[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.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Health and Human Rights in Gaza: Shame on the World
27 Nov[Preliminary Note: This post devoted to health and human rights in Gaza. It is based on a video presentation some weeks ago to a conference on this theme held in Gaza. It makes no effort to update by reference to the latest cycle of violence sparked by the targeted assassination of Baha Abu-Ata, an Islamic Jihad military commander, on November 12. I feel strongly about the issues raised by this post not only because I have witnessed living conditions in Gaza and have friends in Gaza who have endured hardship and injustice for so long without losing their warmth or even their hope. My contacts with Gaza and Gazans over the course of many years has been at once inspirational and deeply dispiriting, a deep insight into the deficiencies of the human condition coupled with an uplifting glimpse at the spiritual courage of those so severely victimized.
Reflecting on the terrifying destiny bestowed upon the people of Gaza I became ashamed of stultifying silences, especially of those governments and their leaders in the region and those countries with a historical responsibility (the UK) and with geopolitical leverage (the US). I also take alarmed note of the refusal of the mainstream media to accord attention to the misery so long endured by the people of Gaza. If ever the norm of ‘the responsibility to protect’ was applied according to humanitarian need, Gaza would be at the top of the list, but of course there is no list, and if ever there were one, given the present international atmosphere, Gaza would remain among the unlisted! This neglect of the people of Gaza is so acute as to extend the web of criminal complicity far beyond the borders of Israel.]
Health and Human Rights in Gaza: Shame on the World
I want to begin by offering my greetings to all those here today. I dearly wish that conditions in Gaza were different, enabling me to share the experience of the conference directly with you by taking part directly and actively. The theme of the conference touches the policies and practice of Israeli abuse that have been victimizing the people of Gaza for such a long time. The population of Gaza already faced a lamentable situation ever since the occupation began in 1967, but it has grown far worse since the Gaza elections of 2006, as reinforced by the changes in political administration that occurred in the following year. Israel’s policies have been systematically cruel and abusive, disregarding the legal standards and moral values applicable to the behavior of an Occupying Power. These standards and values are embodied in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL).
Upholding the right to health is among the most fundamental of human rights, first articulated in the 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organization: “The right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” This right is further articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially in Article 25, and then put in a treaty form by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. The deliberate interference with the right to health is among the worst imaginable collective abuses of a people subject to belligerent occupation. Israel, which relies on an apartheid regime to maintain control over the Palestinian people in the face of their internationally protected right of resistance, has been particularly guilty of behavior that hasflagrantly, consistently, and intentionally encroached upon and violated the right to health of the entire civilian population of Gaza in a variety of ways.
The Great March of Return epitomizes the brutalities of Israeli occupation policy, which include a shocking disregard of the physical and mental health of the Palestinian civilian population taking part in the demonstrations. It also offers us a metaphor for the abuses of the right to health and other rights of the Gaza population regarded as a collective entity. This pattern of abuse occurs in the context of persistent and courageous Palestinian acts of resistance in support of their right of return to their homeland, a right affirmed at the UN and clearly established in international law, which Israel has refused to uphold for seven decades, that is, ever since the Nakba. In the face of such a failure of international procedures to uphold Palestinian rights, a recourse to a politics of self-reliance seems reasonable, and in fact the only path presently capable of yielding positive results. The people of Gaza have waited long enough, indeed too long, without having their most basic international rights protected by the organized world community.
A preliminary matter is whether, as Israel alleges, it is relieved of all international legal obligations to the people of Gaza as a result of its supposed ‘disengagement’ from Gaza in 2005. From an international law perspective, the physical removal of IDF occupying troops from the territory of Gaza and the dismantlement of unlawful Israeli settlements did not affect the legal status of Gaza as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’ Israel has maintained tight control over Gaza, which has included massive military attacks in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014, as well as frequent uses of excessive force, unlawful weapons and tactics, and disregard of the constraints of law. Despite ‘disengagement’ Israel maintains effective and comprehensive control over Gaza’s borders, air space, and offshore maritime waters. In fact, as a result of the blockade in existence since 2007, the occupation is more intense and abusive than was the oppressive form of occupation that existed in Gaza prior to disengagement. From the perspective of IHL and IHRL, Israel is fully obligated under international law in exercising its role as an occupying power, and its claims to the contrary are legally irrelevant. Unfortunately, due to geopolitical realities and the weakness of the UN, these Israeli claims continue to have a political relevance as Israel’s obligations are unenforced and mostly ignored, creating an unacceptable situation in which Israel enjoys de facto impunity and escapes from all procedures of accountability provided by recourse to international law and international judicial institutions.
It is also important, in our view, to understand the significance of the findings of the 2017 ESCWA report prepared by Virginia Tilley and myself. We concluded after examining the evidence that Israel maintains an apartheid structure of control over the Palestinian people as a whole, which of course includes the population of Gaza. Our main point is that Israel uses a variety of means to subjugate and victimize the Palestinians so as to establish and sustain an exclusivist Jewish state in which, according to Israel’s Basic Law of 2018 gives only Jews authority to claim a right of self-determination. To circumscribe the right of self-determination by exclusionary racial criteria is a virtual acknowledgement of an apartheid ideology.
It needs to be more widely appreciated that apartheid is a Crime Against Humanity, according to Article 7(j) of the Rome Statute that governs the operations of the International Criminal Court. The criminal character of apartheid had been previously confirmed by the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. If apartheid is indeed present then all governments have themselves legal and moral obligations to join the effort to suppress and punish. As with IHL and IHRL, the criminalization of apartheid is not acted upon by formal intergovernmental mechanisms due to roadblocks erected by geopolitics and the related weakness of the UN, but this does not mean that the designation is politically and morally insignificant. Since governments refuse to act, the responsibility and opportunity for law enforcement falls on the peoples of the world to do what the formal framework of world order is incapable of doing.
Such an anti-apartheid grassroots surge occurred with respect to the South African regime of apartheid, producing an entirely unexpected reversal of approach by the Afrikaner leadership of the country resulting in the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years of captivity followed by the largely peaceful transition to a multiracial constitutional democracy with human rights promised to all regardless of race. Such an outcome was considered impossible across the entire political spectrum in South Africa until 1994 when it actually happened.
We cannot guarantee, of course, that history will repeat itself and liberate the Palestinian people from their century-long ordeal, but neither can we foreclose the possibility that the combination of Palestinian resistance and global solidarity will have an empowering, liberating effect. In part, the Palestinian national movement is the last great unfinished struggle against European settler colonialism. Looked at in this way, the Zionist Project through the establishment of Israel temporarily reversed the flow of history in Palestine for a series of complicated reasons, but the final fate of Palestine remains in doubt so long as Palestinian resistance is sustained and solidarity robust. In this regard, the Great March of Return is a powerful sign that Palestinian resistance here in Gaza continues to offer inspirational energy to those of us throughout the world who believe that this particular struggle for individual and collective justice by an oppressed people is what human rights are most fundamentally about.
The Great March is a perfect metaphor for both the theme of this conference and of the struggle that motivated the defenseless residents of Gaza to demand this most basic right to return to their homeland from which they have been wrongfully and forcibly displaced. This demand was impressively reasserted every Friday for more than a year in the face of Israel’s vindictive reliance on excessive force since its inception in March 2018. Israel from the very beginning of the protests adopted an approach of excessive force based on terrorizing the demonstrators by resorting to lethal violence in an harsh effort to punish and destroy this formidable creative challenge to Israeli apartheid/colonial control. Israel’s aim seems to be a vain and unlawful effort to undermine the Palestinian will to resist that has survived decades of confinement, discouragement, and unspeakable abuse.
At the same time, such a criminal response by Israel to this anguished claim of right by the people of Gaza was also the culminating expression of Israel’s assault on the physical and mental health of the civilian population of Gaza. It is hardly surprising that the burdens created by 20,000 injured Gazans have overwhelmed Gaza’s already stressed medical capabilities. Many of those injured received life and limb threatening gunshot wounds, causing serious infections and frequently requiring amputation. This crisis situation in health care was aggravated by shortages of needed antibiotic medicines, and by the dismal experiences of those injured Gazans requiring specialized attention that could be obtained only outside of Gaza. Those so desperately in need of medical treatment external to Gaza faced almost impossible difficulties obtaining required exit and entry permits that Israel often even withheld under normal circumstances. In relation to those wounded at Great March events the situation was far worse. Israel was more unwilling to grant exit permits to those wounded in the Great March, discriminating against any Palestinian who dared to protest peacefully against the denial of the rights to which every human being on earth is entitled. Such an abuse is criminally escalated in relation to Gazans who are supposed to be especially protected by virtue of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, and IHL more generally. Instead of protection, the Israeli approach has been one of imposing prolonged collective punishment not only on Palestinian resistors but on the entire population of Gaza in direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and not for a short interval associated with special circumstances, but over the course of decades.
Beyond these exceptional conditions associated with the medical fallout from the Great March, Israel by failing to protect the civilian population of Gaza under conditions of rightless prolonged occupation is guilty of several additional forms of collective punishment each of which has an adverse impact of Gazan health. These adverse effects consequences result from its maintenance of a vindictive blockade, the periodic application of excessive force well beyond any reasonable security justifications, and the application of policies and practices reflective of the apartheid/colonial character of its approach to the Palestinian people, which has long assumed a sinister form in Gaza. The health results are disastrous as confirmed by reliable statistical measures of the physical and mental condition of the population, as exhibited by the unavailability of safe drinking water, the existence of untreated open sewage, the frequency of long power outages that interfere with the operation of hospitals and medical equipment, and by studies documenting the high incidence of severe trauma experienced by many residents of Gaza, including young and particularly vulnerable children. For those of us who have visited Gaza even under what could be described as ‘normal’ conditions, we came away wondering how anyone could endure such stress without experiencing a traumatic reaction.
This severe infringement on the right to health of the people of Gaza should be the occasion of outrage in the international community, and receive appropriate media attention, but Israel’s deliberate and massive violations of IHL and IHRL are shielded by geopolitics from censure and sanctions on the part of governments and at the UN, a reality further obscured by a compliant mainstream Western media that is misled and manipulated by a carefully orchestrated Israeli propaganda campaign that presents its criminally unlawful conduct as reasonable behavior undertaken to uphold the national security of a sovereign state, an aspect of its legal right to defend itself against what it labels as a terrorist enemy. Such Israeli propaganda falsifies the realities of the situation in multiple ways, but creates enough confusion outside of Gaza to divert attention from the suffering imposed upon the Palestinian people as a whole, and the civilian population of Gaza in particular.
Against this background, it becomes clear that grassroots solidarity efforts to expose these truths and exert nonviolent pressures on Israel by means of the BDS Campaign and other initiatives are essential contributions to the ongoing resistance struggles of the Palestinian people. And unlike the South African response, Israel with its sophisticated global outreach has tried by every means to discredit such global solidarity work, even going to the extent of using its leverage overseas to criminalize participation in BDS activity by encouraging the passage of punitive laws and the adoption of restrictive administrative policies in Europe and North America.
Let me end these remarks by saying that despite the seeming imbalance of forces on the ground, history remains strongly on the side of the Palestinian struggle against this Israeli apartheid regime. Much of the world realizes that the brave people of Gaza have long been in the eye of a dreadful and seemingly endless storm. It is my honor to support as best I can your struggle for the realization of the right of self-determination. Despite present appearances to the contrary, I am confident that justice will prevail, that Palestinians will achieve their rights, and surprise the world as did the opponents of South African apartheid a generation ago. It is my hope that I will live long enough to visit Gaza in the future at a time of liberation and celebration. In the meantime, I wish you a successful conference.
Tags: collective punishment, Criminal Complicity, Gaza, Health, Human rights