[Prefatory Note: The post below is a much modified set of responses to questions posed by Mohamed Elmenshawy a journalist working at Al Jazeera Arabic from Washington 1/10/2024). Question 9 below has been added to deal with Western media bias as illustrated by three opinion pieces published on 1/17/2024.]
1. How should we interpret the South Africa allegation that Israel’s military operations in Gaza violate the country’s obligations under the United Nations Genocide Convention and that its actions constitute genocide?
Israel’s military operations have lasted more than three months, but from almost their very outset objective observers felt confronted by ‘a text book case’ of genocide as the military onslaught was systematically and openly aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable and inflicting severe suffering on innocent civilians in flagrant violation of basic rules of international law. Such a military campaign was proclaimed in these extremist terms by Israel’s top political and military leaders and consistently exhibited in practice by the sadistic tactics relied upon by Israel’s armed forces. Disregarding official language that called for turning Gaza into ‘a parking lot’ or ‘emptying Gaza of all Palestinians’ or posing a choice of ‘leave or die’ disclose a stunning defiance of the criminal prohibition against the crime of genocide. Israel overlooks the fact that it was a party to the Genocide Convention, which pledged respect for this unconditional limitation on state behavior, meaning that neither self-defense nor anti-terrorism could provide a legally credible basis for Israel’s behavior toward Gaza since October 7. In addition, Israel twists the facts and evidence as in its presentation to ICJ, by contending that the Hamas attack was the real occasion of genocide and that it is Israel that is defending itself against a genocidal adversary.
2. What happens if South Africa wins at the ICJ?
We cannot know how Israel and the United States, and other countries would respond, but we can offer an informed opinion that draws on Israeli allegations against South Africa, insisting that the mere bringing of a legal dispute alleging the reality of genocide in Gaza amounts to a blood libel against the Jewish people, and in the more guarded secular language of the US State Department that the South African initiative is ‘meritless’ as it lacks an acceptable legal basis in fact. The US is likely if necessary to use its veto power in the Security Council and disregard any General Assembly resolution that called for compliance with whatever Provisional Measures the ICJ decrees, as it is authorized to do under Article 41(1) of the Statute governing its operations.
If this anticipated sequence of evasive or defiant non-compliance occurs, it will likely lead to large and sustained protests throughout the world, including in the North American and former European countries that have lent Israel varying degrees of support and initially gave their full-throated approval to Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack. The rising opposition to Israeli behavior in Gaza is posing serious destabilization threats of adverse political consequences in some countries, typified by the widespread labeling of Israel as ‘a pariah state’ in some settings, and to a dramatic escalation in the nature and militancy of global solidarity initiatives throughout the world including recourse to sports and cultural boycotts, and calls for an arms embargo and international sanctions. This civil society activism has the potential leverage to transform the discursive approach to the underlying conflict of many governments in the Global South and possibly in Israel and its governmental supporters. This happened to the surprise of many in South Africa, although under very different circumstances.
3. What happens if South Africa loses at the ICJ?
Israel would undoubtedly gloat, celebrating a lawfare victory, and demeaning critics of Israel’s tactics in its Operation Swords of Iron as hysterical antisemites. It would also lead Israel and the US to feel vindicated by the refusal to follow the global majority favoring an early ceasefire.
Those supporting the South African initiative would likely react with a mixture of perplexing confusion and outright anger at this disappointing outcome at the ICJ. How could the highest court in the world look at such overwhelming evidence so well presented to the Court by the South African legal team, and decide perversely and unprofessionally. Assuming even a split reaction to a majority decision in which the Global West stood behind Israel and rejecting the views of those adopting the perspectives of the Global South, the Court’s stature as a legal tribunal deserving the utmost respect of UN member states would be drastically reduced, temporarily at least.
There is a middle ground based on a highly technical and legalistic jurisdictional argument put forward by Israel at the ICJ hearings to the effect that any action by the Court would be ‘premature’ as there was a failure to establish that a ‘legal dispute’ between the parties existed prior to when the application to the Court was submitted. This argument was refuted by the South African team at the ICJ January hearings, but it could relieve the Court, or some of its judges, of the duty to resolve the awkward dilemma at the core of South Africa’s request for Provisional Measures, which pits legal propriety against political expediency.
In some respects, the most significant result of a negative decision or even a technical evasion would be widespread disappointment producing a probable reaction in world public opinion to the effect that the World Court is out of touch with the flow of history, and in light of this, a dramatic increase in global solidarity initiatives along BDS lines will occur exhibiting surging transnational activism. The growing belief that only civil society activism has any prospect of terminating this terrible humanitarian ca such as has been unfolding in Gaza this in which the primacy of geopolitics disregards law and morality when strategic interests are at stake.
In a sense, whether South Africa’s request that the Court issue Provisional Measures to stop the genocide succeeds or fails might not make a big immediate difference as to the substantive impact of its decision. If the Court grants the South African request Israel will almost certainly refuse to comply which will produce civil society anger and coercive actions in response to Israel’s non-compliance. Whereas if the request is rejected, an angry populist response would also escalate civil society engagement and add to present hostility toward Israel in many parts of the world. In the latter case some of the frustration would be directed at ICJ as a flawed or politicized institution, whereas if its positive decision is ignored, most of the frustration would be expressed as anger toward Israel and the US. In other words, win or lose, the implementation of the norms of the Genocide Convention are subject to formal nullification by what has afflicted the whole UN system when it comes to enforcement—the primacy of geopolitics in determining the presence or absence of a sufficient political will on the part of actors with requisite capabilities to achieve enforcement of authoritative judicial decisions. The prospect of geopolitical obstruction in response to the South African initiative dooms orderly compliance in the event that the ICJ grants the request for Provisional Measures to stop Israeli violence until a decision of the merits is forthcoming on the allegation of the crime of genocide.
4. Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli military is the “most moral army in the world”, Do you agree with him? why?
This was never more than a highly inflated claim made by Israel’s formidable hasbara, or simply. the message transmitted by its state propaganda machine and repeated throughout the Global West by Israel support groups. The Goldstone Report of a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission undertaken after the 2008-09 massive land/sea/air attack on the essentially helpless people of Gaza contains hard evidence of a series of war crimes relating to Israel’s tactics and weapons. It should be appreciated that Israel has a special obligation in Gaza to protect the civilian population, accentuated by its status as the Occupying Power, and hence subject to the legal constraints contained in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. It should be remembered that years before the current encounter, even conservative international visitors, for example, David Cameron, referred to Gaza as ‘the largest open air prison in the world.” It is hardly surprising that individuals driven from their homes and homeland decades ago, then denied a right of return, and finally permanently ‘imprisoned’ for no crime where they kept on what a prominent government advisor called ‘a subsistence diet,’ would at some point risk everything to achieve a jail break, what Norman Finkelstein termed ‘a slave revolt.’ From a legal and moral point of view, to the extent validated by independent sources, the Hamas attack on October 7 included war crimes, and unlawful hostage-taking, and should be repudiated, although part of a legitimate act of resistance against prolonged oppressive occupation.
Looked at less legalistically and more strategically, Israel has since 1967 used Gaza as a valuable experimental combat area where it could demonstrate the efficiency of its counter-terrorism capabilities a warning to its enemies and as a sales pitch to other governments helpful in winning customers for its robust arms industry, including in relation to innovations in tactics, weaponry, and training. It also wanted to show hostile countries in its neighborhood that it would retaliate against provocations with disproportionate force. It formulated such an approach in the Dahiya Doctrine back in the early 1980s, a mode of thinking that justified the destruction of a poor neighborhood in south Beirut that was known to be a Hezbollah stronghold enjoyed populist support. It is this Dahiya Doctrine, in a geometrically magnified form, that underlies the security justification for Israel’s horrifying response to the attack of October 7th, and to the extent that Israel response is deemed by a growing number of observers as an instance of genocide making a mockery of attempts to continuing to portray Israeli armed forces as ‘the most moral in the world.’ Morality does not mix well with official assertions from political leaders and military commanders that the Palestinians as a people are sub-human and deserve to be treated as such. The whole international movement to protect human rights rests on the foundation of human equality, and the universality of the legal entitlement to human dignity.
5. How does the war on Gaze affect the respect and prestige of International Law?
The short-term, yet insufficient, answer will be greatly influenced by how the ICJ handles the South African request for Provisional Measures, and whether the states of the world, particularly Israel and the UN, exhibit defiance or respect for the outcome. Also relevant is the degree to which civil society is favorably impressed by the ICJ response to the South African request, including its prompt delivery. A positive result will have some redeeming effects on street-level perceptions of international law around the world, and act persuasively to support the view that even when states refuse compliance and the UN is helpless to act, international law can be useful for advocates of justice through legality.
If we broaden the optic beyond the legal assessment of the violence of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it becomes obvious that Israel has long openly violated international humanitarian law during its period of Gaza occupation that started with its victory in the 1967 War. Among many unlawful policies, Israel can be charged with during this period when it had the added obligations associated with being the Occupying Power in relation to Occupied Palestine, the most blatant are collective punishment, establishment of Jewish settlements in occupied territory, claims of sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, appropriation of water and other resources in the West Bank, failure to withdraw from territories occupied during the 1967 War or to fulfill in good faith the primary duties as specified in the 4th Geneva Convention to protect the Palestinian people subject to its administrative authority as the Occupying Power. Israel also refused to heed the near unanimous ICJ Advisory Opinion of 2004 challenging the construction of a separation wall on occupied Palestinian territory. In general, Israel has defied international law whenever compliance would seriously interfere with its national policies and strategic priorities as pertaining to the Palestinian people. At the same time Israel invokes international law whenever it could be used to justify its actions or complain about Palestinian resistance. Its pathetic lines of argument January 11th ICJ Hearings on the South Africa initiative sought to invert the facts and evidence by casting itself in the role of the victim of Hamas genocide rather than its perpetrator.
By such manipulations, International Law is reduced to brazen lawfare, that is, International Law becomes a policy instrument in the toolkit tool of partisan national behavior, essentially a mode of propaganda to bolster self-serving legal arguments upholding national claims and denunciation of behavior by adversaries. This kind of manipulation undermines the ideals of law as constituting a set of constraints that rest on the formal authority to regulate the behavior of all sovereign states in ways that achieve mutual benefits by way of peace and justice. This kind of legal framework for action is what the UN Charter ambiguously offered the world in 1945. The geopolitical tensions of ensuing years made the UN generally helpless to implement these central war prevention goals, and often marginalized the UN in war/peace contexts.
6. Israel is not a member state of the International Criminal Court? Could its leader be persecuted under its jurisdiction?
In theory, the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute a leader of a sovereign state if the alleged international crime was committed within the territory of a party to the Rome Statute governing its operations. In practice, However, such a proceeding would require that the ICC to obtain physical control over the individual and this would normally depend upon the voluntary cooperation of the national state of the accused persons belong to a state that is not a party. States that are ICC parties governing the operations of the International Criminal Court are under a treaty obligation to cooperate with the ICC, including during the investigative and any resulting arrest phases of a legal process. The accused person or persons must also be present in the courtroom in the unlikely event that there is a prosecution.
Israel does not need to be a party of the Rome Statute governing the authority of the ICC if the tribunal finds that it possesses valid legal authority to proceed with an investigation and possible indictment of Israeli political and military leaders charged with responsibility for crimes in Occupied Palestinian Territory, which would include Gaza. The ICC after a variety of delays did formally decide in 2021 in a Chamber consisting of three judges that it could proceed to consider Palestinian allegations of Israeli crimes committed on the territory of Occupied Palestine subsequent to 2014. Palestine had become a non-voting Member of the UN in 2012, and on the basis of this qualification as ‘a state,’ later a party to the ICC treaty framework as set forth in the Rome Statute. The present prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, has shown little interest in proceeding as permitted. This sloth is in sharp contrast to the haste displayed with respect to allegations against Putin for crimes in Ukraine associated with the 2022 alleged aggression.
7. What is South Africa is seeking to achieve of such a case?
It is always hard to depict the motives for a controversial legal initiative of this kind, and in this instance the objectives may be less clear than the motivations. Post-apartheid South Africa has associated the Palestinian struggle for basis human rights with its own struggle against an apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela famously said, “our freedom will not be complete until the Palestinians are free.” In a sense, genocide should in some instances be regarded as the consummation of apartheid. It is the almost invariablle characteristic of the final stages of a settler colonial project, which is probably the best way to understand what is happening in Gaza, and to appreciate the bad memories that analogous developments generated in South Africa.
South Africa may also be motivated by recollections of the role played by governments in the Global West in relation to its own earlier struggle that was long insensitive to the oppressive racist rule because it was strategically linked to apartheid South Africa in the Cold War Era. Palestine has been victimized and Israel shielded and enabled by the American-led commitment to its strategic interests in the Middle East as reinforced by pro-Israeli domestic lobbying and donor leverage in relation to government policy and media presentations.
Many of those who work on the South African initiative or were supportive of its effort to appeal to the ICJ to stop the Gaza genocide have been quoted as saying world to the effect, “I have never been so proud to be a South African or of our government.”
8. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Israel being referred to the (ICJ) for alleged genocide during its war in Gaza, calling the claim “meritless.”, What do you make of the Biden Administration position?
As suggested in earlier responses, the primacy of geopolitics in US foreign policy leads to the subordination of international law whenever compliance clashes with strategic interests. To call the South African initiative ‘meritless’ in light of the copiously documented genocidal practices, policies, and exterminist language of Israel’s top leaders defies reality as embodied in the provisions of the Genocide Convention, which calls upon parties to prevent and punish the commission of genocide by others as well as to refrain themselves from such behavior. To not exempt ‘genocide’ from geopolitics is in my judgment itself a sign of national decadence at a time when the global public good desperately needs expressions of respect for all peoples inhabiting the planet.
There are two points to observe: (1) the contrast between the US impassioned allegations of violations by its adversaries, China and Russia, and its unconditional support for accused international friends and allies is a stunning display of irresponsible statecraft; (2) the moral hypocrisy associated with such brazen double standards, severely undermines the authority of international law by treating equals unequally, and opportunistically.
The US is paying a high reputational cost at home and internationally by standing with Israel in opposition to the South African effort, which enjoys support all over the world, because it is seeking to bring an ongoing and transparent genocide to an end. This initiative by way of the ICJ was undertaken only after several attempts in the UN Security Council and General Assembly were blocked, diluted, or were unheeded principally due to US leverage exerted on behalf of Israel. It shines a bright light on the significant relevance of complicity crimes to this horrifying ordeal being inflicted on the civilian population of Occupied Palestine.
9. How important is the mainstream media bias in the US? In relation to the perceptions of genocide in Gaza? And to claims of liberal democracy, which include media independence, which has become crucially important to assessing American foreign policy?
Western Media Bias, Israeli Apologetics, and Ongoing Genocide
I found shocking that the NY Times published on January 17th no less than three opinion pieces by Jewish authors, unbalanced by a single Palestinian or principled critical voice. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli former peace negotiator, yet for many years a critic of what I would call the maximalist Zionist approach to ending the Israel/Palestine struggle over territory and statehood. In this latest piece Levy fails to use the word ‘genocide,’ yet helpfully pronounces as dead the two-state solution long rejected by Israeli leadership yet to this day embraced by US policymakers as a PR tactic to suggest that Washington is not a blind follower of Israel. I have no quibble with the Levy opinion piece that deserved to be published, but was so overshadowed by its two companion contribution by NY Times regulars.
Levy argues that the US should abandon this zombie peace diplomacy and adopt a more modest approach that limits its role to advocating the protection of Palestinian human rights for all those living beneath the current Israeli existential one state version of ‘the river to the sea.’ Levy is persuasive in taking account of Israel’s “categorical rejection of Palestinian statehood” referencing Netanyahu pre-October 7th defiant assertion that ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.’” This aggressive approach to the endgame of the conflict falls outside the comfort zone of many liberal Zionists and is obviously distasteful to Levy.
The Levy piece was a reasonable expression of opinion largely at odds with the Biden approach but as juxtaposed to adjoining pieces by Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman it contributed to an impression of extreme bias. The Stephens piece was so extreme, in my view, as should have made it unpublishable in any responsible media platform, and yet the NY Times gave it prominent billing on its Opinion Page. I suspect, even though ardently pro-Israeli, it would have been summarily rejected if submitted by someone unconnected with the newspaper rather than by one of its regular opinion writers. Its title accurately foretells its tone and essential message: “The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity.” Stephen’s vitriolic prose is directed at the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, which was based on a scrupulous legal argument setting forth in a 95 page carefully crafted document supporting its application for Provisional Measures to stop the ongoing ‘genocide’ until the tribunal decides the substantive allegation on its merits. Stephens’ piece even had the audacity to normalize the dehumanizing language used by the Israeli leadership in describing the ferocity of their violence in Gaza. Stephens seems willing to endorse the position that the alleged and presumed barbarism of the Hamas attack of October 7 allowed Israel to engage in whatever violence would serve their security without being subject to legal scrutiny or UN authority. At this point Israel has killed at least 23,000 Palestinians, without counting the 7,000 missing persons thought to be buries in the rubble. This total of 30,ood fatalities of mostly innocent, long abused civilians, is the equivalent of over 5,oo,ooo if a similar proportion of deaths were to occur in a country with a population of a size similar to that of the US, and the worst may yet to come for the Palestinians. Beyond the death toll are other severe crimes of humanity that are also features of the overall genocide: forced evacuation; induced starvation and disease; destruction of homes, hospitals, holy places, schools, and UN building.
In Stephens’ view this decimation of the people of Gaza is not indicative of genocide but should be viewed as the normal side-effects of a war that is a legal instance of self-defense. Given the weaponry used against sheltering civilians in sites protected under international law, what I find obscene is the heartlessness of Stephens’ gushing carte blanche vindication of Israel’s behavior coupled with the contempt he bestows on those who stand up for the protection of Palestinian rights and the repudiation of what has all the appearance of genocide as specified in the Convention.
Indeed, Stephens argues that China’s abuse of the Uyghurs or the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia or Soviet Gulag conditions is the real stuff of genocide, and yet went unpunished, while Israel is being maliciously singled out for these delegitimating charges of genocide solely because in his warped judgment the perpetrators are Jewish. It is a shameful line of argument put forward in a slick tone of tribal superiority and legal indifference. There is much room for debate surrounding these events in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, but to characterize South African recourse to the preeminent judicial body in the world, known for its respectful attitude toward state sovereignty as a ‘a moral obscenity’ is a further illustration of Stephen’s inciteful extremism that feeds the repressive impulses of such Israeli powerhouse lobbies as AIPAC. It ventures beyond the pale of responsible editorial filters, sure to be present if a Palestinian author wrote, with greater justification, that Israel’s defense of its behavior before this very court amounted to ‘a moral obscenity.’ Not only would such a hypothetical article be rejected, but any future submission by such an intemperate author would probably be rejected without being read.
The third opinion piece was written by the newspaper’s chief pontificator, Thomas Friedman. It recounts part of an interview Friedman. conducted with Antony Blinken a day earlier at a public session of the Davos World Economic Forum. Friedman was far more civil than Stephens, not a high bar, but more subtly as provocatively aligned with the Israeli narrative, and as always, self-important and pretending to write from above the fray. Friedman started his piece by contextualizing Israeli behavior sympathetically as reflective of the extreme trauma experienced by Israelis as a result of the Hamas attack, without a word of sympathetic empathy for the Palestinian outburst of resistance after 50 years of abusive occupation and 15 years of a punitive total blockade. Against this background, Blinken was portrayed as a tireless representative of the US Government doing his diplomatic best to limit the magnitude of devastation in Gaza and support the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid. In the interview Blinken declared that he was heartbroken by the tragic ordeal being experienced by the Palestinians, and yet Friedman not bring himself to question this high US official and unconditional supporter of Israel even gently as to why given these grim realities he continues to endorse the support for Israel’s military operation at the UN and through military assistance knowingly contributing to a continuation of this onslaught.
Friedman offers no reference to Blinken’s earlier extravagant official assurances of direct US combat participation if Israel so requests. Friedman failed to pow3 even a softball question about Blinken’s attitude toward Israel’s dehumanizing statements, tactics, or evident ethnic cleansing goals. Blinken had seemed for most of the 100+ days of Israeli violence entirely comfortable to be carrying out his role as enabler-in-chief of the Israeli ongoing genocide. Such a role entails legal accountability for serious, ongoing complicity crimes, and not the celebration of a man doing a professional duty that brought him personal grief. It is illuminating to appreciate that to slow the velocity of genocide, even if such a mitigating intention is conceded, is still genocide.
What makes this show of media bias particularly disturbing is the refusal to consider that most non-Westerners have little doubt about the true nature of Israel’s guilt in relation to the commission of this ‘crime of crimes.’ This perception has nothing to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, and everything to do with the stark clarity of Israel’s formal intentions and the manifest nature of its militarist extremism that is entering its fourth month. A further damning fact is that this is the most transparent genocide in all of human history as nightly TV brings its daily occurrence before the eyes of virtually the whole world. The horror of previous genocides, including the Holocaust, has been largely disclosed after the fact, and even then these human tragedies were largely interpreted by way of abstraction and statistics, as well as through the grim tales told by survivors or in the form of reconstructions done long after the bloody realities by documentary films, investigative journalism, and scholarly inquiry.
My emphasis on this single day’s selection of opinion pieces is not merely to allege NY Times bias, but to raise the tricky questions of self-censorship and media independence of deference to government policy especially in the context of war/peace issues. As shocking as I found the Stephens’ rant, more shocking was the failure of the NY Times and most national media to report on the extraordinary protest activity around the country in recent weeks, including a demonstration in Washington on Martin Luther King Day of 400,000 pro-ceasefire protesters. Surely, this such an outpouring of citizen didn’t deserve to be dismissed as not newsworthy. Especially in this era where social media reinforces the post-truth ethos of right-wing politics, the future of democracy under threat, would benefit from more responsible managerial standards on the part of the most trustworthy media, and especially with regard to controversial foreign policy, more debate, and less deference to Pentagon, State Department, and White House viewpoints.
I have no intention to make the NY Times a scapegoat. Its response to the Gaza genocide is indicative of a systemic problem with media reportage. For instance, watchers of CNN deserve more independent critical voices, and less official rationalization from government spokespersons, or retired military officers and intelligence bureaucrats. It is dangerous enough to endure deep state manipulations from within the bureaucracies but to have such views infuse media integrity is to resign the country to an autocratic future.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Is Genocide a Controversial International Crime?
30 JulWhy ‘Genocide’ is still a Controversial Crime?
In this strikingly original, strange, and brilliant book, Philippe Sands raises a haunting question among a tangle of other intriguing issues discussed throughout East-West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (New York: Knopf, 2016). It is at once a plural biography (with a bit of autobiography thrown in), a jurisprudential fairy tale, and a searing account of the horrifying impact that vicious Nazi policies had on the lives of the author’s family members as well on those of his human rights heroes. The haunting question is this: was it a wise and practical decision to keep the crime of genocide from being part of the international criminal law framework used to assess the individual accountability of surviving Nazi political and military leaders, and then subsequently in dealing with past and present mass atrocities?
Reflecting my own interest over the years in the use and misuse of the language of genocide, I found this to be the most provocative and enduring dimension of this multiply fascinating book in which Sands exhibits his versatility as jurist, legal practitioner, investigative journalist, and amateur historian of the Holocaust as it victimized one small region in contemporary Poland that happened to be the birthplace of his grandfather as well as two of the most renowned contributors to the development of international criminal law of the past century. The book’s title is obscure until we readers discover that East-West Street runs the length of the small town in contemporary Poland where these three families originated, and resided, until the momentous events of the 1930s forced them to seek refuge by moving Westwards.
East-West Street can be read from many different angles, divided into no less than 158 short chapters besides a prologue that explains how such an unusual literary/intellectual journey got its accidental start with a lecture invitation to the author and an epilogue that attempts to summarize the juridical interplay between the two prime architects of core international crimes (Sir Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin) and the crimes themselves (crimes against humanity and genocide). What creates the dramatic tension in Sands’ treatment of this interplay is the contrast between a jurisprudential logic that focuses on crimes committed against individuals as contrasted with a competing logic that emphasizes crimes against groups. Also at play for Sands are the contrasting personalities and legal approaches of Lauterpacht, the cool, pragmatic, revered professorial insider, and Lemkin, the emotionally driven, obsessive outsider who dedicated his adult life to lobbying governments to support genocide as a crime, and somehow managed to get results.
In the background of this titanic struggle of ideas, were the personal stories of the individuals involved, which, in effect, provided the private motivations for such influential public acts. An extraordinary coincidence that Sands puts to excellent literary use arises from the simple fact that both Lauterpacht and Lemkin were connected in their early lives and studies with a small town, variously named, that changed hands eight times between 1914 and 1945, being governed at different times by Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Its most durable name during the period covered in the book is Lemberg, although it is today known by its Polish name, Lviv. What strains credibility almost to the breaking point is that Sands’ own grandfather, Leon Bucholz, also was born in Lemberg, and it is around the lives of these three men of the law that Sands weaves a complex narrative structure that is surprisingly readable. Much of the book is devoted, with passionate attention to the minutest detail, to how their personal lives and sensibilities were shaped by their departure from the Lemberg before it fell under Nazi occupation, and by the pain associated with the wrenching reality of losing contact with their families left behind. Only belatedly, years later did they each discover the ghastly experiences of lethal victimization experienced by family members after the Nazis took over what had then been Polish sovereign territory. It was striking that only silence could accord dignity to occurrences that were evidently experienced as unspeakable, paralyzing a sensitive moral imagination.
Against such a background it is to be expected that the book examines closely the person and behavior of Hans Frank, one of the 21 Nazis prosecuted at Nuremberg, who served as the cruel and devoted Governor General of Poland during the war years when the country fell under German occupation, and became the most notorious killing field of the Nazi era. It is also highly relevant that the three men whose lives and careers are the focal point of the narrative, given further reality by interspersed family pictures and documents, were Jewish, although none with any pronounced religious commitment. Yet their lives and careers were multiply determined by this Jewish identity, and what this meant during a period of unprecedented mass persecution and extermination. This interest in Frank is reinforced by Sands’ extraordinary collaboration with Franks’ son, Niklas, with whom he visits the Nuremberg courtroom where 68 years earlier a death sentence had been imposed on his father. Not to be content with the involvement of Niklas, Sands’ also persuades Horst, son of Otto von Wächter, who administered for Nazi rulers an area that included Lemberg, and had earlier been a classmate of Lauterpacht in the law school of the local university, to assist in the reconstruction of the events. These intergenerational connections led Sands to write the screenplay and perform in a documentary film, My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did, which had its 2015 premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, and won recognition and awards.
Such an attempt at reliving of these historical events illustrates the contrasting adjustments to the present, with Niklas feeling that his father fully deserved the punishment he received at Nuremberg, while Horst exhibits a morbid pride, remembering his father’s prominence without any sign of shame or even regrets about his father’s role in carrying out the evil policies of the Nazi occupiers. Philippe Sands positions himself both within and without this apocalyptic past, trying to pull the pieces together in a coherent multi-dimensional account without losing contact with his own personal engagement in this overwhelming family tragedy.
Putting to one side the intriguing biographical and autobiographical levels of Sands’ construction of these various lives, I wish to concentrate my observations on the legal legacies associated with Lauterpacht and Lemkin,
depicted with such vividness throughout the book, reaching their climax at Nuremberg. As Sands observes, crimes against humanity (CAH) and genocide were both radical and innovative juridical ideas seeking to criminalize Nazi atrocities. CAH focused on protecting the individual against the criminality of any state including one’s own, while genocide was conceived to criminalize the mass killing of identifiably distinct ethnic or religious groups. Lauterpacht more or less invented CAH with the intention of repudiating the impunity that traditionally attached to wrongdoing by a sovereign government against individuals subject to its territorial jurisdiction and thus insulating those who acted on behalf of the state from any kind of personal accountability. CAH mounted a legal challenge directed at unconditional territorial sovereignty and the prevalence of absolute monarchy, which had long dominated the state-centric world order established in Europe by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Such impunity continued to be a feature of nationalist ideology despite the French Revolution and the emergence of democratic constitutionalism. The numerous subsequent efforts to make governments internally accountable for their acts through law and a variety of constitutional procedures, including elections, did not extend to external behavior. What made CAH such a radical step forward was this insistence on some measure of external or international accountability by means of law.
Lemkin, on his side, invented the crime of genocide, including even the word, almost all by himself. He was guided by the unwavering belief that criminalizing the kind of racialist policies put into practice by Nazi Germany was urgently necessary to save civilization from the recurrence of barbarism. It seems that Lemkin was initially disposed to criminalize such behavior by his shocked reaction to the mass killing in Turkey of Armenians in 1915, and the absence of any punitive international response embedded in international law. He believed fervently that the deadly political virus giving rise to such collective behavior was a distinct form of criminality that should never be conflated with a series of separate criminal acts, however severe, that were directed at individuals.
I would have thought that there was every reason to support both forms of criminality in reaction to the Nazi experience, and to a certain extent, so does Sands. The main technical obstacle, only superficially discussed by Sands, to the prosecution of these crimes at Nuremberg was the prohibition against retroactive applications of criminal laws. In fact, the Nuremberg Judgment devoted considerable energy to demonstrate its respect for the prohibition, endorsing CAH only if the acts in question could be connected with the onset of the war in 1939; in other words, from 1933 to 1939, the early years of the Nazi regime, the wrongdoing of those acting on behalf of the German government continued to be internationally shielded by impunity. Subsequently, the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Nuremberg Principles, ratified now by more than a half century of state practice gives CAH the status of obligatory norms under customary international law, no longer necessarily linked to aggressive war. More than this, these Principles have come to be regarded as ‘peremptory norms’ or simply jus cogens, that cannot be altered by governmental action, and can be changed only through their replacement by another peremptory norm.
Genocide has had a somewhat similar intellectual voyage after being sidelined at Nuremberg to Lemkin’s great disappointment. His personal crusade to achieve the inclusion of genocide among the crimes charged against the Nazis failed. Undeterred by this setback, Lemkin’s unwavering perseverance after Nuremberg was soon rewarded. The Genocide Convention came into force in 1950, and as Sands observes, almost instantly genocide became the ‘crime of crimes,’ the most stigmatizing form of criminality whose commission results in a permanent tainting of the national character of a sovereign state found to have been guilty of genocide. There have been various allegations of genocide over the decades, with Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda being among the most notorious instances.
Sands situates himself not quite equidistant in relation to these two jurisprudential giants. His own academic life and personal associations disposed him to side with Lauterpacht, celebrating his success in introducing CAH into the fabric of the Nuremberg experience and from there, to become a critical norm in the emergence of international criminal law, and a featured crime embedded in the Rome Statute that creates the legal framework for the International Criminal Court. Sands is unabashedly appreciative, even awed, believinging that Lauterpacht was recognized as “the outstanding legal mind of the twentieth century, and a father of the modern human rights movement.” [loc. 254] Lauterpacht, as an influential Cambridge professor later elected to the International Court of Justice became a member of the British establishment, and was professionally admired for his prodigious output as a scholar that showcased his committed, yet cautious approach to the development of international law. For Lauterpacht this development to be authentic had to arise from the practice of sovereign states. He had a keen appreciation of the limits of what was politically feasible and legally appropriate, and was respectful toward patterns of statecraft, possibly reflecting his exposure while a student to the great Austrian formalist and positivist, Hans Kelsen. In a book built around the organic links between the personal and public, it is hardly surprising that Sands turns out to have been a student at Cambridge and that Eli Lauterpacht, the jurist son of Hersch, was his teacher and a collaborating source of information about his famous father. This contributes one more instance of Sands’ interest in fathers and sons. Unfortunately, for his scheme of things, Lemkin never married and had no sons.
The older Lauterpacht was openly skeptical of genocide, viewing it as ‘impractical,’ even an impediment to the realistic development of international law. Sands is never fully clear as to why a crime that seemed to depict the very essence of the Nazi victimization of Jews and others, should have been put aside on grounds of practicality in the lead up to the Nuremberg proceedings. He does mention in passing American and British reluctance to put such a crime into the indictment at Nuremberg was related to the rattle of skeletons in their respective historical closets: the systematic decimation of native Americans and a variety of British colonial practices. According to Sands, “Lauterpacht never embraced the idea of genocide. To the end of his life, he was dismissive, both of the subject, and more politely, of the man who concocted it, even if he recognized the aspirational quality.” [loc.6700] Sands does refer to the problematic aspects of genocide in various places—especially a lawyer’s difficulty of finding strong enough evidence of the appropriate criminal intent to convince a court of law, considering that those engaged in genocide rarely leave a paper trail that satisfies those sitting in judgment and aware that to obtain a guilty verdict in responses to genocide is an indirect punishment of a nation and its people as well as of the individuals charged.
In this regard, despite the crime of genocide not being part of the formal proceedings at Nuremberg, Germany has been convicted of ‘genocide’ in the court of public opinion, and Germans whatever their relationship to the Nazi experience seem destined to live perpetually under this dark cloud. As many have observed, and I have experienced, this deep German consciousness of historic guilt explains an excessive deference to the policies of the state of Israel and the related fear that any criticism of Israeli behavior, however justified, will be perceived as anti-Semitism. In this respect, there is a real objection to the formal and informal allegations of genocide because it imposes guilt not only on individuals who acted for the state but on the nation as a whole. There is a related issue, not raised by Sands, of the degree of complicity with Nazism that it is fair to attribute to the German people as a whole, and whether this complicity should cast its shadow over future generations.
I have had an interest in the embittered standoff between the Armenian diaspora and Turkey over the redress of historic grievances relating to the tragic events of 2015. To resolve this standoff depends exclusively on the willingness of Turkey to issue a formal acknowledgement that the wrongs endured more than a century ago by the Armenian people constituted genocide. No lesser form of apology by Turkey even if accompanied by initiatives that keep historical memories alive via a museum, educational materials, and commemorative events will overcome this Armenian insistence, supported by many Western governments, that Turkey admit genocide. Sands appears sympathetic with the difficulty posed by this apparent fetishization of genocide, writing, “[i]t was no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper, on the occasion of the centenary against Armenians, suggested that the word ‘genocide’ may be unhelpful, because it ‘stirs up national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs.’” [loc. 6618]
Questioning the Armenian insistence on genocide has become political incorrect even though the crime was unknown in 1915 when the offending behavior took place and the modern state of Turkey did not then exist as it only came into existence in 1923. Of course, such legalistic considerations will never resolve the controversy as what is deeply at stake is the way historical memories should be inscribed on political consciousness of both victim and perpetrator societies, as well as in authoritative public accounts. It is plausible to admit that what happened a hundred years would have qualified as the crime of genocide if it took place after 1950. The case is further complicated because many Turks continue to subscribe to a historical narrative that claims that the massacres resulted from excessive uses of force in a wartime situation in which Armenians were seen to be a subversive presence siding with the Russian adversaries of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and included occasions on which Turks were also slaughtered. This counter-narrative complicates any acknowledgement by the Turkish government of genocide as it would agitate the volatile ultra-nationalist sentiments that dominate the extreme right in the country.
It is understandable from Armenian perspectives that only an admission of ‘genocide’ is capable of encompassing the magnitude of the wrongs suffered by the Armenian people. There is no other word with comparable stigmatizing power. It was this stigmatizing power that led to Bill Clinton in 1994, while president of the United States, to issue his notorious order that the word ‘genocide’ should not be used by government employees with reference to the massive killing taking place in Rwanda. Clinton evidently feared that the mobilizing effect of labeling these events as genocide would exert unwanted pressure on the United States to intervene to stop the killing.
This is the meeting point of the genius of Lemkin, and the worldliness of Lautherpacht, with Sands sensitive to the virtues and limitations of both viewpoints although leaning toward the Lauterpacht approach. Of course, the German guilt is quite different in its essentials from the Turkish reality. A Turkish admission of genocide, should it ever be made, would not be internalized in the manner forced upon Germany by the denazification program implemented by the victors after World War II. It is relevant to realize that Armenian genocide did not emanate from an extremist racialism that was so closely connected with Hitler’s rise to power based on virulent anti-Semitism.
In one sense Lemkin has been too successful. In his insistence that what the Nazis were doing to Jews, and other peoples, was a crime against the group, he unwittingly succeeded in elevating genocide above crimes against humanity, and thereby weakened Lauterpacht’s interest in promoting international accountability for crimes without undermining peace among states. There are other concerns. If genocide if read backward into history, as in the Armenian case, it opens a Pandora’s Box that intensifies numerous bitter memories of the past, reopens wounds, and seems to unduly burden present generations with a legacy of criminality that was the work of those no longer alive. What is worse, the Holocaust as the context in which the crime was formalized operates as a standard of comparison, the crime of crimes that lies behind the legal conceptualization, which discourages its acknowledgement by political entities that might be ready to issue an apology but not to suggest that in their national past is an experience that deserves to be treated as comparably reprehensible to what Jews, and not only Jews, suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Given a world of states, maybe Lauterpacht after all adopted the more tenable position. Perhaps the most that can be hoped for is an international criminal law framework that prosecutes, as appropriate, individuals, and leaves the chronicling of group crime to historians, novelists, and filmmakers. Even here there are problems not faced by Lauterpacht or Sands that relate to the hierarchical character of world order that makes any serious application of international criminal law more a creature of geopolitics than an expression of the rule of law or a tenet of global justice.
Sands while right to be proud of his own role as revered litigator of international crimes adopts a more questionable position by downplaying the relevance of geopolitics. In a notable passage about the objection to Nuremberg as ‘victors’ justice’ he writes, “[y]es, there was a strong whiff of ‘victor’s [sic] justice,’ [at Nuremberg] but there was no doubting that the case was catalytic, opening the possibility that the leaders of a country could be put on trial before an international court, something that had never happened before. [loc. 288] A whiff! [for those unfamiliar with ‘whiff’ its dictionary definition is this: “a brief passing odor in the air as in ‘a whiff of perfume’ or “a very small trace as in ‘a whiff of self-pity in her remarks’] Looking at the impunity conferred by the Nuremberg framework on the indiscriminate, terror bombing of German cities [recall Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five], not to mention the fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the victors’ dimension
couldnot be convincingly marginalized from the overall legal proceedings. It was certainly more consequential than even ‘a strong whiff’! Even the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, who is portrayed by Sands quite reasonably as the most influential presence at Nuremberg, understood that the moral validity of the decision rendered was precarious, and needed future vindication by being integrated into an international law framework that bound all states, winners and losers, strong and weak. That this never happened deserves commentary that Sands fails to provide.Instead, Sands reminds us that there has been much follow up to Nuremberg that supports his assessment of its catalytic impact. He cites his own extensive experience with both categories of criminality in cases involving Serbia, Croatia, Libya, United States, Rwanda, Argentina, Chile, Israel and Palestine, United Kingdom, Yemen, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iraq, and Syria as if the mere listing proves his point. [loc. 6607] I believe Sands’ impressive legal activism only shifts the focus. True, there has been a robust development of human rights and international criminal law, especially after the end of the Cold War, but this has obscured rather than overcome this fundamental flaw. The integrity of the rule of law as an operative global system, depends crucially on treating equals equally, and this has never happened, nor will it happen without a sea change in world politics. As African countries have been pointing out with plausibility, criminal accountability for both CAH and genocide is limited to weak states and losing sides in wars, and impunity remains for the strong and winners. We will long be waiting for the likes of George W. Bush or Tony Blair being called to account for their role in embarking on a disastrous aggressive war against Iraq in 2003.
True, introducing these categories of criminality into the legal vocabulary gave a valuable normative tool to civil society, first effectively utilized by the much maligned Russell Tribunal in the midst of the Vietnam War and more recently by the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005 that addressed crimes associated with the Iraq War. Yet civil society has only public opinion at its disposal, and even here, is hampered by the statist orientation of most media outlets that demean such civil society initiatives as illegitimate intrusions on the public sphere reserved exclusively for governments representing sovereign states. At best, these civil society tribunals that pass judgment on the behavior of geopolitical actors are expressions of a moral consciousness that acts as if these norms of international criminal law should be universally regulative rather than selectively applied.
Sands, along with Lauterpacht and Lemkin, share the liberal conviction that law is an autonomous force for the good in human affairs (unless deformed in its application as by the Nazis). Their sense of practicalities appears to be a willingness to overlook geopolitical constraints, and to take what incremental steps are made available by circumstances with the hope and expectation that over time the growth of law and legal institutions will overcome the present arbitrariness of practice. In the meantime, the liberal test of validity is a matter of procedural assurances that trials are fair and that those who are convicted are guilty of heinous acts that deserve to be punished. The related fact that some are too powerful to be accountable is a fact of life that it is best not to think too much about. Along with far more notable public intellectuals (e.g. Russell, Sartre, Chomsky, Edward Said) I dissent from this liberal optimism/opportunism, believing that the conscience of engaged citizens is an indispensable challenge to all political systems, (talking truth to power) rather than limiting constructive contributions by acting within it. At the same time, I would not judge liberal icons, such as Sands and Lauterpacht, who have made a political choice opposite to mine.
In the course of this essay I have ignored other significant publications by Sands, most particularly his prior relevant and important book, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules (2005), a well-reasoned and documented critique of the approach to international law taken by the neoconservative presidency of George W. Bush, especially with respect to the Iraq War, but also in reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Although valuing this contribution to the policy debate that occurred during that period, it is fully consistent with the liberal orientation, which is often to oppose American and British foreign policy undertakings, especially if they happen to be unsuccessful and are peripheral to national or strategic interests, and depend upon unilateral aggressive uses of force not authorized by the UN Security Council. In this vein the recently released massive Chilcot Report evaluating British involvement in the Iraq War follows a parallel liberal line, condemning any decision to go to war except on the basis of adequate advance planning and the buildup of public support, but sidestepping the question of whether it was also mandatory on Britain to comply with international law and the UN Charter. Despite the 2.3 million words of the report there is no where a hint about Blair’s potential personal responsibility if international criminal law were to be properly applied.
As expressed at the beginning, despite these differences, I greatly admire the author, and applaud Sands’ dazzling performance. Among other qualities, Sands displays an incredible willingness to go to great lengths to get the details correct. He tracks down addresses, relatives, obscure documents and pictures to piece together a riveting narrative of these three lives, and their families, coping with one of the most extreme collective traumas of all time. As said, this book can and should be widely read from many perspectives, and the psycho-politics of the jurisprudence it imparts is the one that happens to interest me most, but it is only one of several strands in this exceptionally rich tapestry, and each one deserves similar detailed commentary.
Tags: collective guilt, Crimes against Humanity, genocide, Hans Frank, Hersch Lauterbach, Lemberg, Lviv, Nazi Era, Nuremberg Judgment, Philippe Sands, Rafael Lemkin, Robert Jackson, rule of law, Victors' Justice