Introducing Ismaels’/MacDonald’s Pax America: America’s Unending War on Iraq

29 Aug

[Prefatory Note: In the face of the failure of the US Government to use its diplomatic

leverage to end the war in Ukraine, and renounce the project to score a geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of the people of Ukraine (and Russia) and persisting with its active complicity with Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people residing in Gaza, and so far to a lesser extent to those residing in the West Bank, this book could not be timelier. It is a grim reminder of the Iraq War precedent in which the United States openly embraced a criminal path in both its attack and long occupation of Iraq beginning with  “shock and awe’ unprovoked aggression and culminating in a state-building venture that brought the Islamic State to the region. Memories of geopolitical failures of the magnitude of what took place over the course of more than a decade of occupation and supposed state-building is brilliantly depicted in this authoritative book dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Ismael, the long devoted partner of Tareq Ismael. It was my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword to this fine book, just published, which I strongly recommend both to remind us of the Iraq War and its dismal aftermath, and to cast light on the present negation of the most minimal standards of decency in the course of human interaction. I find myself haunted by a simple epistemological question: WHY DO WE AS A NATION, PEOPLE, AND SPECIES REFUSE TO LEARN FROM PAST TRAGIC FAILURES?]   

Intrioducing Pax Americana: Ae

Foreword to  Pax Americana: America’s Unending War on Iraq by

                  Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, & Leslie T. MacDonald

                  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Narrating the Logic of Pax Americana

Recent references to the Iraq War of 2003 in the West tend mostly to

come from the political or anti-war left sources seemingly intent on issuing

stern reminders that Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was foreshadowed in

its most objectionable features by the US/UK attack followed by a long

controversial occupation of Iraq, while the mainstream tries to erase

America’s experience from collective memory.

Those invoking Iraq as a precedent relevant to Ukraine offer a justifi-

able critique of the imperial aspects of American foreign policy that make

a mockery of self-righteous appeals to international law and the UN

Charter to mobilize international opposition to Russia while building

global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and huge donations of eco-

nomic assistance. Adopting such an ahistorical, abstract, and Eurocentric

optic, however useful, comes at a price. Iraq loses its core reality as a coun-

try inhabited by people who have endured the trials and tribulations of

tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The US

refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South,

especially in the countries of the Middle East, vividly confirmed by its

complicity in Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon Gaza, remains a significant

precedent in relation to the policy debate about Ukraine, but it is far from

telling the whole story of the Iraqi ordeal of the past 80 years.

This remarkable book is written by Jacqueline and Tareq Ismael, both

highly respected Iraqi specialists who are longtime scholarly commenta-

tors on the sorrowful recent history of the country. They present us with

Forewordviii FOREWORD

a devastating critique of the American role in Iraq during the 20 years

since the ill-conceived aggression of 2003, but they do much more. Above

all, they convincingly explicate the comprehensive anatomy of victimiza-

tion that became the fatal destiny of Iraq and its people, climaxing with

the aggressive regime-changing war of 2003. The historical contextualiza-

tion of the war and the refusal to erase from political consciousness its

terrible impact on the Iraqi civilian population is what makes this book

such a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understand-

ing imparted by their analysis goes far deeper than typically superficial

assessments based on a simple model of ‘attack and occupation.’

Jacqueline Ismael, who sadly died earlier this year, and Tareq, her Iraqi-born

writing partner and husband, have long devoted their scholarly lives

to narrating the American desecration of Iraq. Additionally, they have

together built an ambitious academic infrastructure that has made major

contributions to Iraqi studies. These have included the founding of a jour-

nal, organizing international conferences, and publishing books. And per-

haps most of all, by developing an international community of scholars

committed to probing various less-known, yet integral, aspects of the

complex Iraqi experience of the last century. This high-quality scholarship

should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Beltway think

tanks that offer the US government menus of policy options that are gen-

erally pleasing to the Pentagon and mainstream foreign policy venues. In

contrast, the Ismael orientation is objective, exhibiting and encouraging

others to undertake interdisciplinary styles of inquiry and assessment. This

work also valuably merges standard political and economic concerns with

serious attention to the social, ethical, religious, and even artistic and phil-

osophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural heritage. It is this

heritage that has been shattered by Iraq’s encounters with America in the

course of fragmenting the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.

In this necessarily last collaborative book, the Ismaels draw on their

superb qualifications to share with us their cumulative knowledge and wis-

dom about Iraq. This short but profound book manages to consider both

the disasters that have befallen Iraq but also the confused and sinister

behavior embedded in this pattern of dysfunctional US deployments of

hard and soft power over a period of six decades. What results is a highly

instructive book that contextualizes US geopolitical tactics and strategies

in a manner that sheds light on a host of other contemporary concerning

issues around the world. In essence, the Ismaels have managed to interpret

the interplay of America’s global and regional hegemonic ambitions inix FOREWORD

ways that yield a deeply informed narrative of the tragic events that have

ravaged Iraq and spilled over its borders to cause comparable forms of

distress elsewhere in the region. The book brilliantly depicts the intercon-

nections between the fate of Iraq and that of the Middle East as a whole,

presenting an illuminating account of why the impacts of the American

imperial agenda should not be conceptualized as mere aggression followed

by an occupation devoted to benign ‘state-building’ undertakings suppos-

edly aimed at constitutional governance and developmental dynamism.

With electrifying clarity, the Ismaels show that contemporary tragedy of

Iraq should not begin, as in most assessments with a focus on the two wars

in 1991 and 2003, their interim of harsh sanctions, and their chaotic after-

maths, but look at the downward spiral of events starting in 1963. The

book’s illuminating, mostly ignored or suppressed starting point is the

1963 CIA-facilitated coup that replaced the nationalist Qasim govern-

ment with the dictatorial repressive Ba’athist Party leadership, eventually

headed by Saddam Hussein. Tareq Ismael’s personal history of living in

exile ever since this coup and forever scarred by these events of 60 years

that culminated in the roundup and massacre of at least 5000 Iraqi intel-

lectuals and progressive. political activists, lends an aura of authenticity

and significance to these barely recollected events.

In a manner the 1963 coup in Iraq recalls the 1953 coup in Iran that

overthrew the Mossadegh government with the covert help and encour-

agement of the CIA, anticipating in several of its particulars the Iraqi

undertaking ten years later. In Iran, the Shah was restored to the Peacock

Throne, and more importantly, foreign ownership of the Iranian oil indus-

try was restored, with leading American energy corporations the greatly

enriched beneficiaries.

The true character of these events in both major oil producing coun-

tries was thinly disguised by then fashionable Cold War rationalizations of

saving these countries from a Communist takeover by marginalizing and

discrediting Soviet/Marxist/socialist influences that purportedly under-

mined Western strategic interests in the Middle East, as well as threatening

these countries with Stalinist futures. Such state propaganda, spread by an

ideologically subservient Western media, downplayed the true strategic

motivation for these disruptive political events, which was to keep the

energy reserves of the region under secure Western control while entrust-

ing their custodianship to the American oil industry. In this process, the

disregard for the sovereign self-determination rights of the state and suf-

fering of the peoples that followed was ignored as were the allegations thatx FOREWORD

the outcomes reflected the maneuvers of the CIA rather than the revolt of

nationalist forces. Only years later was the instrumental role of the CIA

widely confirmed. The original public rationale portrayed the events as

internally driven anti-Communist rejections of hysterical or tyrannical

leaders.

The book draws appropriate attention to the critical differences between

regime-changing interventions in the period between 1950 and 1990, and

those taking place after the Soviet implosion in 1991. Earlier efforts to

disrupt the politics of self-determination were hidden and covertly carried

out, and hence entrusted to the CIA and collaborating national elites in

countries targeted for regime change. The only overt exceptions of any

consequence during the Cold War occurred in the two wars taking place

in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam where international fault

lines were breached by the revisionist behavior of rival nationalist forces

seeking restored unification of the states as single nations. Elsewhere, the

United States tried to disrupt what it opposed by acting off-stage and rely-

ing on compliant national elements to construct the successor states.

After the Cold War the dynamic of intervention in the Middle East

became overtly militarist, tied to arms sales and predatory globalization.

The US sought to legitimize these overt interventions at the UN by claim-

ing humanitarian and international law justification or counterinsurgency

imperatives in the face of alleged terrorist threats. Among the rationaliza-

tions put forward in 2003 for violating Iraq’s state boundaries were its

possession of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret pro-

gram to develop nuclear weapons; Afghanistan after 9/11 as safe haven for

international terrorism; humanitarian urgency in Libya concerning the

beleaguered population of Benghazi. If UN legitimation was not granted,

as was the case with Iraq (and earlier Kosovo, 1999), then the US together

with allies proceeded to intervene openly, feeling no need for the secrecy

it relied upon during the Cold War. When the UN Security Council

refused the American request for authorization to use force in Iraq, George

W. Bush angrily suggesting that if the UN decided to withhold approval

of US war plans, it would find itself irrelevant. And regrettably, Bush was

to some extent right.

This overtness, also enabled prolonged foreign occupations, and in Iraq

was an alleged necessity to complete the challenge of liberating the coun-

try from its dictatorial past, which required ensuring that the successor

state was a stable and secure exemplar of constitutional democracy. The

only thing hidden from view in carrying out such state-building plans arexi FOREWORD

the various aspects of economic exploitation, including a forced entry into

neoliberal world economy.

This form of state-building by an occupying foreign power is half of the

abusive story exposed by this book. The other half has not been previously

explicated. What the Ismaels have managed to demonstrate through their

focus on the specifics of the American occupation is a set of policies that

had the intended effects of doing the opposite of what was claimed for

state-building. In actuality, the American occupation destroyed prospects

of a stable, competent, and prosperous Iraq, let alone a state protective of

human security and public order. The policies and practices systematically

pursued destroyed sturdy pillars of governmental stability that existed in

Iraq prior to 2003. The occupation purged the armed forces and bureau-

cracy of its Sunni highly professional staffing during the Ba’athist period,

turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and archeological artifacts

undermining cultural identity and national consciousness. Such an

approach gave ample political space to the assertion of a variety of sub-national

grievances and embittered rivalries among religious factions and

ethnic minorities. As the Ismaels explain state-building turned out in Iraq

to be state-ending, such a dismal assessment of the occupation manifested

itself through greatly increased ethnic strife, radical micro-politics, rising

criminality, gross corruption, persisting chaos, and increasing poverty.

It is for these reasons that ‘state-building,’ as argued by the authors, is

better conceptualized as a process of ‘state-ending’ or ‘state deconstruc-

tion.’ This is a radical claim that goes far beyond critiques of the conven-

tional understanding state-building as benevolence gone wrong with

Afghanistan and Iraq especially in mind. The shocking argument that the

Ismaels advance for our consideration is that this outcome was not a fail-

ure of occupation policy but a deliberately orchestrated success. The goal

of such an approach may seem perverse, but reflects American deep state

thinking on the Middle East, as strongly paralleled by Israeli beliefs and

practice, that the cornerstone of regional security is not so much a matter

of weaponry as it is in the existence of weak, internally divided and preoc-

cupied states.

In an informative chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority

further concreteness is added to the exposition of how occupation mis-

shaped Iraq by showing that the US and Israel both promoted Kurdish

aspirations in ways that weakened Iraqi sense of national identity, so vital

for successful state formation projects.xii FOREWORD

The geopolitical hypocrisy of the American role in Iraq is given a bipar-

tisan slant that goes back to the Kennedy role in promoting the 1963 coup

against Qasim and forward to the efforts of both Bush’s to wage war

against their former client state, Iraq. We need to remember that in 1980

Saddam’s Iraq had been persuaded to attack Iran in what turned out to be

a grueling eight-year war, partly extended by US arms sales to both sides.

In addition, Saddam was given ambiguous signals a decade later by the US

ambassador in Baghdad about launching an attack on subsequent annexa-

tion of Kuwait, only to find Iraq subject to international denunciations by

the US President, Arab neighbors, and the UN as a legitimizing prelude

to a ‘shock and awe’ attack, and after another twelve years of punitive

sanctions that ravaged the civilian population of Iraq, yet another American

aggression launched against its former notorious ally who ended up pay-

ing with his life.

This mastery of the Iraq narrative by the Ismaels does what most Iraqi

commentators do not do. That is, they present dismaying evidence that

the wellbeing of the people of Iraq was consistently sacrificed as a sup-

pressed side-effect of this American quest for political and economic dom-

inance in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a

metaphor for the twenty-first-century US imperial (mis)adventures

throughout the entire world. To be sure, the region was especially vulner-

able to imperial design, and a result, has vividly exhibited this state-destroying

and people-victimizing behavior by the United States. This

reflects several factors: oil geopolitics as its supreme strategic priority,

Israel’s junior hegemonic status as its unconditional domestic priority, and

the blowback threats of Islamic radicalism and expansion of Islamic influ-

ence in the region after the 9/11 attacks have shaped its security dialogue

at least until the Ukraine War. We can be most thankful to have such a

book for its insight, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, and for getting

right the complex story of America’s role in Iraq.

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

_ Richard Falk

Tags: , ,

The Responsibility of Western ‘Liberal Democracies’ for Gaza Catastrophe

13 Aug

\

[Prefatory Note : This is the text of an interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute modified for clarity and style, with no changes in substance.]

 Richard Falk: Western “Liberal Democracies” Responsible for Genocide in Palestine

Mike Billington : This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I have the pleasure of having an interview today with Professor Richard Falk, who has done another interview with us earlier. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton, among other positions he holds in institutions around the world, mostly peace related. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine. So, given the circumstances that we have today in the Middle East, it’s a very timely moment to have a discussion with Professor Falk. So let me begin with that. Professor, the assassination of Haniyeh today in Tehran is clearly a sign that Israel is trying its best to get an all-out war with Iran started, but also, it’s the fact they just killed the person who was leading negotiator with Israel for peace in Palestine. So what are your comments on that?

Prof. Falk: I agree with your final sentences that this is certainly either gross incompetence on Israel’s part or a deliberate effort to provoke a wider war. And a shady effort by Israel to compel the engagement of the United States in Israel’s multiple struggles in the region. One should also refer here to the double assassination. Not only Haniyeh, but Nasrallah’s right-hand assistant and prominent military commander, Fouad Shukra, who was killed 2 or 3 days ago, in Beirut. And so now Israel in successive inflammatory assassinations attacking the capitals of Lebanon and Iran, certainly signaling an almost intentional search for some kind of escalatory response. The Supreme Leader of Iran has already declared that that Iran will arrange — he didn’t go into detail — arrange an appropriately harsh response, in retaliation for Israel’s criminal act. In the Lebanese context, Nasrallah and Hezbollah deny the Israeli justification for the attack, which was the missile that landed in the Golan Heights a few days earlier, killing several Syrian children playing on a soccer field. It almost certainly was not intended as the target by whoever fired the missile, which is still being denied by Hezbollah. The very explosive situation in the Middle East — perhaps the assassinations were motivated by the wish to distract attention from Israel’s failure to destroy Hamas and Netanyahu’s unpopularity in Israel. At best, this is a very dangerous way of proceeding because a multi-state war in the Middle East will bring widespread destruction , including likely attacks on Israeli cities, something Israel has avoided over the course of its existence. This may yet be a dramatic turning point for the worse in the whole experience of Israel’s defiance of international law, international morality and just plain geopolitical prudence.

Mike Billington : You have been a very outspoken supporter of the role of the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and their rulings, including the decision on the South African petition that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza; the issuing of arrest warrants on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders; and more recently, the verdict that the entire occupation of the Palestinian territories has been illegal from the beginning, ordering it to end the occupation and withdraw the settlements. But of course, Israel has ignored them totally, while the US and the EU have equally ignored them. As you pointed out in one of your articles, Bibi Netanyahu even said “No one will stop us,” from driving all the Palestinians out or killing them. What can be done overall to deal with the Gaza genocide?

Richard Falk: Well, it is, of course, a terribly tragic moment for the Palestinian people who are faced with this grotesquely sustained and executed genocide, that has now gone on for more than nine months on a daily basis. As your question suggests, Israel has been crucially backed up throughout this process by the complicity of the liberal democracies, above all the US. And so long as that power relationship persists, it’s very unlikely that an effective intervention on behalf of Palestine, or to stop the genocide, can be organized and implemented. From that point of view, these judicial rulings, although they give aid and some comfort to supporters of Palestine are not able to influence the situation on the ground, which continues to be horrifying. At the same time, the rulings are important in depriving Israel and the West of complaining about Palestine and Hamas as violators of international law, including ‘terrorist’ accusations. In other words, by reliably finding that Israel is in gross violation of international law and by issuing arrest warrants, global judicial procedures deprive these aggressive countries from opportunistically using international law as a policy instrument the way they have against Russia in the Ukrainian context. It also influences media discourse and civil society behavior, particularly activists throughout the world, who feel vindicated and challenged to do more by way of pro-Palestinian solidarity initiatives.

There exist a variety of initiatives underway in civil society that not only brand Israel as a rogue state, but also propose nonviolent acts of boycotting, divesting, and shows of opposition, highlighted by the activism of students in university campuses around the world giving rise to repressive responses by pro-Israeli elites in and out of government. This has become quite a distinctive phenomenon — even during earlier student activist periods involving South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, there wasn’t nearly as much passion or such animated expressions of civil society activism. This is now a near universal reaction, including a growing portion of citizens in the country whose governments are complicit in supporting Israel’s commission of genocide.

Also prresent is a contested and growing gap between what the citizenry wants and the government is doing. This gap was highlighted and dramatized by the scandalous, honorific speech that Netanyahu gave last week to a joint session of Congress, where he received a hero’s welcome, frequent standing ovations, thunderous applause and cordial meetings in the White House with Biden and Kamala Harris. It was widely observed that Harris abandoned protocol by not attending the joint session of Congress over which the vice president ordinarily presides whenever a foreign leader is making such an address, and the Netanyahu visit was met be large protests in the streets of Washington.

Mike Billington : Your friend, and mine, Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder and the head of the International Movement for a Just World based in Malaysia, has written a letter to all member nations of the UN noting, as you have also, that the West is ignoring the evil in Gaza, and called on the UN General Assembly to act upon Resolution 377, which, as I understand it, allows the General Assembly, when the Security Council fails to take action to stop a disaster against peace, to act in its own name, to deploy forces, I think unarmed forces, to intervene. You are, among other things, a professor of international law. What is your view of this option?

Prof. Falk: There is that option, that was adopted in the Cold War context of the Korean War, with the objective of circumventing future Soviet vetoes. GA Res. 377 was thought initially to give the West a possibility of nullifying the Soviet veto and mobilizing the General Assembly to back Western positions. As the anti-colonial movement proceeded, the US in particular became more and more nervous about having an anti-capitalist General Assembly empowered to act when the Security Council was paralyzed. To my knowledge that Resolution 377 has never been actually invoked in a peace – war situation. I think there is a reluctance to press the West on this kind of issue, because it would require, to have any significance, a large political, military, and financial commitment, as well as a difficult undertaking to make effective. So I’m not optimistic about such a move to empower the General Assembly . I think the law can be interpreted in somewhat contradictory ways, as is often the case, particularly where there’s not much experience. But I don’t think the political will exists on the part of a sufficient number of governments to make the General Assembly act on behalf of Palestine. I think in general making the UN more effective and legitimate, empowerment of the General Assembly would be desirable and should be supported by people that want to have a more law governed international society, but preferably without relying on this Cold War precedent

.

Mike Billington : On that broader issue, do you have any hope or any expectation that the UN in general will be reformed in the current crisis situation internationally?

Prof. Falk: I’m skeptical about that possibility. The forthcoming UN Summit of the Future on September 22-23 is dedicated to strengthening the UN. This is an initiative of Secretary-General Guterres that seeks to discuss some ambitious ideas about UN reform, enlarged participation by civil society and more democratic, transparent procedures for UN operations. But my guess is that the Permanent Members, and probably including China and Russia, will not push hard for such major development. Each of the P5 states seems to believe that their interests are better protected in a state-centric world, even if geopolitical managed, than they would be in a more structured world system operating according to a  more centralized authority structure. It might  become even more susceptible to Western domination and manipulation than is the case with present arrangements.

Mike Billington: On the US situation, you issued a public letter to Kamala Harris soon after Biden dropped out of the race. There and elsewhere, you have denounced what you called the “diluted optimism” of President Biden, who talks about American greatness and the great future America is looking forward to, and so forth. You called it: “a dangerous form of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national circumstances and a stubborn show of a failing leader’s vanity.” you express some hope that Kamala Harris will dump the Biden team of Blinken and Sullivan. Who do you think could possibly come to be her advisors? Who could, in fact, change the failed direction of the Biden-Harris administration?

Prof. Falk: You raise a difficult issue, because effective governance involves balancing various pressures from without and within the apparatus of the state. I think Harris knows and respects these constraints, aware that even an elected leader is restricted, encountering resistance if public policy dissents from the main tenets of the Washington Consensus. Harris’s policy choices are restricted because those that are prominent enough to be eligible for confirmation in the top jobs are either conforming to this geopolitical realism, or they’re regarded as too controversial to get by the congressional gatekeepers and survive media objections. In fairness to Harris, or any leader for that matter, it’s a difficult undertaking to make American foreign policy particularly more congruent with the well-being of people and more oriented toward sustaining peace in a set of dangerous circumstances that exist in different parts of the world. And, of course, the Israeli domestic factor is probably also at least a background constraint. In light of this, the best that I could hope for, realistically, is some critical realist personalities like John Mearsheimer or Anne-Marie Slaughter, or possibly Stephen Walt. These are people that have been more enlightened in their definition of national interest and more critical of the Jewish lobby and of other manipulative private sector forces. But they’re strictly, and properly, categorized as realists, A more progressive possibility, but probably still too controversial for serious consideration, would be Chas Freeman despite his distinguished diplomatic background. Obama wanted to give him an important position in the State Department. But he was perceived even in 2009 at that time as sufficiently controversial as to be blocked, and Freeman’s proposed appointment was withdrawn. Obama himself is an outside possibility. He’s privately let it be known that he’s quite critical of the way in which Israel has behaved in this period. He is oriented toward domestic policy yet would like to promote a more peaceful, less war oriented world. But whether he would be willing to play that kind of role, having been previously President is uncertain, and whether Harris would want such a strong political personality within her inner circle remains uncertain. Possibly, if he was willing, he could be the US Ambassador at the UN or some kind of other position. But it’s strange that in a country of 330 million people, there are so few individuals can both back a progressive foreign policy agenda and get by the gatekeepers, a part of whose job is to make sure that more progressive voices are not appointed to top foreign policy positions. So, for instance, someone like Chomsky or Ellsberg, if heallthy, would be perhaps amenable to serving in a Harris government. And she might be eager to chart a somewhat independent path and give more sensitive attention to foreign policy and more support to the people that have been suffering from inflation and other forms of deprivation resulting from a cutback in social protection that has occurred in the last decade or so.

Mike Billington : In a more general sense, you’ve been critical of what you call the “incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there, beyond American borders, at a time when the US role has never been more controversially intrusive.” As you know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the head of the Schiller Institute, has initiated an International Peace Coalition (IPC) which is aimed at addressing that problem, bringing together pro-peace individuals and organizations from around the world, many of whom have different political views, but to put aside those differences in order to stop the extreme danger of an onrushing nuclear conflict with Russia, and also possibly with China, and to restore diplomacy in a West which has fully adopted the imperial outlook of the British Empire, which they now call the “unipolar world.” How can this movement be made strong enough to make those kinds of changes in the paradigm?

Prof. Falk: That’s an important challenge. There are other groups that are trying to do roughly parallel things. I’ve been involved with SHAPE [Save Humanity And Planet Earth], the group that Chandra Muzaffar is one of the three co-conveners along with Joe Camilleri [and myself]. But it’s extremely difficult to penetrate the mainstream media, and it’s very difficult to arrange funding for undertakings like your own, that challenge the fundamental ways that the world is organized. The whole point, I think, of these initiatives is to create alternatives to this kind of aggressively impacted world of conflict, and to seek common efforts, common security, human security, that humanistically meets the challenges of climate change and a variety of other issues that are currently not being addressed adequately. But this kind of development depends, I think ultimately, on the mobilization of people. Governments are not likely to encourage these kinds of initiatives. The question needs to be rephrased: how does one mobilize sufficient people with sufficient resources to pose a credible challenge to the political status quo in the world?

Mike Billington : In that light, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has also called for the founding of what she called a Council of Reason, reflecting back on the Council of Westphalia, which led to the Peace of Westphalia, where people of stature, as you indicated, are brought to step forward and speak out at a time when that kind of truthful, outspoken approach is sorely lacking and very, very much needed. What’s your thought on that?

Prof. Falk : I think all such initiatives help to build this new consciousness that is more sensitive to the realities of the world we live in. There has been, as you undoubtedly know, a similar Council of Elders composed of former winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and a few selected other individuals, but it hasn’t had much resonance either with the media or with government. It’s very difficult to gain political space and non-mainstream credibility the way the world is now structured, as empowered by a coalition of corporate capitalism and militarized states. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about what can be achieved. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t struggle to do what at least has the promise and the aspiration to do what’s necessary and desirable. And the Counsel of Reason, presumably well selected and adequately funded, and maybe with an active publication platform, could make contributions to the quality of international public discourse. It’s worth a try, and I would certainly support it.

Mike Billington: I appreciate that. What are your thoughts on the peace mission undertaken by Viktor Orban?

Prof. Falk: Well, I don’t have too many thoughts about that. It seemed to coincide what many independent, progressive voices were saying. In any event. The interesting thing about Orban’s advocacy is that he’s the leader of a European. state, and therefore his willingness to embark on such a journey and to seek ways of ending the Ukraine conflict is certainly welcome. He, of course, has a kind of shadowy reputation as a result of widespread allegations of autocratic rule within Hungary. I don’t know how to evaluate such criticisms I haven’t been following the events in Hungary, but he’s portrayed in the West as an opponent of liberal democracy. And for that reason, he doesn’t receive much attention from the media or from Western governments overall. Orban’s message seems too deserve wider currency, but whether he can deliver that message effectively seems to me to be in fairly significant doubt. I think the Chinese are in a better position to make helpful points of view toward ending the Ukraine War.

Mike Billington : You’re saying that he is accused of being against “liberal democracy.” Do you think criticism of liberal democracy is wrong?

Prof. Falk: No, no. I consider myself a critic of liberal democracy. But I think liberal democracy remains  powerful in the West because it’s linked to corporate capitalism on the one side, and the most militarized states on the other side. The liberal façade of these Western states purports to be guided by the rule of law and human rights, presenting an attractive image to many people who close their eyes to the contradiction in the behavior of these states, especially in foreign policy.

Mike Billington : You’re generally very pessimistic about the US election, saying that you saw the choice — this was before Biden dropped out — but you saw it as “a warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” That’s pretty strong. You welcomed Biden dropping out, but do you see any improvement in the choices today?

Prof. Falk: Yes, I see at least the possibility of an improvement, because we don’t know enough about how Kamala Harris will try to package her own ideas in a form that presents an independent position. It’s conceivable it would even be to the right of Biden, but I don’t think so. Her own background on domestic issues is quite progressive and at the same time pragmatic. As a younger person, she has a mixed record, to say the least while serving as prosecuting attorney and attorney general in California. But I think there is a fairly good prospect that she will be more critical of Israel during the last several years as Biden’s vice president. She has already indicated a determination to not support Israel, at least openly, if they engage in a massive killing of Palestinian civilians. She probably feels she is walking a tight rope to avoid alienating Zionist funders and others who would be hostile should she show a shift to a more balanced pro-Palestinian position.

Mike Billington : you referred to Trump in that passage as a warmonger. But on the other hand…

Prof. Falk: No, you misunderstood me. Biden is the warmonger.

Mike Billington : Oh, a “warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” I got it. So those terms were both as a description of Biden.

Prof. Falk: I would never call Trump “peace minded,” but he has at various points suggested an opposition to what he and others have called “forever wars,” these US engagements in long term interventions that always seemed to have ended up badly, even from a strategic point of view, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump is so unpredictable and unstable that I wouldn’t place any confidence in his words or declared interntions. He does seem determined to move the country in a fascist direction if he’s successful in the election. And if he isn’t successful, he seems to want to agitate the country sufficiently so that it experiences some level of civil strife, or at least unrest.

 Mike Billington: Well, he clearly is insisting that there must be peace and negotiation with Russia on the Ukraine issue. Do you see any hope that he would also negotiate with China in terms of the growing crisis there?

Prof. Falk: I doubt it because of his seeming perception of China as an economic competitor of the US, and as one that, in his perceptions has taken advantage of the international economic openness to gain various kinds of unfair economic advantages. I think he is, if anything, more likely to escalate the confrontation with China and at best to put relations on a very transactional basis, which suggests that only when it was to the material benefit of the US would the US Government in any way cooperate with China even for the benefit of the public good. 

Mike Billington: Of course, we saw just recently in China that the Xi Jinping government brought many diverse Palestinian factions together in Beijing, and that they did come to an agreement. What are your thoughts on the agreement that they came to and what effect will that have?

Prof. Falk: It seems helpful.  I hope it lasts. There have been prior attempts, mostly in the Middle East, mostly with Egypt playing an intermediary role, especially before the present Sisi government. And none of these earlier unity arrangements have lasted. There is a lot of hostility rivalry among the PLO, Fatah Hamas, and several other Palestinian factions. It relates to the religious – secular divide, differences of personality, patterns of corruption, and opposed adjustments to Israeli criminality. It was encouraging to me that Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, condemned the assassination of Haniyeh. That, I think, was an early confirmation of the potential importance of this Beijing Declaration and the successful, at least temporarily successful, effort at bringing these Palestinian factions together in common struggle. And from the Palestinian point of view, unity has never been more important as a practical matter to achieve and sustain any hope of statehood or realization of their right of self-determination. The entire future of Palestinian resistance probably depends on being able to have a more or less united front to sustain hopes that a post-Gaza arrangement will be beneficial for Palestine.

Mike Billington : You recently signed an appeal which was issued by the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, which has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for alleged complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel. What are your expectations for that effort?

Prof. Falk: The ICC, the International Criminal Court, is much more susceptible to political pressure than is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is part of the UN and came into existence when the UN was established back in 1945. The ICC was established recently, in 2002. It doesn’t have many of the most important countries among its members or signatories to its treaty, the so-called Rome Treaty. It would be a pleasant surprise if the Chamber of ICC judges follows the Prosecutor’s recommendation and issues these arrest warrants. Already, Netanyahu has given the recommendation of the prosecutor an international visibility by denouncing them and calling on the US and, and the liberal democracies to bring pressure on the ICC to avoid issuing the warrants. And that reflects the strong impression that even though Israel defies international law, its leaders are very sensitive about being alleged to be in violation, especially of international criminal law and particularly of the serious offences alleged to have taken place in Gaza. The basis for recommending arrest warrant for Israeli leaders doesn’t extend to cover the elephant in the room — genocide. It enumerates other crimes that Israel, that Netanyahu and Gallant, are said to be guilty of perpetrating, and does the same thing for Hamas, in trying to justify issuing arrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders. Of course, they don’t have to worry about Haniyeh anymore, and I think, I’m pretty sure he was one of the three Palestinians who were recommended as sufficiently involved in the commission of international crimes on October 7 to justify the issuance of arrest warrants.

Mike Billington: As I mentioned, you were the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine from 2008 to 2014. During that period, you were regularly declared by Israel to be an anti Semite for things you said and did during that time. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that at this point. Also, the current person in that position, Francesca Albanese, is also under attack from Israel. What do you think about her role today?

Prof. Falk: Well, as far as my own role is concerned, the attacks came not directly from the government, but from Zionist oriented NGOs, particularly UN Watch in Geneva and some groups in the US and elsewhere, all in the white Western world. I mean, all the attacks on me. And of course, they were somewhat hurtful. But this kind of smear is characteristic of the way in which Israel and Zionism has dealt with critics for a long time. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader in the UK, has been a victim of such a smear and defamatory campaign. It’s unfortunately a tactic that has had a certain success in branding one as lacking in credibility, and thus not fit to be listened to by the mainstream. Israel and its Zionist network are not interested in whether the allegations are truthful or even grounded in factual reality. This effort has as its primary aim the deflecting the conversation away from the message to the messenger.

And they’ve done, shockingly and without shame, the same thing with Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur. Francesca is an energetic, dedicated, very humanistic person and gives no signs of anhy kind of ethnic prejudice, much less anti-Semitism. She’s written very good reports in the time she’s been the Special Rapporteur, and bravely and forthrightly confronted her attackers.

It’s a real disgrace that this unpaid position at the UN is dealt with in such an irresponsible and personally hurtful way. The special rapporteurs enjoy independence, which is important in such roles, but they’re essentially doing a voluntary job, that frees them from the discipline of the UN, but also makes them vulnerable to these personal attacks that are intended to be vicious. The UN does nothing very substantial to protect those of us that have been on the receiving end of this kind of ‘politics of deflection.’ UN passivity reflects a core anxiety within the UN bureaucracy centered on losing funding from the countries that support Israel.

After I finished being Special Rapporteur, I collaborated with Professor Virginia Tilley to produce one of the first detailed reports in 2017 examining contentions of Israeli apartheid. The report was denounced by Nikki Haley [US Ambassador to the UN] in the Security Council soon after its release. I was singled out by her as a disreputable person undeserving of serious consideration. The UN secretary General Guterres, newly appointed at that time, was publicly threatened by Haley with withholding US funds if he didn’t remove our report from the UN website, and to our regret he complied. He removed the report, though it was already the most widely read and frequently requested report in the history of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, which is a regional commission of the UN.

Mike Billington: And who was it that ordered it removed?

Prof. Falk: Guterres. Yes. Removal caused a stir. The head of this UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), was a civil servant named Rima Khalaf who resigned her UN post as a consequence of what was done. Our report was commissioned as an independent academic study. We were treated as scholars and not as UN civil servants. But the report was sponsored and accepted by a UN agency, and thus could not entirely escape its association with our conclusions that were controversial at the time.

Mike Billington: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we close?

Prof. Falk: No, I think we’ve covered a lot. I would hope that things will look better in a few months, but I’m not at all confident that they will. They could look a lot worse if this wider war unfolds in the Middle East. And if they are new tensions that come to the surface in the Pacific area. I find myself clinging to this marginal hope that Kamala Harris will not only win the election but surprise us by being more forthcoming in promoting an enhanced image of what a liberal democracy means internationally.

Mike Billington: Let us hope. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to do this at a critical moment, with your own personal role in the Middle East having been so important historically and still today. So we’ll get this circulated widely. And let’s hope that, in fact, we do see a big change at a moment where the crisis is such that you would think people would be stepping forward all over the world to stop the madness.

Prof. Falk: Yes but they need — I found that they need the entrepreneurial underpinning. They have to have the support, sufficient funding. Support so that their words will have weight. This unfortunate, but it’s one of the political dimensions of the imperative: ‘follow the money.’ 

Mike Billington: Something we’ve always had to deal with in the LaRouche movement. I invite you to join us on Friday, we will have the 61st weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition, at 11:00 East Coast time, on Friday. And it would be very useful if you could attend and perhaps say some of what you said today in this interview or if that’s not possible, perhaps we could read a section of what you said today, during that event. So I’ll correspond with you to see if you can attend on Friday.

Prof. Falk : I know that I can’t because I have to attend a conference in Istanbul. I’m living these days in southern Turkey, a plane ride away from Istanbul. And I’m taking part in a conference on international law after Gaza , a little bit optimistic in the title. I’m occupied all day either with this trip or with my role at the conference.

Mike Billington: All right. Well, I’ll correspond with you about whether we may be able to read a portion of what you had to say in the interview today for the for the attendance.

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The Criminal Assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran

9 Aug

[Prefatory Note: This post originated in a series of responses to questions asked by a journalist writing a feature story for the Turkish publication, TRT World. My responses here are derived from that source but took on a different life of their own.]

[Prefatory Note: This post originated in a series of responses to questions asked by a journalist writing a feature story for the Turkish publication, TRT World. My responses here are derived from that source but took on a different life of their own.]

The Criminal Assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran

What does Hamas chief Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran mean for the wider conflict?

It appears that none of the countries directly involved in the conflict with Israel–Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen–seek a wider war in the Middle East. Only Israel, and its leader, Bibi Netanyahu seem to approach such a prospect favorably. This cycle of provocative acts followed by retaliations almost all initiated by Israel have their own escalating momentum that is difficult to control, and at some point, might merges with a deadly commitment to securing a wider victorious outcome.

There is much speculation that Netanyahu has his private motivations centering on his personal survival and the related likelihood that his coalition government would soon collapse after the Gaza war recedes from view. He was also associated with obsessively pushing a vendetta against Iran, especially recently as a useful distraction from the Gaza campaign that failed to achieve its main explicit objective of destroying Hamas and promoting the Greater Israel Project of territorial expansion.

Additionally, the recent cycles of tit-for-tat provocative acts almost exclusively initiated by Israel have an escalating momentum that is difficult to control, and at some point, merges with a commitment to securing a victorious outcome through sustained warfare.

Ismail Haniyeh’s July 31 assassination while attending the inauguration of the new president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, was a step in the direction of regional war. It was further aggravated because of the location, the occasion, Haniyeh’s reputation as a ‘moderate’ in the Hamas leadership circle. And even further by taking account of his current role as the chief negotiator in the search for a ceasefire, prisoner exchange, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei immediately threatened a response that will be perceived as a ‘harsh punishment’ by political actors. The religious leader added that Iran is ‘duty-bound’ to inflict a response that ‘avenges’ the assassination. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian offered his strong condemnation of the killing of Haniyeh: “We will make the occupying terrorist regime [of Israel] regret its action.”

This assassination may also be seen as Israel’s reaction to Iran and Hamas in the aftermath of the Unity Deal between Hamas and Fatah facilitated by the mediation efforts of China. The agreement signed in Beijing on July 23 by 14 Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah agreed on the composition of an ‘interim national reconciliation government,’ and seems to be the most serious effort to achieve Palestinian unity since Hamas emerged after the 1967 War. Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), made a meaningful gesture of his own that is being interpreted as an affirmation of the newfound unity of Palestinian resistance by joining in the condemnation of Israel for carrying out the assassination of Haniyeh. This seems significant as the PA has long been the bitter adversary of Hamas.

The Biden presidency seems intent on managing these tensions in such a way that avoids a general war in the region while not alienating Israel and its supporters in the West. It also purports to play its customary intermediary role in relation to Israel/Palestine conflict by putting forth a three-stage ceasefire, hostage/prisoner exchange, and Israeli Gaza withdrawal. It is odd that the Palestinians would accept such a diplomatic process, given the depth of US complicity in lending crucial support to the genocidal assault during the last ten months directed at the entire population of Gaza.

Even Iran despite its seeming commitment to revenging Haniyeh’s death while on a state visit to a high profile public event in Iran seems searching for a response that is viewed as retaliatory but as signaling its intent to avoid a war with Israel.

There are many actors involved with a wide range of disclosed and disguised motivations, making predictions hazardous. If a wider war  does occur, it will almost certainly be undertaken at Israel’s initiative, quite possibly reflecting Netanyahu’s personal animus. If Iran succeeds in inflicting heavy symbolic or substantive damage in executing its retaliatory attack, Israel might treat magnify the event as a suitable pretext for launching a wider war that I believe it would come to regret. Among other consequences, it may induce Iran to cross the nuclear weapons threshold, assuming this has not happened already. Given the security prerogatives of sovereign states, it would not seem unreasonable for Iran to seek a nuclear deterrent, given the threats and provocations over the years. Such a move would deeply challenge Israel and US-led anti-proliferation geopolitics, being a blow struck against the imperfect regional nonproliferation regime in the Middle East. So long as an aggressive Israel possesses and develops its own nuclear weaponry, without any pretense of accountability, the security situation highlights the double standards embedded in the Biden/Blinken ‘rules governed world.’



2. How will Iran respond to this? 

My earlier answer tentatively predicts a proportionate retaliation that may be treated by Israel as sufficiently ‘disproportionate’ to induce a further escalatory cycle. Although Iran has shown that it does not seek a wider war, it also seems poised to take risks to avoid being seen as weak by both adversaries and allies—the latter being demeaned by being called ‘proxies’ in the Washington and European official statements and media.

Although the world and particularly Iran, assumed that Israel was responsible for Haniyeh’s assassination, Israel failed to claim responsibility for several days.  Before doing so, Israel had been widely accused by Iran, and assumed responsible for this sovereignty-violating assassination. Israel’s official silence rather than offering an evidence-based denial strengthened the dominant impression that Israel was the culprit.

Also passed almost without prominent noticed was the almost simultaneous assassination of  Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah military commander and close associate of accused by Israel of planning a deadly attack on a Druze town of Majjid-Shams in the Israel occupied Golan Heights, killing 12 children playing on a soccer field. Hezbollah denies responsibility for the attack, and it seems that whoever was responsible for the attack misfired as the missile hit a site unassociated with Israel.

3.   The Gaza/Hamas Angle

In a notable statement, the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, indirectly accused Israel of assassinating Haniyeh in a post published on social media. Al Thani observed, “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” referring to Haniyeh as one of the main mediators in the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. And further, “Peace needs serious partners and a global stance against the disregard for human life.” Israel has failed to respond to such an allegation, although it seems to have backed a rumor that Iran might itself have carried out or at least facilitated this assassination.

The US has been the pioneer in relying on assassination as a major instrument of covert warfare during the Cold Year, generally under the auspices of the CIA. During the Carter presidency Senate hearings were held (‘Church Hearings’), leading to the issuance of Executive Order 11. 905 in 1977 prohibiting political assassinations. This Executive Order was later somewhat relaxed during the Reagan Presidency in the 1980s. There seems to be agreement that the ceasefire proposals that looked quite promising in the days before Haniyeh’s assassination now are indefinite hold given the

The Criminal Assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran

What does Hamas chief Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran mean for the wider conflict?

It appears that none of the countries directly involved in the conflict with Israel–Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen–seek a wider war in the Middle East. Only Israel, and its leader, Bibi Netanyahu seem to approach such a prospect favorably. This cycle of provocative acts followed by retaliations almost all initiated by Israel have their own escalating momentum that is difficult to control, and at some point, might merges with a deadly commitment to securing a wider victorious outcome.

There is much speculation that Netanyahu has his private motivations centering on his personal survival and the related likelihood that his coalition government would soon collapse after the Gaza war recedes from view. He was also associated with obsessively pushing a vendetta against Iran, especially recently as a useful distraction from the Gaza campaign that failed to achieve its main explicit objective of destroying Hamas and promoting the Greater Israel Project of territorial expansion.

Additionally, the recent cycles of tit-for-tat provocative acts almost exclusively initiated by Israel have an escalating momentum that is difficult to control, and at some point, merges with a commitment to securing a victorious outcome through sustained warfare.

Ismail Haniyeh’s July 31 assassination while attending the inauguration of the new president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, was a step in the direction of regional war. It was further aggravated because of the location, the occasion, Haniyeh’s reputation as a ‘moderate’ in the Hamas leadership circle. And even further by taking account of his current role as the chief negotiator in the search for a ceasefire, prisoner exchange, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei immediately threatened a response that will be perceived as a ‘harsh punishment’ by political actors. The religious leader added that Iran is ‘duty-bound’ to inflict a response that ‘avenges’ the assassination. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian offered his strong condemnation of the killing of Haniyeh: “We will make the occupying terrorist regime [of Israel] regret its action.”

This assassination may also be seen as Israel’s reaction to Iran and Hamas in the aftermath of the Unity Deal between Hamas and Fatah facilitated by the mediation efforts of China. The agreement signed in Beijing on July 23 by 14 Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah agreed on the composition of an ‘interim national reconciliation government,’ and seems to be the most serious effort to achieve Palestinian unity since Hamas emerged after the 1967 War. Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), made a meaningful gesture of his own that is being interpreted as an affirmation of the newfound unity of Palestinian resistance by joining in the condemnation of Israel for carrying out the assassination of Haniyeh. This seems significant as the PA has long been the bitter adversary of Hamas.

The Biden presidency seems intent on managing these tensions in such a way that avoids a general war in the region while not alienating Israel and its supporters in the West. It also purports to play its customary intermediary role in relation to Israel/Palestine conflict by putting forth a three-stage ceasefire, hostage/prisoner exchange, and Israeli Gaza withdrawal. It is odd that the Palestinians would accept such a diplomatic process, given the depth of US complicity in lending crucial support to the genocidal assault during the last ten months directed at the entire population of Gaza.

Even Iran despite its seeming commitment to revenging Haniyeh’s death while on a state visit to a high profile public event in Iran seems searching for a response that is viewed as retaliatory but as signaling its intent to avoid a war with Israel.

There are many actors involved with a wide range of disclosed and disguised motivations, making predictions hazardous. If a wider war  does occur, it will almost certainly be undertaken at Israel’s initiative, quite possibly reflecting Netanyahu’s personal animus. If Iran succeeds in inflicting heavy symbolic or substantive damage in executing its retaliatory attack, Israel might treat magnify the event as a suitable pretext for launching a wider war that I believe it would come to regret. Among other consequences, it may induce Iran to cross the nuclear weapons threshold, assuming this has not happened already. Given the security prerogatives of sovereign states, it would not seem unreasonable for Iran to seek a nuclear deterrent, given the threats and provocations over the years. Such a move would deeply challenge Israel and US-led anti-proliferation geopolitics, being a blow struck against the imperfect regional nonproliferation regime in the Middle East. So long as an aggressive Israel possesses and develops its own nuclear weaponry, without any pretense of accountability, the security situation highlights the double standards embedded in the Biden/Blinken ‘rules governed world.’



2. How will Iran respond to this? 

My earlier answer tentatively predicts a proportionate retaliation that may be treated by Israel as sufficiently ‘disproportionate’ to induce a further escalatory cycle. Although Iran has shown that it does not seek a wider war, it also seems poised to take risks to avoid being seen as weak by both adversaries and allies—the latter being demeaned by being called ‘proxies’ in the Washington and European official statements and media.

Although the world and particularly Iran, assumed that Israel was responsible for Haniyeh’s assassination, Israel failed to claim responsibility for several days.  Before doing so, Israel had been widely accused by Iran, and assumed responsible for this sovereignty-violating assassination. Israel’s official silence rather than offering an evidence-based denial strengthened the dominant impression that Israel was the culprit.

Also passed almost without prominent noticed was the almost simultaneous assassination of  Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah military commander and close associate of accused by Israel of planning a deadly attack on a Druze town of Majjid-Shams in the Israel occupied Golan Heights, killing 12 children playing on a soccer field. Hezbollah denies responsibility for the attack, and it seems that whoever was responsible for the attack misfired as the missile hit a site unassociated with Israel.

3.   The Gaza/Hamas Angle

In a notable statement, the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, indirectly accused Israel of assassinating Haniyeh in a post published on social media. Al Thani observed, “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” referring to Haniyeh as one of the main mediators in the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. And further, “Peace needs serious partners and a global stance against the disregard for human life.” Israel has failed to respond to such an allegation, although it seems to have backed a rumor that Iran might itself have carried out or at least facilitated this assassination.

The US has been the pioneer in relying on assassination as a major instrument of covert warfare during the Cold Year, generally under the auspices of the CIA. During the Carter presidency Senate hearings were held (‘Church Hearings’), leading to the issuance of Executive Order 11. 905 in 1977 prohibiting political assassinations. This Executive Order was later somewhat relaxed during the Reagan Presidency in the 1980s. There seems to be agreement that the ceasefire proposals that looked quite promising in the days before Haniyeh’s assassination now are indefinite hold given the leadership to the supposedly hardline Yahya Sinwar.

Israel has a long record of assassinations in Iran, including of high profile nuclear scientists (e.g. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh) and a much revered military commanded and diplomat. Qasem Solemani, in January 2020, the last days of the Trump presidency.

Political assassinations carried out on the territory of a foreign country in the form of an official undertaking of a government is a violation of international law, an act of aggression, and a violation of fundamental human rights standards.

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Interrogating the Venuzeulan Victory of Nicolas Madura

6 Aug

Murat Sofuoglu

Venezuela election sparks geopolitical feud between US, China and Russia

Whether incumbent President Nicolas Maduro holds on to power could very well depend on his allies, and the result could have global ramifications.

Murat Sofuoglu

MURAT SOFUOGLU

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, left, and opposition presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez address supporters during a protest in Caracas, July 30, 2024. Photo/Cristian Hernandez
APOpposition leader Maria Corina Machado, left, and opposition presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez address supporters during a protest in Caracas, July 30, 2024. Photo/Cristian Hernandez

One week after Venezuela held its presidential election on July 28, the United States and its rivals China and Russia are taking sides in the debate over who actually won power in the South American state, which has had an anti-Western socialist leadership under President Nicolas Maduro. 

The US contests the official results declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), the country’s election oversight authority, which said that Maduro won 51 percent against opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia’s 44 percent. 

Meanwhile China and Russia are standing by the incumbent president.

According to the US-backed opposition, Gonzalez won the presidency with a large margin. He has called for protests against Maduro, and anti-government demonstrations have been raging across Venezuela since the CNE’s declaration of election results. Maduro described the unrest as a far-right conspiracy against his government. 

Venezuela’s election has also divided Latin America, where pro-Western governments from Argentina to Peru, Panama and several other states rejected the official result. Countries like Cuba, which have socialist leaderships, have backed Maduro’s reelection. 

“At present, Maduro’s victory has received congratulatory messages from left governments in the region including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia and critical reactions from the US and European countries,” said Richard Falk, a leading international relations expert. 

Meanwhile, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, the three critical Latin American countries with leftist or left-leaning governments, have distanced themselves from the US position. These nations have important interactions with both Russia and China, and oppose external interference to address the Venezuelan impasse. 

But the three states also called on Caracas to release details of election results, urging an internal “institutional solution”. Caracas says that a hacking attack prevents the electoral oversight body from releasing detailed outcomes as its website continues to be down. 

History of tensions

Venezuela has seen at least two failed coup attempts against anti-Western governments since the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999, which was launched by Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who passed away in 2013 which brought his protege Maduro to power.

APA mural of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with a message that reads in Spanish: “Chavez, the heart of our towns”, in Caracas, Venezuela, July 24, 2024. Photo/Fernando Vergara

The Bolivarian revolution refers to Simon Bolivar, a 19th-century Venezuelan leader who was instrumental in achieving the independence of some South American states from Spanish rule. Like Bolivar in the past, Chavez and later Maduro along with their allies have aimed to form an anti-Western socialist bloc across the region. 

“The natural stance of the opposition and of countries (Western powers) is to oppose Madurismo-Chavismo,” said Juan Martin Gonzalez Cabañas, a researcher at Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU) and a Eurasia specialist at the Argentine-based Center of Studies “Soberanía”. 

Madurismo-Chavismo refers to the ongoing leftist governance in Venezuela since the Bolivarian revolution. So far, at least two failed coup attempts were launched against the Venezuelan socialist leadership. 

In 2002, US-linked forces ousted Chavez for a brief time from power, but in a dramatic reversal, much of the military loyal to Chavez restored him to power after a tense 47 hours. In 2020, there was another failed coup attempt against Maduro’s government. This one was orchestrated by Jordan Goudreau, a US Green Beret, who was recently arrested by the US in New York for arms smuggling.

“More or less impartial commentators believe that the political outcome will depend on whether the Venezuelan armed forces continue to back Maduro and whether the opposition is militant and organised enough to threaten the survival of the Maduro government,” Falk told TRT World. 

Cabanas assesses that Western powers’ antagonist relationship with Maduro and their approach to his reelection bid are clearly related to their political interests. “A [Venezuelan] government opposed to Chavismo would be more functional to their objectives,” he told TRT World.

Russia and China weigh in

On the other hand, the Kremlin is on the side of Maduro, “firmly” backing him and the outcomes of elections that recognised him and his government as winner of elections, according to Cabanas. 

AP ARCHIVEVenezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, right, meets with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, April 18, 2023.

China, which has already congratulated Maduro on a third term following the release of election results, also reiterated its support for the socialist leader. 

“China will, as always, firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, national dignity and social stability, and firmly support Venezuela’s just cause of opposing external interference,” President Xi Jinping said last week.

Both Chavez and Maduro have been long aligned with the anti-Western camp, ranging from Russia to China and regional leftist states like Cuba to counter US influence in Venezuela. 

But Caracas faces a serious economic recession under US-led sanctions, which has led more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to migrate to other countries, particularly the US, since 2014.

It’s difficult to present a fair assessment of the elections because “they are being undertaken in a country that operates in a state of economic siege and hostile relations with the United States,” said Alexander Moldovan, a researcher on social movements and security in Latin America at York University.

“Democracy and national security are difficult to balance,” Moldovan told TRT World, referring to the Venezuelan political dilemma. He sees that the country’s post-election process will be difficult as both pro-government and opposition forces have been entrenched into their firm positions. 

Prior to the election, Maduro has shown his flexibility and held talks with Washington to address the two countries’ differences, aiming to reach an agreement to ease sanctions. 

“Although Maduro’s victory is a win for the counter-hegemonic powers that counterweights the West, this fact should be measured in its proper context: Venezuela is facing an economic recovery after very hard years, and Chavismo is no longer an ideological ‘export brand’ as it used to be, at least in its region (South America/Latin America),” Cabanas added. 

Madurism and regional socialist trends

Falk said he believes that Madurism’s future might depend on how “governments with progressive credentials, such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, will influence” its perceptions outside Venezuela if the socialist leader’s reelection is “sustained in a future period that is bound to be turbulent.” 

APBolivia’s President Luis Arce, from left, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva assemble for a group photo during the South American Summit at Itamaraty palace in Brasilia, Brazil, May 30, 2023. Photo/Andre Penner

The three countries are part of BRICS, a non-Western alliance, and have not sided with the Western stance, as Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva said he found “nothing abnormal” in the election process. 

“If Maduro manages to hold on, and especially if he gains support from Brazil and other moderate governments, it will be interpreted as a setback for ideologically motivated US coercive diplomacy, including an effort to exert political influence by imposing sanctions unilaterally,” Falk said. 

But if the opposite political scenario becomes a reality, then Maduro’s exit and opposition success could be perceived “as allied with the right and the beneficiary of US intervention,” according to Falk. This perception would essentially empower leftist tendencies in Latin America, “not so much for the sake of socialism or electoral integrity, but to assure sovereign rights and resistance to foreign intervention, especially on behalf of capitalist vested interests.” 

The professor also drew attention to the media’s use of political language when it comes to internal settings and processes of anti-Western states like Venezuela. 

While pro-Maduro forces describe María Corina Machado Parisca, a leading opposition leader, and Gonzales, as the leaders of “right-wing” or “far-right” groups, “the liberal media never uses this language, painting the struggle as between “autocratic” and “democratic” tendencies,” he said.

On the other hand, “Maduro describes his movement as one on behalf of the people, especially the poor and marginalised, rarely speaking of ‘socialism’ as the inspiration or goal,” he added.

SOURCE: TRT WORLD

Murat Sofuoglu

Murat Sofuoglu

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Revised Open Letter to Kamala Harris

26 Jul

[Prefatory Note: An earlier version of thiss Open Letter to Kamala Harris was published by CounterPunch on July 23, 2024;  so many developments have occurred in recent days as to make this longer version seem justifiable.]

An Open Letter to Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, July 2024

These is every reason to be glad that Joe Biden finally acted responsibly by withdrawing his candidacy for a second term. It should have happened weeks earlier. To consider this overdue act ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’ is to rob those precious words of their proper meaning. Withdrawal was a pragmatic move forced upon Biden by mounting pressures from the leadership of the Democratic Party and the insistence of a large majority of potential voters.

It is certainly true that Trump and his Republican base repeatedly lie about their achievements and the failings of their opponents, yet it is time to admit that the exaggerations and selective self-congratulations of the Democratic Party are only a degree less deceptive from the perspective of meaningful political communication in self-respecting democracies. Exaggerations are best understood as ‘soft lies’ and are integral to the style of post-truth political discourse.  They should not be excused by such phrases as ‘that’s the way of politics.’

Biden, and so far, Kamala Harris, neither defend nor apologize for a foreign policy that has repudiated diplomacy in the Ukraine context and made no secret of its complicity in supporting Israel’s violent assault on the entire civilian population of Gaza that much of the rest of the world views as a transparent and severe instance of the crime of crimes, genocide. And this seems also reflects the implicit views of the International Court of Justice, including the American judge, in its preliminary and interim responses to the well-presented legal arguments of the South African team in The Hague on why Israel is violating the Genocide Convention and needs to be stopped.

Against this background, should not Democrats, and Americans generally reasonably expect more forthrightness from Harris before heeding unity pleas tied tightly to urgent pleas for yet more campaign donations? What Biden and Harris said in their comments on Biden’s decision to withdraw and call for support of the current VP is worth reflecting upon. This is especially so in view of the foregrounding of controversy during Netanyahu’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress, which were highlighted by bipartisan standing ovations with the hallowed halls, while on the streets near the Capital large hostile demonstrations led by Jewish Voices for Peace were seeking Netanyahu’s arrest for crimes rather than for applause for the world to witness.

At least, Harris absented herself from the Congressional appearance of Netanyahu, and limited herself to a private courtesy meeting in the White House entire separated from Biden’s welcoming of Netanyahu.

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Biden’s words in his official letter announcing his withdrawal are best reflected upon in this wider political framing:

“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

This statement is pretty much boiler plate for such occasions, although it would have been better appreciated if it had included some affirmation of Kamala Harris as having a bold independent, intelligent, compassionate voice that made her counsel so valuable during these past four years. Instead, Biden leaves a dominant impression that Harris performed so admirably because she did such a good job in implementing his policy agenda. Now all Americans will have an opportunity to listen to what Kamala Harris has to say on her own behalf. She is unquestionably an outstanding experienced public servant but to earn broad support beyond her appeal as not being ‘not Trump’ (or Vance) depends on expressing her vison of what presidential leadership should aspire to be at this critical stage in the country’s evolution. The Harris/Trump epic contest this November is shaping up to be one of the most vitally important presidential elections in the country’s 248 years of existence.

In accepting Biden’s endorsement and committing herself to seeking the presidency Kamala Harris’s words are for my taste too much in the spirit of presenting herself to the voting public as Biden 2.0: Of course, this is what a vice president is supposed to do while in service, but at this stage, Harris is uniquely challenged to be simultaneously Biden Vice President until his term ends in January 2025 and to make a distinct case for herself as the next leader of the country. In effect, this amounts to asking Harris to give strong hints as to her views on foreign policy, especially if they significantly different from those of Biden is to be in an impossible position. It is not to be expected that Harris makes explicit note of such differences as that would be divisive given

the circumstances associated with having been Biden’s loyal junior partner during these four years of his presidency.

Her words on accepting Biden’s endorsement of her candidacy are probably neither better nor worse than could be expected given such he sensitive situation.

“I am running to be President of the United States. 

“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve alongside our Commander-in-Chief, my friend, President Joe Biden – one of the finest public servants we will ever know. And I am honored to have his support and endorsement. [emphasis in original]

“And I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together. We built our country back after our predecessor left it in shambles – making historic progress in upgrading our nation’s infrastructure, fighting climate change, and more. We are stronger today because we took action – together – to invest in America’s future.”

The language is a gracious expression of her experience while serving as VP, but also again it manages nothing revealing about Harris’ worldview beyond her embedded commitment to carry on the work as VP during the remainder of the Biden presidency, which is to be judged as compiling a record to be assessed by its positive impacts on the lives of Americans, conveying an image of US foreign policy being so bipartisan that is not worth talking about, or more truthfully because both its defense and critique would be divisive. The Democratic Party is badly split with regard to its attitude toward complicity with the Israeli perpetrators of criminal policies and practices in Gaza, including those that are parallel yet apart from the genocide issue, On July 19 the ICJ pronounced by a near unanimous majority of the 15 judges who issued a decision on Israel’s multiply wrongful occupation of Gaza and drew the legal conclusion that Israel should be required to depart from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as quickly as possible. Although the decision is within the ICJ category of ‘Advisory Opinions’ it sets forth an authoritative determination of the international law issues and their consequences, including the ICJ insistence that Israel, all States, and the UN itself implements its extremely far reaching rulings. [“Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Isael in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem,” 19 July 2024].

It is possible that Kamala Harris, who admirably acknowledged in declaring her candidacy that she must earn the nomination not merely inherit it as a Biden final bequest, will give a forthright speech to the American people that exhibits some measure of independence, and abandons the incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there beyond American borders at a time when the US role has never been more controversially intrusive. Surely, Biden’s frequent claims that America is in the best position of any country to provide global leadership, a view widely contested outside the West, deserve either a reasoned reaffirmation or, more appropriately, a prudent modification that is sensitive to criticisms and failures as it is boastful about achievements.

Aside from her double identity as VP and presidential candidate, Harris has a great opportunity to speak in her own voice, and not just channel the Biden record, but will she seize it? Looking back at her autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, I was encouraged by the pride she took in being part of an activist family of color dedicated to progressive causes while growing into adulthood, including activist opposition to the Vietnam War and almost daily engagement in the civil rights movement. And even during her semi-obligatory downplayed meeting in the White House with Netanyahu, she seemed to distance herself from the mindless immorality of Israel’s behavior in Gaza since October 7. Since March she has been more forthright that Biden in supporting a war-ending ceasefire.

Also, encouraging are her rumored intention to replace the foreign policy team of Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan that have served as such mediocre Biden international ideologues, especially Blinken whose startling ignorance of international affairs and excessive embrace of Israel have not served well the country or the Democratic Party. Perhaps, Democratic Party incredible silence amid engagement in two controversial and dangerous wars was after all a clever tactical diversion of attention from the world scene to domestic realities.

Harris can bring enthusiasm to her candidacy by talking about reinvigorating US commitments peace and justice in the world. Her choice of a running mate, promised by August 7 will be one opportunity for a fresh start, particularly is she has the political and moral wisdom to pass over Josh Shapiro who has been in the Biden camp on Israel, and hostile to pro-Palestinian campus activism.

In closing, I should acknowledge that despite the deplorable prospect of a second Trump term made worse by an awareness that JD Vance would then be a heartbeat away from presidential leadership, I had substantive reservations about supporting Biden/Harris, despite appreciating much of their domestic record, because of their foreign policy. It posed for me, to put it bluntly, an unwelcome choice between a warmonger and a mentally unstable incipient fascist. I confess to nightmares that this is still my choice, or and not yet sure whether Harris will make the fundamental adjustments in governance that might at least restore US credentials as first among the world’s ‘liberal democracies.’

I should also add that I was disappointed by the domestic failure of the Biden/Harrris presidency to do more to protect the academic freedom of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and elsewhere. and by the related refusal to take responsibility for protecting all its students, and not just Jewish students as beneficiaries of donor interferences with the integrity of America’s once proud centers of higher education. One result has been to lead such institutions to take punitive action against foreign, especially Muslim, students who dare express their pro-Palestinian sentiments by way of civic activism.

As many Americans are assessing the highly objectionable Netanyahu visit to Washington during this past week, it is a time to elevate the electoral dialogue not only at the presidential level but also in relation to the many important Congressional contests. This unfortunate display of perverse diplomacy will also test Harris’ composure in her role as Vice President, whether to exhibit politeness but refrain from an ideological embrace of a foreign leader with a scandalous record, and from early accounts she seems to have handled the political delicacies of the situation in an encouragingly skillful manner.  

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Will the ICC Act? The Netanyahu/Gallant Arrest Warrants are a Truth or Dare Moment?

17 Jul

A Shaky Start for the ICC

Since its establishment in 2002 the International Criminal Court has struggled tofind a path to legitimacy. Its establishment was a triumph for the Global South and civic activism in extending the potential reach of international criminal law to the countries of the Global North. ICC prospects were limited from the outset by its organizational identity being situated outside the formal UN framework and even more so, by the failure of the geopolitical ‘big three’ of the US, China, and Russia to join, and in relation to present concerns, by Israel’s refusal. The ICC has 124 members including the liberal democracies in Western Europe, all states in South America, most in Africa, and  many in Asia. Despite this wide representation it has struggled throughout its existence for credibility, influence, respect, and legitimacy.

In its early years the ICC was deservedly blamed for concentrating its activities on the alleged wrongdoing of sub-Saharan African leaders, suggesting a racialist bias. Then later on, in relation to US and Israel’s alleged crimes in Afghanistan and Occupied Palestine, the ICC prosecutor sat on the files containing abundant evidence justifying at the very least, diligent investigations to determine whether indictments and prosecution were legally warranted, and by doing nothing, an impression was formed that the ICC was so weak and insecure that it could not hope to resist geopolitical, Western backdoor manipulations. ICC inaction in this instance was partly attributed to the radical ultra-nationalism of the Trump presidency that had the temerity to impose personalized sanctions on the prosecutor of the ICC should the tribunal open a case against either the US or Israel. Such sanctions were abandoned when Biden became president but the underlying hostility to ICC accountability.

The story goes on, but with new twists. When Russia attacked Ukraine in early 2022, the ICJ was called upon by the NATO West to act decisively with unaccustomed haste. The ICC obliged by expediting its procedures to move forward on an emergency basis to make a determination as to whether Putin and others should be immediately indicted for war crimes and arrest warrants issued. This unusual request for haste appeared to serve the geopolitical interests of the West, again somewhat racialized by the fact that ICC activism was on behalf of Ukraine a majority white, Christian victim of alleged war crimes. Such haste and pressures from the West had never before in the brief existence of the ICC been so enlisted. The ICC obliged, further compromising its credibility, by issuing arrest warrants for Putin and a close assistant, confirming the suspicion that it could be bullied even by non-parties to the Rome Statute that states adhered to if seeking status as parties, active in the work of the ICC.

Such haste with respect to Russia was not at all evident in relation to Gaza, despite the far greater urgency, considering the magnitude and severity of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe facing the Palestinian people. To date it has withheld a meaningful response to the legal effort of Chile and Mexico to have the ICC investigate allegations against Israel. These two governments were seeking an ICC investigation and appropriate responses to the violations of the Genocide Convention by Israel in the course of carrying out its retaliatory attack on Gaza after October 7 that seemed designed to ignore the civilian innocence of the Palestinian people in Gaza in a prolonged process of imposing collective punishment on an occupied people, itself a violation of Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention.  This difference in ICC responses to these two initiatives reinforced an impression of double standards in the tribunal’s treatment of allegations of international crimes. In this instance the behavior of the ICC contrasted unfavorably with the laudable efforts of ICJ to do what it could do by way of declaring the relevant international law. The effectiveness of the ICJ Interim Orders was hampered by its inability to induce compliance by Israel or enforcement by the UN. These unfortunate frustrations were also attributable in part to the complicity of the liberal democracies in aiding and justifying Israel’s response to the Hamas attack.

Is the ICC Escaping from its Bad Reputation Thanks to Israel?

Against this background, it was inevitable that the ICC would be widely viewed as a weak institution, above all by not initially obtaining participation or cooperation of such important states as the US, Russia, China, and of course, Israel. In this regard, the ICC was most unfavorably compared to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to which all members of the UN were automatically parties. The ICJ was widely respect for maintaining a high degree of professionalism and juridical dignity in the course of assessing the merits of legal disputes referred to the tribunal for adjudication even when geopolitical strategic interests were present. This positive reputation of the ICJ was greatly enhanced by its near unanimous Interim Orders of January and March 2024 granting several Provisional Measures requested by South Africa to impede Israel’s behavior that seemed to lay a plausible basis for concluding that Israel was guilty of ‘genocide’ in Gaza, although no such conclusion was reached, and the substantive legal status of the genocide allegation deferred until the ICJ rendered its decision on the merits.

Israel was also legally ordered by the ICJ to allow humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians without interference, at least until the final judgment on the merits of the genocide contention could be rendered.  This was expected to happen in years hence after the ICJ had an opportunity to respond to further elaborate oral and written pleadings by the parties and those actors given leave to intervene. This process was expected to last for several years, quite likely reducing the existential relevance of the ICJ judgment as the killing would have hopefully have stopped long before the Court had time to rule. The decision would still have jurisprudential value as an authoritative interpretation of the crime of genocide, and might give rise to the establishment  of preventive and early response mechanisms in anticipation of future genocides. It is possible that the passage of time would reduce the intensity of partisan geopolitics, creating a better atmosphere for cooperative moves to strengthen the global normative order against futue outbreaks of genocidal violence.

Despite the cautious legal professionalism of the ICJ a nearly unanimous panel of the seventeen judges found Israel sufficiently responsible for ‘plausible genocide’ to grant Provisional Measures in response to South Africa’s request. [Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel, ICJ Orders, 192, 20240126 & 192 20240328, ProvMesures)]; [see also systematic assessment of Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide,’ A/HRC/55/73, 25 March 2024].

These orders legally require Israel to take a variety of steps to stop engaging in genocidal behavior including interference with efforts to deliver food and medicine to starving and desperate Palestinians huddled together in dangerously crowded collective misery in the small city of Rafah on the Egyptian border. The prospect of bloody extensions of genocide are daily proposed by Israeli leaders in their murderous attacks on Rafah, much overcrowded condition resulting from sheltering large numbers of Palestinian civilians. Israel also issued a series of evacuation orders purporting to shift Palestinians to ‘safe zones,’ but in practice subjecting even these areas in Central Gaza to devastating attacks. This pattern of evacuation orders and continuous attack has  put the finishing touches on Israel’s actions that are more and more widely perceived as repudiations of the minimal moral sensibilities of a common humanity as well as carrying out mortal threats to the life prospects of Palestinians now estimated at over 186,000 by the highly respected medical journal, Lancet. This higher figure than the death statistcs compiled and verified by Gaza Public Health sources the direct Israeli violence, results from counting as deaths attributable to the attacks, Palestinians missing as presumably buried beneath piles of rubble, as well as the deaths caused by starvation, malnutrition, inadequate sanitation.  Using the Lancet estimate of the proportionate loss of life in Gaza (without taking account of injuries, physical and mental) if occurred in US society would amount to 2,900,000 fataities, which is a figure greater than the total loss of American loss of lives in all the wars of the entire 20th century.

A Redemptive Moment for the ICC?

If asked even a week ago, I would have said that Bibi Netanyahu would have been the very last person on the planet to come to the institutional rescue of the ICC, although he did so in a backhanded way. Netanyahu leaped to respond after leaked rumors suggested that the ICC was on the verge of issuing arrest warrants naming Netanyahu, the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, and Army Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi. Somehow this prospect so agitated Netanyahu that he chose to go on the offensive in advance of any formal action. His five-minute video tirade against the ICC is worth watching by everyone—

 https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1785362914519519597?s  1-–if only to get a sense of just how potentially formidable the ICC might become if it performs in conformity with its statute. On balance, if it takes Netanyahu’s misplaced sense of outrage to shame the ICC into finally doing its job, so be it.

At the same time Netanyahu’s gross distortions of what was happening in Gaza were extreme enough to provide valuable material to late night TV humorists. The obvious purpose of Netanyahu’s tirade was to whitewash over six months of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imperiling the individual and collective survival of the long abused civilian population of Gaza.  Israeli behavior is so macabre as to be beyond the realm of good-natured, apolitical comedy, providing more of an occasion for weeping and mourning the lost and ravaged lives, and devasted cities, hospitals, places of worship, schools, and UN facilities.

It is within this setting that the ICC seems to have been given an opportunity to act finally in accordance with its mandate, to redeem its reputation for spinelessness, and strike a symbolic blow in the increasingly worldwide struggle to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It is technically possible and undoubtedly politically tempting for the prosecutor to disappoint these expectations by limiting ICC action against Israeli and Hamas leaders to their alleged  pre-October 7 crimes. Such an evasion would be within scope of the 2015 initiative of Palestine, a party to the Rome Statute, which was initiated in such a manner that any crime after 2014 was potentially indictable. Such an evasion would be a double disappointment for those seeking to increase pressure on Israel to accept a ceasefire followed by a series of restorative acts that could include redress, reparations, accountability, and reconstruction punitive directives.

We are left with the puzzle of why Israel’s reaction to the ICC, in view of its low institutional esteem, was seen as so much more threatening to Israel than the more authoitative directives of the far more established ICJ. Could it be that the criminal character of the ICC and the personal nature of arrest warrants are more of an emotional pushback than  mere legal rulings? Or was the ICC perceived as low hanging fruit, which even Israel took respectful account of the ICJ legal proceeding, and participated both in appointing a prominent Israeli jurist as an ad hoc judge and by taking part in the proceedings by offering a defense of their actions in Gaza.

Netanyahu phrased his key argument against the arrest warrants as posing a mortal threat to the right of democracies to defend themselves against their evil enemies, singling out Iran.  Such a view, reverses the perceptions of peoples throughout the world excepting those governments and right-wing elements that support  Israel in the Global West and the hardest core Zionist ideologues. Increasingly, even in the strongholds of Zionist influence, softer versions of Zionism and more independent Jewish voices are siding with the pro-Palestine protesters, reacting against the stark reality of genocide.

A Concluding Remark

We should all know by now that Israel has no intention of complying with international law no matter what the source of authority. In this sense, the importance of the ICJ and potentially, the ICC, is to strengthen the growing tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment around the world, and an emerging consensus to escalate civic solidarity initiatives of the sort that contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam despite total battlefield military superiority and that doomed the South African apartheid regime. In this regard, the utterances of the most influential international institutions entrusted with interpreting international law have more impact in high profile political situations such as exist in Gaza, than does do either the ICJ or ICC, and for that matter, than even the UNSC. Once again if the Palestine people do finally realize their basic rights, it will be thanks to the resistance of those victimized as reinforced by the transnational activism of people everywhere.  It may be in launching his vitriolic attack on the ICC, Netanyahu was subconsciously delivering his\ mendacious sermon to the aroused peoples of the world. 

We now know that the Prosecutor of the ICC did recommend to a sub-commission in the form of a panel of judges the issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, and so far no decision has been forthcoming. Notable, also, was the omission of genocide from the crimes charged to the Israeli leadership. The US reacted with anger, as exhibited by President Biden, that the ICC Prosecutor seemed to create a moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorist organization, Hamas. Critics of Israel and complicit states in contrast objected to the equivalency but from an opposite position—making an attack justified by Hamas’ right of resistance within the limits of international humanitarian law equivalent to Israel’s 9+ months of genocide.

Perhaps needless to observe, the ICC has yet to deliver its judgment.

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Biden’s Escapist Vision & Democratic Party’s Evasive Electoral Campaign

10 Jul

[Prefatory Note: With trivial variations, this essay was published in CounterPunchon July 9, 2024. It expresses my dissatisfaction with Biden’s stubborn resolve to challenge Trump despite his impaired capabilities (and I would add his woeful foreign policy toward the Ukraine War and Gaza Genocide) and wooly-headed optimism about the future of America and his ill-conceived optimism about its ability to lead the world. The Democratic Party is faulted for its head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy, limiting its electoral campaign strategy to the deserved demonization of Trump and Trumpism, but despite these two controversial ‘wars,’ refusing to defend or distance their campaign from these central features of the Biden presidency.]

Critiquing Biden’s Worldview, Democratic Party Tactics, and America’s Destiny

The Democratic Party is waging its 2024 electoral campaign by focusing on two

themes: first, a denunciation of all that Trump proposes to bring to the presidency  centering on  the destruction of American democracy, if elected, and secondly, a celebratory spin on the domestic record of the Biden years with several notable benefits for the American people  including jobs and wages, climate, energy policy, social protection, gun control, and a stock market at record highs. What is missing from this rosy picture of America and even more so from Democratic Party feckless advocacy is neither claims nor explanations of foreign policy, only a deafening silence. It is as if the leadership of the Democratic Party wants the voting public to forget that there is a world out there, beyond national boundaries. While it has pragmatic reasons to adopt this evasive approach, especially in an election year, it is irresponsible about its partial description of America’s role in the world at a critical historical juncture.

Embracing this national posture seems strange as the US has so heavily invested in military capabilities to secure its global dominance in the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago.  And as a consequence, finds itself currently engaged controversially in these wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza. It appears that even Biden is reluctant to claim political credit when addressing national audience for US support of Israel and Ukraine, and prefers to speak in generalities about the greatness of America as a country whose future is bright except to the extent dimmed by the threatened advent of Trump and Trumpism. This tendency to ignore the world should be more troubling to American voters than even Biden’s refusal to leave the presidential stage in light of his thinly deniable disabilities of age and mental health that have put his 2024 candidacy in such public peril as to make more likely a Trump victory in November. Such an evasive pattern gives seems to lend itself in Biden’s campaign rhetoric to absurdly boastful, yet distorting and unconvincing, assessments of the present broad political outlook for the country and the world.

Biden’s speech on the 3rd Anniversary of the January 6th Insurrectionary attack on Congress is a typical example. After a lengthy, persuasive recital of warnings about the Trump menace, Biden offers some unhinged general remarks, starting with his oft repeated startling expression of personal confidence in the glorious future of America: “I have never been more optimistic about the future of our country.”  No explanation is given for why this is so, and there could not be one even if Orwellian tropes were relied upon. Biden makes no mention of the dubious wars, of massive homelessness, of dangerously large economic inequalities, of an epidemic of mass shootings, of growing migrant tensions, of backsliding on carbon emissions and the related rise of extreme weather events, of numerous signs of rising risks of future major wars with China and Russia, quite possibly prompting the use of nuclear weapons, of deeply disturbing erosions of academic freedom recently accompanied by punitive encroachments on dissent and freedom of expression, as well as the emergence bitterest and most divisive societal polarization since the American Civil War. I confess that I have never in my life felt more pessimistic about the future of the country. At least the citizenry was entitled expected a self-professed liberal such as Biden to be forthright about addressing the unmet illiberal challenges that have been rampant during his years in the White House, and a program to do so in the increasingly unlikely event that Democrats are given the mandate to govern in November.

Biden also was immaturely boastful on the same occasion. “We’re the greatest nation on the face of the earth.” And possibly betraying his uncertainty about the outlandish claim immediately added reassuring words but no specifics, “We really are.’ Then he proceeded to display the kind of hubris long associated with the twilight of past declining empires. Counter-historically Biden observed that “We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism.’ It underpins the broader claim that evokes doubt and opposition outside the West: “there’s no country in the world better positioned to lead the world than America..Just remember who we are..We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.’ Remembering who we are, or have become, is the ideological leader of the (il)liberal democracies of the West who mostly lent a helping hand to Israel while in recent months it carried out a genocidal assault on the helplessly vulnerable 2.3 million civilian population of the tiny Gaza Strip. This American led complicity in what much of the world’s peoples perceived as a transparent genocide, even proclaimed as such in the rationales articulated and policies pursued by Israel’s political leaders and put into deadly practice by its armed forces. While claiming to be “defending the sacred cause of democracy” Biden doesn’t respect his own citizenry sufficiently to acknowledge Israel’s policies face unprecedented challenges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering neither an explanation nor an apology. We must ask ourselves whether such a failure to include the citizenry in evaluating foreign policy that much of the public dissents from is in keeping with an existential commitment to democratic styles of governance. Or for that matter, whether cooperative security arrangements and friendly relations touted by Biden with the governments of India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others can be reconciled with his personal commitment to the promotion of a democratizing world as the only acceptable alternative to its autocratic adversaries.

US democracy from the founding of the republic almost 250 years ago has been associated with a constitutional arrangement that stresses the division of and balance between the three principal branches of government as supplemented by the guiding idea that even the acts of the president are not above the restraints and accountability procedures of law. Currently, both pf these vital pillars of a functioning democracy are crumbling, and near collapse. The US Supreme Court has never been so out of touch with the values of American traditions and the defense of its democratic character, not only by its denial of women’s reproductive rights but in relation to upholding the rule of law in relation to the behavior of the president and the regulation of corporate wrongdoing. Congress, in many vital sectors of public policy, has become captive to well-funded lobbying pressures and the interests of the wealthiest American leading commentators to argue that plutocracy has become a more accurate description of the form of government than democracy, To be optimistic in the face of such developments has all the appearances of playing the role of the fool.

For me an unmistakable indicator of the alienation of the governing process from the citizenry is the extension of a bipartisan invitation to the embattled Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress later in July. This bestowal of such a signal honor on a foreign leader for whom ‘arrest warrants’ has been recommended by the habitually cautious ICC, will be further enhanced by a meeting with the President at the White House undoubtedly accompanied by a TV moment exhibiting harmony between these two leaders that includes unconditional support and a profession of shared values. Such an inappropriate gesture of approval is a slap in the faces of those many American opponents of Israel’s policies in Gaza over the course of recent months, especially a show of disrespect toward young Americans who protested on university campuses across the country, and for their expressions of belief and conscience experienced police brutality and professionally harmful punishments imposed educational administrators, themselves under pressure from donors and politicians. The Netanyahu invitation is an edifying metaphor that helps justify the dark foreboding of skeptics critical of the US global role since the end of the Cold War and deeply pessimistic about the future of the country. From such an angle, Biden’s off-the-wall optimism and the tactics of the Democratic Party establishment are the opposite of reassuring. Rather I find these patterns as strong evidence of dangerous forms of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national and global circumstances and a stubborn display of a failing leader’s resilient vanity.      

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ASSESSING THE PUNITIVE ‘RELEASE’ OF JULIAN ASSANGE

9 Jul

[Prefatory Note: This is a modified text of responses to questions posed by a Washington-based AlJazeera journalist, Mohamed Elmenshawy, about the plea bargain release of Julian Assange (6/25/24)]

ASSESSING THE PUNITIVE ‘RELEASE’ OF JULIAN ASSANGE

1-What do you make of the plea deal reached between the US Government and Assange?

The release of Julian Assange is long overdue, although it would have been more widely welcomed at this time if it had not been achieved within the framework of a plea bargain. More appropriate, and far less ambivalent, would have been a presidential pardon that kept the door open for future investigative journalists with the courage to reveal and comment upon inconvenient truths.

As it was, Assange after being released from prison was obliged to stop in the small city of Saipan in an Northern   Marianas Island in the Western Pacific, which is actually US territory, and face espionage charges in a criminal court. To gain his freedom after 14 years on the run and in various types of confinement, Assange’s guilty plea bargain required him to plead guilty on one of a series charges against him. The US Government seemed content with Assange’s acceptance of the charge of conspiring unlawfully to obtain and disseminate classified materials.

Despite securing this guilty plea, the prosecution had agreed that it would not seek to have Assange made subject to any further punishment. His time in the UK maximum security prison at Belmarsh Prison for the past five years was apparently treated as sufficient jail time, allowing the government to claim that US espionage laws were being enforced in response to Assange’s unlawful behavior. Assange’s long confinement in the Ecuador Embassy in London for the nine years preceding confinement in Belmarsh during the long extradition legal process amounted also to a punishment for the dubious contention that Wikileaks rather than being dissident journalism was espionage, despite Assange’s diligent redaction of any material that might endanger the safety of persons named in the released classified documents. Assange was also imprisoned for 50 weeks in the UK after jumping bail to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face some alleged criminal  charges  of an ambiguous sexual assault.

While there exist humanitarian and principled political reasons to celebrate Assange’s freedom there are also grounds for concern and criticism. To begin with there were rather well-sourced reports that the CIA considered kidnapping or even assassinating Assange during his prolonged stay in Ecuador’s Embassy. These concerns were aggravated by insinuations that the US had helped engineer a change of government in Ecuador that resulted in the withdrawal of its grant of asylum to Assange in London. The most damaging materials that was disclosed by Wikileaks came to Assange by way of a US Army Intelligence Officer, Chelsea Manning (previously known as Bradley Manning), who transmitted 750,000 classified and diplomatic documents to Assange relating to various incidents in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that confirmed and documented US reliance on criminal tactics that amounted to international war crimes. Manning was court-martialed for violating the Espionage Laws and was imprisoned from 2010-1017 for leaking classified materials to Assange. Her prison sentence was commuted by Obama in 2017, releasing Manning from serving out her sentence.

By treating such disclosures as espionage, as is the effect of Assange’s guilty plea, is to send all dissident journalists an intimidating signal that they could be subject to a criminal prosecution in the future. Mainstream journalists frequently address pro-government issues that are shaped by privileged access to classified government documents without facing such threats. The difference in treatment of dissident journalists whose views rarely are represented on influential establishment media platforms in the West arises from their political slant rather than from their classified character. In this instance the media performs, especially in relation to foreign policy and national security, operate as an instrument of state propaganda. In contrast, Wikileaks is primarily motivated by a radical anti-state, left populist orientation supportive of greater transparency with respect to government policy in the conduct of foreign policy.

This dissident identity leads some commentators on the political right to consider Assange to be an ‘anarchist hacker’ rather than a true journalist, and as such, deserving of punishment to the full extent of the law. They even object to the current arrangement governing his release as endangering future national security interests and the safety of those citizens who might be exposed by public disclosure, as well as those with whom US intelligence, diplomatic, and military personnel collaborate in foreign countries.

Other notable commentators argue that there exists an inevitable fuzzy line separating journalism from espionage, ‘a gray zone’ that exhibits overlapping tensions between guarding legitimate state secrets and protecting free expression. Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School has described this as a tension between ‘national security hawks’ and ‘First Amendment absolutists,’ implying that those sensible moderates who allegedly determine policy must make contextual judgments based on the character of information disclosed, the sincerity and prudence of the actor charged with release, and the effects on US credibility and security of the disclosures.

Such reasonableness, in my judgment, undermines the importance of safeguarding those that take risks to inform the citizenry about the wrongdoings of government, which contributes to the democratic quality of state/society relations. There are limits to permissible disclosure, but they should be administered with a due regard for restoring democratic vitality in an era where most of what governments hide is to keep these inconvenient truths from being known by the national citizenry and to avoid accountability procedures by what social forces ensure that government policy is respectful of applicable law. In this sense, the whistleblowing rationale challenges government claims that state secrets are integral to national security. Statist apologists purport to be concerned about sensitive information being accessed by foreign enemy governments in ways that hamper the discretion of the state to adopt pragmatically justified policies and practices.

The balancing of relevant opposing interpretations would be more persuasive if it took account of the specific identity of the state whose secrets were being revealed and the purposes of the disclosure. In this instance, the United States was acting extraterritorially in ways that harmed the people and public interests of a variety of foreign states. This is quite different from the effort of vulnerable countries, such as Iran, to view breaches of its national security plans and capabilities as crimes that deserved punishment. Such distinctions lend support to views that regard violations of constraints on disclosure as being in a grey zone that depends on interpretation and analysis of specific cases.   

2-And what do you make of its timing?

It is impossible to separate the timing of this plea bargain from the presidential elections in the US. Releasing Assange relieves Biden of the burden of answering questions about a seemingly vindictive pursuit of a public spirited individual who as Australian citizen acting outside was arguably not even subject to US espionage laws, and has been forced to live a fugitive existence for the past 14 years. It is helpful to appreciate that Assange was a non-citizen acting outside the United States whose behavior and alleged criminal acts that would normally be treated as beyond the proper reach of US espionage laws, especially as the classified documents were voluntarily transmitted to him rather than stolen.

A final point powerfully made by Chris Hedges is that Assange owes his freedom, belated and grudging as it is, to the sustained support of people demonstrating on his behalf throughout the world. Without this display of people power exercised on behalf of the global public interest Hedges argues that there is every reason to suppose that if US prosecutors had earlier succeeded with their extradition efforts, Assange would be prosecuted and sent to jail for the rest of his life (he could potentially have been sentenced to 175 years in prison if found guilty by a court of all charges brought against him), or at best made to hide shamefully from American law enforcement efforts virtually forever. As important as it is to acknowledge the role of people in the streets demonstrating to demand Assange’s  freedom is a recognition of the degree to which the demonstrators were affirming the acts of Assange as well as the individual. Assange was disclosing to the world what citizens of a genuine democratic world order were entitled to know and act upon.

The Assange case, following the example of Daniel Ellsberg in relation to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, shows us above all, how important it is to have brave individuals dedicated to transparent governance that is respectful of international law. It also reveals the strong support ordinary people lend to those truth-tellers and whistleblowers like Assange and Chelsea Manning.  A viable democracy, more than ever in this digital age of robotics and AI, depends on governmental truthfulness and maximum transparency, this depends on protecting the role of dissident journalism and engaged citizenries. A frightening dimension of danger in these days are  growing credible fears of stumbling into World War III. This is becoming a major public concern in the US and elsewhere as war mongers in Washington seem to be pushing tension toward military confrontations in a whole series of flashpoints around the world. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has repeatedly warned of such dangers, suggesting the world is but one calculation away from a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Especially, in relation to geopolitical actors, formally freed from a legal duty to act within the framework of the UN Charter, we the people need to lend populist forms of support to the Assanges and Ellsbergs among us.


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‘Occupied’ Palestine: Jerusalem Annexed, Gaza Genocide, West Bank Apartheid

20 Jun

[Prefatory Note: RAF interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, published in Truthout, May 13, 2024, and republished here with modifications of my responses to reflect intervening developments. In the month since the initial publication, the situation as described below has become even more severely abusive toward the civilian population of Gaza, with the Israeli Government making no effort to uphold its legal or moral responsibilities as Occupying Power to protect the Occupied Palestinian People under its administrative control as requi red in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. The Israeli Government has exhibited a total absence of empathy, in policies and practices that exemplify the worst features of the international crime of apartheid. Even if life in Gaza quiets down, housing restored, Israel security forces withdrawn and some gestures of normalization have been made, the situation in the West Bank, unless modified, will continue to exhibit apartheid characteristics generating a different kind of humanitarian catastrophe. Overall, the Palestinian future can only be redeemed by terminating the Israeli role at the earliest possible time and internationally enforcing the dismantling of Israeli settlements, removal of settlers, and the termination of Israel’s administrative presence and repression. The UN although reporting and documenting human rights violations committed by Israel has so far lacked, in the face of P5 strategic support of Israel, the ability or relevant political will to implement its own recommendations relating to compliance with international humanitarian law. That which is humanly necessary seems politically impossible; the result is a moral scandal of global significance, and a human tragedy brought on my unspeakable and persistent criminality.]

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Israel Continues Unfettered Colonization of the West Bank Amid Genocide in Gaza

Daniel Falcone: The West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the Zionist settler movement’s pursuit of a “Greater Israel.” Amid the genocidal campaign in Gaza, Israel has expanded its settlement project and markedly increased colonial violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians. “Killings are taking place at a level without recent precedent” in the occupied West Bank, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, international relations scholar Richard Falk reminds us of the reality and aims of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Falk details the degradation, starvation, human rights abuses, unchecked political power and resource control in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also explains the U.S.’s aims in the West Bank and how they differ from those in Gaza.

Daniel Falcone: With a lot of the attention on Gaza due to the extremity of Israel’s bombing in Rafah, the West Bank is sometimes overlooked in media reports and political discussions about the ongoing Palestinian struggle for survival. How can we understand the differences between Israel’s strategic aims in Gaza and the West Bank?

Bottom of Form

Richard Falk: The three territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and the Gaza Strip have experienced rather different conditions of occupation and governance during the 57 years of Israeli control, none of them with remotely positive results.

The whole of Jerusalem was officially declared by the Knesset in 2019 to be “the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel.” Such a unilateral action on Israel’s part was incompatible with international humanitarian law. It also violated the letter and spirit of unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 242, which immediately after the 1967 War looked toward the complete withdrawal of Israel’s occupying armed forces in the near-term future with an unspecified consideration give Israeli demands for “minor border adjustments.” It has always been a Palestinian demand and expectation of most international advocates of a two-state solution that East Jerusalem would be the capital of any future Palestinian state. This Palestinian position has been generally regarded as an integral element of the UN consensus that developed around the widespread support for “a two-state solution” that persists today despite many reasons to believe it would not be sustainable.

In 1967 Gaza was deemed the third and least important element in the administration of the occupied territories that came under Israel’s control during the war. Its status was viewed ambivalently at first, mainly because it was deemed outside the Zionist project. The Zionist commitment to return to “the promised land” that formed the geographic contours of the Zionist vision of a Jewish supremacy state was not included in most versions of Zionist thought and political vision. It also seemed overcrowded and imporverished at first, possessing little economic promise from Israel’s point of view. Nevertheless, in the period of 1967 to 2005 Gaza was treated by Israel as part of Occupied Palestine, with an intrusive and abusive IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military presence, and the unlawful establishment of Jewish settlements along the Gaza coast that became home for 8,000 Jewish settlers. The administration of Gaza was long viewed by Tel Aviv as an economic burden and security challenge for Israel, and a center of Palestinian resistance radicalism.

The major resistance initiative directed at Israeli occupation known as the First Intifada originated in Gaza in 1987, challenging both Israel and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat and the coalition of secular Palestinian groups known under the rubric of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. In 2005, Israel formally “disengaged” from Gaza, contending that the withdrawal of its armed forces and the dismantling of its settlements relieved Israel of further responsibilities as Occupier in Gaza, with possible future peace solutions for the Gaza Strip as involving of some sort of federated arrangement whereby Gaza would become subject to the sovereign control of Jordan and/or Egypt. This Israeli interpretation of disengagement was rejected by the UN and both Arab states. They considered Israel’s revised approach to Gaza as nothing more substantive than a redeployment of IDF ground forces to just across the Israeli border coupled with the maintenance of total control of Gaza’s air space and offshore waters. The approach also included a tight regulation of the entry and exit of persons and goods to and from the Strip. Despite announcing “disengagement” as a step toward peace Israel never overcame the perception of Gaza as “the largest open-air prison” in the world, which for many in Gaza, including secular Palestinians, meant growing sympathy with and support for Hamas as dedicated to active struggle to obtain Palestinian sovereign territory.

The complex Gaza narrative after disengagement included the unexpected 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, previously listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU, as well as Israel. Despite Hamas agreeing to forego “armed struggle,” in 2007 Israel imposed a strict and economically punitive blockade of goods and persons seeking to leave or enter Gaza, engaging in periodic major military operations, described by Israeli security advisors as ‘mowing the lawn’ and putting the population on what was unfeelingly described as “a diet” by restricting the import of food.  Despite Israel’s repressive moves and military incursions, Hamas put forward long-term ceasefire and co-existence proposals that were ignored by Tel Aviv and Washington. When such an effort to suspend the violent aspects of the conflict failed, Hamas revived it resistance struggle. A creative nonviolent campaign of resistance known as “the Great March of Return” attributed to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, as well as Hamas, was met with deadly Israeli sniper violence in 2018 at the border, including the apparenr lethal targeting of well-marked journalists.

Finally, Israel’s provocations and the Hamas-led attack of October 7 set the stage for the latest genocidal phase of Israel’s presence, combining the wrongs of occupation with many crimes of oppression, dehumanization, devastation, starvation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, culminating in genocide. It seemed that as of 2024, Gaza is strategically and economically far more important to the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government and its settler temperament than it was earlier. This is due to the discovery of extensive offshore oil and gas deposits, and a reported interest in a major engineering undertaking that has blueprinted the Israeli construction of a Ben Gurion Canal traversing part of Gazan territory, with the goal of creating an alternative to the Suez Canal. While the devastation Gaza was still a daily reality, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obscenely proposed luxury waterfront homes for settlers in a Gaza emptied of Palestinians.

It is against this background that the West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the pursuit of “Greater Israel,” which was the animating ideal of the settler movement. Maany settlers were closely allied with the extreme right Religious Zionism coalition partner of the Netanyahu-led government that took over the governance of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in January 2023. From its first days of governance, it became clear that Israel was preparing to push to completion a maximal version of the Zionist Project. Israeli radicalism along these lines was exhibited by the greenlighting of settler violence on the West Bank that included a series of inflammatory incidents intended to make the Palestinians feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own homeland. The occupying government in Tel Aviv revealed its orientation through tacitly approving settler violence rather than responsibly fulfilling their legal duties to protect Palestinian residents. Crimes against West Bank Palestinian residents, including land seizures and gratuitous vigilante violence, were not only tolerated but applauded by rightist members of Netanyahu’s inner circle.

Of supplemental relevance was the official endorsement of increasing the settlement population in the West Bank by expanding building permits and territorial extensions to settlers and their settlements — already estimated to number 700,000 (500,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem). This move to ensure Israeli permanence on the West Bank was combined with the acceleration of diplomacy that focused on forming a de facto alliance with Sunni-dominated Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and the containment and destabilization of Shiite-dominated Iran. Further, Netanyahu’s September 2023 performance at the UN General Assembly in which he arrogantly displayed a map of “the new Middle East” on which Palestine was erased — treated as nonexistent — must have made a show of Palestinian resistance imperative.

These elements are the background context preceding the Hamas-led attack of October 7. The true character of the attack itself needs to be internationally investigated, given the extensive and credible warnings given to the Israeli government, Israel’s ultra-sophisticated surveillance capabilities, and the inflated initial accounts that blamed Hamas for all the most barbaric crimes allegedly committed during the attack. Some of the initial macabre claims of October 7 were later discredited and even modified by Israel. The most suspicious element of the Israeli response was its readiness to embark upon a genocidal campaign, which, while concentrated on Hamas and Gaza, seems also intended to induce a second Nakba with major secondary impacts on the West Bank residential security of Palestinians.

In the months preceding the Hamas-led attack, the West Bank had been the scene of increased settler violence and a heightening of the IDF’s repressive tactics. In the years before October 7, Israel was found guilty of the international crime of apartheid in a series of well-documented reports compiled by objective, expert sources (Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’tselem). Liberal democracies and the mainstream media refused to acknowledge this damaging consensus bearing on the legitimacy of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and instead smeared and blacklisted Israel’s critics. The US Government deflected questions from the media, refusing to respond substantively and opting for institutional silence despite the mounting evidence and legal analysis of objective sources.

In addition to the settlements, Palestinian property rights, mobility and security of residence were undermined and threatened in various ways in the West Bank. Palestinian land was further encroached upon at the end of the 20th century by the construction of a separation wall between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank that expropriated additional Palestine-owned land and divided villages such as Bil’in. Although this mode of constructing the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was found to be illegal by a near unanimous majority of the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2003, Israel defied the findings of the Advisory Opinion, as requested by the UN General Assembly over the objections of the US and Israel. In the end Israel continued its wall project without deference to international law or international procedures of accountability.

Israel’s rejection of attempts to establish Palestinian statehood with sovereign rights within delimited borders have long concentrated upon the West Bank. This pattern goes back as long ago as 1947, when the UN approved a controversial plan for the partition of Palestine relying on internal and international borders derived from the British mandate over Palestine. In the dark shadows being cast by the Holocaust and given influence by Zionist pressures, there emerged a UN consensus that the only viable solution for the struggle of the two peoples claiming Palestine as their homeland was to split sovereign rights between two equal states, assumed to be named Israel and Palestine.

Distinguished commentators from both peoples opposed such a territorial division for a variety of reasons, well summarized from a Jewish perspective in Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile and from a Palestinian perspective in the later writings of Edward Said.

Always the central question, even if often left implicit, was the destiny of the West Bank and its residents, as well as whether Palestinian “security” would be restricted by demilitarization and dependence on Israeli forbearance in the two-state models, and whether the Zionist commitment to a Jewish supremacist state, as projected in Israel’s 2018 Basic Laww, could be accommodated or needed to be modified in the one-state models.

Falcone: What are the U.S. goals in the West Bank and how do they differ from its Gaza policy?

Falk: The U.S. has a strong reputational interest in retaining the identity of the West Bank as Occupied Palestinian Territory. If Israel extends its sovereignty over the West Bank, which it has long claimed should be classified as “disputed territory” rather than “occupied territory,” it would bring to a screeching halt any further pretense by the U.S. government to be serious about the advocacy of a “two-state solution.”

Trump’s proposed “deal of the century” contained a nominal Palestinian mini state to sustain the illusion that the interests of both peoples were being considered, but it failed to fool almost no one, including two-state advocates that naively envisioned two states with equal sovereign rights and sovereign control over national security policy. .

American credibility as an “honest broker” in the Oslo Peace Process, and elsewhere, was greatly eroded by its gradual acquiescence in the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank despite their patent illegality and their negative impacts on a meaningful political compromise embedded in the final territorial allocation  of Palestine between the two peoples. The U.S.’s mild reaction to settlement expansion was limited to the muffled whisper that such behavior “was not helpful.” In actuality it was essential to the validation of the Israeli network of settlements.

By now, given the bipartisan U.S. endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its repeated use of the veto to block a meaningful ceasefire directive and a widely supported initiative to treat Palestine as a full member of the UN, I believe that the U.S. could not any longer put itself forward as a trustworthy intermediary in any future bilateral negotiating process. It would covertly and overtly become Israel’s international sword and shield, exhibiting the extreme partisanship of the US while its leaders and media falsely claiming that the American posture supports adherence to international law and diplomatic balance.

With regard to the differing interests of the U.S. in the West Bank and Gaza, it comes down to two issues: first, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza, while maintaining Israel’s legitimacy as an occupying power in the West Bank and insulating its violations of international humanitarian law from UN censure, boycotts and sanctions; and secondly, recognizing that the West Bank is the integral core of a Palestinian state.


Falcone: How does Israel complicate the work on the ground by scholars, activists and elected officials? The fact that the two regions are separate seems to make the problem even more insurmountable. 

Falk: The differing character of Israel’s approaches to the two areas creates many complications for those who seek normal operating conditions. Gaza is considered by Tel Aviv to be administered by Hamas, a terrorist entity in its view, whereas the West Bank is co-administered with the quasi-collaborationist Palestinian Authority to ensure that resistance activities are minimized, or when occurring, treated punitively by Palestinian security forces. Even peaceful forms of resistance face harsh punishment in the form of Palestinian enforcement , and since Israel came under more extremist leadership, the conditions of daily life have become so unpleasant and dangerous that some Palestinians are being forced to leave for neighboring countries, and accept the loss of their homeland, becoming refugees or exiles, harboring resentment and hatred resulting from their mistreatment in what was their homeland.

Until recently the balance of opinion in Israel was wary about any Israeli state that purported to include Gaza. This wariness was associated with Israeli concerns about an emergent “demographic bomb” accompanying any attempt to absorb an additional 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinians with high fertility rates into Greater Israel. As Israel has replaced its liberal democratic façade with a hardening apartheid regime the issue of democratic legitimacy has receded.

In the West Bank, Israel was nervous about the effect of civil society activism, and even scholarly work and cultural expressiveness, generating unfavorable international publicity as to the nature of such a prolonged occupation. As mentioned, the Israeli occupation is currently being challenged at the ICJ following a General Assembly request to legally assess the continued validity of Israel’s administrative role, given the passage of time, unlawful practices, and frequent recourse to severe forms of collective punishment. This UN effort to challenge Israel’s occupation comes after 57 years without the slightest sign of willingness to implement the withdrawal of Israeli forces envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and in the face of numerous flagrant continuing violations of international humanitarian law. Quite the contrary, as Israel seems more dug into a permanent domineering presence in the West Bank.

Even prior to the present Netanyahu government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued decrees in 2021 banning the activities of respected West Bank NGOs by classifying them “terrorist organizations.” Elected Palestinian leaders have been harassed and imprisoned despite Israel’s collaboration on security and administrative funding over the years with the Palestinian Authority, which is distrusted and disapproved by a growing number of Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Territories.

Falcone: What is the role of the West Bank in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy? 

Falk: The West Bank is an indispensable component of Biden’s persistent, although half-hearted advocacy of a two-state solution. This advocacy was always half-hearted and never a persuasive expression of genuine U.S. policy intentions. The two-state mantra seems more and more like a public relations posture to satisfy world public opinion as time passes without the slightest expectation that it will ever be realized except possibly in some nominal form. If it had been a genuine goal, Biden would have challenged Israeli moves of recent years, which became more pronounced since the Netanyahu coalition took over in 2023. Even if Biden is regard as lacking high intelligence, few regard him as so stupid that he remains oblivious to Israel’s quest for a Greater Israel.

 It was an open secret that this extremist coalition was committed to the unilateral completion of the Zionist Project by establishing Greater Israel in the shortest possible time even if it required brute force and massive ethnic cleansing to get the job done. Extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank would have the consequence of making even formalistic adherence to two-state advocacy a sign of geopolitical ignorance, so out of touch with the geographic contours of Palestinian statehood as to be in the category of a bad joke.

A viable Palestinian state presupposes full sovereign rights over the West Bank, which must include territorial governance and the substantial dismantlement of the settlements. Neither seems likely to happen if Zionist ideology continues to shape the policy of the Israeli state. It would be awkward for Biden to be asked what kind of Palestinian state does the U.S. favor. He likely would be inclined to answer evasively by saying that “it is up to the parties.” But if he was forthright, it would probably look like a permanently demilitarized Palestinian state with settlements governed according to Israeli law, exempted from territorial regulation, and traveling on roads for Jews only to and from Israel proper. Such a Palestinian state might could possibly the formal requirements of statehood, but it would be a nonstarter for many Palestinians, who continue to insist on their inalienable right of self-determination. The long Palestinian ordeal, stretching over the course of more than a century, would not be ended by the willingness of Israel to allow the formation of a puppet state. After its complicity in the Gaza genocide, the US, as well as any other NATO and G7 should be ruled out of any future part in a genuine peace diplomacy. It is a dangerous sign that the US geopolitical weight is still great enough to allow it to put forward a post-Gaza peace initiative that even Israel is willing to endorse, and so is Hamas. The days of American leadership in global diplomacy should have ended during its months of being a facilitator of the crudest and most transparent genocide of all history, transmitted by images and on site commentary in real time to the peoples of the world.

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A Judicial Web of Confusion: the ICJ, ICC, and Civil Society or Peoples Tribunals (5/24/24)

4 Jun

An intriguing sideshow during the seven months of savage genocidal violence against the entrapped Palestinian population of an estimated 2.3 million has been the attention given to international law and to international procedures available for its interpretation and enforcement. To begin with, many concerned persons wonder about why there are two distinct tribunals: the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Beyond this, for many never exposed to a sophisticated explanation of the process by which international law is judicially implemented the distinction between these two tribunals, both located in The Hague, is far from transparent. This short essay is a simplified introduction to the ICJ and ICC, both indispensable judicial resources of a functionally effective and equitable international legal order. Their positive contributions to law and justice are diminished to the extent that such institutions are subject to geopolitical manipulation.[1] To acquire legitimacy and respect such institutions must operate in an atmosphere of judicial independence. The record to date is mixed and difficult to assess.

At the same time, the pronouncements of these institutions can have major symbolic influence even if their rulings are ignored or violatied. The experience of the ICJ in relation to Israel’s defiance of its Interim Orders in the case of South Africa v. Israel is suggestive, adding a further element of legitimacy to civil society activism in opposition to Israel’s continuation of  the Gaza genocide.

ICJ

All states that are members of the UN are automatically parties to the legal instrument framing the activity of the ICJ known as the ‘ICJ Statute.’ The relationship between the UN and the ICJ is set forth in Chapter XIV of the Charter, Articles 92-96. This Statute frames in technical detail the role, procedure, and scope of concerns of the ICJ. The main function of ICJ is to decide legal disputes between sovereign states as an integral aspect of the UN Charter’s encouragement of ‘the pacific settlement of disputes’ conceived as a principal instrument of war prevention (UN Charter, Articles 2(3), 33-38). The underlying justification for the ICJ is to provide members of the UN with a politically independent and professionally distinguished panel of judges with strong credentials in international law to pronounce upon its relevance and development to the resolution of disputes brought before it. Such a judicial mechanism offers states an alternative to war and political stalemate. This judicial remedy is only available if both sides agree to resolve an international dispute by recourse to the ICJ and the Court decides that the dispute is of a legal character rather than being a political or moral dispute.   

Israel recently contended that there was no legal dispute with South Africa about the interpretation of the Genocide Convention, but the ICJ disagreed by a near unanimous vote of its seventeen judges. The ICJ ruled that a legal dispute between South Africa and Israel existed as to the application of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Article IX authorizes any party to the Convention to submit a complaint relating to a legal dispute to the ICJ for resolution. The ICJ has no jurisdiction with respect to individuals or criminality, its legal authority to adjudicate being limited to states. It also lacks authority to act with respect to political disputes. This sometimes raises troublesome questions as to the distinction between law and politics.

The ICJ as an institution within the UN orbit has no enforcement capabilities of its own. Its legal judgments are mere declarations of law unless the losing State party voluntarily complies, or the Security Council possesses the political will to enforce an ICJ decision that is not being complied with by the losing party. This means that the Security Council must have support from its membership, including the affirmative vote or abstention of all five of its Permanent Members that possess a right of veto. The General Assembly possesses the authority to recommend compliance with decisions of the ICJ or other measures designed to overcome non-compliance but has no coercive authority of its own by which to implement ICJ decisions. Yet, as mentioned, civil society activism if mobilized can impose punitive responses to high profile instances of non-compliance, as here

The ICJ has certain distinctive features several of which are worth briefly mentioning:

            –there are fifteen judges elected for nine years terms, no two of which can come from the same country, and each is expected to have strong experiential credentials as a jurist.  If a party to a legal action at the ICJ is from a country not represented by one of the fifteen elected judges then it is entitled to appoint an ad hoc judge for this case. As neither Israel nor South Africa were so represented, each exercised this right to select an ad hoc judge, and thus the panel of judges in the genocide case numbered seventeen.

–over the course of its history the ICJ has earned a reputation of judicial independence and professionalism but has been criticized for excessive formalism and cumbersome procedures, centering on the lengthy intervals of years between the date of submission and that of judgment. The ICJ has never before been so deeply engaged with an ongoing high profile legal dispute, and so far, has received widespread praise for its measured and legally well-reasoned treatment of South Africa’s effort to obtain a ruling that will legally repudiate and put an end to Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7 by concluding that Israel is indeed guilty of perpetrating the crime of genocide. Israel has already been ordered by the ICJ to take provisional measures in light of the humanitarian emergency imperiling Palestinian lives in numerous ways, while awaiting the decision on the merits of the allegation of genocide that will not be forthcoming for several years or long after the probable end of violence in Gaza;  

            –the judges are elected by the members of the General Assembly and Security Council, but a negative vote by one of the P5 is treated as a normal vote, and doesn’t count as a veto;

            –in response to formal requests from the distinct organs and specialized agencies that make up the UN System, including its specialized agencies, the ICJ also has a parallel authority and duty to render what are called in its Statute ‘Advisory Opinions.’ These are issued in response to formal requests, but only from organs and specialized agencies of the UN. As the language implies, the legal findings of advisory opinions are not binding, and there is no expectation that where the issues are controversial, the rulings will change behavior of the government(s) whose policies and practices are incidentally found to be unlawful by the ICJ in this advisory role, although remembering that the ICJ does not directly use an advisory opinion to assess the legality of the behavior of sovereign states. Nevertheless, the legal assessments of the judges rendering Advisory Opinions may exert a considerable educational and political influence in relation to the future development of international law. Diminishing the authority of advisory opinions is one example of how the UN balances sovereign rights of its members against the supposedly overriding authority of international law;

            –states have an option of signing up for compulsory jurisdiction, which means that if an adversary state is mutually so bound, it can invoke a legal obligation to resolve an international legal dispute by submitting it to the ICJ. In some instances, as in the Genocide Convention, the duty to have legal disputes adjudicated if a party to the treaty formally requests is written into the treaty itself;

            –the ICJ has rendered some unpopular and dubious decisions in the course of its history, as in the so-called Southwest Africa Cases back in 1966 whereby the outcome was upheld by a close vote. It upheld South Africa’s legal right to govern as the mandatory authority in South West Africa (now Namibia) by relying on the same kind of apartheid regime it applied to its own domestic racial divide.[2] Again, the secondary effects of an ICJ decision can be significant even if contrary to its legal reasoning. The anger among government of the Global South at the UN resulting from an ICJ decision that favored apartheid South Africa, led the General Assembly abruptly to terminate South Africa’s mandate, facilitating the achievement of sovereign statehood for South West Africa;

            –the contributions of the ICJ to the development of international law through its well-analyzed and researched opinions, including dissents and separate opinions, has been at least as important as its assigned priority of resolving international legal disputes. It has been given very few opportunities during its almost 80 years of existence to render judgment on legal disputes between geopolitical rivals..

ICC  

The ICC is still quite a young institution that did not come into existence until 2002, or 57 years after the UN was established. It came about as a projectthat gained political traction by creating a collaborative coalition of governments from the Global South and many civil society actors, or NGOs. To become a member of the ICC it is necessary to become a party to the Rome Statute, a stand-alone international treaty, that provides the technical framework for the operations of the tribunal. Unlike the ICJ, the ICC operates without any formal relationship to the UN.

Such a procedure requires states to submit the Rome Statute as an international treaty to diverse national constitutional procedures that involve typically signature by a representative of the executive branch of government followed by legislative approval, sometimes requiring  a super-majority. As of 2023, 124 countries have become ICC members, including all of the European states that have supported Israel’s claim to act in defense of its security, but to a lesser degree than the US.

Unlike the ICJ, the ICC has only jurisdiction over individuals who are physically subject to its authority. Members of the ICC are obligated to cooperate with its formal orders, including the arrest of individuals accused of international crimes after a lengthy investigation of the evidence of criminality has been obtained and evaluated. A weakness of the ICC is that the most important geopolitical actors, the US, China, and Russia chose not to join for pragmatic and ideological reasons, challenging the basic notion that international criminal law took precedence over national sovereignty and its legal institutions.

A controversial aspect of the Rome Statute is its grant of authority to the ICC to prosecute properly accused individuals who allegedly committed crimes on the territory of member states but were themselves nationals of non-member states. The Global West, especially the US and Israel have made this issue into a challenge in current circumstances to the effectiveness and legitimacy of ICC operations. After the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 the US and European members pushed hard for the arrest of Putin and others, while in the context of Israel’s genocide, these same governments were outraged when the Senior Prosecutor of the ICC recommended the issuance of arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders. At this point, there is no finality as the recommendation awaits action by a panel of three ICC judges who must decide to approve or reject. In any event, there is no prospect of implementing ICC arrest warrant against Israel as only member states are obliged to give effect to such warrants should they be issued.  

Nevertheless, even at this preliminary stage, these recommendations pertaining to arrest warrants has some adverse implications for the individuals targeted and the country of their affiliation. The indicted individuals might hesitate before traveling to countries, such as the UK and France, which are ICC members, and obligated to carry out arrests, especially if they have incorporated universal jurisdiction legislation as part of their law. It is bears on how the political actors are perceived in civil society, tilting the scales of legitimacy. This could have reputational implications for both the countries involved and for the reputation of the ICC, causing, as here, an angry Israeli backlash against all forms of internationalism.

It should be observed that in the past, the ICC has been criticized for its focus on the alleged criminal wrongdoing of political leaders in countries of the Global South, especially those from Sub Saharan Africa. When the ICC earlier attempted to investigate evidence of crimes by Israel in Occupied Palestine and those of the US in Afghanistan there was a furious reaction in Washington including the formal adoption of sanctions against ICC officials, including the ICC. The failure to move forward, despite the abundant evidence, created an impression that the ICC was a weak institution not capable of consistent professionalism or of fulfilling the expectations contained in the Rome Statute. Again, in relation to the Gaza genocide there have been calls for ‘sanctions’ against the Prosecutor and other officials of the ICC should the recommended issuance of the arrest warrants or other actions against Israelis take place.

The future of the ICC, and indeed the struggle to extend criminal accountability to the strongest political actors will be seriously affected by the outcome in Gaza, and by whether the ICC responds to current geopolitical pressures in ways that improve its reputation for judicial independence. Ever since the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials international criminal law has been seriously compromised in war/peace contexts by its failures to treat equals equally. The damning fact remains that these World War II prosecutions only addressed the crimes of the losers while excluding from consideration the crimes of the winners. Such a double standard has tainted all efforts since 1945 to strengthen generally legal accountability for international crimes. It raises the question as to whether ‘the primacy of geopolitics’ within the UN and elsewhere in managing global security is subject to challenge. The planned summit scheduled for September 22-23 on the future of the UN [Summit for the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow] should cast light on this fundamental question, but may well not touch a  topic that is so sensitive and bound to give rise to inter-governmental friction.

Peoples’ Tribunals

Ever since the Russell Tribunal of 1966-67 organized as a project of civil society activism in the middle of the Vietnam War, the ad hoc organization of such tribunals have created a non-state mode of instituting a judicial approach in situations where controversial international conflicts were not being addressed in a manner that calmed public concerns. Such tribunals can alter public discourse by media impacts and through documentation of allegations, as articulated by individuals with

reputations as public intellectuals and persons of conscience. Unlike the ICJ or ICC, the emphasis is put upon morality and politics.

It is also possible for civil society representatives to file briefs or make suggestions to the ICJ and ICC in a variety of ways. A particularly interesting initiative has been taken by the Geneva International Peace Research Institute submitting a long scholarly, prudently phrased statement to the ICC Prosecutor advancing an argument for why a formal investigation should be undertaken of the complicity crimes relating to the Gaza Genocide allegedly committed by Ursula von der Leyen in her role as  President of the European Commission.

This interplay between civil society activism and the working of the formal statist procedures deserves further investigation and commentary..   

[1] A clear case of geopolitical interference has been clearly present with respect to the role of the U agency entrusted with the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention in relation to the Douma Incident in 2018.

[2] The vote in the ICJ was 7-7, which according to its rules, meant that the President of the Court, who supported the South African legal position has a second ‘casting vote’ that broke the tie.

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