Tag Archives: Israel

USG Sanctioning Francesca Albanese: Marco Rubio Tramples on Law, Justice, and Truth

27 Jul

[Prefatory Note: The text below was published in The Nation on July 15, 2025, appears here unmodified. The delay due to a weak Internet here in Turkey. There has been much critical reaction to this US Government defamatory statement justifying the imposition of sanctions on this exceptional independent expert appointed by the UN to an unpaid position, and left to hang in the wind by the politically motivated show of indifference by the UN Secretariat.]

Sanctioning Francesca Albanese: Marco Rubio Tramples on Law, Justice, and Truth

Richard Falk

Justifying US Sanctions

US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a dazzling Orwellian display inverted reality by slapped sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the much-embattled UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. If the sanctions are implemented against this extraordinary citizen of Italy, in the face of strong UN objections, Albanese will be barred from entering the US, presumably even to discharge her annual UN duty to present a report to the Third Committee of the General Assembly. Additionally, as a vindictive feature of the sanctions, whatever American financial assets she happens to possess, including real state, will be frozen. It is relevant to take notice of the that not only is Francesca Albanese, the first UN unpaid officeholder to be sanctioned, but she happens to be the first woman to be named UN Special Rapporteur of Occupied Palestine.

Relying on an earlier Trump Executive Order 14203 (“Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”), which is a stretch when it comes to the SR role played by Albanese, Rubio resorts to this lawfare ploy to connect her with an analogous sanctions imposed in February on five members of the ICC for their involvement in the issuance of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli former Minister Defense, Yoav Gallant. The only link between the ICC and Albanese derived from her most recent SR report that explores the connections between the profits earned by some 60 named corporations in the US and European defense sectors and her carefully documented allegations of Israel’s criminal responsibility for genocide in Gaza. The recommendation in her report to the UN of investigation and indictment by the ICC provides the basic for accusing Albanese of waging ‘economic warfare’ against the US and Israel. As might be expected, big tech and arms dealers exerted their own pressures for the US to strike back, and strike it did.

Anyone familiar with the vicious Israeli campaign against Albanese since her appointment in 2022, fully seconded by the US, will jump to the plausible conclusion that these objecting countries were waiting for just such a setting to take punitive action against this fearless scholar and passionate advocate of human rights for the Palestinian people. Rubio acknowledges as much when he departs from the technical rationale for sanctions, giving voice to the deep roots of US hostility to Albanese. Rubio’s words read as if scripted by the most militant of AIPAC or UN Watch loyalists: “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur.” His statement goes on falsely contending that “Albanese has spewed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.” Hardly a word of this defaming allegation is true beyond the partial exception of the ‘open contempt’ phrase. What seems relevant is that the sanctions were imposed days after the release of Albanese’s report that focused on corporate complicity with Israel’s criminality in Gaza, naming a series of prominent corporations that profited from supplying weapons and other military equipment facilitating the genocide. Rubio’s formal statement signaled the context by unusually referring to ‘economic’ as well as ‘political’ interests.

Background of Attacks on Albanese

The last three Special Rapporteurs on Palestine, of which I was one, were each subjected to harsh pushbacks in the form of character assassinations, death threats, and smears. These were similar to what Albanese experienced prior to the July 9 sanctions. We were much less visible and influential than Albanese, in part due to her public prominence, documented confirmation of inflammatory genocide accusations. As her fearless and persuasive critical assessments of Israel’s criminality began gaining growing credibility at odds with the mainstream news cycle upholding the legitimacy of Israel’s response to October 7 she became a prime target of government and societal diehard supporters of Israel. So when her last report named leading defense industry companies, and recommended ICC investigations and prosecutions it was apparently the last straw for US foreign policy establishment.

I will not claim any credentials, but my predecessor, John Dugard, and my successor, Michael Lynk, were world class jurists, whose views on international law issues were widely solicited and impressively influential long before they became UN SRs and have continued after their SR terms expired. This Israeli tactic of attacking the credibility of the messenger instead of addressing the message seemed to commence in the 2005-2010 period. Although not acknowledged by either Israel or its European and North American supporters this tactic appeared perversely responsive to the overwhelming evidence of highly visible Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in their administrative occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s core duty as embedded in the Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation was daily being flagrantly violated. It specified the obligations of an Occupying State to uphold the safety, security, needs, and interests of an occupied people. Among the most serious violations was the encouragement of Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank a fundamental breach of international humanitarian law that doomed peacemaking ventures, especially the viability of any durable two-state solution that is not a Bantustan buyoff. It also gave rise to the strong suspicion, later confirmed, that the Zionist Project coveted not only East Jerusalem, which was the unlawfully incorporated into Israel after the 1967 War, and proclaimed Israel’s eternal capital, but the West Bank as part of ‘the promised land’ in Jewish traditions.

To deflect attention from its lawless behavior, Israel chose to go after Special Rapporteurs and prominent critics by recourse to launching personal attacks rather than by addressing substantive criticisms by relying on counter-arguments. The centerpiece of this strategy came to be identified as ‘the weaponization of antisemitism,’ reinforced by manipulating the influential polemical IHRA definition of antisemitism. Criticisms of Israel’s behavior, including of its practices of ethnic cleansing and Knesset enactment of a Basic Law in 2018 of Jewish supremist ideology. Critical reactions by UNSRs and others were repudiated by Israel, derided as the purveyors of hatred toward Jews, and with US support mounting an intensifying campaign to eliminate the SR Mandate for Occupied Palestine. In this pushback against Israel’s critics, accusations were invariably directed at individuals who had strong reputations as strengthening human rights and had no animosity whatsoever to Jews as persons or as a people. These smearing tactics were intended to harm professional reputations and to be emotionally hurtful. The broader goals of these campaigns were to create toxic intimidating consequences for anyone who dared cross these ill-conceived red lines. These discrediting attacks have proved alarmingly effective over the years in diverting attention from Israeli wrongdoing, sowing doubts either cynically or by a naive citizenry and a self-censoring media that responds as folk wisdom instructs, ‘where there is smoke there must be fire.’

No one has endured more unwarranted hate and deserved admiration along these unscrupulous lines than Francesca Albanese. She has heroically persevered in an entirely objective expose of Israel’s prolonged, transparent, and cruel genocidal assault against the civilian population of Gaza

Exposing the Genocidal Narrative of Alleged Retaliation

It is against this background, knowingly or pragmatically indulged by Western governments and influential corporatized media platforms, that brought Albanese under fierce attack from the moment she was appointed SR by the UN. After October 7, 2025 when the Israeli response in Gaza assumed from its outset a genocidal quality, Albanese rose to the challenge of the UN mandate by naming the massive high tech violence against Gaza as ‘genocide’ when the mainstream mobilized to keep the debate about whether Israel was winning in gaining its public goal of exterminating Hamas. Albanese showed that this outcome was politically enabled by the prior dehumanization of the Palestinians. Her periodic reports to the UN brilliantly analyzed genocide as embedded in the Zionist Project of ‘settler colonialism,’ the essence of which consisted of persecuting Palestinians as strangers in their own homeland. She was energetic and effective in disseminating these provocative findings and allegations, building a global reputation unlike any previous Special Rapporteur across the spectrum of 58 mandates established over the years by the UN Human Rights Council. However fierce, intimidating, and unfair these attacks, Albanese courageously did not bend to the pressures mounted against her, which seemed to further frustrate and incense her vengeful adversaries in Israel and the United States. They could not quiet her voice or divert her message, no matter the fury of the insults or threats, including from pro-Zionist groups spread around the Global West. It is unlikely that the imposition of US sanctions, however punitive, will overcome these past strenuous efforts to silence Albanese’s eloquent global voice of conscience fortified by deep knowledge of what she speaks.

The Larger Stakes

More than Albanese’s reputation and ability to carry out the duties of Special Rapporteur is at stake in this struggle. National sanctions imposed by the host country of the UN violates two important international treaties designed to balance state sovereignty against UN effectiveness and independence. [International Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN; Host Country Agreement]. The US has repeatedly refused to be bound by international law and morality when these normative imperatives clash with strategic interest in shielding allies from criticism and censure. It also slams the door on the integrity of unpaid civil servants who enjoy a reputation for exceptional performance as is the case with Albanese. All members of the UN are of course fully entitled to express disagreement with the views and recommendations of an SR, hopefully in a responsible manner. It is quite another to join a campaign of slander without the slightest effort to engage the well documented arguments of an experienced and highly respected human rights defender and international law scholar of Albanese’s stature. Worse yet, the US Government is joining Israel in reinforcing slanderous attacks by punitive action that intentionally interferes with the performance of an elected and appointed UN official selected by the Human Rights Council after an elaborate vetting process that included the recommendation of a committee of UN diplomats who evaluate a large pool of applicants, shortlisting for review by the President of the HRC who passes on his recommendations to the Assembly of UN member who must endorse the SR nominee by a consensus vote (interpreted as registering no negative votes) among members states of the HRC. To impose sanctions on such a UN appointee due to disagreements with her assessment of a controversial situation is to weaken the influence of a UN institution and  discourage qualified persons from subjecting themselves to unseemly reprisals for performative integrity. It is also a terrible precedent, overriding the objective reportage of the most severe violations of international law by recourse to strongarmed geopolitics.

Albanese’s central allegations of genocide and disruptive Israeli interference with the international delivery of humanitarian aid for the desperately deprived civilian population of Gaza were in harmony with the near unanimous interim measures ruled upon in 2024 by the ICJ, and defied by Israel. The ICJ judgment although provisional was widely admired across the world as an exercise of judicial independence, exhibiting the professionalism of its judges. This included the American judge, Sarah Cleveland, who sided with the South African request for interim relief from the devastation being wrought by the relentless military assault as did the judges from Israel-supporting Germany and Australia. Because of the drawn-out procedures of the ICJ, including delays in the proceedings granted to Israel, it may be several years before this judicial body renders a final judgment on these central questions, and even then, in a manner confined by conservative judicial practice than are SR reports.

In this sense, the establishment of the position of Special Rapporteur was a brilliant innovation in UN procedures, enabling responsive reporting by 44 SRs on a variety of international themes ranging from the rights of free expression to abusive treatment of women, as well as 14 country SRs deemed deserving of attention. The SR on Israeli violation of human rights in Palestinian Territories occupied after 1967 was established in 1993, and has been subject to Israeli and US objections ever since its inception. Despite such opposition this UN position has steadily gained influence, prestige, and media respect. Its prominence reached a peak during the first three-year term of Albanese’s tenure, now extended as is in keeping with usual practice for a second and final second three years. Her reports were invaluable sources of trustworthy and well-researched assessments of an international controversy that increasingly pitted the West against the rest. Thirty years ago, Samuel Huntington predicted a turbulent sequel to the end of the Cold War in the form of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ and only a few would doubt that it has come to pass.

Albanese surmounted this contentious political atmosphere with reason, knowledge, and a lifelong dedication to international law and human rights under the most difficult of circumstances. Instead of being sanctioned and maligned by the US Government, Francesca Albanese is now honored by heading the line of nominees waiting to receive the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. If Americans were living in a democratic and peace minded country our President would insist on the resignation of Marco Rubio for his shameful act of overreach. It would be a dramatic show of national support for internationalism even when it goes against US foreign policy. This currently inconceivable double outcome of honor for Albanese and infamy for Rubio could have strengthened the UN and recognized civil society contributions by engaged citizens the world over who are devoted to justice and peace, and above all, in relation to the weak and vulnerable currently epitomized by the plight of the Palestinian people.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Civic Responses to Gaza Genocide and Regional Nuclearism

17 Jul

[Prefatory Note: The post below is in two parts, both interviews published in the Italian weekly, Il Manifesto. The first addresses the Gaza dimension of the current Palestinian ordeal now extended to the West Bank and drawing worldwide negative attention by induced mass hunger and water scarcity. These severe civilian hardships resulting from Israeli criminality have given rise to a variety of protest activities, governmental denunciations, yet continue to gain unconditional support by the United States and the UK, while drawing some mild critical drawbacks from formerly supportive  France, Canada, and Germany but without stoppage of trade or flows of vital supplies to Israel. The second part in the form of an early comment on the short Iran War, initiated by Israel, joined by the US to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s nuclear sites, dramatized by the US reliance on ‘blockbuster bombs’ of 30,000 pounds to destroy nuclear facilities built deep underground. Their initial US and Israeli claims of victorious results have been watered down by growing doubts of how much damage was actually done to Iran’s nuclear attacks. A further setback for the attackers is the widespread speculation that Iran might now decide to develop nuclear weapons unless Israel would agree, which seems highly doubtful, to dismantle their nuclear arsenal and agree to a nuclear-free monitored Middle East. These texts are slightly modified for updating and clarity.]

Patricia Lambroso Interview Questions, Richard Falk Responses, Il Manifesto (5/20/25)

1. The Gaza Peoples Tribunal (civil society tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, political leaders,  governments, protest activism around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?

Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders and supported by the liberal democracies of the West. The ICJ accepted jurisdiction to address tje submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as amounting to genocide. The ICJ then also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the international delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked all UN enforcement and ceasefire efforts by exercising its right of veto. It is more accurate  to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council each of whom was vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings. The ICJ should not be blamed, it should instead be vested with enforcement powers to ensure the effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled and shaped by the winners of World War II in 1945 to preserve their habitual entitlement that gave precedence to strategic interests when challenged by international law.

The ICJ also issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza that is legally regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[‘Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”’]  The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War justified terminating Israel’s administrative authority and physical presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza, and within no more than a year. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligations by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment, and not to view implementation with the ruling as merely ‘advisory.’ This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack.

Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, and the ICC unlike the ICJ is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil.

 Attention should also be given to an ‘Accountability Gap’ of impunity that is supplementary to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC for advocating proceedings allegedly exceeding the lawful authority of the tribunal. It simultaneously imposed sanctions on the four ICC judges that facilitated the arrest of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants. Beyond this the US officially threatened future action in the event of any new effort to take action contrary to the political and economic interests of the US, Israel, and other allies.

Also relevant for analyzing the UN disappointing response to Israel’s prolonged genocide is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC. These tribunals have thus far refrained from directly examining allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. It is up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement. In early July 2025 the UN Special Rapporteur of Occupied Palestine, Francesco Albanese, was also sanctioned for her attribution of legal responsibility to corporations for continuing their profitable relations with Israel in the face of genocide. She accompanied this assessment with a recommendation that the ICC initiate investigations with an eye toward prosecutions. Known as a dedicated and brave human rights defender, the sanctions generated widespread protests, including calls for awarding Albanese the Nobel Peace Prize and demands that the sanctioning Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, resign. This is highly unlikely to happen so long as the US treats its alliance with Israel as superior to its obligations as a law-abiding member of international society.

It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct and a settler colonial occupation making Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is important. It exerts often unacknowledged influences on many governments, the tone and substance of media coverage, and breadth and depth of civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide, as has been the experience of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more 21 months.

Disregarding international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings repudiated, the outcomes of legal controversy can exert a defining influence on public perceptions of legitimacy, that is, in the dynamics  of configuring of the legal and moral high ground in an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of ‘political realists’ who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, relative military capabilities are no longer reliable predictors of which side will prevail in an armed political struggle. This should have been the core message derived by the United States from the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet went on to lose the war. This pattern was repeated in most colonial wars fought during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to many 21st century conflict situations, especially in nationalist resistance to foreign intervention, regime change and state rebuilding projects, settler colonial stabilization repressive policies and practices.

 The Gaza Peoples Tribunal was formed in2024 with this background in mind. It was conceived exclusively as an initiative of global civil society with the dual objectives of helping swing the balance in the Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestine as well as encourage nonviolent solidarity initiative supportive of the Palestinian struggle. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after the attack on Israeli border villages on October 7, resisted in the months that followed repeated calls for an Israeli ceasefire. Israel also rejected the option of complying with international law defying ICJ and ICC rulings. Such postures amid an r extremely one-sided conflict gave rise to an intensifying moral outrage among the peoples of the world, and eventually among more and more governments, especially in the Global South. The GPT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the relevance of international law and world politics in its several dimensions bearing on the situation in Gaza. The compilation of testimony and documentation will be presented to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons of diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written short substantive reports. The distinctiveness of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal (as compared to the ICJ and ICC) is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics. GPT makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors of opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. In past peoples tribunals when such a defendant actor is invited to present a defense, it has always been rejected, presumably because the overall outcome of the judicial process is predetermined.  

The GPT does not attempt to mimic judicial tribunals that operate technically and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, seeking to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War. GPT prides itself on being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to stimulate solidarity on the level of action. The GPT relies on a variety of civil society initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also supports a range of nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participants; arms, trade, and investment embargoes; protest activity of all varieties, including act of civil disobedience expressive of the conscience of engaged citizens.     

2. The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust  is weaponized  by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?

Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There are two principal lines of explanation. The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, are acutely sensitive to this allegation. The governments and citizenry of such countries have unfortunately adopted the view that to overcome the disgraces of their past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the ‘never again’ renunciation of genocide pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim.

The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy and Western civilizational superiority, a reenactment of the Crusades under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is situated on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect enacting ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington.’ In this sense, the real ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the regional encroachment of the white and secular West. For opposite reasons to the Western alliance with Israel, Iran regards Israel as its principal adversary.

 3. Trump touring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?

Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May visit to the Gulf States has had adverse consequences for Gaza, but their exact nature remains obscure beyond giving Israel further time to impose its will on the helpless Palestinian civilian population. On one side, it could have been the first stage of a more transactional US relationship with Israel than the kind of unconditional support given during the Biden presidency.

In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might have resulted in a greater willingness to forego the dangerous attack on Iran, and a greater readiness to seek a negotiated solution to Western objections to their nuclear program. Such a course of action would been a challenge to Netanyahu’s Israel. It might even have shaken Israel confidence in receiving unlimited support for their preferred endgame scenarios in Gaza. It might also encourage Netanyahu to lend support, which he has recently done, to Trump’s patently surreal candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, supposedly among his narcissistic phantasies, and concretely allow Israel to get on with the genocidal assault on Gaza, and bury once and for all the zombie two-state endgame that while delusional, subverts Israel’s manifest ambition to terminate the Zionist Project triumphalist solution with a single Israeli one-state incorporating the whole of mandate Palestine.

In retrospect, judging by what has happened since, the trip to the Middle East seems to have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with the Gulf monarchies and yet give Netanyahu all the support that he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders share Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas for the sake of their repressive stability.  Many of these Arab regimes might in the future be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a common counter-terrorism orientation. This posture might prove compatible with Israel’s coerced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, persons to be ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where the hope is that in time they will give up their dreams of liberating Palestine.

Israel has in recent months increasingly lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza to cruel extremes of starvation and by making aid distribution sites into death traps. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including an increasing proportion of citizenries of the once liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip momentarily sidelining Israel diplomatically, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of Gideon’s Chariot, the name given Israel’s latest military operation in Gaza has not led to a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations. It is uncertain at this time whether maintaining harmony with Israel, despite the continuing genocide, strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that these demeaning ties with Israel, including complicity with Israel’s resolve to control ‘the day after negotiations’ will continue come what may in Gaza, a sad commentary on the suppression of liberal values whenever upholding the rule of law and minimal morality stand in the way of ideological and strategic goals, including civilizational unity. With the political advent of MAGA Trumpism liberal pretensions within the US have been buried as deep underground as Iran’s nuclear sites and seemingly as indestructible.    

R. Falk Comment for Il Manifesto on US Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities 6/22/25, in response to request by Patricia Lombroso

Once again, the world is moving once again closer to the brink of major war in the Middle East, with Israel doing most of the dirty work relative to Western post-colonial imperialism under the joint Israel/US auspices. The US actively joined Israel’s unprovoked aggression to the extent that Israel needed its help to complete a military operation against Iran’s nuclear sites. The US and Europe keep continuing to evade scrutinizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and give Israel a totally free hand of impunity to embark upon either the mass forced departure of Palestinian from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.  even from pre-1967 Israel itself, or a plan B of constructing death camps in the devastated city of Rafah to confine Palestinian survivors in Gaza. The immoral audacity of Israel is exhibited by naming such morbid arrangements as constituting ‘a humanitarian city.’

To complete the mission of destroying or significantly delaying the completion of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities, Israel needed more than US complicity as it lacked blockbuster bombs and B-2  bombers (alone capable of delivering such massive bombs) to destroy or heavily damage Iranian deep underground facilities at  Fordow and Natanz, and its surface nuclear site at Isfahan. It remains undetermined whether Israel used the pretext of a nuclear threat posed by Iran as a justification for its post-October 7 policy of mounting devastating military attacks throughout the region to destroy hostile movements and weaken potential adversary states such as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. In the Iran unprovoked attacks, part of the incentive for striking in June 2025 was undoubtedly to divert attention from the growing international opposition from its continuing genocidal policies in Gaza, most recently including luring starving Palestinians to supposed humanitarian food distribution sites, which acted as horrifying death traps.

An irony is that these June 21 US attacks on three main nuclear facilities gave Iran an airtight international law argument for the validation of claims to retaliate by relying upon its right of self-defense against the prior Israel and United States acts of aggression that violated Iran’s territorial sovereignty. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, vowed to retaliate and did so to a limited extent that penetrated Israel’s layered defenses sufficiently to discredit its claims of invulnerability to air and missile attack. It remains uncertain whether Khamenei’s warning will be fully carried out at some future time in the event that the present ceasefire arrangement lapses, Israel again provokes, and combat resumes.

As a result, the threat of war between Iran and Israel as supported strongly by the US and rather weakly by the European Union casts a dark shadow of potential war throughout the region at this time.  The outbreak of war probably depends on whether Iran is perceived to possess deterrent capabilities taking the form of launching a sufficiently effective attack on US strategic assets, especially against its minimally defended numerous military bases spread around the region. Prior to the ceasefire the Iranian response was measured and cautious, designed to demonstrate that it possessed the military capabilities to inflict heave damage on any adversary in the future. Iran’s show of force was undertaken despite a near certain expectation of an even a more devastating US attack. Such a response would likely be accompanied by a direct and explicit promotion  of regime change in Tehran promoted by mobilizing internal opposition forces, encouraged by pledges of substantial external material encouragement, and even carrying out an assassination of Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khamenei. It is quite possible that Israel will keep pushing tactics designed to promote Iranian regime change although on an ambiguous basis of deniability and covert support for the internal Iranian opposition.

A political complexity facing Iran from a legal perspective arises from the reality that US strategic targets in the region are concentrated in Arab countries currently at peace with Iran. The governments of such states would have a self-defense claim against Iran for forcibly violating their territorial sovereignty. It could also lead to questions in the US about the costs of maintaining its Middle Eastern force structure. It also could lead Arab government to question whether their security and stability is being reliably upheld by the acceptance of visible American military assets on their sovereign territory. Such questioning would almost certainly accompany a Second Arab Spring in the region should it take place.

Whether the world would continue to stand aside while the US and Israel, in apocalyptic interaction with Iran, plunge the world into a new world war is uncertain. This uncertainty exists despite the likely results of threats and even uses weapons of mass destruction. With Trump and Netanyahu calling the shots, there is the prospect of a dramatic further expansion of the combat zone, with few policy guard rails to discourage nuclear threats and their implementation. There is much public pressure in the US to wage wars of choice in a politically acceptable manner that avoids ‘boots on the ground’ so as to minimize American casualties, thereby weakening citizen opposition to wars disconnected with direct threats to national sovereignty. This option of relying on missiles, bombers, drones has made it tempting for the US/Israel leadership to gamble on mounting a credible threat to secure its desired outcome in Iran even, if necessary, by demonstrating the willingness to use nuclear weapons if needed to achieve its strategic objectives. Stumbling into an unwanted nuclear Armageddon may not be expected by war hawks, and certainly not wished for, but the stage is being set for such a catastrophic future. As scholarship has shown, the world was extremely lucky to escape nuclear war back in 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might not be as lucky this time when much less prudent leaders than Kennedy and Khruschev are in control of warmaking by the antagonistic governments of current geopolitical actors (US, China, Russia).

We should not forget that while this Iranian drama plays out, Israel is freed from media and governmental scrutiny as its war machine speeds up the Zionist master plan of completing the work of Palestinian erasure, Israeli leaders have been increasingly emboldened to proclaim their preferred solution to the conflict by way of a one supremist Jewish state that has now become a de facto political reality. It remains somewhat obscured by the remarkable continuing Palestinian resilience and resistance. Israel has made no secret of its priority as a sequel to genocide, which is the forced disposition of Palestinians living under occupation as a repetition of earlier instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Nakba, 1948; Naksa, 1967) or its grisly alternative of confining Palestinians to a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ currently under construction. The Trump presidency has given many blessings to this Israeli vision of victory over the struggle of Palestinians to sustain their struggle no matter the extremity of the human suffering.

Whether Israel has been decisively weakened by the steady erosion of its legitimacy through its defiance of the most basic norms of international law, by repeated condemnations in sharply worded UN General Assembly resolutions reflecting the views of a majority of the world’s people and governments, and by a hostile turn of world public opinion remains to be seen. It will also be reflected on how civil society in the West responds, facing at present repression at home and impunity-free defiance by Israel.

A decisive question for those seeking a denuclearized Middle East is when will the awkward issue of dismantling Israel’s long hidden nuclear weapons arsenal is at last put on the diplomatic agenda for all to see. It has been one of the geopolitical triumphs of the US and Europe to keep Israel’s opposition to a nuclear-free Middle East from affecting the approach to regional stability and world peace. The major Arab countries and Iran have long favored regional denuclearization, but such a goal has been effectively thwarted by Israel and its closest allies.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Ambivalence Toward Resistance as a Human Right: Matters of Law and Policy

16 Jun

[Prefatory Note: I publish here my foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy’s pathbreaking book on the right of resistance. Murphy provides readers with a comprehensive framework for thinking about resistance to public authority in a variety of settings without the controversial baggage of commentaries on such salient cases as Palestine, Ireland, Kashmir. Exempt from direct consideration is also self-defense instances of resistance, which are not treated except historically, and then as matters of the security rights of sovereign states rather than human rights. It may disappoint some readers that none of these three classic instances of popular resistance is discussed in the text and hence not even referred to in the index. The author fruitfully conceptualizes the right of resistance as a human right that has a universal, if amorphous, resonance in international law and in the constitutional foundations of legitimate national governance in all parts of the world.

The manipulation of language in the context of the October 7 lethal attack on Israeli border villages by political forces living under a punitive siege in Gaza imposed in 2007 in response to a Hamas victory in internationally monitored elections held the prior year and supplemented by Hamas prevailing in an intra-Palestinian power struggle with its rival, the Palestine Liberation Organization (linked to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority that shares partial administrative, collaborative control over the West Bank with Israel). It is widely believed that Hamas’ rise was due to its advocacy and practice of a politics of resistance in contrast to the politics of accommodation pursued by the Palestinian Authority and PLO.

October 7 is so pivotal for an appreciation of the contradictory agenda of Israel and the Palestinian people. On the side of the established order favored by governments and elites in the West and resting on the geopolitical primacy of the Global West in the Middle East, the attack on Israel was a terrorist disruption of order executed in a barbaric manner. On the side of the Palestinians and much of the post-colonial Global South, the attack was perceived as a justifiable action of resistance to a settler colonial project that had long denied Palestinian rights, above all, Palestine’s inalienable right to self-determination as enshrined in Article 1 of both human rights covenants that frame recourse to resistance by reference to law. The commission of violations by the resisters during the attack were commingled with Israeli official justifications for an extreme response, articulated ‘legally’ as ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ or simply as an appropriate claim of self-defense or as ‘counterterrorism.’ It not surprising that in the ensuing six months influential media platforms of the West accepted the Israel approach, decontextualizing Israel’s pre-October 7 behavior toward the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular. Only after months of devastating attack on Gaza did this simplistic portrayal of the attack begin to be challenged by referencing the historical background, civil society protest activity, daily atrocity images and witness testimony, genocidal tactics and intentionality, and by disclosure of territorial ambitions and an ethnic cleansing agenda. At this stage, only the firmest defenders of Israel’s conduct, forgo the rhetoric of genocide in describing the attacks, thereby subverting Western official posture of punishing the use of the word genocide as a hate crime, a mainstream taboo. An encroaching Palestinian right of resistance rarely is even considered. Instead, even peace-oriented groups often limit their goals to achieving a non-judgmental ceasefire.

A careful application of Murphy’s way of analyzing the role of resistance claims and practice would produce a more balanced, less propagandistic and geopolitical tinged, battle of words as between terrorist violence and resistance, and between the security of sovereign states and the human rights of people considered both individually and collectively. The Ukraine War and the recently commenced Iran War are further illustrations of the degree to which mainstream normative discourse on armed struggle is not deployed as a source of objectively interpreted legal norms and principles in conflict situations but rather used as a policy instrument to condemn the actions of adversaries and lend protective support to friends and partners. Thus, Russia is condemned, without any account of NATO provocations, while Israel is given the benefit of the doubt despite its unprovoked aggression and its unacknowledged yet widely known, arsenal of nuclear weaponry.

To gain a deeper, more constructive understanding of these and other issues, Shannonbrooke’s guidance is indispensable. Her book is available at all the usual places.]

*************############%%%%%%%%%

Foreword to Shannonbrooke Murphy, The Human Right to Resist in International and Constitutional Law, Cambridge University.

As I read this jurisprudentially fascinating and exceptionally learned book, the media was consumed by its daily accounts of the massive military operation conducted by Israel against the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. It was a gruesome story rationalized on one side as self-defense against Hamas cast as a terrorist organization that carried out a barbaric attack on October 7, 2023, and as such, could be legitimately situated outside the protection that international law by setting limits on the violence of warfare, although compliance was often problematic. On the other side, criticism mounted that what was being called self-defense would be better understood if interpreted as a deliberate and unabashed recourse to genocide by Israel whose slaughter of Gazans that amounted to a humanitarian catastrophe affecting the whole of the Palestinian people. By and large, political leaders in the West endorsed Israel’s shocking response to the horrific Hamas attack on 22 villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the death of an estimated 1,400 Jewish civilians and soldiers, as well as the seizure of an estimated 240 hostages, severe war crimes committed by Hamas that seemed to qualify as crimes against humanity.

In contrast, were exceptionally large and aggressive public demonstrations in cities around the world, including in the United States, UK, and other governments whose governments were giving unconditional support to Israel. These street protests were denouncing the scope, targeting, intensity, severity of Israel’s response as amounting to the crime of crimes, genocide, although the milder events in the West tended to confine their demands to calls for an immediate ceasefire, which Israel and the United States opposed at the UN and in its diplomatic stance. Both views, however contradictory their political outlooks seem, were connected by invoking law to justify and explain their impassioned partisanship. A reading of Shannonbrooke Murphy’s timely and conceptually brilliant book, while itself demanding a reader’s sophisticated and dedicated attention, is the most illuminating treatment of these and kindred issues of how law can be used in good faith to uphold a politics of armed resistance while at the same time putting strict limits on the legally grounded human right of people to resist various forms of oppressive conditions. It is an unusual situation, but far from unprecedented, for law to exist in certain respects but still lacking sufficient clarity to offer definitive guidance to parties in conflict as to what is behaviorally permitted and what is not, enabling the more powerful actors to engage in lawfare as part of its strategic approach.

Murphy does not examine specific cases of conflicts between the forces of order and the rights of resistance in trying to depict and improve upon the conceptual landscape that throughout history has surrounded this inherently controversial set of issues. Instead, she considers resistance from the perspective of human rights law as it currently functions in international law and constitutional law, while presenting a learned and relevant account of historical antecedents in the work of past celebrated jurists and other normative sources of reflection on the dual role of law in prohibiting and permitting resistance. A prominent feature of the human right to resist is that it functions as a right of exception to the normal duty to obey. It is a matter of varying circumstances that give rise to resistance in a variety of context because existing arrangements of governance are harming individuals, groups, and peoples in socially unacceptable ways, often reflecting changing or evolving societal values. Such a potential role for positive law affirms that the contested behavior in addition to being morally and politically deplorable, can be further stigmatized as sufficiently legally deplorable as to vindicate the existence and exercise of the human right of resist. Domestic law typically wrestles with such issues at the level of the individual or group. These issues may be features of governance (for instance, colonialism, apartheid) of characteristics of civil society (for instance, homophobia, racial and religious prejudice, patriarchy).

Such a human right to resist became prominent in the United States in the 1960s due to the refusal of individuals to comply with the legal obligation to serve for a limited period of time in the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. Western democracies had previously wrestled with this issue during World War II, generally granting individuals and groups such a right if it derived from religious convictions and was directed against all wars, or warfare as such. During the Vietnam War an increasing number of secularly motivated young Americans developed a legal argument that became known as ‘selective conscientious objection’ in which justification for the refusal to join the armed forces was based on moral/legal/political objections to this particular war in Vietnam. Revealingly, as the Vietnam War became more unpopular with the citizenry over time, courts in the U.S. looked with greater favor on this once novel secular rationale for conscientious objection. To be more attuned to Murphy’s conceptual clarity, this set of issues of political propriety is addressed as a ‘cognate’ notion that influences but is distinct from the penumbra of the ‘human right of resistance.’ In such a spirit, Murphy subtly balances positivist concerns with achieving as much conceptual precision as possible against the importance of retaining enough flexibility to enable law to evolve as societal values and circumstances change. Her jurisprudential stance favors codification efforts that take sensitive account of changing conditions and societal values while recognizing the benefits of achieving maximum conceptual precision and stability with regard to prevailing expectations about the content of the human right to resist.

The originality of this learned discussion of the human right to resist, which should be of particular interest to common law countries such as the United States, is the decision of the author not to address specific cases of collective resistance such as the Irish or Palestinian struggle for human rights, including some form of self-rule or even the radical forms of opposition to Nazi genocide. In this sense, Murphy’s jurisprudentially impressive study can be fruitfully read as a complement to Noura Erakat’s fine Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). What Erakat gains by way of readability and context is somewhat offset by her fully acknowledged substantive sympathies that become part of the policy analysis that underpins her critique of the ways international law has failed the Palestinian people. In this same sense, what Murphy, despite the lucidity of her prose, loses by way of readability is fully redeemed by a fundamental rethinking, with partisan undertones, of what is at stake when a right of exception is given to individuals, groups, and peoples to violate the law legally, but within a secondary framework of authoritative legal limits.

I am a great admirer of both works, but for different, yet interlinked reasons. In Erakat’s case because I share her compelling concern for delegitimizing Palestinian victimization via lawfare, while in Murphy’s case because I am made far more aware of the complexity of the issues involved in legalizing resistance, taking account of its continuing evolution and persisting conceptual gaps, and explicating and exploring linkages to other kindred issues that bear centrally on limiting the power of the state. These linkages pertain both to incorporating the right to resist authority into domestic constitutional texts and by way of applicable international human rights standards that have evolved into moral aspirations to become legal obligations. In this latter instance, for instance, such crimes as apartheid and genocide are not conceptually insulated from legal accountability by invoking claims of unlimited sovereignty over territorial governance or by constitutional provisions that accord superiority to domestic sources of law whenever clashes with international law are present.

In one important respect, Murphy’s positivist presentation of issues associated with resistance legality takes our attention away from the political contexts of enforcement. We could end up with an admirably coherent conceptual framework but with a useless, or even regressively opportunistically legalistic approach to various categories of grievances emanating from those who are deemed as class adversaries or international rivals. The authority of law has radically uneven limits in its functioning within and among sovereign states. For instance, such ‘legal’ developments as the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials accepted the taint of ‘victors’ justice’ because of foreclosing inquiry, much less accountability, into the crimes of the victors. Even more consequential for evolving a humane global rule of law was the right of veto inserted into the UN Charter, thereby both hampering and tainting the operations of the United Nations. International law is weak when it comes to vital issues because its implementation tends to be disrupted by and subordinated to the primacy of geopolitics, which rests protection of rights on such unreliable restraints as imposed by deterrence threats and prudence, if at all. This results in major resistance claims being manipulated to reflect the interest and policy priorities of powerful states and domestic elites. What is evident is that the selective implementation of human rights law in general creates images of moral hypocrisy and double standards as diluting the authority of and respect for international legal discourse. True, some creative tension has emerged internationally due to the collapse of European colonialism, although Israel is a reminder of what colonialism meant for oppressed native peoples and is expressed by the establishment of counter-hegemonic legal arenas, including among jurists as exemplified by TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship reflecting the Global South’s experience of the hegemonic uses of international law relied on by colonial Europe in exploiting the resources and dehumanizing non-Western peoples. Resistance to colonialism has in the post-colonial era of international relations inspired the determined effort to generate support for a counter-hegemonic approach to international and constitutional law, which is expressed by

the transnational bonding of Global South jurists in the TWAIL enterprise.

Shannonbrooke Murphy is fully aware of the incompleteness of a purely positivist focus on the human right to resist, while here setting for herself this already Herculean challenge of conceptual clarification. Her contributions to contemporary jurisprudence are profound, and rendered in ways that permit and encourage diverse inquiries into other bodies of human rights pertaining to a range of topics, including rights of self-defense, freedom of expression and freedom of religion in relation to such sensitive policy questions as recourse to war, rights of secession by ethnic or religious minorities, as well as the more sensitive personal issues of gender parity and identity. Let the legal architects produce responsive blueprints. Let the debates begin!

Fifty or so years ago a British graduate student at the Yale Law School, Rosalyn Higgins, who like me fell under the charismatic influence of Myres McDougal in studying international law, but was troubled by the subjectivity and seeming ideological bias of a jurisprudential approach that gave legal hegemony to the Cold War values prevalent in the West. I was also troubled, but on different grounds. I questioned the jurisprudential necessity for such an ideological bias and instead sought a contextually sensitive approach to law that was guided by the type of secular humanism that infuses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the UN Charter.

Professor Higgins, who later became a distinguished judge at the International Court of Justice, organized a conference in London to explore these rifts between the British and American approaches to law. Without the benefit of Murphy’s conceptual mapping, I found the conference most intriguing because of the gathering of fine legal scholars for such an unusual conversation, yet intellectually unrewarding as it merely reproduced the tensions between a British insistence that the subjectivity of the New Haven School of International Law undermined the authority of law and the American claim that law without a political and ethical context is artificially cut off from reality. If we were to arrange such a meeting in the future, I would insist that Shannonbrooke Murphy’s book be required background reading believing that both sides could valuably learn from it. Also, I cannot imagine a better beginning for an advanced course in either human rights, resistance claims, or the interplay of international and constitutional law than by assigning this demanding, yet remarkably imaginative, erudite, and rigorously conceptualized contribution to an improved understanding of the interactions between law, resistance, and human rights in a variety of substantive contexts.

Richard Falk

Yalikavak, Turkey

November 6, 2023

.’    

Tags: , , , , , , ,

What Future for US/Israel Relations? Justifying the Gaza Tribunal, Addressing US Complicity

7 Jun

Tri

[Prefatory Note: the post below is the text of an interview published in Italian in Il Manifesto on 6/7/2025. The interview was conducted by a journalist friend, Patricia Lambroso. It appears here in somewhat modified form, and is devoted to questions about the Gaza Tribunal.]

1. The GAZA Tribunal (civilian tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, leaders and governments around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?

Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders. The ICJ accepted its jurisdiction to resolve a submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as genocide, although a definitive ruling on violations of the Genocide Convention would not be available for some years in the future.

The ICJ in 2024 also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked impulses toward UN enforcement by its right of veto and its dismissive attitude toward recourse to the ICJ, supporting Israel claim to be acting in self-defense.

It is more accurate  to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the three NATO  Permanent Members of the Security Council each of which is vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings in the event of a refusal of voluntary compliance by the losing party. The ICJ should not be blamed. Instead it should be given enforcement powers to ensure the enhanced effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be mainly associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled by the winners of World War II in 1945 that acted to safeguard the primacy of geopolitics. In part this design defect was a reaction to the perceived failure to recognize this primacy in the design and operation of the League of Nations, resulting in the non-participation or exclusion of several key countries in the organization, and its failure to avoid developments that culminated in the outbreak of World War II.

The ICJ issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also  resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza as supposedly regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”]  The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War required terminating Israel’s administrative presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligation by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment. This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack. Israel has given not the slightest sign that it would comply with this crucial Advisory Opinion main conclusion ordering the withdrawal of Israel’s presence from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, presumably relying on the supposedly ‘advisory’ nature of the ICJ authority in relation to UN requests for guidance on ‘legal disputes.’

Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, which is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil. This outcome gives attention to an ‘Accountability Gap’ as a supplemental weakness of international to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed personal sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor and any officials that participated in the issuance of arrest warrans by the ICC allegedly for exceeding its lawful authority. The US also threatens to sanction anyone attached to the ICC who tries in the future to facilitate the detention of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants.

Also relevant is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC that has so far refrained from directly examine allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. The single effort to raise complicity issues was undertaken by Nicaragua that submitted a complaint that Germany was violating international law by supplying arms to Israel. A final decision has yet to be rendered, although the ICJ rebuffed the allegation Germany on the grounds that its supply of arms to Israel was too small to be capable of constituting a violation of the Genocide Convention. It seems to be left up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is now integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement.

A final structural weakness of the judicial enforcement of international law by way of the UN System is what might be termed ‘a temporal lag,’ the long lapse of time between a submission and a final decision in situation where the victims of behavior need and deserve expedited relief. There must be an emergency procedure that allows the ICJ to reach a decision within days and weeks, even if later in the proceedings it is revised or even reversed.

It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct but that is a misinterpretation. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes of international institutions are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is nevertheless important. Its outcomes exert influences on many governments, media coverage, and civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law help achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide. The victimization of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more than 19 months has severely delegitimized. It is now widely viewed throughout the world as a pariah state whose behavior in Gaza has created the ‘moral crisis of our time’ for all peoples and governments Israel. Many argue that Israel’s defiant refusal to abide by international law and to respect the authority of the UN should result in its suspension from UN participation until Palestinian self-determination is achieved. Israel has responded to these proposed initiative principally by way of weaponizing antisemitism claiming that its opponents are motivated by ‘Jew hatred’ rather than the motives that they claim. This line of Israel defense has grown ineffective even in countries with the most complicit governments. And yet Israel’s daily actions continue after all this time to be unimpeded, because of the absence of the political will needed to mount an ad hoc protective intervention to alleviate the humanitarian emergency and provide safety for the surviving Gazan population.

A public dismissal of international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings geopolitically nullified, the outcomes of legal controversy exert an influence on discursive perceptions of legitimacy, that is, on the shaping of the legal and moral high ground in relation to an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of political realists who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, military capabilities no longer are the best predictors of which side will prevail to defeat settler colonial arrangements in political struggles for self-determination. This should have been the lesson learned by the United States from its involvement in the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet lost the war. Thus pattern has been repeated in most colonial wars during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to typical 21st century conflict situations, but the lesson remains unlearned. This is so because the defeats incurred are profitable for private sectors arms producers that wield great influence in the Global West, particularly in the United States.

 The Gaza Tribunal was formed against this background. It was conceived as a project of global civil society in the conduct of a Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestinian people. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after October 7, resisted repeated UN calls for an Israeli ceasefire as well as defied the ICJ and ICC rulings, provoking a rising sense of moral outrage among the peoples of the world. The GT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the significance of international law in its several dimensions relevant to the situation in Gaza. The results will be presented in October of this yeard to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons with diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, moral authority, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written responses. This result of the Gaza Tribunal is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics, and makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors ample opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. The GT does not mimic judicial tribunals that operate within strict technical limits and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, and hopes to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War, proudly acknowledges itself as being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to prove itself relevant on the level of action. The GT relies on a variety of civil society solidarity initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also encourages nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participation; arms, trade, and  investment embargoes; and protest activity of all varieties.     

2 The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust  is weaponized  by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?

Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There exist two principal lines of explanation for this stance so contrary to the values proclaimed from the rooftops by liberal societies in the West . The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany is acutely sensitive to this allegation and politically has unfortunately opted for the view that to overcome its past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the renunciation of genocide in the pledge pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, here the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, here genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim. The Srebrenica genocide of 1995 tested the pledge because the events in Bosnia tested whether ‘never again’ was ethnic or geographical, of relevance only if Europe was the scene.

The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy, a reenactment of the Crusade under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington’ fatalistic warning that the end of the Cold War was not a gateway to global peace, but rather a shift in conflict patterns from Communism to Islamism. In this sense, the emergent ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the white and secular West, and which also happens to regard Israel as its principal enemy. In this sense, the opposition to the West from the Iranian perspective is anti-imperial and political, more than it is civilizational, although its deep roc ots are difficult to disentangle from the historical interaction, especially vivid memories of a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 that forcibly restored the autocratic modernizing monarchy to the Pahlavi throne.

 3. Trump touring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?

Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Gulf States will have consequences for Gaza, but their nature remains obscure at this time. On one side, it could be the first stage of a more transactional relationship with Israel than the kind of blind support given during the Biden presidency. In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might result in a greater willingness to forego an attack on Iran, and more readiness to seek a negotiated solution with Tehran as to their nuclear program, a course of action disquieting to Israel, and shaking Tel Aviv’s confidence in unlimited support for their preferred endgame in Gaza. It might also encourage the US Government to seek to strengthen Trump’s patently absurd candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, reportedly high among his narcissistic phantasies. As strange as it seems, this image of Trump as a peacemaker concretely express incentives and exert real pressure on Israel to stop finally the genocidal assault on Gaza. It might even push the US to back a two-state endgame that subverts Israel’s obvious ambition to terminate the Zionist Project by annexing the West Bank on its way to establishing an Israeli one-state.

Even more radical would be a shift away from further tolerance of Israel’s secret acquisition on a nuclear weapons capability achieved with Western complicity to a position of backing regional denuclearization, but the long silence makes even this sensible contribution seem utopian as far as the prospects of its adoption is concerned. But which of the nine nuclear powers has shown less respect for international law and the constraints of the UN Charter than Israel when it comes to the use of force?

Contrariwise, May trip to the Gulf energy-rich monarchies may have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with these Gulf regimes and yet give Netanyahu what he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders want Hamas destroyed as much as do the Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv, and could be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a shared counter-terrorism orientation that might prove compatible with the forced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where it is falsely assumed by advocated that in time those displaced by the second Nakba event will stop dreaming of and disengage from struggles to liberate Palestine from the clutches of settler colonialism, no matter how long it takes. Israel has lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza beyond the outer limit of decency by recourse to deliberate tactics of prolonged starvation. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including the citizenries of the liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip sidelining Israel diplomatically, at least for the moment, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of the Gideon’s Chariot, Israel’s new military operation, may signal a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations or turn on whether maintaining harmony with Israel strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that US support for Israel to remain unaffected in the near future as the levers of Zionist influence (e.g. AIPAC, donor deference) are still strong in the United States

Tags: , , , ,

Trump v. Netanyahu: Transactional or Ideological?

2 Jun

Trump’s second term as US President has been mercurial, with lots of bobbing and weaving more bearing resemblance to a boxer’s opening round in which the point is to feel out the opponent rather than to land decisive punches. The pragmatism of the deal or the inflexibility of firm commitments premised on images of world order and national interest as reflective of hard power calculations in a world of states that political realists perceive as divided among friends, enemies, and those that don’t count.

In the case of Israel, this early rhythm of Trump’s second term is notable mainly for its uncertainty, contrasting with the tight brotherly embrace of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who tried from time to time to adjust this image ever so slightly by  gestures of humanitarian concern that Netanyahu seemed to misconstrue as serious US efforts to constrain Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. As the quickly faded red line in Gaza illustrated Biden’s gentle warnings to Israel were mainly for show in response to public relations concerns arising in the US in response to the American protest activity and liberal media criticisms of Israel’s behavior in Gaza that struck more and more observers as ‘genocide,’ although most influential media platforms shied away from calling a spade a spade, that is, naming Israel’s Gaza violence as genocide. This inhibition on any governmental naming of the crime persists under Trump and is combined with the intensification of the repressive campaign inherited from Biden to treat support for the Palestinian pursuit of their basic rights and criticisms of Israeli excesses as ‘antisemitism,’ as a ‘hate crime against the Jewish people.’ Siding with the victim of flagrant crime is transformed by the magic of language into itself being the crime. This turn of phrase also offers Trump a pretext for advancing his generalized attacks on knowledge-based policy making of experts and reflecting scientific research as typified by elite universities, which are themselves epitomized by Harvard. Trump’s moves against Harvard involving defunding of research and challenging the immigration status of foreign students amount to an pedagogical assault on the accepted modern learning paradigm flavored by appeals to xenophobia rampant among the MAGA base. This campaign is vintage Trump, who combines his trust in belief-based action as fused with professions of ultra-nationalism.

Trump, despite shifts against Israel in US and European civil society sentiments never wastes words by making even the slightest display of empathy for the extrem suffering of the Palestinian people. He seems almost pathologically dazzled by prospects of access to the extreme wealth and geopolitical grandeur of the Gulf monarchies, carried to absurd extremes by proposing a US takeover of Gaza with the surreal promise of establishing ‘the Riviera of the Middle East,’ which included a proviso undoubtedly comforting to Tel Aviv that the reconstruction plan would be preceded by the forced departure of its surviving Palestinian population. It remains unclear to this day whether Trump was seeking a deal in which the financial burden would be shifted to the Arab world while the political administration of post-genocide Gaza, purged of Palestinians, would be entrusted to US administrative supervision, which is a double gain for Israel (no Palestinians, no UN).  

As such, more than his predecessors Trump seemed at first to support unconditionally even Israel’s regional game plan of eliminating or weakening by military means potential threats to its future security by states and movements in its region. Despite likely swerves on the road ahead Trump seems at this stage determined to avoid Israeli distractions from the pursuit of his own separate primarily transactional goals in the Middle East that are of a primarily economistic character. Trump’s transactional mindset can be reduced to the  pursuit of national gains with respect to trade and investment as awkwardly combined with corrupt personal and family enrichment schemes.  

Above all such a course of action presupposes the US being not too overtly seen as aiding and abetting Netanyahu’s resolve to complete the Zionist Project of establishing an Israeli one-state solution that displaces Palestinians from the land and Palestine from maps of the Middle East. It should be noted that long before October 7 and years prior to Netanyahu extremist coalition that assumed governing authority at the start of 2023 the Israeli Knesset formally enacted into law the claim of exclusive Jewish supremacy without the slightest adverse reaction from Washington. [Israel’s Basic Law of 2018]. Netanyahu was Prime Minister at the time heading a less extreme governing leadership in Israel, yet committed to Israel sovereignty from the river to the sea, achieved by relying on a long tradition of patient reliance on salami tactics, taking small steps toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project.

What the new 2023 Netanyahu team brought to the table was an acceleration of this consensus ‘solution’ to Palestinian resistance and resilience by disclosing its endgame agenda of violent dispossession and provocation.  Trump will face a foreign policy dilemma of either opposing the revival of the UN-backed two-state negotiated solution or siding with Israel, concluding that the time has come to legitimize Israel’s one-state genocidally engineered outcome that included permanent statelessness for the Palestinian people, which entailed repudiating their inalienable right of self-determination.

The most revealing near-term regional measure of geopolitical affinity with Israel is whether American foreign policy chooses to normalize relations with Iran by reaching agreement about its nuclear program or eventually goes along with, and possibly even joins, Israel’s strong push for a major miliary strike aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran’s large-scale long-range missile response, and possibly sparking regime change in Tehran. Iranian diplomacy seems flexible about accepting enrichment limits and international inspection, although a recent UN inspection concluded that Iran was heightening its enrichment output to near weapons’ grade uranium, presumably devising its own weak form of deterrence to the overt threats to its security constantly being made. Trump seems likely to be tempted, for regional and geopolitical reasons, to explore options for an agreement with Iran, especially if it looks like a win for Washington’s diplomacy. If this is only speculatively accurate Trump would come to resent Israel’s effort to discourage ending Iran’s isolation without first getting rid of its anti-Israeli government. If Israel is antagonized in its regional security plan of neutralizing hostile threats by weakening the unity and capabilities of all Middle East actors, movements as well as states, an open break could occur, however improbable that now seems.

There are many unknowns that will impact upon regional developments, not least of which is Trump’ susceptibility to embarking on drastic changes in policy maneuvers as he or his entourage of submissive advisors perceive and juggle their options. Nevertheless, there are reasons at this time to accord serious attention to contrasting normalization and warmaking scenarios. The world is experiencing the dawn of a new phase of international relations in a less unipolar world order marking a terminal phase of international history best understood as ‘the aftermath of the Cold War’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the transitional uncertainties are shifts in geopolitical alignments, alliance relationships, and financial hierarchies. The yet undefined yet ascendant roles and ambitions of China and Russia, and possibly India, are likely to challenge the prior era of undiluted US geopolitical primacy. A major uncertainty is whether the US will adapt to multipolarity or seek at great cost to perpetuate its post-Cold War dominance that it achieved from 1992 to 2022. To do the latter would mean focusing on nullifying the geopolitical challenges of not only Russia and China, but also a more activist and coherent Global South. It would also mean sacrificing the wellbeing of Americans, the ravages of climate change, allowing public indebtedness to reach untenable levels, and letting the national infrastructure to deteriorate even further.

A related uncertainty is whether this new phase of multipolarity would be more conflictual or more cooperative than the world order of the past three decades. Would the less unified West embark upon an all-out worldwide Cold War as was done in the years after 1945 in greatly altered global circumstances? Or would it seek some form of geopolitical collaboration that prepared the way toward problem-solving cooperative relations within reconfigured geopolitical spheres of interest that accorded primacy to political tradition and geographic proximity. The reinvention of viable 21st century spheres of influence and agreed fault lines should preoccupy ‘the best and the brightest’ among foreign policy gurus in the US, Russia, and China.

It is untested whether Trump’s leverage over Netanyahu is sufficient to induce Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the return of the hostages. It is partly a matter of how much Trump is prepared to weaken US domestic support in the US for his presidency in Zionist and Evangelical circles by putting visible pressure on Israel to discontinue its genocidal policies in Gaza, coupled with the Gazification of West Bank policy. Trump currently appears far more concerned about avoiding open war with Iran than stopping the violence in Occupied Palestine. Of course, Trump is the most quixotic leader on the present world scene, and so it may be that he is personally offended by Netanyahu’s refusal to do what he proposes on behalf of wider US strategic interests in the region, and would be prepared to accept an open break with Israel, which would have unpredictable impacts on the governability of the US.

At odds with such transformative prospects for world order are the concrete indications that even give Trump’s ambivalence toward Netanyahu’s approach he is complicit in its recent unfolding. It takes the form of insinuating an American presence in a politically motivated humanitarian aid plan that is managed by an American private security company (SRS) that provides mercenaries to oversea the distribution centers for the dispensing of aid. The whole scheme is disguised by deceptive language of humanitarianism. Even if it ran according to its announced plan, it would bypass the neutral auspices of UN-administered aid as bolstered by international civil society humanitarian aid as well as explicitly collect surveillance information designed to track Palestinian aid recipients. So far, this relief effort directed as alleviating a humanitarian emergency has made ‘starvation’ the lesser of evils when compared to the massacres of those lured to the distribution centers, and then killed and wounded in large numbers by drones, tank fire, and indiscriminate shooting of helpless Palestinians caught by the cruel lure of food. Although the Israeli Occupation Forces deny the allegations, they have confirmed by numerous eye witnesses and journalists on the ground. It seems a particularly grotesque extension of the genocide to kill randomly starving civilians who

Lost their lives while desperately seeking food and aid for their families.

Turning to Netanyahu, the question is how much pressure would be needed to produce a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza. Over the course of almost two years Netanyahu has been notably stubborn and unyielding in response to critics at home and internationally, including in the US. He might expect that Trump would give Israel a bright green light to complete the end game of the Zionist Project by depopulating and partially occupying

Gaza and annexing all or most of the West Bank. Also at issue is whether Netanyahu’s caving into Trump pressure on Gaza would result in the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition government, and subject Netanyahu to resumed fraud prosecutions in Israel.

In the end I think the safest prediction is a compromise, whereby a long-term ceasefire, less than permanent, is agreed upon coupled with renewedsupport for Israel’s expansion of the settler presence in West Bank (22 new settlements have been approved by the Knesset at the end of May) and accompanying annexationist moves. The whole outcome in Gaza may depend on how seriously Israel is about launching a strike designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program as balanced is the Trump quest for a more advantageous deal than was negotiated in 2015 while Obama was president.

In the background is the weakening support for Israel among the governments in western Europe partially reflecting the loss of Israeli support in civil societies around the world, including the US and Canada. Whether these countries and others will back up this recent wave of criticism with censure and sanctions is at this time unknown as is how this conjecture of a weakening of western support for Israel will impact US policy. Will it make Trump more or less insistent on backing Israel and move Netanyahu to become somewhat receptive to a ceasefire/hostages deal as a prelude to ending the Gaza ordeal. The weeks ahead will contain signs as to which way the wind is blowing both in the region and internationally. At present, the overall situation is in flux aggravated by these two leaders who are temperamentally autocratic, but one bends with the wind and the other is as rigid as brainless robot.

Tags: , , , ,

The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal (29 May 2025)

30 May

[Prefatory Note: the post below is The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal, a consensus document prepared in conjunction with participants in the first of two Public Sessions of the Gaza Tribunal, released on May 29, 2025. The second session of the tribunal is scheduled for late October. The proceedings in Sarajevo consisted of survivor testimony from Gaza, invited expert speakers, a roundtable on media complicity, and the reports of three chambers tasked with documenting evidence and consequences of alleged genocide and crimes associated with forcible application of the Settler Colonial Project to Gaza following October 7, as well as the failure of the UN, growing public protests, and of leading governments to bring the genocide to an end in accordance with international law and hold the perpetrators accountable. The Sarajevo Declaration is a comprehensive text intended to convey the orientation, broad scope of the goals of civil society solidarity activation and reflecting the diversity of concerns among members of the Gaza Tribunal community. Sarajevo was our chosen site to express symbolic solidarity with an earlier genocide at Srebrenica that occurred 30 years ago. Encourage wide sharing of the Sarajevo Declaration. It is my honor to serve as president of the GTP in concert with dedicated scholars, witnesses, and activists from around the world, including the inspiring participation of our Palestinian sisters and brothers.]

                                    The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal

28 May We, the members of the Gaza Tribunal, having gathered in Sarajevo from 26 to 29 May 2025, declare our collective moral outrage at the continuing genocide in Palestine, our solidarity with the people of Palestine, and our commitment to working with partners across global civil society to end the genocide and to ensure accountability for perpetrators and enablers, redress for victims and survivors, the building of a more just international order, and a free Palestine.

We condemn the Israeli regime, its perpetration of genocide, and its decades-long policies and practices of settler colonialism, ethno-supremacism, apartheid, racial segregation, persecution, unlawful settlements, the denial of the right to return, collective punishment, mass detention, torture and cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment, extrajudicial executions, systematic sexual violence, demolitions, forced displacement and expulsions, ethnic purges and forced demographic change, forced starvation, the systematic denial of all economic and social rights, and extermination.

We are horrified by the Israeli regime’s systematic devastation of Palestinian lives, lands, and livelihoods, including its intentional destruction of all sources and systems for food, water, healthcare, education, housing, culture, as well as mosques, churches, aid facilities, and refugee shelters, and its targeting of medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, and United Nations staff, and its direct targeting of civilians, including children and older persons, women and men,  girls and boys, persons with disabilities and those with medical conditions.

We demand an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces and an end to the genocide, to all Israeli military action, to forced displacement and expulsions, to settlement activities, to the siege of Gaza and restrictions on movement in the West Bank. We call for the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners, including the thousands of Palestinian women, men and children held in abusive Israeli detention facilities. We insist on the immediate resumption of massive humanitarian aid to all of Gaza without restriction or interference, including food, water, shelter, medical supplies and equipment, sanitary equipment, rescue equipment, and construction materials and equipment. We call as well for a complete withdrawal of all Israeli forces from all Lebanese and Syrian territory.

We call for an end of the smearing of UNRWA and other humanitarian workers, for the free and unhindered access of UNRWA and all other United Nations and humanitarian organizations in all areas of Gaza and the West Bank, for full compensation by the Israeli regime for damage caused to UN and humanitarian facilities, alongside full compensation and reparations to the Palestinian people, and for full accountability for the harassment, abduction, torture, and murder of UNRWA and other humanitarian workers and their families.

We call on all governments and on regional and international organizations to end the historic scandal of inaction that has characterized the past nineteen months, to urgently respond with all means at their disposal to end the Israeli assault and siege, to uphold international law, to hold perpetrators to account, and to provide immediate relief and protection to the people of Palestine.

We denounce the continued complicity of governments in the perpetration of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Palestine, and the shameful role of many media corporations in covering up the genocide, dehumanizing Palestinians, and in the dissemination of propaganda fueling anti-Palestinian racism, war crimes, and genocide.  

We equally denounce the wave of persecution and crackdowns on human rights defenders, peace activists, students, academics, workers, professionals, and others, perpetrated by Western governments, police agencies, the private sector, and educational institutions. We honor those who, despite this persecution, have had the courage and moral convictions to stand up and speak out against these historic horrors, and we insist on the full protection of the human rights of free expression, opinion, assembly, and association, as well as the right to defend human rights without harassment, retaliation, or persecution.

We reject the unjust tactic of smearing as “antisemites” or “supporters of terrorism” all those who dare to speak up and act to defend the rights of the Palestinian people and to condemn the injustices and atrocities of the Israeli regime and its perpetration of apartheid and genocide, or those who criticize the ideology of political Zionism. We stand in solidarity with all those who have been smeared or punished in this way.

We are convinced that the struggle against all forms of racism, bigotry, and discrimination necessarily includes the equal rejection of Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and antisemitism. It also includes an acknowledgment of the horrific effects that Zionism, apartheid, and settler-colonialism have had and continue to have on the Palestinian people. We commit to fighting all such scourges.

We also reject the destructive ideology of political Zionism, as the official state ideology of the Israeli regime, of the forces that colonized Palestine and established the Israeli state on its ruins, and of pro-Israel organizations and proxies today. We insist, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and that there are no exceptions to this rule. We call for decolonization across the land, an end to the ethno-supremacist order, and the replacement of political Zionism with a dispensation founded on equal human rights for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others.

We are inspired by the courageous resistance and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of over a century of persecution, and by the growing movement of millions standing in solidarity with them around the world, including the principled advocacy and nonviolent action of thousands of Jewish activists who have rejected the Israeli regime and its ethnonationalist ideology, and have declared that the Israeli regime neither represents them nor acts in their name.

We recognize the right of the Palestinian people to resist foreign occupation, colonial domination, apartheid, subjugation by a racist regime, and aggression, including through the use of armed struggle, in accordance with and as recognized in international law and as affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly.

We recall that the Palestinian right to self-determination is jus cogens and erga omnes (a universal rule not subject to exception and binding on all states) and is non-negotiable and axiomatic. We recognize that this right includes political, economic, social, and cultural self-determination, the right to return and full compensation for all harms suffered in a century of persecution, to permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and to non-aggression and non-intervention. We respect Palestinian aspirations and full Palestinian agency and leadership over all decisions affecting their lives, and we stand in solidarity with them.  

We are gravely concerned at the direction of international relations, international politics, and international institutions, and by attacks on those international institutions that have challenged genocide and apartheid in Palestine. We believe that the normative foundations of the global order, grounded in human rights, the self-determination of peoples, peace, and the international rule of law, are being sacrificed at the altar of ruthless political realism and obsequious deference to power, with the people of Palestine left undefended and vulnerable on the front lines. We insist that another world is possible and intend to fight to bring it about.

We fear that the nascent and flawed international normative order, built up since the Second World War, with human rights at its center, is at risk of collapse as a result of the sustained attack waged on the system by the Israeli regime’s Western allies in their quest to buttress Israeli impunity. We pledge to oppose this attack and to work to protect and advance the project of building a world in which human rights are governed by the rule of law, beginning with the struggle for Palestinian freedom. And we believe that the weaknesses and inequities hard-wired into the international system from the start, including the geopolitical right of exception codified in the United Nations Security Council veto, the disempowerment of the General Assembly, and the structural obstacles that mitigate against the enforceability of International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisions, must be reformed and rectified.

We demand immediate action to isolate, contain, and hold accountable the Israeli regime through universal boycott, divestment, sanctions, a military embargo, suspension from International organizations, and the prosecution of its perpetrators, and we commit ourselves to this cause. We equally demand individual criminal accountability for all Israeli political and military leaders, soldiers, and settlers implicated in war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, or gross violations of human rights, as well as accountability for all persons and organizational actors guilty of complicity in the regime’s crimes, including external proxies of the Israeli regime, government officials, corporations, arms manufacturers, energy companies, technology firms, and financial institutions.

We applaud the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its ongoing historic genocide case against the Israeli regime and for its landmark advisory opinion findings on the illegality of the Israeli occupation, of the apartheid wall, and of the Israeli practice of apartheid and racial segregation, and its findings that the rights of the Palestinian people are not dependent upon or subject to negotiation with their oppressor and that all states are obliged to abstain from treaty, economic, trade, investment, or diplomatic relations with Israel’s occupation regime. We celebrate the principled action of South Africa in bringing to the ICJ the historic genocide case against the Israeli regime.

We call on all states to ensure the implementation of all provisional measures adopted by the ICJ in the genocide case against Israel, to fully respect the findings of the ICJ in its advisory opinion of July 2024, to comply with all elements of the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 13 September 2024 (A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1), ending all arms trade with and implementing sanctions on the Israeli regime, and to support accountability for all Israeli perpetrators.  We urge civil society organizations and social movements around the world to initiate and strengthen campaigns to support the ICJ’s decisions and opinions on Palestine, and to press their own governments to abide by them.

We similarly applaud the International Criminal Court for (albeit belatedly) issuing arrest warrants for two senior Israeli regime leaders and call on the ICC to both expedite action on these cases and to issue further warrants for other Israeli perpetrators, both civilian and military.  We call on all ICC State Parties to urgently act on their obligations to arrest these perpetrators and hand them over for trial, and we demand that the United States lift all ICC sanctions and cease all obstruction of justice.

We express our gratitude and admiration to the independent special procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council for their expert contributions and for their strong and principled voices in holding the Israeli regime to account and defending the human rights of the Palestinian people. They have shown themselves to be the conscience of the organization, and we call on the United Nations and all member states to defend and support these mandate holders without fail. We applaud, as well, the principled action of those United Nations agencies that have acted to defend the rights of the Palestinian people and to provide aid and relief to the survivors of genocide in Palestine in the face of unprecedented risks and obstacles, foremost among them, UNRWA.

We believe that the world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine. Dangerous forces in both the public and private spheres are pushing us toward the abyss. The events of the past nineteen months, and our own deliberations, have convinced us that both key international organizations and most countries of the world, whether acting individually or collectively, have failed in defending the human rights of the Palestinian people and in responding to the Israeli regime’s genocide in Palestine. We are convinced that the challenge of justice now falls to people of conscience everywhere, to civil society and to social movements, to all of us. As such, our work in the coming months will be dedicated to meeting this challenge. Palestinian lives are at stake. The international moral and legal order is at stake. We must not fail. We will not relent.

* * * * * * * *

Tags: , , , ,

GAZA TRIBUNAL PROJECT: Opening Remarks and Sarajevo Program, May 26-29, 2025

27 May

Opening Remarks, Richard Falk, Sarajevo Public Session of Gaza Tribunal, 26 May 2025

Members of the Gaza Tribunal, Ladies and Gentlemen, Persons of Conscience Throughout the World, and Rector Ahmed Yildirim. It is my honor to welcome you to the opening day of the Sarajevo Public Session of the Gaza Tribunal. It is with great regret that I am not physically present in Sarajevo. I wish that I could be with you in person, but an unforeseen family accident disrupted my travel plans.

The purpose of the Gaza Tribunal is to add credibility to the torment and outrage of people throughout the world and do are part to bringing the Gaza ordeal of death and devastation to an end. Among our goals is to motivate nonviolent action performed with a goal of exerting pressure on Israel to desist from genocide. We commit ourselves to this goal in the name of our common humanity.

We are most grateful to the International University of Sarajevo, and particularly Rector Yildirim for hosting our presence on this historic campus. We are of course mindful of Sarajevo’s and Bosnia’s recent past and its symbolic relevance to the tragic fate that has befallen the Palestinian all of whom have are living as permanent refugees or as persecuted strangers in their own homeland. In the spirit of solemn acknowledgement, we should pay homage today 30 years after the willful massacre of 8,000 male Bosnians at Srebrenica for no reason other than their nationality and religion.

In the present period already lasting more than 19 months the eyes and ears of the world have been exposed to daily atrocities victimizing the besieged crowded, impoverished, and tiny Gaza Strip. Earlier genocides, including the Holocaust, were mostly known in retrospect by way of survivor stories and reconstructed images of the horrors experienced by the victims. This was a macabre contrast to the devastation of Gaza reported by the hour in words and images. Day after day the unspeakable suffering of Palestine’s remarkably resilient and resisting people disoriented persons of conscience by its transparent spectacles of evil. This impact was worsened by being brought to human awareness in real time.

Shamelessly, Israel made little attempt to hide its genocidal intentions or disguise its genocidal tactics. Its leaders and pro-government activists openly declared their goals as killing and maiming Palestinians, whether by bombs or by way of terrifying refusals to allow Gazans to obtain desperately needed food and medical supplies. Its leaders on some occasions sought to justify their behavior be referencing Biblical stories of genocide. Presumably, this was done to provide a hallowed religious precedent for their current operations in Gaza of mass extermination. Israel’s minimum goals were to induce large-scale departures from Occupied Palestine to places as distant as possible from their homeland that has been rendered virtually uninhabitable by repeated bombardment and artillery shelling. The genocidal cast of mind accompanying the military onslaught was manifest. Prominent Israeli citizens and government officials openly compared the mentality accompanying the killing Palestinians to that experienced while killing of cockroaches. Some high-profile Israelis even advocated dropping a nuclear bomb on the densely populated and totally vulnerable people of Gaza. Despite some pretensions to the contrary, the Israeli hostages held by Hamas did not restrain Israel’s violence or move the government toward accepting a permanent ceasefire even after the fury of its campaign went on month after month without achieving its purported original objective of destroying Hamas.

The pleas and warnings of the world’s leading moral authority figures went unheeded by Israel or its supporting governments. These including dedicated pleas from Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV as well as from the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and several Nobel Peace Prize winners. These varied revered voices were defiantly scorned by Israel’s government and citizenry, and the massacres in Gaza continued unabated, and even spread to the West Bank.

The UN despite making a variety of responses has not been able to stop the killing, let alone protect the victimized people of Gaza, even its children, women, disabled, and elderly comprising an estimated 70% of Palestinian casualties. The UN has been blocked from taking decisive action by the diplomatic complicity of the North American and European liberal democracies. It has become obvious to all that the UN lacks the independent political will, authority, and capability to override the kind of geopolitical and material impunity given to Israel by the US. As the Israeli rogue behavior persisted the peoples of the world, including in the countries whose governments were openly aligned with Israel, mounted increasingly militant protests. However, the governments that could have made a difference watched the carnage of bodies and rubble pile up without making moves to stop it, and this sadly includes the governments of Israel’s Arab neighbors whose peoples ardently supported the Palestinian liberation struggle while their regimes remained passive. In many instances even maintained positive economic and political links with Israel belying their pretenses of neutrality or verbal opposition.

It is against this background that Gaza Tribunal was established some months ago, launched in London in November of 2024. Since then working with dedication to prepare as well as possible for this public session in Sarajevo. The undertaking can be grasped from the appended ambitious Program of the Tribunal that will unfold over the next four days.

The GT draws inspiration from prior peoples tribunals, most especially from the Russell Tribunal addressing the unlawfulness of US intervention in the Vietnam War, from the Iraq War Tribunal that was prompted by the 2003 regime-changing aggression that brought chaos and misery to the Iraqi people, and from the tireless work of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal of Rome that sponsored and organized comparable civil society inquiries into the leading injustices in the world. This legacy of earlier peoples tribunals had a common core rationale for coming into existence. This rationale also defines the mission of the Gaza Tribunal and can be explained concisely: It is the failure of organized international society to respond to severe injustices by enforcing international law and holding perpetrators and accomplices accountable. In short, these tribunals arise when the governments of leading states and inter-governmental institutions fail or neglect to address severe injustices, especially bearing on war and peace. In essence, people only act in response to international issues when the established order exhibits its moral and legal depravity from the perspective of justice.

It needs to be appreciated that the funding and organization of a people’s tribunal is a daunting challenge for ordinary citizen. Its inherent posture of radical opposition to governmental policy will be rejected harshly by establishment elites, including the corporate media, and often give rise to punitive reactions. That is to say, the reality of the Gaza Tribunal was a project not lightly undertaken by its principal organizers or by participating activists.

Gaza is the leading example, as well as a metaphor for the dying of settler colonialism, and is thus perceived as a dagger struck to the heart of anti-colonial national liberation. It prompted a few countries of the Global South to have recourse to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, hoping to find formal and authoritative judicial support for their well-documented allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity. Even this progressive reliance on a ‘law and order approach’ turned out to be of little practical benefit in stopping the genocide. The near unanimous rulings and decisions of the ICJ proved to be as unenforceable as were the prior General Assembly ceasefire resolutions. And thus the genocide continue, perpetrators retain de facto impunity, and the complicit governments have the audacity to seek control over day after negotiations.

Yet for opponents of Israel’s policies even these disappointing realities of judicial futility are helpful in this context because authoritative pronouncements of relevant law add symbolic force to the claim that Israel and its supporters have been driven from the high moral and legal ground despite their commanding influence over public discourse by virtue of hasbara manipulations and sympathetic major Western media outlets. Further, since 1945 the side in political conflicts that wins the main legality battles also wins the legitimacy war that informally adjudicates right and wrong. These symbolic victories have turned out to be historically relevant to shaping political outcomes. From the Vietnam War forward the side with military superiority has rarely controlled political outcomes in anti-colonial warfare, however much death and devastation it inflicts in trying for victory. Whether Palestinian resilience, extraordinary as it is,  has the capability to withstand the relentless pressure of Israeli genocide insulated from the enforcement of legal obligations by geopolitical protection, and prepared for by decades of apartheid governance and ethnic cleansing that encountered hardly any pushback from the UN aside from contributions to Palestinian victories in the battlefields of the legitimacy war.

In the coming days we will try to vindicate the establishment of the Gaza Tribunal by striving to add our efforts to rising global opposition to the brutal crimes of a continuing genocide. Can we do otherwise? Only two days ago Israel’s IDF reportedly knowingly targeted the home of two doctors married to one another. The IDF allegedly acted on the basis of surveillance technology that conveyed the knowledge that the house was full of children. While the mother, Alaa de-Najjar, a pediatrician was on duty at the nearby Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, her home was bombed and nine of her ten children were killed by the fire caused by the explosion. The nine bodies of her children were brought to her at the hospital, while her husband critically wounded by the bomb and the singly surviving child, aptly named Adam, were struggling to stay alive. Can any of us rest while such barbarous behavior goes on and on?

Desperate for an end to this genocide I hope many will join me in calling for ‘the gravitas of awakened people’ to do what governments have failed to do, namely, to do all in our power to bring this Palestinian ordeal to an end

We are gathered here in Sarajevo to respond as effectively as we can to what is being increasingly identified as ‘the moral challenge’ of our time. The Gaza ordeal has cast its dark shadow across the entire planet. Our endeavor is to make the experience of the Gaza Tribunal a glimmer of light, an expression of hope against hope.

GAZA TRIBUNAL PROJECT, MAY 26-29, 2025, Sarajevo, Bosnia

 CHAMBER 1
 INTERNATIONAL LAW 
MONDAY, MAY 26
   
9:00-9:30Welcome
Rector of International University of SarajevoAhmet Yıldırım
President of the Islamic Cooperation Youth ForumTaha Ayhan
President of the Gaza TribunalRichard Falk
9:30-10:00Chamber 1 co-Chairs introduce proceedingsMichael Lynk
Susan Akram
10:00-11:45Panel 1: Nakba and Colonial Genocide
GenocideNimer Sultany
Apartheid and Self-DeterminationVictor Kattan (online)
Forced Population TransferTriestino Marinello (online)
Witness testimony: Al Haq Field ResearcherPre-recorded & translated from Arabic
Witness testimonyAhmed Abu Artema
 Witness testimonyKhaled Alhatoun (read by  )
 Witness testimonyAya Abusharakh (read by  )
 Witness testimonySherene Alsafi (read by )
   
11:45-12:15Coffee Break
12:15-14:00Panel 2: Patterns of Genocide
Political PrisonersLisa Hajjar
Right to foodFarah Al-Haddad
Reproductive systemsHeidi Matthews
 Witness testimony (prisoner – Addameer)Diala Ayash (pre-recorded, translated)
 Witness testimony (prisoner – Addameer)Ahmed Khreish (pre-recorded, translated)
 Witness testimony (prisoner – Addameer)Khader Al’ashi (pre-recorded, translated)
 Witness testimony (prisoner – Addameer)Khader Al’ashi (pre-recorded, translated)
 APN witness: Right to FoodWritten testimony read by:
14:00-15:00Lunch
15:00-16:45Panel 3: Specific Acts
Protection of CiviliansMaryam Jamshidi
 Attack on Health InfrastructureHana / read by Wesam Ahmad
Witness testimony: Gaza Soup Kitchen; UNRWA USAHani Almadhoun
Witness testimony: Volunteer physician in GazaDr. Thaer Ahmad
Witness testimony: Volunteer physician in GazaDr. Mimi Syed
16:45-17:15Closing by Co-ChairsMichael Lynk
Susan Akram
17:15-18:00Closing RemarksRaji Sourani
   
   
CHAMBER 2
 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS & WORLD ORDER 
 TUESDAY, MAY 27 
9:00-9:30Chamber 2 co-Chairs introduce proceedingsRichard Falk (online)
Craig Mokhiber (online)
9:30-10:00Panel 1: Political Realism and Contemporary Geopolitics
Political Realism Revisited and the Law of PeoplesRichard Falk (online)
Paulina Chan
10:00-11:15Panel 2: Political Economy of Genocide and Obliteration of GazaModerator:
Wesam Ahmad
Nakba, Liberation, and Decolonization Through a Political Economic Lens: from 1948 to the Gaza GenocideLara Eborno
Enforcement and the Accountability Gap: The Crime of StarvationHilal Elver (online)
Ecocidal Violence in Gaza: Is it Part of Genocide or a Separate International Crime?David Whyte (online)
Pursuing Physically Disabling Combat TacticsPenny Green
11:15-11:30Coffee break
11:30-12:15Expert Testimony
Mazin Qumsiyeh 
Sami Al Arian 
Noura Erakat (pre-recorded) – Failures of the UN 
Asmer Safi – Criminalisation of student protests 
   
12:15-14:00Lunch
14:00-15:15Panel 3: Deficiencies of the formal international normative orderModerator: Lisa Hajjar
The International System in the Age of GenocideCraig Mokhiber (online)
Looking Ahead to EnforcementPhyllis Bennis (online)
International Tribunals: The ICJ and ICCMichelle Burgis-Kasthala (online)
15:15–16:00Panel 4: GTP conception of an alternative jurisprudential legal paradigmModerator: Penny Green
Civil Society Tribunals: Meeting the Challenge of Israeli Impunity for Gaza Genocide Michelle Burgis-Kasthala (online)
Permanent Peoples TribunalGianni Tognoni
16:00-17:15Panel 5:
Activism of civil society and social movements		Moderator: Wesam Ahmad
Sumud and Self-Determination: The Enduring Legacy Against ErasureRamzy Baroud
Jewish Voices for Peace and the Ceasefire CampaignPhyllis Bennis (online)
Learning from South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid StruggleHaidar Eid (online)
17:15-17:30Break
17:30-18:30Discussion
 CHAMBER 3 
HISTORY, ETHICS & PHILOSOPHY
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
9:00-9:30Chamber 3 co-Chairs introduce proceedingsPenny Green Cemil Aydin
9:30-10:30Panel 1: Understanding GenocideModerator: Lara Elborno
Genocide as State Crime : the importance of understanding it as a processPenny Green
Ethical Implications of the Genocide in GazaAyhan Citil
History of Ethnic Cleansing/GenocideIllan Pappe (online)
10:30-11:30Panel 2: Ideological Underpinnings – Exposing DehumanizationModerator: Cemil Aydin
Challenging the Matrix of Control/House DemolitionsJeff Halper
An Ontological Abortion of the
Enfleshed Genocidal State: The Ongoing Genocidal Nakba in Gaza		Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (read by Penny Green)
The Unmaking of the Palestinian HomeHenrietta Zeffert
11:30-11:45Break
11:45-12:45Panel 3: Resisting GenocideModerator: Thomas MacManus
The GT ArchiveAndy Simmons
Michelle Burgis -Kasthala
Palestinian ResistanceAbed Takriti
Archaeology and the Erasure of PalestineAkram Lilja
Expert testimony: The BDS CampaignOmar Bargouti (pre-recorded)
12:45-14:00Lunch
14:00-15:00Panel 4: Ideological Underpinnings – Civilization and Weaponizing the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism
Holocaust Exceptionalism and Israel’s GenocideRaz Segal (online)
Ethnic Cleansing Through Civilisational NarrativesCemil Aydin
 The Role of the Israeli Academy in Genocide ProductionMaya Wind (pre-recorded)
15:00-16:00Media Roundtable
Peter Oborne, Jonathan Cook, Victoria Brittain,
Ezgi Basaran, Kenize Mourad
16:00-16:15Break 
   
16:15-17:00Panel 5: Cultures of ErasureModerator: Wesam Ahmad
Politics of Palestine ExceptionUssama Makdisi (online)
Zionist Culture and Genocide DenialSaree Makdisi (online)
17:00-17:30Summary of Chamber 3 ReportPenny Green Cemil Aydan
17:30-18:30Discussion of the Sarajevo Declaration
   
 DAY 4 
 THURSDAY, MAY 29 
   
09:00-10:30Srebrenica/Gaza Roundtable
10:30-11:00Coffee Break
   
11:00 – 12:00Presentation of the Sarajevo Declaration + Press Conference 
12:00-12:30Closing Remarks

.

Tags: , , , ,

GAZA TRIBUNAL: Program for Sarajevo Public Sesssion, May 26-29, 2025

25 May

[Prefatory Note: The Gaza Tribunal will hold its first public session, starting Monday, 10:00 AM GMT; it presents extensive reports on various dimensions of the Gaza Ordeal endured for more than 19 months by the population of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 50,000, wounding more than 100,000, and traumazing the entire population estimated at 2.3 million on October 7, 2023. As this meeting gets underway the surviving Palestinian population is being subjected to tactics of deliberate denial of food and medical supplies, and Israel leaders and public opinion is calling for extermination tactics as supplemented by forced exclusion or ethnic cleansing, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. The Gaza Tribunal was formed as a civil society initiative after it became clear that neither the UN nor its member states possessed the political will or operational capabilities to stop the killing and devastation. Its intention is lend legitimacy to nonviolent civil society solidarity initiatives in support of the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. Links are available to access the streaming of the Sarajevo proceedings. <youtube.com/@gazatribunal>]

GAZA TRIBUNAL

Sarajevo Meetings – May 26-29, 2025

International University of Sarajevo

09:00 – 09:30
Welcome Speeches

CHAMBER 1: INTERNATIONAL LAW

MONDAY, MAY 26

09:30 – 10:00
Chamber 1 Co-Chairs Introduce Proceedings
Michael Lynk, Susan Akram

10:00 – 12:00
Panel 1: Nakba and Colonial Genocide

  • Genocide – Nimer Sultany
  • Apartheid and Self-Determination – Victor Kattan
  • Pre-recorded witness testimony – Al Haq field researcher
  • Pre-recorded witness testimony – Ahmed Abu Artema
  • Written witness testimony – Badil / read (3 testimonies)
  • Q&A and Discussion

12:00 – 13:00
Lunch

13:00 – 14:45
Panel 2: Patterns of Genocide

  • Political Prisoners – Lisa Hajjar
  • Right to Food – Farah Imad
  • Reproductive Systems – Heidi Matthews
  • Pre-recorded prisoner witness testimonies – Addameer
  • Pre-recorded testimony – Focal point engineer from Gaza (Arab Group for the Protection of Nature)

14:45 – 15:00
Coffee Break

15:00 – 16:30
Panel 3: Specific Acts

  • Protection of Civilians – Maryam Jamshidi
  • Attacks on Healthcare Infrastructure – Wesam Ahmad on behalf of Al Haq
  • Witness testimony: Volunteer Physician in Gaza – Dr. Thaer Ahmad
  • Witness testimony: Volunteer Physician in Gaza – Dr. Mimi Syed
  • Q&A and Discussion

16:45 – 17:30
Expert Talk
Raji Sourani

CHAMBER 2: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS & WORLD ORDER

TUESDAY, MAY 27

09:00 – 09:30
Chamber 2 Co-Chairs Introduce Proceedings
Richard Falk, Craig Mokhiber

09:30 – 10:00
Panel 1: Political Realism and Contemporary Geopolitics

  • Political Realism Revisited and the Law of Peoples
  • Past Global Response to Genocide: A Record of Failure – Richard Falk, Paulina Chan

10:00 – 11:15
Panel 2: Political Economy of Genocide and Obliteration of Gaza
Moderator: Wesam Ahmad

  • Nakba, Liberation, and Decolonization Through a Political Economic Lens: from 1948 to the Gaza Genocide – Lara Eborno
  • Enforcement and the Accountability Gap: The Crime of Starvation – Hilal Elver
  • Ecocidal Violence in Gaza: Is it Part of Genocide or a Separate International Crime? – David Whyte
  • Pursuing Physically Disabling Combat Tactics – Penny Green

11:15 – 11:30
Coffee Break

11:30 – 12:30
Expert Testimonies
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sami Al Arian, Azzam Tamimi, Noura Erakat

12:30 – 14:00
Lunch

14:00 – 15:00
Panel 3: Deficiencies of the Formal International Normative Order
Moderator: Lisa Hajjar

  • The International System in the Age of Genocide – Craig Mokhiber
  • Looking Ahead to Enforcement – Phyllis Bennis
  • Working with and Beyond International Courts – Michelle Burgis-Kasthala

15:00 – 15:45
Panel 4: GTP Conception of an Alternative Jurisprudential Legal Paradigm
Moderator: Penny Green

  • Peoples’ Tribunals as Alternative Justice Sites: Assessing the Role of Civil Society – Michelle Burgis-Kasthala
  • Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal – Gianni Tognoni

15:45 – 16:00
Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:15
Panel 5: Activism of Civil Society and Social Movements
Moderator: Wesam Ahmad

  • Sumud and Self-Determination: The Enduring Legacy Against Erasure – Ramzy Baroud
  • Jewish Voices for Peace and the Ceasefire Campaign – Phyllis Bennis
  • Learning from South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle – Haidar Eid
  • Criminalization of Student Protests – Asmer Safi

17:15 – 18:00
Discussion

CHAMBER 3: HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, ETHICS & PHILOSOPHY

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28

09:00 – 09:30
Chamber 3 Co-Chairs introduce proceedings
Penny Green, Cemil Aydin

09:30 – 10:30
Panel 1: Understanding Genocide
Moderator: Lara Elborno

  • Genocide as State Crime: Understanding It as a Process – Penny Green
  • Ethical Implications of the Genocide in Gaza – Ayhan Citil
  • History of Ethnic Cleansing/Genocide – Illan Pappe

10:30 – 11:30
Panel 2: Exposing Dehumanization
Moderator: Cemil Aydin

  • Challenging the Matrix of Control/House Demolitions – Jeff Halper
  • An Ontological Abortion of the Enfleshed Genocidal State: The Ongoing Genocidal Nakba in Gaza – Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
  • The Unmaking of the Palestinian Home – Henrietta Zeffert

11:30 – 11:45
Coffee Break

11:45 – 13:00
Panel 3: Resisting Genocide
Moderator: Thomas MacManus

  • The GT Archive – Andy Simmons, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala
  • Palestinian Resistance – Abed Takriti
  • Archaeology and the Erasure of Palestine – Akram Lilja
  • Expert testimony: The BDS Campaign – Omar Bargouti

13:00 – 14:00
Lunch

14:00 – 15:00
Panel 4: Civilization and Weaponizing the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism
Moderator: Sami Al Arian

  • Holocaust Exceptionalism and Israel’s Genocide – Raz Segal
  • Ethnic Cleansing Through Civilisational Narratives – Cemil Aydin
  • The Role of the Israeli Academy in Genocide Production – Maya Wind

15:00 – 16:15
Media Roundtable
Moderator: Mehmet Karlı
Ezgi Basaran, Victoria Brittain, Lauren Booth, Lubna Masarwa, Kenize Mourad, Peter Oborne, Assal Rad

16:15 – 16:30
Coffee Break

16:30 – 17:15
Panel 5: Cultures of Erasure
Moderator: Wesam Ahmad

  • Politics of Palestine Exception – Ussama Makdisi
  • Zionist Culture and Genocide Denial – Saree Makdisi

17:15 – 17:30
Summary of Chamber 3 Report
Penny Green, Cemil Aydın

17:30 – 18:00
Final Discussion of the Sarajevo Declaration

DAY 4

THURSDAY, MAY 29

09:00 – 10:00
Srebrenica/Gaza Special Panel
Moderator: Ahmet Köroğlu
Panelists: Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura, Harun Halilović, Mustafa Cerić

10:00 – 10:45
Expert Talk
Taha Abdurrahman

10:45 – 11:00
Break

11:00 – 12:00
Presentation of the Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal + Press Conference

PUBLIC ASSEMBLY

May 26-29, 2025

JOIN US LIVE ON YOUTUBE

youtube.com/@gazatribunal

Tags: , , , ,

SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth: Statement on Gaza Ordeal

25 May

[Prefatory Note: SHAPE is an international network of persons sensitive to the imperatives of human unity and the guardianship of the natural habitat in accordance ecological wisdom that illuminates paths of resilience and adaptation. In this era of predatory capitalism, imperial geopolitics, and surging fascism we as a leaspecies need to think, feel, and act differently to avoid catastrophe, and do so in a spirit of urgency. Please distribute this statement and contact us if you wish to endorse and join our efforts.]

In the name of humanity, the barbarism in Gaza must stop

Over the last eighteen months the world has witnessed undiluted militarised cruelty targeting the entire population and the supportive natural habitat of Gaza – with not so much as an ounce of mercy or compassion, let alone justice, or sensitivity to issues of ecological viability.

No one has been spared in this onslaught: not civilians, not children, women or the elderly, not humanitarian workers or UN personnel overseeing the distribution of aid, not homes, schools, places of worship, or hospitals.

No logic can begin to explain or justify this genocidal policy of indiscriminate maiming and killing, or the calculated and systematic starvation of the already traumatized Palestinian population. These and other unspeakable atrocities leave us with just two words to describe the conduct of the cabal presently ruling the State of Israel: pure evil

Faced with such vicious behaviour, humanity has but one option: to call out the evil and take appropriate action to put an end to such outrageous conduct.

In the name of humanity we therefore call on all peoples and governments to:

  1. Terminate all transactions with the State of Israel that relate to military capabilities until a just and lasting peace settlement has been reached, which gives effect to the inalienable right of Palestinian self-determination. This embargo should include:
  2. A ban on the export of all weapons and dual-use equipment as well as ammunition, whether supplied directly or through a third party
  3. A ban on the import of all Israeli weapons and military technology
  4. A cessation of all other forms of military cooperation, including joint operations/exercises/logistics and communications initiatives, intelligence cooperation and sharing, and expert exchanges and visits
  5. A ban on all financing arrangements designed to facilitate the above activities.
  6. Break diplomatic relations with the State of Israel until a complete and durable ceasefire has been established across all the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  7. Seek the exclusion of Israeli participation in international cultural and sporting events and call for national boycotts of foreign and domestic cultural and sporting happenings until a complete and durable ceasefire has been established across all the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  8. Apply maximum pressure on those governments that have been Israel’s primary backers, notably the United States, Britain and Germany, to cease forthwith any support of Israel’s inhuman conduct in Gaza and Palestine as a whole.
  9. Support and financially contribute to the Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction formally adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in March 2025, and to this end call for an immediate UN-sponsored international summit, open to all supportive governments, relevant regional organisations and sympathetically disposed civil society, philanthropic and business organisations. The reconstruction process in Gaza and the proposed international summit should be mindful of Palestinian rights, especially the right of self-determination as applicable to all developments pertaining to Israeli Occupied Palestine.
  10. Encourage nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, both individual and collective action of the sort that proved helpful in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. A mobilized people can change history, and bring political evil to an abrupt end, especially where, as is the case in Gaza, a severe humanitarian emergency exists.

Such measures on the part of states need to be complemented and reinforced by resolute, collective action at the UN General Assembly. A special session of the General Assembly should be urgently called to denounce the heinous crimes being committed in Gaza and the West Bank and the constant threats to cleanse Palestine of its people by measures of forced displacement.

The General Assembly should consider and adopt a series of resolutions which demand:

  1. An immediate ceasefire in all parts of Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and adjacent areas
  2. The establishment of  a UN peacekeeping contingent of sufficient strength to monitor and supervise the ceasefire and deter in timely fashion actions that would lead to a renewal of violence
  3. The unimpeded flow of water, food, fuel and medicines to Gaza
  4. Strong measures designed to protect humanitarian aid workers, health and medical personnel, and agencies and institutions engaged in the running of hospitals, clinics, kitchens and other essential services  
  5. Decisive measures to enable journalists and media personnel to carry out their duties in safe and secure environments.   

We also request the world’s religious organisations to issue a call addressing from a spiritual and ethical perspective the evil of genocide as it continues to unfold in Gaza. They are uniquely placed to set forth the ethical criteria that should govern an agreement on the cessation of all military hostilities in the Occupied Territories and the creation of just and durable peace in Palestine. 

Since October 2023, millions have exposed and protested against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They have succeeded in raising the level of global public awareness even though their cries for humanity and justice have thus far gone unheeded. The complicity of the rich and the powerful have stood in the way.

People of good will everywhere must now redouble their efforts in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They must peacefully and resolutely unite their voices and work closely together for as long as it takes.

A powerful global dialogue for a just peace in Palestine that brings together people of diverse social, cultural and religious background is a primary ethical imperative of our time. So is accountability, which means punitive action against leaders of the State of Israel and the complicit enabler governments, including imposing obligations to pay reparations to the victimised population of Gaza and contributions to the funding of reconstruction.

Issued on behalf of SHAPE and its Coordinating Committee by

Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, Dr Chandra Muzaffar and Professor Emeritus Joseph Camilleri

SHAPE Co-Conveners

22 May 2025

Email: savinghumanityandplanetearth@gmail.com

Website www.theshapeproject.com/

Tags: , , , ,

Richard Falk, Foreword to Haidar Eid, Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza

16 May

[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of foreword to a very special book on the Palestinian Ordeal, written in the form of short pieces from 2009 to the present. Banging on the Walls of the Tank, is especially illuminating by its portrayal of the contrast between the Israeli oppressive occupation before October 7 and after. It underscores a contrast between the earlier Israeli approach as ‘incremental genocide’ as opposed to ‘accelerated’ genocide after the Hamas attack. Copies of this book may be ordered from Amazon, and other booksellers. Eid is in the best traditions of journalism, scholarship, and engaged citizenship].

The Political Is Inevitably Personal

I have read many discerning and moving books on Palestine over the last fifty years but none has spoken to me as forcefully and persuasively as this short volume of opinion pieces written by Haidar Eid from 2009 to the present. The prophetic insight of these dispatches and their cumulative impact offer readers a vivid Palestinian narrative of tragic suffering and the heroic resistance of the Gazan population to Israel’s occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, as well as a pervasive Israeli reliance on collective punishment of Palestinians. 

Banging on the Walls of the Tank, a reliable interpretation not filtered and distorted by Western mainstream media,should be read by all those in the West who seek to understand the bitter realities of the Israel/Palestine struggle. Almost every page is enlivened by the author’s uncannily memorable formulations of the true and awful nature of the Palestinian plight, which was desperate long before the horrifying real-time genocide that has unfolded in the form of daily atrocity spectacles ever since October 7. In his readable style and with the skill of a trustworthy storyteller, Eid offers insights rooted in his direct experiences as a Gaza refugee, expositor of Palestinian steadfastness, resistance activist, witness, and survivor.

Contextualizing October 7

These dispatches, written since 2009 in response to the evolving bloody tactics and criminality of the Israeli occupation, are both an anticipation of the October 7 attack and a condemnation of the Israeli genocidal response. An aspect of the originality and significance of Eid’s presentation is ti convincingly demonstrate that Israel has harbored an apartheid ideology and practice from the time of its birth. This is long before the most influential human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) dared issue reports, as they did in 2021, that fully documented the allegations that Israel was systematically applying apartheid policies and practices to administer the occupation. Israel also relied upon discriminatory internal regulatory laws to subjugate all Palestinians who were directly subject to Israeli sovereignty, including those living in post-1948 Israel as citizens. These domestic laws were supplemented by exclusionary nationality laws and practices relied upon by Israel to deny Palestinian refugees a right of return as bestowed by international law and confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 (11 Dec 1948) while at the same time granting birthright Jews an unlimited rights of return no matter whether they had any link to Israel or not.

Eid’s dissent from pro-Israeli orthodoxy in Europe and North America extends to his important assessment that Israel’s supposed “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 was deceptively presented to the world as a move toward peace. What was not told was that this Israeli unilateral initiative was coupled with Israeli administered border control that effectively imprisoned 2.3 million Gazans in their own homeland. Such confinement was later cruelly reinforced by a punitive siege that converted Gaza into what became known as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. The impact over time of these oppressive conditions are characterized by Eid, borrowing from historian Ilan Pappe,[1] as “incremental genocide.” This importantly demarcates the “before” and “after” of October 7 as one of continuity rather than as totally discontinuous, coming out of the blue, as Israel, followed by the West, desperately wants us to believe up to this day. It is obvious that Israel devoted much attention to decontextualizing October 7 to avoid the implications of the pre-October 7 realities of apartheid and incremental genocide so persuasively delineated by Eid being taken into account when evaluating the Hamas attack.

Eid is writing as a victim/survivor/activist as well as a journalist/intellectual of the before and after of the Gaza ordeal. For him, the sixteen months of direct, undisguised genocide that has preoccupied the world to an unprecedented degree was nothing fundamentally new but rather an intensification of what Gazans had been experiencing ever since 1967 in more attenuated forms. There is no doubt that incremental genocide would be virtually impossible to establish in a court of law as a distinct crime because of the difficulty of proving genocidal intent as compared to criminalizing what followed after October 7 as a violation of the Genocide Convention. The numerous undisguised assertions by Israel’s top leaders easily met the rigorous legal standards of genocidal intent insisted upon by objective jurists. These words of genocidal incitement were combined with the crude, often sadistic, Israeli Defense Forces combat tactics relied upon to bring its helpless Palestinian adversary agonizingly close to the brink of extinction.

The Israeli discourse on October 7 also points its finger at Hamas, seeking its complete delegitimation by treating its attack as pure “terrorism,” justifying an exterminist response, and relieving Israel of pressure to obey the laws of war in its response. Eid challenges this Israeli rationalization by regarding the attack as both a justifiable and a legitimate form of resistance, especially in view of the context, which includes the Netanyahu performance at the UNGA a few weeks earlier during which he displayed a map with no Palestinian entity, an erasure of Palestine alongside the presumed establishment of Greater Israel. By taking these factors into account, Eid produces a revisionist view of October 7 that is more realistic and reflective of the values at stake.

There is a deeper significance to the way Eid establishes the context accounting for October 7. His approach is a necessary antidote to the Western hegemonic discourse, which denounced any assertion that the Palestinian attack was justifiable resistance to the provocative criminality of apartheid, several terrifying militarily inflicted massacres, and sixteen years of a cruelly punitive blockade whose constraints on imports could not be plausibly justified as a security measure while guaranteeing the misery of Palestinian lives in Gaza. Eid’s book should be read as a corrective to the disgraceful performance of a mainstream media in the West that excluded all considerations of context from its evaluation of the events of October 7 and declared justificatory acceptance of Israel’s claimed entitlement to act in self-defence, echoing its coverup of overt recourse to genocide as nothing other than a necessary “security operation.” This is a deliberate attempt to banish the word “genocide” from use in Western public discourse and mainstream media when reporting on Israel’s totally dominant military capabilities in executing its indiscriminate rampage against the completely helpless civilian population of Gaza. Despite this effort to restore the discipline of pro-Israeli discourse, describing the Israeli violence as “genocide” has been gradually normalized in many societal and media venues, but not yet all.

Failures of Implementation: International Law and Universal Moral Standards

This linkage between what daily occurs on the ground in Gaza and the broader issues of toxic dysfunction that have long poisoned the Palestinian experience exposes the willful impotence of what Eid generously terms the “international community,” as if there was one.  It is intolerable for Eid that outsiders, whether governments, international institutions, media, or even individuals, remain spectators, or worse, render aid and comfort to the perpetrators and their accomplices in carrying out this “crime of crimes.”  Along the way, Eid acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust against Jews was similarly internationally tolerated, especially by the Western liberal democracies that have, since 1945, alleviated their guilt at the expense of the Palestinians, who pay for moral shortcomings for which they had no responsibility. Two massive wrongs never make things right; rather, as the poet Auden teaches, “those to whom evil is done / do evil in return.”[2]

Israel’s official occupation policy after 1967 stressed putting the people of Gaza “on a diet,” with just enough food to avoid death by starvation but not enough to enable nutritional health. Eid emphasizes the long denial of the right of return enjoyed by refugees after 1948 as affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 194. Any process of satisfying the requirements of international law would also necessitate the dismantling of the apartheid regime of control and ethno-religious claims of a Jewish supremist state.

Eid’s Vision and Its Enemies

As Eid articulates his vision of a benevolent future for the Palestinian people, he sets forth its simple but far-reaching governance implications: A single secular state for both peoples from the river to the sea with equal rights for all resident ethnicities. For Eid, this is the one and only solution, an indirect repudiation of the two-state delusion as well as his complete rejection of an Israeli one-state apartheid Greater Israel.

Eid does far more than relate the horrors of incremental genocide. He condemns not only the Israeli perpetrators but severely incriminates their complicit supporters who supplied weaponry and funding that sustains the mighty military capabilities of Israel and give diplomatic credence to it is flagrant defiance of international law. This is more than critique, it is also a rejection of the only pathway Eid envisions as leading to peace with justice for the Palestinians, and even Jews. Such a solution, which will strike many jaded souls as “utopian” or both unattainable and unacceptable, rests on the simple major premise of fulfilling Palestinian rights under international law. In the Palestinian case, this means, among other policy alterations, lifting the draconian blockade of Gaza that has made the daily existence of inhabitants of Gaza (two-thirds of whom are refugees) a life of misery, one deliberately “engineered” by Israeli tacticians who “mow the lawn,” a term officials in Tel Aviv use to refer to Israel’s massive military attacks that are properly undertaken whenever Gaza seems to pose security threats by the vitality of its resistance activism, regardless of whether by armed struggle or nonviolent civil action.

Eid’s dispatches are written with the passion and experience of someone who has lived as a refugee since 1964, when he was born in Gaza. His parents lived in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp after they were forced, in 1948, to leave their home in the Palestinian village of Zarnouga. As the decades passed, they never gave up their expectation on one day returning to Zarnouga, even knowing it had been demolished. As they faced death, Eid’s parents last wish was that at least their bodies could be returned to their village for burial; a wish that was denied; a wish that, even if granted, would be far from fulfilling the kind of return envisioned by international law.

That he grew up in a refugee household helps explain Eid’s preoccupation with the exercise of the right of return of the five or six million Palestinians living as refugees as a necessary feature of any sustainable and acceptable peace process. And as such, it undoubtedly informs why he shows such contempt for the Oslo diplomacy initiated in 1993, a diplomacy that totally ignored, and implicitly rejected, this basic right embodied in international law. On other grounds, as well, Oslo justifiably reinforced his rejection of a Palestinian leadership that failed to insist on affirming the Palestinian entitlement to the most fundamental of human rights in the post-colonial era, the inalienable right of self-determination possessed by all peoples and claimed on behalf of every nation on the planet. Eid adopts a cynical view of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which, by accepting the Oslo framework, sacrificed the future of Palestine for a seat at the far end of the negotiating table and the dubious ‘reward’ of a photo op on the White House lawn; the photo was used by the West to show the world the much celebrated, but deeply misleading Arafat/Rabin handshake as a historic reconciliation that was never to be implenmented . What followed the publicized initiation of Oslo diplomacy was, at best, a charade that dragged on long enough for Israel to expand its settler population to a politically irreversible level. Throughout, Israel has benefited from a ‘peace process’ that was never about peace, and which while running its course seriously harmed the Palestinians. The supervision of the negotiations by the overtly partisan US government should never have been accepted by the designated representatives of the Palestinian people who defied reason by not insisting on neutral auspices. As Rashid Khalidi, among others, have shown, the United States never even pretended to be an honest broker of the Oslo Process, but made no secret of situating itself in Israel’s corner.[3]

Eid’s perspective is formed by a blend of his multiple identities as victim, witness, survivor, activist, humanist, writer and journalist, university teacher, and public intellectual. This rare combination of experience and commitment contributes to making Eid an exemplary interpreter of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal. He is decidedly not a neutral observer; he is an undisguised and fully engaged “honest partisan” who develops a compelling Palestinian account of why the Palestinian ordeal came about and was allowed to happen. While his observations are avowedly one-sided, this lack of balance, oddly, provides a more objective approach because it is congruent with the realities of Gaza if tested by the evidence, regulative norms of law and morality, and proclaimed values at stake. As such, it presents readers with a happy contrast to the brainwashing pretensions of such influential media platforms as the New York Times or The Economist, which claim balance but, when it comes to reporting on Israel/Palestine, are more accurately perceived as sophisticated instruments of state propaganda.

Even without the benefit of being confronted by the pre-October 7 historical, legal, and ethical context, public protest began to mount, including in the centers of Israeli support in North America and Western Europe, as Israel continued the genocide unabated, refusing to heed growing public calls for ceasefires and constraint. Pro-Palestinian protests erupted on many university campuses but were quickly countered by Israeli donor leverage and governmental pressures, especially in the US. With the advent of Trump in 2025, pro-Palestinian activism on campuses and elsewhere faced renewed challenges, and not only in the US but also throughout Europe, reflecting a political swing to the ultraright.

Valuing and Learning from the Eid Perspective

What also makes Eid’s commentary exceptional is the authenticity of his voice, shaped by his intense experiences since his birth in 1964. His work is further informed by channeling the wisdom of profound and enraged Palestinian cultural icons, referencing the insights of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Edward Said, as well as making good use of anti-colonial writings drawn from authors in the Global South. It should be instructive for all readers that Eid derives his inspirational political guidance from these cultural sources rather than from the Palestinian political leaders that he holds co-responsible for misleading their own people in various self-destructive ways. Eid is appalled by the willingness of the Palestinian leaders anointed by the West to accept what he calls “bread crumbs” rather than insisting on liberation and basic rights as conferred by international law; law that is never acknowledged by Israel or enforced by either the UN or responsible geopolitical statecraft as ineptly overseen by the United States since the end of the Cold War that tended to favor geopolitical and strategic interests to legal, moral, and even prudent restraint. The most tainted bread crumb, in Eid’s reflections, is the idea of the acceptance of a permanently demilitarized Palestinian statehood on 22 percent of historic Palestine, especially considering that, in 1947, Palestinians rejected the dubious UN partition resolution that split the country – but at least awarded Palestinian with 45 percent of the land.

Eid is deeply influenced by the successful, analogous struggle against the hegemonic racism and settler colonialism of apartheid South Africa. He believes that the lessons of this earlier struggle can be adapted and applied to Palestinian circumstances, embracing the famous dictum, often attributed to Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which distinguishes the rational understanding of political injustices from an emotional reassurance that a just outcome will emerge from the struggle of the Palestinian people. In addressing this tension from my outlook, my rational self is less confident than Eid about the sufficiency of the South African model of liberation. I believe that Palestinian liberation will remain impossible unless it overcomes the primacy of adverse geopolitics (shaped by strategic interests rather than by a willingness to respect the rule of law and universally affirmed moral notms). These currently unregulated forces empower the Islamophobic complicity of the white West and are currently aligned with the Zionist networks in the West that have exerted an unhealthy influence over policy formation at national, regional, and global levels.

Giving equal attention to matters of political will, I am also encouraged by anti-colonial success stories. This reading of the recent historical record echoes Eid’s interpretations and, before him, Said’s. Both thinkers deeply theorized a belief that the side that controls “the high moral ground” in the end prevails politically over the side that dominates the battlefield due to its military superiority. In my terminology, and in keeping with Eid’s assessments, Palestine is winning this Legitimacy War and is on its way to an emancipatory future, although with much suffering and devastation on the road to such a political outcome. This guardedly hopeful outlook assumes Palestinian perseverance for as long as it takes, which Israel is ceaselessly working to undermine and weaken by its recourse to the most extreme methods of violence in the combat zones and to dirty tricks overseas, including “weaponizing antisemitism” as a policy tool of combat.

In Conclusion

The title of Eid’s book, borrowed from a poignant line in Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, would strike most international readers as enigmatic and obscure. Eid informs us that these words have become a popular slogan of Palestinian resistance fighters, conveying the vital message, “If you want to live, make noise”; that is, resist, but if ready to die in body or spirit, stay quiet. Such is Eid’s fighting spirit. His noise is a challenge to all everywhere to act on behalf of the Palestinian struggle within our respective spaces before it is too late. And as a fitting indictment, Eid’s last words in the epilogue again echo those of Kanafani: “Gazans have been banging on the walls of the Gaza concentration camp since 1948,” and still nothing happens by way of rescue, much less liberation. Silence almost everywhere, especially shameful among Arab regimes neighbouring besieged Gaza is reinforced by the timidities of the Arab League.

For Eid, Arab silence is not broken by uttering words of condemnation unless accompanied by coercive actions. In this sense, Eid’s own journey has led him and his family to take refuge in South Africa in recent months, the country that has acted more substantively than any other against Israel since October 7E by submitting a graphic complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention. Unsurprisingly, Eid in exile insists that Palestinian liberation must take the form of a single secular constitutional and democratic state with recognized borders encompassing the whole of mandate Palestine. This affirmation is coupled with a total rejection of the dangerous fiction of co-existence and accommodation that is based on the mutual acceptance of a neutered Palestinian mini state that would be permanently demilitarized and otherwise left at the mercy of a highly militarized and racist Israel. [AC1] 

Secondly for Eid, a present grounding of realistic hope in this particular liberation struggle must be predominantly based on the activation of people rather than the good will and energies of governments and their institutions. This leads Eid to stress the role of solidarity initiatives to be with a sense of urgency throughout the world as typified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. He strongly endorses BDS as a principal modality of Palestinian prospects ever since its initiation in 2005, when it began as a collective action with the backing of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. In effect, liberation from settler colonialism in the historical presence can move toward victory only when people in strategic countries around the world are sufficiently mobilized to exert transformative pressures on governments and the international community to undo the political and economic ties that bind them to the oppressor.

Eid is lucidly persuasive in his refusal to accept the common refrain that there are “two sides” in recent debates about Israeli tactics and goals. Zionist liberals especially would have us so believe, evading the central reality that this a classic struggle, with distinctive features of the oppressed against the oppressor and its complicit allies. Eid is seeking a crucial rectification of the asymmetrical nature of the struggle. Suc continues to be highly controversial in the West, but seems vital to act upon if non-Palestinians are to support a genuinely just and sustainable peace. This view expresses a radical challenge to the status quo as its realization requires the rejection of the Zionist Project of Jewish supremist prerogatives in a distinct state as the essential precondition could enable the two peoples to live together as equals. Eid’s vision of liberation does not include the forced departure (in effect, an ethnic cleansing) of Jews or the destruction of Israel as a state, but it does require major adhustments: a fundamental reconstruction of its internal race relations; an abandonment of Zionist ideology; ethnic equality of treatment in nationality and citizenship laws; and quite likely the naming of the emergent one-state entity to signify the rejection of an ethnic statehood for either people.   

Gruesome patterns of Israeli abuses over the years are further confirmed by Eid’s own existential encounters with Israel’s prolonged dehumanizing and sadistic treatment of the people of Gaza, especially its children. His prose is written not with ink but with the blood of the innocents, undoubtedly a tearful recounting of very concrete incidents involving family members, close friends, neighbours. Eid is unflinching in his determination to bring Israel’s brutalizing behaviour out into the open by bearing anguished witness to targeted killings of innocent children by Israeli snipers, as well high tech weapons of war that killed whole families trapped in their homes and devastated entire residential neighbourhoods during Israel’s massive incursions, characterized as “massacres,” in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2018, and frequently, on a smaller scale, in the leadup to the full-scale genocidal response to October 7. In a significant conceptual move, Eid follows Pappe in presenting these years preceding that pivotal day as “incremental genocide.” This reality posed for every Palestinian an ultimate choice between the dangers of resistance and the humiliations of submission to the harsh apartheid constraints of Israeli control.

What makes this book truly groundbreaking, aside from its chronicling of witnessing in ways that impressively counteract the propagandistic decontextualization of October 7, is its clarity when it comes to a critique of the mainstream diagnosis of the Palestinian struggle and accompanying positive prescriptions about the path to a Palestinian victory emerging from the piles of rubble signifying Gaza after enduring these months of genocide.

Even though the provisional rulings of the ICJ on January 26, 2024, did nothing to change the facts on the ground, it should be read as an authoritative affirmation of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and a heartfelt juridical lament for the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe still befalling Gaza. It undoubtedly helped motivate Eid to express the optimism of his will by the dramatic assertion in the epilogue that “Israel is now on the verge of collapse.”

Richard Falk

Santa Barbara, California

30 January 2025

[1] Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth (Oneworld Publications, 2019). [the ‘e’ in Pappe is written with an accent over it)

[2] W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939,’ published in Poetry of the Thirties , Penguin, 1964

[3] Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East,” Beacon Press, 2013, https://harpers.org/2013/03/brokers-of-deceit-how-the-u-s-has-undermined-peace-in-the-middle-east/.

 [AC1]Something missing here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →