strike many jaded souls as “utopian” or both unattainable and unacceptable, rests on the simple major premise of fulfilling Palestinian rights under international law. In the Palestinian case, this means, among other policy alterations, lifting the draconian blockade of Gaza that has made the daily existence of inhabitants of Gaza (two-thirds of whom are refugees) a life of misery, one deliberately “engineered” by Israeli tacticians who “mow the lawn,” a term officials in Tel Aviv use to refer to Israel’s massive military attacks that are properly undertaken whenever Gaza seems to pose security threats by the vitality of its resistance activism, regardless of whether by armed struggle or nonviolent civil action.

Eid’s dispatches are written with the passion and experience of someone who has lived as a refugee since 1964, when he was born in Gaza. His parents lived in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp after they were forced, in 1948, to leave their home in the Palestinian village of Zarnouga. As the decades passed, they never gave up their expectation on one day returning to Zarnouga, even knowing it had been demolished. As they faced death, Eid’s parents last wish was that at least their bodies could be returned to their village for burial; a wish that was denied; a wish that, even if granted, would be far from fulfilling the kind of return envisioned by international law.

That he grew up in a refugee household helps explain Eid’s preoccupation with the exercise of the right of return of the five or six million Palestinians living as refugees as a necessary feature of any sustainable and acceptable peace process. And as such, it undoubtedly informs why he shows such contempt for the Oslo diplomacy initiated in 1993, a diplomacy that totally ignored, and implicitly rejected, this basic right embodied in international law. On other grounds, as well, Oslo justifiably reinforced his rejection of a Palestinian leadership that failed to insist on affirming the Palestinian entitlement to the most fundamental of human rights in the post-colonial era, the inalienable right of self-determination possessed by all peoples and claimed on behalf of every nation on the planet. Eid adopts a cynical view of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which, by accepting the Oslo framework, sacrificed the future of Palestine for a seat at the far end of the negotiating table and the dubious ‘reward’ of a photo op on the White House lawn; the photo was used by the West to show the world the much celebrated, but deeply misleading Arafat/Rabin handshake as a historic reconciliation that was never to be implenmented . What followed the publicized initiation of Oslo diplomacy was, at best, a charade that dragged on long enough for Israel to expand its settler population to a politically irreversible level. Throughout, Israel has benefited from a ‘peace process’ that was never about peace, and which while running its course seriously harmed the Palestinians. The supervision of the negotiations by the overtly partisan US government should never have been accepted by the designated representatives of the Palestinian people who defied reason by not insisting on neutral auspices. As Rashid Khalidi, among others, have shown, the United States never even pretended to be an honest broker of the Oslo Process, but made no secret of situating itself in Israel’s corner.[3]

Eid’s perspective is formed by a blend of his multiple identities as victim, witness, survivor, activist, humanist, writer and journalist, university teacher, and public intellectual. This rare combination of experience and commitment contributes to making Eid an exemplary interpreter of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal. He is decidedly not a neutral observer; he is an undisguised and fully engaged “honest partisan” who develops a compelling Palestinian account of why the Palestinian ordeal came about and was allowed to happen. While his observations are avowedly one-sided, this lack of balance, oddly, provides a more objective approach because it is congruent with the realities of Gaza if tested by the evidence, regulative norms of law and morality, and proclaimed values at stake. As such, it presents readers with a happy contrast to the brainwashing pretensions of such influential media platforms as the New York Times or The Economist, which claim balance but, when it comes to reporting on Israel/Palestine, are more accurately perceived as sophisticated instruments of state propaganda.

Even without the benefit of being confronted by the pre-October 7 historical, legal, and ethical context, public protest began to mount, including in the centers of Israeli support in North America and Western Europe, as Israel continued the genocide unabated, refusing to heed growing public calls for ceasefires and constraint. Pro-Palestinian protests erupted on many university campuses but were quickly countered by Israeli donor leverage and governmental pressures, especially in the US. With the advent of Trump in 2025, pro-Palestinian activism on campuses and elsewhere faced renewed challenges, and not only in the US but also throughout Europe, reflecting a political swing to the ultraright.

Valuing and Learning from the Eid Perspective

What also makes Eid’s commentary exceptional is the authenticity of his voice, shaped by his intense experiences since his birth in 1964. His work is further informed by channeling the wisdom of profound and enraged Palestinian cultural icons, referencing the insights of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Edward Said, as well as making good use of anti-colonial writings drawn from authors in the Global South. It should be instructive for all readers that Eid derives his inspirational political guidance from these cultural sources rather than from the Palestinian political leaders that he holds co-responsible for misleading their own people in various self-destructive ways. Eid is appalled by the willingness of the Palestinian leaders anointed by the West to accept what he calls “bread crumbs” rather than insisting on liberation and basic rights as conferred by international law; law that is never acknowledged by Israel or enforced by either the UN or responsible geopolitical statecraft as ineptly overseen by the United States since the end of the Cold War that tended to favor geopolitical and strategic interests to legal, moral, and even prudent restraint. The most tainted bread crumb, in Eid’s reflections, is the idea of the acceptance of a permanently demilitarized Palestinian statehood on 22 percent of historic Palestine, especially considering that, in 1947, Palestinians rejected the dubious UN partition resolution that split the country – but at least awarded Palestinian with 45 percent of the land.

Eid is deeply influenced by the successful, analogous struggle against the hegemonic racism and settler colonialism of apartheid South Africa. He believes that the lessons of this earlier struggle can be adapted and applied to Palestinian circumstances, embracing the famous dictum, often attributed to Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which distinguishes the rational understanding of political injustices from an emotional reassurance that a just outcome will emerge from the struggle of the Palestinian people. In addressing this tension from my outlook, my rational self is less confident than Eid about the sufficiency of the South African model of liberation. I believe that Palestinian liberation will remain impossible unless it overcomes the primacy of adverse geopolitics (shaped by strategic interests rather than by a willingness to respect the rule of law and universally affirmed moral notms). These currently unregulated forces empower the Islamophobic complicity of the white West and are currently aligned with the Zionist networks in the West that have exerted an unhealthy influence over policy formation at national, regional, and global levels.

Giving equal attention to matters of political will, I am also encouraged by anti-colonial success stories. This reading of the recent historical record echoes Eid’s interpretations and, before him, Said’s. Both thinkers deeply theorized a belief that the side that controls “the high moral ground” in the end prevails politically over the side that dominates the battlefield due to its military superiority. In my terminology, and in keeping with Eid’s assessments, Palestine is winning this Legitimacy War and is on its way to an emancipatory future, although with much suffering and devastation on the road to such a political outcome. This guardedly hopeful outlook assumes Palestinian perseverance for as long as it takes, which Israel is ceaselessly working to undermine and weaken by its recourse to the most extreme methods of violence in the combat zones and to dirty tricks overseas, including “weaponizing antisemitism” as a policy tool of combat.

In Conclusion

The title of Eid’s book, borrowed from a poignant line in Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, would strike most international readers as enigmatic and obscure. Eid informs us that these words have become a popular slogan of Palestinian resistance fighters, conveying the vital message, “If you want to live, make noise”; that is, resist, but if ready to die in body or spirit, stay quiet. Such is Eid’s fighting spirit. His noise is a challenge to all everywhere to act on behalf of the Palestinian struggle within our respective spaces before it is too late. And as a fitting indictment, Eid’s last words in the epilogue again echo those of Kanafani: “Gazans have been banging on the walls of the Gaza concentration camp since 1948,” and still nothing happens by way of rescue, much less liberation. Silence almost everywhere, especially shameful among Arab regimes neighbouring besieged Gaza is reinforced by the timidities of the Arab League.

For Eid, Arab silence is not broken by uttering words of condemnation unless accompanied by coercive actions. In this sense, Eid’s own journey has led him and his family to take refuge in South Africa in recent months, the country that has acted more substantively than any other against Israel since October 7E by submitting a graphic complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention. Unsurprisingly, Eid in exile insists that Palestinian liberation must take the form of a single secular constitutional and democratic state with recognized borders encompassing the whole of mandate Palestine. This affirmation is coupled with a total rejection of the dangerous fiction of co-existence and accommodation that is based on the mutual acceptance of a neutered Palestinian mini state that would be permanently demilitarized and otherwise left at the mercy of a highly militarized and racist Israel. [AC1] 

Secondly for Eid, a present grounding of realistic hope in this particular liberation struggle must be predominantly based on the activation of people rather than the good will and energies of governments and their institutions. This leads Eid to stress the role of solidarity initiatives to be with a sense of urgency throughout the world as typified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. He strongly endorses BDS as a principal modality of Palestinian prospects ever since its initiation in 2005, when it began as a collective action with the backing of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. In effect, liberation from settler colonialism in the historical presence can move toward victory only when people in strategic countries around the world are sufficiently mobilized to exert transformative pressures on governments and the international community to undo the political and economic ties that bind them to the oppressor.

Eid is lucidly persuasive in his refusal to accept the common refrain that there are “two sides” in recent debates about Israeli tactics and goals. Zionist liberals especially would have us so believe, evading the central reality that this a classic struggle, with distinctive features of the oppressed against the oppressor and its complicit allies. Eid is seeking a crucial rectification of the asymmetrical nature of the struggle. Suc continues to be highly controversial in the West, but seems vital to act upon if non-Palestinians are to support a genuinely just and sustainable peace. This view expresses a radical challenge to the status quo as its realization requires the rejection of the Zionist Project of Jewish supremist prerogatives in a distinct state as the essential precondition could enable the two peoples to live together as equals. Eid’s vision of liberation does not include the forced departure (in effect, an ethnic cleansing) of Jews or the destruction of Israel as a state, but it does require major adhustments: a fundamental reconstruction of its internal race relations; an abandonment of Zionist ideology; ethnic equality of treatment in nationality and citizenship laws; and quite likely the naming of the emergent one-state entity to signify the rejection of an ethnic statehood for either people.   

Gruesome patterns of Israeli abuses over the years are further confirmed by Eid’s own existential encounters with Israel’s prolonged dehumanizing and sadistic treatment of the people of Gaza, especially its children. His prose is written not with ink but with the blood of the innocents, undoubtedly a tearful recounting of very concrete incidents involving family members, close friends, neighbours. Eid is unflinching in his determination to bring Israel’s brutalizing behaviour out into the open by bearing anguished witness to targeted killings of innocent children by Israeli snipers, as well high tech weapons of war that killed whole families trapped in their homes and devastated entire residential neighbourhoods during Israel’s massive incursions, characterized as “massacres,” in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2018, and frequently, on a smaller scale, in the leadup to the full-scale genocidal response to October 7. In a significant conceptual move, Eid follows Pappe in presenting these years preceding that pivotal day as “incremental genocide.” This reality posed for every Palestinian an ultimate choice between the dangers of resistance and the humiliations of submission to the harsh apartheid constraints of Israeli control.

What makes this book truly groundbreaking, aside from its chronicling of witnessing in ways that impressively counteract the propagandistic decontextualization of October 7, is its clarity when it comes to a critique of the mainstream diagnosis of the Palestinian struggle and accompanying positive prescriptions about the path to a Palestinian victory emerging from the piles of rubble signifying Gaza after enduring these months of genocide.

Even though the provisional rulings of the ICJ on January 26, 2024, did nothing to change the facts on the ground, it should be read as an authoritative affirmation of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and a heartfelt juridical lament for the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe still befalling Gaza. It undoubtedly helped motivate Eid to express the optimism of his will by the dramatic assertion in the epilogue that “Israel is now on the verge of collapse.”

Richard Falk

Santa Barbara, California

30 January 2025

[1] Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth (Oneworld Publications, 2019). [the ‘e’ in Pappe is written with an accent over it)

[2] W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939,’ published in Poetry of the Thirties , Penguin, 1964

[3] Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East,” Beacon Press, 2013, https://harpers.org/2013/03/brokers-of-deceit-how-the-u-s-has-undermined-peace-in-the-middle-east/.

 [AC1]Something missing here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Gaza Ordeal: How Will it End?

12 May

[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.

Tags: , , , ,

An Open Letter to the Democratic Party: Right and Wrong Ways of Opposing Trump, Fascist Tendencies in 2025

7 May

[Prefatory Note: the opinion commentary below was published in slightly modified form in CounterPunch on May 6, 2925. A short epilogue is appended to this version.]

An Open Letter to the Democratic Party

A Perspective of Discontent

Ever since Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024 I have been receiving multiple daily solicitations for funds to support the Democratic Party, individual Democratic candidates for Congress or State Offices, and notification of worthy campaigns on public issues such as the protection of Social Security, Medicare, and reproductive rights, as well as on voter protection measures in various forms. I am personally sympathetic with robust resistance to this perverse and dangerous Republican effort to dismantle democracy and constitutional governance in the United States by taking giant steps toward legitimating autocratic rule with fascist features of arbitrary violence and cruelty without empathy and decency.

I expect many will be critical of what I write here as a diversion from attacking the main targets of concern: a White House out of control, a subjugated Republican Congress that does Trump’s bidding as if composed of automatons, and a Supreme Court that endorses the subversive shTrump ethos 90% of the time and is due to be further ‘packed’ with Trumpists in coming years.

My response to this litany of political challenges: recent Democratic Party failures of style and practice deserve to be treated as overdue occasions for self-criticism, and the criticisms of a disappointed ally can be restorative, at least indirectly. At least it is motivated by constructive goals associated with rethinking the relation of money to political competition for support as well as a plea to address controversial issues of foreign policy in a forthright manner, and hopefully in the spirit of our ‘better angels.’

Funding Entrapment Techniques

Against this background, I find myself increasingly alienated by procedural and substantive aspects of the chosen approach being taken by the Democratic Party leadership to oppose such an undesirable and frightening set of developments in the governance of the country. On procedural issues, besides crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns, giving the impression to the voting public that democratic politics is little more than a continuous funding appeal. This is the increasingly overt posture of the Democratic Party establishment in recent years. Without overlooking the importance of funding, I find this shift of emphasis from ideas to money deeply distressing.

It lends itself to ultra-manipulative fundraising tactics. This outlook employs a variety of techniques to induce presumed liberal voters with a high frequency to take an opinion survey by responding to simplistic, almost rhetorical, questions about the Trump agenda as opposed to a preferred Democratic alternative. Not a word is mentioned that the survey is a sleeper leadup to a mandatory monetary contribution without which the survey cannot be completed. Gullible respondents are given a fool’s choice between opting out after taking the time to answer the several pages of questions and committing to make a monetary contribution. This is clearly a funding entrapment mechanism that I found alienating in spirit and form.

The choice foisted upon an innocent respondent is to pay or abort the survey. My objection may seem trivial, even captious, but reliance on such technique exhibits a mentality of deception that more and more dominates bipartisan relations of the two political parties with their own followers, and of course with the citizenry as a whole. And not only in relation to electoral politics but across the entire spectrum of public concerns. To restore trust and animate robust activism the Democratic Party needs to cultivate reasoned honesty, however radical, and abandon its present style of hysterical rhetoric pretending either that all is won or everything lost by proclaiming liberal intentions or the significance of Trump’s anger or stumbles in exaggerated language that is incongruous with the grim realities of the political sphere. National policy prospects are bleak enough without resorting to hollow exaggerations (claiming tears of joy or panic) that annoy rather than motivate, much less enlighten.

An Escapist Nationalist Policy Agenda

If anything, my substantive objections to Democratic Party mobilizing tactics are more serious and raise my concerns to such a level of disillusionment that I am teetering on the brink of withdrawing support, financial and otherwise, from the Democratic Party. I am appalled that the party establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to US foreign policy, which encourages an interpretation of continuing unconditional support for Israel despite its transparent and prolonged Gaza genocide. Such criminality itself thinly disguises Israel’s territorial objectives that depend upon coerced ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s censure of those who stayed on the sidelines in the struggle against South African apartheid is fully applicable here: “It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.” To be silent is even more morally tone deaf than to be neutral. It was Kamala Harris’s silence on hot issues, including but not limited to Gaza, that quite likely led to Trump’s victory last November and certainly undermined her leadership credibility for the future. To play it safe to avoid controversy amounts to the self-neutering of political identity that has long plagued liberal politics by being shamelessly pragmatic rather than principled when it comes to the hard issues that have arisen over the years in US foreign policy. If Harris had expressed either measured and informed opposition to Israel’s policies or even ventured her own Biden-free rationale for continuity of US policy in the Middle East, she would have earned respect rather than indifference, even scorn. If she had not distanced herself from controversy during her listless campaign for the presidency, she might now be heading a revitalized opposition rather than feebly mending fences with a stunned public helplessly watching de-democratization proceed daily without an energizing sense of credibly fighting back.

This unseemly silence by the Democratic Party leadership and liberal media on Israel/Palestine extends to foreign policy in general. Outsiders perceive an America that wants to run the world and is willing to pay the price of doing so but is indifferent to how or why. To be disappointed by Trump only because of his wrecking ball approach to a liberal domestic agenda while overlooking global issues is beyond misleading – it verges on insanity given the nature of the global challenges facing Americans, and indeed all of humanity. It means indifference to the UN, the diplomacy of war and peace, foreign aid, relations with China and Russia, nuclear disarmament, AI, robotics, and support for international law and morality. Its willed blindness surpasses the monkey that sees no evil!

If Trump is subtly attacked for building walls, not bridges, the Democrats are not far behind. It is hard to reconcile this inward turn with their overwhelming support for a huge ‘peacetime’ budget to fund the military while the poor at home suffer and the infrastructure rots. It is hard to explain the disparity between this investment in the world that excites the global imperialists in Washington of both political parties dream about and the measured pursuit of humane forms of sustainable governance that the leaders of the Democratic Party should be championing to meet 21st century challenges at home and internationally. Among the mistakes being made is to suppose that a costly hegemonic foreign policy can be divorced from a humane dedication to domestic priorities. The Democratic Party seems intent on promoting such a divorce, which invites a deep misunderstanding of the linkages between disappointment at home and running the world by relying on a militarized geopolitics.

To explain my discomfort with this presumed disinterest of US voters in anything beyond their borders and to show that I was not overstating this mood of apparent contentment with a walled in America, I list the issues selected in a typical recent funding appeal by the Democratic Party that polls Democrats about their main concerns as a prelude to a funding appeal. The only issue on this list that might justify inclusion in a foreign policy agenda is ‘addressing the climate crisis.’ Even climate concerns so described might be understood as no less domestic than the others given its wording, differing from Trump only with respect to not dismissing global warming as a hoax. The list below copies the exact language used in typical Democratic Party appeals:

“Which of the following best describes why you support Democrats? (Select all that apply.)

I believe in addressing the climate crisis.

I believe in creating more good-paying jobs and supporting unions.

I believe in reproductive freedom.

I believe in affordable health care.

I believe in protecting and expanding rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

I believe in protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

I believe in protecting democracy and the right to vote.

I believe in moving our country forward, not backward.

I believe in protecting critical federal services for working people, veterans, children, and the elderly.

I believe in strong, stable leadership.

All of the above

Other:”

Concluding Remarks

My final assessment of this recipe for despair, and continuing defeat, is that without a revitalized internationalism, America’s prospects are dismal at home as well in the world. Unless the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself with a sense of urgency the nation’s future will remain under a darkening sky. To restore hope that is not a cover for ‘wishful thinking’ requires reconnecting what we wish for at home with what we do abroad. Without adding demilitarization and denuclearization to the policy agenda the challenges facing the country and the world will continue to be misconceived. Without dedication to the prevention of and opposition to genocide, apartheid, and ecocide, prospects for cooperative problem-solving in multilateral venues will not be forthcoming. As well, without a stronger United Nations that rejects the primacy of geopolitics, any hopes for humane global governance, let alone war prevention and nuclear disarmament, will be in vain.

Perhaps it is too much to wish for, but by recourse to  ‘a politics of impossibility’ I would like to believe that the leaders of the Democratic Party are still capable of listening to loyal voices of disillusionment. Revisions of messaging to the faithful is only the tip of the iceberg. The underlying challenge is to make opposition to Trump evolve a transformational vision of how to frame political and economic agendas for a brighter future at home and abroad, and that means stepping into the sunlight of truthfulness and controversy, which should in any event be the lifeblood of a healthy democracy.

Tags: , , ,

Forum on Nuclear Weapons and Global Order

3 May

On Monday, May 5, a Forum at Columbia University will feature Jeffrey Sachs, world renowned public intellectual and Ivana Hughes, charismatic President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, in a discussion, which I am also honored to take part. I hope as many of subscribers will attend online.

Here is the link, the time is 4:45 EDT.

ttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/81521733678?pwd=IN1ItX3mclbNJi0gBIxTd2kUgszywB.1

Meeting ID: 815 2173 3678

Passcode: 424699

Resisting Genocide in a Geopolitical World Order

2 May

[Prefatory Note: The post below was originally published by the Qods News Agency in English and Farsi versions in later April 2025. It is here republished in modified form, although the initial questions are retained. The central issue considered is the primacy of geopolitics in relation to international law, global justice, and universal morality. Consideration is given to the role of international law in activating civil society by legitimating resistance in the face of severe instances of direct and indirect criminal wrongdoing—humanitarian intervention, civic solidarity initiatives, peoples tribunals]

  1. As you know, Israel resumed its relentless bombing of Gaza and has shattered the Gaza ceasefire with Hamas adopted on 19 January. Israel has resumed weaponizing starvation in Gaza by its decision to break the ceasefire agreement. Israel has broken international law by blocking aid to Gaza. What’s your opinion? What should we do to stop the Israeli crimes against Palestinians?  How can the international community help Palestinians get rid of the Israeli occupation?

Response: A useful starting point is the realization that despite the views of a strong majority of governments representing most peoples of the world are opposed to the post-October 7 criminality of Israel in Gaza. And despite this, the organized international community as centered in the UN has proved helpless to enforce the basic provisions of the UN Charter and international law in this situation even in the face of a humanitarian emergency that urgently needs to be stopped, not just for the sake of the Palestinian victims, but for the credibility of humanity with respect to upholding the basic elements of the right to life. These conditions making international action imperative are reinforced by near unanimous interim rulings of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court that have been angrily rejected by Israel, and arrogantly regarded as ‘without legal merit’ by Israel’s strongest supportive, complicit governments in North America and Europe.

What has become clear in this process is that the UN was not designed to be effective whenever, as here, adherence to international law (and morality) clashes with the strategic interests and geopolitical role of one or more of the five permanent membersof the Security Council, UN’s the only organ with enforcement authority. Each of these five, known as the P5, enjoys a right of veto that legally nullifies majoritarian preferences, and introduces an anti-democratic component into the core functioning of the UN. It is instructive to realize that when it comes to peace, security, and fundamental human rights the UN was never intended to be a new framework for world order.

The UN from the start was a winners’ framework based, as earlier in what was regarded as an ‘anarchic society in which the prevalence of power in relation to law in contexts of clash was taken for granted and seen to be ingrained in international practice. To appease public opinion this underlying reality was somewhat disguised by the lofty idealistic language of the Preamble to the Charter.  If this was not the intention of the founders of the UN it would make no sense to give the winners in 1945, the world’s most dangerous political actors, a path to total impunity for all that they might undertake, however destructive of a global rule of law, to promote national interests in war/peace and conflict situations. If as some have argued, the intention was to recognize inequality or civilizational diversity as architectural features of world order, then it made no sense not to give India and Brazil seats at the table or Indonesia (the most populous Islamic state) or Nigeria (for Africa) and Brazil (for Latin America). The failure to institutionalize these other criteria of inequality exhibited both ‘a winner.takes all approach to global order’ in combination with taking steps to assure the enduring dominance of global order by the Global North.

In light of this, if the peoples or governments of the world seriously seek the enforcement of international law as pronounced by the ICJ in the face of a P5 SC veto, we must turn to civil society activism. What the near unanimous interim rulings of the ICJ on 26 March 2024 and its strong Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 establish beyond any reasonable doubt is the existence of a crippling enforcement gap with respect to the implementation of international law. Past instances, including the anti-war movement that challenged the US-initiated Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid campaign that struggle against South African racism, suggest that the mobilization of civil society in relation to law and justice can contribute to closing this gap in situation that find international institutions and governments paralyzed, or worse, are to varying degrees complicit.

There is a creative interaction present in relation to Israel’s criminal course of action in Gaza. Despite the enforcement gap judicial institutions are influential sources of legitimacy that lend credibility to a variety of global solidarity initiatives, including BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), pressuring governments to enact arms embargoes, mass protests, declarations by organized labor and faith community, civil disobedience and self-immolation, and others. Such a mobilization on a global scale is already spontaneously happening to some extent and may have already reached a tipping point that exerts decisive pressure, especially on Israel and United States, although not yet with discernable behavioral results that bring closure to the Palestinian ordeal. The cruel repression of protest activity in the US and Israel is both a reactive demonstration of the growing effectiveness and of the shameless refusal of liberal democracies to coordinate their behavior with their self-righteous claims to be champions of international human rights norms, benevolently guiding ‘a rules-governed world’ that brings stability to international political and economic life.

I am personally associated with the Gaza Tribunal Project that seeks to encourage civil society nonviolent action to be undertaken in a spirit of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, above all the inalienable right of self-determination. The GTP does not seek to be a substitute for the ICJ when it comes to identifying authoritative legal guidelines for the peoples of the world. This civil society tribunal was formed and dedicated to overcoming the enforcement gap. It is also committed to delimiting the accountability, complicity, and information gaps as well as to the establishment and maintenance of a permanent archive and permanent record of the Gaza Genocide, including its spillover effects in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East.  

  • Ansarullah (known in the Western media as ‘the Houthis’) said that Yemen will not back down from continuing its support operations for the Palestinian people until the Israeli aggression on Gaza stops and the siege is lifted. Ansarullah officials affirmed that Yemen’s stance on Palestine stems from religious, national, and moral principles. Ansarullah vowed to continue their military operations against Israel and US forces in the region. How do you evaluate the Yemeni people and Ansarullah stance in support of innocent Palestinian people.

Response: Ansarullah (‘helpers of God’ in Arabic; a reference to Houthis in Yemen; an ongoing party in the long unresolved civil war for unified control of Yemeni governance) assertions declarative of the Houthi commitment to solidarity with the Palestinian liberation is an admirable example of an ethnic group acting in a self-sacrificing, brotherly manner in the face of continuing genocide victimizing a kindred long repressed ethnicity. It strikes both substantive and symbolic blows against the criminal actions of Israel and the complicity of the US and other supporters of this transparent genocide enacted in real time, consummated by the commission of daily atrocities brought to the eyes and ears of the world’s peoples in the digital age.

It is a sad commentary on contemporary world order that so few governments and ethnicities, express by their words and even more by their deeds, a comparable passion to that of Yemeni Houthis. It is further revealing that those few governments that do exhibit some visible degree of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle are all situated in the Global South. It suggests that even after the formal collapse of colonialism, the US Government continues to project western imperial power through its political and economic leverage, and militarism. These domineering characteristics of post-Cold War global order are sustained by a worldwide network of military bases, regime-changing interventions, and navies in every ocean.

The result since the end of the Cold War is a new unified form of geopolitical governance of the planet. This US-led dominance is an alternative to either the moderate decentralism of sovereign states or a more centralized world order system administered by democratic regional and global institutions. A third possibility, not yet tested or legitimated, although glimpsed in the warnings of Samuel Huntington, first set forth in 1992, that the sequel to the Cold War would not be a peaceful world order, but a clash of civilizations. This would amount to some sort of hybrid arrangement bonding regional or civilizational political orders with global institutions on one side and sovereign states on the other. At this time, such a form of hybridity is dramatized by the fate of the Palestinian people, with several white western states aligned with Israel while diverse Islamic political forces actively support the Palestinian struggle by forcible resistance..  

  • Israel is coming under increasing international criticism over its handling of the    war in Gaza. Millions of people around the world have taken part in protests against Israel’s war crimes. Protesters voiced outrage over what they described as war crimes committed by Israel in the besieged Gaza Strip and demanded immediate international action. What’s your opinion that Israel is becoming more and more isolated due to its genocide?

Response: I think it is true that this last post-ceasefire resumption of the genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, cruelly implemented by Israel’s weaponization of food shortages, polluted water, and medical supplies, facilities, and personnel has isolated Israel as a toxic rogue state among the peoples of the world. It has also posed the greatest moral/political/legal challenge of the 21st Century to the entire world of states, institutions, and peoples.

The ICJ in its authoritative Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 as overwhelmingly endorsed by the UN General Assembly in one of the most important acts of the long existence of the GA expressed by a vote of 124 in favor, 14 opposed, and 43 abstentions. This judicial action put a reasoned end to the lawfulness of the further administration of Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by Israel during the 1967 War. [A/RES/ES-1024; revealingly, the original request with the closer vote came on 11 November 2022, that is before October 7, 2023 while the latter vote in September 2024 (or 11 months after the attack on Gaza) by the GA to the ICJ for an AO on the OPT enjoyed only a narrow margin of support with a vote of 87-26(opposed)-53(abstentions)] The resolution in the GA after ICJ’s judgment ordering Israel to end its ‘unlawful presence’ in OPT, including East Jerusalem no later than 12 months from the date of the GA Resolution on 19 September 2024. This was a clear sign that even among governments, Israel had a lower reputational standing in view of carry out its Gaza policy in the interval between the two GA actions. Equally significant was the ICJ pronouncement that the UN as an organization as well as member states in their individual capacity had a legal obligation to implement the legal findings in the Advisory Opinion. In effect, it was not just ‘advice’ from the ICJ but ‘mandatory guidance’ as interpreted and pronounced by the ICJ. Of course, it remains doubtful that either the ICJ or GA possesses the political traction to overcome the enforcement gap even in the face of this strong appeal by the most respected international institution, confirming even in relation to transparent and prolonged genocide that geopolitics retains its primacy in international relations..

Whether this isolation of Israel will be facilitated by militant civil society initiatives is a currently unanswerable question. The legal and moral foundations for such militancy exist. It is now a matter of whether a sufficient political will exists to prompt sufficient action along these solidarity lines. Also relevant is whether governments in the non-West are prepared to take a greater role in sheltering such civic action and activists from various forms of backlash organized by Israel and implemented by the formidable Zionist network of support that exerts considerable direct and indirect influence, especially in the US and parts of Europe, not only as a junior partner to the US effort to be a regional hegemon in the Middle East, but through reviving memories of Jewish victimization during the Holocaust and a more wide ranging ‘weaponization of antisemitism.’.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Hailing Francesca Albanese’s Second Three Year Term

16 Apr

[Prefatory Note: Over time, the role of the Special Rapporteur as established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and report upon Israel violations of human rights in Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, has gradually assumed increasing importance as a source of reliable information and enlightening analysis. The position of SR is both unpaid and demanding, and is aggravated recently by often harmful and always hurtful defamatory attacks from pro-Israeli NGOs, most notably UN Watch based in Geneva and NGO Monitor with headquarters in New York City. It is a fact that the SR influence has grown over time as have the intensity of these attacks on the SR truth-bearing messengers. The mean spirited attacks seem to have as their main purpose a diversion of attention away from the message. Ms. Albanese’s experience was preceded by that of the SR signatories of the support letter below. Our milder although similar experience of defamation is set forth in the course of a book entitled Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations, Clarity Press, 2022,  with a forward by Ms. Albanese.

This double dynamic has reached its climax during the first three-year term of Francesca Albanese tenure as SR that happened to coincide with Israel’s genocidal response to the October 7 Hamas-led attack, which instead of opposition elicited the active complicity of North American and leading European governments and the passive complicity of Arab and many other governments around the world, with a few notable exceptions, including South Africa, Colombia, and Chile. In this period, the excellence of Ms. Albanese’s SR reports made a major impact on civil society awareness. They added professional competence as to why allegations of Israeli genocide were well-grounded in law and fact. Her energetic and courageous high visibility talks in all parts of the world at the invitation of a great variety of organizations made her a prime target of vicious smears by Zionist support groups, especially in the West, characterizing her without a shred of evidence as ‘a notorious antisemite.’ As with Israeli bombing of Gaza, Israel’s acknowledged intention is not to be accurate but to inflict maximum damage. In this case, the battlefields are symbolic yet the blood of victims spills.

This pattern of increased reliance on SR reports also reflects an awareness of Israel’s formidable, sophisticated, and well-funded efforts to shape the public discourse on Israel/Palestine, and the acceptance by the most influential Western media platforms of a one-sided approach that gives consistent priority to Israel’s spin on developments in Gaza and the West Bank. The separate reports of the SR to the Human Rights Council and General Assembly each year have become the go-to source trustworthy relevant information and analysis for anyone seeking objective assessments of the ongoing  Palestinian ordeal, now reaching a peak with the connivance of the Trump presidency and a totally subservient Congress.

We welcome this opportunity to congratulate Francesco Albanese on the renewal of her second three-year term, and take note of the shameful effort of Israel, US, Germany, and a few other UN members to end the Mandate concerned with Occupied Palestine altogether. Given the personal abuse to which she was subjected, it is a tribute to Ms. Albanese commitment and courage that she is willing to endure further abuse for another three years.

We celebrate her achievements, and join with those who feel that a Nobel Peace Prize would be a highly deserved recognition of her contributions to peace and justice to so recognize her achievements. Some are even suggesting that her credentials of service to the UN while under fire make her an ideal candidate to become the first female Secretary General of the Organization. The UN needs a person that can take the heat of abusive criticism at a time when the UN’s most powerful member is an undisguised opponent of internationalism and even cooperative problem-solving on a global scale. Given these realities it is almost inconceivable that such an inspirational choice will be made at the UN any time soon. Among other hurdles, it would only become technically possible in the highly unlikely event that the five permanent members of the Security Council gave their approval.

Should I ever be asked, Francesca would certainly receive my vote based on her extraordinary performance but also as an expression of my hopes for a stronger, more relevant UN in the future when called upon with a sense of urgency to stop genocide and uphold global security in the manner set forth in the UN Charter.]

\\\*****////SR Letter to Jürg Lauber\\\*****///

3 April 2025

To your excellency, Jürg Lauber, President of the Human Rights Council;

We write as former Special Rapporteurs of the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 with reference to the reappointment of Francesca Albanese to this position. We are conversant with her work since becoming Special Rapporteur, which we commend, and for Jürg Laubers the basis for this message of enthusiastic support for her reappointment, which we understand is scheduled to be voted on 4 April 2025.

We have learned that a small number of governmental members of the HRC have indicated their intention to vote against Ms. Albanese. We find this show of opposition to be irresponsible and harmful to the United Nations, which stands for excellence of performance combined with accuracy and objectivity of analysis. Ms. Albanese has been confronted with extreme behavior on the part of Israel, including flagrant instances of disregard of basic provisions of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, as well as those obligations incumbent on an Occupying Power to extend protection to the civilian population of the Occupied society in all circumstances. With insight and careful research Albanese has called world attention to these patterns of wrongdoing as is her duty as Special Rapporteur.

Against this background of Israel’s lawlessness, Ms. Albanese, by her reports and public appearances has brought these patterns of Israeli violation of international law to the attention of millions all over the planet. She is trusted by the many of the most influential media platforms and is a frequent participant in webinars, academic conferences, and media events. Under the most difficult of circumstances, she is doing exactly what she is supposed to do as a UN SR. Having ourselves been attacked unfairly and inaccurately when similarly acting on behalf of the UN we feel great sympathy for our friend Francesca who has been mercilessly smeared and misrepresented in this unseemly effort by Israel and its partisans to shift attention from her message to her alleged lack of credibility as a messenger due to the diversionary slur of being a ‘virulent antisemite.’

As suggested, we not only ardently support reappointment, but believe the work of Ms Albanese should be formally acknowledged and praised by the top echelons of UN officials. In our judgment, she has received in the past insufficient support in carrying out difficult missions on behalf of the UN in her unpaid role as SR operating in a particularly dangerous atmosphere. She has the right to expect to be insulated from such irresponsible and false invective. We hope that you will be able to congratulate Francesca Albanese after she is reappointed tomorrow.

Respectfully yours,

John Dugard, Richard Falk, and Michael Lynk

\\\******///

Tags: , , , ,

CHOOSING NAMES: parenting begins

15 Apr

[Prefatory Note: This poem was initially published in TRANSCEND Media Service (TMS) on April 14, 2025. It is by the Hawaiian poet, Puanani Burgess, who also engages in healing and reconciliation activities. It made me think that we who have brought children into the world have often been complacent when it comes to giving them names, which can be lifelong gifts or unwanted challenges. When we name our child it ideally manifests love and our hopes, offering guidance at the unconscious levels of being, and if lucky, of becoming, telling us of who we are and wish to be. I thank Puanani Burgess for making me think of naming as our initial, sometimes pre-natally expressed, act of parenting.]

Choosing My Name

                        Puanani Burgess

When I was born my mother gave me three names:
Christabelle, Yoshie, and Puanani
Christabelle was my “English” name,
My social security card name,
My school name,
The name I gave when teachers asked me for my “real” name
A safe name

Yoshie was my home name
My everyday name,
The name that reminded my father’s family
That I was Japanese, even though
My nose, hips, and feet were wide,
The name that made me acceptable to them
Who called my Hawaiian mother kuroi mame (black bean),
A saving name

Puanani is my chosen name
My piko name connecting me back to the ‘āina
And the kai and the po’e kahiko
My blessing, my burden,
My amulet, my spear

                        Puanani Burgess

********************

Hawaiian Word Definitions:

  • kuroi = black
  • ‘aina = land
  • piko = belly button
  • kai = ocean
  • po’e kahiko = ancestors

__________________________________________________________

“Choosing My Name” is a poem written by Hawaiian author, Puanani Burgess. It can be found in her book, Growing Up Local: An anthology of poetry and prose from Hawai’i.

Puanani Burgess (1947 -2024) was a poet, priest, aunty, and friend to many. She was a community activist in the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement for over fifty years. As the designer and facilitator for Building the Beloved Community – a process that brings ceremony, storytelling, and circles of trust and respect – Aunty Pua shared Native Hawaiian practices throughout the world to bring healing and reconciliation. She served as the Myles and Zilphia Horton Chair for the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee and as a community scholar in residence at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawai’i. Aunty Pua was an ordained Zen Buddhist priest in the International Daihonzan Chozen-ji.

“You want to make a difference? Then start by looking within.” – Aunty Puanani Burgess

Tags: , , , ,

Will the UN Pillory Francesca Albanese?

3 Apr

[Prefatory Note: The post below is based on my responses to Murat Sofuoglu, a journalist working for TRT World in Turkey devoted to the Reappointment of Francesca Albanese, published on 4/3/25. Although the article relies on the interview, its tone and content are quite different. This is another pivotal moment for the UN, and specifically for its Human Rights Council, raising the question whether the Organization is subject to geopolitical manipulation in addressing controversial issues that test the UN’s political independence. Tomorrow the UN Human Rights Council Assembly of Governments will vote on whether to reappoint Francesca Albanese as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestinian Territories for a second term of three years. She has been accused of ‘virulent antisemitism’ in carrying out this controversial role.]

Will the UN Pillory Francesca Albanese?

1. How do you feel about her mandate extension vote on April 4?

The renewal of a Special Rapporteur mandate after three years for an additional and final term of three years completes six years of unpaid voluntary service to the UNHuman Rights Council. Having known many SRs, especially during my own six years as SR for Occupied Palestine (2008-2014), I encountered not a single case of non-renewal for a second term as SR. Unlike the initial appointment, which is by consensus, that is, there must be no dissenting votes by governments that are members of the Human Rights Council, the second three-year term is by majority vote.

In the case of Francesca Albanese, the argument for her approval is overwhelmingly strong. She has displayed great energy and commitment in meeting the challenge of this sensitive position despite encountering irresponsible opposition since day one to her performance at every turn led by the Israeli partisan civil society organization, UN Watch. She has been repeatedly attacked as an antisemite, which is totally a totally defamatory smear that has been repeated by Israeli media and lobbying organizations around the world even influencing Western governments to varying degrees. Similar attacks, although less ferocious, have been directed at each of the three SRs that preceded Francesca Albanese. Knowing her well, I can affirm that she is a person of the highest moral character, a true champion of human rights, and someone who is entirely free from prejudice against any ethnicity, including of course the Jewish people. At the same time, she is an unsparing critic of Israel as a state guilty of settler colonial policies and practices that made the Palestinian people suffer extreme harm and hardships since 1948. Isreal and its minions around the world have increasingly relied on a ‘politics of diversion,’ which has meant in this setting to shift as much attention as possible away from the message and toward the credibility of the messenger.

2. Do you believe that she will be reappointed as Special Rapporteur by the UN Human Rights Council?

If Albanese is not reappointed it will be greatly damaging to the reputation of the UN, and particularly the Human Rights Council as it would represent a punitive response to her courageous diligence and overall competence that warrants praise and unconditional support given the surrounding circumstances. She has produced the most widely read and influential SR reports in the entire history of the HRC during her first term, which coincided with a period of Israeli behavior widely condemned by world public opinion as an instance of transparent genocide reported to the world in real time by virtue of digital age communications. Her two reports on Israeli genocide are carefully researched and presented in accord with the highest scholarly standards and widely discussed in the media and academic gatherings. Instead of her appointment coming under special scrutiny, her performance should be celebrated as contributing to a knowledge-based understanding of the relations between state violence and international criminal law in the context of allegations of genocide.

3. How do you see pro-Israeli opposition against her reappointment?

It seems likely that Israel, although not a member of the HRC, will go all out in denouncing Albanese, and treat her as the poster child of UN antisemitic hostility to Israel, a country that Israeli supporters argue is being held to higher standards than any other country in the world only because it is a self-proclaimed Jewish state. Such a propagandistic contention ducks the substantive question as to whether Israel has responded to the October 7 Hamas attack by engaging in practices that violate the Genocide Convention.

It is quite likely, although far from certain, that the heavy load of opposing Albanese will be carried by UN Watch, a notorious NGO that unconditionally defends every Israeli atrocity by engaging in repeated character assassinations of those like Albanese are brave enough to mount fact- and law-based criticisms. The recent withdrawal of the US from the HRC is probably helpful from the perspective of weakening pressure on Western governments to oppose her reappointment, although a few European states have expressed opposition to the reappointment of Albanese and indicate that that they might vote against her. It is possible that unconvincing allegations of receiving funding and paid travel in violation of UN rules could be brought up in the HRC debate to discredit her in the course of a debate prior to the vote.

It is also possible that Israel will see the writing on the wall, and not further tarnish its own reputation by openly opposing such a qualified candidate for reappointment, but doubtful. Israel is more likely to seize the occasion as one more way to castigate the UN for spreading venomous slander by shielding anti-Israel personnel and promoting their racist attitudes. This is shameful, of course, in view of Israel’s own criminal behavior being convincingly condemned by the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court in several near unanimous authoritative decisions.

4. During her first term, her outspokenness against Israeli policies and genocide in Gaza has marked an extraordinary period in UN history and even for human rights struggle in world history. How do you reflect to support and opposition she has received during this period?

The overwhelming majority of people in the world endorse the views professionally set forth in Francesca Albanese’s fine reports to the HRC that have activated the moral conscience of the world to endorse allegations of genocide and other crimes that she has documented and denounced. On the basis of such reports, it is a source of widespread disappointment that the UN and leading states have failed to enforce international law in ways that protect the long-suffering Palestinian people against such flagrant unlawful and unjust treatment. Palestine have been victimized and persecuted in their own homeland ever since Israel was established in 1948. International law has been authoritatively declared. What is missing is its ‘enforcement.’

This ‘enforcement gap’ must be closed if the human rights of vulnerable people are to be protected. This involves more than ending impunity for Israel. It requires UN reform, especially limiting the role of the veto power given to the five winners of World War II in the Security Council and empowering the General Assembly to enforce international law whenever the Security Council is somehow blocked in the future from carrying out its basic undertakings, especially as here where apartheid, genocide, ecocide, as well as flagrant collective punishment are at stake.

In the immediate instance of this crucial reappointment vote on April 4th, it is essential that the UN meets the challenge of supporting a brave, dedicated, and talented SR who has persisted in her role despite receiving little by way of support from the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and other high level UN civil servants, including the High Commissioner of the HRC, Volker Türk. There have been unanswered calls from her removal from the SR position by members of the US Congress and in an unverifed public statement by the former US Special Envoy on Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, that the UN Secretary General called Albanese ‘a horrible person’ in private conversation. [Times of Israel, Jan. 15, 2025] Not to be outdone, Hillel Neuer, longtime director of UN Watch, submitted a 55 page document to the SG that outlined Albanese’s violations of the UN Code of Conduct that is applicable to those who serve the UN. His wider view was unrelenting view that Albanese was disqualified for reappointment because of the consistent antisemitism she exhibited in carrying out the UN mandate on Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This test case at the HRC tomorrow will cast another dark  shadow over the UN reputation should a majority of HRC member states vote against Albanese’s reappointment. It would create a terrible precedent for the future as well as render a grave personal injustice in the present. It would discourage many persons of conscience from taking on these voluntary positions at the UN that are neither compensated nor insulated from the whiplash of geopolitics and the dangers of being unprotected by the UN in the face of threats and disgraceful insults.

Tags: , , , ,

On the Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination: A Conversation with Mimi Rosenberg

28 Mar

d the link below.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →