Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
Published On 10 Dec 202510 Dec 2025
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Internally displaced Palestinians walk among the ruins of destroyed buildings in the Al Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza Strip, 08 December 2025 [Mohammed Saber/.EPA]
The catastrophic violence in Gaza has unfolded within an international system that was never designed to restrain the geopolitical ambitions of powerful states. Understanding why the United Nations has proved so limited in responding to what many regard as a genocidal assault requires returning to the foundations of the post–World War II order and examining how its structure has long enabled impunity rather than accountability.
After World War II, the architecture for a new international order based on respect for the UN Charter and international law was agreed upon as the normative foundation of a peaceful future. Above all, it was intended to prevent a third world war. These commitments emerged from the carnage of global conflict, the debasement of human dignity through the Nazi Holocaust, and public anxieties about nuclear weaponry.
Yet, the political imperative to accommodate the victorious states compromised these arrangements from the outset. Tensions over priorities for world order were papered over by granting the Security Council exclusive decisional authority and further limiting UN autonomy. Five states were made permanent members, each with veto power: the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China.
In practice, this left global security largely in the hands of these states, preserving their dominance. It meant removing the strategic interests of geopolitical actors from any obligatory respect for legal constraints, with a corresponding weakening of UN capability. The Soviet Union had some justification for defending itself against a West-dominated voting majority, yet it too used the veto pragmatically and displayed a dismissive approach to international law and human rights, as did the three liberal democracies.
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In 1945, these governments were understood as simply retaining the traditional freedoms of manoeuvre exercised by the so-called Great Powers. The UK and France, leading NATO members in a Euro-American alliance, interpreted the future through the lens of an emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union. China, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a civil war that continued until 1949.
Three aspects of this post-war arrangement shape our present understanding.
First, the historical aspect: Learning from the failures of the League of Nations, where the absence of influential states undermined the organisation’s relevance to questions of war and peace. In 1945, it was deemed better to acknowledge power differentials within the UN than to construct a global body based on democratic equality among sovereign states or population size.
Second, the ideological aspect: Political leaders of the more affluent and powerful states placed far greater trust in hard-power militarism than in soft-power legalism. Even nuclear weaponry was absorbed into the logic of deterrence rather than compliance with Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which required good-faith pursuit of disarmament. International law was set aside whenever it conflicted with geopolitical interests.
Third, the economistic aspect: The profitability of arms races and wars reinforced a pre–World War II pattern of lawless global politics, sustained by an alliance of geopolitical realism, corporate media, and private-sector militarism.
Why the UN could not protect Gaza
Against this background, it is unsurprising that the UN performed in a disappointing manner during the two-plus years of genocidal assault on Gaza.
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In many respects, the UN did what it was designed to do in the turmoil after October 7, and only fundamental reforms driven by the Global South and transnational civil society can alter this structural limitation. What makes these events so disturbing is the extremes of Israeli disregard for international law, the Charter, and even basic morality.
At the same time, the UN did act more constructively than is often acknowledged in exposing Israel’s flagrant violations of international law and human rights. Yet, it fell short of what was legally possible, particularly when the General Assembly failed to explore its potential self-empowerment through the Uniting for Peace resolution or the Responsibility to Protect norm.
Among the UN’s strongest contributions were the near-unanimous judicial outcomes at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on genocide and occupation. On genocide, the ICJ granted South Africa’s request for provisional measures concerning genocidal violence and the obstruction of humanitarian aid in Gaza. A final decision is expected after further arguments in 2026.
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On occupation, responding to a General Assembly request for clarification, the Court issued a historic advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, finding Israel in severe violation of its duties under international humanitarian law in administering Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. It ordered Israel’s withdrawal within a year. The General Assembly affirmed the opinion by a large majority.
Israel responded by repudiating or ignoring the Court’s authority, backed by the US government’s extraordinary claim that recourse to the ICJ lacked legal merit.
The UN also provided far more reliable coverage of the Gaza genocide than was available in corporate media, which tended to amplify Israeli rationalisations and suppress Palestinian perspectives. For those seeking a credible analysis of genocide allegations, the Human Rights Council offered the most convincing counter to pro-Israeli distortions. A Moon Will Arise from this Darkness: Reports on Genocide in Palestine, containing the publicly submitted reports of the special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, documents and strongly supports the genocide findings.
A further unheralded contribution came from UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, whose services were essential to a civilian population facing acute insecurity, devastation, starvation, disease, and cruel combat tactics. Some 281 staff members were killed while providing shelter, education, healthcare, and psychological support to beleaguered Palestinians during the course of Israel’s actions over the past two years.
UNRWA, instead of receiving deserved praise, was irresponsibly condemned by Israel and accused, without credible evidence, of allowing staff participation in the October 7 attack. Liberal democracies compounded this by cutting funding, while Israel barred international staff from entering Gaza. Nevertheless, UNRWA has sought to continue its relief work to the best of its ability and with great courage.
In light of these institutional shortcomings and partial successes, the implications for global governance become even more stark, setting the stage for a broader assessment of legitimacy and accountability.
The moral and political costs of UN paralysis
The foregoing needs to be read in light of the continuing Palestinian ordeal, which persists despite numerous Israeli violations, resulting in more than 350 Palestinian deaths since the ceasefire was agreed upon on October 10, 2025.
International law seems to have no direct impact on the behaviour of the main governmental actors, but it does influence perceptions of legitimacy. In this sense, the ICJ outcomes and the reports of the special rapporteur that take the international law dimensions seriously have the indirect effect of legitimising various forms of civil society activism in support of true and just peace, which presupposes the realisation of Palestinian basic rights – above all, the inalienable right of self-determination.
The exclusion of Palestinian participation in the US-imposed Trump Plan for shaping Gaza’s political future is a sign that liberal democracies stubbornly adhere to their unsupportable positions of complicity with Israel.
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Finally, the unanimous adoption of Security Council Resolution 2803 in unacceptably endorsing the Trump Plan aligns the UN fully with the US and Israel, a demoralising evasion and repudiation of its own truth-telling procedures. It also establishes a most unfortunate precedent for the enforcement of international law and the accountability of perpetrators of international crimes.
In doing so, it deepens the crisis of confidence in global governance and underscores the urgent need for meaningful UN reform if genuine peace and justice are ever to be realised.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
[Prefatory Note: On October 26 the Istanbul Statement issued on behalf of the Steering Committee was issued, and expressed the central concluding concern that although a ceasefire was formally agreed upon by Israel and Hamas, the genocide continued, including periodic resumptions of lethal violence by Israel killing many Palestinians. The struggle for a just peace continues, and includes the rejection of all efforts to exclude Palestinian rights and Palestinian authentic participation.]
Istanbul, 26 October 2025
At conclusion of the Final Session of Gaza Tribunal this Istanbul Statement is made on behalf of the Steering Committee at a historic moment of darkness expressive of our continuing quest for the light of justice.
The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice.
Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine.
The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full.
The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame.
We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers.
Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations.
We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice.
To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.
[Prefatory Remark: I post today the historic outcome of Gaza People’s Tribunal Final Session in Istanbul, May 23-26. The Jury composed of persons of diverse backgrounds, but joined by lives vividly committed to a lives of engaged citizenship, progressive political consciousness, with actions guided by the deep roots of conscience. The GPT was designed to honor these same features with a particular emphasis on serving as an instrument of truth-telling with respect to the Palestinian ordeal resulting from the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. To expose the truth that emerges from respecting reality and evidence is necessary because of state propaganda and a filtered, biased media that either hides or slants the truth, even to the extent of punitive and lethal action against independent journalists and dismissing as irrelevant the rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
Its formation inspired by the Russell Tribunal of 1966-67 that reacted to US crimes in the Vietnam War that were not resisted, or even exposed by the organized international community as embodied in the UN. When institutions fail to implement international law in extreme situation people of conscience must act. Israel has become a rogue or pariah state becuase the peoples of the world have reacted, but it is not enough. Palestinian rights must be realized, and future of peace must be shaped by the victims of criminality, not by the perpetrators.]
FINAL STATEMENT OF THE GAZA TRIBUNAL JURY OF CONSCIENCE
Istanbul, October 26, 2025
We, the undersigned members of the Jury of Conscience, hereby deliver this Statement of Findings and Moral Judgment
at the final session of the Gaza Tribunal. The Jury, guided by conscience and informed by international law, does not speak
with the authority of states, but when law is silenced by power, conscience must become the final tribunal.
The Tribunal is not a court of law so does not purport to determine guilt or liability of any person, organization or state. It is a
civil society response to the continuing lack of accountability for the commission by Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. We
believe that genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe.
Genocide in Gaza is the concern of all humanity. When states are silent civil society can and must speak out.
The Gaza Tribunal has brought together a wealth of material in a valuable archive, the existence of which provides lasting
evidence of the truth of the genocide against the Palestinian people. The Jury expresses solidarity with the rallies, the
marches, the encampments, the flotillas, the strikes and other actions that protest the genocide and states’ unwillingness
to hold Israel to account. And it offers a counter-narrative to the security narrative Israel and its allies persistently broadcast
and to the labelling of Palestinian suffering as a humanitarian disaster. It is not. It is the deliberate commission of the gravest
of crimes, imposed with dire humanitarian consequences.
We have heard extensive evidence of the crimes committed by Israel, of the causes of the genocide, of the collusion by and
complicity of other actors, of courageous resistance and resilience by Palestinians and by global civil society. We have heard
moving personal testimonies of the physical and mental harms wrought by these crimes and the suffering of the Palestinian
people.
This concluding statement presents our findings based upon this evidence and the legal standards of the Genocide
Convention, the human rights treaties, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the moral imperatives of
natural justice. Yet above all, this decision is grounded in the unyielding belief that every human life has equal worth, and that
no state or ideology has the right to destroy an entire people.
Our decision builds upon the testimonies, oral and written, the expert evidence and the research and analytical papers
carried out by many people over the past months. It reiterates and endorses the Sarajevo Declaration adopted in May 2025.
Israel’s Crimes
The Jury condemns the ongoing genocide and crimes listed below. We believe these crimes and their impact on the Palestinian
people should be separately named to understand the holistic nature of the genocide, its dehumanisation of the people,
its sadistic character and its temporality. These crimes did not commence in October 2023 and they will not end with the
ceasefire; deaths and severe physical harm will continue. The physical and psychological trauma of the surviving population
will be transmitted through the generations.
The Jury condemns the commission of the following additional crimes:
Starvation and famine through the deliberate denial of food, water and systematic destruction of the entire food system.
Domicide is more than the intentional mass destruction of residential properties and their infrastructure – electricity,
water and sanitation. A home is about love, life, a repository of memories, hopes and aspiration. Its destruction causes
displacement, trauma, the disintegration of communities and profound cultural loss.
Ecocide describes a particular kind of warfare based on ruination of land fertility, air quality, sources of food and water:
catastrophic environmental damage that destroys the capacity to survive after the bombing ceases.
Deliberate destruction and targeting of the healthcare infrastructure, equipment and personnel have been
systematic for decades and has become almost total. The most important issue for physical and mental health is the
Israeli occupation and the dehumanisation of the population.
Reprocide is the intentional and systematic targeting of Palestinian reproductive care through prevention of births,
eliminating future lives and the ability to reproduce safely.
Scholasticide is the genocide of knowledge, the destruction of Palestine’s intellectual future through the killing, silencing
and displacing a generation of students and teachers, obliteration of schools and universities, destroying dreams andaspirations.
Attacks on journalists. ‘Genocide documentation’ is carried out by Palestinian journalists and they and their families
are targeted. Silencing these journalists is instrumental to the concealment of the genocide and more journalists have
been killed than in any other conflict.
Torture, sexual violence, disappearances, gender-based violence in detention, at checkpoints, in house searches, in
displacement and elsewhere.
Politicide is the targeted assassination and kidnapping of political and cultural leaders, representatives, activists, and
destruction of civic institutions.
The Jury finds a coherent and consistent pattern of exterminatory violence in the intentional and targeted destruction of
homes, water supplies, schools, hospitals, clinics, universities, cultural and religious institutions, agricultural land, and natural
ecosystems. The weaponization of hunger, denial of medical care, and forced displacement are not collateral damages of
war—they are instruments of collective punishment of the entire population and of genocide. They are not justified by any
claim of military objectives.
Complicity and Collusion
The Jury finds Western governments, particularly the United States, and others complicit in, in some cases colluding with,
Israel’s commission of genocide through provision of diplomatic cover, weapons, weapon parts, intelligence, military
assistance and training, and continuing economic relations. Such actions constitute moral failure and breach of their legal
duty to prevent genocide and to cooperate to end a violation of a peremptory norm of international law – genocide and the
Palestinian right to self-determination. Silence and inaction in the face of genocide are not an option and are other forms of
complicity.
The Jury finds a range of non-state actors to be complicit in genocide. Biased media reporting in the west on Palestine and
under-reporting of Israeli crimes conform to the economic and political interest of the ruling elites and their allied interests.
Academic institutions through their investments support Israel; staff and student endorsements of Palestine are silenced
or disciplined.
Israel survives through militarisation; global supply chains sustain the genocide through weapons, banks, technology,
transportation, and other multinational corporations. The hi-technology sector sustains the machinery of genocide by
manipulating contents through algorithms, and allowing Israel to watch and plan every airstrike and assassination. Companies
that sell cloud capacity to Israel provide the computer power for genocide. The Jury considers that the political economy of
genocide is the highest form of hyper imperialism of the 21st century.
The Jury finds the current global order, structured by power hierarchies and economic dependencies, to have revealed its
incapacity to prevent or punish atrocity crimes when committed by the powerful or their allies. The United Nations, paralyzed
by the veto and political selectivity, has abdicated its foundational responsibility “to save succeeding generations from the
scourge of war.”
The Jury however commends the UNHRC special procedures, including the Commission of Inquiry and especially the
steadfastness of the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for their affirmation of
genocide.
Conclusions
The Jury affirms that Israel is perpetrating an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, within—and enabled
by—a broader settler-colonial apartheid regime rooted in the supremacist ideology of Zionism. This campaign is inseparable
from over a century-long project targeting Palestinians across all of Palestine and in exile. The root causes of genocide lie in
a racist, supremacist ideology—Zionism—that underpins a system aiming to dispossess, dominate, and erase Palestinians,
supported by an oppressive neo-colonial power structure led by the United States and its allies, and shielded by international
complicity, including from many Arab and Muslim governments.
The Jury considers the genocide in Gaza to have several exceptional characteristics. It is perpetuated on a captive population
in a tiny, closed territory where Israel controls all entries and exits. It is systematic and carried out with the most advanced
technology. Despite Israel’s attempts to prevent reporting, it is highly visible in real time. There has been resort to international
judicial bodies, the International Court of Justice by South Africa and the request for an Advisory Opinion by the UN GeneralAssembly with respect to UNRWA and the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, yet these have been ignored with impunity by
Israel and other states have made little real protest and minimal sanctions have been imposed. Indeed, it is the ICC personnel
and NGOs assisting the Court that have been sanctioned by the United States.
Recommendations
Ending Impunity and Ensuring Accountability
To hold all those responsible, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically, perpetrators, supporters, enablers,
and complicit parties fully accountable by every lawful means and to the fullest extent of the law.
To suspend Israel from international organizations and institutions, particularly the United Nations and its affiliates.
To activate UN General Assembly Resolution 377 A(V) (Uniting for Peace) so the UNGA can adopt collective measures
to mandate a protective force for the Palestinian territories and stop the genocide in Gaza, given the UNSC’s failure to
act due to successive U.S. vetoes.
Resisting and Dismantling Oppressive Structures
The Jury reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to choose their modes of resistance to achieve
liberation, freedom, and independence.
The Jury endorses a global, rights-based strategy to dismantle Zionist structures: identify and map the Zionist regime’s
sources of power and enabling pillars.
The Jury calls for building a worldwide movement that weakens, isolates, and dismantles each source through coordinated
political, legal, economic, academic, cultural, technological, and social action.
To achieve this objective, two main tasks are paramount:
1. Steadfastness and non-displacement. Palestinians—in Gaza, the West Bank including Jerusalem, Palestinian
communities inside the 1948 lines, must remain rooted in their land. There must be no further forced displacement of
Palestinians in exile, particularly refugees across the region. Preventing displacement and sustaining steadfastness are
essential to maintain the struggle.
2. Comprehensive global confrontation. Confront the Zionist movement and regime globally in every sphere—political
and diplomatic; legal and human rights; economic and commercial; media, cultural, intellectual, academic, and
educational; industrial, technological, and scientific; arts, tourism, and sports. This mobilization centers peoples,
movements, parties, unions, civil-society organizations, and individuals so that solidarity becomes power, normalization
is resisted, and the Zionist project is besieged on all fronts.
The Jury affirms that the struggle is with Zionism as a racist, supremacist, settler-colonial enterprise—not with Jews or
Judaism. The strategic horizon is a single rights-based political order grounded in equality, decolonization, restitution, and
the unfettered right of return. Only this course can end the ongoing genocide and open a path to a just and durable peace
for all who live in Palestine and beyond.
We issue this statement in the name of justice, dignity, and peace, and in remembrance of all those who have perished in
Gaza and throughout Palestine.
Silence is not neutral; silence is complicity; neutrality is surrender to evil.
In solidarity with the people of Gaza and in memory of all victims of genocide,
[Prefatory Comments]This post consists of my responses to a Brazilian journalist who posed some questions about the recent diplomatic surge of recognitions of Palestinian statehood, as provisionally represented by a PLO coalition of political actors, chaired Mahmoud Abbas, and in the 1990s given the supposedly temporary, ambiguous title of the Palestinian Authority with its capital in the West Bank city of Ramallah. This political development resulted from the Oslo diplomacy that allowed the PLO to represent the Palestinian people although within a pro-Israeli partisan framework that empowered the US to serve as intermediary without requiring Israel to freeze settlement activity or to comply with international humanitarian law during ‘the peace process.’ The central expectation of this process was that a Palestinian state would emerge from a complex series of bilateral negotiations, but what occurred was an evident lack of political will on the part of Israel and Washington to produce such an outcome. The whole undertaking was contradicted and discredited by the continuous expansion of unlawful Israeli settlements on the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The Palestinians were advised at the time by the US to withhold their objections to Israeli behavior until the final stages of statehood negotiations were reached (which never happened), and the Palestinian team foolishly heeded the advice, and itself lost credibility for consenting to take part in a diplomatic exercise that did not even acknowledge the Palestinian right of self-determination.
At the outset a certain skepticism seems prudent. It suggests a cautious response to this foundational question: Should this new surge of internationalist enthusiasm for ‘two-statism’ be viewed as a buildup for a replay of the Oslo process or as something new? Underlying conditions are different as
Israel’s military operations Gaza are now normalized, even in most of the previously complicit liberal democracies of the West and in most influential venues of political discourse as ‘genocide.’ This has resulted in Israel’s delegitimation and emergent identity as a rogue or pariah state that has become the target of hostile civil society initiatives ranging from BDS to rising pressures to impose arms embargoes, suspension of diplomatic relations, and expulsion or suspension from the UN. It has also produced pushback by the US in the form of sanctioning UN appointees by barring entry and freezing assets, denying visas to PLO members, including the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, and classifying Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. Israel has reacted defiantly to calls for Palestinian statehood and to the boycott of Netanyahu’s speech at the 80th anniversary session of the General Assembly. To date, France and the US have put forward peace proposals, with some cooperation and encouragement from Arab governments, that end the genocide, but reward Israel by excluding Hamas from any future political role in Gaza, and dubiously presupposing the adequacy of the PA to represent the struggle for Palestinian rights, including the establishment of a functioning state. My responses below are based on a strong conviction that until the Palestinian people are given the choice as to their political representation by way of an internationally monitored free elections in Gaza and the West Bank or through a reliable referendum allowing for the selection or ranking of political representation options, no peace process should be accorded legitimacy by the UN or civil society assessments.
How can the recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Belgium, and others help in a plan to officialize the creation of the State of Palestine?
The push toward Palestinian recognition will probably has now extended to at least 157 of the 193 members of the UN, representing a large majority of the world’s peoples. The only major opponents being Israel and the United States, along with s Hungary, Paraguay, and Argentina, autocratic middle powers. The longer-term undertaking of the states bestowing statehood recognition is a two-state solution of the underlying conflict. This objective has been most influentially articulated so far by France, and somewhat separately by the US although it has not yet openly challenged Israel’s refusal to allow the emergence of a Palestinian state in any form. It is based on the belief that the only way to end the conflict and achieve regional stability is by promoting a solution that provides an alternative to Israel’s One-State Plan (Greater Israe) but also by a Euro/Arab packaging of Palestinian statehood to preclude a genuine Palestinian liberation. Israeli one-statism is structured in accord with Israel’s 2018 adoption of a Basic Law institutionalizing Jewish supremist dominance in Israel and the OPT according to an unacknowledged adoption of a settler colonial approach to apartheid control imposed on the subjugated and dehumanized native population of historic Palestine. President Trump’s assertion that he would not allow Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory may depict a middle ground of permanent Israeli occupation and gradual Israelization without a Palestinian state of any sort coming into existence.
The French-backed solution, now competing with the Trump US proposal along somewhat similar lines, is centered on endorsing the establishment of a Palestinian state following the release of hostages held captive in Gaza since October 7 and the gradual dismantling of Hamas by an International Stabilization Force with an armed Arab administrative presence in Gaza. Palestinian governance of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem would be eventually entrusted to what is generally referred to as a reconstituted Palestinian Authority, originally brought into existence within the framework of Oslo Diplomacy of the 1990s. Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime, quasi-collaborationist President of the Palestinian Authority told the General Assembly speaking online as barred entry to the US, that he favors a demilitarized Palestinian state, the demilitarization and exclusion of Hamas from a governance in role , and opposed the October 7 attack, while indicting Israel for ‘genocide’ in shaping its response. Abbas has not so far insisted that Israel be required to implement the right of return enjoyed by an estimated 8 million Palestinian refugees living in the OPT and neighboring countries.
A handful of states apparently oppose this approach, most unambiguously, Israel, as it is inconsistent with Israel’s firm commitment to a one-state solution, and refusal to accept any form of Palestinian statehood. Israeli state propaganda opposes these recent Global West recognitions of Palestine by its former allies, several earlier complicit in supporting the genocide diplomatically, and some of these governments continuing their material support. Israel condemns these diplomatic moves as somehow ‘rewarding’ Hamas and its allegedly ‘terrorist’ assault of two years ago, but it hard to fathom how Hamas gains from this variation of two-state advocacy that includes the punitive exclusion of Hamas from any future role in the administration of Gaza. In other words, this variant of the two-state approach appears to reward the perpetrator of genocide and punish the victim. In fact, it may reopen the road to political and economic normalization and acceptance within the Arab Middle East.
The seeming majority Palestinian approach rejects both Israeli one statism and the two-statism as delimited by Emanuel Macron as set forth in the New York Declaration, arising from summit on Palestine co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, as well as the 21 Point Program for conflict resolution put forward by Trump in consultation with Arab countries. The most independent and trustworthy Palestinian voices are calling for the selection of a new more legitimate mechanism than the PA for the pursuit of national liberation objectives. This would be expected to require mechanisms for a meaningful exercise of the Palestinian right of self-determination by the Palestinian people including those Palestinians and their descendants living in neighboring countries or the OPT as refugees. Authentic Palestinian representation would likely take the form of a fully unified sovereign secular state (presumably renamed and deZionized) encompassing Palestinians and Jews in viable, ethnically neutral governance structures and integrated with guaranteed rights of return for Palestinians living as exiles or in refugee camps and of Jews living in the diaspora. Palestinian statehood could take the form of a viable, fully distinct, equal, and sovereign Palestinian state co-existing with a post-Zionist Israel that embodied the principles of ethnic equality, implying either the revision of Zionist ideology or its complete abandonment, reflecting approval by authenticated Palestinian representatives.
The recognition diplomacy of former supporters of Israel’s response to and characterization of October 7, even though vigorously repudiated by Israel, does not bring the conflict closer to a just and durable outcome. In effect, despite Israel’s apparent rejection, if the Palestinian statehood proposals is ever implemented along these proposed lines would not only reward Israel for genocide, and additionally have the perverse effect of extending the conflict rather than ending it. If ending was the true objective then Israel would be required to reject the practice, policies, and ideology of Zionism as the basis of Israeli governance and to refrain from establishing new settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, if not called upon to remove some or all of the settlements. As of the present, Israel is strongly opposed to the Franco/American approaches as has been made clear in words, and also by its actions, particularly threats of partial or complete annexation of the West Bank and new provocative expansions of settlements, including a new particularly controversial settlement in E1 where a proposed settlement would bisect occupied the West Bank effectively ending any prospect of a viable Palestinian state.
2- Israel has criticized the recognition of a Palestinian state, claiming that it will strengthen Hamas. Netanyahu has said there will never be a Palestinian state. How do you see this?
Netanyahu signaled by the Doha attack of September 13 seeking to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team that Israel’s priorities remain the extermination of Hamas as a source of resistance, a discrediting of the PA as capable of being ‘a partner of peace,’ and an overall, unshakable commitment to Greater Israel, which implies opposition to any form of Palestine statehood, however limited. As suggested it also implies total extermination of Hamas as the organized center of continuing Palestinian resistance. Israel as now constituted remains currently unwilling to end the genocide, and seeks political rewards as measured by land and the removal of Palestinian residents to offset its political loss of legitimacy. As noted, Israel is now a politically isolated pariah state that is economically subject to an increasing variety of civil society harassments. The underlying conflict between the two peoples remains frozen with no horizon of durable peace visible to informed eyes.
With so many nations recognizing Palestinian state, what will be necessary to make the transition from a symbolic reality to a sovereign territorial reality with recognized borders and governmental authority?
As the foregoing seeks to make clear, this sequence of diplomatic recognitions at this point seems to produce a diplomacy of futility, acceptable to neither side, and lacking the will and capabilities at the UN and elsewhere to overcome the ongoing stalemate created by Israel’s refusal to consent to coexist with a viable, and fully sovereign Palestinian state, or even a willingness to accept a Palestinian state with ghost characteristics. Israel seems poised to prolong the agony pushing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Back to leave or die. In effect, to create a third mass dispossession of the sort that in 1948 and 1967 led to the mass expulsion of Palestinian residents to obtain and preserve a Jewish majority population. Israel to fulfill the apparent goals of the Zionist Project must not only claim and exercise territorial sovereignty over the land and ethnic dominance with an apartheid matrix of control over remaining Palestinian but continuously act to defuse the demographic bomb resulting from Palestinian fertility rates being higher than that of their Jewish oppressors and from the persisting legally based claims of Palestinian refugee communities to implement their long deferred right of return.
The likely outcome of increasing international pressure to end the genocide and settle the conflict by a diplomatic compromise is currently taking the mainstream shape of a two-state outcome has little prospect of realization, given the opposition of both Israel and Palestine (if legitimately represented). If a Palestinian demilitarized statelet should be accepted by a weak and dependent PA leadership, that is, not of Palestinian choosing, it will at best recreate a pre-October 7 set of conditions of de facto Israeli one-statism periodically challenged by resistance violence. It may also lead to creative efforts by Palestinian activists and countries in the Global South to gain enough international backing for a justice-driven solution to produce a new conflict-resolving diplomacy. Two-state advocacy would likely be discredited and soon superseded by Palestinian advocacy and civil society activism that will increase over time pressures within Israel to contemplate ways to restore national legitimacy and overcome the perceptions and practices of being a pariah state. This would be, as was the case in racist South Africa, a transactional adjustment rather that a reevaluation of priorities and identity.
In conclusion, the French-Arab-American led diplomatic approaches should be critically analyzed on grounds of their misleading and concealed allegiances with many of the underlying tenets of Israel and Zionism that amount to a continuing denial of fundamental Palestinian rights. Until Palestinian representation is determined by Palestinians rather than by external political actors, whether the US, the UN, or others. Only when Palestinian international representation is reliably established will it become credible to embark upon a truly genuine effort, with integral Palestinian participation and truly neutral intermediation to devise a durable and desirable solution based on a mutually acceptable governance arrangements and agreed boundaries either of a binational single state or of two coexisting equal sovereign states.
‘Albanese has spoken truth with unflinching clarity in a world largely silent in the face of a holocaust, carrying out her mandate with integrity and defiance that honours both the law and the human conscience. This book is a formidable indictment of injustice and demonstrates what it means to stand alone against power’ Susan Abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World
Israel’s genocide in Palestine and the complicity of powerful Western states is undermining international human rights and the UN system. The United States has imposed sanctions on lawyers, UN experts, and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bully and intimidate them into silence. One prominent example is UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has played an important role in documenting Israel’s atrocities and those who profit from its oppression of Palestinians.
This book compiles Albanese’s indispensable and damning reports on Israel’s conduct in Palestine since October 2023. First outlining the case that this period should be understood as a genocide, Albanese goes on to explain how the ongoing violence fits into a longer history of Israel’s settler colonialism, and finally presents a devastating indictment against the international corporations that treat mass killing and destruction as a business opportunity.
The volume also features a reflection by Albanese on the current state of affairs; revelations by her predecessors Richard Falk, John Dugard, and Michael Lynk of their experiences as UN special rapporteurs; and a preface by Lex Takkenberg, a 30-year veteran of UNRWA, co-authored with scholar Mandy Turner.
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The ebook is free to download from the Pluto Press website indefinitely, with request for a donation to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. All royalties from sales of the book will be donated to UNRWA.
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The book’s title is a variation on a line from a poem by the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. It is a metaphor for hope and strength even in the darkest of times.
The cover features a painting ‘Children of Gaza Dreaming of Peace’ from Malak Mattar, a Palestinian artist from Gaza
The English version posted below has been somewhat modified, mainly for style and some updatijng.]
Q<How can Israel and Netanyahu be stopped at this moment?
That is a question that has haunted the world for the past two years, and worried peace and justice activists for a much longer time. The most obvious issue is to how to persuade the US government and EU countries to withdraw their support in response to Israel’s abusive occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. It remains crucial for any hope of an adequate, if belated, international response to the Gaza genocide for European countries do more than just step back but encourage the imposition of collective sanctioning measures through the UN or by a coalition of the willing. It is of even greater relevance to bring pressure on the US Government to stop shielding Israel and to join in a genuine effort to overcome the current famine that is threatening death by starvation to most of the surviving Palestinian population trapped in Gaza.
The political atmosphere regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza has changed over the course of the last five months, that is, after Israel broke the ceasefire on March 13 of this year. A much larger segment of the public, including in previously complicit countries, is increasingly disturbed by Israel continuing genocide, especially by the cruelty of inducing deliberate starvation, the manipulation of the humanitarian aid, and perhaps most of all by converting the food distribution centers into killing fields. The overall impression produced by Israel’s tactics is one of death of innocent people and destruction of their habitats and cultural heritage with a ferocity that is unprecedented in human history. Prior genocides were never before as widely and vividly witnessed around the world in real time. The Israeli response to October 7 has been exposing the eyes and ears of the entire world to daily images of atrocities, as well as the complicity of the Western liberal democratic governments and the feebleness of UN genocide prevention efforts. This represents a moral collapse by Western governments and reveals the deficiencies of international law and the UN in the face of clashes between humanitarian concerns and strategic interests. If this dynamic results in Israeli post-genocide occupation of Gaza and the expulsion and repression of surviving Palestinians, this tragic failure of moral internationalism will be completed. Such a result will keep reviving memories of generations to come with graphic descriptions of this appalling behavior that was tolerated and significantly enabled by the West, particularly by the former European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies. The work of documentary and fictional filmmaking will undoubtedly preserve and disseminate this dark and scandalous chapter in human history.
We who are alive now cannot evade responsibility for taking what action we can that is directed at securing Palestinian rights as well as resisting Israel’s crimes. The urgent question before the world is ‘how to translate opposition to this ongoing experience of criminality into effective action of opposition given existing emergency conditions?’ The humanitarian emergency can only be address by an immediate response of sufficient magnitude. We have little time to plan and intervene protectively if we are serious about engaging to save the surviving Gazan population of an estimated two million persons, most of whom have already been severely malnourished and traumatized by almost two years of relentless wholesale onslaught conducted with minimal constraint.
What has been happening in Gaza should not be treated as a ‘war,’ which presupposes a somewhat symmetrical struggle between two sides. The conflict unfolding in Gaza is more accurately portrayed as a ‘massacre’, or even provocatively as ‘a military hunting expedition.’ It is so one-sided in its characteristics, with one side having its choice of options as to the most hyper-modern weaponry and targets, and the other side vulnerable and helpless, with few options other than to seek shelter and pray to survive. To use the language of war for such a conflict is to normalize Israel’s behavior by raising technical questions of the law of war as to whether it has exceeded the limits of ‘self-defense’ or ‘military necessity.’ Such issues can be argued indefinitely by lawyers for and against, thereby minimizing the horror that is transpiring.
Language matters as it allows advocates of abhorrent behavior to hide the true nature of their true motivations that account for the tactics deployed to destroy the identity, livelihood, memories, and lives of an entire people and at the same time engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the land of its native population. The recourse to force of this intensity and duration given the context cannot be explained by reference to Israeli security or even revenge, but only by reference to territorial ambitions and depopulation that long infused the Zionist Project, which has delayed implementation until an opportunity was present,.
In the case of Gaza there’s a special feature that this violence is concentrated in a tiny area occupied after the 1967 War and subject to international humanitarian law with Israel being a provisional occupying power that has now been declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to have flagrantly abused its authority and role from the perspective of international law. This most respected international tribunal in a near unanimous judgment concluded that Israel was legally obligated to withdraw its military presence and political administration altogether from occupied Palestinian territories and allowed it a year to do so. The year expired on July 19, 2025, although extended to September by General Assembly resolution. Given the refusal of Israel to comply, this authoritative judicial opinion instructed the UN and its Members in their individual capacities to take steps to implement Israel’s withdrawal. What is now established is that Israel no longer has any legitimate foundation for exercising control in either Gaza or the West Bank, and has itself become an unlawful, as well as an abusive occupant. Israel not only refuses to comply with the ICJ decision. Instead, Israel has defiantly announced plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank, directly violating an important legal constraint found in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation and signaling an intention to make its presence in the West Bank permanent and irreversible. So far there are no signs at the UN or elsewhere that there exists a sufficient political will to do anything that would really make Israel feel obliged to comply.
There are some symbolic gestures that have been recently made by several important European countries including Germany, France, Britain, and others reacting to the official confirmation of famine in Gaza and the reports of children and others dying of starvation. But in terms of stopping an extremist leader like Netanyahu and the Zionist movement that has captured control over the governing process and the citizenry in Israel, and there is little indication that anything in the short term can or will be done to mitigate the suffering in Gaza, or to avert what seems to be worse to come. There is a slender hope that the increasing pariah or rogue status of Israel will induce an unexpected willingness of Israel’s leaders to compromise the further pursuit of maximalist goals in exchange for a pledge to normalize Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Middle East, a revival of the Abraham Accords initiated in the last year of Trump’s first term as the US president.
People have started advocating, including here in Istanbul, the authorization and formation of a UN armed protective force that would intervene at the invitation of Palestine with sufficient capabilities to protect the Gazan population perhaps by a peacekeeping presence deployed at the borders between Israel and Gaza, as well as between Israel and the West Bank. It is doubtful that this will happen so long as the U.S. and Israeli opposition remains as unrelenting as in the past 22 months. Indeed, Netanyahu in early September signaled Israel’s rejection of any post-genocide idea of Palestinian statehood by expressing anger. His defiant words were coupled with threats of annexation to carry to completion the Zionist end game of Palestinian political erasure despite its diplomatic recognition by as many as 150 states, including the most important NATO members aside from the United State
At the same time, it may be the best hope aside from an Israeli course correction, and it’s certainly worth exerting public pressure that might make Israel do something radically inconsistent with its behavior before and after October 7. History is full of surprises, good and bad, reflecting the inability of the human species to know the future, despite its amazing technocratic sophistication and thus forced to live with uncertainty on every level of human existence. But uncertainty is no excuse for passivity in the presence of evil. What seems a phantasy hinged to Israel’s willingness to change its behavior by accepting an arrangement committed to enforcing international law and accepting a stable and just peace that would also promise the political as well as the physical reconstruction of Gaza is neither probable nor impossible.
Such a scenario, however remote it now appears, is what we should struggle to achieve at this point even though most self-confident experts would dismiss its relevance as an idle utopian fantasy and move on to plan some incremental feasible face-saving adjustment that would not attempt to address the underlying maladies associated with prolonged apartheid governance and genocidal practices and policies.
Q>If genocide cannot be stopped what is the outcome Israel seeks? When do you think Israel will stop this military operation increasingly labeled as ‘genocide’ in public discourse?
In my view Israel’s undertaking was not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all by security considerations. Israel had ample capabilities to address whatever security threats existed after October 7, and assuming that Israel didn’t let the attack happen so as to have the pretext for such a response, it would merely be a matter of enhancing border security, well within Israel’s defense capabilities. Israel received warnings that this attack was coming. Including a New York Times front page story about the degree to which Netanyahu had been made aware of the preparations in Gaza for launching this attack. As well, the Egyptian intelligence reportedly warned Netanyahi in the days before the attack. The world deserves an international investigation of the October 7 events, including what preceded and what followed, to obtain a better grasp of what motivated Israel to act as it has.
Ordinary persons should at least entertain the possibility that Israel wanted the pretext for initiating such a large-scale response that it would begin the end game for the Zionist project, which means grabbing as much land as they could acquire in terms of what was in some sense withheld from Israel by the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. The Israeli made no secret of wanting to have one Israeli state with Jewish supremacy and allowing only the Jewish people as having a right of self-determination. This is set forth in Israel’s Basic Law adopted by the Knesset in 2018. As Israel has no constitution, the Basic Law is the highest form of legislation and the most difficult to amend and repeal. It internalizes and acknowledges the apartheid regime Israel has long relied upon to deal with Palestinians living in Israel or in the occupied territories or even as refugees. It has been complemented by episodic seizures of Palestinian land and periodic expulsion of Palestinians.
On the West Bank there’s been an increasing spillover from the Gaza violence, mainly evident in the upsurge of settler violence directed at making life unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank and encouraging a movement among the many militant settler communities that are very well represented in the Netanyahu coalition to annex the West Bank and to occupy substantial if not the whole of Gaza and in the process to find ways to remove as many Palestinians as possible, either by forced expulsion or by some kind of ‘voluntary’ arrangement with another country that would accept them, possibly being bribed to do so by economic incentives. Several African countries have been talked about in this way but so far none have been persuaded to accept an influx of Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homeland.
But Israel and specifically the Zionist movement has always been animated by the idea of a single colonized Israel state that has the characteristics of a settler colonial undertaking. Such a project has been pursued at the very moment that colonialism has collapsed elsewhere in the world. Hence, it hardly surprising that there’s more resistance from the Palestinians to a historical attempt to engage in a new colonial undertaking during what is often referred to as a post-colonial era.
This persistent resistance of Palestinians has given rise to a vicious circle linking resistance to more and more severe repression taking the form of apartheid. No matter what its name Israel has devised a system of racial domination and exploitation that is based on ethnicity not on class but on identity determined to be either Jew or non-Jew. Aside from Israel’s resolve to exert discriminatory submission on the part of the Palestinians, its ambitions are more extensive, involving land and racial purification that depends on a continuous process of ethnic cleansing.
And when apartheid doesn’t succeed in achieving the ends that are being sought there has been a strong tendency of settler colonial movements to embrace a logic of genocide of varying degrees of severity depending on circumstances in each instance. Recourse to genocide often came about because it seemed the only way that the settler colonial undertaking could find stability and achieve homeland security. All settler colonial settler states have commenced their existence with an often unconsciously constructed apartheid-like structure, which if resisted over a long period would tend to transition to genocide or in a few instances the abandonment of the project. The US and Canada illustrate a transition to genocide, Algeria and South Africa illustrate a transition to withdrawal after resistance from within and without seemed to formidable to ignore.
As such what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories is not a new phenomenon, it happened in all the white British breakaway colonies Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand. They each experienced this sequence of apartheid followed by genocidal policies to marginalize the native peoples within their territories, and if long stabilized, by rituals of apology without the slightest intention of redressing legitimate grievances of surviving descendants of the victimized native population.
One has to understand that against the background of several centuries of history, genocide has never been effectively stopped by the international community. Even the Holocaust in Germany was tolerated until Hitler launched a war against Poland and then attacked the Soviet Union. It was only then that Germany was delegitimized as a sovereign state. Even during World War II, the allied powers notoriously refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, although some historians question this interpretation of Allied conduct with regard to the Nazi genocide.
In the background of the Gaza genocide is the extensive experience that countries in the West have had of consolidating the ambitions of dominant racial elites by any means unless there exists within or without some sufficient strategic interest with the ability and will to stop them.
A final thing aspect of this approach to Gaza is to mention at least that after the Cold War, Islam became the next enemy of the Global West. It is relevant to take note of the striking fact that all the countries that were complicit with Israel’s genocidal behavior are from the white West and all the countries and movements that support the Palestinian struggle come from the Global South or from governments or movements originating in Islamic neighbors of Palestine. In other words after the end of the Cold War, there emerged in the faultlines of the Middle East an inter-civilization struggle for land, energy reserves, trade routes, and hegemonic status.
Q>So we shouldn’t wait patiently for the international community to act. International organizations and geopolitical actors have never acted effectively to stop this or any previous genocide. History tells us almost everything we need to know, or does it?
The organized international community has never been designed or empowered to stop genocide. It has always in the past reacted after the fact. With digital communications this could change but obstacles to fashioning effective responses remain. If enough agitation arises in civil society it might effectively bring pressure on some governments to change their policies so as to support an anti-genocide protective intervention under international auspices, and act to provide an implementing capability. This might require the coordinated imposition of sanctions with demands for consent to deploy armed blue helmet protective forces.
This happened in a limited way regarding Apartheid South Africa which was strategically allied with the UK and the US. But the internal politics of these two countries turned so strongly against apartheid that these governments, despite their conservative governments under the leadership of Thacher and Reagan, complied with the wishes of their citizens rather than pursued their strategic interests. The Israeli case is different as Zionist lobbies, especially AIPAC, continue to be effective in asserting leverage over US policy toward Israel.
Q> Is it possible for the completely different Gaza plan to what Trump proposed in his promotional video- Gaza riviera – on social media to come true? A plan where Gaza is fully emptied, and Palestinians leave their land…
We’re living at a time of radical uncertainty so that what seems impossible may become actualized in ways that it’s currently difficult to anticipate. The crystal ball used to predict the future is even foggier than usual. We are destined to live in an atmosphere of ambient uncertainty with respect to future developments, but this does not relieve us from responsibility to struggle for what we believe is right and just. Precisely because a benign future is not foreclosed, as engaged citizens dedicated to a humane future our responsibility to act on behalf of justice is an imperative of moral conscience.
Reinforcing this general idea of political responsibility are concrete factors.Trump is sufficiently narcissistic, unpredictable, and impressionable that he could launch a major campaign to prove that this vision of a Middle East Riviera comes at least partially into being. It now seems unlikely because it’s not wanted by any of the relevant actors and it seems reminiscent of the the imperial side of the colonial era. Such a proposal poses an awkward question for advocates: ‘by what possible right has the U.S. to take over a territory with which it has not had any relevant historical connection or prior reasonable claim. Trump has made similar bizarre threats about American ambitions to exert sovereignty over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and undoubtedly others will be added to this notorious list.
Q>Netanyahu thinks he’s winning. Is he really winning, Israel is really winning?
No. Without doubt Israel prevails on the battlefield they have no opposition, they kill lots of people, they destroy lots of structures, disrupting the life and heritage of Gaza in a totalizing manner. At the same time, they basically lost what the onslaught set out to achieve beyond the devastation of Gaza. Recourse by Israel to this level of violence was supposed to exterminate Hamas, yet after two years of horrifying violence Israel finds itself with no choice but to negotiate with Hamas and to reach a deal to achieve a ceasefire and hostage exchange. In the background, of course, is Israel’s insistence on excluding Hamas from any governance role in Hamas, an extreme case of rewarding the main wrongdoer and further punishing the devastated victim.
Beyond this, there are all sorts of civil society and even governmental pushbacks by former supporters, including a flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Even Israeli tourists are subject to angry protest. They have recently been denied the right to get off tourist ship in the harbors of Greek islands. More and more Israeli applicants are denied visas in an increasing number of places. IDF soldiers are facing threats of criminal prosecutions in several countries that have universal jurisdiction.
The whole legitimacy of a Zionist Israel is very much in doubt and its legitimacy challenged at this point. There are moves afoot to suspend Israel participation in UN activities or even to expel Israel from the UN. Several prominent Israelis are beginning to talk in a very strong way at least domestically against Netanyahu not only because of the failure to obtain the release of the remaining hostages but for broader issues of behavior that has ruined the reputation the whole idea of a a Jewish democratic state.
This Gaza genocide is the worst thing that has befallen diaspora Jews since Hitler. It brings authentic antisemitism rather than the fake weaponized antisemitism that is relied upon by the Zionist networks around the world to discredit Israel’s critics including of Jews such as myself. I was somewhat victimized this fake version of antisemitism while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, but not in the serious way Francesca Albanese has been. However ethically inappropriate, it is the tactic Israel devised to divert attention from critical messages of unlawful behavior to the fake antisemitism attributed to the messenger to undermine his or her credibility.
Israel earlier in its answered substantive criticisms but it became so obvious that it was violating the rights of the occupied Palestinian people in numerous ways that it began adjusting its approach. Although reckless and disreputable the tactic was quite effective as a diversionary tactic. Fortunately, its overuse has weakened these fake accusations, and made the practice understood to be defamatory in unacceptable ways, especially in international arenas.
Q>How will history record the world’s silence and it’s allowing all this to happen?
Of course, much will depend on the eventual political outcome that remains unclear, especially whether what emerges from such a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza leads to ‘Greater Israel’ and realizes Netanyahu’s vision of ‘the new Middle East’ or whether Israel faces such pressures on its economic viability and political legitimacy that it renounces the apartheid features of Zionism, and moves finally towards a genuine accommodation with Palestine that acknowledges the Palestinian right of self-determination. The unexpected transformation of racist South Africa from an apartheid structure of governance to a constitutional democracy is an instructive and hopeful precedent. It should also lead us to understand that at this stage Israel has yet to win or Palestine to lose. The conflict and struggle goes on even though future Palestinian prospects for a justice-driven peace have never seemed bleaker. As earlier expressed, the ‘certainties’ of the present are often transformed in unanticipated way as the realities of the future unfold.
If Israel prevails and manages to normalize its relations in the Middle East and with the world and is again accepted as a legitimate sovereign state, recollections derived from the events of the past two years may be airbrushed to an extent that their gruesome realities become marginalized in the public imagination as became the fate of native peoples in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. I do not see this as happening, at least not in the near future, unless there is an upheaval in Israel that drastically changes the outlook of Zionism or repudiates Zionism altogether, and I do not see this happening, although it remains a less remote possibility than it did two years ago.
Evaluating the future perception of this post October 7 experience is also difficult currently. Israel’s leadership was warned by various friendly governments of an impending Hamas attack, yet appears to have chosen to let it happen so as to have a pretext for a violent response. In fact, Israel instantly over-reacted without taking any account of the context or its complacency about border security. We should remind ourselves that the context included a harsh blockade of Gaza since 2007 that induced widespread misery, periodic Israeli military incursions causing devastation, and a refusal even to respond to Hamas diplomatic initiatives for a long-term ceasefire lasting up to 50 years. The Zionist Project made political use of the October 7 attack to launch its endgame based on territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinian occupied territories and adjustments by way defusing the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ set to explode at some point due to higher Palestinian than Jewish fertility rates. The solution was to be found by way of ethnic cleansing which meant coercing the departure of as many Palestinians as possible. In effect, carrying out the last stage of any durable settler colonial project by Israel presupposes provoking a second Nakba of mass expulsion on the long suppressed Palestinian nation that despite all has remained resilient and resistant.
If Israel succeeds, as now seems likely, it will not bring peace but lead to new forms of Palestinian resistance. This will be viewed as the greatest failure of modern times to bring an end the colonial era in a civilized manner. It will be objectively seen as one of the cruelest abuses in history, made worse by the material and psychological support given to Israel’s prolonged genocide by the Western liberal democracies that had so proudly championed the development of human rights and genocide-prevention after World War II. It will be looked back upon from many perspectives, including as a sequel to the Cold War in which Israel safeguarded the Middle East for Western exploitation and continuing encroachment, as well as containing the spread of the kind of radical Islam favored by Iran. In the process the West sacrificed commitments to international law and global justice for the sake of geopolitical priorities and Western racial cohesion. It also exhibited unabashed moral hypocrisy by invoking international criminal law to bash Russia for its border-crossing attack on Ukraine while shielding Israel from compliance with the rulings of the most respected international tribunal. In this process international law was doubly damaged first by backing Israel’s Gaza campaign and secondly by making clear that international law was to be taken seriously only as a policy and propaganda instrument to be reserved for use against adversaries and rivals, but to be evaded in the event of unlawfulness by friends and allies.
Q<Could you please tell us about the Gaza Tribunal that you’re the president? Who launched it? Who are the members? And what is your aim?
To respond adequately, would require a long response. I will be brief and encourage those interested to read ‘The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal’ for a more detailed account of the perspective of our effort. https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8 [See text of Declaration, attached]
A group of sponsors, affiliated with the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (ICYF), a civil society organization affiliated with the Conference of Islamic Cooperation and possessing UN credentials, approached Hilal Elver and myself to accept this role of organizing a civil society tribunal devoted to documenting and increasing pressure on Israel and its supporters to stop the genocide, and possessed the funding needed to make it happen. We on our part insisted on political independence and full respect for our identity in the shaping of the work of the GT, which emphasized our resolve to operate as a civil society initiative that had no connections with governments or with active politicians and diplomats. GT is administered by a Steering Committee, and its members include Palestinian NGO representatives, public intellectuals and civil society activists, former UN Special Rapporteurs and former UN officials, and retired diplomats.
We believed such an initiative justified as neither the UN nor states acting individually or collectively were able to end the genocide or impose sanctions on Israel. Our standpoint was informed by the failure of Israel to comply with international law or the ruling of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as supplemented by the failure of the UN to close the enforcement and accountability gaps, principally due to the right of veto possessed by Israel’s leading supporters in the Security Council.
The undertaking of the GT is to expose three gaps in a workable system of global governance: enforcement of law, accountability of perpetrators and complicit actors, and the refusal of states and their institutions to heed the global public interests and adapt national interests as needed. GT also aims to establish a documentary record of the genocide free from media manipulation and self-censorship in the format of an archival record that will be published in due course. The purpose to the extent possible is to insulate public discourse from state propaganda and special interests, particularly in the domain of the arms industry. The overriding immediate goal of GT is to legitimize civil society activism in the face of continuing Israeli criminality and the humanitarian emergency threatening the future of Palestinians in Gaza, and more recently in the West Bank. Such a goal also involves opposition to efforts to suppress peaceful protest activity and punish critics of Israel as has been happening in North America and many European countries.
To be clear this is a peoples tribunal, not a conventional court of law. This will be evident in the final session of the GT in Istanbul (Oct 23-26, 2025) by the centrality of a Jury of Conscience, charged with arriving at a final verdict and preparing a written judgment. This framing signals an emphasis on justice rather than on the more technical approaches to law applied by governmental and inter-governmental courts. Ironically, the GT by encouraging people to act both to exert pressure on governments and by participating in solidarity initiatives has more enforcement capabilities than do traditional capabilities in this kind of situation.
[Prefatory Note: This interview was conducted on behalf of Fayn Press by an independent Turkish journalist, Semin Gumusel, on August 19, 2025. It was published initially in Turkish and can be found at link: https://www.fayn.press/prof-richard-falk-gazzeyi-yalnizca-halklarin-direnisi-kurtarabilir/The English version posted below has been somewhat modified, mainly for style.]
Q<How can Israel and Netanyahu be stopped at this moment?
That is a question that has haunted the world for the past two years, and worried peace and justice activists for a much longer time. The most obvious issue is to how to persuade the US government and EU countries to withdraw their support in response to Israel’s abusive occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. It remains crucial for any hope of an adequate, if belated, international response to the Gaza genocide for European countries do more than just step back but encourage the imposition of collective sanctioning measures through the UN or by a coalition of the willing. It is of even greater relevance to bring pressure on the US Government to stop shielding Israel and to join in a genuine effort to overcome the current famine that is threatening death by starvation to most of the surviving Palestinian population trapped in Gaza.
The political atmosphere regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza has changed over the course of the last five months, that is, after Israel broke the ceasefire on March 13 of this year. A much larger segment of the public, including in previously complicit countries, is increasingly disturbed by Israel continuing genocide, especially by the cruelty of inducing deliberate starvation, the manipulation of the humanitarian aid, and perhaps most of all by converting the food distribution centers into killing fields. The overall impression produced by Israel’s tactics is one of death of innocent people and destruction of their habitats and cultural heritage with a ferocity that is unprecedented in human history. Prior genocides were never before as widely and vividly witnessed around the world in real time. The Israeli response to October 7 has been exposing the eyes and ears of the entire world to daily images of atrocities, as well as the complicity of the Western liberal democratic governments and the feebleness of UN genocide prevention efforts. This represents a moral collapse by Western governments and reveals the deficiencies of international law and the UN in the face of clashes between humanitarian concerns and strategic interests. If this dynamic results in Israeli post-genocide occupation of Gaza and the expulsion and repression of surviving Palestinians, this tragic failure of moral internationalism will be completed. Such a result will keep reviving memories of generations to come with graphic descriptions of this appalling behavior that was tolerated and significantly enabled by the West, particularly by the former European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies. The work of documentary and fictional filmmaking will undoubtedly preserve and disseminate this dark and scandalous chapter in human history.
We alive now cannot evade responsibility for taking what action we can that is directed at securing Palestinian rights as well as resisting Israel’s crimes. The urgent question before the world is ‘how to translate opposition to this ongoing experience of criminality into effective action of opposition given existing emergency conditions?’ The humanitarian emergency can only be address by an immediate response of sufficient magnitude. We have little time to plan and intervene protectively if we are serious about engaging to save the surviving Gazan population of an estimated two million persons, most of whom have already been severely malnourished and traumatized by almost two years of relentless wholesale onslaught conducted with minimal constraint.
What has been happening in Gaza should not be treated as a ‘war,’ which presupposes a somewhat symmetrical struggle between two sides. The conflict unfolding in Gaza is more accurately portrayed as a ‘massacre’, or even as ‘a military hunting expedition.’ It is so one-sided in its characteristics, with one side having its choice of options as to the most hyper-modern weaponry and targets, and the other side vulnerable and helpless, with few options other than to seek shelter and pray to survive. To use the language of war for such a conflict is to normalize Israel’s behavior by raising technical questions of the law of war as to whether it has exceeded the limits of ‘self-defense’ or ‘military necessity.’ Such issues can be argued indefinitely by lawyers for and against, thereby minimizing the horror that is transpiring. Language matters as it allows advocates of abhorrent behavior to hide the true nature of their true motivations that account for the tactics deployed to destroy the identity, livelihood, memories, and lives of an entire people and at the same time engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the land of its native population. The recourse to force of this intensity and duration given the context cannot be explained by reference to Israeli security or even revenge, but only by reference to territorial ambitions and depopulation that long infused the Zionist Project, which has delayed implementation until an opportunity was present,.
In the case of Gaza there’s a special feature that this violence is concentrated in a tiny area occupied after the 1967 War and subject to international humanitarian law with Israel being a provisional occupying power that has now been declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to have flagrantly abused its authority and role from the perspective of international law. This supreme international tribunal in a near unanimous judgment concluded that Israel was legally obligated to withdraw its military presence and political administration altogether from occupied Palestinian territories and allowed it a year to do so. The year expired on July 19, 2025, and given the refusal of Israel to comply, this authoritative judicial opinion instructed the UN and its Members in their individual capacities to take steps to implement Israel’s withdrawal. What is now established is that Israel has no legitimate foundation for exercising control in either Gaza or the West Bank, and has itself become an unlawful occupant. Israel not only refuses to comply with the ICJ decision but has announced plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank, directly violating an important legal constraint found in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. So far there are no signs at the UN or elsewhere that there exists a sufficient political will to do anything that would really make Israel feel obliged to comply.
There are some symbolic gestures that have been recently made by several important European countries including Germany, France and the UK reacting to the official confirmation of famine in Gaza and the reports of children and others dying of starvation. But in terms of stopping an extremist leader like Netanyahu and the Zionist movement that has captured control over the governing process and the citizenry in Israel, and there is little indication that anything in the short term can or will be done to mitigate the suffering in Gaza, or to avert what seems to be worse to come. There is a slender hope that the increasing pariah or rogue status of Israel will induce an unexpected willingness of Israel’s leaders to compromise the further pursuit of maximalist goals in exchange for a pledge to normalize Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Middle East, a revival of the Abraham Accords initiated in the last year of Trump’s first term as the US president.
People have started advocating, including here in Istanbul, about forming a UN protective force that would intervene with sufficient capabilities to protect the Gazan population perhaps by a peacekeeping presence deployed at the borders between Israel and Gaza, as well as between Israel and the West Bank. It is doubtful that this will happen so long as U.S. and Israeli opposition remains as firm as in the past 22 months.
At the same time, it may be the best hope aside from an Israeli course correction, and it’s certainly worth exerting public pressure that might make Israel do something radically inconsistent with its behavior before and after October 7, but history is full of surprises, reflecting an inability to know the future and thus forced to live with uncertainty on every level of human existence. But uncertainty is no excuse for passivity in the presence of evil. What seems a phantasy hinged to Israel’s willingness to change its behavior, accepting an arrangement committed to enforcing international law and accepting a stable and just peace that would also promise the political as well as the physical reconstruction of Gaza is neither probable nor impossible.
Such a scenario is what we should struggle to achieve at this point even though most self-confident experts would dismiss its relevance as an idle utopian fantasy, and move on to plan some incremental feasible face saving adjustment that would not attempt to address the underlying maladies.
Q>If genocide cannot be stopped what is the outcome Israel seeks? When do you think Israel will stop this military operation increasingly labeled as ‘genocide’ in public discourse?
In my view Israel’s undertaking was not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all by security considerations. Israel had ample capabilities to address whatever security threats existed after October 7, and assuming that Israel didn’t let the attack happen so as to have the pretext for such a response, it would merely be a matter of enhancing border security, well within Israel’s defense capabilities. Israel received warnings that this attack was coming. Including a New York Times front page story about the degree to which Netanyahu had been made aware of the preparations in Gaza for launching this attack. As well, the Egyptian intelligence reportedly warned Netanyahi in the days before the attack. The world deserves an international investigation of the October 7 events, including what preceded and what followed, to obtain a better grasp of what motivated Israel to act as it has.
Ordinary persons should at least entertain the possibility that Israel wanted the pretext for initiating such a large-scale response that it would begin the end game for the Zionist project, which means grabbing as much land as they could acquire in terms of what was in some sense withheld from Israel by the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. The Israeli made no secret of wanting to have one Israeli state with Jewish supremacy and allowing only the Jewish people as having a right of self-determination. This is set forth in Israel’s Basic Law adopted by the Knesset in 2018. As Israel has no constitution, the Basic Law is the highest form of legislation and the most difficult to amend and repeal. It internalizes and acknowledges the apartheid regime Israel has long relied upon to deal with Palestinians living in Israel or in the occupied territories or even as refugees. It has been complemented by episodic seizures of Palestinian land and periodic expulsion of Palestinians.
On the West Bank there’s been an increasing spillover from the Gaza violence, mainly evident in the upsurge of settler violence directed at making life unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank and encouraging a movement among the many militant settler communities that are very well represented in the Netanyahu coalition to annex the West Bank and to occupy substantial if not the whole of Gaza and in the process to find ways to remove as many Palestinians as possible, either by forced expulsion or by some kind of ‘voluntary’ arrangement with another country that would accept them, possibly being bribed to do so by economic incentives. Several African countries have been talked about in this way but so far none have been persuaded to accept an influx of Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homeland.
But Israel and specifically the Zionist movement has always been animated by the idea of a single colonized Israel state that has the characteristics of a settler colonial undertaking. Such a project has been pursued at the very moment that colonialism has collapsed elsewhere in the world. Hence, it hardly surprising that there’s more resistance from the Palestinians to a historical attempt to engage in a new colonial undertaking during what is often referred to as a post-colonial era.
This persistent resistance of Palestinians has given rise to a vicious circle linking resistance to more and more severe repression taking the form of apartheid. No matter what its name Israel has devised a system of racial domination and exploitation that is based on ethnicity not on class but on identity determined to be either Jew or non-Jew. Aside from Israel’s resolve to exert discriminatory submission on the part of the Palestinians, its ambitions are more extensive, involving land and racial purification that depends on a continuous process of ethnic cleansing.
And when apartheid doesn’t succeed in achieving the ends that are being sought there has been a strong tendency of settler colonial movements to embrace a logic of genocide of varying degrees of severity depending on circumstances in each instance. Recourse to genocide often came about because it seemed the only way that the settler colonial undertaking could find stability and achieve homeland security. All settler colonial settler states have commenced their existence with an often unconsciously constructed apartheid-like structure, which if resisted over a long period would tend to transition to genocide or in a few instances the abandonment of the project. The US and Canada illustrate a transition to genocide, Algeria and South Africa illustrate a transition to withdrawal after resistance from within and without seemed to formidable to ignore.
As such what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories is not a new phenomenon, it happened in all the white British breakaway colonies Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand. They each experienced this sequence of apartheid followed by genocidal policies to marginalize the native peoples within their territories, and if long stabilized, by rituals of apology without the slightest intention of redressing legitimate grievances of surviving descendants of the victimized native population.
One has to understand that against the background of several centuries of history, genocide has never been effectively stopped by the international community. Even the Holocaust in Germany was tolerated until Hitler launched a war against Poland and then attacked the Soviet Union. It was only then that Germany was delegitimized as a sovereign state. Even during World War II, the allied powers notoriously refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, although some historians question this interpretation of Allied conduct with regard to the Nazi genocide.
In the background of the Gaza genocide is the extensive experience that countries in the West have had of consolidating the ambitions of dominant racial elites by any means unless there exists within or without some sufficient strategic interest with the ability and will to stop them.
A final thing aspect of this approach to Gaza is to mention at least that after the Cold War, Islam became the next enemy of the Global West. It is relevant to take note of the striking fact that all the countries that were complicit with Israel’s genocidal behavior are from the white West and all the countries and movements that support the Palestinian struggle come from the Global South or from governments or movements originating in Islamic neighbors of Palestine. In other words after the end of the Cold War, there emerged in the faultlines of the Middle East an inter-civilization struggle for land, energy reserves, trade routes, and hegemonic status.
Q>So we shouldn’t wait patiently for the international community to act. International organizations and geopolitical actors have never acted effectively to stop this or any previous genocide. History tells us almost everything we need to know, or does it?
The organized international community has never been designed or empowered to stop genocide. It has always in the past reacted after the fact. With digital communications this could change but obstacles to fashioning effective responses remain. If enough agitation arises in civil society it might effectively bring pressure on some governments to change their policies so as to support an anti-genocide protective intervention under international auspices, and act to provide an implementing capability. This might require the coordinated imposition of sanctions with demands for consent to deploy armed blue helmet protective forces.
This happened in a limited way regarding Apartheid South Africa which was strategically allied with the UK and the US. But the internal politics of these two countries turned so strongly against apartheid that these governments, despite their conservative governments under the leadership of Thacher and Reagan, complied with the wishes of their citizens rather than pursued their strategic interests. The Israeli case is different as Zionist lobbies, especially AIPAC, continue to be effective in asserting leverage over US policy toward Israel.
Q> Is it possible for the completely different Gaza plan to what Trump proposed in his promotional video- Gaza riviera – on social media to come true? A plan where Gaza is fully emptied, and Palestinians leave their land…
We’re living at a time of radical uncertainty so that what seems impossible may become actualized in ways that it’s currently difficult to anticipate. The crystal ball used to predict the future is even foggier than usual. We are destined to live in an atmosphere of ambient uncertainty with respect to future developments, but this does not relieve us from responsibility to struggle for what we believe is right and just. Precisely because a benign future is not foreclosed, as engaged citizens dedicated to a humane future our responsibility to act on behalf of justice is an imperative of moral conscience.
Reinforcing this general idea of political responsibility are concrete factors.Trump is sufficiently narcissistic, unpredictable, and impressionable that he could launch a major campaign to prove that this vision of a Middle East Riviera comes at least partially into being. It now seems unlikely because it’s not wanted by any of the relevant actors and it seems reminiscent of the the imperial side of the colonial era. Such a proposal poses an awkward question for advocates: ‘by what possible right has the U.S. to take over a territory with which it has not had any relevant historical connection or prior reasonable claim. Trump has made similar bizarre threats about American ambitions to exert sovereignty over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and undoubtedly others will be added to this notorious list.
Q>Netanyahu thinks he’s winning. Is he really winning, Israel is really winning?
No. Without doubt Israel prevails on the battlefield they have no opposition, they kill lots of people, they destroy lots of structures, disrupting the life and heritage of Gaza in a totalizing manner. At the same time, they basically lost what the onslaught set out to achieve beyond the devastation of Gaza. Recourse by Israel to this level of violence was supposed to exterminate Hamas, yet after two years of horrifying violence Israel finds itself with no choice but to negotiate with Hamas and to reach a deal to achieve a ceasefire and hostage exchange. In the background, of course, is Israel’s insistence on excluding Hamas from any governance role in Hamas, an extreme case of rewarding the main wrongdoer and further punishing the devastated victim.
Beyond this, there are all sorts of civil society and even governmental pushbacks by former supporters, including a flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Even Israeli tourists are subject to angry protest. They have recently been denied the right to get off tourist ship in the harbors of Greek islands. More and more Israeli applicants are denied visas in an increasing number of places. IDF soldiers are facing threats of criminal prosecutions in several countries that have universal jurisdiction.
The whole legitimacy of a Zionist Israel is very much in doubt and its legitimacy challenged at this point. There are moves afoot to suspend Israel participation in UN activities or even to expel Israel from the UN. Several prominent Israelis are beginning to talk in a very strong way at least domestically against Netanyahu not only because of the failure to obtain the release of the remaining hostages but for broader issues of behavior that has ruined the reputation the whole idea of a a Jewish democratic state.
This Gaza genocide is the worst thing that has befallen diaspora Jews since Hitler. It brings authentic antisemitism rather than the fake weaponized antisemitism that is relied upon by the Zionist networks around the world to discredit Israel’s critics including of Jews such as myself. I was somewhat victimized this fake version of antisemitism while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, but not in the serious way Francesca Albanese has been. However ethically inappropriate, it is the tactic Israel devised to divert attention from critical messages of unlawful behavior to the fake antisemitism attributed to the messenger to undermine his or her credibility.
Israel earlier in its answered substantive criticisms but it became so obvious that it was violating the rights of the occupied Palestinian people in numerous ways that it began adjusting its approach. Although reckless and disreputable the tactic was quite effective as a diversionary tactic. Fortunately, its overuse has weakened these fake accusations, and made the practice understood to be defamatory in unacceptable ways, especially in international arenas.
Q>How will history record the world’s silence and it’s allowing all this to happen?
Of course, much will depend on the eventual political outcome that remains unclear, especially whether what emerges from such a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza leads to ‘Greater Israel’ and realizes Netanyahu’s vision of ‘the new Middle East’ or whether Israel faces such pressures on its economic viability and political legitimacy that it renounces the apartheid features of Zionism, and moves finally towards a genuine accommodation with Palestine that acknowledges the Palestinian right of self-determination. The unexpected transformation of racist South Africa from an apartheid structure of governance to a constitutional democracy is an instructive and hopeful precedent. It should also lead us to understand that at this stage Israel has yet to win or Palestine to lose. The conflict and struggle goes on even though future Palestinian prospects for a justice-driven peace have never seemed bleaker. As earlier expressed, the ‘certainties’ of the present are often transformed in unanticipated way as the realities of the future unfold.
If Israel prevails and manages to normalize its relations in the Middle East and with the world and is again accepted as a legitimate sovereign state, recollections derived from the events of the past two years may be airbrushed to an extent that their gruesome realities become marginalized in the public imagination as became the fate of native peoples in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. I do not see this as happening, at least not in the near future, unless there is an upheaval in Israel that drastically changes the outlook of Zionism or repudiates Zionism altogether, and I do not see this happening, although it remains a less remote possibility than it did two years ago.
Evaluating the future perception of this post October 7 experience is also difficult currently. Israel’s leadership was warned by various friendly governments of an impending Hamas attack, yet appears to have chosen to let it happen so as to have a pretext for a violent response. In fact, Israel instantly over-reacted without taking any account of the context or its complacency about border security. We should remind ourselves that the context included a harsh blockade of Gaza since 2007 that induced widespread misery, periodic Israeli military incursions causing devastation, and a refusal even to respond to Hamas diplomatic initiatives for a long-term ceasefire lasting up to 50 years. The Zionist Project made political use of the October 7 attack to launch its endgame based on territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinian occupied territories and adjustments by way defusing the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ set to explode at some point due to higher Palestinian than Jewish fertility rates. The solution was to be found by way of ethnic cleansing which meant coercing the departure of as many Palestinians as possible. In effect, carrying out the last stage of any durable settler colonial project by Israel presupposes provoking a second Nakba of mass expulsion on the long suppressed Palestinian nation that despite all has remained resilient and resistant.
If Israel succeeds, as now seems likely, it will not bring peace but lead to new forms of Palestinian resistance. This will be viewed as the greatest failure of modern times to bring an end the colonial era in a civilized manner. It will be objectively seen as one of the cruelest abuses in history, made worse by the material and psychological support given to Israel’s prolonged genocide by the Western liberal democracies that had so proudly championed the development of human rights and genocide-prevention after World War II. It will be looked back upon from many perspectives, including as a sequel to the Cold War in which Israel safeguarded the Middle East for Western exploitation and continuing encroachment, as well as containing the spread of the kind of radical Islam favored by Iran. In the process the West sacrificed commitments to international law and global justice for the sake of geopolitical priorities and Western racial cohesion. It also exhibited unabashed moral hypocrisy by invoking international criminal law to bash Russia for its border-crossing attack on Ukraine while shielding Israel from compliance with the rulings of the most respected international tribunal. In this process international law was doubly damaged first by backing Israel’s Gaza campaign and secondly by making clear that international law was to be taken seriously only as a policy and propaganda instrument to be reserved for use against adversaries and rivals, but to be evaded in the event of unlawfulness by friends and allies.
Q<Could you please tell us about the Gaza Tribunal that you’re the president? Who launched it? Who are the members? And what is your aim?
To respond adequately, would require a long response. I will be brief and encourage those interested to read ‘The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal’ for a more detailed account of the perspective of our effort. https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8 [See text of Declaration, attached]
A group of sponsors, affiliated with the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (ICYF), a civil society organization affiliated with the Conference of Islamic Cooperation and possessing UN credentials, approached Hilal Elver and myself to accept this role of organizing a civil society tribunal devoted to documenting and increasing pressure on Israel and its supporters to stop the genocide, and possessed the funding needed to make it happen. We on our part insisted on political independence and full respect for our identity in the shaping of the work of the GT, which emphasized our resolve to operate as a civil society initiative that had no connections with governments or with active politicians and diplomats. GT is administered by a Steering Committee, and its members include Palestinian NGO representatives, public intellectuals and civil society activists, former UN Special Rapporteurs and former UN officials, and retired diplomats.
We believed such an initiative justified as neither the UN nor states acting individually or collectively were able to end the genocide or impose sanctions on Israel. Our standpoint was informed by the failure of Israel to comply with international law or the ruling of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as supplemented by the failure of the UN to close the enforcement and accountability gaps, principally due to the right of veto possessed by Israel’s leading supporters in the Security Council.
The undertaking of the GT is to expose three gaps in a workable system of global governance: enforcement of law, accountability of perpetrators and complicit actors, and the refusal of states and their institutions to heed the global public interests and adapt national interests as needed. GT also aims to establish a documentary record of the genocide free from media manipulation and self-censorship in the format of an archival record that will be published in due course. The purpose to the extent possible is to insulate public discourse from state propaganda and special interests, particularly in the domain of the arms industry. The overriding immediate goal of GT is to legitimize civil society activism in the face of continuing Israeli criminality and the humanitarian emergency threatening the future of Palestinians in Gaza, and more recently in the West Bank. Such a goal also involves opposition to efforts to suppress peaceful protest activity and punish critics of Israel as has been happening in North America and many European countries.
To be clear this is a peoples tribunal, not a conventional court of law. This will be evident in the final session of the GT in Istanbul (Oct 23-26, 2025) by the centrality of a Jury of Conscience, charged with arriving at a final verdict and preparing a written judgment. This framing signals an emphasis on justice rather than on the more technical approaches to law applied by governmental and inter-governmental courts. Ironically, the GT by encouraging people to act both to exert pressure on governments and by participating in solidarity initiatives has more enforcement capabilities than do traditional capabilities in this kind of situation.
In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.
Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?
Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.
The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.
Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.
The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.
In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]
This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.
Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?
Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.
Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.
The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.
Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”
Daniel Falcone:Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?
Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’
Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.
As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.
Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?
Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.
The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.
Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.
Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.
Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.
[Prefatory Note: Interview text of responses to question]s posed by Naman Bakaç, an idependent journalist in Turkey. The interview was published by FOCUS, an independent online media platform. The link can be found at the link below:
https://www.fokusplus.com/roportaj/prof-dr-richard-falk-bm-ve-kuresel-hukuk-filistin-halkinin-haklarini-koruyamadi?s=09 ] 1. Let’s start with your book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience,’ whichyou co-edited with Ahmet Davutoğlu and was published in June 2025. The bookincludes articles by more than 30 politicians, academics, diplomats, intellectuals, andstatesmen from 17 countries. Who are the contributors in this book? What motivationsled to the creation of this book? What message do you aim to convey to the globalpublic through this book?
Response: As we explain in the Preface, the contributors were selected from a much larger group of distinguished signatories of a Declaration of Conscience, drafted by the former Prime Minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu and myself, and issued in late 2023 not long after the October 7 events. The Hamas-led attack was designed to be an anguished protest against the failure of governments and the UN to bring what seemed to us almost from its outset to be a transparent genocide carried out in real time and by digital technology brought to the awareness of the eyes and ears of the world. The issuance of our Declaration was met with unexpected enthusiasm from frustrated citizens in many countries that resulted in the private funding of a conference in London on 27 March 2024.
By coincidence, the conference was held the day after the International Court of Justice made its historic initial interim rulings in response to requests from South Africa that had submitted a legal dispute with Israel as to whether Israeli violence was of a nature that violated the International Convention on Genocide, as well as whether Israel was legally obliged to stop obstructing the international delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population of Gaza. Naturally, we were encouraged by these ICJ rulings to the effect that Israeli indiscriminate violence against the civilian population of Gaza coupled with the Israeli official decrees prohibiting entry of food, fuel, and water made allegations of genocide ‘plausible.’
As well, the ICJ in a second near unanimous judicial ruling ordered Israel to stop interfering with the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid. These ICJ rulings encouraged us to continue our effort to mobilize civil society on the basis of a justice-driven interpretation of law to engage with this unfolding human tragedy through the activation of nonviolent solidarity initiatives.
If a single message emerges from such a multi-authored book gathering between its pages distinguished public personalities from around the world
with diverse perspectives on global issues, yet united in condemning the genocide, it is this: when the existing normative order of rules, procedures, and institutions established by governments and international institutions, especially those falling within the UN System, fails to meet an urgent challenge to peace and human rights, it is time for the peoples of the world to act in resolute opposition.
In our search for participants, we wanted to focus on people whose view were similar to ourselves who were not presently holders of high positions in governments or inter-governmental institutions but were widely respected as moral authority figures. Our influence and ‘weapons’ were of the mind, heart, and spirit that were best expressed by engaged citizenship, trust in the guidance of conscience, and existential belief in the power of people in the service of truth. We hope our book conveys that message, which includes the conviction that conscience in extreme situations demands action as well as rhetorical utterances. Words unsupported by action in the face of genocide is an unacceptable form of silence. We regard our efforts as playing a small but determined part in an emergent global solidarity movement of people in support of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, above all, the right of self- determination.
From the London Conference devoted to exploring the implications of the Gaza Declaration, the idea of a book emerged as a matter of course, encouraged by a publishing commitment by Clarity Press. Our intention was to have this varied collection of writings exhibit both shared values and diverse policy judgments, and stimulate creative solidarity actions throughout the world, thereby confirming the view that the Gaza Genocide is not just an urgent challenge to all of humanity, but is also a test of whether the peoples of the world can develop moral agency to challenge dark challenges to the human future.
As far as the book is concerned, I think the range and quality of the contributions exceeded our expectations, although admittedly its impacts on human behavior remain unknowable, and even after 21 months such initiatives have not extinguished the need for intensifying activism in support of the Palestinian struggle.
2. In December 2023, you published a text calling for international justice and conscience conference on Palestine was held in London. Could these civil initiativesyou undertook out of a sense of responsibility turn into a global civil movement to enforce international law and order? Has it already turned into one? Can wesay that, while the UN and international law have failed in the face of the Gazagenocide, you are moving from words to action with this civil movement? Afterall, the unifying theme of the London Conference was that words are not enoughand action is imperative., which included some of the names in your new book.
Response: Although we were motivated to make what contribution we could to change the political atmosphere sufficiently to stop the genocide, we had no illusions that our pleas for humane politics would be heeded in the short run. Yet we felt that silence in its two forms was unacceptable, that is, refusing to name the violence of the Israeli response as ‘genocide,’ given its clear intentionality as further exhibited in its actions. Since naming gave rise to various forms of punitive pushback, especially in Europe and North America during the months after October 7, to name the violence ‘genocide’ was not only a word but became an action in defiance of Zionist worldwide efforts to treat evidenced- based criticism of Israel as a hateful form of antisemitism. As the genocide has persisted now for more almost two years genocide as the accepted descripted term has been somewhat normalized even in the mainstream media. It is still true that few governmental or officials in international institutions of the West speak of ‘genocide’ even when condemning the prolonged Israeli violence, and even UN top officials while highly critical of Israel’s behavior continue to refrain from characterizing the violence in Gaza as genocide.
It is notable that Francesca Albanese, the fearless UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine has been admirably forthright when it coming to naming, devoting three of her semi-annual official reports to different facets of genocide, including the depiction of the Zionist Project as a prime instance of ‘settler colonialism’ and complicit behavior of supporting governments and profit-making corporations as integral to Israel’s criminal responsibility for genocide. It is not surprising in view of this that Ms. Albanese has been singled out by the US Government and sanctioned in her personal capacity, being denied entry to the US and having her American assets frozen, a vindicative response to truthful witnessing on behalf of the public good, illustrative of UN functioning with courage and effectiveness despite contrary systemic pressures according to the high ideals of the Preamble to the UN Charter.
As indicated in my response to your first question, the confinement of criticism of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza to words of condemnation are insufficient in the face of prolonged and transparent genocide, with cruel and aggravating tendencies for more than 22 months. Action must be proposed and acted upon, whether the actors are governments, institutions, civil society activist, or individuals and collectivities of
various sorts. The political suicide of Aaron Bushnell in 2023, an American airman in front of Israel’s embassy in Washington is illustrative of an extreme humanistic sacrifice or self-martyrdom, an enactment of the repudiation of genocide as well as a desperate appeal to others to take action aimed at stopping the genocide. The action of Madleen Freedom Flotilla mission undertaken by Greta Thunberg and other brave and dedicated activists is another example of anti-genocidal activism, with an emphasis on both highlighting and circumventing Israel’s disruptions of the international delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid, an initiative that combines a care-giving gesture in the context of the humanitarian emergency in Gaza with an unspoken yet powerful appeal to others to engage actively, given their personal situation, in a variety of ways that involves truth-telling and solidarity with the victimized population of Gaza.
The importance of conscience as a motive for political action is gives rise to expressions of bravery in situations of risk without knowing whether controversial utterances will engender a response from those hitherto on the sidelines that might grow into a movement with transformative capabilities valuable for their own sake. In that sense, opposing genocide in Gaza is both an intrinsic reaction of conscience and a distinct action that has political goals of motivating others to join the struggle.
In retrospect, it is obvious that from feeble solidarity initiatives early on, a civil society movement of many distinct parts has grown to the point where Israel’s legitimacy as a state is increasingly drawn into question, both symbolically and substantively. One manifestation of this solidarity trend is the intensity of growing calls for Israel’s suspension from UN activities, as well as proposals for arms embargoes, denial of visas to Israeli citizens, boycotts of cultural and sporting events, solidarity fasts and cutting diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.
Even though Israel has continued to follow its lawless, abusive path, its behavior and identity has been slowly delegitimized by public discourse even in the most influential civil society media platforms of the West, reflecting the symbolic defeat of Israel when it comes to controlling the high normative ground of law and morality. As I have argued in the past the side that wins the Legitimacy War fought over symbolic entitlements of legality and morality tends to prevail politically in the end despite being defeated on the battlefield due to inferior military capabilities. The Palestinians of Gaza, with the help of global supportive solidarity and Palestinian resistance and sumud, have clearly won the Legitimacy War despite the tragic costs paid by participants in such anti-colonial liberation struggles. As with other anti-colonial uprisings, the uncertainty is whether the Palestinians have the national stamina to gain the fruits of such a victory, that is, national liberation embodying the realization of the ultimate human right, that of self-determination. Israel under the sway of Zionist ideology and the Masada Complex seems prepared to pay a far higher price in blood, treasure, and reputation than have been other recent settler colonial projects to exterminate opposition its goals of eliminating resistance by the native or homeland residents.
3.The Israel-Iran war raises many questions as to what kinds of changes will it bring to the regional and global order? What do you think is the real reason behind Israel targeting Iran after Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen? What do you think are the geopolitical and the political goals of the Israel-US duo?
Response: Israel has made clear in its foreign policy pronouncements that it seeks to prevent any country in the region from becoming strong or bold enough to challenge Israel’s military preeminence. Its extension of the Gaza combat zone to several Middle Eastern countries signals its resolve to eliminate or severely weaken any Islamic non-state movement that is aligned with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, the exercise of its long-denied rights of self-determination and perceived in Tel Aviv to pose a challenge to Israel’s strategic and hegemonic ambitions. The inflamed atmosphere caused by the prolonged genocide in Gaza give rise to a context in which rising global discontent with Israel create incentives to strike at its actual and imagined regional adversaries.
Iran above all is singled out as Enemy No. 1, in part to divert attention from the grim happenings in Gaza and the West Bank, to carry out its long-time strategy of remaking the Middle East to its liking, and to address Iran’s supposed security threat centered on its potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. The Israeli justifications involve preempting security threats before they can materialize or striking disproportionately (along the lines of the Dahiya Doctrine) in response to behavior perceived as hostile to the Zionist game plan that features the minimization of a Palestinian presence within an enlarged reconfigured Israel that erases Palestine from the map of what Netanyahu likes to call ‘the New Middle East’ or ‘Greater Israel.’ Such ambitions would compel the massive physical displacement and psychological marginalization of Palestinians. It also seeks to coerce the most defeatist representatives of Palestine to agree to the surrender of national political goals, including the most basic rights embodied in international law, especially in relation to human rights.
The 12-day Iran War exemplifies this approach, with the proclaimed goal of eliminating, or at least substantially delaying, Iran’s alleged threat to acquire nuclear weapons. A secondary rarely openly acknowledged goal is to stimulate a restive Iranian opposition to seize the moment to launch a campaign to achieve regime change in Tehran. Underlying these, is an unspoken third goal of renewing fear of Israel’s deterrent capabilities and preventive war mindset in a potentially hostile post-Assad Syria feared to emerge as a destabilizing presence in the Middle East. The attack on Iran also created an opportunity that came to fruition to involve the US directly in the coercive administration of Middle East politics. Israel’s dependence on US supplementing its initial attacks by enlisting B2 planes that the US alone possessed delivering Blockbuster Bombs on underground Iranian nuclear sites demonstrated the strength of Israel’s leverage in Washington and the limits of Israel’s purported military dominance in the Middle East.
The Israel/US duo in the region has two imperial objectives. The first is assuring friendly governments control the energy resources of the region. The other is to
contain the spread of Islam beyond the vital civilizational fault lines in the Middle East. This second goal helps explain the blind eye that the Western liberal democracies turned toward the prolonged genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza while actually exhibiting complicity in the commission of this crime. This crime simultaneously denied the right to life, right to peace, and a rebuff of fundamental individual and collective legal entitlements of national self- determination to all peoples.
4.You previously served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. Prof. Michael Lynk, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine between 2016 and 2022, recently stated at Boğaziçi University’s conference ‘Rethinking International Law after Gaza’ that international law alone cannot ensure Palestine’s liberation and that there must also be international resolve. What concrete proposals do you have for establishing the resolve to implement the principles and decisions ofinternational law?
Response: I share Michael Lynk’s view about the inability of international legal authority to be self-enforcing in situations of defiant non-compliance that Israel has manifested in all aspects of its relations with the Palestinian people and most dramatically over the course of more than 22 months of a genocidal assault on the civilian population of Gaza and the devastation of physical infrastructure of Gazan society casting doubt of its viability as a place fit for human habitation. This is especially the case, as here, where the violator enjoys geopolitical support from the US and the European Union. There are several steps that can be taken on levels of policy and others of a more systemic character.
Civil Society Solidarity Initiatives. There are variety of ways that people can act to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps when the UN and organized normative order fails, as it has in Gaza, and more generally with regard to protecting the basic rights of the Palestinian people. The struggle against the South African apartheid regime illustrates the impact of civil society activism in the struggle to combat racist criminality. Such initiatives as the BDS movement, featuring nationalist boycotts of cultural and sporting events by refusals to perform in South Africa and mounting pressure to exclude participation by South African performers and athletes elsewhere contributed to anti-apartheid struggle, as well as seeking to discourage new investments and to divest from past investments, and sanctions by way of arms embargoes and other punitive actions were expressions of moral outrage directed at the South African regime, and although unacknowledged, are widely thought to have contributed to the unexpected and sudden decision by South African leaders to abandon apartheid, free Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, and arrange
free elections of all South African inhabitants to select a new leadership and establish a constitutional structure based on racial equality and human rights for all.
There are a variety of other solidarity initiatives that can be mentioned: waging a Legitimacy War to control public discourse, with the winner controlling the high ground of law and morality; exertions of a variety of pressures on media and government in complicit countries; protests by global voices of conscience demanding arms embargoes; individual actions such as tax refusal and self- martyrdom in protest.
Collective Governmental Coalition. The Hague Group, originally formed by states of the Global South, provides a venue for opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide, including a statement of purpose and the recommendation of action-oriented measures intended to exert pressure on Israel in relation to its behavior in Occupied Palestine. The Hague Group met in Bogotá at an emergency meeting at the joint invitation of Colombia and South Africa. A Declaration signed by the 30 participating governments and the adoption of a commitment to impose a series of anti-Israeli measure by 12 of the participating states. The event is an important indication of the emergence of the Global South from a period of post- colonial passivity and suggests a revival under altered circumstances of the Bandung Spirit, which challenged the preoccupations of the Cold War by giving priorities to liberation struggles and development priorities, and projecting a different conception of global security and international legitimacy at the UN and elsewhere.
UN Reform. There are variety of UN Reforms that would enhance respect for international law and enforcement/accountability prospects. The most promising reforms to achieve a more effective UN that seek to serve global public interests with respect to war prevention and global security include the following: empowerment of the General Assembly via implementation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution and Responsibility to Protect (R2P), direct enforcement without recourse to Security Council of ICJ judgments; elimination or curtailment of the right of veto in the Security Council and in other decision points in the UN System; expediting ICJ proceedings in emergency situations; renaming ‘Advisory Opinions’ of ICJ as ‘Authoritative Legal Judgments;’ adding layers of protections to the work of Special Procedures to ensure political independence and immunity from defamation and sanctions. Seldom discussed is the enhancement of status of UN Special Rapporteurs, including more explicit responsibilities of the UN Secretariat to offer protection extending to disallowing defamatory attacks by NGOs within UN arenas of appraisal such as the Human Rights Council. Vesting increased war prevention authority in the office of the Secretary General.
New Pedagogical Paradigm. Legal education is deficient in its approach to international law, especially in relation to core public order issues of conflict, human rights, and development. It focuses on the vocational preparation of students to be practicing lawyers within the confines of nation states. International law is seen as a discretionary subject at the margins of the law school curricula and is not well understood even within democratic societies governed in accord with constitutional commitments to uphold the ‘rule of law.’
A pedagogy of international law that would be more supportive of a global normative order that was more geared to the realization of values associated with peace, justice, and sustainable development would view legal education as a vital source of civic education in relation to engaged citizenship. The goals would be to require all graduates of law schools and other law programs to grasp the relevance of an effective just world order to human interests in overcoming global challenges.
Educational reform would also include course offerings on the history of international relations. Courses would feature critiques of ‘political realism’ that continues to be the shared operational code of planners and advisors that shape the worldviews and foreign policy of almost all leading governments. The ‘group think’ of foreign policy elites create an atmosphere in which strategic ambitions and security calculations take precedence, limiting international law in its regulative role to policy settings in which mutuality is seen to exist. With respect to global security context the propaganda role of international law tends to be paramount, serving as a foreign policy instrument for mobilizing opposition against international enemies while dismissing international law when its constraints are violated by the national government or its allies. Law is not law that treats equals unequally as was the Global West’s appeal to international law when dealing with Russia’s attack on Ukraine and its dismissal when responding to more serious allegations of genocide made against Israel.
5.What kind of global order and international law was built after World War II such that no power, mechanism, legality, or institution can stop Israel’s genocidal, expansionist, and occupationist policies? If this inability continues, what kind of globalorder and international law awaits us? As an experienced scholar who has conductedacademic and field studies in international law and practices for more than 40 years,and who has written books on the legitimacy of global order, legality, and the futureof international law, how do you think the global order and international law will beshaped after Gaza? What kind of world order awaits us? How would you name thisnew order? Is it similar to past versions of Pax America?
Response: To some extent the last part of my response to the prior question anticipates your concerns here. As suggested, the overriding of international law by the political realist control of foreign policy results in world order being shaped by power rather than by the restraints and procedures of law and the guidelines of ethics and justice, at least in relation to global security and war/peace issues. More specifically, what emerged from World War II was not a genuine war prevention or global security framework as pledged in Preamble to the UN Charter. Instead, the international normative order deliberately marginalized the UN, and international law generally, although with certain potentially significant exceptions. The global normative order that has evolved since 1945 was designed to give the winners in the war against fascism freedom of action to pursue their strategic interests exempt from the rule of law and international law by virtue of a right of veto given to the five winners that also turned out to be the five countries allowed to acquire nuclear weaponry.
Such a great power hegemonic world system was also evident in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, which only prosecuted German and Japanese military and political officials, that is, the crimes of the losers in the war. No legal scrutiny led to investigations, much less prosecutions of the major crimes of the winners, including indiscriminate strategic bombing and the use of atom bombs against two Japanese cities despite their scant military importance. A great liberal show was made of the limited due process offered to these surviving high officials of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, but the one-sidedness of the legal proceedings made a mockery of claims that a new of international criminal justice had commenced at the war crimes trials. A further irony is that the agreement to establish these tribunals were set by the Allied Power in London on August 8, that is on the day between dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and a second bomb on Nagasaki, a historic display of humanitarian insensitivity by the self-righteous winners of World War II.
A second phase of such a hegemonic normative order emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union bringing the Cold War to an end in the early 1990s with victory by the West. To fill the geopolitical vacuum that existed, the US proceeded to project its power throughout the planet by becoming the first ‘global state’ enabled by a network of hundreds of foreign military bases, naval units in every ocean, and an aggressive space program to safeguard dominance on earth. By so acting, the US ignored the possibilities at the end of the Cold War of achieving nuclear disarmament, demilitarization, a justice-oriented approach to global policy, and prosperity resting on an ecologically resilient approach to economic and social development. This missed opportunity for global reform has generated chaos, violent conflict, wasted resources, widening wealth/income gaps, the rise of chauvinistic autocratic rule in many leading countries, and dangerous levels of ecological instability affecting adversely global warming and food security.
Pax America is most accurately interpreted as an historic period of post-colonialism that is best described as US dominated Western imperialism.’ It is also illuminating to regard the interval between the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 as an enactment of Pax America, with less Pax and more America. It featured US armed interventions with the goal of achieving regime- change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by lengthy occupations committed to state-building along capitalist, constitutional lines at great expense, and disappointing outcomes given the motivations of the intervenors. Dubbed ‘wars of choice’ and ‘forever wars’ these attempts to impose Western models of pollical and economic structures and alignments in accord with the postulates of neoliberal globalization were not only carried out with scant attention to the constraints of international law but resulted in political failures. The US experience in the Vietnam War is paradigmatic: enduring political defeat despite battlefield dominance.
6.While the people of Gaza are living through a live genocide under bombs, hunger,diseases, and blockade, as a theorist in the field of global order and international law,how do you think this genocide can be resolved by Netanyahu and Hamas? Hamasand Netanyahu are not stepping back from their core arguments. How can thisdeadlock be overcome? What is your concrete proposal?
Response: To begin with, Netanyahu and Hamas are not equal or symmetrically situated. Israel enjoys total military control of the political space and enjoys material and diplomatic support from the NATO members of the UN Security Council, as well as the backing of these countries in the West on such legal and moral issues as whether Israeli use of force should be viewed as ‘genocide’ or ‘self-defense.’ All ‘two sides’ approaches to the Israel/Palestine past, present, and future are tainted by their tacit acceptance of master/slave structures of interpretation and advocacy. Hamas has few cards to play when it comes to diplomatic negotiations. The only obvious one, and it is tenuous and contingent, is the retention of Israeli hostages taken on October 7, some alive, some dead. In addition, Israel’s leaders have manifested on many occasions that the return of the hostages is not a high priority justifying significant concessions.
The only just way to manage conflict resolution is to balance a long-term ceasefire against an assured path to meaningful realization of the long deferred Palestinian right of self-determination in a form that is not another instance of Israeli/US ‘breadcrumb diplomacy,’ exchanging Israeli territorial expansion for a demilitarized Palestinian Bantustan put forward as the fulfillment of ‘the two-state solution.’ Palestinian representation must be legitimate and endowed with agency at any day-after
diplomatic process seeking reconciliation. From a detached perspective, for a variety of reasons, a single secular state with equal rights for both peoples seems like the only durable justice-driven solution, but it is up to Israeli and Palestinians to arrive awhat now appears a ‘utopian’ solution.
7.Since October 7, 2023, if we ask you to analyze the stances and actions of the following actors in the face of Netanyahu, Hamas, and the genocide, what picture would you paint for us? The Mahmoud Abbas Government, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey
. Response: —Mahmoud Abbas Government: At its best, a pragmatic adjustment to the victimization of the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, privileging a matter of getting on with daily life as well as possible, while continuing to represent Palestine in international negotiations and endorse to the ‘two state solution’; at its worst, collaborating with Israel in maintaining security on the West Bank, supporting anti-Hamas tactics of Israel including the punitive blockade on Gaza imposed in 2007 in reaction to the unexpected Hamas electoral victory the prior year; failure to win support from most Palestinians living in foreign countries as refugees or exiles; by and large, the Ramallah government operates within the comfort zone of Israel and United States, as does settler violence land-grabbing; in my judgment the Abbas government is not playing a satisfactory role of international representation of the Palestinian resistance focused on the exercise of basic rights, especially the inalienable right of self- determination;
—Egypt: In keeping with the behavior of other Arab governments Egypt has verbally criticized Israeli behavior in Gaza, but has carefully refrained from engaging in any act that might provoke hostile reactions by Israel; in this sense, Egypt has remained nervously on the sidelines, although resisting pressures to date to accept large numbers of Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza; Egypt as aligned with the US and Saudi Arabia exhibits hostility to Hamas as an extension of its domestic antipathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood within its own borders. Compared to Nasser’s Egypt the current government has lost popular support and regional respect, especially in civil society circles of influence;
—Qatar: As a small country hosting a major US military base and vulnerable to hostile action by other Gulf monarchies, Qatar has few choices, although it has maneuvered skillfully to give itself the unique position of being the Switzerland of the Middle East, useful to all sides in the multidimensional conflicts that have brought chaos and misery to many countries in the region; Qatar’s leaders have been careful to appear neutral in relation to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, although it has long provided a
safe haven for top Hamas leaders living in exile, and extended hospitality to other Palestinian notables, such as Azmi Bishara, no longer to feel secure in Israel; in the current high profile Gaza ceasefire negotiations only Qatar was considered suitable, providing security and facilities;
—Turkey: Only Turkey has played effectively a somewhat contradictory role. On the one side Turkey, as much as any government in the region aside from Iran is second to none in the fierceness of its denunciation of Israel’s behavior in Gaza since October 7, with its top leadership in Ankara not hesitant to categorize Israel’s violence as ‘genocide’ and to provide a domestic setting supportive of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights, including such initiatives as the Gaza Peoples Tribunal scheduled to have its final session in Istanbul at the end of October; at the same time, Turkey seeks to maintain good economic and political relations with the European Union and the United States. The Turkish government has also been criticized, and accused of moral hypocrisy, due to its failure to shut down the pipeline supplying Israel with oil sent from Azerbaijan and supposedly vital for its war effort.
8.In your book translated into Turkish as ‘Globalization and Religion: Humanitarian Global Governance,’ you list several reasons for your new idea of ‘Humanitarian GlobalGovernance’ as follows: ‘Part of the appeal of religion is an antidote to thehomogenizing effects of out-of-control consumerism and pseudo-universalism.’ You also state, ‘I have never gotten along well with the morality or knowledge system ofscientific humanism in my approach to law and politics.’ Could you elaborate on yourperspective that religion serves as an antidote? Also, why do you not get along wellwith scientific humanism? Which paradigm do you currently align with in yourapproach to law and politics?
Response: The book’s title and central idea are unfortunately mistranslated. In English the key word is ‘humane,’ not ‘humanitarian, which has a different meaning and resonance. Humanitarian or humanitarianism refers to acts of relief, undertakings designed to mitigate human suffering, or simply acts of kindness toward those in need. ‘Humane’ refers to a worldview animated by love, justice, fairness to all human beings, and an affirmation of the spiritual dimensions of reality. It can be coherently brought to reality or nurtured by certain patterns of governance that reflect shared societal values often transmitted by way of organized religion, but more often betrayed by repressive and corrupt governance and by despiritualized religious institutions and practices. My ambivalence toward ‘scientific humanism’ is a consequence of its epistemological stance, which devalues spirituality in all its forms, substituting rationality and scientific validation of knowledge.
These understandable reactions to the shortcomings of
religion led to the liberation of superstition and marginalization of metaphysical abstractions (such as ‘God’) from the workings of society, leading to the substitution of the Enlightenment view of knowledge and to the rise of modernity in the West with its vision of progress reliant on dynamic technological innovation. What was sacrificed in the process was a sense of human community including the ethics of empathy and a politics of compassion, as well as the denial of spirituality. The aspirations of a ‘humane’ approach is to restore the virtues of the pre-modern without losing the benefits of modernity as conditioned by the extension of human rights, the curtailment of militarism and nuclearism, and care for ecological stability.
To reorient modernity to overcome these dangerous deficiencies is what I intend by the stress on a ‘humane’ worldview. It calls for an ethics and politics of moderation, enlivened by spiritual awareness and practices, reflecting a realistic appreciation of global challenges. Among governance frameworks, the most congenial for me is that of ecologically conditioned varieties of democratic socialism in a global setting finally inclined toward denuclearization and demilitarization, as well as the repudiation of predatory capitalism and the kind of excessive individualism that arises when the market is entrusted with the promotion of human wellbeing in all its facets.
This article appears in the August 1, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
lPrefatory Note: An interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute on array of topics. Published in the August issue of Execuitve Intellligence Review}
Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University. He is a prolific author who has written extensively on international law and the United Nations. From 2008 to 2014 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The interview was conducted on July 23, 2025 by EIR’s Michael Billington. Subheads have been added.
Mike Billington: Welcome. This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m very pleased to once again have the opportunity to do an interview with Professor Richard Falk. Professor Falk is a professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University. He is also the former United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in Palestine and the Occupied Territories. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation, in which he published a recent article on the issues that we’re going to discuss. He’s the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which we will also discuss. Welcome, Professor Falk, and thank you for joining us.
Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
Prof. Richard Falk: Thank you, Mike, for having me. Glad to be with you again.
Billington: In your article in The Nation on July 15, which was titled “Sanctioning Francesca Albanese—Marco Rubio Tramples on the Law, Justice and Truth,” in that article, you review the heroic role of Francesca Albanese as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, which is a position you held from 2008 to 2014, in two three-year terms. In the article you denounced the sanctions imposed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Ms. Albanese. What is the background to this situation?
Prof. Falk: Well, the background, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, relates to the arrest warrants that the International Criminal Court issued some months ago, to arrest, for crimes, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and the former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. In February of this year the U.S. imposed sanctions on the four judges that participated in the endorsement of the prosecutors’ recommendation that the arrest warrants be issued. The ICC was sanctioned through the denial of entry to the U.S. to these individuals and their immediate families, and their assets that were within the U.S. were frozen. The ostensible reason that the U.S. government gave for sanctioning Francesca Albanese was that she, in her last report, which has the title “From the Economics of Occupation to the Economics of Genocide,” singled out 48 American and international corporations that were profiting from the genocidal policies being pursued by Israel, and recommended that the ICC investigate and possibly prosecute individuals associated with these companies.
The reason, I think, for the linkage to the ICC in her case, was that the Trump executive order that originally was issued after the ICC arrest warrants, implicated the ICC in imposing these arrest warrants against Israel, in violation of America’s U.S. political interests. This was backed up by the claim that, because the U.S. and Israel are not members of the ICC—they’re not parties to the Rome Statute setting up the ICC—they’re not subject to its authority, and therefore the ICC and the prosecutor and these judges were overreaching their authority.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, whom Prof. Falk characterizes as “the world’s leading candidate for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.”
Francesca’s recent report really didn’t have very much to do with the ICC, except for that recommendation at the end. But it was a kind of a link to the executive order that gave at least the appearance of being a legal foundation for sanctioning her. Rubio, in his statement, made clear that that was not the only grievance that they had against her. He made a statement that she was maliciously associated with anti-Semitism and did harm to U.S. and Israeli economic and political interests, and in fact, accused her of engaging in economic warfare. It was a quite intemperate statement for a prominent U.S. official to make. And it represented, I think, a long term campaign by Zionist NGOs and by Israel to get rid of her, or at least to discredit her in a kind of distinctive and punitive manner. That was the attempt.
It had the exact reverse effect. Because now she’s, I suppose, the world’s leading candidate for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. And she’s even being mentioned as the ideal candidate to be the first woman Secretary-General of the United Nations. So, it is an interesting polarization between this kind of satanic image of her misdeeds, and the sense of praise for what she has accomplished in the course of being a Special Rapporteur of the UN at a difficult time, when the UN itself has proved to be unable to do anything effective to stop the genocide.
Billington: Right. You yourself wrote an article calling on Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, rather than the sanctions that she had been given by Rubio and the U.S.
Prof. Falk: I also added that a President respectful of the rule of law and international justice, would have requested Rubio’s resignation after making such an outrageous action.
Billington: I was going to add to that there’s a petition now circulating which has well over 300,000 signatures calling on Francesca Albanese to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What do you think will be the impact of that, if she actually gets that award or if she gets appointed as the Secretary-General of the UN, as you mentioned?
Prof. Falk: As far as the Nobel Peace Prize is concerned, I’ve tried to warn people not to have the appearance of a campaign on her behalf for the Peace Prize, that will hurt her prospects. I’ve been nominated a few times myself, and I know from the committee in Oslo that they are very put off by the sense that they’re giving the award in response to a campaign on behalf of a candidate. So, I wish this petition wasn’t being circulated because they’re quite capable of reaching their own independent assessment, and they might well react to the feeling that they don’t want to seem to be succumbing to political pressure to give her the award.
Acts Destructive of Justice
Billington: You state in the article that you had in The Nation that the sanctions being imposed are “contrary to international law and morality.” In general, what does this say about the fact that the U.S. role in the world is now increasingly seen as an imposer of sanctions and dictates, rather than any kind of policy for supporting development and progress?
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very concrete instance of punishing a person that should be given an honorific recognition for her bravery and trustworthy reporting under a very difficult situation. So, it’s symbolic of a broader spectrum of acts destructive of justice and world order, of which the U.S. had taken pride in establishing after World War Two. It was established with certain notable deficiencies, but it did respond to public pressure for a war prevention and global security framework that would be more in keeping with the global public interest of peoples, and less an instrument of either capitalist expansion or militarist domination. Unfortunately, after the Cold War, the U.S. chose this path of promoting its national economic and geopolitical interests at the expense of the public good.
Billington: Francesca Albanese was a featured speaker at a meeting that took place in what’s called The Hague Group in Bogotá, Colombia, over this last week. This is a group of over a dozen countries that are led by South Africa and Colombia to address the question of the Palestine genocide and the question of statehood for Palestine. I’d like to read a short excerpt from her presentation there, about which I’d like to hear your comment. She said that “Each state should immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel…. I mean, cutting ties with Israel as a whole…. And to consider first and foremost what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught.” She also said there’s a revolutionary shift going on in the mood of the world. “We are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority,” often called the Global South. “…I say the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics…. Millions are watching, hoping for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us. Principled states must rise to this moment….” And “Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter … as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today, more than ever, neoliberal tyranny.” Do you have anything you’d like to add to that?
A Glimmer of Light in a Dark Sky
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very eloquent and idealistic vision of a different world order, with values that are much more in keeping with the well-being of humanity as a whole and more conducive to the promotion of peace and justice in the world. They do give a kind of a glimmer of light in a dark sky. There have been several such glimmers of light recently. And they do have the potential, far from the certainty, but the potential of a change in the political atmosphere and in the way in which global security and war prevention and development policies are pursued. It involves curtailing the impact of predatory capitalism and militarist geopolitics. That will not happen without overcoming the entrenched commitment of the established order to things as they are. And we have a very unimpressive set of global leaders in the important countries of the world at this time of global challenge.
A more skeptical response to what Francesca has said would be to criticize the short term, performance orientations of the elites of the world, both the corporate elites and the political elites. Corporate elites thinking of the profit, near-term term profits, political elites thinking of their re-election or their legacy, but in a manner that doesn’t address the fundamental issues that confront the world at this time, ranging from climate change to mass poverty, to very severe forms of continuing political violence in many places, and of course, to the centrality of this ongoing genocide that has been a challenge to even the political language that is used by the U.S. government and other supporters of Israel, which present the most transparent genocide as if it were a routine exercise in justifiable self-defense. That involves, I think, one of the worst Orwellian reversals of reality that has occurred in my lifetime. And it is at the cost of this massive, prolonged suffering endured by all Palestinians, but most especially those living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Billington: You mentioned other glimmers of hope of a major change like this. Do you want to comment on any of the other glimmers you were thinking of?
Prof. Falk: One of the other glimmers is the victory of Zoran Mamdani in the New York mayoralty primary, which defied pollsters and political conventional wisdom that a Muslim progressive had no chance politically to prevail. He was outspent 10 to 1. And he evoked this sense, that also Francesca was projecting, that there is another possibility, another set of possibilities for how one copes with the problems of equity, fairness and the issues that are on the top of the political and economic agenda.
What we see in response is the backlash from the darker forces that are bipartisan in character, both the Democratic and Republican establishments. The two-party system wants no part of the political ownership of a man [with] Mamdani’s kind of revolutionary politics. But at least in this arena, one encounters the sense that there could be an alternative. But it’s only a glimmer of light at this point. It has to be reinforced by a popular movement of people and the engagement with the ongoing conflicts, especially Gaza and Ukraine, in ways that bring a more stable future to world politics and allow the focus to be placed more on what people need to lead a decent life, and what the world and the planet needs to be ecologically resilient under growing threats of instability.
Objectives of the Gaza Tribunal
Billington: You are also the president of the Gaza Tribunal, which was founded at a conference in Sarajevo in May. The resolution which was signed there by the founders, including yourself, condemned the failure of the UN, the growing public protests and leading governments, whose actions have thus far not stopped the ongoing genocide by war and starvation of the Palestinian people. What is the purpose of this Tribunal, and what do you think has been the impact in its founding?
Prof. Falk: I was asked to be the president by some sponsors in Türkiye of this undertaking, and they convinced me that it was a worthwhile undertaking. I’m not normally very comfortable in quasi-administrative roles and also not very confident in them, but I was unsuccessful in persuading them to seek an alternative to myself. And I thought it was important. I’ve participated as a judge in past people’s tribunals and found them to be a useful way of narrating a conflict in a manner that is progressive and free from media manipulations and government control and self-censorship and so on.
And in the context of the Gaza situation, the formation of such a tribunal takes place after the formal system exhibited an inability to enforce international law. It did some positive things, such as the International Court of Justice’s response to the South African submission that Israel was, in carrying out its policies in Gaza, was violating the International Convention on Genocide. It was very professional and juridically impressive in responding to that submission by issuing some interim orders that acknowledge the plausibility of alleging genocide, and condemned Israel’s disruption of international delivery of humanitarian assistance.
A mother in Gaza cries for her four-year-old daughter, who lost her life due to starvation and lack of treatment, brought about by Israel’s genocide policy against the Palestinians.
These interim rulings were directed to Israel, but were defied, as expected, and so an enforcement gap was made clear that the ICJ could declare authoritatively the law, but its enforcement, if a state such as Israel refused to voluntarily comply, and was subject to the veto of the only part of the UN system that had enforcement capabilities and authorities, the Security Council, that meant that the UN was paralyzed in dealing with enforcement or accountability or complicity.
The objective of the Gaza People’s Tribunal is to close these gaps, or at least to exert pressure on these gaps, by activating people in civil society to exhibit solidarity initiatives that support the Palestinian struggle, by both placing pressure on governments to stop supplying arms, to cut diplomatic relations, to do various things that would indicate more than a verbal commitment to end this genocide.
It is shameful that the Arab governments that could exert decisive pressure have proved to be passive or even indirectly supportive of Israel’s tactics in Gaza. So, the two main objectives of the Tribunal are stimulating activism by civil society individuals and other collective actors, NGOs and so on. And the second one is to document in an objective and comprehensive way the crimes that have been committed centering on the genocide, which, even if the ICJ eventually comes with a favorable decision, will not be rendered for a couple of years at best.
So, this promises a quicker result and a result guided more by the pursuit of justice than a legalistic conception of wrongdoing. In other words, a formal court is bound by the technical rules of a legal process. And that means impartiality and due process for the accused side. This Tribunal starts with the premise of Israeli guilt, and it makes no attempt at appraising the arguments advanced by Israel in an objective manner. But it does try to treat the evidence available to it as objectively as possible, and to proceed along the line, somewhat similar to what the Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has done in her three genocide reports, to create an archive that is authoritative as to the criminality of the Israeli policies. So, it’s action oriented and archival, stimulated, archivally ambitious, and has involved a good many highly qualified people.
A Jury of Conscience
Billington: You plan a follow-up meeting in October. What are your plans or your expectations for that event?
Prof. Falk: Let me preface this by saying the launch [of the Gaza Tribunal] was in London a few months before the Sarajevo meeting. The Sarajevo meeting tried to assemble a series of reports that addressed these two sets of objectives, and it will be an input into the final session in Istanbul, which will feature a jury of conscience, again trying to distinguish itself from a court of law. It is not. It is motivated by morality as much as by the attempt to identify and apply relevant law. Law is not irrelevant, but it isn’t the controlling criteria of how one assesses behavior in this sort of context, and it tries to be representative of all parts of the world and has members of its broader advisory council that come from different countries. The jury of conscience will also try to be representative and not composed of jurists alone, but of persons who have reputations as moral authority figures.
Billington: You have particularly protested the use by governments and by the press of calling anybody who protests the horror going on in Gaza as “anti-Semitic” or “supporters of terrorism.” What do you think about those repeated accusations?
Prof. Falk: I think they are a shamefully effective means of deflecting attention in the media and in the public from the message and trying to get people to talk about the credibility of the messenger. It somewhat works, reflecting the maxim that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Most people, and even the media, are sufficiently uninformed that they’re easily susceptible to this kind of manipulation. In the case of the use of this so-called weaponization of anti-Semitism against political figures, like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and the three special rapporteurs on Palestine prior to Frances Francesca Albanese, there’s utterly no truth to the accusation that these individuals have any record or attitudes that are hostile to Jews as people. They are hostile to Zionism as an ideology that has made the Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. And that’s something that has also been manipulated in the press to a great degree, where the reality of Israel is fused with the ideology of Zionism.
I grew up in a Jewish home myself in New York City, but in an atmosphere of anti-Zionism. and I guess I’ve maintained that kind of identity throughout my life. I was a close friend of Edward Said, who was one of the principal Palestinian advocates of a just peace and an outcome that recognized the Palestinian rights, but also didn’t favor the forced displacement of Jews that were already in Israel. It did presuppose the dismantling of a Zionist set of rationales for the way in which Israel was governed, which involves, even prior to the genocide, a clear commitment to an apartheid structure, which is also a serious international crime, and was validated by such human rights NGOs as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
I also collaborated with Virginia Tilley in a study sponsored by the UN Commission for the Middle East, on how to interpret the allegations of apartheid in terms of Israel’s policies and practices. That’s all part of the pre–October 7th [2023] reality that was effectively erased after the Hamas attack in such a way as to validate this reaction as if it came in a political vacuum—as the UN Secretary-General pointed out, and paid the price of being declared persona non grata in Israel even though he has refrained, as have many high officials in Europe and the UN, from using the G word.
Truth Is Getting Out
Billington: Speaking of the growing Jewish resistance to this Zionist genocidal policy, you probably saw this article by Dr. Omer Bartov, the professor at Brown University, which was published in The New York Times, which we were all quite surprised that The New York Times allowed such a thing to get through their strict restraint on any truth. But anyway, they did run this article, and he pointed out that the Israeli policy is clearly genocide. He said that not only is he Jewish, but he grew up in a Zionist family, that he lived in Israel for a long time, he served in the IDF and that he has spent his life teaching and researching war crimes and the Holocaust, so he recognizes genocide when he sees it, and this is it.
You probably know also that even the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has declared that the building of a so-called “humanitarian city” is nothing but an excuse for building a concentration camp, which, of course, in Israel brings up very powerful images for people who lost many of their family in Nazi concentration camps. Do you think there is a shift going on in getting the truth out, getting this narrative out?
Prof. Falk: Yes. I think there is a normalization of language, which includes even The New York Times being somewhat receptive to using illuminating terminology rather than obfuscating terminology, which they had been using, describing this as a war, or as a “justifiable defensive response” to the isolated attack on October 7th. But you should take note of the fact that today, the lead editorial in TheNew York Times by Brett Stevens, a militant or ultra-Zionist, has the descriptive headline: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide.” It is an intelligent but highly selective way of saying that Israel is engaged in a traditional war scenario, and that bad things happen in wars, but this has nothing to do with trying to kill Palestinians because they’re Palestinians. The casualty totals would be much higher if that was the Israeli objective, he claims. They could kill many more people with the technology that they have and the absence of any meaningful capability to resist, which very seldom is taken note of in the West. This is the most extreme of asymmetric conflicts, where one side is totally vulnerable, and the other side just decides what it wants to destroy and faces no meaningful resistance.
The Fascist Roots of Zionism
Billington: Just the fact that such a headline would be published demonstrates that they’re increasingly frantic about the fact that the world does recognize that this is genocide. So, thou dost protest too much, as they say.
You used the term “political Zionism.” What do you mean by that term?
Prof. Falk: I mean that it is an ideology that started in the 19th Century and was a reaction to European anti-Semitism and a biblically rooted idea that Jews would flourish again if they could recover Palestine and make it into a Jewish promised land. They proceeded, in their early stages, under secular leadership. Very antagonistic actually, to diaspora Jews, while quite pragmatic in their dealing with the Nazi leadership in the early years.
They shared with the Nazis, before the Final Solution was adopted by the Nazis, a shared objective of removing Jews. Zionists wanted to coerce emigration to what was then Palestine, and the early Nazis wanted to exclude as many Jews as possible, a kind of ethnic cleansing, and even made favorable economic arrangements with Zionists to allow those who agreed to emigrate to take their property with them, to liquidate their real property and take the liquid assets with them. So there’s a long collaboration, a kind of ruthless pragmatism.
Zionists were responsible for blowing up a synagogue in Iraq in order to again persuade Jews that they had no future if they didn’t come to Israel. And several of the European countries helped give the Zionist militias weapons and training. So, there was a kind of joint project, orientalist in its character. The residents of Palestine, the Arab residents, were never consulted. This was partly a British colonial policy that wanted to divide and rule Palestine after World War One, the famous Balfour Declaration. Balfour himself, who was Foreign Secretary of the UK, was known to be an anti-Semite and welcomed the idea of Jews migrating to Israel, and supported not a state, but a homeland.
The tactics of political Zionism from the beginning have been to take what they could get at any given time, but not regard it as a satisfaction of their project. In other words, it was the pursuit of so-called salami tactics where you proceed by small steps toward the ultimate objective. In my view, their response to October 7th was their attempt to pursue the end game of the Zionist political project, which the Netanyahu coalition, which came to power several months before October 7th, made rather clear: that their objective was to promote the settler militancy on the West Bank with the objective of annexation, and to secure the erasure of Palestinian political identity and goals.
Netanyahu came before the UN General Assembly several weeks before October 7th and waved a map at the delegates which showed what he called the “new Middle East” with no Palestinian entity acknowledged. Therefore, I think October 7th in the broader context of what was called, even by Washington, the most extreme Israeli government ever to govern, was [used to justify] this kind of onslaught on Gaza as a way of terminating any Palestinian expectations of statehood or of continued resistance.
It’s well known that Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership had several very reliable warnings of the impending Gaza attack, including from Washington, months before the event, and that this was either deliberately ignored, or certainly not responded to with any kind of typical Israeli security preoccupations.
Lord Balfour’s visit to Binyamin, Palestine, in 1925. Sitting from left to right: Vera Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann, Balfour, Nahum Sokolov. Standing: British Mandate officials and PKA officials.
Billington: This all goes back to Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father, who worked with Jabotinsky. That whole history was covered extensively in a book by one of the leading members of your Gaza Tribunal, Avi Shlaim.
Prof. Falk: He’s a professor at Oxford.
Billington: My associate, Harley Schlanger, has written an extensive report on the book by Avi Shlaim, which we published in the Executive Intelligence Review, which goes into that whole history, and touches on the role of Bibi Netanyahu’s father and Jabotinsky and others in doing what you described. So this is very important.
Prof. Falk: Fascism, particularly in Italy, was a powerful influence on the Jabotinsky view, which in a certain sense was realistic in viewing the fact that the Palestinians would not just abandon their own nationalism. And either Israel would have to face a continuing challenge, or it would have to erect an Iron Wall and have the Palestinians effectively behind that wall.
Billington: Right. The resolution of the Gaza Tribunal states that “self-determination is a universal rule not subject to exception and binding on all states.” But obviously this is not being followed, not being honored. How do you account for that and what has to be done?
Prof. Falk: I think that the liberation of the Palestinian people depends on the realization of their basic rights that have long been denied. The aspiration for self-determination has a certain legal and moral foundation, in being endorsed by the UN General Assembly and being the subject of an important General Assembly resolution which talks about cooperation and friendly relations among states, and affirms not only the right of self-determination, but also the right of a people to struggle with weapons if necessary, to achieve these rights. So, there is a right of armed resistance to a situation characterized widely now as colonialism or settler colonialism.
Pictured here, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Betar leaders in Warsaw, Poland, circa 1939. Betar is a right-wing youth movement that arose at that time and adopted special salutes and uniforms influenced by fascism. Bottom left is Menachem Begin, future Prime Minister of Israel.
I think that’s a very important background reality. Of course there is resistance to its fulfillment in various settings, most prominently now in Gaza, but also in Kashmir, Western Sahara and other places in the world. There’s been a lot of discussion of the rights of the people in Chechnya in Russia, and in Xinjiang Province in China; Puerto Rico and Hawaii in the U.S. context. So, there are many unresolved issues of self-determination. It’s also somewhat confused by a second principle in international law, which is that the rights of self-determination cannot be achieved by the coercive fracturing of existing states. That really confuses the issue.
The last thing I would mention or call attention to is that both of the covenants of human rights, which are the basic instruments for the protection and an articulation of human rights, have as their common Article 1 the inalienable right of self-determination of a people. So, it has a real rootedness in the evolution of international law, post 1945.
Are We No Better than Animals?
Billington: On another subject, you have worked with our mutual friend Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder of JUST International, based in Malaysia. Recently, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who just turned 100 years old by the way, a week or so ago, issued a very powerful statement which goes after the question—it’s based a lot on Palestine—but it’s basically going after the collapse of civilization that we’re living through. Let me read a short section from this and get your response. He starts by saying, “For centuries we have been ridding ourselves of barbarism in human society, of injustices, of the oppression of man by man.” He goes on about that, but then he says: “But can we say we are still civilized? Now, over the last three decades especially, we have destroyed most of the ethical values that we had built up. Now we’re seeing an orgy of killing. We’re seeing genocide being perpetrated before our own eyes, where the genocide is actually being promoted and defended, perpetuated by the so-called great leaders of our civilization, by a great nation, the United States of America…. I feel ashamed. We should feel ashamed in the eyes of the animals we consider to be wild. We are worse than them…. I hide my face, I am ashamed. Civilization is no more the norm.” Your thoughts on that?
Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Prof. Falk: I think it’s a very strong and powerful statement. I had the pleasure of meeting Mahathir some years ago, and he has very strong, impressive convictions, and he’s not afraid to express them in relation to what he feels is the abusive behavior of the West. He’s controversial, of course, in Malaysia itself. He’s harsh toward his own opposition within Malaysia. The present Prime Minister of Malaysia [Anwar Ibrahim] is a former protégé, but also became an adversary of his. So he’s a very interesting figure and one of the few great leaders that is still alive at that age, and active at that age, which I can only envy.
But I think that he overstates to some extent the degree of what was being done before this most recent period, since the end of the Cold War. The 30 years he refers to was also characterized by barbarism of various sorts, not least of which was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—of which this is the 80th anniversary year, and one that was exempt from legal scrutiny because it was perpetrated against an Asian country. If it had been used against, say, European cities, there’s no doubt that they would have been punished as war criminals, the surviving leaders, and the nuclear weapons might well have been prohibited as permissible weaponry, that is now in the possession of at least nine sovereign states that are very reluctant to give them up—give up that weaponry—because it gives them a hegemonic relationship to the non-nuclear countries.
Iran has just recently paid the price of not having nuclear weapons. That Iran war, the 12-day war that supposedly was trying to destroy the enrichment facilities of Iran, was a clear case of aggression under the UN Charter and under disgraceful double standards. Israel is a country that acquired nuclear weapons covertly, with the help of the liberal democracies of the West that championed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. When it comes to Iran, they ignore that much-worse behavior on the part of Israel. This was an issue in the Kennedy Presidency in the early 1960s. So, the idea that the West was somehow not responsible for very destructive and unjust policies during the Cold War era is, I think, somewhat misleading, in the degree to which the Vietnam War was fought in a way that has certain resemblances to what’s happening in Gaza: high technology capabilities being used against a low technology society with no adequate means of defending itself or retaliating.
The apartheid system in South Africa, the vestiges of colonialism—there were many things in the post 1945 period that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that were quite reprehensible from the perspective of law, morality and justice. So, I welcome Mahathir’s statement because of its general sentiments, but I think it overstates the situation that has emerged in the last period.
Viability of a Two-State Solution
Billington: Right. So, as I’m sure you know, on July 28 and 29, the UN General Assembly will be holding a session, delayed from an earlier planned meeting in June which was disrupted by the Iran war. The new session will address the call for a two-state solution for the Middle East. The meeting was called by France and Saudi Arabia. We issued a statement by the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review called “A Two-State Solution, Not a Final Solution.” Of course, we are not the only people to make references to the Nazi regime and their Final Solution to what’s taking place today in Gaza, but it’s worth recalling.
In our proposal, we are calling for what’s called the Oasis Plan. This is a proposal first issued by Lyndon LaRouche in the 1970s. He had been looking at this throughout his life, to create a massive water and power development plan in the region, centered on Gaza, but extending throughout the broader region as the only basis for creating a situation which will actually address the needs of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, based on the concept that only by addressing the lack of water, and creating an abundance of water and energy, can we create the equality needed for a Palestinian state and the Israeli state to coexist. Your thoughts on that?
Prof. Falk: Well, I think it made more sense in the 1970s than it does today, in my judgment, because I don’t see either side agreeing. The one thing the Israelis and Palestinians seem to agree about is the non viability of a two-state solution. The Israelis don’t want Palestinian statehood of any kind. And the Palestinians don’t want to have a Bantustan emerge out of a supposed solution that is drafted without their consent and participation, which has been there a lot from the beginning.
Every step, including the Balfour Declaration, the UN Partition Plan [for Palestine, 1947], and the various negotiations, have all been carried out without meaningful Palestinian participation. To expect the Palestinians to accept a demilitarized state for themselves in collaboration with Israel, which remains a regional superpower, is, again, I think, quite unrealistic.
Israel, unless it sheds its Zionist mantle, is certainly unwilling to demilitarize, and it’s unwilling to have any Palestinian entity legitimately militarized. So, I’m much more sympathetic with an equally difficult resolution to put into practice with the Edward Said vision of a single secular state based on human equality and premised on a thorough commission of reconciliation, which addresses the history of grievances of the Palestinian people. I feel that has at least a glimmer of a chance of making the transition from this horrifying spectacle of one sided genocide, to a sustainable, durable peace.
Billington: The idea of the Oasis Plan— It’s pretty clear that what you just said is true, that as long as you have this genocidal policy being dominant in Israel, nothing’s going to happen of use. But the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference coming up at the UN, to put on the table the fact that there is a solution; that if both sides work together on an actual development policy, what the Pope [Paul VI] once described as “the new name for peace is development,” that if you have a joint plan that addresses the actual needs of transforming the region— Obviously China knows they could get involved with their Belt and Road process, to do the kind of thing they’ve done to transform their deserts into blossoming agricultural regions. They could be part of this. The Belt and Road could be part. And the idea is to put on the table, especially for this conference, a discussion about the only real solution that exists.
UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek. Courtesy of the ICJ
Vusimuzi Madonsela (right), South African Ambassador to the Netherlands, and Dr. Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of the Republic of South Africa, addressing the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, Jan. 26, 2024.
Let me add that you brought up the question of reconciliation. I’m sure you know Dr. Naledi Pandor, the former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation in South Africa, who took Israel to the International Court of Justice over the genocide. She has been participating in our Schiller Institute conferences. In an interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in February, she said the following about the Oasis Plan and linked it to the question of South Africa’s history. She said: “I think the Oasis Plan presents a set of very useful proposals that could be looked at by groupings that are in contention as the basis for further discussion, from our own experience as South Africa, having agreed 30 years ago that we would enter into negotiations with those who had oppressed us for many, many decades. We know that once you get around the table, it is the former oppressed who must determine what future they would like to see.”
So, this addresses the question you brought up, but in a way which locates the need for a policy on the table to demonstrate that there are solutions, and that, as Helga has said in her Ten Principles, the fact that the lack of development is the cause of poverty in almost every case, but it is also true that this is due to man. And since it’s due to man, it’s also reversible; it can be corrected. We have to put that into people’s heads, that these are issues that can be resolved. There are solutions. It’s only the lack of will to solve these issues. That has to be the basis for our discussion worldwide. Do you want to say anything more on that?
A Positive Solution Invites Discussion
Prof. Falk: I think that in a situation which I would characterize as desperate, I think that’s a constructive initiative which deserves to be tested. I am a little bit skeptical of whether the elites representing those that will meet at this UN conference will be receptive. But at least, as you suggest, putting a solution on the table invites discussion.
Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader, who has been held as a political prisoner by Israel since 2002.
There’s a second problem of who will decide who represents the Palestinians at that table. There’s a grave doubt as to the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as the appropriate representatives of the Palestinian people at this time. Remember that when the South African elite made its decision to entertain the sort of discussion that former Minister Pandor refers to, they agreed to release Nelson Mandela from prison, and he had a stature that enabled him to provide a legitimate representation. The only possible person that could do that in the Palestinian situation is Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison on multiple criminal charges, which are not thought to be valid. If Israel had any interest in really coming to a mutually beneficial solution, it would at least consider releasing Barghouti from prison. He seems to be the only person capable of unifying Palestinian representation.
Billington: Do you see any glimmer of hope, as the term you used, that in fact, he will be released, perhaps in one of these prisoner exchanges?
Prof. Falk: I think the South African precedent was coupled with a political affirmation that Mandela was released in a context which looked forward to a transformation of the South African governing structure. And I think just releasing Barghouti in a prisoner exchange without endowing him with a show of Israeli confidence that they are prepared to negotiate with him and to respect him, will not be very fruitful.
There’s another Barghouti—it’s a big family—Mustafa Barghouti, who’s an opposition figure living in Palestine, living in the West Bank. But I don’t think he has the same charismatic potential that Marwan Barghouti has. He’s very respected. He has a somewhat similar background, actually, to Mahathir. They were both doctors, medical doctors originally, and went into politics. He’s involved with our Gaza Tribunal. We’ve tried to involve Palestinians who seem to be more representative of their real aspirations than the Ramallah group under Muhammad Mahmoud Abbas, which was a sort of creature of the Oslo diplomacy, given legitimacy by the West, but never by the Palestinians. They’ve collaborated, the Palestinian Authority so-called, has collaborated with Israel and the U.S. in security arrangements on the West Bank. So they’re viewed with considerable suspicion. They’re also extremely anti-Hamas. They were pushed out of Gaza by Hamas. The PLO was quite corrupt there. I don’t know the full merits of the conflict, but it’s quite complicated.
Billington: Right. I appreciate this very much. We will definitely get this discussion widely circulated, especially going into this meeting at the UN on the 28th and 29th of July, which we’re committed to making a turning point, using the Hague Group work in Colombia and the work you’re doing with the Gaza Tribunal and other developments that are taking place. Do you have any sort of final thoughts you’d like to convey to our audience?
Prof. Falk: I think you’ve covered the ground. We didn’t say much about Ukraine, but I think I found it a fruitful exchange.
Billington: Well, we can do another discussion if you’d like to touch on the obviously still very sensitive and very dangerous situation around Ukraine and the question of whether there will actually be a reconciliation between the U.S. and Russia or not. It’s certainly not clear that there will be, given the rather volatile attitude coming from the U.S. Presidency at this point, which seems to change every five minutes. But perhaps we can have another discussion if you’d like to go into the broader issues.
Prof. Falk: Yes. Let’s wait a couple of weeks and see how things work out. It’s possible that the Oasis Plan would have more traction at this point with Ukraine and Russia. Or trilateral, some sort of trilateral adaptation.
Billington: We certainly think that the Russia-China cooperation and how that led into the BRICS and the process which the BRICS represents as an alternative to the horror that’s being implemented by almost the entire Western leadership at this point is extremely important. We don’t want to see this break down into two “blocs.”
We have to figure out a way of getting the Western leaders to recognize their own fate is dependent upon their collaboration with China, especially, and with Russia strategically as well as economically. And if they do recognize that before the whole Western financial system collapses, as it’s heading right now, then we have a chance of a new global architecture which recognizes both the security and the development of every single country—which is, obviously, what you and what Francesca Albanese and others are promoting.
The point is that we have to change the direction of civilization as a whole if we’re going to get out of this unfortunate rapid descent into the threat of global war and even a nuclear war.
Prof. Falk: I completely share that view.
Billington: So, yes, let’s consider a second discussion, which could look broader. And thank you very much for this.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
