[Prefatory Note: This is a slightly modified text of an article published in Middle East Eye on September 1, 2015, and republished on my blog with permission. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/israel-s-likud-troika-and-end-oslo-peace-process-1425103979]
Israel’s relentless accumulation of territorial facts on the ground some years ago doomed the peace process associated with the Oslo Framework of Principles adopted in 1993. It became increasingly difficult to envisage an Israeli willingness to dismantle settlements and road network or remove the separation barrier, and without such steps there could never be achieved an independent and viable Palestinian state. It should be kept in mind, without even raising the issue of the right of return of at least five million Palestinian refugees living outside of Palestine, that the whole premise of Palestinian statehood was based on the green line ceasefire borders that emerged from the 1967 borders. Even if Israel were persuaded to withdraw from the entirety of occupied Palestine, it would amount to only 22% of historic Palestine, less than half of what the UN recommended to a much smaller population by way of partition in 1947 (GA Res. 181). Yet even in those days of illusion when Israel was purporting to be receptive to the two-state approach it insisted on carving out a permanent security zone in the agriculturally rich Jordan Valley and maintaining a significant measure of border control.
For years Israel has played along with the diplomatic consensus constructed on basis of a two-state solution of the conflict as the only reasonable politically compromise. Israel had lots to gain from upholding this consensus, but quite a bit to lose by actually implementing it in a reasonable manner. Maintaining the diplomatic track satisfies its own citizenry and world public opinion that it is doing everything possible to reach a peaceful end of the conflict. In the course of such events, Israel gained the time it needed to expand the settlement phenomenon until it became so extensive as to negate any reasonable prospect for substantial reversal. And yet by relying on its sophisticated control of the media it could pin most of the blame on the Palestinian Authority for one round after another of failed bilateral negotiations. This in turn made it possible to mount propaganda campaigns around even the false claim that Israel lacked a Palestinian partner for peace negotiations.
While this diversionary process has continued for more than two decades, Israeli consolidated its influence in the U.S. Congress, which strengthened an already unprecedented ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. These dynamics made a mockery of Washington’s claim to be a neutral intermediary. And above all, the consensus pacified the international community, which repeatedly joining the public chorus calling for resumed negotiations. This became a cynical process with diplomats whispering in the corridors of UN buildings that the diplomatic effort to end the conflict was a sham while their governments kept restating their faith in the Oslo approach.
As argued here, the present futility of Oslo diplomacy has been indirectly acknowledged by Israel, and should be explicitly abandoned by the world community. Whether Israel’s was ever prepared to accept a Palestinian state remains in doubt. The fact that each prime minister since Oslo, and this includes Yitzhak Rabin, endorsed settlement expansion raises suspicions about Israel’s true intentions, but there were also indications that Tel Aviv earlier had looked with favor upon the diplomatic option provided that it could, with American backroom help, persuade the Palestinians to swallow a one-sided bargain that incorporated the settlement blocs and satisfied Israel’s security goals.
In the last couple of years the veil has been lifted, and it is overdue to declare Oslo diplomacy a failure that has been costly for the Palestinian people and their aspirations. We can reinforce this assessment by pointing to three connected developments at the pinnacle of Israeli state power, dominated in recent years by the right wing Likud Party. The first is the election by the Knesset in 2014 of Reuven Rivlin as the tenth Israeli president.
Rivlin is a complex political figure in Likud politics, a party rival of Netanyahu, a longtime advocate of a one-state solution that calls for the annexation of the West Bank, and an opponent of international diplomacy. The complexity arises because Rivlin’s vision is one of humane, democratic participation of the Palestinian population, conferring citizenship based on fully equality, and even envisioning an ethnic confederation of the two peoples to be achieved within Israel’s expanded sovereign borders.
The second development was the campaign promise made by Netanyahu on the eve of the March elections that a Palestinian state would never be established so long as he was prime minister. This startling break with the American posture was also a reversion to Netanyahu’s initial opposition to the Oslo Framework, and bitter denunciations of Rabin for embracing a process expected to result in Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s 2015 campaign pledge seemed closer to his true position all along if judged by his behavior although contradicting what his talk at Bar Ilan University back in 2009 when he declared support for Palestinian statehood as the only way for Israel to achieve peace with security. To slightly mend relations with Washington after his recent electoral victory, Netanyahu always crafty, again modified his position, by saying that in the heat of the elections he only meant that no Palestinian state could be established so long as jihadi turmoil in the region persisted. Given the extent of Israeli territorial encroachments on occupied Palestine I would trust Netanyahu’s electoral promise much more than his later clarification, a feeble attempt to restore confidence in the special relationship with the United States.
The third development, which should remove the last shred of ambiguity with respect to a diplomatic approach, is the designation of Danny Danon as Israel’s next ambassador at the UN. Danon is a notorious settlement hawk, long an outspoken advocate of West Bank annexation, arrogantly disdaining the arts of diplomacy needed to deflect the hostile UN atmosphere. If Israel felt that it had anything to gain by maintaining the Oslo illusion, then certainly Danon would not have been the UN pick. There are plenty of Israel diplomats skilled in massaging world public opinion that could have been sent to New York, but this was not the path chosen.
How shall we best understand this Israeli turn toward forthrightness? In the first instance, it reflects the primacy of domestic politics, and a corresponding attitude by Israel’s leaders that it has little need to appease world opinion or accommodate Washington’s insistence that diplomacy, while not now working, remains the only road leading to a peaceful solution.
Furthermore, the Likud troika seems to be converging on a unilateralist approach to the conflict with the Palestinians, while doing its best to distract the international attention by exaggerating the threat posed by Iran. This unilateralist approach can move in two directions: The Netanyahu direction, which is a shade more internationalist, and involves continuing the process of de facto annexation of occupied Palestine, reinforced by an apartheid structure of control over the Palestinian people; the Rivlin/Danon direction overtly incorporating the West Bank into Israel, and then either following the democratic and human rights path of treating the two peoples equally or hardening still further the oppressive regime of discriminatory control established during over 48 years of occupation.
While this Israeli scenario of conflict resolution unfolds most governments, not sensing an alternative, continue to proclaim their allegiance to a two-state solution despite its manifest disappointments and poor prospects. At present, there are a series of international gestures toward lifting the peace process from its deathbed. Sisi of Egypt hosts Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority proclaiming a readiness to mediate bilateral negotiations, and even Netanyahu in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s inability to scuttle the Iran Nuclear Agreement has the temerity to indicate an interest in renewed peace talks. In effect, ‘Oslo is dead, long live Oslo.’ Put differently, the political death of Oslo is being disguised by a diplomatic afterlife. It will be shameful if the Ramallah leadership again enters this cynically set diplomatic trap. As the above analysis shows there is no evidence whatsoever that Israel is at all inclined to allow an independent sovereign Palestinian state to come into existence. Israel is even fought hard against allowing Palestine to fly national flag in front of the UN building. Of course, as in the past, Israel will for the sake of public relations, including rehabilitating its ‘special relationship’ with the United States, evidently again play this cruel game of charades. But why are the Palestinians willing to be partners to such a sham?
This see-no-evil posture of governments, and even the UN, ignores the emergence of two more promising alternatives: the gathering momentum of civil society activism exhibited via the BDS campaign and increasingly acknowledged by Israel as its most security threat, leading recently to the establishment of an official ‘Delegitimation Department’ assigned to do battle with the Palestinian solidarity movement.
And on a diplomatic level, pursued with some energy and imagination by the Palestinian Authority, is the use of international law and Palestinian statehood to engage the wider international community of states in support of its struggle. Several examples illustrate the approach: the 2012 General Assembly endorsement of Palestinian statehood; the adherence to prominent international law treaties and conventions; admission as member to UNESCO; adherence to the Rome Treaty framing the activities of the International Criminal Court; and just days ago, the GA approval of the wish of Palestine, although having the status of a non-member observer state, to fly its national flag alongside the flags of UN members at UN buildings. With the abandonment of armed struggle and the breakdown of bilateral diplomacy, Palestinian recourse to legitimacy tactics reinforces the civil society global solidarity network that has been exerting increasing pressure on Israel.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
ACTING BEYOND THE STATE: TOWARD A COSMOPOLITAN AWAKENING?
20 Jun[Prefatory Note: The following review of Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanityis scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the London Review of International Law.]
ACTING BEYOND THE STATE: TOWARD A COSMOPOLITAN AWAKENING?
Ayça Çubukçu,For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity theorizes the global anti-war movement occasioned by the Iraq War of 2003 around her experience of involvement in an elaborate global initiative culminating in a tribunal established by ‘world citizens’ that held its final session in Istanbul. Beyond question, the Iraq War Tribunal (WTI) was an extraordinary undertaking from start to its finish, a worldwide non-hierarchical network of civil society activists that prior to the Istanbul finale in 2005 had organized separate tribunal sessions devoted to the Iraq War in major cities around the world including London, Seoul, Copenhagen, New York, Stockholm, several Japanese cities, Rome, Frankfurt, Genoa, Barcelona, Lisbon. Although there are many examples of prior citizen tribunalson a variety of controversial issues, none before achieved this global scale or were guided by such a grand visionary ambition.
The acknowledged inspirational origin of the WTI was the Bertrand Russell Tribunal organized in 1967 to document American criminality associated with its engagement in the Vietnam War. Relying on the prestige of the great British philosopher and his influential moral voice this innovative tribunal based its credibility on the participation of celebrity Western left intellectuals, with Jean-Paul Sartre serving as President.[1]What was most notable about the Russell Tribunal was the novel appropriation of a statist legal framework by private citizens for the purpose of conducting a comprehensive legal inquiry into the Vietnam War. The Tribunal secretariat gathered testimonies of witnesses and commentaries of experts, but based its authority to pass judgment largely on the reputation of its 24 prominent members, mostly men, including such iconic cultural figures as James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and Peter Weiss. Among its members was Lelio Basso, a prominent Italian jurist and legislative figure who later founded the Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT) in Rome on the basis of this experience, which has held many comparable sessions over the intervening years on a variety of issues that governments and the UN found too hot to handle.
As Ayça Çubukçushows so brilliantly, relying on an ethnographic approach, the WTI was shaped with this background in mind, but with much more organizational self-consciousness and sense of enduring purpose that any earlier civil society initiative of this kind. WTI also featured a populist, feminist, and activist organizing strategy that was very different in style and substance than all earlier tribunal initiatives that were the work of progressive elites as facilitated by a closely knit group of organizers. Çubukçurecounts, as integral to the process, the conceptual struggles among the organizers about how to address the challenge of claiming an authority to pass legal judgement not only on the behavior of powerful sovereign states but also on the criminal culpability of their leaders. The ‘law’ framing this populist venture involved a convergence of motives, chief among which is the claim that ultimate sovereignty is located in people as a belonging to nascent polity of humanity rather than the institutions of government, whether national or international. Additionally, a justification for WTI was the widely endorsed political assumption that geopolitical leverage had paralyzed international law and the UN, allowing the overriding of Iraq’s sovereign rights causing negative impacts on global justice, world peace, and the wellbeing of Iraqi people. Relying on unattributed direct quotations of the participants at a lengthy WTI organizing session, Çubukçumakes us appreciate the clarifying fact that the organizers shared an overall hostility to the Iraq War despite their realization that the US/UK intervention had toppled a cruel dictator, guilty of many crimes against humanity. In this way the mission adopted by the WTI was to accord priority to worldwide anti-war and anti-imperial goals even granting that there were some human rights benefits resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
This policy assessment was the backdrop for a broader, fundamental, essentially jurisprudential question about the nature of the WTI as an initiative with many of the legal trappings and pretensions of a judicial proceeding yet conducted without the presence of the defendants or any prospect of enforcement. Çubukçuis attentive to this crucial issue of how to endow the WTI with legitimacy given its lack of formal authority. The Russell Tribunal was dismissed in mainstream circles as an anti-war propaganda stunt, a kangaroo court that proceeded on the basis of pre-determined conclusions that were alleged to make a mockery of the tribunal format. At the same time, the law framing of the inquiry was believed necessary to give WTI a credibility with mainstream opponents of war and the media that it could not have achieved by way of a mere political condemnation. In effect, the WTI was claiming that its proceedings provided the public with correct interpretations of international criminal law. These interpretations filled the normative vacuum created by the political failure of the current world order system to overcome the impunity of geopoliticalwrongdoers.
Considering the issue more deeply, it is well to recall that the generally affirmed war crimes tribunals after World War II (at Nuremberg and Tokyo) also went forward on the basis of pre-determined results, although the defendants were present in the courtroom, accorded partial rights of defense, and the judgment reached was enforced and the defendants punished. These tribunals did receive criticism as ‘victor’s justice,’ but mainly because of impunity, that is, the crimes of the winners (e.g. strategic bombing, atomic attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki) were not subject to prosecution and could not even be invoked as defenses by those accused. Çubukçudiscusses in some detail the contrast between the parallel American organized trial of Iraqi leaders held under the auspices of the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad and the subsequent execution of Saddam Hussein. Such a formalized judicial proceeding in Iraq was obviously intended to serve as a kind of vindicating ritual for the attack, yet compromised by impunity for the crimes of the US/UK attackers and occupiers, as well as by the bloody end game of the botched execution of Saddam Hussein. It was as much a show trial as anything done during the notorious Stalin period in the Soviet Union that also indulged in judicial escapades, and in terms of the quality of the legal assessment compared unfavorablyto the overall undertaking of the WTI.
What most interests Çubukçuis the challenge of using the legal scaffolding by WTI while not endowing international law with sanctity, given its historic role of upholding war and justifying imperial undertakings, including in the past European colonialism. She instructively compares the role of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo that gave a qualified endorsement to the Kosovo War with the WTI to make the point that the NATO War in 1999 set an unfortunate legal precedent for the Iraq War. In effect, international law enjoys, at best, an equivocal relationship to justice when it comes to restraining war making diplomacy of dominant states, and so should not be unconditionally affirmed.
In this sense, Cubukcu’s most provocative contribution is undoubtedly the quite original depiction of the driving force that animated the formation and operation of the WTI. In her striking formulation it was ‘the love of humanity.’ The thirst for legalism, a concern with justice per se, and building a global anti-war movement were all contributing factors, but as complements to the core motivation of ‘species love.’ This conclusion overrides, but does not invalidate the claims of the WTI to clarify the relevance of international law against geopolitical violators. The love of humanity encompasses the anti-war animus of a global movement that made use of a tribunal format so as continue activist opposition to the bellicose behavior of the United States that was hiding its imperial master plan behind a hypocritical commitment to protect human rights and promote democracy. In her view, the WTI, above and beyond all else was an expression of an emergent cosmopolitan ethos of species love that transcended national boundaries and could only be activated by the agency of the peoples of the world. It was this activation by the WTI that is for Çubukçuits greatest achievement, as well as constitutes the ultimate basis of its legitimacy.
The book ends somewhat enigmatically with a pronouncement that law and empire cannot be reliably disentangled, and for this reason law must be ‘interrogated and overturned’ in a similar progressive move that provided the stimulus to the WTI and the repudiation of the Iraq War. Instead of law, Çubukçuopts for a humanistic version of cosmopolitan populism, expressed by reference to species identity, and given a special twist by invoking the unexpected strong referent of ‘love.’ The book ends whimsically with these words: “Perhaps then, less violent and necessary may be acting for the love of humanity.” (157) We can only hope thatÇubukçu’s next ambitious book will be devoted to explicating this tantalizing sentence!
Part of what makes this book so impressive is that its radical vision is sustained and deepened by sophisticated reference to the ideas of many of the leading European political philosophers of the last hundred years and by a social science methodology that relies on an ethnographic record compiled by a participant-observer who doubles as author. This fine, memorable book possesses a theoretical and practical significance that extends well beyond the confines of the WTI experience.[2]Çubukçunot only observes, reports, philosophically comments, but she engages by taking sides. As such, she is part of a recent academic trend toward ‘partisan objectivity,’ disclosing openly the author’s point of view rather than pretending neutrality. For anyone concerned about political activism, transnational organizing, a new progressive agenda, international law, the ethics of resistance, and the post-colonial, post-Cold War world order this book is required reading.
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[1]For an account of the Russell Tribunal including a text of the proceedings see John Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence (Flanders, NJ: O’Hare Books, 1968)
[2]For a comprehensive presentation of the WTI proceedings see Muge Gursoy Sokmen,World Tribunal of Iraq: Making the Case Against War(Olive Branch Press, 2008).
Tags: anti-war 'law', Ayça Çubukçu , civil society activism, Iraq War Tribunal, legitimacy