[Prefatory Note: The post below is a modified version of an opinion piece published in CounterPunch on November 24, 2023. The ‘pause’ or ‘truce’ as it frequently called, in Western media is detached from the genocide that preceded and closely linked to the Hamas Attack of October 7th, which is characterized as ‘terrorism’ whereas Israeli genocidal violence is treated as Israel defending itself or less approvingly as an excessive and disproportionate recourse to violence that seemed to focus its fury on target inflicting massive casualties on Palestinian civilians. Sustained warfare almost inevitably produces suffering for the innocent, often minimized as ‘collateral damage,’ but the Israeli campaign has seemed to aim at maximize acute suffering of the whole of civilian Gaza. If this is not ‘terrorism,’ public language serves as a tool to validate the priorities of the powerful while casting the actions of its adversary as pure evil, distorting expectations about a reasonable outcome.]
The ‘humanitarian pause’ started on November 24 after elaborate negotiations between adversaries who must interact despite an atmosphere of intense hostility and bitter resentment. The pause now often referred to as a ‘truce’ is supposed to last for four days, but is thought likely to be extended if Hamas can be induced to release additional hostages. Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and leaders of Israel’s unity government repeatedly pledge to renew their ‘war’ when the pause ends, and resume pursuing its earlier objectives in Gaza until all are achieved.
We in the public, are not told very clearly about the attitude of Hamas toward the pause but we can imagine that any relief from Israel’s devastating 24/7 attacks brings welcome relief, yet is accompanied by a sense a continuing resolve on the part of the Hamas leadership to resist Israel’s oppressive occupation of Gaza, and its preferred outcome that seems to include substantial ethnic cleansing in the form of permanent forced evacuation of more than half of the 2.3 million Palestinians from northern Gaza leaving what remains of the Palestinian in the previously overcrowded southern Gaza to be utterly dependent on UN relief efforts for the necessities of life including housing and daily needs. If funding becomes available on more that a subsistence level of ‘bare existence’ it will undoubted come, not from Israel, but from those ‘humanitarian’ governments, guilt-ridden by their positive entanglement with Israel’s genocidal onslaught, especially if it resumes in a few days.
We know something about ‘the fog of war,’ the hidden motivations and the confused perceptions, the devious methods and justifications, and the subtle unacknowledged change of goals, but most of us trust the specious clarity of mainstream media and ‘never-wrong’ leaders despite the ‘discourse fog,’ that is, the partisan use of language and ‘facts’ by opinion-maker twist ‘the hearts and minds’ of viewers and readers. Even when, as during this period since October 7th, the events and images are so rending and so extreme if regarded from a humane angle, there is a deliberate, unacknowledged, perhaps automatic tendency, to create perceptions of ethical symmetry between antagonists and indulge ‘war is hell’ reactions in which both sides are locked in a death dance.
In all respects, going back to before the establishment of Israel as a state and member of the United Nations in 1948, Israel has worked hard to neutralize criticism based on law and morality, by itself occupying the high moral ground based on empathy for the victimization of Jews, on the myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land,’ on the romanticizing of the kibbutzim and ‘making the desert bloom,’ on the Orientalist reductive distortions of ‘the dirty Arab’ or the Arab mind that only can be tamed to behave properly by ‘pressure,’ a coded word that acts as a synonym for genocide in the context of the Israel Operation of Iron Swords (Biden implicitly chooses these tropes and partial truths to cast Hamas into a realm of outer darkness while staying mum about moral and legal accountability on the Israeli side), on the master premise of modernist world order that deifies the state and demonizes its victimized adversaries that is in denial about the minor premise of rights of resistance that rose up to defeat the superior military forces at the disposal of the imperial Global West. The Palestinian ordeal epitomizes the confluence of these and other adverse features of political life during the last hundred years to produce an appalling human catastrophe made worse because it has unfolded so transparently and exposed the pathetic weakness of moral scruples if clashing with strategic interests of onlooking political leaders.
The rhetoric of ‘humanitarian pause’ is illustrative of a media disinformation campaign designed to affirm certain attitudes and stigmatize others. For instance, the Israeli pledge to resume the war after this brief interlude of relative calm rarely includes critical comments on the sinister nature of this commitment to reengage Hamas by recourse to genocidal warfare victimizing the entire population of Gaza. In contrast, when released hostages report humane treatment by their captors this is either belittled or altogether ignored, whereas if released Palestinian prisoners were to make analogous comments about how they enjoyed Israeli prisons their words would be highlighted. We can only imagine the harsh response of Western media outlets to Russia’s participation in a comparable pause in the Ukraine War, dismissing any humanitarian pretensions by Moscow as cynical state propaganda, and insisting with righteous indignation that the pause be transformed into a ceasefire unless the war was going well for the Ukrainians. A critical media would feast over the double standards and moral hypocrisy, but that presupposes what doesn’t any longer exist, an independent media on global issues.
Unless properly addressed the whole provenance of ‘humanitarian pause’ is misunderstood. Remember that Israel’s political leaders went ahead with such an alternative only when it was made clear that Israel had no intention of converting the pause into a longer-range ceasefire, to be followed by ‘day after’ negotiations as to the viability of continuing occupation and a new agreement as to governance arrangements for Gaza and the role to be played by Hamas. Rather than sustaining their statist cult by dismissing Hamas as ‘terrorists’ the security of Israel would almost certainly be dramatically enhanced by treating Hamas as a legitimate political entity, which although guilty of violations of international law, is far less guilty than Israel if an objective comparative evaluation is made, and some account is taken of Hamas’ long-term ceasefire diplomacy summarily rejected by Israel, although a preferable security alternative than the decades of cross-border violent eruptions that kill, deepen enmity, and solve nothing.
In retrospect, I understand better the rationale behind this apparently genuine Hamas efforts, which I received first-hand contact with as a result of my extended conversations with Hamas leaders living in Doha and Cairo while I was UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories a decade ago. Israel could not take seriously what appeared to be beneficial from its security perspective of such Hamas initiatives or the 2002 Arab Peace Proposal issued in Mecca. Both Hamas and the Arab proposal conditioned peace on withdrawal from the Occupied Territory of the West Bank, which has long been in the gun sights of the settler wing of the Zionist Project, and consistently privileged over Israeli security by its leaders, long before Netanyahu’s Coalition Government made this unmistakably clear when it took over in January of 2023. Israel never convincingly accepted the internationally presumed notion that a Palestinian state would include the West Bank and have its capital in East Jerusalem, despite gesturing at various times in such a direction, but always framed in a manner that was so one-sided as to ensure Palestinian rejection, although the Palestinian leadership did their cause no good by failing to put forward a counter-offer or make a stronger effort to achieve unity as between the PLO and Hamas so long as the liberation struggle was not resolved.
It is this unwillingness to take account of the master/slave structure of a prolonged, abusive occupation that renders plausibility to the both sides’ narratives embodying the delusion that Israel and Occupied Palestine are formally and existentially equal as profoundly misleading. Such narratives equate, or invert, the Hamas attack with the Israeli genocidal onslaught that followed, regarding the former as ‘barbaric’ while the latter is generally sympathetically or at least neutrally described as Israel’s reasonable and necessary entitlement to defend itself. Variations of such themes are integral to the apologetics of former US mediating officials such as Dennis Roth or liberal Zionist casuists such as Thomas Friedman.
A final observation relates to the inappropriateness of the word ‘humanitarian’ if the object is to understand and express the motivations of Israel. Of course, Israel seeks both security for its Jewish citizens, including the settlers, but when forced to choose between security and territory it has consistently opted to pay the costs associated with fulfilling the territorial goals of the Zionist Project. The current unity government of Israel only accepted the pleas of the hostage families and succumbed to pressures from Washington after its several security services and military commanders gave reassurances that Hamas could not take tactical advantage of the pause, and that the Israel campaign could resume within the pre-pause unrestrained parameters after it was over. In other words, the pause was politically motivated as a way of allowing Israel to seem responsive to domestic and external humanitarian pressures without the slightest show of responsiveness to the governments throughout the Global South that called for a ceasefire to halt genocide and by the enraged protesters in city streets in all parts of the world. The ‘humanitarian pause’ as the deal has been presented is totally an initiative rooted in the Global West, admittedly with support from a scattering of autocratic governments elsewhere. We do not know why Hamas went along with such a plan, but a safe conjecture is that it sought some days of relief from Israel’s tactics of devastation and may have wanted to reduce its responsibilities of caring for children and injured or elderly hostages under such dangerous circumstances.
As the ‘humanitarian pause’ goes into effect, it is bound to create surprises and impart a greater understanding of the ‘fog of humanitarianism.’ What it should not do is to induce complacency among those who honor the fundamental commitment of the Genocide Convention to do all in their power to prevent the onset or continuation of the crime of crimes and to take steps to punish its most prominent perpetrators.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Saudi Arabia, Royal Impunity, and the Quicksand of Special Relationships
20 Oct(Prefatory Note: This post is a substantially revised version of an opinion piece published online by Middle East Eye on October 6, 2015; it challenges the geopolitics of impunity from both principled and pragmatic perspectives, and also casts doubts on ‘special relationships’ that the United States has established in the Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Finally, an effort is made to suggest that there is an alternative based essentially on the practical wisdom in the 21st century of upholding and strengthening the global rule of law.)
Saudi Arabia enjoys a spectacular level of impunity from international accountability. This is not only because it a powerful monarchy or has the world’s richest and largest royal family with influence spread far and wide. And it is not even just about oil, although having a quarter of the world’s pre-fracking energy reserves still engenders utmost deference from those many modern economies that will depend on Gulf oil and gas for as long as this precious black stuff lasts. The Saudi comfort zone is also sustained by its special relationship with the United States that provides geopolitical backing of great benefit.
This refusal to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for upholding law and morality raised mainstream eyebrows that have usually looked the other way when it came to the Saudi record on human rights. Recently electing Saudi Arabia to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), partly due to a secret vote swap with the UK, seemed to cross a hereto invisible line. And if that was not enough of an affront to cosmetic morality in the sphere of human rights, the Saudi UN ambassador has been recently selected to chair the influential HRC ‘ consultative panel that recommends to the President of the Council a short-list of whom shall be appointed as Special Rapporteurs, including on such issues as right to women, freedom of expression, and religious freedom.
This news is coupled with confirmation that Saudi Arabia has inflicted more beheadings than ISIS this year, over 2 a day, and has ordered Ali Mohammed al-Nimr to be executed by crucifixion for taking part in an anti-monarchy demonstration when he was 17. In a second representative case, the popular blogger, Raif Badawi, was sentenced to a long prison term and 1000 lashes in public for criticizing the monarchy. This behavior resembles the barbarism of ISIS more than it exhibits qualifications to occupy senior UN positions dealing with human rights.
Additionally, Riyadh like Damascus, seems guilty of severe war crimes due to its repeated and indiscriminate targeting of civilians during its dubious Yemen intervention. The worst incident of late was an air strike targeting a wedding party on September 29th, killing 131 civilians, including many women and children, but the overall pattern of the Saudi military onslaught has been oblivious to the constraints of international humanitarian law as embodied in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
The Saudi mismatch between stature and behavior cannot be considered, as it appears to be, a grotesque anomaly in the global normative order. Instead, it fits neatly into a coherent geopolitical pattern. Ever since World War II Saudi Arabia has been an indispensable strategic asset for the West. Oil is the core explanation of this affinity, but it is far from the whole story. Earlier Saudi anti-Communism was important, a kind of health insurance policy for the West that the government would not lured into the Soviet orbit or adopt a non-aligned position in the manner of Nasser’s Egypt, which would have dangerously undermined energy security for Western Europe.
In recent years, converging patterns of extreme hostility toward Iran that Saudi Arabia shares with Israel has delighted Washington planners who had long been challenged by the difficulty of juggling unconditional support for Israel with an almost absolute dependence of the West on keeping Gulf oil flowing at affordable prices. This potential vulnerability was vividly revealed in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle East War when Saudi Arabia expressed the dissatisfaction of the Arab world with Western pro-Israel positioning by persuading OPEC to impose an oil embargo that caused a global panic attack. This crisis unfolded on two levels– a high road revealing Western vulnerability to Middle Eastern oil and a low road of severe consumer discontent in reaction to long gas lines and higher prices at the pump attributable to the embargo.
It was then that war hawks in the West murmured aloud about coercively ending the embargo by landing paratroopers on Saudi oil fields. Henry Kissinger, never troubled by war scenarios, speculated that such an intervention might be ‘necessary’ for the economic security of the West. The Saudi rulers heard this ‘never again’ pledge from the custodians of world order, and have since been careful not to step on Western toes.
Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that NGO concerns about the dreadful human rights landscape in Saudi Arabia falls on deaf ears. President Obama who never tires of telling the world that the national character of America requires it to live accord with its values, centering on human rights and democracy, holds his otherwise active tongue when it comes to Saudi Arabia. He is busy reassuring the new Saudi king that the US remains as committed as ever to this second ‘special relationship’ in the Middle East, the first being, of course, with Israel.
If we look beneath the word ‘special,’ which conveys the added importance attached of the relationship, it seems to imply unconditional support, including a refusal to voice criticism in public. US geopolitical backing confers impunity, shielding a beneficiary from any pushback by the international community at the UN or elsewhere. There are other perks that come with this status additional to impunity. Perhaps none more notable than the embarrassment associated with hustling Saudi notables out of the United States the day after the 9/11 attacks. Remember that 15 of the 19 plane hijackers were Saudi nationals, and the US Government still refuses to release 28 pages of detailed evidence on alleged Saudi connections with Al Qaeda gathered by the 9/11 investigative commission.
Surely if Iran had remotely comparable linkages to those notorious events it would likely have produced a casus belli; recall that the justification for attacking Iraq in 2003 was partially based on flimsy fictitious allegations of Baghdad’s 9/11 complicity.
The Saudi special relationship (unlike that with Israel) is more mutually beneficial. Because of the enormous revenues earned by selling 10 million barrels of oil a day for decades, Saudi unwavering support for the dollar as the currency of account has been of crucial help to the American ambition to dominate the global economy. Beyond this, the Saudis after pushing the world price of oil up by as much as 400% in the 1970s quickly healed the wounds by a massive recycling of so-called petrodollars through investments in Europe and North America, and especially appreciated, have been the Saudi purchase of many billions of dollars worth of arms over the years. The United States did its part to uphold the relationship, especially by responding to the 1990 Iraqi attack on Kuwait that also menaced Saudi Arabia. By deploying 400,000 troops in Saudi Arabia and leading the successful effort to compel Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, American reliability as Saudis protective big brother was convincingly upheld. Of course, in this interest there was a genuine convergence of interests. Western policy as shaped by American foreign policy accorded an absolute priority to keeping Gulf oil in friendly hands.
Despite the major strategic benefits to both sides, the most remarkable aspect of this special relationship is its survival in the face of the Saudi role in its massive worldwide funding of Islamic anti-Western militancy or jihadism. Saudi promotion of religious education with a Wahhabist slant is widely believed to be largely responsible for the rise and spread of jihadism, and the resultant turmoil.
I would have thought that the West, especially after 9/11 would insist that Saudi Arabia stop supporting Wahhabist style extremism abroad, even if it overlooked denials of human rights at home due to the imposition of harsh controls upon freedom of expression, of association, women’s rights, cruel and unusual punishments. More damaging in its political consequences than being the shield of Saudi impunity is the willingness of the US to go along with the anti-Iranian sectarian line that the Saudi leadership relies upon to justify such controversial moves as direct interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, as well as the provision of weapons and money to anti-Assad forces in Syria.
Saudi opportunism became evident when the kingdom threw its diplomatic support and a large bundle of cash to an anti-Sunni coup in Egypt against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Saudi’s true enemies are determined by the threat posed to the stability of the monarchy, and not by their sectarian identity. In this sense Iran is an enemy because it is a regional rival that threatens to impinge upon the role and influence of Saudi Arabia, and not because of its adherence to a Shia variety of Islam. Similarly the Muslim Brotherhood, despite being of Sunni persuasion, was perceived as as a threat to royal absolutism by its democratizing challenge directed at the Mubarak autocracy. Sectarian identity is distinctly secondary, especially for the Saudi monarchy that is responsible for the conduct of foreign policy. At home, the stability of royal governance is sustained by allowing a free rein to the Wahhabi religious leadership that subject the Saudi people to its severe sectarian constraints.
Saudi impunity makes us appreciate the value of normal relationships among sovereign states. These do not entail exemptions from accountability in relation to international crimes and human rights violations. These special relationships have become politically costly in this century, especially if used to protect rogue states from international scrutiny. Accountability based on the rule of law is far better for stability, security, and sustainable peace than impunity. It has become increasingly awkward for US Government to validate, in part, its global role by championing human rights while refusing to blink when it comes to the most minimum expectations of accountability for Saudi Arabia or Israel.
I would go further, and argue that such special relationships, although expressions of the primacy of geopolitics (as over against the implementation of a global rule of law), do not serve on balance to uphold national interests in the course of abandoning national values. Contrary to the precepts of political realism, in the Middle East these two special relationships unthinkingly bind the United States and its European allies to a failing foreign policy that has occasioned great suffering for many of the peoples of the region. The migration crisis that is one direct effect of these unfortunate policies, especially military intervention, is finally leading observers to connect some dots, and recognize that what is done in the Middle East has menacing reverberations for Europe. As well, it further damages the reputation of the United States as a principled leader in a global setting that is serving the global public good as well as promoting its national policy priorities. Perhaps, that reputation is tarnished beyond recovery at this point in any event, making repetitional considerations almost irrelevant.
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Tags: accountability, Human rights, Human Rights Council, international law, jihadism, Saudi Arabia, sectarianism, Wahabbism