Tag Archives: Complicity Crimes

South African ICJ Initiative, Gaza Atrocities, and the Ceasefire Imperative

20 Jan

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a much modified set of responses to questions posed by Mohamed Elmenshawy a journalist working at Al Jazeera Arabic from Washington  (1/10/2024).

1. How should we interpret the South Africa allegation that Israel’s military operations in Gaza violate the country’s obligations under the United Nations Genocide Convention and that its actions constitute genocide?

Israel’s military operations have lasted more than three months, but from almost their very outset objective observers felt confronted by ‘a text book case’ of genocide as the military onslaught was systematically and openly aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable and inflicting severe suffering on innocent civilians in flagrant violation of basic rules of international law. Such a military campaign was proclaimed in these extremist terms by Israel’s top political and military leaders and consistently exhibited in practice by the sadistic tactics relied upon by Israel’s armed forces. Disregarding official language that called for turning Gaza into ‘a parking lot’ or ‘emptying Gaza of all Palestinians’ or posing a choice of ‘leave or die’ disclose a stunning defiance of the criminal prohibition against the crime of genocide. Israel overlooks the fact that it was a party to the Genocide Convention, which pledged respect for this unconditional limitation on state behavior, meaning that neither self-defense nor anti-terrorism could provide a legally credible basis for Israel’s behavior toward Gaza since October 7. In addition, Israel twists the facts and evidence as in its presentation to ICJ, by contending that the Hamas attack was the real occasion of genocide and that it is Israel that is defending itself against a genocidal adversary.


2.      What happens if South Africa wins at the ICJ?

We cannot know how Israel and the United States, and other countries would respond, but we can offer an informed opinion that draws on Israeli allegations against South Africa, insisting that the mere bringing of a legal dispute alleging the reality of genocide in Gaza amounts to a blood libel against the Jewish people, and in the more guarded secular language of the US State Department that the South African initiative is ‘meritless’ as it lacks an acceptable legal basis in fact. The US is likely if necessary to use its veto power in the Security Council and disregard any General Assembly resolution that called for compliance with whatever Provisional Measures the ICJ decrees, as it is authorized to do under Article 41(1) of the Statute governing its operations.

If this anticipated sequence of evasive or defiant non-compliance occurs, it will likely lead to large and sustained protests throughout the world, including in the North American and former European countries that have lent Israel varying degrees of support and initially gave their full-throated  approval to Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack. The rising opposition to Israeli behavior in Gaza is posing serious destabilization threats of adverse political consequences in some countries, typified by the widespread labeling of Israel as ‘a pariah state’ in some settings, and to a dramatic escalation in the nature and militancy of global solidarity initiatives throughout the world including recourse to sports and cultural boycotts, and calls for an arms embargo and international sanctions. This civil society activism has the potential leverage to transform the discursive approach to the underlying conflict of many governments in the Global South and possibly in Israel and its governmental supporters. This happened to the surprise of many in South Africa, although under very different circumstances.


3.      What happens if South Africa loses at the ICJ?

Israel would undoubtedly gloat, celebrating a lawfare victory, and demeaning critics of Israel’s tactics in its Operation Swords of Iron as hysterical antisemites. It would also lead Israel and the US to feel vindicated by the refusal to follow the global majority favoring an early ceasefire.

Those supporting the South African initiative would likely react with a mixture of perplexing confusion and outright anger at this disappointing outcome at the ICJ. How could the highest court in the world look at such overwhelming evidence so well presented to the Court by the South African legal team, and decide perversely and unprofessionally. Assuming even a split reaction to a majority decision in which the Global West stood behind Israel and rejecting the views of those adopting the perspectives of the Global South, the Court’s stature as a legal tribunal deserving the utmost respect of UN member states would be drastically reduced, temporarily at least.

There is a middle ground based on a highly technical and legalistic jurisdictional argument put forward by Israel at the ICJ hearings to the effect that any action by the Court would be ‘premature’ as there was a failure to establish that a ‘legal dispute’ between the parties existed prior to when the application to the Court was submitted. This argument was refuted by the South African team at the ICJ January hearings, but it could relieve the Court, or some of its judges, of the duty to resolve the awkward dilemma at the core of South Africa’s request for Provisional Measures, which pits legal propriety against political expediency.

In some respects, the most significant result of a negative decision or even a technical evasion would be widespread disappointment producing a probable reaction in world public opinion to the effect that the World Court is out of touch with the flow of history, and in light of this, a dramatic increase in global solidarity initiatives along BDS lines will occur exhibiting surging transnational activism. The growing belief that only civil society activism has any prospect of terminating this terrible humanitarian ca such as has been unfolding in Gaza this in which the primacy of geopolitics disregards law and morality when strategic interests are at stake.

In a sense, whether South Africa’s request that the Court issue Provisional Measures to stop the genocide succeeds or fails might not make a big immediate difference as to the substantive impact of its decision. If the Court grants the South African request Israel will almost certainly refuse to comply which will produce civil society anger and coercive actions in response to Israel’s non-compliance. Whereas if the request is rejected, an angry populist response would also escalate civil society engagement and add to present hostility toward Israel in many parts of the world. In the latter case some of the frustration would be directed at ICJ as a flawed or politicized institution, whereas if its positive decision is ignored, most of the frustration would be expressed as anger toward Israel and the US. In other words, win or lose, the implementation of the norms of the Genocide Convention are subject to formal nullification by what has afflicted the whole UN system when it comes to enforcement—the primacy of geopolitics in determining the presence or absence of a sufficient political will on the part of actors with requisite capabilities to achieve enforcement of authoritative judicial decisions. The prospect of geopolitical obstruction in response to the South African initiative dooms orderly compliance in the event that the ICJ grants the request for Provisional Measures to stop Israeli violence until a decision of the merits is forthcoming on the allegation of the crime of genocide.

4.      Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli military is the “most moral army in the world”, Do you agree with him? why?

This was never more than a highly inflated claim made by Israel’s formidable hasbara, or simply. the message transmitted by its state propaganda machine and repeated throughout the Global West by Israel support groups. The Goldstone Report of a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission undertaken after the 2008-09 massive land/sea/air attack on the essentially helpless people of Gaza contains hard evidence of a series of war crimes relating to Israel’s tactics and weapons. It should be appreciated that Israel has a special obligation in Gaza to protect the civilian population, accentuated by its status as the Occupying Power, and hence subject to the legal constraints contained in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. It should be remembered that years before the current encounter, even conservative international visitors, for example, David Cameron, referred to Gaza as ‘the largest open air prison in the world.” It is hardly surprising that individuals driven from their homes and homeland decades ago, then denied a right of return, and finally permanently  ‘imprisoned’ for no crime where they kept on what a prominent government advisor called ‘a subsistence diet,’ would at some point risk everything to achieve a jail break, what Norman Finkelstein termed ‘a slave revolt.’ From a legal and moral point of view, to the extent validated by independent sources, the Hamas attack on October 7 included war crimes, and unlawful hostage-taking, and should be repudiated, although part of a legitimate act of resistance against prolonged oppressive occupation.

Looked at less legalistically and more strategically, Israel has since 1967 used Gaza as a valuable experimental combat area where it could demonstrate the efficiency of its counter-terrorism capabilities a warning to its enemies and as a sales pitch to other governments helpful in winning customers for its robust arms industry, including in relation to innovations in tactics, weaponry, and training. It also wanted to show hostile countries in its neighborhood that it would retaliate against provocations with disproportionate force. It formulated such an approach in the Dahiya Doctrine back in the early 1980s, a mode of thinking that justified the destruction of a poor neighborhood in south Beirut that was known to be a Hezbollah stronghold enjoyed populist support. It is this Dahiya Doctrine, in a geometrically magnified form, that underlies the security justification for Israel’s horrifying response to the attack of October 7th, and to the extent that Israel response is deemed by a growing number of observers as an instance of genocide making a mockery of attempts to continuing to portray Israeli armed forces as ‘the most moral in the world.’ Morality does not mix well with official assertions from political leaders and military commanders that the Palestinians as a people are sub-human and deserve to be treated as such. The whole international movement to protect human rights rests on the foundation of human equality, and the universality of the legal entitlement to human dignity.  

5.    How does the war on Gaze affect the respect and prestige of International Law?

The short-term, yet insufficient, answer will be greatly influenced by how the ICJ handles the South African request for Provisional Measures, and whether the states of the world, particularly Israel and the UN, exhibit defiance or respect for the outcome. Also relevant is the degree to which civil society is favorably impressed by the ICJ response to the South African request, including its prompt delivery. A positive result will have some redeeming effects on street-level perceptions of international law around the world, and act persuasively to support the view that even when states refuse compliance and the UN is helpless to act, international law can be useful for advocates of justice through legality.

If we broaden the optic beyond the legal assessment of the violence of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it becomes obvious that Israel has long openly violated international humanitarian law during its period of Gaza occupation that started with its victory in the 1967 War. Among many unlawful policies, Israel can be charged with during this period when it had the added obligations associated with being the Occupying Power in relation to Occupied Palestine, the most blatant are collective punishment, establishment of Jewish settlements in occupied territory, claims of sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, appropriation of water and other resources in the West Bank, failure to withdraw from territories occupied during the 1967 War or to fulfill in good faith the primary duties as specified in the 4th Geneva Convention to protect the Palestinian people subject to its administrative authority as the Occupying Power. Israel also refused to heed the near unanimous ICJ Advisory Opinion of 2004 challenging the construction of a separation wall on occupied Palestinian territory. In general, Israel has defied international law whenever compliance would seriously interfere with its national policies and strategic priorities as pertaining to the Palestinian people. At the same time Israel invokes international law whenever it could be used to justify its actions or complain about Palestinian resistance. Its pathetic lines of argument January 11th ICJ Hearings on the South Africa initiative sought to invert the facts and evidence by casting itself in the role of the victim of Hamas genocide rather than its perpetrator.

By such manipulations, International Law is reduced to brazen lawfare, that is, International Law becomes a policy instrument in the toolkit tool of partisan national behavior, essentially a mode of propaganda to bolster self-serving legal arguments upholding national claims and denunciation of behavior by adversaries. This kind of manipulation undermines the ideals of law as constituting a set of constraints that rest on the formal authority to regulate the behavior of all sovereign states in ways that achieve mutual benefits by way of peace and justice. This kind of legal framework for action is what the UN Charter ambiguously offered the world in 1945. The geopolitical tensions of ensuing years made the UN generally helpless to implement these central war prevention goals, and often marginalized the UN in war/peace contexts.

6.      Israel is not a member state of the International Criminal Court? Could its leader be persecuted under its jurisdiction?

In theory, the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute a leader of a sovereign state if the alleged international crime was committed within the territory of a party to the Rome Statute governing its operations. In practice, However, such a proceeding would require that the ICC to obtain physical control over the individual and this would normally depend upon the voluntary cooperation of the national state of the accused persons belong to a state that is not a party.  States that are ICC parties governing the operations of the International Criminal Court are under a treaty obligation to cooperate with the ICC, including during the investigative and any resulting arrest phases of a legal process. The accused person or persons must also be present in the courtroom in the unlikely event that there is a prosecution.

Israel does not need to be a party of the Rome Statute governing the authority of the ICC if the tribunal finds that it possesses valid legal authority to proceed with an investigation and possible indictment of Israeli political and military leaders charged with responsibility for crimes in Occupied Palestinian Territory, which would include Gaza. The ICC after a variety of delays did formally decide in 2021 in a Chamber consisting of three judges that it could proceed to consider Palestinian allegations of Israeli crimes committed on the territory of Occupied Palestine subsequent to 2014. Palestine had become a non-voting Member of the UN in 2012, and on the basis of this qualification as ‘a state,’ later a party to the ICC treaty framework as set forth in the Rome Statute. The present prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, has shown little interest in proceeding as permitted. This sloth is in sharp contrast to the haste displayed with respect to allegations against Putin for crimes in Ukraine associated with the 2022 alleged aggression.

7.      What is South Africa is seeking to achieve of such a case?

It is always hard to depict the motives for a controversial legal initiative of this kind, and in this instance the objectives may be less clear than the motivations. Post-apartheid South Africa has associated the Palestinian struggle for basis human rights with its own struggle against an apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela famously said, “our freedom will not be complete until the Palestinians are free.” In a sense, genocide should in some instances be regarded as the consummation of apartheid. It is the almost invariablle characteristic of the final stages of a settler colonial project, which is probably the best way to understand what is happening in Gaza, and to appreciate the bad memories that analogous developments generated in South Africa.

South Africa may also be motivated by recollections of the role played by governments in the Global West in relation to its own earlier struggle that was long insensitive to the oppressive racist rule because it was strategically linked to apartheid South Africa in the Cold War Era. Palestine has been victimized and Israel shielded and enabled by the American-led commitment to its strategic interests in the Middle East as reinforced by pro-Israeli domestic lobbying and donor leverage in relation to government policy and media presentations.

Many of those who work on the South African initiative or were supportive of its effort to appeal to the ICJ to stop the Gaza genocide have been quoted as saying world to the effect, “I have never been so proud to be a South African or of our government.”


8.      U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Israel being referred to the (ICJ) for alleged genocide during its war in Gaza, calling the claim “meritless.”, What do you make of the Biden Administration position?

As suggested in earlier responses, the primacy of geopolitics in US foreign policy leads to the subordination of international law whenever compliance clashes with strategic interests. To call the South African initiative ‘meritless’ in light of the copiously documented genocidal practices, policies, and exterminist language of Israel’s top leaders defies reality as embodied in the provisions of the Genocide Convention, which calls upon parties to prevent and punish the commission of genocide by others as well as to refrain themselves from such behavior. To not exempt ‘genocide’ from geopolitics is in my judgment itself a sign of national decadence at a time when the global public good desperately needs expressions of respect for all peoples inhabiting the planet.

There are two points to observe: (1) the contrast between the US impassioned allegations of violations by its adversaries, China and Russia, and its unconditional support for accused international friends and allies is a stunning display of irresponsible statecraft; (2) the moral hypocrisy associated with such brazen double standards, severely undermines the authority of international law by treating equals unequally, and opportunistically.

The US is paying a high reputational cost at home and internationally by standing with Israel in opposition to the South African effort, which enjoys support all over the world, because it is seeking to bring an ongoing and transparent genocide to an end. This initiative by way of the ICJ was undertaken only after several attempts in the UN Security Council and General Assembly were blocked, diluted, or were unheeded principally due to US leverage exerted on behalf of Israel. It shines a bright light on the significant relevance of complicity crimes to this horrifying ordeal being inflicted on the civilian population of Occupied Palestine.

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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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