Tag Archives: apartheid

WHAT DRIVES ISRAEL—10/29/24

29 Oct

Prefatory Note This post is a much modified, updated version of my responses to questions posed Murat Sofuoglu, a Turkish journalist associated with TRT World. The dehistoricizing and decontextualization of the Hamas attack of October 7 was spread around the world by the most influential global media platforms and political leaders of the liberal democracies, and led to widespread sympathy for Israel and some months of tolerance of their response despite its legally and ethically unacceptable character. As such the Israeli response was initially sanitized by regarding  Palestinian grievances in Gaza as irrelevent, and also by uncritically accepting Israeli  hasbara that its response to the Hamas attack was solely motivated by security and counter-terrorist considerations, and thus disconnected from the Greater Israel priority and preoccupations of the Netanyahu coalition that came to power at the start of 2023 or more than nine months before the attack.]  


1. Has the Israeli model to secure Jews a homeland in Palestine failed?

I think it is misleading to refer to the Zionist Project in the singular and by reference to ‘a homeland’ as originally pledged in the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917. The minimum pre-1948 goal of world Zionism was to create a Jewish supremist state in Israel with an unlimited right of returns for Jews from anywhere in the world, and the denial of such an equivalent right to the Palestinians who were the native majority population. The Nakba that accompanied the 1948 War involved the forced expulsion from Palestine and permanent refugee/exile status for of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of the portion of Palestine set aside for Israel by the partition resolution of 29 November 1947 UN GA Res. 181. Israeli expulsion politics exhibited the Zionist intention in the fog of war was to ensure a long-term Jewish majority settler population that would enable Israel to claim credibly in its early years to be both Jewish and democratic, the latter proving to become

overwhelmed by the apartheid regime that was convincingly delimited as such over the course of the last decade. The occupation was fully documented as a type of apartheid violating the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This assessment was validated by comprehensive reports, filled with data, prepared by ESCWA, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGO, B’Tselem.

Prefiguring the response of the governments of most liberal democracies was the failure to express any adverse reactions to Israeli apartheid despite their earlier support for the global anti-apartheid movement that exerted so much pressure on the South African government that it pleasantly surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and proceeding rapidly to become a constitutional democracy incorporating legal commitments to racial equality. Why was there no negative international response to Israeli apartheid?  At the very least the apartheid assessments should have led to a demand that Israel withdraw from Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Even earlier, the most that the US Government could manage to say about the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements that ‘it was unhelpful.’  At first, Western governments were reluctant to be even mildly critical of Israel because of their own failure to do more by way of opposition to the Holocaust, inducing a debilitating sense of guilt made more potent by Israel’s domination of the public discourse subtly facilitated by a racist dehumaniization of the Palestinian other as an Orientalized inferior people when compared to the rapid modernizing prevailing temperament in the new Jewish state.

The UN contributed to the Palestinian tragedy by initially proposing partition of a previously colonized national entity without bothering to consult the Arab majority population residing in Palestine that would have certainly been opposed to lending legitimacy to such a fracturing of their homeland. But the Palestinians were never given a chance to vote in a referendum on partition, which itself was an ahistorical imposition of UK colonial interest and methods of control by a logic of ‘divide and rule.’

This post-1945 tragedy was compounded and prefigured the future ordeals of the Palestinian people by the failure to at least secure the promised Palestinian state of equal status to Israel before legitimating Israel’s claims to statehood by diplomatic recognition and admission to the UN as a member sovereign state. The 1967 War aggravated Palestinian grievances by. establishing Israeli de facto control by way of conquest over the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, again given unregulated de facto control by way of the doctrine of Belligerent Occupation, supposedly within a temporary and regulative international law framework set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention and the First Additional Protocol. Israel massively violated its terms of occupation in numerous fundamental ways from Day One. Perhaps, the most flagrant early expression of Israeli territorial unilateralism was its incorporation of East Jerusalem into sovereign Israel as ‘its eternal capital.’ This symbolic and substantive land-grabbing that included Islamic sacred sites has never to this day been accepted by the majority of states, and the Israeli move to establish Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was declared ‘null and void’ in an 2017 Emergency Session General Assembly Resolution (ES-1019) supported by a super-majority of Member states but opposed and then ignored by the US and the main states of NATO [the vote was 129-9-35 (abstentions).

The developments between 1967 and 2024 consolidated Israeli territorial ambitions in occupied Palestine by way of the extensive unlawful settlement movement, a coercive apartheid occupation regime that subjugated Palestinians living under prolonged occupation that culminated in the genocidal and ecocidal assault on Gaza that killed many in real time and totally devastated Gaza as a livable habitat. The settler colonial assessment of Israel disposing the majority native population resembled the pattern of the breakaway British colonials (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) each of which, although New Zealand less so, implemented their colonial encroachments by genocidal tactics in response to resistance, and succeeded in establishing their flourishing and enduring state.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that Zionism, and since 1948, Israel itself pursued a two-track strategy: first, a public hasbara discourse that claimed moderation and pretended to seek a democratic polity and engage in a search for a political compromise on land rights, democracy, and human rights with the native population; secondly, a political strategy that opportunistically advanced by stages to realize the hard core Zionist Project of restoring Jewish exclusive control over the Biblically ‘promised land’ of Jewish tradition at a given time for what it could get by way of an expansionist vision with respect to Israel itself, neighboring countries, and regional geopolitics. Not only did the shadows cast by the Nazi Holocaust in the early years of Israel’s existence inhibit criticism of the settler colonial aspects of Israel’s approach to the indigenous non-Jewish residents of Palestine but Israel’s first political leader, David Ben Gurion a committed secularist, cynically declared ‘Let the Bible be our weapon,’ and in the process claimed a religious entitlement to all of historic Palestine as ‘the promised land’ of Jewish tradition, which has prevailed over the prime norm of colonial decline, that of the right of sef-determination.

After the 1967 War Israel became itself a partner in ‘colonialism after colonialism’ in the Middle East. There emerged a strategic relationship with the United States and Europe that embraced regional security, safeguarding oil and gas reserves for the West, and cooperating with respect to the containment of political Islam, especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). This US led geopolitical limitations imposed on regional autonomy were highlighted by the unprecedented US political commitment to ensure that Israel possessed a military capability to defeat any combination of regional adversaries. Such a willingness to indulge ‘Israeli exceptionalism’ with respect to regional security was  dramatized by looking away while Israel covertly, with European active complicity not only became the sole nuclear weapons state in the Middle East but assumed the role of guardian of non-proliferation when it came to Iran.  As Israel gained in strength and regional acceptance via the Abraham Accords reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency it seemed on a path that would end with a one-state solution under its sole and uncontested dominion.

As Israel gained in political acceptance and self-confidence it became less shy about revealing its nationalist agenda. The 2018 Basic Law, with a quasi-constitutional status, was forthright in claiming Israel as a Jewish State, with the Jewish people exclusively entitled to exercise the right of self-determination (ignoring the rights and relevance of the 20% of its population that was non-Jewish, and Hebrew was confirmed as the only official language. Even extreme Israeli apologists seemed reluctant to any longer claim, what was never true, that “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East.” The net result as of late 2024 is that it is the Palestinians who have become unwelcome strangers in their own historic homeland. Israeli democracy, such as it has become, was clearly in practice and law ‘for Jews only.’ And again the Western patrons of Israel watched from the sidelines as Israel kept enlarging and disclosing its zero-sum vision of conflict resolution, and disregard of the US role as intermediary in the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict.  

2. What is Israel trying to achieve with its ongoing war campaign across the Middle East?

Again, we are challenged to deal with Israel’s mainly undisclosed intentions and what is disclosed is not trustworthy or a small part of the Israeli policy agenda motivating the enlargement of the combat zone. For greater insight we are forced to rely on conjecture to produce some kind of illuminating, yet plausible, interpretation. As with Gaza, Israel claims a right of self-defense. It seeks extra weight by insisting that its enemies are all sponsors or guilty of ‘terrorist’ violence’ and proxy engagements determined to undermine Israeli security, Even if we accept this line of argument Israel’s use of force in Lebanon is disproportional and indiscriminate, self-acknowledged and operationalized as an inflammatory application of the Dahiya Doctrine originally set forth in the Lebanon War of 1982. The Dahiya Doctrine was enunciated by a leading Israeli general, expressing the intention to retaliate disproportionately against security provocations threatening Israeli interests. The Gaza genocide can be viewed as a grotesque and maximal example of Dahiya thinking and practice, although specifically motivated by Israeli extraterritorial security priorities, ethnic cleansing, economic ambitions, regional paranoia, as well as its invariable dismissal of the genuine grievances and armed resistance of adversaries as invariably of a terrorist character.

In certain ethical respects the Dahiya Doctrine is an Israeli adaptation of the logic of deterrence that guided security policy of both US and USSR during Cold War. Its most salient feature was known as Mutual Assured Destruction  (or to critics as MAD). Israel’s adaptation consisted of substituting the threat of genocide for that of nuclear retaliation. The core idea of deterrence is a credibly threatened unacceptably disproportionate response to any fundamental threat to strategic interests or to homeland security of the nuclear antagonists and their close allies.

There is no mutuality in Israel’s approach to deterrence, which is a generalized warning to its regional adversaries of dire results if they dare to attack or provoke Israel. Any regional state purporting to balance Israel hegemonic nuclear capabilities is projected as such a threat, which presupposes a geopolitical right to maintain Israel’s regional nuclear supremacy.

3. Do you think with the current campaign, the Netanyahu government aims to resolve once and for all the Jewish question, fixing Israel’s place in the Middle East? 

It seems as though Israel has been expanding its combat objectives initially justified as retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack by adopting a proclaimed goal of exterminating Hamas. While pursuing this goal Israel engaged in such excessive and indiscriminate violence that its behavior was widely perceived as a transparent instance of genocide committed in real time and including a growing and increasingly activist minority in the civil societies of the Western countries, including many Jews, whose governments most ardently support Israel. Israel has suffered a near total loss of legitimacy as a normal state and is increasingly viewed as a pariah or rogue state to an extent exceeding the condemnation of even overtly racist and oppressive South Africa. This ended when the Pretoria government surprised the world by abandoning apartheid in the mid-1990s, apparently for pragmatic reasons associated with debilitating sanctions that limited South Africa’s participation in world society, including cultural and sporting boycotts that curtailed the freedoms of the ruling white minority.

Israel has handled this international hostility differently and more defiantly than South Africa, partly because it has had the benefit of strong geopolitical support from the governments of the Global West, especially the all-important US. Israel’s security is a matter of strategic importance to the West as a beachhead in the Middle East for the related purposes of ensuring access to oil and gas reserves of the region and containing the spread of political Islam. Thus, the increase of Israel’s war objectives to include Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Iran has also become a battleground in the Clash of Civilizations within the region and is a potent source of instability parallel to the incipient Second Cold War with China and Russia. Whether Israel, with Washington’s backing and probable participation will provoke war with Iran is one of the great uncertainties of this historical moment. Part of this uncertainty involves assessing the relevance of Netanyahu’s personal survival agenda and whether the Religious Right in the governing coalition will push these wider objectives to the point of regional war with dangerous geopolitical risks. An ethical imperative is also continues to be present– not to shift attention away from the ongoing acute human catastrophe entrapping the civilian population of Gaza in deliberately induced death threatening traumas of mass hunger and widespread disease.

What Israel does and refrains from doing in the next few weeks will have a major impact on the prospects for a peaceful future responsive to growing ecological challenges. This in turn may reflect the outcome of the US presidential elections, and how the new leadership handles this dangerous, fragile global situation that combines a prolonged humanitarian catastrophe, ethical and legal gross abuses of civilian innocence, and hazardous neglect of heightened risks of geopolitical encounters and ecological collapses.

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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?

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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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Probing the Depths: Roots of Unspeakable Crimes in Gaza–Criminality and Complicity

10 Jan

[Prefatory Note: the following interview with an Iranian journalist was completed on 1/9/24, during the week when South Africa puts forth its legal argument before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, seeking ‘provisional measures’ designed to stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Even if Israel refuses to comply should the World Court respond favorably to this emergency request as I expect it will, the decision will have an historic importance: drawing the West into the orbit of legal accountability by indirectly implementing its complicity with the Israeli attack, by an almost certain escalating effect on pro-Palestinian solidarity initiatives around the world, and by conferring on Israel the labels of ‘rogue state’ or ‘pariah state.’]

  1. At first, there’s a need to contextualize for our readers Israel’s urge to silence pro-Palestinian voices and the voices of the critics of Israel, both in the US and globally. As someone who has experienced it firsthand, can you please explain that urge?

Israel is very sensitive to international criticism, especially by critics associated with its base of support in the colonial settler and European colonial states, which together comprise the White Global West. It is also sensitive to pro-Palestine lawfare associated with international institutions, especially the UN, International Court of Jusstice (ICJ), International Criminal Court, and the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) because its legitimacy as sovereign state partly rests partly claim to be the only democratic state in the Middle East, a (mis)perception reinforced by US at the highest levels of governments pointing to ‘shared values’ that were at the core of ‘the special reliationship,’ overlooking the crimes against the indigenous majority Arab population of Palestine involving massive expulsion in 1948 and exploitative dominance since at least 1967 over the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza.

I was the target of Israeli smears and defamatory attacks during the period I served as Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Pallestine in the period of 2008-2014. The attacks involved slanderous accusations of antisemitism on my part, and also sharp criticism of the UN as biased due to its disproportionate attention given to alleged Israeli wrongdoing. The UN responded defensively doing whatever it could to distance itself from me, especially during the time that Ban Ki Moon was Secretary General. He explained my remaining as Special Rapporteur by reminding Israel and the world that I, as an unpaid appointee of the Human Rights Council, was not part of the UN civil service and hence beyond his disciplinary reach. This was a virtuall admission that the Israel defamatory criticism were justified. Attacking its critics became a policy tool used by Israel and its Zionist support structure in Global West countries with increasing frequency for two reasons: the weakness of Israel’s substantive position creating an incentive to shift the conversation from a focus on its severe violations of law and morality to the credibility of the critics a process that I have called ‘the politics of deflection’ in which the attention of the media is diverted to the messenger rather than the substantive message about Israel’s violations, and the related intimidation directed at activists and others who dare promote nonviolent solidarity initiatives such as BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). No comparable effort was made to stifle such criticism or activism of South Africa during the apartheid period even though the governments of the US and UK were strategically aligned with apartheid South Africa during the Cold War years. The presence of a pro-Israeli Zionist network that shields Israel from criticism by ‘weaponizing antisemitism’ in varying ways that cause imbalances in the media and infringements upon academic freedom within educational institutions of the West.

  • How can we explain Israel’s tight grip on public discourse on Israel-Palestine issue for so long? How could it accumulate so much power and influence within different states and international entities? If there is a financial aspect to it, how powerful is it?

This is a complex, fundamental question. Israel established its legitimacy as a new state shortly after World War II in the twilight of the European colonial order, imposing its sovereign claim on a resident majority Arab majority that identified as belonging to the nation of the Palestinian people. The Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was a dream of a small dedicated movement in late 19th century Europe that became a political project when the UK pledged its support in the Balfour Declaration (1917) for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, a purely colonial interference with the self-determination rights of people. The statehood of Israel became an attainable goal during the British mandate period in which the UK administered Palestine as an International Mandate on behalf of the League of Nations, and encouraged Jewish immigration, a process accelerated in response to the rise of fascism in Europe, climaxism of lethal antisemitism in the Holocaust that put to death as many as six millions Jews in Europe, and caused a sense of guilt on the part of Western liberal democracies for their meager efforts to oppose such genocidal behavior.

The British ended their mandate, partly in reaction to Zionist anti-British terrorism dumping on the newly formed UN the daunting challenge of finding a solution to the surging internal conflict in Palestine between settler Jews and indigenous Arabs. The UN relied on British experience with its divide and rule style of colonialism. It established a commission that made recommendations centering on a proposed partition of Palestine into two states with Jerusalem as both their common capital and an international city. The Zionist Movement accepted partition, the representatives of the Palestinian people rejected it. Against this background Israel was established in the aftermath of a war internal to Palestine between Jewish militia forces and the armed forces of neighboring Arab countries, ending with an agreed ‘green line’ that was treated as a provisional internal boundary between the two peoples that enlarged Israel beyond the UN partition territorial allocations, giving the Jewish state 78% of Palestinian territory rather than the 45% contained in the UN plan, and dividing Jerusalem between the two peoples, leaving the control of Palestinian side of the green line to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt.

Even with its military victory and Western diplomatic and economic support, Israel was founded in a context that contained challenges to its legitimacy as a state from its region and indeed from most of the Global South. From the outset Israel realized that its security and status in international life would be greatly helped if it could control the public discourse that shaped international public opinion. Its fragile security was highlighted by the fact that in its early years it was surrounded by hostile larger states that perceived the establishment of Israel in their midst as a territorial, racial, and religious intrusion, a colonialist solution of a European problem at the expense of the Islamic, Arab bloc of countries.

Israel’s success in discourse control was greatly aided by the extent of Jewish influence in the large media platforms of the West, especially in the US and UK, as facilitated by the wealth of Diaspora Jews mobilized after Hitler to support the establishment and development of a Jewish state as a place of secure sanctuary in the event of future outbreaks of lethal antisemitism. This propaganda tool was used in sophisticated ways to create great admiration for Israel as liberal democracy in the Western mold and a modernizing success in contrast to the supposedly backward, stagnant, impoverished Palestinian society. In contrast, Israel was portrayed as socially progressive, economically successful, and even managed to make ‘the desert bloom.’ At first, there were tensions in the West between support for Israel and maintaining reliable access to the huge oil and gas reserves of the region. Israel was able to resolve these tensions with its victory over its Arab adversaries in the 1967 War, as well as occupying the territories allocated to the Palestinians in 1948. And most symbolically important it unilaterally incorporating Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel, an initiative that to this day is not accepted by many governments. After 1967 Israel shifted its relationship to the US from that of strategic burden to strategic partner, and became a militarily significant actor throughout the region. Israel was allowed to acquire nuclear weapons in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty arrangements. After the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 Israel becaame even more valuable as the fall of the Shah meant the loss of the only other strategic ally of the West in a region strategically important for energy and control of major trade routes. 

At the same time as Israel’s apartheid regime engaged in dehumanizing modes of controlling Palestinian resistance and Israel became increasingly clear about its unwillingness to reach a political compromise achieved by bilateral negotiations, resulting in new assaults on its legitimacy became more widely questioned even in Western societies, but not by governments. This process was recently further intensified when the Netanyahu coalition government with Regligious Zionism party took over in January 2023, and immediately greenlighted settler violence on the West Bank, violated the sanctity of Muslim sacred sites (especially Al Aqsa Mosque), and displayed maps at the UN and elsewhere with only Israel present between ‘the river and the sea.’ Throughout this period Israel’s control of the discourse, reinforced by the Zionist well funded network in the Global West used its discourse dominance to demonize its critics. It was helped by the adoption of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Asssociation) definition of antisemitism, which treated any sharp criticism of Zionism or Israel, however justified by evidence and reasonable, as antisemitism. With possibly tragic irony such false branding seems to be producing real antisemitism in the world in its authentic form of hatred of Jews as an expression of hostility towards the behavior Zionism and Israel.

  • We hear or read a lot these days about the fact that Israel is an apartheid regime; what is apartheid, and how does Israel qualify as an apartheid state?

Most understandings of the nature of apartheid accept the definition set forth in Article II of the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which reads as follows:

Article II

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term “the crime of apartheid”, which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:

(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person:

(i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups;

(ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;

(iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;

(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

(e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;

(f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

It was made clear in the understanding of the crime that although South African racial system of exploitative subjugation of the African indigenous population was the model for declaring apartheid to be a Crime Against Humanity, it is applicable to any arrangement that satisfies the treaty definition. It is so regarded by the International Criminal Court, see Article VII(1)(j). In Article VII(2)(h)) the nature of the crime is clarified: (h)  “The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”;

In the years since 2017 a series of reports sponsored by the UN and issued by widely respected human rights NGOs have confirmed the credibility of earlier allegations that the treatment of Palestinians qualifies in various ways as apartheid. (See detailed reports of UN ESCWA; Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; B’Tselem). To some extent, the criminality of Israeli apartheid has been temporarily subordinated to allegations of genoicide following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. If Israel’s falls short of its current genocidal effort to coerce Palestinians to leave their homeland, then concerns about Israel’s policies and practices of apartheid would undoubtedly be renewed.

  • Given the recent momentum that the pro-Palestinian movement has gained, especially in the US, do you see any chance for a change in the essence or form of the US support for Israel in the short-term?

There has definitely been a shift in public opinion among the citizenry in Global West countries, but the governments, above all the US and UK continue their support of Israel despite spreading opposition to the devastation of the civilian population of Gaza, making the small crowded region totally unlivable without a massive reconstruction and relief effort.

The governments that continue to support Israel even after its recourse to genocide are influenced by a mixture of strategic interests and what might be called identity politics. The strategic and identity issues converge in relation to Israel as it combines strong military capabilities with a civilizational identity as a high-tech modern society with principal ties to the West, and having a series of hostile Islamic countries and non-governmental movements as its adversaries. If a wider war breaks out it will be viewed as ‘a clash of civilizations’ recalling Samuel Huntington’s 1993 prediction of the world after the end of the Cold War. Part of this overall picture of stability of Israel’s relationship with the liberal democracies of the West despite its unabashed endorsement of genocide in addressing the Palestinian people is best explained by the effectiveness of Zionist funding of political opponents of elected officials critical of Israel, and financing of Israel friendly politicians in these countries where donor leverage that remains strong at the national level. Also important, is the absence of organized Palestinian lobbying capabilities in the West that could somewhat diminish pro-Israeli foreign policy biases.

If Israel succeeds in implementing its population transfer scenario in Gaza, forcing surviving Palestinians to become refugees in the region, ethnic cleansing will be added to the criminality of genocide in the form of a Crime Against Humanity. This would almost surely lead to mobilization of anti-Western forces throught the Middle East, adding dangerous new stresses to the fraying bond tying the Global West to Israel. Also, uncertainties as to Israels reaction to being treated as ‘a pariah state’ subject to boycotts and even sanctions, and surging militancy among global solidarity groups dedicated to a humane future for the Palestinian people, including the 7+ million refugees and exiles living nearby and around the world.

  • As you’ve mentioned in your preface to the book, ‘We Will Not be Silenced’, in Israel’s war against Gaza, “’the people’ become the enemy,” and, therefore, to legitimize such a war, one has to dehumanize that people. How has Israel gone on about doing so from 1948 onwards?

As Edward Said pointed out in his book, Orientalism, the colonial intellectual portrayal of the Arab is a prelude to dehumanization and a sense of Western civilization superiority, especially as assessed through an optic of technocratic modernity. As earlier discussed, Israel was established as the European colonial order was collapsing and in the aftermath of a monstrous genocide that the liberal democratic countries in the West did little to stop until Germany and Japan committed aggression imperiling their overall global hegemony. The early Zionist anticipated the current attempts to erase the Palestinians from their homeland as expressed by the dehumanizing saying: “a land for a people without land for a land without people.”

What has complicated life for Israel is that the indigenous nationalism of the Global South as well as the defeat of European colonialism created a sense of the legitimacy of resistance, even armed resistance that has been incorporated to a controversial extent into contemporary international law. The recognition of the inalienable right of a people to national self-determination results in the settler colonial authority movements as being lawless undertakings, the overt enemy of indigenous populations as denigrated as backward or non-existent. If such tactics do not remove such obstacle, then the settler colonialist move by stages until reaching the genocidal conclusion that unless the indigenous population is utterly marginalized, exterminated, or expelled it will prevail over time. In this sense the settle colonial failed projects of South Africa and Algeria are instructive on the central point that superior military capabilities will not bring the settler regime reliable security, nor  will its cruelty and exploitative policies exhibited by its imposed dominance. Despite the darkness of the skies over Palestine at present, it has never been closer to an achieving some kind of victory and liberation that was unimaginable just a few months ago.

  • As my last question, I want to know, in your opinion, what hope is left for Palestinians? They are witnessing, on a daily basis, what seems to be a deadlock, created by the US’s unconditional support for Israel, and they have no recourse to the international law.

The best hope for Palestine at this time is the escalation of civil society activism to stop the genocide, as sought by South African application to International Court of Justice, and to isolate Israel in meaningful ways through cultural, sports, and all types of boycotts. Within the foreign policy of the Global West and in relation to Israel itself there is no basis for a just and sustainable peace being promoted diplomatically and strategically by leading governments or effectively by the UN. Geopolitical primacy in situations of strategic priority, as is the case for the US and Israel, overrides the guidance of international law and the morality of inter-governmental co-existence. This, short of geopolitical reassessment there is no realistic prospect for any sufficient change in the commitment of the West to Israel’s security as it seeks to pursue it.

As mentioned above, only civil society activism can change the calculus of strategic interests in the West and Israel in the short run of 5-10 years. As the transformation of South Africa made clear, the impacts of becoming a pariah state in a variety of international arenas made it willing to transform the state from an apartheid regime to a constitutional democracy that facilitated transition by outstanding African leadership, a sympathetic world public opinion, and a focus on racial issue and political rights, which respecting the economic rights and social status of the displaced white settler elite. While Israel for all sorts of reasons cannot be compared to South Africa, there exists a zone of uncertainty that may generate some comparable solution that is above all able to find a framework based on racial/religious equality and a coexistence based on respect for the rule of law and human rights for all.

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Is The Amnesty International Report an Israeli ‘Sharpeville Moment?’

10 Feb

[Prefatory Note: The following interview contains some probing questions put to me by C. J. Polychroniou. The interview was published in Truthout  on February 9th, following the release on February 1st, of the explosive Amnesty International Report finding Israel to be guilty of committing the continuing crime of apartheid. How much longer can governments, the UN, and liberal Zionist close their eye in face of the mounting consensus in the international human community on the question of Israeli apartheid?]

Is The Amnesty International Report an Israeli ‘Sharpeville Moment?’

Q1. Amnesty International’s new report exposes Israeli abuses against Palestinians. The report shows that Israel imposes a form of domination and oppression against Palestinians under its control that qualifies as a system of apartheid under international law. In this context, it affirms the 2017 United Nations report that you had helped produce and for which you were personally attacked by Nikki Haley at the Security Council. Yet, the report is full of lies, according to Israel, and some of its strongest allies (US, UK, and Germany) reject the description of Israel as an apartheid state. Let’s start with the most basic question of all: Is there anything in the report that is not true? If not, why has it caused such a bipartisanship fury in the US?

I think it is important to assess the AI report in the wider context of the perception of Israeli apartheid over the course of the last five years since the issuance of ESCWA Report in 2017 [Richard Falk & Virginia Tilley, “Report on Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” UN ESCWA Report, March 15, 2017]. In 2001 two comprehensive reports by widely respected human rights organizations added weight to the apartheid allegations. The first one by the most established and internationally trusted Israeli NGO devoted to the protection of human rights, B’Tselem. It has developed an outstanding reputation for professionalism over the years. [“A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid,” B’Tselem, Jan. 12, 2021.] The second report was issued by Human Rights Watch, the flagship human rights civil society organization in the United States with offices around the world. [“A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2001, 312 pp.] The AI Report should be seen as the culmination of a trend validating allegations of Israeli apartheid, at least within international civil society. [“Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, Amnesty International, Feb. 1, 278 pp.]

To dismiss and denigrate these reports adhering to the highest human right research standards, as Israeli and American leaders and spokespersons have attempted to do, calling the AI Report full of ‘lies’ and the work of ‘anti-Semites’ is a shameless slander. Such inflammatory language is designed to shift the conversation from the message to the messenger. This interpretation of the tactics of those rejecting the AI Report is strengthened by the absence of any serious effort to refute the substantive charges. So far there has been a bipartisan angry rejection of the AI Report in Congress, and virtual silence in the mainstream TV and print media. How different would be the U.S. reaction to an Amnesty Report summarizing the breakup of Hong Kong demonstrations or damning the Chinese denial of human rights to the Uyghur minority. The inevitable  conclusion reached is that international law and human rights function for the U.S. Government as geopolitical tools rather than normative principles. 

Another element of context seems highly relevant. This pushback against the AI should be understood in light of a recent Israeli campaign to demonize the protection of human rights in Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories. The most dramatic move of this character was the Executive Order issued on October 19, 2021 by the Defense Minister, Benny Gantz, declaring six of the most respected civil society organizations in the West Bank to be ‘terrorist organizations’ on the basis of secret and undisclosed evidence deemed ‘legally dubious’ even in liberal Israeli media venues such a Haaretz. A large sector of public opinion in North America and Europe, including in liberal Zionist circles, was shocked by Gantz’s crude move, which was followed up by Major General Yehuda Fuchs, the military commander in the West Bank by a milder declaration that five of the six organization listed by Gantz were ‘unlawful associations’ under his authority to issue Emergency Regulations. (one organization exempted from the list because it had previously been earlier so designated). At least, General Fuchs refrained from repeating the more severe condemnation of Gantz, but the intention was the same, to inhibit donors and to neutralize the efforts of civil society to cope with the hardships of prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank and attendant violations of international humanitarian law.

A final issue of context results from the Israel’s Knesset in the form of the 2018 Basic Law proclaiming Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish people, who alone have the right of self-determination within Israel’s still unspecified borders, although the settler communities on the West Bank were clearly intended to be incorporated as part of Israel. The importance here is the extraordinary claim of Jewish exclusivity in what had been for centuries the homeland of a majority Palestinian population. When the colonialist Balfour Declaration was declared in 1917 the Jewish minority in Palestine was less than 10% of the total population of Palestine despite feverish efforts of twenty years of the Zionist Movement to settle Palestine with as many Jews as possible.

These issues of context are of help when assessing both the AI Report and the criticisms directed at it. Responding directly to your inquiry about whether there is reason to accord credibility to the Israeli response. In long reports of this nature there are sure to be contradictory ways of interpreting the evidence. The legal profession depends upon the plausibility of such diverse readings of the evidence. Yet. having collaboratively written one report and carefully read the others, I can assure you that there is no ‘lie’ or even irresponsible allegation in any of the four reports. Because of the sensitivity surrounding accusations of apartheid directed at Israel as well as the realistic apprehension that Israel and its most ardent supporters habitually resort to dirty tactics to discredit critics, the AI authors and researchers leaned over backwards to avoid making suspect allegation. They were scrupulous throughout in compiling and interpreting the evidence. I believe any objective reading of the reports would agree that the highest standards of competence and canons of responsible investigation were upheld. Unlike the apartheid leaders of South Africa, Israel’s leaders deny the charges of apartheid altogether while defending their belief in the appropriateness of the practices and policies used to uphold security given the nature of Israel as a state of the Jewish people. Yet rather than substantively defending reliance on apartheid Israeli apologists are irresponsibly attacking the integrity of the report and the supposedly despicable motivations of its authors and sponsoring organization..  

You also understandably also ask ‘why the fury?’ if the reports themselves are not mendacious, but serious objective assessments of allegations, then why would Israel not respond in kind with contrary interpretations of the evidence or by a show of evidence that the Israeli system of controlling Palestinians is consistent with a reasonable construction of Israeli security imperatives. After all, Israel has plenty of skilled jurists who always seem ready to go along with the prevailing Israeli policies based on Jewish supremacy. For instance, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the legality of 2018 Basic Law, and its chief judge even had the temerity to assert that the law didn’t alter the democratic character of the Israeli state.

 I suppose that at some point an attempt will be made to put forward an argument in defense of Israel’s racial policies, although differing in nature from South Africa’ overt legal, moral, and political defense of apartheid. I believe Israel will never admit to the apartheid allegations but would defend its laws, policies, and practices as reasonable given security threats facing the country. This approach by way of legalism would be quite a stretch given the essentially uncontested evidence that Israel’s policies and practices do satisfy the accepted international definition of apartheid relied upon in international law circles, which rests on systemic racial domination together with the demonstration of a specific intent to impose and maintain system by all necessary means.

I would contend that from time of the 1948 War during which more than 700,000 were uprooted from their homeland mostly becoming refugees in neighboring Arab countries generations ago Israel was administering race relations according to an apartheid ethos. The destruction of several hundred Palestinian villages was an incriminating complement to the wartime coercive departure of Palestinians. Israeli intentions became even clearer by an official blanket denial to Palestinian refugees of thei4 international law right of return. These features accompanying the establishment of Israel lends credence to the view apartheid was integral to Israel’s state-building project from its origins until the present day.

Israel is understandably distressed by this growing civil society consensus that its treatment of the Palestinians amounts to apartheid. To begin with, apartheid is listed as one of the crimes against humanity in Article 7 of the Rome Statute governing the operations of the International Criminal Court. As the AI Report contends, if apartheid exists then there is present an international responsibility to take steps to bring it to an end. Although Israel has refused to govern its behavior by international law standards in relation of other issues, it nevertheless deeply resents being so charged. It is especially reactive to critics and organizations that have positive and generally apolitical reputations, which includes AI, HRW, and B’Tselem.

There is still the puzzle posed by Israel’s long record of defying international law without suffering adverse consequences, a position made possible by the unconditional geopolitical support provided by the United States, which is also often reinforced by its European allies. It is notable that despite the civil society consensus, few governments other that post-apartheid South Africa have been prepared to go along with the apartheid allegation in inter-governmental contexts, presumably fearing a backlash. This reluctance of governments and international institutions to implement the conclusions and recommendations of AI exposes the political weakness of  a normative consensus opposed by strong geopolitical forces.

Yet it is admittedly not foolish for Israeli officials and think tank policy experts to be worried. Even though Israel will not waver in its rejection of the apartheid allegation at this time or alter its policies of domination and victimization, it has suffered a serious setback. Symbolic politics have an underappreciated relevance to the long-term resolution of internal and international conflicts ever since 1945. This relevance runs counter to the lingering, anachronistic belief of political realists that the flow of world history reflects relative military capabilities. It should be illuminating to realize that the anti-colonial wars were eventually won by the nationalist side that prevailed on the symbolic battlefields of Legitimacy Wars rather than by prevailing by its military prowess in the combat zones. The U.S. experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan illuminate various facets of this shift in the post-World War II balances of power that derive from the resolute pursuit of legitimate grievances, and the weakening of capabilities that arise from losing the Legitimacy War.

Beyond this, Israel has learned from the South African experience that anti-racism and anti-colonialism have strong mobilizing appeals in contemporary world society that can give rise to powerful global solidarity campaigns that encourages national resistance, and eventually influences the calculations of political leaders. Such concerns help explain Israel’s excessively punitive tactics adopted in reaction to the nonviolent BDS international campaign. South Africa criminalized internal forms of opposition to apartheid, but it never tried to pressure other government to take similar action against supporters of BDS, including in the U.S.       

Q2.  Let’s talk about the concept of apartheid. There is clearly severe discrimination inside Israel against Palestinians, but one could argue that there are many analogues elsewhere, including in the US. What are the similarities between apartheid South Africa and contemporary Israel in terms of the latter’s treatment of Palestinians living inside Israel?

The criminal internationalization of the South African regime of racial supremacy gradually occurred during the period after World War II. This process featured an increasing role of the United Nations in a global campaign of delegitimation of South Africa’s form of racism. The campaign initially concentrated on the former German colony that became under the control of Pretoria after World War I, becoming known as South West Africa and only years later challenging apartheid orientation of the Afrikaner leadership in South Africa itself. This latter development was the most direct encroachment on territorial sovereignty of a UN member in the early experience of the Organization. The campaign succeeded in having apartheid formally declared to be an international crime, initially in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid, and more recently enumerated in Article 7 of the Rome Statute governing the operations of the International Criminal Court.

It is important to understand that although the origins of apartheid as an international crime are entirely bound up with the experience of South Africa its internationalization from the outset was intended to reach any system of overt domination and victimization based on race, without any requirement that the racist regime so accused resemble the racist regime that governed South Africa until the mid-1990s.

The most widely accepted definition of apartheid is contained in Article 2 of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid. Racism, understood as discrimination based on ideas of ethnic superiority and inferiority, does not necessarily imply apartheid. For instance, the Nazi genocidal approach was unconcerned with using the state and its administrative apparatus to keep the races apart as its genocidal intention centered on erasing or exterminating inferior races, especially Jews and Roma.   Separation and racial discriminatory policies and practices are crucial components of apartheid forms of control, but by themsleves, lacks the element of specific intent as evidenced and sustained by cruel acts a system of domination with the purpose of keeping the subjugated race under the explicit control of the dominant race. In Israel and Occupied Palestine this has meant domination by Jews as implemented by an array of administrative decrees and nationality laws restricting immigration of non-Jews, and denying Palestinian refugees right of return, which is an international legal entitlement.

Even the sort of systemic racism that exists in the United States is embedded in the socio-economic-culture of the society rather than existing as an expression of the overt ideology and practices of the state. To be sure sub-national political entities are complicit to varying degrees in carrying out racist policies, which is often exhibited by allowing racist civil society sentiments to shape the behavior of public institutions. The United States with impacts from its notorious past that included the implemention of a genocidal approach to Native American indigenous communities and a labor system in agriculture based on generations of slavery. This dubious legacy is illustrated by the continuing disposition in the American South of trial juries to convict whites accused of murdering blacks, while rushing to guilty verdicts however scant the evidence if the case involves the prosecution of a black defendant accused of murdering a white woman. Also, double standards in policing expose the deep roots of anti-black racism in the U.S. as giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and the complex, contradictory societal reactions to the police homicide of George Floyd in May of 2020 in the Northern city of Minneapolis.

The similarities between Israeli and South African apartheid relate to the historical and ideological narratives of both countries in which European settlers displaced, subjugated, and exploited the resources of the indigenous population, and claimed rights of ethnic supremacy based on race. In both South Africa and Israel, native claims to homeland were overridden, and the settlers took over control of all aspects of governance with the intention of keeping the natives permanently under strict control, using law and lawmaking as a principal tool of control and exploitation by the state and its favored settler ethnicity.

The dissimilarities between Israel and South Africa derive from fundamental demographic, economic, and ideological considerations. The fact that the white minority was never more than 25% of the South African population meant that inclusive democracy could not be entertained as a legitimating option, while for Israel political democracy was a fundamental aspiration of the Zionist Project of establishing and legitimating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This undertaking relied on biblical and historical connections to the land of Palestine (eretz Israel) that went back for hundreds of years. Israel’s first and most illustrious president, David Ben Gurion, put aside his secularized Judaism, famously declaring ‘the Bible shall be our weapon,’ by which he presumably meant that Zionism would mobilize support from Jews and others by insisting that Jews had a sacred right to return to the biblically promised land.

A further fundamental dissimilarity related to the economic role of blacks in South Africa and Palestinians in Israel. South African wealth was derived mainly from extractive industries involving mining, which depended on a large source of cheap labor. In contrast, Palestinian cheap labor undercut a well-organized labor movement at the core of the Zionist movement, and was considered inessential to the growth and development of Israel. The Israeli economy came increasingly to emphasize high technologies, including armaments, in part to avoid any future dependence on Palestinian labor.

In this regard, many on the Israeli right even now favor ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to achieve racial purity in Israel and to complete the work of de facto annexation of the West Bank. These concerns reference the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ that is seen as posing a future threat to the presently solid Jewish majority in Israel, and hence to political control. This threat arises partly from the higher Palestinian fertility rate, which if Israeli annexation plans become fully realized would lead to a 50:50 division of the combined population of fourteen million living in Israel and Occupied Palestine, which would mean a circumstance of demographic equality, which would weaken the case for considering Israel to be a Jewish state, and for that reason alone is regarded by most Israelis as intolerable, portending worse to come.

Q3. I raised the previous question about the relevance of the comparison between apartheid South Africa and contemporary Israel because when it comes to the occupied territories, the situation is far worse than apartheid. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out to me in some personal exchange, which I believe to be correct, “South Africa needed  its Black population, and catered to them at least to a limited extent. Israel had no need of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and is making life unlivable for them.” Can you comment on this as I think it really raises questions about the broad use of the term “apartheid” when it comes to describing the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

In my understanding, Chomsky’s essential insight is correct and significant, but I do not agree that South Africa catered to the black population more than Israel do to the Palestinian. Because Israel rests its claims on being ‘democratic’ it caters to the Palestinian minority of 20% in a variety of ways to sustain its international image of political legitimacy. The South Africans drew strict color lines that deprived blacks of any civil or political rights, while Palestinians in Israel proper can vote and even form their own political parties and serve in the government.

The greater harshness of Israeli apartheid arises from the Israeli ambition to control a relatively limited territory as compared to the South African ability to rely on African townships and bantustans for purposes of segregation, security, and control in a rather sparsely populated country. In effect, the proximity and demographic vitality of the Palestinians, ‘the dangerous neighborhood’ of hostile Arab countries, the historical legacies of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and the character of Palestinian armed resistance led Israel to be more engaged in violent repressive activities than were the South Africans, especially in Gaza. Also, Israeli concerns with demographic implications of a diminished Jewish majority led both to its adoption of a politics of fragmentation involving the dispersal of Palestinians beyond Israel’s borders and to the exclusion of Palestinians seeking fulfillment of their right of return. South Africa, as devising apartheid from the perspective of a racial minority, never had to cope with these specific to Israel concerns.

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DECLARATION OF THE CRIME OF APARTHEID: ISRAEL

7 Jul

[PREFATORY NOTE: The Declaration on Apartheid below is an initiative initiated by the wellknown
Tunisian mathematician, Ahmed Abbes, and endorsed by scholars and artists worldwide. If impressed
please distribute widely as there is a campaign underway to reach 1,000 signatures.]

Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine
6 juillet |

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Over 700 scholars, artists and intellectuals from more than 45 countries have signed the following declaration calling for the dismantling of the apartheid regime set up on the territory of historic Palestine and the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that grants all its inhabitants equal rights and duties. The signatories include many distinguished figures, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, academics with legal expertise Monique Chemillier-Gendreau and Richard Falk, scholars Étienne Balibar, Hagit Borer, Ivar Ekeland, Suad Joseph, Jacques Rancière, Roshdi Rashed and Gayatri Spivak, health researcher Sir Iain Chalmers, composer Brian Eno, musician Roger Waters, author Ahdaf Soueif, economist and former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN Sir Richard Jolly, South African politician and veteran anti-apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils and Canadian peace activist and former national leader of the Green Party of Canada Joan Russow.

Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine
Whereas :

1- Israel has subjected the Palestinian people for 73 years to an ongoing catastrophe, known as the Nakba, a process that included massive displacement, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity ;

2- Israel has established an apartheid regime on the entire territory of historic Palestine and directed toward the whole of the deliberately fragmented Palestinian people ; Israel itself no longer seeks to hide its apartheid character, claiming Jewish supremacy and exclusive Jewish rights of self-determination in all of historic Palestine through the adoption in 2018 by the Knesset of a new Basic Law ;

3-The apartheid character of Israel has been confirmed and exhaustively documented by widely respected human rights organizations, Adalah, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and in the UN ESCWA academic study that stresses the importance of defining Israeli apartheid as extending to people rather than limited to space, [“Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” UN ESCWA, 2017] ;

4- Israel periodically unleashes massive violence with devastating impacts on Palestinian civilian society, particularly against the population of Gaza, which endures widespread devastation, collective trauma, and many deaths and casualties, aggravated by being kept under an inhuman and unlawful blockade for over 14 years, and throughout the humanitarian emergency brought about by the COVID pandemic ;

5- Western powers have facilitated and even subsidized for more than seven decades this Israeli system of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid, and continue to do so diplomatically, economically, and even militarily.

Considering :

i- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stipulates in its first article that ’all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ And taking account that the inalienable right of self-determination is common Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Political Rights, and as such, a legal and ethical entitlement of all peoples.

ii- The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which stipulates in Article I that ’apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination, as defined in article II of the Convention, are crimes violating the principles of international law, in particular the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and constituting a serious threat to international peace and security.’ The States Parties to this Convention undertake in accordance with Article IV :
_ “(a) To adopt any legislative or other measures necessary to suppress as well as to prevent any encouragement of the crime of apartheid and similar segregationist policies or their manifestations and to punish persons guilty of that crime ;
_ “(b) To adopt legislative, judicial and administrative measures to prosecute, bring to trial and punish in accordance with their jurisdiction persons responsible for, or accused of, the acts defined in article II of the present Convention, whether or not such persons reside in the territory of the State in which the acts are committed or are nationals of that State or of some other State or are stateless persons.”

The endorsers of this document :

A- Declare their categorical rejection of the apartheid regime set up on the territory of historic Palestine and imposed on the Palestinian people as a whole, including refugees and exiles wherever they might be in the world.

B- Call for the immediate dismantling of this apartheid regime and the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that grants and implements on all the inhabitants of this land equal rights and duties, regardless of their racial, ethnic, and religious identities, or gender preferences, and which respects and enforces international law and human conventions, and in particular gives priority to the long deferred right of return of Palestinian refugees expelled from their towns and villages during the creation of the State of Israel, and subsequently.

C- Urge their governments to cease immediately their complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime, to join in the effort to call for the dismantling of apartheid structures and their replacement by an egalitarian democratic governance that treats everyone subject to its authority in accordance with their rights and with full respect for their humanity, and to make this transition in a manner sensitive to the right of self-determination enjoyed by both peoples presently inhabiting historic Palestine.

D- Call for the establishment of a National Commission of Peace, Reconciliation, and Accountability to accompany the transition from apartheid Israel to a governing process sensitive to human rights and democratic principles and practices. In the interim, until such a process is underway, issue a call for the International Criminal Court to launch a formal investigation of Israeli political leaders and security personnel guilty of perpetuating the crime of apartheid.

* Academics, artists and intellectuals can endorse this declaration by completing this form.

* Endorsed by 723 academics, artists and intellectuals on July 8, 2021 (click here for the full list), including

Ahmed Abbes, mathematician, Director of research in Paris, France
Sinan Antoon, New York University, United States
John Avery, Writer, Denmark
Bertrand Badie, Sciences Po Paris, France
Étienne Balibar, Anniversary Chair of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, United Kingdom
Anthony Barnett, Writer, United Kingdom
Edmond Baudoin, Auteur de bandes dessinées, France
George Bisharat, UC Hastings College of the Law/Professor, musician, United States
Nicolas Boeglin, Professor of Public International Law, University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica
Hagit Borer, Professor, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, Council of Elders of the ICCA Consortium, Switzerland
Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, UC Berkeley, United States
Anouar Brahem, Musician, Composer, Tunisia
Rony Brauman, Physician, writer, former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, France
Iain Chalmers, Editor, James Lind Library, United Kingdom
Hafidha Chekir, Emeritus Professor of Public Law, Al Manar University, Tunis ; Vice President of the International Federation for Human Rights, Tunisia
Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Professeure émérite de droit public et de sciences politiques, Université Paris-Diderot, France
David Comedi, National University of Tucumán and National Research Council, Argentina
Laurent Cugny, Professeur, Sorbonne Université, France
Eric David, Emeritus Professor of International Law at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Chandler Davis, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Toronto, Canada
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Professeure émérite à l’Université de Paris, France
Herman De Ley, Emeritus Professor, Ghent University, Belgium
Ivar Ekeland, Professor emeritus of mathematics and former President, University of Paris-Dauphine, France
Brian Eno, Artist/Composer, United Kingdom
Adolfo Esquivel, Premio Nobel de la Paz 1980 (Nobel Peace Prize 1980), Argentina
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University, United States
Emmanuel Farjoun, Emeritus Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Jan Fermon, Avocat. Secrétaire général Association Internationale des Juristes Démocrates, Belgium
Domenico Gallo, Chamber President in Supreme Court of Cassazione, Italy
Irene Gendzier, Prof Emeritus in the Dept Political Science, Boston University, United States
Catherine Goldstein, Director of Research, Paris, France
Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Penny Green, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Sondra Hale, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Michael Harris, Professor of Mathematics, Columbia University, United States
Judith Herrin, King’s College London, United Kingdom
Christiane Hessel-Chabry, Présidente d’honneur de l’association EJE (Gaza), France
Shir Hever, Political Economist, Germany
Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor, London School of Economics, United Kingdom
Abdeen Jabara, Attorney, past president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, United States
Richard Jolly, Emeritus Fellow, IDS, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Davis, United States
Mary Kaldor, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
Ronnie Kasrils, Former government minister, South Africa
Assaf Kfoury, Computer Science Department, Boston University, United States
Rima Khalaf, Former Executive Secretary of UN ESCWA, Jordan
Daniel Kupferstein, Film director, France
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, Emeritus professor, University of Nice, France
David Lloyd, University of California Riverside, United States
Brinton Lykes, Professor & Co-Director, Boston College Center for Human Rights & International Justice, United States
Moshé Machover, Mathematician, KCL, United Kingdom
Kate Macintosh, Architect, United Kingdom
Mairead Maguire, Nobel peace laureate, Ireland
Dick Marty, Dr. Jur. Dr. H.c., former Chair of the Committee of Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Switzerland
Georg Meggle, Philosopher, Prof. em. at University of Leipzig, Germany
Jan Oberg, DrHc, peace and future researcher, Transnational Foundation, Sweden
Joseph Oesterlé, Emeritus professor, Sorbonne University, France
Adi Ophir, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University ; Visiting Professor, The Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the center for Middle East Studies, Brown Universities, United States
Karine Parrot, Professeure de droit à l’Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France
Ghislain Poissonnier, Magistrate, France
Susan Power, Head of Legal Research and Advocacy, Al-Haq, Palestine
Prabir Purkayastha, Editor, Newsclick.in, India
Jacques Rancière, Professeur émérite, Université Paris 8, France
Roshdi Rashed, CNRS/Université de Paris, France
Steven Rose, Emeritus Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and Gresham College, London, United Kingdom
Hilary Rose, Professor Emerita Sociology University of Bradfor, United Kingdom
Jonathan Rosenhead, Emeritus Professor of Operational Research at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom
Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, United States
Alice Rothchild, MD, retired, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School, United States
Joan Russow, Researcher, Global Compliance Research Project, Canada
Richard Seaford, Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Leila Shahid, Former Ambassador of Palestine, Palestine
Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker – Essayist, France
John Smith, Filmmaker, Emeritus Professor of Fine Art, University of East London, United Kingdom
Nirit Sommerfeld, Singer, actress, writer, Germany
Ahdaf Soueif, Writer, Egypt
Gayatri Spivak, Columbia University, United States
Jonathan Steele, Author and journalist, United Kingdom
Annick Suzor-Weiner, Professor emeritus, Université Paris-Saclay, France
Salim Tamari, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Birzeit University, Palestine
Virginia Tilley, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, United States
Salim Vally, Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Roger Waters, Musician, United Kingdom
Robert Wintemute, Professor of Human Rights Law, King’s College London, United Kingdom
John Womack jr, Harvard University, United States
* Institutional affiliations are given only for identification purposes

* The full list of signatories is available here.

* Academics, artists and intellectuals can endorse this declaration by completing this form.

* Version française ; versión en español ; versione italiana ; النسخة العربية

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Qui était Edward Said ? Une interprétation biographique, un souvenir existentiel
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Palestine is Winning the Legitimacy War

19 May

[Prefatory Note: This opinion piece was published in Middle East Eye on May 18,2021, and republished in Il Manifesto  and The Wire under different titles. It attempts to contextualize the current violence directed against Gaza in earlier Israeli provocations. It also takes note of Israel’s reliance on excessive force in its attack upon an essentially helpless Gazan civilian population of over two million people trapped inside a crowded and unlawfully blockaded enclave. The communal violence between Arabs and Jews in Israeli towns and villages, the unity displayed by Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, the protests at the borders of Jordan and Lebanon, the Jewish dissent from Israeli criminal assault on Gaza, and the greater receptivity of the Western media and even the US Congress to Palestinian grievances different than past interludes of severe violence. The future will tell us whether finally an inflection point in the Palestinian struggle has been reached in which the path to peace is cleared by the fusion of resistance from within and solidarity from without.]

The Last Stand of Settler Colonialism: Apartheid Israel

The current crisis of Palestine/Israel deepens and widens as casualties mount, smoke from destroyed buildings blacken the sky over Gaza, rioting on the streets of many Israeli and West Bank towns, Israeli police disrupting worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and protecting extremist Jewish settlers shouting genocidal slogans ‘death to the Arabs’ in their inflammatory marches through Palestinian neighborhoods. Underlying this entire eruption of tensions between oppressor and oppressed were the flimsy legalized evictions of six Palestinian families long resident in the Sheikh Jarrah. These evictions epitomized the long Palestinian ordeal of persecution and banishment in what psychologically remains their homeland. While this mayhem continues the lights have remained scandalously dim at the UN. Western leaders pathetically call for calm on both as if both sides shared equal blame, while perversely affirming the one-sidedness of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ which supposes that Israel had been attacked out of the blue.

Is this but one more cycle of violence exhibiting the unresolvable clash between a native people overwhelmed by a colonial intruder emboldened by a unique religiously grounded settler sense of entitlement? Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the century long struggle by the Palestinian people to defend their homeland against the unfolding Zionist Project that stole their land, trampled on their dignity, and made Palestinians victimized strangers in what had been their national home for centuries? Only the future can fully unravel this haunting uncertainty. In the meantime, we can expect more bloodshed, death, outrage, grief, injustice, and continuing geopolitical interference. What these events have made clear is that the Palestinians are withstanding prolonged oppression with their spirit of resistance intact, and refuse to. be pacified regardless of the severity of the imposed hardships. We also are made to appreciate that the Israeli leadership and most of its public is no longer in the mood even to pretend receptivity to a peaceful alternative to the completion of their settler colonial undertaking despite its dependence on a weaponized version of apartheid governance. 

THE HASBARA NARRATIVE

For Israelis and much of the West the core narrative continues to be the violence of a terrorist organization, Hamas, challenging the peaceful state of Israel with destructive intent, making the Israeli response seem reasonable as both a discouragement of the rockets but also as a harsh punitive lesson for the people of Gaza designed to deter future terrorist attacks. The Israeli missiles and drones are deemed ‘defensive’ while the rockets are acts of ‘terrorism’ even though Israeli human targets are seldom hit, and despite the fact that it is Israeli weaponry that causes 95% of the widespread death and destruction among the over two million civilians Gazans who have been victims of an unlawful and crippling blockade that since 2007 has brought severe suffering to the impoverished, crowded, traumatized Palestinian enclave long enduring unemployment levels above 50%.  

In the current confrontation Israel’s control of the international discourse has succeeded in de-contextualizing the timeline of violence, having the effect of leading those with little knowledge of what induced the flurry of Hamas rockets to believe falsely that the destruction in Gaza was a retaliatory Israeli reaction to hundreds of rockets launched by Hamas and Gaza militia groups. With abuses of language that might even surprise Orwell, Israel’s state terrorism is airbrushed by the world along with the rebuff of Hamas’ peace diplomacy over the past 15 years that has repeatedly sought a permanent ceasefire and peaceful coexistence.

For Palestinians, and those in solidarity with their struggle, Israel knowingly allowed the subjugated population of East Jerusalem to experience a series of anguishing humiliations to occur during the holy period of Muslim religious observances in Ramadan rubbing salt in the a wounds recently opened by the Sheikh Jarrar evictions, which had the inevitable effect of refreshing Palestinian memories of their defining experiences of ethnic cleansing days before the annual May 15th observance of the Nakba. This amounted to a metaphoric reenactment of that massive crime of expulsion accompanying the birth of Israel in 1948, culminating in the bulldozing of several hundred Palestinian villages signaling a firm Israeli intention to make the banishment permanent.

SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

Unlike South Africa, which made never claimed to be a democracy, Israel legitimated itself by presenting itself as a constitutional democracy. This resolve to be a democracy came with a high price tag of deception and self-deception, necessitating to this day a continuing struggle to make apartheid work to secure Jewish supremacy while hiding Palestinian subjugation. For decades Israel was successful in hiding these apartheid features from the world because the legacy of the Holocaust lent uncritical credence to the Zionist narrative of providing sanctuary for the survivors of the worst genocide known to humanity. Additionally, the Jewish presence was making the desert bloom, while at the same time virtually erasing Palestine grievances, further discounted by hasbara visions of Palestinian backwardness as contrasting with Israeli modernizing prowess, and later on by juxtaposing a political caricature of the two peoples portraying Jewish adherence to Western values as opposed to Palestinian embrace of terrorism.

WINNING THE LEGITIMACY WAR

Recent developments in the symbolic domains of politics that control the outcome of Legitimacy Wars have scored several victories for the Palestinian struggle. The International Criminal Court has authorized the investigation of Israeli criminality in Occupied Palestine since 2015 despite vigorous opposition from the leadership of the Israeli government, fully supported by the United States. The investigation in The Hague, although proceeding with diligent respect for the legalities involved, was not openly engaged by Israel, but rather was immediately denounced by Netanyahu as ‘pure antisemitism.’

Beyond this, the contentions of Israeli apartheid, which only a few years ago was similarly denounced when an academic report commissioned by the UN concluded that the allegation of apartheid was unequivocally confirmed by Israeli policies and practices of an inhuman character designed to ensure Palestinian victimization and Jewish domination. In the past few months both B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights NGO, and Human Rights Watch, have issued carefully documented studies that reach the same startling conclusion that the Israel indeed administers an apartheid regime within the whole of historic Palestine, that is, the Occupied Palestinian Territories plus Israel itself. While these two developments do not alleviate Palestinian suffering or the behavioral effects of enduring denial of basic rights, they are significant symbolic victories that stiffen the morale of Palestinian resistance and strengthen the bonds of global solidarity. The record of struggles against colonialism since 1945 support reaching the conclusion that the side that wins a Legitimacy War will eventually control the political outcome, despite being weaker militarily and diplomatically. 

The endgame of South African apartheid reinforces this reassessment of the changing balance of forces in the Palestinian struggle. Despite having what appeared to be effective and stable control of the African majority population through the implementation of brutal apartheid structures, the racist regime collapsed from within under the combined weight of internal resistance and international solidarity. Outside pressures included a widely endorsed BDS campaign enjoying UN backing. Israel is not South Africa in a number of key aspects, but the combination of resistance and solidarity was dramatically ramped upwards in the past week. Israel has already long lost the main legal and moral arguments, almost acknowledging this interpretation by their defiant way of changing the subject with reckless accusations of antisemitism, and is in the process of losing the political argument.

Israel’s own sense of vulnerability to a South African scenario has been exposed by this growing tendency to brand supporters of BDS and harsh critics as ‘antisemites,’ which seems in the context of present development best described as ‘a geopolitical panic attack.’ I find it  appropriate to recall Gandhi’s famous observation along these lines: “first, they ignore you, then they insult you, then they fight you, then you win.”  

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Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

25 Apr

Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

 

[Prefatory Note: This post was published in a somewhat altered form in Transcend MediaService on April 20, 2020 under the title “Triple Jeopardy and the Plight of Palestinian Prisoners.]

 

Double Jeopardy for Refugees/Migrants

Recently reflecting on the plight of refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Central America I was struck by the analogy to ‘double jeopardy.’ As widely understood, double jeopardy is a procedural rule of criminal law that prohibits prosecution by a state of an individual more than once for the same crime. It is deservedly treated as a human right that protects persons from being harassed after judicial acquittal by repeated allegations of the same alleged crime. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) in Article 14(7) defines double jeopardy: “No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again for an offense for which he has already been finally convicted or acquitted in accordance with the law and penal procedure of each country.” (There are exceptions for acquittals tainted by fraud, confessions by the accused, and the wording of the rule should be corrected for its gender bias implying that it is only ‘men’ who could be victimized by vindictive re-prosecution).

 

For some years, the images of violent border security associated with keeping masses of needy refugees or migrants from crossing international boundaries to reach more peaceful or affluent countries in Europe or North America is what prompted me to sense an analogy to the kind of ordeal that exists when someone wins an acquittal after a long, emotionally and economically costly trial, and is then confronted by a new indictment for essentially the  same supposed criminal offense. In a well-administered democracy, the double jeopardy rule is taken for granted, and prevents such injustices from happening. But what of the world of refugees and migrants?

 

What made the double jeopardy comparison apt for me were these haunting images of doubling down on punishment of those who were not only innocent, but already victimized by circumstances beyond their control, and then again punished for acts that deserve empathy and accommodation, not punishment, if humanitarian values were extended to  refugees/migrants. My existential premise, borne out by some experience, is that persons almost never leave their place of birth and family residence without overwhelming provocation, and are especially hesitant to use their small saving and meager borrowings to embark on a voyage to a distant land with a different language and culture. Most of us, even if dissatisfied with conditions in our native land or our personal circumstances will still not voluntarily depart from the familiarities of family and friends, and of language, traditions, and nationality. Only circumstances of grave danger such as presented by ravaged combat zones or resulting from grinding poverty found in societies that confront residents and entire communities with gray horizons of hopelessness that offer neither safety nor security, can induce most persons to so uproot themselves. In other words, the motivation underlying the emotional reality of the overwhelming majority of refugees and migrants is one of desperation, of grasping at straws and escaping doom. Of course, the small nomadic elites of adventurers, exiles, and expatriates are examples of persons leaving their home countries not from necessity, but in pursuit of the exotic and the paradisiac.

 

This sad depiction of the decision to flee to safety or to search for economic security is then generally accompanied by a treacherous and harrowing journey that often drains the traveler of his or her small savings. Many trips end with death and illness for many in the group, or perilous trips across stormy seas or barren deserts, only to be confronted by a coercive ‘no’ in the form of barbed wire, walls, detention centers, and even live ammunition if and when the destination is reached. To be placed in detention centers with long waits may be the best that can be hoped for by such forsaken souls, often including young children, that experience the depths of insecurity in their homeland, and also along the way that reaches a negative climax when and if the national goal is ever reached.

 

I am not suggesting that this refugee/migrant experience is double jeopardy in a legal sense, but it seems to possess the same ingredients of the unjust repetition of indictment and prosecution, itself punitive, that is prohibited as a part of civilized behavior in a society responsive to the rule of law, and protective of human rights. It is a kind of morally grounded, culturally and spiritually debasing, and often life-threatening duplication of criminal prosecution without any account being taken of human dignity and fundamental innocence of those being victimized, or the ordeal of struggling against a criminal allegation.

 

And yet, moral outrage or a call for compassion does not acknowledge the complexity of the issues raised. Unlike the individuals accused of the same crime a second time, the refugee/migrant does not, as such, pose real threats to the countries that are being expected to act as benign hosts or to extend hospitality to strangers in need. This is notto say that a country does not have the right to deny entry to those with criminal records or contagious diseases, provided due process is accorded, and similarly have authority to insist that those who enter do legally.

 

We live in a state-centric world where international boundaries define the outer limits of community, which has not changed fundamentally no matter how much we hear cosmopolitan sermonizing and ecologically persuasive calls for planetary identity. In such a framework, the citizenry of a country feel threatened in various ways by the influx of large numbers of strangers, especially if their racial and cultural characteristics clash with that of the country asked to show hospitality or grant asylum. The reality of this resistance is producing extremisms of scapegoating and xenophobia, which make moderates search for compromises in the form of requiring lawful entry, quotas, job training, and language and civilizational educational resources. Given the scale of the challenge, and the unlikely emergence of greater receptivity, the main line of an effective and humane response structure should be a large investment in overcoming the conditions in foreign countries that give rise to massive displacement and large numbers of persons desperate to find more sustainable life conditions. Overcoming double jeopardy in these settings depends on a self-interested globalization of responsibility for achieving peace and security, as well as lifting the curse of poverty, and this requires the drastic reform of the way the benefits of neoliberal globalization are distributed much more equitably than in the past.       

 

 

Triple Jeopardy for Palestinian Prisoners at a Time of Pandemic

 

This metaphor for layers of unjust suffering initially occurred to me while preparing a ZOOM presentation on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the context of the health dangers associated with the COVID-19 challenge. Such dangers were present for Palestinians under pre-pandemic conditions, but greatly aggravated by Israeli failures to mitigate the additional and aggravated risks that come from keeping around 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in overcrowded prisons where some of the guards and security personnel were reported as testing positive for the virus yet continued to interact with prisoners without prescribed personal protective gear (PPE), and where insufficient hospital and medical capabilities existed in the event that the disease started to spread. This overall sub-par situation was further accentuated in relation to an. estimated 172 child prisoners, many elderly and disabled prisoners, and almost all inmates incarcerated for nonviolent security offenses that should never have been criminalized because of falling within the scope of a right of resistance possessed by persons living under an apartheid regime, which is itself a serious violation of international criminal law. The right to resist Israeli apartheid, at least within the limits of international law regulating violence by reference to choice of targets and other considerations. Israel has not accepted WHO guidelines or a variety of humanitarian appeals by respected NGOs to release at least ‘low-risk’ prisoners as well as those with ‘underlying conditions,’ children, and the elderly.

 

Taking these considerations into account the ‘triple jeopardy’ framing seems justified to underscore the layers of injustice endured by Palestinian prisoners at this time. As the Palestinian writer, Ramzy Baroud, writes, “..all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s when Israel became a state and the Palestinian homeland was erased by Zionist colonialists with the support of Western benefactors.” To drive the point home, Baroud adds, “In Palestine, we don’t call our imprisonment a lockdown, but a ‘military occupation’ and apartheid.” [See Baroud, “A Palestinian Guide to Surviving a Quarantine: On Faith, Humour, and ‘Dutch Candy,’” Middle East Monitor, April 5, 2020]. In effect, Baroud is insisting that all Palestinians are enduring an unjust ‘imprisonment’ that has lasted for more than 71 years with no signs of abatement, and is itself a punishment of individuals of a certain ethnicity for the ‘crime’ of existing.

 

On this basis, the criminalization of resistance, including nonviolent and symbolic forms, extending even to poem and poets (for example, Dareen Tatour, and her crime, the poem “Resist, my people, resist them”), has resulted in harsh confinement in Israeli prisons, including reliance on such legally dubious mechanisms as ‘administrative detention’ (imprisoning without charges or any due process for extended periods) and the unlawful transfer of prisoners from detention in Occupied Palestine to prisons in Israel [behind the green line], andd out of reach of family members). In effect, the imprisoning of any Palestinian in Israeli jails is Double Jeopardy because it puts Palestinians already punishment by lockdown, displacement, and dispossession behind bars because they dared to assert their right of resistance.

 

The allegation of Triple Jeopardy arises from the failure to suspend or mitigate prison condition in light of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the related failure to take responsible steps to protect those so confined from contracting a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease. A virtual death sentence hangs over every single Palestinian prisoner for as long as the pandemic lasts, and poses especially acute risks with respect to particularly vulnerable categories of Palestinians living in prisons.

 

 

 Toward Solutions?

 It is not possible to set forth detailed proposals to overcome double and triple jeopardy as depicted. I will only indicate the vectors that point in a direction sensitive to practical and normative aspects of the challenge.

 For Double Jeopardy: seek to accommodate an ethos of hospitality and empathy with a major commitment at the UN and by national governments to take steps to remove the conditions of mass desperation prompting large numbers to leave their homelands, an undertaking ideally funded by a globally administered tax on luxury goods, financial transactions, fossil fuels, and transnational air travel.

 For Triple Jeopardy: release all Palestinian political prisoners immediately, with a sense of urgency, and commit to ending apartheid as the essential step toward a sustainable and just peace based on the equality of rights of Jews and Palestinians.

 

 

 

 

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Chained to its Past: A German Formula for Injustice toward the People of Palestine

20 Sep

[Re-posting Second Prefatory Note: To allow for prior German online publication I temporarily removed this post after two hours. The text below is identical to what was previously posted. We are eager to encourage debate, discussion, and democracy, and so encourage dissemination through social media, and whatever means you find effective. Hearing a few days ago of the Dortmund City Council’s rescinding of the Nelly Sachs Prize for Literature to the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamies because it discovered that was a supporter of BDS is a further confirmation of the decline of democracy in Germany, at least in relation to this subject-matter of Israel/Palestine.]

 

[Prefatory Note: The following article written jointly with my longtime cherished friend, Hans von Sponeck, who by family experience and moral disposition is acutely aware of the German policy dilemmas associated with its past. These issues have recently surfaced in the context of suppressing pro-Palestinian nonviolent activism, which we believe are being handled in ways that tend to reproduce rather than transcend the evils of the Nazi Era by taking a variety of steps to shield the criminality of the Israeli Government from pressures exerted by the Palestinian global solidarity movement, and the BDS Campaign in particular. We attempted to publish this opinion piece first in a series of leading German newspapers, but were turned down. Apparently, the media guardians of public opinion in Germany regard silence as preferable to discussion and debate on this crucial issue.

 

As a biographical aside, Hans served for 32 years in the United Nations. In his last posting with  a rank of UN Assistant Secretary General, he headed the Oil for Food Program in Iraq by virtue of his role as Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (1998-2000) that followed the First Gulf War (1991) He resigned on principle because of the UN Security Council’s imposition of punitive sanctions responsible for producing massive casualties in the Iraqi civilian population.]

 

Chained to its Past: A German Recipe for Injustice toward the People of Palestine

 

Richard Falk & Hans von Sponeck

 

The GermanBundestag resolution on May 15ththat condemned the BDS Campaign as contributing to a rising threat of anti-Semitism in Europe is a grave cause of concern. It brands the BDS, a nonviolent Palestinian initiative, anti-Semitic and urges  the German government to refuse support, not only to BDS itself, but to any organization that is supportive of BDS. It takes this stand, pointing out Germany’s special responsibility toward Jews, without any reference at all to  Israel’s prolonged abuse of the most fundamental of human rights, that of self-determination, of the Palestinian people. The German resolution also fails to refer to the important role that an earlier BDS Campaign against South African racism played in bringing about a nonviolent end to the apartheid regime, and that even those who opposed BDS

on strategic or pragmatic ground never sought to demonize its advocates.

 

What particularly disturbs us is the punitive approach to BDS taken by the German legislative branch. It should be remembered that despite lots of opposition to the South African campaign those who were BDS activists were never told that it was legally and morally unacceptable to take part. Objections based on feasibility and effects, as well as specious claims that Africans in South Africa were better off under apartheid than were their brothers and sisters throughout the continent.

 

In essence, we believe this resolution is the wrong way to learn from the German past. Instead of opting for justice, for law, and for human rights, the Bundestag never even mentions the Palestinian people, and the ordeal that they are experiencing, and BDS is challenging. To give a green light to Israeli oppressive and expansionist policies is to endorse implicitly policies of collective punishment and abuse of the weak that were, it should be recalled, the most reprehensible features of the Nazi era.

 

We write as two individuals with very different pasts, yet sharing a commitment to

a strong United Nations and the duty of countries large and small to respect international law and promote global justice

 

We also share a continuing awareness of the Holocaust as a terrible tragedy befalling the Jewish people and others, as well as a horrendous crime by Germany and other countries in the past. We share an overriding commitment to a global order in which such tragedy and criminality do not occur with respect to the Jewish people and to all others everywhere. We are also mindful that such tragedies and crimes have been perpetrated since 1945 against various ethnicities and targeted peoples, including in Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia and more recently, the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

 

Our backgrounds are (also)quite different. One of us is German and Christian (von Sponeck) , the other (Falk) is American and Jewish. Von Sponeck is the son of a general executed by the Nazis in the latter stages of World War II and had gone to Israel in 1957 to work in a moshav and several kibbutzim. He served for 32 years as an international civil servant within the United Nations, rising to the rank of Assistant Secretary General. His UN career ended when he resigned as the UN Coordinator of the Oil-for-Food Programme (1998-2000) in protest over the Iraq sanctions policy of the UN Security Council leading to the death of many innocent Iraqi civilians. Since his resignation von Sponeck has been teaching and lecturing in various venues and publishing on UN topics including The Politics of Sanctions on Iraq and the UN Humanitarian Exception(2017).

 

Falk is American and was a member of the faculty of Princeton University for 40 years, holding the position of Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law. His family background includes paternal German ancestry with both grandparents born in Bavaria. not far from Munich, emigrating to the United States in the middle of the 19thCentury. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. He has published widely on international topics, including recently Power Shift:On the New Global Order (2016) and Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope(2017).

 

We have analyzed the failure of international diplomacy to find a solution for the conflict between Israel and Palestine. We believe that Israel bears the main responsibility for this failure, which has resulted in decades of acute suffering for the Palestinian people. We believe that the root of this failure is the Zionist project to impose a Jewish state on an essentially non-Jewish society. This has inevitably occasioned Palestinian resistance, and an increasingly racist based set of structures designed to keep the Palestinian people as a whole subjugated within their own country. We believe further that peace can only come for bothpeoples when these apartheid structures are dismantled as they were in South Africa over 25 years ago.

 

Against this background we find the reluctance of the German government and the German people to respond to this circumstance of injustice to be unacceptable and its tacit acquiescence in Germany particularly worrisome and extremely regrettable. Both of us and our families are in different senses victims of Nazism. This, however, does not prevent us from insisting that German hesitation to be critical of Israeli ethnocentrism exhibits a dangerous misunderstanding of the relevance of the Nazi past. The Holocaust should above all serve to warn the world against injustice, state crime, and the victimization of a people based on their racial and religious identity. It should not exempt Israel from legal and moral accountability just because its leadership is Jewish and many of its Jewish citizens are related to victims of the Holocaust.

 

Israel claims an identity through the 2018 adoption by the Knesset of a Basic Law as the Nation-State of the Jewish people as if this confers a mandate of impunity. The lesson of the Holocaust has to do with abuse, criminality, and victimization, and should not be perverted by any subversive implication that because Jews endured horrific crimes in the past they are exempt from accountability when they commit present crimes. We recall Albert Einstein’s letter to Chaim Weizmann in 1929 in which he wrote “If we do not succeed in finding the path of honest co-operation  and coming to terms with the Arabs, we will not have learnt anything from our two thousand year old ordeal and will deserve the fate which will beset us!” The Israeli Government must realize that much of the menacing rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiments in Europe and elsewhere has its origin in the very policies it pursues.

 

We expect that our plea will be strongly attacked as anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic. Part of the function of such attacks is to freeze German responses by reminders of the Holocaust, and the false suggestion that criticizing Israel and Zionism is a renewal of an attack on Jews and Judaism. We insist that this is absolutely not the case. It is quite the opposite. It affirms that the core values of the Jewish religion and humanistic values generally are connected with justice, and that this use of anti-Semitic smears is a totally unacceptable tactic to shield Israel from justifiable criticism. This kind of intimidation should be opposed and overcome.

 

From this perspective it is our belief and hope that Germany and the German people have the strength to rid themselves of the moral numbness induced by the bad memories from the past, and can join in the struggle against injustice. Such a dynamic of moral empowerment would be clear if Germany were to show empathy for the Palestinian ordeal, and lend their support to nonviolent initiatives designed to express solidarity with and encouragement for the Palestinian national movement to uphold basic rights, including above all, the inalienable right of self-determination.

 

We are most encouraged that our actions are not occurring in a vacuum here in Germany. We take note of the dedicated efforts by the Humboldt Three to protest Israeli apartheid, and the popular support the action of these young people, two Israelis and one Palestinian, have received. Their inspirational message is similar to ours. It is time for the German government and its citizens to break their silence, recognize that the Nazi past is best overcome by active opposition to the unjust oppression of the Palestinian people. We also feel kinship with the Open Letter widely endorsed by intellectuals around the world, including many in Israel, calling on ‘Individuals and Institutions in Germany’ to end all efforts to conflate criticisms of Israel with Anti-Semitism.

 

We believe that peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine depends on taking steps to restore equality of relations between these too long embattled peoples. This can only happen if the current apartheid structures are dismantled as a prelude to peace. The South African precedent shows us that this can happen, but only when international pressures combine with national resistance. It seemed impossible in South Africa until the very moment that it happened. It seems impossible at this time with respect to Israel, but the impossible happens when it is aligned with the demands of justice, and mobilizes the support of people of good will from around the world. The flow of history has favored the weaker side militarily in the great anti-colonial movements of the last half of the 20th century, and so we should not lose hope in a just outcome for Israeli and Palestinians despite the fact that the present balance of forces now favors Israeli dominance.

 

It is also important to keep in mind that as long as the Palestinian people are denied their basic rights, there can be no peace. Any agreement reached while apartheid remains will be nothing more than a ceasefire. A sustainable peace depends on recognizing and implementing the equality of the two peoples on the basis of mutual self-determination. Germany and Germans have a great opportunity to promote such a vision, and by doing so, liberating the country  from its past. In a profound sense, whether German, American, or other we each owe the Jewish and Palestinian peoples nothing less.

 

 

 

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The future of statehood: Israel & Palestine

3 Feb

[Prefatory Note: Interview Questions of a Brazilian journalist Rodrigo Craveiro on behalf of Correio Braziliense: (Jan. 30, 2019) on current prospects of Palestinian national movement.]

 

Fatah, Hamas, the Future of Statehood and Peace Prospects

 

1. With the dissolution of government do you see any risk for unity among all Palestinian factions? Why? 

 

It is difficult at this stage to interpret the significance of the recent dissolution of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), which serves as the Parliament of the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank and enjoys formal recognition as the representive of the Palestinian people internationally. The PLO continues to exist as an umbrella framework to facilitate coordination among Palestinian political factions aside from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have never been associated with the PLO. It seems that dissolution of the PLC is related to the prospect of new leadership of the Palestinian Authority, especially the speculation that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas will soon retire, and be replaced. It is also possible that this move is an attempt by the PA to create a stronger basis for creating an actual Palestinian state in an atmosphere in which the Oslo diplomatic framework has been superseded.

 

Without the prospect of a diplomatic resolution of the conflict by negotiation between the parties, the Abbas leadership is trying to establish for Palestine the status of an international state by way of its own unilateral moves. Israel on its side it trying by its unilateral initiatives to create its own expanded state that extends Israeli sovereignty over all or most of the West Bank, which remains legally ‘occupied’ despite a variety of fundamental encroachments on Palestinian autonomy. In other words we are witnessing contradictory moves by both Israel and Palestine to achieve their goals by unilateral political moves rather than through international diplomacy under U.S. auspices based on a negotiated agreement reflecting compromise. In the process both the PA and Israel are in the process abandoning earlier pretensions of democratic governance. This move by Abbas to dissolve the PLC is most accurately interpreted as the further de-democratization of Palestine, and the establishment of a more robust autocratic governing structure that does not inspire trust among many Palestinians and their supporters throughout the world. The failure, for instance, of the PA to back BDS is indicative of the gap between global solidarity initiatives and the timid leaders provided the Palestinian national movements by Abbas leadership in Ramallah.

 

2. How do you analyze the role of Hamas inside the political life of Palestinian people? 

 

It is again difficult to be too definite about the role of Hamas at this time. This is partly because Hamas is likely affected by the changes in the tactics and leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which continues to be internationally regarded as the sole representative of Palestinian interests while being subject to criticism and rejection by large segments of the Palestinian people, especially those spread about the world by being refugees, exiles, and displaced persons., For some time, Hamas has indicated its willingness to agree to a long-term truce (or hudna)with Israel lasting up to 50 years, but only on condition that Israel withdraws from the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as Gaza, and ends the blockade that has been used to deny the entry and exit of goods and people to Gaza ever since 2007. It is possible that a different leadership in Israel as a result of the April elections will produce a new Israeli approach to Gaza, which could include some kind of grant of autonomy or even independence as one type of alternative policy or intensified coercion that sought to destroy Hamas and its military capabilities as another.

 

What remains clear is that Hamas, as opposed to the PA, has been a consistent source of resistance to Israeli occupation and expansionism, although evidently willing to pursue its goals by political tactics rather than armed struggle. It is Israel that has insisted that Hamas is a terrorist organization, refusing even to consider establishing a ceasefire regime of indefinite length. It is also the case that Hamas is rooted in Islamic beliefs and practices, which are resented by secularized Muslims and non-Muslim Palestinians. This tension has erupted at various times in the course of the decade of Hamas governance in Gaza. Nevertheless, Hamas has popular support throughout occupied Palestine, and one explanation for the failure of the PA to hold elections is the anticipation that Hamas would likely be the winner, or at least make a strong showing.

 

3. Do you consider Hamas a danger for peace efforts building by Palestinian factions with Israel in future? Why?

There is no doubt that if the Palestinian Authority persists in excluding Hamas from participation in shaping the future of the national movement that the friction of recent years will continue, if not intensify. It is also possible that any new, post-Abbas PA leadership will try with increased motivation to find an embracing political framework that brings together the secular factions with those of religious persuasion, and especially Hamas. If the Trump ‘deal of the century’ is made public in coming months, and is treated as a serious proposal that is accepted as a basis of negotiation by the Palestinian Authority, then it would test whether the Palestinian people will be represented in a manner that joins in a single political actor secular and religious forces. The people of Gaza have suffered for many years, the conditions of poverty and environmental hazards are becoming more severe, with shortages of medical supplies, health hazards from polluted drinking water, astronomical levels of unemployment, and the absence of nutritious food creating emergency conditions for the entire civilian population of Gaza of about two million. Given these realities it is almost certain that Hamas will seek to pursue a more viable future for Gaza, but as the Great March of Return has demonstrated in recent months, the population, despite years of demoralization, retains a strong will to resist oppressive conditions of Israel domination.

 

      4-Until now all efforts to overcome the division between Hamas and Fatah didn’t work. Why? Why is it difficult to achieve a common sense?

I believe the principal reasons that all attempts to achieve a sustainable accommodation tween Hamas and Fatah have failed relate to both ideology and questions of trust. This failure has also been a consequence of Israel’s overt and covert feverish efforts to promote Palestinian disunity and fragmentation. Israel’s emphasis on a politics of fragmentation in addressing the Palestinian challenge is expressed in many ways, including establishing separate governance regimes for the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, as well as for the Palestinian minority living in Israel and the refugees in neighboring countries.

 

On ideology there are two main sources of division between Fatah and Hamas—the secular/religious divide, and the greater readiness of Fatah to accept and legitimate the permanence of the Israeli state than is Hamas. For Hamas Israel remains a usurper of Palestine, and such a illegitimate state that can never be formally accommodated, although as suggested, Hamas is prepared to accept a truce of long duration without altering its underlying claims to exercise sovereignty over the whole of historic Palestine. If such a truce was to be agreed upon by Israel it would amount to a de facto acceptance of Israel, and vice versa. If the truce held, it could lead to some kind of indefinite extension that would allow both governing leaderships to feel that they achieved their primary goals, in other words, a win/win outcome.

 

Fatah, at least since 1988, as well as the PLO, has been willing to normalize relations with Israel and to agree to a territorial division of Palestine along the 1967 boundaries, provided that the arrangement provided for the retention of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. As matters now stand, it is almost unimaginable that Israel would accept the Hamas approach to a future relationship, and given the continuing expansion of the settlements it seems unlikely that Israel would agree to the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state under any conditions, that is, even if Hamas did not exist.

 

It is quite likely that Israel would seek to impose a one-state solution by annexing the West Bank in a manner similar to their annexation of the city of Jerusalem. The unresolved tensions between Fatah and Hamas are in my judgment less fundamental than is Israel’s increasing clarity about rejecting any negotiated compromise on such core issues as territory, refugees, and Jerusalem. Israel seems to regard the present situation as one in which it feels almost no pressure to compromise, and instead that it is possible for Tel Aviv to push forward toward an end of the conflict by claiming victory, a view endorsed by Zionist extremists and seemingly supported by the Trump diplomacy to date. I find these perspectives to be shortsighted and unsustainable. Even should the Palestinian leadership is forced given present realities to accept a political surrender, such an induced outcome will produce a ceasefire not a lasting peace. In this post-colonial age denying the Palestinian people their fundamental right of self-determination is almost certain to be unable to withstand the tests of time.

 

 

 

        5- In your opinion what is the recipe or formula to make all Palestinians join together in pursuing common goal, which is the establishment of Palestine State?

 

I have partially given my answer to this question in earlier responses to your questions. In essence, I am arguing that given the present outlook in Israel, as well as regional and global considerations,

It is not possible to envision the establishment of a Palestinian state even if Palestinians were able to achieve unity and went on to accept the 1967 boundaries excluding the Israeli settlement blocs along the border. Israel no longer hides its intention to expand its state boundaries to encompass the whole of ‘the promised land,’ considered a biblical entitlement within the dominant view of the Zionist project.

 

As earlier suggested, Israel will do its best to disrupt Palestinian efforts to overcome the cleavages in their movement so as to keep the Palestinian movement as fragmented as possible. As long as the United States continues its unconditional support Israel seems able to ignore the adverse character of international public opinion, as exhibited at the UN and elsewhere. Israel makes little secret of the absence of any  pressure to seek a political compromise. Ever since the 1990s a political compromised has been assumed to mean an independent  Palestinian state. Only recently, as Israel’s expansionism has made a Palestinian state a diplomatic non-starter and even a political impossibility has the idea of a single state embracing both peoples gained traction.

 

This shift to a one-state approach has taken to two forms: a single democratic secular state in which the expansionist goals of Zionism are renounced, and no longer would a Jewish state as such exist. Jews would have to accept equality of treatment within such a non-ethnic state, although the establishment of a Jewish homeland might be possible. The alternative single statehood model would be to absorb all Palestinians into a single Jewish state of Israel, perhaps conferring full or more likely partial citizenship rights to Palestinians. Both of these statehood models are post-diplomatic, as is the PA effort to establish a state of its own while enduring a prolonged occupation.

 

The Israeli version of a single state outcome of the struggle is more in keeping with present realities than is the Palestinian version. Such as assessment also gains strength by noting that the main Arab neighbors of Israel, in particular Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have withdrawn support for Palestinian national aspirations, and are actively cooperating with Israel, giving an Arab priority to the containment of extremist threats to their governments and to their sectarian rivalry with Iran. All in all, the regional and global geopolitical trends of late remove almost all incentives on the Israeli side to do anything other than to manage the favorable status quo until the moment arrives when it seems right to declare and claim that the boundaries of New Israel encompass of the entire territory managed between the two world wars as the British Mandate of Palestine.

 

As matters now stand it is utopian to anticipate a Palestinian state or a single secular democratic state, but these conditions that seem currently so favorable to Israel are unstable and deceptive, and unlikely to last. There are signs that a position of balanced support as between  Israel and Palestine is gaining strength in the West, especially among the American public. Account should also be taken of a growing global solidarity movement that has become more militant, and exerts greater pressure on Israel, especially by way of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign (BDS). In this respect, conditions could change rapidly as happened in South Africa in the early 1990s against all expectations and expert opinion at the time. Israel is increasing regarded as an apartheid state, which the Knesset itself virtually acknowledged by enacting in 2018 the Basic Law of the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Finally, it should be appreciated that by virtue of Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is classified as a crime against humanity. The experience of South Africa, although very different in its particular, is instructive with respect to the untenability over time of apartheid structures of control over a resisting ethnicity. Whatever the governance arrangement, Palestinian resistance will produce a cycle of insurgent and repressive violence, and this can provide stability for Israel only so long as its apartheid regime remains in place. If the apartheid regime is dismantled it would be accompanied by the end of any claim to impose a Jewish state on the Palestinian people.

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The New New Anti-Semitism

18 Nov

The New New Anti-Semitism

 

 

Hiding Israel’s Crimes of State Behind False Claims of Victimization

 

I along with many others am being victimized these days. They are being labeled anti-Semites, and in some instances, self-hating Jews as well. This is a Zionist and Israeli effort to shut down our voices and punish our non-violent activism, with special venom directed at the BDS Campaign because it has become so effective in recent years. This negative branding of the opposition is being called ‘the new anti-Semitism.’ The old anti-Semitism was simply hatred of Jews as expressed through negative images and attitudes, as well as discriminatory practices, persecution, and vigilante violence. The new anti-Semitism is criticism of Israel and Zionism, and it has been endorsed by governments friendly to Israel and pushed by a variety of prominent Jewish organizations, including some associated with Holocaust survivors and memories. Emmanuel Macron, President of France, put this pushback by apologists for Israel rather clearly, if in a rather malicious form: “We will never surrender to the expressions of hatred. We will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is the reinvention of anti-Semitism.” The false premise is equating Zionism with Jews, automatically making criticism and opposition to the Zionist state of Israel as anti-Semitism.

 

Already in 2008 the U.S. State Department moved more subtly in a direction similar to that of Macron with this formal statement: “Motives for criticizing Israel in the UN may stem from legitimate concerns over policy or from illegitimate prejudices. […] However, regardless of the intent, disproportionate criticism of Israel as barbaric and unprincipled, and corresponding discriminatory measures adopted in the UN against Israel, have the effect of causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general, thus fueling anti-Semitism.” The fallacy here is to view criticism as ‘disproportionate’ without ever considering the realities of Israel’s long record of unlawfulness with regard to the Palestinian people. To those of us who view the reality of Israeli policies and practices have little doubt that the criticisms being advanced, and the pressures being exerted, are in every sense proportionate.

 

A related argument often made is that Israel is being held to higher standards than other states, and this discloses an anti-Semitic sub-text. Such an argument is disingenuous. It is not a defense to suggest that the criminality of others is more severe. Besides, the U.S. subsidizes Israel to the extent of at least $3.8 billion a year, besides its unconditional backing of its behavior, creating some responsibility to impose limits according with international humanitarian law. As well, the UN contributed to the Palestinian ordeal by failing to implement the partition solution, and allowing for 70 years for millions of Palestinians to be subject to apartheid structures of domination. No other people can so justifiably blame external forces for its own sustained tragedy.

 

 

In 2014 Noam Chomsky explained the false logic of such an allegation with typical moral and intellectual clarity: “Actually, the locus classicus, the best formulation of this, was by an ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, […] He advised the American Jewish community that they had two tasks to perform. One task was to show that criticism of the policy, what he called anti-Zionism — that means actually criticisms of the policy of the state of Israel — were anti-Semitism. That’s the first task. Second task, if the criticism was made by Jews, their task was to show that it’s neurotic self-hatred, needs psychiatric treatment. Then he gave two examples of the latter category. One was I.F. Stone. The other was me. So, we have to be treated for our psychiatric disorders, and non-Jews have to be condemned for anti-Semitism, if they’re critical of the state of Israel. That’s understandable why Israeli propaganda would take this position. I don’t particularly blame Abba Eban for doing what ambassadors are sometimes supposed to do. But we ought to understand that there is no sensible charge. No sensible charge. There’s nothing to respond to. It’s not a form of anti-Semitism. It’s simply criticism of the criminal actions of a state, period.”

 

 

One feature of this new anti-Semitism is its non-response to the well-evidenced allegations of crimes against humanity made by those being labeled as anti-Semites. Do these ardent supporters of Israel really carry their sense of impunity to such an extent that silence is allowed to stand as an adequate defense? Underlying such a denial of the very idea of legal accountability and moral responsibility is this sense of Israeli exceptionalism, an outlook toward international criminal law that it shares with American exceptionalism. Those who adhere to such exceptionalism purport to be outraged even by the implication that such a government might be subject to the norms embedded in the statute of the International Criminal Court or the UN Charter. Israeli exceptionalism does have its own roots in biblical tradition, especially a secular reading of Jews as ‘the chosen people,’ but really rests on a comfort zone created by the geopolitical umbrella shielding its most law-defying moves from global scrutiny. Illustrative of many such protective actions was the recent UN General Assembly Resolution declaring Israeli steps toward the annexation of the Golan Heights to be null and void, with only Israel and the United States voting ‘no’ as against 151 UN members voting ‘yes.’

 

If we take just a minute to consult international law we find the issue so obvious as to be unworthy of serious discussion. A cardinal principle of contemporary international law, often affirmed by the UN in other contexts, is the impermissibility of the acquisition of territory by force of arms. There is no dispute that Golan Heights were part of Syrian sovereign territory until the 1967 War, and that Israel acquired control that it has exercised ever since as a result of forcible occupation.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ironies of the New New Anti-Semitism

 

There is an opportunistic irony present. The new anti-Semitism seems to have no trouble embracing Christian Zionist despite their hostility to Jews that is coupled with their fanatical devotion to Israel as a Jewish state. Anyone who has watched a Christian Zionist briefing knows that their reading of the Book of Revelations involves an interpretation that Jesus will return once all Jews return to Israel and the most holy temple in Jerusalem is restored. Such a process does not end there. Jews then face an ultimatum to convert to Christianity or face eternal damnation. And so there is present among these fanatical friends of Israel a genuine hostility to Jews, both by trying to insist that ending the Jewish diaspora as a matter of religious imperative for Christians, and in the dismal fate that awaits Jews who refuse to convert after The Second Coming.

 

An illuminating perversity is present. Unlike the new anti-Semites that have no hostility to Jews as people, the Christian Zionists give priority to their enthusiasm for the state of Israel, while being ready to disrupt the lives of diaspora Jews and eventually even Israeli and Zionist Jews. Maybe it is less perversity than opportunism. Israel has never had any reluctance to support the most oppressive and dictatorial leaders of foreign countries provided they buy arms and do not adopt an anti-Israeli diplomacy. Netanyahu’s congratulatory message to Jair Bolsonaro the newly elected leader of Brazil is but the most recent instance, and Israel received a quick reward by an announcement of a decision to join  the United States in moving its embassy to Jerusalem. In effect, the new anti-Semitism is comfortable with both Christian Zionism and with foreign political leaders that exhibit fascist inclinations. In effect, a blind eye toward the core reality of true anti-Semitism is a characteristic of the new anti-Semitism so favored by militant Zionists. For abundant documentation see the important book by Jeff Halper,War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (2015).

 

Against such a background, we need a descriptive term that identifies this phenomenon and rejects its insidious claims. I am here proposing the inelegant label ‘the new new anti-Semitism.’ The idea of such a label is to suggest that it is the new anti-Semites not the critics and activists critical of Israel that are the real bearers of hatred toward Jews as Jews. Two kinds of arguments are contained in this pushback against the campaign seeking to discredit or even criminalize the ‘new anti-Semites.’ First, it deflects criticism from the persistence of an alarming reality, the continuing ordeal of apartheid imposed on all the Palestinian people as a whole, which should become the salient concern for all who wish the best for humanity. Secondly, it deliberately or unwittingly diverts attention from, and confuses, objections to real anti-Semitism by accepting on behalf of the state of Israel the embrace of Christian Zionists (and evangelicals) along with that of fascist leaders who preach messages of ethnic hatred.

 

To conclude, we who are attacked as new anti-Semites are really trying to honor our humanidentity, and to reject tribalist loyalties or geopolitical alignments, in our commitment to the realization of Palestinian rights, above all their right of self-determination. As Jews to hold Israel accountable under standards that were used to condemn Nazi surviving political and military leaders is to honor the legacy of the Holocaust, not to defile it. In contrast, when Israel sells weapons and offers counterinsurgency training to fascist led governments around the world or remains ready to accept post-Khashoggi Saudi Arabia as a valued ally, it obscures the evil nature of the Holocaust in ways that could haunt Israel and even diaspora Jews in the future.

 

 

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