Tag Archives: Israel

Militarism and Genocide in Gaza: The Bloody Signature of Western Decline

9 Oct

[Prefatory Note: The text of an interview with an independent Turkish journalist, Naman Bakac, published in Turkey on Sept. 26, 2024. Somewhat modified for this online publication.]

1.Almost all fundamental rights and principles are clearly being violated in the Palestinian territories: from the right of Palestinians living in occupied lands to self-determination, to the right of representation, which leads to the murder, imprisonment, and exile of their freely elected representatives; from the right to shelter as tents are deliberately bombed, to the right to food as Palestinians are deliberately left to starve; from sexual abuse of prisoners to torture, and from there to the right to housing as homes are demolished. However, international law and the community have been unable to prevent these violations to date. What legal texts are missing to stop these systematic violations? Which institutions are absent? If legal texts, legal institutions, and decision-making mechanisms cannot resolve this, what other tools and methods should be activated to prevent these systematic violations of rights?

Response: The Palestinian ordeal is not a consequence of the shortage or inadequacy of legal norms or mechanisms for their enforcement. The primarily obstacle to imposing adverse consequences in reaction to gross and transparent Israeli criminality is one of political will, especially on the part of dominant states in the Global West and to a lesser extent on the part of leading Arab neighbors, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Egypt.

It is only countries from the Global South that have been willing to have recourse to the existing international judicial procedures, the ICJ and ICC. The ICJ, the judicial organ of the UN, has a strong reputation for political independence and persuasive interpretation of international law, and its pronouncements are influential, even if they are procedurally cumbersome, often take years from start to finish., lack enforcement capabilities or mandates, and have a mixed record of compliane.

The ICC is a more recent institution, and nor part of the UN System. It does fill a serious gap in the legal coverage accorded to accountability for individuals accussed of committing serious international crimes. The ICC is further weakened by the failure of several leading states to become parrties to the Rome Statute, which is the legal framework governing ICC activities. The ICC also has never achieved legitimacy in the Global South because of its early image of being mainly preoccupied with crimes of leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, which was responsible for its West-centrric reputation. The ICC has seemed reluctant to hold accountable individuals associated with powerful states in the Global West, which include countries in Westernn Europe, North America, and currently Israel. By recommending the issuance of arrrest warrants to three top Israeli leaders (somewhat offset in political messaging by simultaneously making a reccomendation of arrrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders, the ICC prosecutor made a gesture to challenge geopolitical impunity. So far the ICC sub-chamber that has the sole responsibility to issue arrest warrants has not yet acted. It has give to suspicion that the ICC is stalling in its treatment of these controversial recommenndations, due to reliable reports of pressure by Israel and allies to delay its decision, or better, reject the prosecutor’s recommendation on a variety of contrived grounds centering of the dual grounds of Israel not being a member of the ICC and it would be wrong to appear to criminalize a reasonable Israeli claim of self-defence.

The secondary obstacle is the degree to which World Order continues to be based on a hybrid arrangement of hybrid and contradictory relations of law to power: the majority of states are subject to international law in the area of peace and security, while a few, including the UN P5 (and their strategic friends) occupy a position that allows such governments to privilege strategic interests if these clash with legal obligations in UN settings. This hierrarchy is indirectly acknowledged by the veto power allowing the most dangerous states in 1945 to paralyze UN responses to their criminality and even to that of their friends and allies.

The Western support for Israeli genocide is itself criminal, as complicity is criminalized in the Genocide Convvention, but it is virtually exempt from critical scrutiny at the UN or elsewhere. A domestic court in the US has had been the cite of a judicial action to stop the Gaza Genocide brought by a çivil society organization, Center for Constitutional Rights, relying on a Universal Jurisdiction rationale. It has been so far been blocked in this legal pursuit by a dubious internal doctrine that views US foreign policy initiatives as not subject to adjudication due to a so-called Political Questions doctrine. This doctrine rests on an anachronistic view of the Separation of Powers that views Foreign Policy as belonging exclusively in the Executive Branch of Government, and therefore is not subject to judicial scrutiny. This overlooks the growth of international legal authority as a constraint on national behavior even if conducted as foreign policy.

2.Despite the world witnessing, in an unprecedented way, one of the most brutal massacres in history, with live footage, after Gaza can we still talk about international humanitarian law, international human rights, or the Pax Americana order established after World War II? Doesn’t the “Rule of Law in the Global Village,” the title of one of your books, come to an end after Gaza? Or should the path of reform regarding the United Nations, international law, and world order, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been advocating for years, be built?

Response: Although the first-order implementation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, annd Pax Americana failed at the governmental and international institutional level, their existence was important in awakening çivil society to the gross injustices and crimes that have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. Changes in the public discourse are important, as well, branding Israel, Israeli leaders, and complicit governments as perpetrators of genocide in a particularly overt and sadistic manner. By such reasoning Israel should be sanctioned for violating the Genocide Convention, its leaders be criminally proscecuted, and complcit governmentss be at least censured. This should make Israel and its supporters leading candidates for çivil society pressure to impose boycotts, to express moral and legal outrage, and to suspend Israel from participation within the framework of legitimate sovereign states until a dynamic of peace and reconciliation takes the place of war and genocide. Israel is guilty of unspeakable crimes and a defiance of respect for the norms of civilized behavior. Such an assessment is not meant to excuse Hamas, and its allies, for its alleged atrocities, although provoked and of a dramatically smaller impact than Israel’s post October 9th behavior.

Civil society is a court of last resort that becomes relevant, as here, when the established processes of law are unavailable, or worse, defied. In this regard, the established of the Gaza Tribunal Project to express opposition to what Israel and the West have done since October 7 and to give voice to the disappointment of citizens of conscience around the world that the normative structure of world order, including the UN, could not protect the vulnerable, essentially innocent and much abused Palestinian civilian population and respond to Palestinian grievances with respect to basic rights.

3.You have written more than 10 books on world order, global order, and international law. You also served for many years as the North America Director of the “World Order Models Project.” In nearly 100 years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as you put it, “the genocide is a continuation of the Apartheid in Palestine.” What kinds of gaps has the Palestinian genocide exposed in the world order paradigm? What truth has it revealed about the foundation upon which the world order is built? After Gaza, what kind of world order and international legal order do you foresee to prevent humanity from experiencing genocides like Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Gaza again? What is your belief and hope in this regard?

Response: If world order persists in its present form it seems almost inevitable that gruesome repetitions of genocide and other severe atrocities in the future. To transform the structures of authority now entrusted with the management of global security ensures a continuation of behavioral patterns that produce genocide, apartheid, aggression, and are responsible for many economic and ecological crimes will require an unprecedented movement from below by peoples organized through çivil society activism, insisting on a framework of law that has the capacity and will to enforce compliance on the strong as well as the weak. Such a development, admittedly utopian, alone could do away with geopolitics whose defining characteristic is a manageriall approach to global security that treats law and morality as irrelevant when in conflict with strategic interests of the Great Powers, and is by practice as well as theory iss dedicated to geopolitical rivalry that reduces law and morality to the level of propaganda and a policy instrument in the foreign policy toolbox useful to denounce the behavior of adversaries yet irrelevant as a constraint..

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others and being attenntive to what is happening. In this period of global interactive intensity it is especially important to learn from those who speak from other cultural spaces. Listening does not means abdicating judgment, but it does require making the effort to respond knowledgeably, which does a constant effort to detect and purge the subtle biases of your educational, discursive, and personal background. This is most difficult for we Americans who are trapped between their ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking, risks, harns, and solutions. We have entered an historical period of unprecedented species hazard, and most national elites are continuing blandly as if ‘business as usual’ was their job description. In some cases, even worse is to acknowledge in rhetoric the dangers that are intensifying, and then acting as if these fundamental challenges do not necessitate profound changes in how we think, feel, and act both individually and collectively.

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others, especially those who speak from other cultural spaces, and making the effort to respond, which requires learning to address the subtle biases of your own  educational and personal background. I have found this to be most difficult for Americans who are trapped between their claims of ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking and solutions. This is a time of unprecedented species hazard.    

4.As you know, Palestinian territories before 1967 were occupied by Israel. Regarding the occupied territories, the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, Turkey, the United Nations, and some Islamic countries are advocating for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders and for a two-state solution. Does this mean that the lands that Israel seized before 1967 through terror, violence, and Nakba are being accepted? Doesn’t this imply that the forced displacement of Palestinians before 1967, and the massacres and raids carried out by Jewish militias in Palestinian villages, are either ignored or legitimized? How do you assess the period from 1917 to 1967 in terms of international legal principles, the global legal order, and the founding mission of the United Nations? Moreover, since Israel does not accept the two-state solution, how is it that international law, institutions, and countries continue to accept it?

Response: I share your overall assessment of an exceedingly llimited willingness to redress the historic wrongs initially inflicted on the Palestinian people by way of a pre-Holocaust colonialist move on the part of the UK, known to the world as the Balfour Declarration, which was the source of the two original wrongs embedded in the Zionist Project, culminating in the Holocaust and its aftermath: first, an Orientalist disregard of non-Western societal wellbeing. It took the form of solving the problems in Europe caused by antisemitism and Jewish presence by encroaching on the sovereign rights of a non-consenting Muslim majority resident population in Palestine. And secondly, a Zionist resolve based on a politically self-serving biblical interpretation that created a Jewish entitlement to make Palestinians persecuted and unwanted strangers in their existential homeland. By such a logic the surviving native peoples in almost every part of the world dispossessed of their land and sovereignty rights would have an unassailable right to their indigenous pre-modern forms of sovereignty.

Given this background, the UN played its own part in furthering the Western-centric solution in the years after World War II, by way of proposing ‘partition’ of Palestine in a period dominated by the sense of guilt of the liberal democracies and effective propaganda by the Zionnist Movemennt  as well as superior military training, weaponry, and tactics in the 1948 War. For the post-1945 period, Israel emerged as as an expansionist nuclear-armed ‘settler colonial state’ that existentially rejected the co-existence, partition, compromise solutions as put forth in a biased framework controlled by the US, a most partisan intermediary. Israel for public relations reasons pretended to go along with this global consensus while acting to undermine it by its settlements, coercion, land-grabbing, and oppressive apartheid regime of control after 1967. During this process liberal Zionism, the UN, Western countries withheld criticism of Israel’s transparently defiant behavior, and continued their stubborn ineffectual adherence to the mantle of internationalism by way of the two-state mantra dismissing Palestinian resistance and even gestures of accommodation as forms of ‘terrrorism’ to be rejected in practice, colliding with the hidden Zionist vision of later became known as ‘Greater Israel.’ In the interim Israel became useful to the West. It lent muscle and diplomacy to the Euro-American regional priorities of retaining access to Gulf energy reserves at acceptable prices and resisting the spread of Islamically oriented nationalism.

The Gaza Genocide was the latest chapter in the struggle revealing political alignments in unexpected ways: the unity of the Western liberal democracies in their complicit response to such criminality; the passive response of Israel’s most prominent Arab neighbors, prompted by fear of Israel, hostility to Iran, and the links between governing elites and non-Middle East geopolitical actors, mainly the US. Given the size and extremism of the Israeli settler movement, especially in the West Bank, it seems politically naive and irrelevant to advocate a two-state solution even if it requires a Palestinian willlingnesss to swallow pre-1967 territorial and resource injustices and land-grabbing. Overall, the story of the West in the Middle East is a shameful chapter in the long narrative of Western encroachment on the most basic rights of non-Western peoples.   

5.While reading your book on “Humane Global Governance,” which is still in the idea phase and gives you hope, I couldn’t quite distinguish whether humanity or religion is the central focus of globalization. Despite your claim that globalization and secularism are in crisis, do you believe that religion should be utilized or that a humane globalization should be grounded in religion? Since your book also includes the chapter “Why and to What Extent Religion?” let us ask: Why is religion a dynamic factor in your model?

This question poses one aspect of why prescriptive writing about the geopolitical management of global security and relations among dominant states is so contingent on historical circumstances that evolve over time. In certain times and situations religion seems to have emancipatory potential and in others its theocratic governance and exclusionary policies seems dystopian. The same extremes can be observed in the role of secularity as national and global phenomena, which has given rise to visions of peace and justice but by way of geopolitical ambition and technological innovation has caused widespread conquest, exploitation and corruption in what was widely considered a post-colonial world following a wave of successful anti-colonial struggles. I have written of ‘colonialism after colonialism’ as best capturing the excesses of Western militarism and capitalism in this period between the end of the Cold War and the Gaza Genocide. It raises a new haunting question ‘What comes next for specific nations and for humanity as ideal and reality?’

6.In your book “Globalization and Religion,” you briefly address a very intriguing question as a chapter title. I would like to ask you to elaborate on it. The question in the book, if I may quote directly, is: “Does the Western secular state have a future?” If so, why? If not, why not?

Response: This kind of fundamental question requires a book if I were to attempt a comprehensive assessment. A brief response refers to the anti-democratic and regressive trends toward autocratic governance at home and anti-internationalism in foreign policy. Whereas ecological threats and technological developmentss are posing increasing threats of catastrophic futures, political agendas of leading governmennts are preoccupied with the short-term satisfactions and frustrations of the citizenry in the face of growing inequality and of governing elites in terms of geopoliticall rivalry and a stagnancy or worse for Western middle class life styles and expectations. It amounts to shifting ecological and technological problem-solving to future generations that will only survive if new political agendas are enacted under the influence of strengthened structures of global governance that are neither secular nor theocratic, but normative in a radical values-driven format of global-democacy-to-come. Such a benevolent future would depend on governmental elites renouncing narrow militarized forms of security.    

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October 7: A Grim Anniversary

6 Oct

[Prefatory Note: Anadolu Agency RAF text on Oct 7; further reflections] 

October 7: A Grim Anniversary

Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse

pertaining to its behavior toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West.

Its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the manner with which it managed the

media treatment of its response to October 7 in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against Palestinian terrorists who staged an unprovoked and barbaric surprise attack by Hamas. This public distortion of the event gave the Western governments the political space needed to justify their closed eyes military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide daily unfolded in Gaza.

This political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes October 7 to create the false impression that peace and quiet prevailed in Gaza until ruptured by this vicious Hamas attack on Israeli villages and civilians gathered for a dance festival. The actual context from a Palestinian point of view couldn’t have been more different, and more objective.

The entire population of Gaza was living under a repressive occupation since the 1967 War as abetted by a punitive blockade imposed in 2007 that caused a steady and deliberate deterioration in the quality of Gaza civilian life that was already one of hardship, danger, and abuse. It is also worth remembering that Hamas was cajoled by Washington to give up armed struggle and pursue its goals by political means to avoid the stigma of its terrorist listing. In this spirit Hamas took part in the Gaza elections of 2006, which it was expected to lose. When it surprised Israel and the US by its success in these internationally monitored elections the result was not welcomed in Tel Aviv, which used its influence in Washington, to keep Hamas in a terrorist box, and the rest is history culminating in the genocidal assault of the past year.

But the history might have been different. Hamas for its part after its electoral success, reinforced by ousting Fatah from its leadership role in Gaza, resorted to diplomacy, seeking a political compromise with Israel reinforced by a long-term ceasefire of up to 50 years, which Israel refused to consider, much less take seriously. This gave Hamas little choice but to surrender its political rights, above all the right to self-determination, or resume its earlier posture of resistance by the means at its disposal.  

Further, from the first day that the extremist Netanyahu far right coalition took over the governance of Israel at the start of 2023 it proclaimed a ‘new Middle East’ which in a map exhibited by Netanyahu just weeks before October 7 erased Palestine. Even then, its main tactic in Gaza was the 2018 nonviolent ‘right of return’ movement, which Israel met at its borders with lethal violence again narrowing Hamas’ choices to surrender or armed struggle. This was a poignant moment when we take account of the fact that 75% of Gaza’s 2.3 milllion inhabitants were refugees or their descendants of the 1948 Nakba.

This course of development is consistent with the Western management of the October 7 event.  First, the early Israeli news releases that greatly exaggerated the atrocities attributed to Hamas were dutifully spread around the world by political leaders and echoed by a compliant media. But more than this, the complete absence of self-scrutiny involving the obvious lapse of Israeli border security helped shift exclusive responsibility to the attackers. This pattern gave rise to suspicions because of widespread reports of reliable warnings given personally to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the days and months before October 7. In light of this it seems highly improbable that the impending Hamas attack was unknown to Israeli intelligence, likely supplemented by surveillance capabilities that could not have missed the training and rehearsals that almost openly preceded the attack.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that in the background of October 7 was the flagrant official greenlighting of settler violence that became part of the West Bank foreground after the attack. In the last days of August Israel unleashed a devastating Gaza-style military campaign so far focused on the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarm.

When October 7 is contextualized, Israeli motivations for a genocidal response become

more plausible. The Hamas attack provided Israel with a pretext for genocide, and increasingly supported an interpretation of this severe violence as ethnic cleansing that should be understood as a prelude to land-grabbing, which helps us understand that the West Bank was always part of the theater of Israel’s military operation. In this sense, interpreters should take a hard look at October 9 (the day that Israel’s response began) if they want to grasp the significance of October 7. Currently, this exposure of ethnic cleansing realities is obscured by an obsessive Western media focus on the tragic fate of Israeli hostages while the larger scenario of Netanyahu extremism evolves beneath the radar.

All along Israel could not have addressed the Hamas challenge as one of pure terrorism without unwavering US and European support, no matter what the human costs and the reputational damage to Western global leadership. To the extent countered, it has been from Islamic sources, centering on Iran but including Hezbollah and the Houthis as active allies of Hamas. October 7 so perceived activated the larger conflict between the West and political Islam, with the Palestinian squeezed between, and for the last year victimized by the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Among the many unfortunate consequences of the past year has been to weaken gravely the war and genocide prevention reputations of the UN. By ignoring the near unanimous rulings of the juridically respected International Court of Justice, the West showed its contempt for the authority of international law if it clashed with strategic interests. The contrast between insisting on the sanctity of international law in the Ukraine context and its complicity in the Gaza genocide exhibited both double standards and moral hypocrisy. A positive development, including in the Western countries supporting Israel, has been the civil society pro-Palestinian activism that is challenging the disregard of international law and human decency by the Western governments.

Let us hope that the year ahead brings peace and justice to the Palestinian people, the entire region, and the other 50 armed combat realties around the world. 

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Reflections on October 7

6 Oct

[Prefatory Note: A commentary on October 7 stimulated by an interview with an independent Turkish journalist, Naman Bakac,]

Q: how do you briefly evaluate the last year regarding the October 7th operation in terms of HAMAS, Palestine and Israel?

Response: For the several months after October 7, Israel’s mastery of public discourse promoted an understanding that allowed Israel to carry out the early phases of its genocidal assault on Gaza with relatively little diplomatic friction in the West but growing discontent among progressive sectors of civil society. Throughout this early period the mainstream media relied on an Israeli optic to promote a one-dimensional misleading appreciation of October 7 as an unprovoked terrorist attack by Hamas terrorists on innocent Israeli civilians accompanied by barbaric atrocities. The atrocity dimension of the Hamas attack was gradually scaled back but without eroding governmental support for Israel in the West led by the US, but with the backing of UK, France, Germany, and most other Western states.

What was missing in this phase of basically unquestioning support for Israel was critical media treatment that did more than blandly report Israel’s version of the facts through endless TV time given over to Israeli government spokespersons, retired military and intelligence officials commenting on the progress of Israel’s supposed retaliatory campaign, and pro-Zionist opinion columnists writing for such established media platforms as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist. Except for rather obscure online platforms there was no space given to critics who pointed to the pre-October 7 extremism of the Netanyahu government focused on making the West Bank unlivable by unleashing settler violence and setting its sights expansively on a one-state Greater Israel solution.

The demonization of Hamas went completely unchallenged although it has been persuaded by the US Government to compete in the 2006 Gaza legislative elections in Gaza as a path if taken by Hamas would lead to political normalization, understood to include removal from the terrorist list. Yet neither Washington nor Tel Aviv expected Hamas to prevail in these internationally monitored elections, and when they did, and Hamas later displaced the corrupt Fatah presence in Gaza, Israel went to work reversing the reassurances given to Hamas prior to the elections, refusing to honor the results, imposing a comprehensive blockade on Gaza in 2007, which continues in effect and amounted to a cruel extended  form of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza strip, 75% of whom were refugees from the 1948 War denied their right of return under international law. Only very recently has there been some attempt to present Hamas in a balanced manner, most notably in a book co-edited by Helena Cobban, Rami Khouri, and David Wildman, entitled Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters (OR Books, 2024).

My own views on Hamas were influenced by meetings ten years ago with Hamas leaders in Doha, Cairo, and Gaza City while I was acting as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  I was impressed by the intelligence and moderation of these Hamas officials that I remain convinced that they were not putting on ‘a show’ to mislead a minor UN official. In these discussions two elements were stressed—first, the need for a political alternative to the resumption of armed struggle for the sake of both Palestine and Israel, and secondly, a long-term ceasefire coupled with an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem as a formula for long-term stability. Turkey more than other countries at the time sought covertly to mediate between Hamas and Israel under the leadership of its star diplomat, Ahmet Davutoglu (later Turkey’s Foreign Minister and Prime Minister), with hopes that some accommodation could be agreed upon, bringing stability and hope to the region and a recovery of some limited sense of normalcy to the long oppressed Palestinian people, now to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and most of all, Iran. Yet, as events since 2006 have darkly demonstrated, this was not to be. Quite the contrary!

Undoubtedly, the worst distortion in these first months after October 7 was the insistence in the Western liberal democracies that the use of the word ‘genocide’ in connection with Israel’s military operation was defamatory, an instance of ‘hate speech’ that warranted punitive responses such as formal retractions, student dismissals, faculty suspensions, and forced administrative resignations. ‘Playing it safe’ in many corporate and governmental settings meant keeping silent about Israeli atrocities except in private conversations among trusted friends. Western governments accentuated this anti-democratic turn by exerting pressures on educational administrators and government employees.

Not mentioning genocide was to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. Numerous statements by top Israeli political officials and military commanders made no secret of their genocidal intent. On October 9, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, announced ‘a total siege’ of Gaza applicable to food, fuel, and electricity. He explained that when ‘fighting human animals’ it is necessary to treat the adversary accordingly. Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked the bloodiest chapter in the Bible justifying revenge against the Amalekites: “Do not spare them, put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Modern Torah teaching generally interprets this troublesome passage metaphorically or as a message intended to address the evil within Jews, but for the far right, including cabinet members of the Netanyahu coalition, the Amalek passage is taken literally and has long served as justification for killing all and any Palestinians.

When reinforced by tactics exhibiting disregard for Palestinian vulnerabilities, the inference of genocide was unmistakable, so much so that even the juridically cautious ICJ gave a preliminary nod in the direction of acknowledging genocide in their rulings of January 26 in response to the South African initiative seeking resolution of its contention that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention of 1951. Of course, Israel rejected these genocidal allegations by its usual tactic of castigating the motives of critics, insisting as always, that it was confronting worldwide antisemitism as well as Hamas terrorism, which it characterized as ‘genocide’ in a willful effort to reverse perceptions.

After this early period of mind control and public confusion, Israel gradually lost control of the discourse except in the Western elite circles where opinion bent somewhat, but in a manner coupled with irresponsible continuation of support. Israel shifted the focus to the plight of the hostages seized on October 7, and admittedly subjected to a harrowing experience of captivity and Israeli bombardments often ending in their death. Such a humanitarian concern about the fate of the hostage is fully justified although typically diluted by Western silence about the unspeakably abusive detention of

several thousand Palestinians on scant or no charges.

Even the European members of NATO were induced by popular protests in their own countries increasingly to abstain rather than openly side with Israel in UN ceasefire votes, leaving only the US and Israel firmly opposing any pronounced criticisms of Israel even if after the near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the ICJ on July 19 condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as unlawful for multiple reasons. This ICJ pronouncement was given a strong measure of approval in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly on September 17 by a vote of 124-14, with 43 abstentions. To be expected, the US and Israel were among the 14, while the European countries abstained.

Such a new objectivity was also evident in the gradual rise of civil society opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and throughout its region. It is not yet robust enough to penetrate the bipartisan support given to Israel by the US, although the media is slightly more willing to expose the daily cruelty of Israel’s tactics, but still habitually cushioned by Israel’s official accounts that whitewash Israel’s controversial tactics by raising their often unsupported claims of Hamas responsibility by way of their siting of tunnels and human shields. The media rarely invites spokespersons for the Palestinian side or strong civil society critics of Israel to its most prestigious platforms.

Perhaps, the most vivid demonstration of this Phase 2 of the Israeli genocide was the widespread protests on college campuses around the world, having the indirect effect of exposing the widening gap between what the governments of the West support and what a growing proportion of their citizenry believe and favor. Israel’s loss of control over the public discourse is unprecedented and coupled with the increasing weight of authoritative interpretations of international law within the UN framework that underscores both Israel’s unlawful behavior of the past year and its underlying unlawful occupation policies, and lingering presence since 1967, as the Occupying Power of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The US has during the year over and over again given its endorsement to Israel’s strategic moves and occupation policies at the cost of disregarding international law. When coupled with its indignant insistence on international law compliance by Russia in the Ukraine context, the US made clear that it will not hesitate to use international law to attack adversaries while dismissing it when an international ally’s behavior is unlawful. This is clearly a glaring instance of double standards and moral hypocrisy, reducing international to a policy instrument rather than a regulative norm.

In conclusion, the more we learn about October 7, the more suspect becomes the official rationale for Israel’s ferocious response.  An independent international investigation is long overdue. How can the  ‘security lapse’ that let the attack happen acknowledged recently by Israel be reconciled with the warnings Israeli leaders received from Egypt and the US, undoubtedly confirmed by Israel’s surveillance and intelligence capabilities in Gaza. The inevitable skeptical views directed at the Israeli retaliation was given immediate credibility by the scale and intensity of the Israeli response that seemed to offer a pre-planned pretext to escalate pre-October 7 plans to establish Greater Israel from the river to the sea facilitated by the forced expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible.

At present, it seems almost foolish to anticipate that October 7, 2025 will be a time to look back on the despair of 2024 as a grotesque anomaly in human experience, but it is not foolish to pray that it might be so.

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Global Governance and Global Security in the 21st Century:  A Philosophical Inquiry

4 Oct

Richard Falk

            [50th Anniversary of Philosophical Society of Turkey, Ankara, Oct. 4, 2024]

A Preliminary Reflection on Orientation

It is an honor for me, not even a philosopher, to be a panelist on this program honoring Professor Kucuredi for her inspirational role in the development of the Turkish Society of Philosophy over its life of 50 years.

Listening to the presentations and the introduction of speakers have made me aware that this Society, unlike so much of contemporary philosophy whether of the language or postmodern variety, is devoted to understanding the global crises of our time and how they might be best resolved for the benefit of all humanity.

If ever during the history of the human species did we need the benefits of ‘deep thinking,’ which is the enduringly profound contribution of philosophy, is now so many of the world’s leaders and influencers are behaving mindlessly or malevolently, raising risks of provoking quasi-species or even extinction events. Never has the need for philosophical deep thinking been greater with attention to the time dimensions of urgency as well as with the space dimensions of complex and intensive interdependence. Of course, this is not to denigrate longer term thinking relating to peacemaking and peacebuilding as a contribution to transformative patters of behavior in political, economic, and cultural domains of human expression and ecological awareness, but it is alerting deep thinker to the emergency conditions that bind together the destinies of all peoples sharing life on planet earth.

I have chosen to focus my remarks on the theme of ‘global governance’ that has been at the core of my scholarly work ever since I was a bewildered graduate student, then fearful of a major war fought with nuclear weapons. My overriding concern is with the management of global security in the sense of war, genocide, and atrocity prevention, which explains their linkage here. I was less concerned with the management of routine interactions across and within national borders that brings order, stability, and benefits in many diverse areas of life, including health, travel, diplomacy, sports, culture, and countless others. It ranks high among the achievements of modernity, but it is not enough given the rate and nature of technological innovation.

I explored from the standpoints of international law, international relations, and cultural values two central issues: 1) a critique of global governance as a structure of international life; 2) were there viable alternative modes of global governance that were less war-prone, more justice-oriented, and less a product Western hegemonic ambitions and civilizational provincialism. In carrying forward this line of thought I often turned to Western philosophy for insight and wisdom and to Eastern philosophy for empathy, different groundings in social/political realities, and ethical values reflecting different civilizational traditions.

Sketching the Philosophical Roots of Global Governance      

Existing structure and procedures of global governance have their normative and political deep roots in the framework set forth in the Peace of Westphalia back in 1648, but continuously evolved to adapt to changing conditions.

The essential feature of this Westphalian framework was the formal or juridical autonomy of territorial states sovereign within recognized international borders, a systemic condition of philosophical anarchy most influentially theorized by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan published in 1651. This vision was accepting of the abiding reality of war, which in Hobbes’ words pitted ‘all against all.’

Hedley Bull modernized Hobbes in his important book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order initially published in 1977. The originality of Bull’s adherence to state-centrism was his idea that anarchy could be combined within the overarching non-governmental normative reality of ‘society,’ which was the narrative he believed best described world history, and could not be changed for the better.  Revealingly, the main societal premise of Bull’s worldview was the political, moral, and legal obligation of sovereign governments to show respect for the norm of non-intervention by refraining from forcible intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries.

The realist element in Bull’s approach was expressed by his rejection of the pretensions of international law as ‘a higher law’ than national legal authority when it came to maintaining global security, establishing and upholding political order, and imposing criminal accountability on individuals. Bull illustrated his bold reluctance to submit power to law within international settings by his rejection of the Nuremberg precedent by which German political and military officials were held internationally accountable after World War II for their alleged criminality.

Bull believed, and experience has largely vindicated his skepticism, that such punitive treatment as imposed on the losers in World War II made a mockery of law by overriding the sovereignty of only the losers. This unwillingness of the victorious countries to submit their own behavior to any legal assessment meant that what was being called ‘law’ at Nuremberg is more properly regarded as a naked expression of power.  At the same time Bull valued law for its functional roles in serving the mutual or reciprocal interests of states in political order internationally, but he believed it had no constructive role in relation to war/peace contexts other than shared humanitarian concerns such as the humane treatment of prisoners-of-war by adversaries.

In effect, the Nuremberg Judgment was more an exercise of state propaganda by the winners in World War II than their claim of an advance in criminal jurisprudence of international accountability. In effect, war was accepted as embedded in the anarchic structures and it was leading many liberal idealists to regard international life as governed by law rather than power. Such thinking was an anathema to a confirmed realist such as Bull who felt there no alternative to leaving global governance and global security to what the most influential international relations

agreed upon despite policy divergencies (Morgenthau, Kissinger, and Kennan).

Bull’s deconstruction of Nuremberg accountability claims have been reinforced by invoking criminal law to punish Saddam Hussein after the Iraq War of 2003 while foregoing any legal scrutiny of serious war crimes allegations directed at George W. Bush or Tony Blair. The furious refusal by the US to have any member of its armed forces investigated or arrested for international crimes by the International Criminal Court is a further indication that Bull’s skepticism continues to be validated by experience.

Also significant is the reality that these projections of global governance that originated in the West and served Western interests in overriding the sovereignty of non-Western national societies by disguising power grabs as criminal justice. At its peak this Western hegemony both had recourse to law to rationalize colonialism, sugarcoat in the process genocidal policies directed toward native populations, especially in the British breakaway colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

As world history unfolded the US Government insisted upon and achieved total impunity even in relation to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were viewed as unlawful in more objective legal and cultural venues ever since such weaponry of mass destruction came into existence. We can only regret that these grants of impunity for the atomic attacks cleared the path to the Nuclear Age that might not have come to pass if Germany or Japan had resorted to such weaponry and yet went on to lose the war. Controversial combat tactics by the losers in war rarely become acceptable practices in future wars, but if by winners it becomes more tenuous to deny the validity of their future use.

Kant’s disruptive challenge to Hobbes and contemporary realists

An earlier partial philosophical break came to the fore in the aftermath of the French Revolution articulated in perhaps the most conceptually sophisticated manner by Immanuel Kant in his publication 230 years ago of a long essay given the title Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. The basic Kantian insight was that the global spread of democratic republicanism, and accompanying human rights, could come to allow separate states to co-exist in a condition of harmony with respect to their national security, thereby indirectly achieving global security.

Kant sought to counter the structure of political realism that envisioned no alternative go ‘perpetual war’ with the revolutionary idea that war was not rooted in the human condition or even in the fragmented character of international society, but is an outgrowth of ideological tension, predatory economic impulses. Kant explored the possibility that the newly comforting belief that democracies would not wage war against each other. There were other related features in this Kantian hopeful view of international relations including a self-interested dynamic of state in mutual demilitarization.

It is arguable that this Kantian radical vision has never been tested historically because of the failure of democracy to spread to many important countries outside of the West, and with anti-democratic national governance remaining commonplace even in the West. The source of both world wars of the prior century were often accurately described as pitting the liberal democracies against first fascism and then totalitarian socialism, which can be conceived as a meeting place between Kant’s bonding expectations of democracies and their antagonism to anti-democratic forms, a kind of second-order fulfillment of Kant’s views on the relevance of internal state/society relations.

With the rise of civilizational consciousness conflict configurations are often portrayed by reference to diverse religious or ethnic  identities, and their conflictual perspectives. Biden is the latest of Western leaders who sought to rally democracies against autocracies, as if he were a Kantian, although his designation of democracy was so broadened as to be normatively meaningless, malevolent, and mendacious by including Israel, Modi’s India, Saudi Arabia, and others. Such ideological opportunism undermines second-order Kantianism.

There remains a slender basis for the Kantian belief that ‘genuine’ democracies do not fight one another, and that if global political landscape came one day to consist only of genuine democracies, there would be, or at least might be, a prolonged period of world peace.

 The Fleeting Promise of Governmental Solutions 

From pre-Westphalian times contrary expectations envisioned an enhanced role for international law, entertaining political and ethical notions of overcoming Hobbesian anarchy by various ideas of institutional centralization expressive of various ideas of spontaneous or coerced unity of humanity, generating even governmental proposals for world government or geopolitical ambition to establish a global state. In other words, the pathway to a peaceful world led not through an anarchic structure but depends on overcoming political fragmentation by way of a deliberative process that credibly gives rise to a more centralized system of governance.

What now exists, epitomized by the design of the UN as an institutional (non-governmental) system in which all sovereign states are treated as equal in a formal diplomatic sense yet the five main prevailing states in World War II enjoy a right of veto in the Security Council, the only UN political organ with the authority to reach binding decisions. In effect, this has meant that global security is managed outside the UN by these powerful political actors who are granted the legal authority to evade the UN Charter while pursuing either peacekeeping or strategic interests.

In fact, this P5 managerial role produced during the 40 years of Cold War led to a precarious balance between the Soviet Union and the three NATO members of the SC led by the US with respect to major war. Since the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War this geopolitical P2 became behaviorally the P1, at least until Russia mounted a geopolitical challenge as an accompaniment to the Ukraine War and the Global South showed signs of promoting their own version of global governance with encouragement by China. The Ukraine War also highlighted the moral hypocrisy of the West by its denunciation of Russia while actively supporting Israel in openly carrying out genocide in Gaza. This posture also exhibited a betrayal of liberal values associated with respect for international law and human rights in this clash with strategic interests and cultural affinities.

After each of the world wars, idealists on the sidelines of world politics put forward views that advocated world government in the form of the enactment of a federalist constitutional framework providing global governance and the institutional management of global security.

These views never gained political traction against either the realist consensus that dominated foreign policy elites in the powerful countries of the world or by public advocacy on the part of engaged national citizenries. These ideas of centralized global governance continued to languish despite the advent of nuclear weapons, the climate crisis, and the wastefulness and menace of militarized global security in the nuclear age. The UN was framed to create a system of institutional centralization for functional activities while being forced to adapt to the geopolitical management of war prevention and global security. It should therefore come as no surprise that the UN has been minimally involved in the ongoing war in Ukraine and the genocidal assault in Gaza

The 2024 UN Summit of the Future with its call for virtuous behavior protective of long-term human wellbeing and ecological stability by UN members and along with the championing of inspiring policies directed at mitigating human suffering seems likely to experience the disappointing destiny of the UN Preamble to the Charter with its confident call to end the scourge of war and serve as a beacon of hope for a peaceful future. Satisfying words with a pacifying impact without obligatory matching deeds is similar to being presented a beautiful wine bottle that is empty of the coveted liquid within.

A Concluding Lament

We live in disillusioning times, where the appeals of 21st century pragmatic thinkers and critics, alive to real world challenges, are still dismissed as visionary, and are neither heard nor heeded in the corridors of power. These venues of power and wealth still remain mainly the preserve of ambitious men who continue to be bewitched by the benefits of short-term performances, while the profound challenges that haunt a human future facing increasingly urgent imperative consisting of long-term vision, commitment, empathy, ecological resilience, and spiritual wisdom. May it be so! And may philosophers add their variants of deep thinking in the process.     

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Israel’s Bloody EndgameS

4 Oct

[Prefatory Note: This post was initially published on the TRT World website on September 30th, having been edited by Shabrina Khatri. It has

been modified to take account of subsequent developments in the region including the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and a widening onslaught against Hezbollah, while tensions mount with Iran. These developments have also affected the US relation to the conflict.]

Netanyahu’s bloody endgame seeks a future Israel with a Minimum   Palestinian Presence

In the face of mounting global criticism, Israel is stepping up its military offensive in Lebanon, continuing its genocidal violence against the Palestinians and even intensifying its attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.

AFP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds maps as he speaks during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 27, 2024. that erase all traces of a Palestinian claim to statehood and the exercise of their right of self-determination.

Israel in the year since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 has insisted that it is motivated only by anti-terrorist goals in its original pledge to exterminate Hamas, and more recently expanded by the commitment to destroy Hezbollah as a credible adversary, and in the process weaken its most feared adversary, Iran. Its evident incidental purpose has been to cast Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis as proxies for arch-enemy Iran, which stands accused of being the main enabler of “anti-Israeli terrorism” in the Middle East, a coalition of militias and political groups in the Middle East, most on Western lists of terrorist organization, and alleged linked to Iran, and less so Syria, as a so-called ‘axis of resistance.’

Casting new dark clouds over the observance of the grim anniversary of October 7, is the Gaza-like onslaught carried out by Israel in recent months against alleged Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, and extending to the Hezbollah controlled neighborhoods of south Beirut.

This latest phase of Israeli hyper-violence culminated in the deadly pager/radio attacks followed days later by the assassination of Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah on September 27. And this was one year after the United Nations Secretary General spoke of the world “as becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise.”

Amid this preoccupation with daily reports of atrocities and severe, massive civilian suffering, a question is recently being posed in reaction to the prolonged excessiveness of Israeli violence coupled with its stubborn refusal to accept the near universal call at the UN and elsewhere for a Gaza ceasefire tied to a hostage/prisoner swap deal: What is Israel’s strategic objective that is worth this much sacrifice in its global reputation as a dynamic and legitimate, if controversial, state?

And lurking behind this unnerving question is a related anxious query: does Israel have an endgame that might vindicate, at least in its eyes, this self-sacrifice along with its sullen acceptance of the criminal stigma of credible allegations of apartheid and genocide, as well as the laundry list of crimes against humanity and its crude defamation of the United Nations?

Netanyahu’s endgame

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in New York to delivered an angry, arrogant speech before a UN General Assembly. Netanyahu managed to blend bitterness toward Israel’s UN critics with an Israeli vision of peace that seemed better treated as a delusional Israel victory speech.

In a diversionary attack, Netanyahu began his remarks by referring to the UN as “a swamp of anti-Semitic bile,” a racist filter through which any allegation against Israel, however perverse, could gain “an automatic majority” against what he pointed out was the world’s only Jewish-majority state “in this flat-earth society” that is the UN. An allegation that seemed to imply that Israel could do no wrong internationally, and if any serious charges were mounted against Israel, no matter how well evidenced, they would be dismissed as nothing more than another instance of antisemitic racist barbs.

AFP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 27, 2024.

It was in this strained atmosphere that Netanyahu chose to announce his grandiose vision of an Israeli endgame that he claimed would alone bring peace and prosperity to the region. What Netanyahu presented to the almost empty UN chamber (because many delegates left in protest of his speech) was a geopolitical package tied together with the verbiage of “the blessings of peace.”

It was essentially a manifesto in which stage one involved the destruction of Israel’s active adversaries, the proxies of Iran. It was to be followed by a stage two “historic peace agreement with Saudi Arabia” presented as a dramatic sequel to the Abraham Accords reached in the last period of Donald Trump’s presidency four years ago.

These words celebrating the emergence of “a new Middle East” were hyped by Netanyahu, who said, “what blessings such a peace with Saudi Arabia would bring.” Other than those who wanted to be fooled by such an envisioned endgame, informed persons realized it was little other than a crude example of state propaganda with little chance of happening and almost no prospect of delivering a bright, peaceful, prosperous future to the peoples of the region.

Netanyahu displayed a map of his new Middle East that assigned no presence to Palestinian statehood, even though Saudi Arabia has recently indicated that it would not establish peace with Israel until a Palestinian state existed.

Such an omission was not an oversight. The Netanyahu coalition with the far-right religious parties led by such extremists as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would collapse the instant any genuine commitment to Palestinian statehood was officially endorsed. It is impossible to believe that Netanyahu was unaware of this constraint, and so it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that he expected any enthusiasm even in Washington for his vision of a peace-building endgame. The US had long hidden its Israeli partisanship behind the two-state mantra that was also a UN consensus that substituted piety for realism.

Probing Israel’s real endgame

Underneath the public relations idea of Israel’s endgame lies a worrisome reality. Even before the Netanyahu government took over at the beginning of 2023, it was evident that Israel’s political agenda was in hot pursuit of a publically undisclosed endgame that would complete the Zionist Project after a century of settler colonial striving.

This first became clear as a publicly endorsed goal when Israel’s government introduced a quasi-constitutional Basic Law in 2018. With it, Jewish supremacist rights were written into Israeli law as conferring the right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people, establishing Hebrew as Israel’s sole official language, and extending Israeli protective sovereignty to the occupied West Bank settlements that had been declared ‘unlawful.’

It was this legislative action by the Knesset that confirmed an Israeli endgame of a one-state solution widely known as “Greater Israel,” a formula for extending Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of international law and the UN consensus, including that of most Western countries.

Such a Basic Law cannot be changed in Israel, which lacks a written constitution, by normal legislative action, but only by a later overriding Basic Law.

When the Netanyahu coalition took over in January 2023 there were provocative signs that this 2018 Basic Law would be coercively expedited as Israel’s number-one priority. It was initially signaled by the informal, yet unmistakable, greenlighting of settler violence in the occupied West Bank with the pointed frequently articulated message to Palestinian residents: “leave or we will kill you.” This violence was tolerated by the IDF, which on some occasions joined in, without even producing a fake censure from Tel Aviv.

In September 2023, Netanyahu’s UN speech featuring a map of the region with no Palestine was reinforced by feverish diplomatic efforts to secure an Abrahamic normalization with some Arab states, further indications to establish so-called “Greater Israel”. These acts along with provocations at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound helped set the stage for the Hamas-led attack on October 7, an event itself now veiled in ambiguity that can only be removed by an international investigation.

Miscalculations on both sides

The world at first largely accepted, or at least tolerated, Israel’s version of October 7, including its retaliatory rationale given an international law cover as an exercise of the “right of self-defense”.

As further information became available, the original Israeli rationalization for its response to October 7 became problematic. It was established that the Netanyahu leadership had received several reliable warnings of an imminent Hamas attack.

After months of training including rehearsals of the Hamas attacks, it strains credulity to accept the official version that Israel’s world-class surveillance capabilities did not detect the impending attack. Further, the immediate magnitude and severity of the Israeli response raised suspicions that Israel was seeking a pretext to induce the forced evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza to be followed by their forced exit from the occupied West Bank.

These developments established a credible prelude to the formal establishment of “Greater Israel”, and the attainment of Israel’s real endgame.

In retrospect, both Hamas and Israel seem to have seriously miscalculated. Israel seems to have counted on genocidal violence producing either political surrender or cross-border evacuation, and a new wave of Palestinian refugees.

,,

Having endured so much, it is hard to envision any kind of acquiescence by the Palestinians, however decimated by the Israeli onslaught, of an endgame that doesn’t include the establishment of a viable Palestine political future.

Israel underestimated Palestinian attachment to the land and to the indignity of being made unwanted strangers in their own homeland, even in the face of total devastation. Israelis undoubtedly anticipate the growth of hostile public opinion around the world after an initial grace period after October 7 of indulging Israeli violence, given the widely endorsed accounts of atrocities inflicted and hostages seized in the Hamas-led attack.

On its side, Hamas underestimated the ferocity of the Israeli response apparently because it conceived of its attack in normal battlefield action and reaction patterns, and not linked to a grandiose Israeli endgame scenario.

Israel’s hollow claims of victory suggest that the Netanyahu coalition is as committed as earlier to the “Greater Israel” endgame, with the enlargement of the combat zone to include Lebanon, and maybe even Syria and Iran, as parts of the Israeli endgame quietly enlarged to include what is being called ‘restored deterrence.’

Having endured so much, it is hard to envision any kind of acquiescence by the Palestinians, however decimated by the Israeli onslaught, of an endgame that doesn’t include the establishment of a viable Palestine political future. This could be either a co-existing Palestinian state with full sovereign rights or a new safeguarded one-state confederation based on absolute equality between these two peoples with respect to the totality of human rights.

In conclusion, the political conditions do not currently begin to exist for an endgame that would satisfy the minimum expectations of both peoples.

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Israel Exposes Its Political Agenda: ‘land’ not ‘security’; Gaza as Prelude, West Bank as Prize

31 Aug

[Prefatory Note: Modified responses to questions posed by Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with the Brazilian newspaper, CORREIO BRAZILIENSE, on 8/29/24, addressing the concerted Israeli military operation, extending the tactics and devastation of its attack on the Gaza Strip since last October, to the occupied West Bank. Again, Washington’s silence is almost as dismaying as Israel blatant disregard of law and standards of decency.] 

  1. I would like to quote you on this military operation in West Bank. How do you see that? What was the purpose?

From the outset of Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, I believed that it was being used as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing’ to induce massive departures of the resident Palestinian populations from the three Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with a long undisclosed priority being systemic expulsion coupled with massive devastation of the West Bank. It should not be forgotten that when the Netanyahu coalition at the start of 2023, that is, months before the Hamas attack, took over occupation and administration of the OPT it was viewed even in Western circles as the ‘most extreme’ in Israel’s history. What made it extreme from Day One were two characteristics: the appointment of Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of the far right religious Zionist parties in the Netanyahu coalition insistent on an ethnic cleansing agenda, as the chief administrators of Occupied Palestine, and the closely associated greenlighting of West Bank widespread settler violence in West Bank villages while the political leadership in Israel smiled obligingly.

What could be clearer than that the Zionist Religious Right was persuaded to join the Netanyahu coalition because it was given unconditional assurances that a Jewish supremist state would be pursued to complete the Zionist Project of establishing Greater Israel in all of the Promised Land. The prominence given Ben Gvir and Smotrich and the intensity of settler violence could not have been a clearer signal that two-staters were pursuing a Zombie solution, and yet the somewhat sullen silence of Diaspora liberal Zionism in the face of these developments exposed both liberal delusions and its self-righteous superficiality. The liberal approach was always more about us in the Diaspora than about ‘them’ (including even Israeli Jews but certainly the Palestinians long recruited against their will to make the major sacrifices to allay the guilt feelings of the Western democracies for hardly lifting a finger in opposition to the grotesque excesses of European antisemitism).

The Israeli response in Gaza over the last 11 months has horrified most peoples of the world, especially of the Global South, while enjoying the active complicity of the liberal democracies of most elites in the Global West. It has now reached a stage where it has undermined Israel’s reputation as a legitimate political actor, creating a vital decision point, signaled by these lethal attacks on the West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Juber. The IDF commander of this latest military operation, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, was quick to point out to the media that this was not an isolated incident to discourage Palestinian militancy but the beginning of a sustained military operation in the West Bank. This represents both a military and political escalation motivated by a commitment ‘to finish the job’ while regional and global anti-Israeli sentiments are already at fever pitch, but now ‘the job’ is revealed to the more attentive public to be what it has always secretly been, a campaign to achieve the coercive incorporation of the West Bank into Israel. This enlarged view of ‘the job’ that American pro-Israelis were earlier tricked into believing they were supporting, which was supposedly limited to the destruction of Hamas as a terrorist political actor and the elimination of its leaders, effectively propagandized as dehumanized  ‘terrorists.’

The Israeli leadership as ever master of shaping the public discourse, still seeks to pull wool over eyes by describing this escalation of the scope of their post-October 7 rampage, insist on justifying their West Bank behavior as directed at West Bank Palestinian militancy. Any fool knows that the most effective way to achieve such a result would be to rein West Bank settler violence, but that is not even part of the conversation. It should not be forgotten that from the perspective of international law the West Bank remains an Occupied Territory subject the 4th Geneva Convention that prohibits Jewish settlements, collective punishment, and imposes legal duties on the Occupier to uphold the safety, security, and material health and wellbeing of an Occupied People. This reading of international law as it pertains to the West Bank was given an authoritative confirmation in the July 19th Advisory Opinion of a nearly unanimous International Court of Justice, which was met in Tel Aviv with a show of condescending scorn and in Washington by looking away altogether.

Even the brave, knowledgeable, and perceptive current UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who rarely takes a false step bought into the core of the Israeli public narrative when she described this surge of official Israeli violence as “a serious pattern parallel with what is happening in the Gaza Strip” in the course of an interview with Drop Site News. I believe it is not parallel but integral to the politics underlying Israel’s response to October 7, which from the outset set up its campaign to induce a new nakba in the West Bank, preceded by this genocidal sideshow in Gaza. In effect, Gaza was Act 1 in a political theater piece of at least two acts.

From this follows my judgment that virtually the entire Israeli response since October 7 has been about land and only incidentally, if at all, about security, except in the secondary sense of warning (or deterring) regional enemy attacks, which means mainly Iran . If security had been the primary concern there were much less bloody and more effective and legally acceptable ways to go about a response: tightening border security, using sophisticated intelligence/surveillance skills to control opposition and resistance in Gaza, and even seeking a normalization of relations based on mutual respect for international law. Relevant here is the near unanimous July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court that clearly set forth multiple reasons for regarding Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank as unlawful, calling on the UN and UN member states to implement its rulings, and on Israel to comply.

If my conjectures are even only partly a corrective of the official version of the Hamas attack, it makes essential an official, trustworthy international investigation of what  really happened on October 7 and how it was decontextualized to serve Israel’s need for a self-serving rationale of the violence that was unleashed for reasons other than the attack. In retrospect, it seems clears that the events themselves were hyped in ways that invalidated criticism of Israel’s behavior and did not contextualize the attack in relation to pre-October 7 recent and structural provocations, the validity of resistance against settler colonialism, and the prolonged nature and severity of Israeli collective punishment of Gazans, the denial not only of rights of self-determination but of rights of return. 

A final observation in the form of a conjecture. US diplomacy used its leverage to discourage further Israeli provocations of Iran to lessen risks of being drawn into a regional war. In exchange, Israel was quietly assured that if it extended the Gaza military operation to the West Bank it would not meet with significant governmental resistance from the US or Europe. In other words, it could get away with completing its master plan of extinguishing the territorial existence of Palestine as well burying the prospect of Palestinian statehood in any viable form once and for all.

  • Do you see the risk of a third intifada after what is happening in Gaza and West Bank?

I believe the greater threat as of now is of a second nakba (catastrophe) involving confronting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with a choice between enduring genocide or fleeing across borders to neighboring Arab countries; so far, Gazan have withstood the pressure to leave, and enduring the unspeakable alternatives of genocide or a permanent refugee status. Such an outcome would be a further stage in a process that goes back to pre-Israel Zionism, which is to make Palestinians so persecuted in their own country that many are compelled to flee for safety across international borders as happened in 1948, and under international law unlawfully denied any right of return.

Such an exclusionary second nakba is not necessarily inconsistent with a third intifada, which would be more like the second than the first, that is it would include armed resistance. What probably prevents a new intifada, which would undoubtedly enjoy more sympathy and gain greater support than the earlier two, is the absence of Palestinian political will to expose themselves to an even more extensive genocidal response.

Beyond this, the resolution of East Jerusalem still awaits further action. Almost off camera have been exhortations and symbolic encroachment on the Al Aqsa compound by settler extremists. Even a wider religious war cannot be ruled out if the Netanyahu coalition continues to call the shots when it comes to the Palestinian future.

  • The Israeli leader, Benny Gantz claimed it´s necessary to repeat in West Bank the military strategy for Gaza. How do you see that?

As with other Israeli leaders, Gantz is using a security rationale for what is better understood as a land-grabbing and people-emptying undertaking. As argued above the overriding purpose of Israel’s behavior since October 7 is to take advantage of the attack (as its propaganda specialists have portrayed it) to address the primary Zionist agenda item of establishing Greater Israel as a Jewish supremist state stretching from at least the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a pre-Netanyahu image of Israeli sovereign territory explicitly embedded in a 2018 Basic Law adopted by the Knesset.

The difference between the Israeli mainstream and the Netanyahu-led extremists is best interpreted as one of style and patience, not substance. The dominant expectations of opposed Israeli establishment groupings raise questions of religion and Jewish tradition, but more fundamentally about power in controlling state/society and international relations of Israel’s government.

Rodrigo Craveiro

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Will the ICC Act? The Netanyahu/Gallant Arrest Warrants are a Truth or Dare Moment?

17 Jul

A Shaky Start for the ICC

Since its establishment in 2002 the International Criminal Court has struggled tofind a path to legitimacy. Its establishment was a triumph for the Global South and civic activism in extending the potential reach of international criminal law to the countries of the Global North. ICC prospects were limited from the outset by its organizational identity being situated outside the formal UN framework and even more so, by the failure of the geopolitical ‘big three’ of the US, China, and Russia to join, and in relation to present concerns, by Israel’s refusal. The ICC has 124 members including the liberal democracies in Western Europe, all states in South America, most in Africa, and  many in Asia. Despite this wide representation it has struggled throughout its existence for credibility, influence, respect, and legitimacy.

In its early years the ICC was deservedly blamed for concentrating its activities on the alleged wrongdoing of sub-Saharan African leaders, suggesting a racialist bias. Then later on, in relation to US and Israel’s alleged crimes in Afghanistan and Occupied Palestine, the ICC prosecutor sat on the files containing abundant evidence justifying at the very least, diligent investigations to determine whether indictments and prosecution were legally warranted, and by doing nothing, an impression was formed that the ICC was so weak and insecure that it could not hope to resist geopolitical, Western backdoor manipulations. ICC inaction in this instance was partly attributed to the radical ultra-nationalism of the Trump presidency that had the temerity to impose personalized sanctions on the prosecutor of the ICC should the tribunal open a case against either the US or Israel. Such sanctions were abandoned when Biden became president but the underlying hostility to ICC accountability.

The story goes on, but with new twists. When Russia attacked Ukraine in early 2022, the ICJ was called upon by the NATO West to act decisively with unaccustomed haste. The ICC obliged by expediting its procedures to move forward on an emergency basis to make a determination as to whether Putin and others should be immediately indicted for war crimes and arrest warrants issued. This unusual request for haste appeared to serve the geopolitical interests of the West, again somewhat racialized by the fact that ICC activism was on behalf of Ukraine a majority white, Christian victim of alleged war crimes. Such haste and pressures from the West had never before in the brief existence of the ICC been so enlisted. The ICC obliged, further compromising its credibility, by issuing arrest warrants for Putin and a close assistant, confirming the suspicion that it could be bullied even by non-parties to the Rome Statute that states adhered to if seeking status as parties, active in the work of the ICC.

Such haste with respect to Russia was not at all evident in relation to Gaza, despite the far greater urgency, considering the magnitude and severity of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe facing the Palestinian people. To date it has withheld a meaningful response to the legal effort of Chile and Mexico to have the ICC investigate allegations against Israel. These two governments were seeking an ICC investigation and appropriate responses to the violations of the Genocide Convention by Israel in the course of carrying out its retaliatory attack on Gaza after October 7 that seemed designed to ignore the civilian innocence of the Palestinian people in Gaza in a prolonged process of imposing collective punishment on an occupied people, itself a violation of Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention.  This difference in ICC responses to these two initiatives reinforced an impression of double standards in the tribunal’s treatment of allegations of international crimes. In this instance the behavior of the ICC contrasted unfavorably with the laudable efforts of ICJ to do what it could do by way of declaring the relevant international law. The effectiveness of the ICJ Interim Orders was hampered by its inability to induce compliance by Israel or enforcement by the UN. These unfortunate frustrations were also attributable in part to the complicity of the liberal democracies in aiding and justifying Israel’s response to the Hamas attack.

Is the ICC Escaping from its Bad Reputation Thanks to Israel?

Against this background, it was inevitable that the ICC would be widely viewed as a weak institution, above all by not initially obtaining participation or cooperation of such important states as the US, Russia, China, and of course, Israel. In this regard, the ICC was most unfavorably compared to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to which all members of the UN were automatically parties. The ICJ was widely respect for maintaining a high degree of professionalism and juridical dignity in the course of assessing the merits of legal disputes referred to the tribunal for adjudication even when geopolitical strategic interests were present. This positive reputation of the ICJ was greatly enhanced by its near unanimous Interim Orders of January and March 2024 granting several Provisional Measures requested by South Africa to impede Israel’s behavior that seemed to lay a plausible basis for concluding that Israel was guilty of ‘genocide’ in Gaza, although no such conclusion was reached, and the substantive legal status of the genocide allegation deferred until the ICJ rendered its decision on the merits.

Israel was also legally ordered by the ICJ to allow humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians without interference, at least until the final judgment on the merits of the genocide contention could be rendered.  This was expected to happen in years hence after the ICJ had an opportunity to respond to further elaborate oral and written pleadings by the parties and those actors given leave to intervene. This process was expected to last for several years, quite likely reducing the existential relevance of the ICJ judgment as the killing would have hopefully have stopped long before the Court had time to rule. The decision would still have jurisprudential value as an authoritative interpretation of the crime of genocide, and might give rise to the establishment  of preventive and early response mechanisms in anticipation of future genocides. It is possible that the passage of time would reduce the intensity of partisan geopolitics, creating a better atmosphere for cooperative moves to strengthen the global normative order against futue outbreaks of genocidal violence.

Despite the cautious legal professionalism of the ICJ a nearly unanimous panel of the seventeen judges found Israel sufficiently responsible for ‘plausible genocide’ to grant Provisional Measures in response to South Africa’s request. [Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel, ICJ Orders, 192, 20240126 & 192 20240328, ProvMesures)]; [see also systematic assessment of Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide,’ A/HRC/55/73, 25 March 2024].

These orders legally require Israel to take a variety of steps to stop engaging in genocidal behavior including interference with efforts to deliver food and medicine to starving and desperate Palestinians huddled together in dangerously crowded collective misery in the small city of Rafah on the Egyptian border. The prospect of bloody extensions of genocide are daily proposed by Israeli leaders in their murderous attacks on Rafah, much overcrowded condition resulting from sheltering large numbers of Palestinian civilians. Israel also issued a series of evacuation orders purporting to shift Palestinians to ‘safe zones,’ but in practice subjecting even these areas in Central Gaza to devastating attacks. This pattern of evacuation orders and continuous attack has  put the finishing touches on Israel’s actions that are more and more widely perceived as repudiations of the minimal moral sensibilities of a common humanity as well as carrying out mortal threats to the life prospects of Palestinians now estimated at over 186,000 by the highly respected medical journal, Lancet. This higher figure than the death statistcs compiled and verified by Gaza Public Health sources the direct Israeli violence, results from counting as deaths attributable to the attacks, Palestinians missing as presumably buried beneath piles of rubble, as well as the deaths caused by starvation, malnutrition, inadequate sanitation.  Using the Lancet estimate of the proportionate loss of life in Gaza (without taking account of injuries, physical and mental) if occurred in US society would amount to 2,900,000 fataities, which is a figure greater than the total loss of American loss of lives in all the wars of the entire 20th century.

A Redemptive Moment for the ICC?

If asked even a week ago, I would have said that Bibi Netanyahu would have been the very last person on the planet to come to the institutional rescue of the ICC, although he did so in a backhanded way. Netanyahu leaped to respond after leaked rumors suggested that the ICC was on the verge of issuing arrest warrants naming Netanyahu, the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, and Army Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi. Somehow this prospect so agitated Netanyahu that he chose to go on the offensive in advance of any formal action. His five-minute video tirade against the ICC is worth watching by everyone—

 https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1785362914519519597?s  1-–if only to get a sense of just how potentially formidable the ICC might become if it performs in conformity with its statute. On balance, if it takes Netanyahu’s misplaced sense of outrage to shame the ICC into finally doing its job, so be it.

At the same time Netanyahu’s gross distortions of what was happening in Gaza were extreme enough to provide valuable material to late night TV humorists. The obvious purpose of Netanyahu’s tirade was to whitewash over six months of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe imperiling the individual and collective survival of the long abused civilian population of Gaza.  Israeli behavior is so macabre as to be beyond the realm of good-natured, apolitical comedy, providing more of an occasion for weeping and mourning the lost and ravaged lives, and devasted cities, hospitals, places of worship, schools, and UN facilities.

It is within this setting that the ICC seems to have been given an opportunity to act finally in accordance with its mandate, to redeem its reputation for spinelessness, and strike a symbolic blow in the increasingly worldwide struggle to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It is technically possible and undoubtedly politically tempting for the prosecutor to disappoint these expectations by limiting ICC action against Israeli and Hamas leaders to their alleged  pre-October 7 crimes. Such an evasion would be within scope of the 2015 initiative of Palestine, a party to the Rome Statute, which was initiated in such a manner that any crime after 2014 was potentially indictable. Such an evasion would be a double disappointment for those seeking to increase pressure on Israel to accept a ceasefire followed by a series of restorative acts that could include redress, reparations, accountability, and reconstruction punitive directives.

We are left with the puzzle of why Israel’s reaction to the ICC, in view of its low institutional esteem, was seen as so much more threatening to Israel than the more authoitative directives of the far more established ICJ. Could it be that the criminal character of the ICC and the personal nature of arrest warrants are more of an emotional pushback than  mere legal rulings? Or was the ICC perceived as low hanging fruit, which even Israel took respectful account of the ICJ legal proceeding, and participated both in appointing a prominent Israeli jurist as an ad hoc judge and by taking part in the proceedings by offering a defense of their actions in Gaza.

Netanyahu phrased his key argument against the arrest warrants as posing a mortal threat to the right of democracies to defend themselves against their evil enemies, singling out Iran.  Such a view, reverses the perceptions of peoples throughout the world excepting those governments and right-wing elements that support  Israel in the Global West and the hardest core Zionist ideologues. Increasingly, even in the strongholds of Zionist influence, softer versions of Zionism and more independent Jewish voices are siding with the pro-Palestine protesters, reacting against the stark reality of genocide.

A Concluding Remark

We should all know by now that Israel has no intention of complying with international law no matter what the source of authority. In this sense, the importance of the ICJ and potentially, the ICC, is to strengthen the growing tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment around the world, and an emerging consensus to escalate civic solidarity initiatives of the sort that contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam despite total battlefield military superiority and that doomed the South African apartheid regime. In this regard, the utterances of the most influential international institutions entrusted with interpreting international law have more impact in high profile political situations such as exist in Gaza, than does do either the ICJ or ICC, and for that matter, than even the UNSC. Once again if the Palestine people do finally realize their basic rights, it will be thanks to the resistance of those victimized as reinforced by the transnational activism of people everywhere.  It may be in launching his vitriolic attack on the ICC, Netanyahu was subconsciously delivering his\ mendacious sermon to the aroused peoples of the world. 

We now know that the Prosecutor of the ICC did recommend to a sub-commission in the form of a panel of judges the issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, and so far no decision has been forthcoming. Notable, also, was the omission of genocide from the crimes charged to the Israeli leadership. The US reacted with anger, as exhibited by President Biden, that the ICC Prosecutor seemed to create a moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorist organization, Hamas. Critics of Israel and complicit states in contrast objected to the equivalency but from an opposite position—making an attack justified by Hamas’ right of resistance within the limits of international humanitarian law equivalent to Israel’s 9+ months of genocide.

Perhaps needless to observe, the ICC has yet to deliver its judgment.

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‘Occupied’ Palestine: Jerusalem Annexed, Gaza Genocide, West Bank Apartheid

20 Jun

[Prefatory Note: RAF interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, published in Truthout, May 13, 2024, and republished here with modifications of my responses to reflect intervening developments. In the month since the initial publication, the situation as described below has become even more severely abusive toward the civilian population of Gaza, with the Israeli Government making no effort to uphold its legal or moral responsibilities as Occupying Power to protect the Occupied Palestinian People under its administrative control as requi red in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. The Israeli Government has exhibited a total absence of empathy, in policies and practices that exemplify the worst features of the international crime of apartheid. Even if life in Gaza quiets down, housing restored, Israel security forces withdrawn and some gestures of normalization have been made, the situation in the West Bank, unless modified, will continue to exhibit apartheid characteristics generating a different kind of humanitarian catastrophe. Overall, the Palestinian future can only be redeemed by terminating the Israeli role at the earliest possible time and internationally enforcing the dismantling of Israeli settlements, removal of settlers, and the termination of Israel’s administrative presence and repression. The UN although reporting and documenting human rights violations committed by Israel has so far lacked, in the face of P5 strategic support of Israel, the ability or relevant political will to implement its own recommendations relating to compliance with international humanitarian law. That which is humanly necessary seems politically impossible; the result is a moral scandal of global significance, and a human tragedy brought on my unspeakable and persistent criminality.]

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Israel Continues Unfettered Colonization of the West Bank Amid Genocide in Gaza

Daniel Falcone: The West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the Zionist settler movement’s pursuit of a “Greater Israel.” Amid the genocidal campaign in Gaza, Israel has expanded its settlement project and markedly increased colonial violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians. “Killings are taking place at a level without recent precedent” in the occupied West Bank, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, international relations scholar Richard Falk reminds us of the reality and aims of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Falk details the degradation, starvation, human rights abuses, unchecked political power and resource control in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also explains the U.S.’s aims in the West Bank and how they differ from those in Gaza.

Daniel Falcone: With a lot of the attention on Gaza due to the extremity of Israel’s bombing in Rafah, the West Bank is sometimes overlooked in media reports and political discussions about the ongoing Palestinian struggle for survival. How can we understand the differences between Israel’s strategic aims in Gaza and the West Bank?

Bottom of Form

Richard Falk: The three territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and the Gaza Strip have experienced rather different conditions of occupation and governance during the 57 years of Israeli control, none of them with remotely positive results.

The whole of Jerusalem was officially declared by the Knesset in 2019 to be “the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel.” Such a unilateral action on Israel’s part was incompatible with international humanitarian law. It also violated the letter and spirit of unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 242, which immediately after the 1967 War looked toward the complete withdrawal of Israel’s occupying armed forces in the near-term future with an unspecified consideration give Israeli demands for “minor border adjustments.” It has always been a Palestinian demand and expectation of most international advocates of a two-state solution that East Jerusalem would be the capital of any future Palestinian state. This Palestinian position has been generally regarded as an integral element of the UN consensus that developed around the widespread support for “a two-state solution” that persists today despite many reasons to believe it would not be sustainable.

In 1967 Gaza was deemed the third and least important element in the administration of the occupied territories that came under Israel’s control during the war. Its status was viewed ambivalently at first, mainly because it was deemed outside the Zionist project. The Zionist commitment to return to “the promised land” that formed the geographic contours of the Zionist vision of a Jewish supremacy state was not included in most versions of Zionist thought and political vision. It also seemed overcrowded and imporverished at first, possessing little economic promise from Israel’s point of view. Nevertheless, in the period of 1967 to 2005 Gaza was treated by Israel as part of Occupied Palestine, with an intrusive and abusive IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military presence, and the unlawful establishment of Jewish settlements along the Gaza coast that became home for 8,000 Jewish settlers. The administration of Gaza was long viewed by Tel Aviv as an economic burden and security challenge for Israel, and a center of Palestinian resistance radicalism.

The major resistance initiative directed at Israeli occupation known as the First Intifada originated in Gaza in 1987, challenging both Israel and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat and the coalition of secular Palestinian groups known under the rubric of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. In 2005, Israel formally “disengaged” from Gaza, contending that the withdrawal of its armed forces and the dismantling of its settlements relieved Israel of further responsibilities as Occupier in Gaza, with possible future peace solutions for the Gaza Strip as involving of some sort of federated arrangement whereby Gaza would become subject to the sovereign control of Jordan and/or Egypt. This Israeli interpretation of disengagement was rejected by the UN and both Arab states. They considered Israel’s revised approach to Gaza as nothing more substantive than a redeployment of IDF ground forces to just across the Israeli border coupled with the maintenance of total control of Gaza’s air space and offshore waters. The approach also included a tight regulation of the entry and exit of persons and goods to and from the Strip. Despite announcing “disengagement” as a step toward peace Israel never overcame the perception of Gaza as “the largest open-air prison” in the world, which for many in Gaza, including secular Palestinians, meant growing sympathy with and support for Hamas as dedicated to active struggle to obtain Palestinian sovereign territory.

The complex Gaza narrative after disengagement included the unexpected 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, previously listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU, as well as Israel. Despite Hamas agreeing to forego “armed struggle,” in 2007 Israel imposed a strict and economically punitive blockade of goods and persons seeking to leave or enter Gaza, engaging in periodic major military operations, described by Israeli security advisors as ‘mowing the lawn’ and putting the population on what was unfeelingly described as “a diet” by restricting the import of food.  Despite Israel’s repressive moves and military incursions, Hamas put forward long-term ceasefire and co-existence proposals that were ignored by Tel Aviv and Washington. When such an effort to suspend the violent aspects of the conflict failed, Hamas revived it resistance struggle. A creative nonviolent campaign of resistance known as “the Great March of Return” attributed to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, as well as Hamas, was met with deadly Israeli sniper violence in 2018 at the border, including the apparenr lethal targeting of well-marked journalists.

Finally, Israel’s provocations and the Hamas-led attack of October 7 set the stage for the latest genocidal phase of Israel’s presence, combining the wrongs of occupation with many crimes of oppression, dehumanization, devastation, starvation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, culminating in genocide. It seemed that as of 2024, Gaza is strategically and economically far more important to the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government and its settler temperament than it was earlier. This is due to the discovery of extensive offshore oil and gas deposits, and a reported interest in a major engineering undertaking that has blueprinted the Israeli construction of a Ben Gurion Canal traversing part of Gazan territory, with the goal of creating an alternative to the Suez Canal. While the devastation Gaza was still a daily reality, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obscenely proposed luxury waterfront homes for settlers in a Gaza emptied of Palestinians.

It is against this background that the West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the pursuit of “Greater Israel,” which was the animating ideal of the settler movement. Maany settlers were closely allied with the extreme right Religious Zionism coalition partner of the Netanyahu-led government that took over the governance of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in January 2023. From its first days of governance, it became clear that Israel was preparing to push to completion a maximal version of the Zionist Project. Israeli radicalism along these lines was exhibited by the greenlighting of settler violence on the West Bank that included a series of inflammatory incidents intended to make the Palestinians feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own homeland. The occupying government in Tel Aviv revealed its orientation through tacitly approving settler violence rather than responsibly fulfilling their legal duties to protect Palestinian residents. Crimes against West Bank Palestinian residents, including land seizures and gratuitous vigilante violence, were not only tolerated but applauded by rightist members of Netanyahu’s inner circle.

Of supplemental relevance was the official endorsement of increasing the settlement population in the West Bank by expanding building permits and territorial extensions to settlers and their settlements — already estimated to number 700,000 (500,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem). This move to ensure Israeli permanence on the West Bank was combined with the acceleration of diplomacy that focused on forming a de facto alliance with Sunni-dominated Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and the containment and destabilization of Shiite-dominated Iran. Further, Netanyahu’s September 2023 performance at the UN General Assembly in which he arrogantly displayed a map of “the new Middle East” on which Palestine was erased — treated as nonexistent — must have made a show of Palestinian resistance imperative.

These elements are the background context preceding the Hamas-led attack of October 7. The true character of the attack itself needs to be internationally investigated, given the extensive and credible warnings given to the Israeli government, Israel’s ultra-sophisticated surveillance capabilities, and the inflated initial accounts that blamed Hamas for all the most barbaric crimes allegedly committed during the attack. Some of the initial macabre claims of October 7 were later discredited and even modified by Israel. The most suspicious element of the Israeli response was its readiness to embark upon a genocidal campaign, which, while concentrated on Hamas and Gaza, seems also intended to induce a second Nakba with major secondary impacts on the West Bank residential security of Palestinians.

In the months preceding the Hamas-led attack, the West Bank had been the scene of increased settler violence and a heightening of the IDF’s repressive tactics. In the years before October 7, Israel was found guilty of the international crime of apartheid in a series of well-documented reports compiled by objective, expert sources (Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’tselem). Liberal democracies and the mainstream media refused to acknowledge this damaging consensus bearing on the legitimacy of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and instead smeared and blacklisted Israel’s critics. The US Government deflected questions from the media, refusing to respond substantively and opting for institutional silence despite the mounting evidence and legal analysis of objective sources.

In addition to the settlements, Palestinian property rights, mobility and security of residence were undermined and threatened in various ways in the West Bank. Palestinian land was further encroached upon at the end of the 20th century by the construction of a separation wall between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank that expropriated additional Palestine-owned land and divided villages such as Bil’in. Although this mode of constructing the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was found to be illegal by a near unanimous majority of the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2003, Israel defied the findings of the Advisory Opinion, as requested by the UN General Assembly over the objections of the US and Israel. In the end Israel continued its wall project without deference to international law or international procedures of accountability.

Israel’s rejection of attempts to establish Palestinian statehood with sovereign rights within delimited borders have long concentrated upon the West Bank. This pattern goes back as long ago as 1947, when the UN approved a controversial plan for the partition of Palestine relying on internal and international borders derived from the British mandate over Palestine. In the dark shadows being cast by the Holocaust and given influence by Zionist pressures, there emerged a UN consensus that the only viable solution for the struggle of the two peoples claiming Palestine as their homeland was to split sovereign rights between two equal states, assumed to be named Israel and Palestine.

Distinguished commentators from both peoples opposed such a territorial division for a variety of reasons, well summarized from a Jewish perspective in Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile and from a Palestinian perspective in the later writings of Edward Said.

Always the central question, even if often left implicit, was the destiny of the West Bank and its residents, as well as whether Palestinian “security” would be restricted by demilitarization and dependence on Israeli forbearance in the two-state models, and whether the Zionist commitment to a Jewish supremacist state, as projected in Israel’s 2018 Basic Laww, could be accommodated or needed to be modified in the one-state models.

Falcone: What are the U.S. goals in the West Bank and how do they differ from its Gaza policy?

Falk: The U.S. has a strong reputational interest in retaining the identity of the West Bank as Occupied Palestinian Territory. If Israel extends its sovereignty over the West Bank, which it has long claimed should be classified as “disputed territory” rather than “occupied territory,” it would bring to a screeching halt any further pretense by the U.S. government to be serious about the advocacy of a “two-state solution.”

Trump’s proposed “deal of the century” contained a nominal Palestinian mini state to sustain the illusion that the interests of both peoples were being considered, but it failed to fool almost no one, including two-state advocates that naively envisioned two states with equal sovereign rights and sovereign control over national security policy. .

American credibility as an “honest broker” in the Oslo Peace Process, and elsewhere, was greatly eroded by its gradual acquiescence in the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank despite their patent illegality and their negative impacts on a meaningful political compromise embedded in the final territorial allocation  of Palestine between the two peoples. The U.S.’s mild reaction to settlement expansion was limited to the muffled whisper that such behavior “was not helpful.” In actuality it was essential to the validation of the Israeli network of settlements.

By now, given the bipartisan U.S. endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its repeated use of the veto to block a meaningful ceasefire directive and a widely supported initiative to treat Palestine as a full member of the UN, I believe that the U.S. could not any longer put itself forward as a trustworthy intermediary in any future bilateral negotiating process. It would covertly and overtly become Israel’s international sword and shield, exhibiting the extreme partisanship of the US while its leaders and media falsely claiming that the American posture supports adherence to international law and diplomatic balance.

With regard to the differing interests of the U.S. in the West Bank and Gaza, it comes down to two issues: first, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza, while maintaining Israel’s legitimacy as an occupying power in the West Bank and insulating its violations of international humanitarian law from UN censure, boycotts and sanctions; and secondly, recognizing that the West Bank is the integral core of a Palestinian state.


Falcone: How does Israel complicate the work on the ground by scholars, activists and elected officials? The fact that the two regions are separate seems to make the problem even more insurmountable. 

Falk: The differing character of Israel’s approaches to the two areas creates many complications for those who seek normal operating conditions. Gaza is considered by Tel Aviv to be administered by Hamas, a terrorist entity in its view, whereas the West Bank is co-administered with the quasi-collaborationist Palestinian Authority to ensure that resistance activities are minimized, or when occurring, treated punitively by Palestinian security forces. Even peaceful forms of resistance face harsh punishment in the form of Palestinian enforcement , and since Israel came under more extremist leadership, the conditions of daily life have become so unpleasant and dangerous that some Palestinians are being forced to leave for neighboring countries, and accept the loss of their homeland, becoming refugees or exiles, harboring resentment and hatred resulting from their mistreatment in what was their homeland.

Until recently the balance of opinion in Israel was wary about any Israeli state that purported to include Gaza. This wariness was associated with Israeli concerns about an emergent “demographic bomb” accompanying any attempt to absorb an additional 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinians with high fertility rates into Greater Israel. As Israel has replaced its liberal democratic façade with a hardening apartheid regime the issue of democratic legitimacy has receded.

In the West Bank, Israel was nervous about the effect of civil society activism, and even scholarly work and cultural expressiveness, generating unfavorable international publicity as to the nature of such a prolonged occupation. As mentioned, the Israeli occupation is currently being challenged at the ICJ following a General Assembly request to legally assess the continued validity of Israel’s administrative role, given the passage of time, unlawful practices, and frequent recourse to severe forms of collective punishment. This UN effort to challenge Israel’s occupation comes after 57 years without the slightest sign of willingness to implement the withdrawal of Israeli forces envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and in the face of numerous flagrant continuing violations of international humanitarian law. Quite the contrary, as Israel seems more dug into a permanent domineering presence in the West Bank.

Even prior to the present Netanyahu government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued decrees in 2021 banning the activities of respected West Bank NGOs by classifying them “terrorist organizations.” Elected Palestinian leaders have been harassed and imprisoned despite Israel’s collaboration on security and administrative funding over the years with the Palestinian Authority, which is distrusted and disapproved by a growing number of Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Territories.

Falcone: What is the role of the West Bank in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy? 

Falk: The West Bank is an indispensable component of Biden’s persistent, although half-hearted advocacy of a two-state solution. This advocacy was always half-hearted and never a persuasive expression of genuine U.S. policy intentions. The two-state mantra seems more and more like a public relations posture to satisfy world public opinion as time passes without the slightest expectation that it will ever be realized except possibly in some nominal form. If it had been a genuine goal, Biden would have challenged Israeli moves of recent years, which became more pronounced since the Netanyahu coalition took over in 2023. Even if Biden is regard as lacking high intelligence, few regard him as so stupid that he remains oblivious to Israel’s quest for a Greater Israel.

 It was an open secret that this extremist coalition was committed to the unilateral completion of the Zionist Project by establishing Greater Israel in the shortest possible time even if it required brute force and massive ethnic cleansing to get the job done. Extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank would have the consequence of making even formalistic adherence to two-state advocacy a sign of geopolitical ignorance, so out of touch with the geographic contours of Palestinian statehood as to be in the category of a bad joke.

A viable Palestinian state presupposes full sovereign rights over the West Bank, which must include territorial governance and the substantial dismantlement of the settlements. Neither seems likely to happen if Zionist ideology continues to shape the policy of the Israeli state. It would be awkward for Biden to be asked what kind of Palestinian state does the U.S. favor. He likely would be inclined to answer evasively by saying that “it is up to the parties.” But if he was forthright, it would probably look like a permanently demilitarized Palestinian state with settlements governed according to Israeli law, exempted from territorial regulation, and traveling on roads for Jews only to and from Israel proper. Such a Palestinian state might could possibly the formal requirements of statehood, but it would be a nonstarter for many Palestinians, who continue to insist on their inalienable right of self-determination. The long Palestinian ordeal, stretching over the course of more than a century, would not be ended by the willingness of Israel to allow the formation of a puppet state. After its complicity in the Gaza genocide, the US, as well as any other NATO and G7 should be ruled out of any future part in a genuine peace diplomacy. It is a dangerous sign that the US geopolitical weight is still great enough to allow it to put forward a post-Gaza peace initiative that even Israel is willing to endorse, and so is Hamas. The days of American leadership in global diplomacy should have ended during its months of being a facilitator of the crudest and most transparent genocide of all history, transmitted by images and on site commentary in real time to the peoples of the world.

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Palestine, Iran, and Populist Resistance: The Limits of Law, Morality, and the UN

3 May

[Prefatory Note: An interview with the Qods News Agency (Qodsna), the first specialized news agency in Iran, focusing on issues related to the Palestinian cause. The interview was published a week ago in Iran, and is reprinted in modified form that seeks to take account of the Palestinian struggle as connected with wider regional and global conflict patterns, and is giving rise to worldwidestudent protests against genocide and complicity with genocide, as well as a tidal wave of global consciousness sweeping away the cobwebs of political and moral complacency.]

  1. Given the fact that Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and prevented the entry of international humanitarian aid into the besieged strip, what is your opinion on nearly 200 days of onslaught in Gaza and its aftermath on Palestinians’ lives? How do you describe the genocidal onslaught and war crimes in Gaza?

What has taken place over the last 200 days in Gaza is the most transparent genocide in all of human history. It is the first time that the daily atrocities were broadcast and seen by the peoples of the world in real time. Past genocides have been known almost totally in retrospect through official reports, films and memoirs, which reconstruct horrifying events but after a passage of time. Those Palestinians who managed to survive physically such sustained violence of this extreme character are reported to be suffering from mental disabilities that could persist for their entire life. It is a tragic, dehumanizing ordeal, above all for children. It is further shocking that Israel should remain insulated from denunciation and accountability despite its continuing practice of such extreme criminality.

Genocide should be understood to exist from three quite distinct moral, political, and legal perspectives. The moral perspective is made clear in Gaza by the declared intentions, policies, and practices of Israel’s highest leaders, and carried out in a totally disproportionate, indiscriminate, and lawless manner, and aggravated by consistently sadistic and demeaning treatment of Palestinian civilians who fall under the control of the Israeli armed forces. The political perspective is established in Gaza by numerous trustworthy witnesses and victims, as well as by vivid visual evidence of genocide in line of justifications adopted by Israel and its supporters. Yet the political assurances about the commission of genocide is vulnerable, as here, to the be overridden by geopolitical considerations and strategic calculations. The legal perspective relies on the presentation of evidence and interpretations of international law, above all by the delineation of genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Provisional conclusions as to international law can be derived from the opinions of legal experts holding important professional positions. For instance, the current UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, Francesca Albanese issued an excellent report in March 25, 2024 entitled ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ [A/HRC/55/73]that carefully analyzed the elements of the crime and concluded that the facts and law supported the allegation of genocide. And yet until a qualified national or international tribunal with jurisdictional authority to assess the charge of genocide examines the evidence and hears the arguments of the defendant government or political actor it is impossible to say with technical propriety that the behavior in question is genocide from a legal perspective.

2-How can the world public put pressure on governments to force Israel to stop atrocities in Gaza?

It has proven difficult to challenge Israel effectively at the UN and elsewhere. Powerful countries in the Global West are complicit in supporting Israel’s policies and practices, including Israel’s misleading claim that it possesses an unlimited right to defend itself in response to the Hamas attack of October 7. The liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America are prominent among governments lending varieties of support to Israel that extends to endorsing Israel’s gross distortions of facts and law, which has had a detrimental effect on the authority of international law and the UN. The US above all has been guilty of double standards, using international law as a policy instrument to attack its adversaries such as Russia and China and disregarding its relevance with respect to the behavior of allies and friends such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and India.

It is important to also understand the more passive complicity of Israel’s main Sunni Arab neighbors that fear challenges from Hamas-type Islamic movements more than intrusions on their autocratic stability associated with the establishment of Israel or post-colonial intrusions by Western powers. It was a surprise to many in the West that the governments of Jordan and Saudi Arabia cooperated in defending Israel on April 13 against the Iranian retaliation for Israel’s April 1st attack on its Syrian consular facility, killing two of its top military advisors. This pattern of regime politics in the Arab world does not reflect the outlook of the population in these countries, which shares a strong affinity with the Palestinian struggle and is often oriented with Islamic leadership of populist, protest Arab politics as was evident during and after the Arab Spring.

South Africa has been applauded widely for taking the initiative to bring allegations of genocide to the International Court of Justice under Article XI of the Genocide Convention that legally empowers any party to the treaty to bring a dispute with another party before the ICJ. Although the ICJ rose above politics by rendering an historically important, near unanimous interim decision granting several of South Africa’s requests for Provisional Measures on January 26, 2024. Unfortunately, this preliminary ICJ order had little behavioral effect as Israel defied the interim obligatory adjustments in Gaza pending a subsequent decision on whether the allegation of genocide has been legally established after fully weighing pro and con arguments.

Israeli defiance and US dismissive attitude toward the authority of the ICJ given its view of Israeli violence in Gaza fully exposed ‘a UN crisis of implementation’ of great significance. Given Israel’s refusal to comply meant that any effort to enforce the ICJ Interim Orders would depend on action by the Security Council, which would almost certainly be vetoed by the United States. Additionally, an ICJ decision on the merits with respect to genocide must await comprehensive oral arguments and written pleadings, as well as the time needed by the judges to do their own inquiries, a legal process that would not be completed for several years, which would likely be after present emergency conditions in Gaza had been resolved for better or worse.

Nevertheless, the ICJ Interim Order was an impressive vindication of international law and a legitimating demonstration of the legal professionalism and political independence of the Court. It has also had an authenticating impact on the governments of the Global South and even more worldwide in relation to civil society, including even in the United States and other complicit countries where the surge of student pro-Palestinian protest activism cannot be wholly disconnected from the authoritative findings of the ICJ disregard in policy by Washington almost as much as by Tel Aviv. Whether this pressure will remain robust enough to result in coercive actions by way of boycotts and sanctions, and pariah status, remains to be seen, but at minimum it suggests that even in this unfavorable political setting international law and populist activism offer some hope that genocide can be stopped and its perpetrators held accountable, if not formally, then by the action of peoples around the world.   

3-What do you think about Palestinian resistance fighters’ right to initiate the October 7 operation against Israel?

The right of resistance on the part of a people long occupied and abused is well established. Prior to October 7, Israel’s commission of the crime of apartheid in its manner of governing the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian minority in Israel had been documented in detailed reports by several of the most respected human rights NGOs including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as by the Israeli NGO, B’tselem, and by UN’s ESCWA.

While the right to resist is certainly justified by the conditions imposed over the long period of occupation, which featured Israeli failure to uphold its duty as Occupying Power to protect Palestinian civilians under its control, it does not confer unlimited rights of resistance. Tactics of resistance, as for other armed groups including those operating under the authority of a sovereign state, are obliged to comply with international criminal law, and not abuse or target civilians, impose collective punishment, and commit atrocities. Yet unlike the apartheid and genocide allegations against Israel, there is as yet no authoritative account of what happened on October 7. There were, at first, luridly exaggerated claims of barbarous behavior reported to the world by Israel, but later modified by retractions and much skepticism about Israel’s depiction of events on that day. Until an international factfinding commission is established and given full cooperation there will be doubt about the extent to which the criminality of the Hamas attack tainted its resistance claims, and the degree to which Israel itself was negligent about heeding warnings and otherwise responsible for the lapse of border security.

4-How can the Palestinian people achieve their rights and overcome the ongoing occupation?

The Palestinian people are winning the struggle for public support in civil society and among many governments in the Global South. The rise of popular support for Palestinian rights even in complicit governments may erode somewhat their willingness to continue normal relations with Israel. Whether this political post-Gaza reappraisal is enough at this stage to make a difference with regard to ending Israeli occupation is not clear at present. Prior anti-settler colonial struggles have been eventually won by a colonized people if they manage to survive the almost inevitable genocidal assault by settlers to their existence. The breakaway British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand managed through genocidal tactics to marginalize or eliminate the resistance of native and indigenous peoples and complete their settler colonial projects; South Africa failed, and the project collapsed. Israel is in that space where it will either join the settler colonial ‘success’ stories or it will succumb to national resistance, with Jews either giving up the Jewish supremacy claims of Zionism or finding a means to coexist with Palestinians on the basis of true equality and mutual respect, presupposing a honest accounting of the past as with some sort of truth and reconciliation process that has smoothed a transition from repressiveness to constitutionalism. The best example of managing such a transition was South Africa, benefitting from the leadership of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, yet also experiencing bumps in the road along the way. Its pro-Palestinian ICJ initiative was a symbolically important way of honoring the enduring legacy of Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle.

5-As you know, Israel attacked Iran’s consulate, killing its military advisors in Syria which is considered contrary to international conventions, which prompted a military response by the country. What is your take on Iran’s punitive response to Israel, especially in terms of international laws?

The Iranian retaliatory strike against Israel caused neither deaths nor damage, although had its array of missiles and large number of drones not been destroyed, it might have had a war-generating disproportionate effect. The interpretation of Iran’s retaliation remains ambiguous. Did it intend to display its military capabilities to attack Israel directly without inflicting major damage or was it an operational failure in the sense that the intention was to be as destructive as possible. Without clarity on this question, it is impossible to make an intelligent assessment of the relevance of international law to the events of April 13th.

The legal status of retaliatory violence is a gray area of conflicting opinions among law experts, often colored by political identities and jurisprudential orientations. On the one side are legalists who suggest that all retaliations violate the UN Charter and international law by validating uses of international force only in situations of a sustained armed attack across an international border. By this reading even a modest retaliation against the Damascus attack was not lawful.

As with other issues, this strict reading of international law is not descriptive of international practice with respect to acts of retaliation, which in practice over the years validate ‘reasonable’ retaliations so long as proportionate in relation to the provocation. Israel’s second attack on Iran, however, would seem to be unlawful as it ignored the reality that it initiating the cycle of violence on April 1st by its lethal attack on Iran’s consular facility in Damascus, and to regard it as entitled by any standard of law or reasonableness would tend to continue the cycle of interactive violence indefinitely.

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Biden’s Warning to Netanyahu: Political Maneuver, Not Policy Shift

6 Apr

[Prefatory Note: The post below contains modified responses to questions posed by a Brazilian journalist, Rodrigo Creviero on 4/4/2024. It is critical of President Joe Biden’s ‘muscular approach’ to the conduct of foreign policy, specifically in relation to China, Russia, and Israel, as played out at the expense of the peoples of the world, including the real interests of the American people. Biden is guilty of war-mongering, reluctance to engage in peace diplomacy, and complicity crimes of support given to Israel while carrying out a prolonged genocide against the long abused civilian population of Gaza along with demonizing and dehumanizing the resistance leadership exhibited by Hamas. In reactions to past genocides the US has done less to oppose their perpetrators than it should  have, but never before has it been an active accomplice, and in the process, undermining the authority of the most widely endorsed norms of international law and demeaned the institutions and procedures internationally available for purposes of interpretation and enforcement.]


1– Biden urged Netanyahu to reach “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza and called on Israel to act in the “next hours and days” in the face of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. How do you see that?

Biden’s call for concrete steps to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches Palestinians in Gaza comes very late, given a geocidal assault on the civilian population that is in its sixth month. Also, the effort to persuade Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire was not elaborated with the same urgency or seriousness as the humanitarian insistence on allowing aid to reach starving Palestinians. A cessation of Gaza violence has long been vital if further devastation of Palestinians is to be minimized, if not avoided, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its January 26 Interim Order decreed in support of South Africa’s plea for Provisional Measures as a response to its preliminary conclusion that it was ‘plausible’ to regard Israel’s violence in Gaza as genocide, the highest international crime that cannot be excused because of claims of self-defense or national security. It is notable that legal absolutism when it comes to genocide is supported by near unanimity among the 17 judges composing the adjudicating panel of jurists, and including judges from the United States, Germany, France, and Australia whose governments had supported Israel’s response to October 7. The ICJ was widely applauded for following the law rather than flags of nationaal allegience, analyzing facts and relevant norms of international law despite the face that the Security Council failed to implement its Interim Order and Israel defied its Interim Order. What the ICJ ordered jnfluenced the symbolic domain of international by legitimating concerns about genocide in Gaza and legitimting the resolve of civil society groups.

Biden’s highly publicized move seems primarily motivated by two developments other than a late surge of empathy for Palestinian suffering: first, shifts in US public opinion away from unconditional support for Israel, which are endangering his prospects for victory in the November presidential election and the fact that Monday’s clearly deliberate attack on the aid convoy of the World Central Kitchen resulted in the death of seven Europeans, sparking media outrage and anger among those governments that had been among Israel’s supporters. No such anger in Washington or hostile media attention were given to prior and worse atrocities responsible for mass casualties among children and women so long as the victims were Palestinians. The surfacing of these concerns, especially in the US, help explain why the public disclosure of the Biden/Netanyahu phone call occurred with official blessings. Such sensitive tensions between previous allies are not normally addressed with such transparency. Such diplomatic moves are considered more effective if carried on secretly, or at least discreetly. Biden evidently was more concerned about winning back Democratic Party voters and reassuring European allies that Western lives should be treated as off-limits for Israel in the future.

Even more disturbing was the explicit support given by Biden to Israel’s recent provocative actions directed at Iran during the 30 minute phone call. The leaders spoke in the aftermath of a targeted attack on April 1st that killed seven Iranian military advisors (including three commanders) while they were present in Iran’s consular building in Damascus, a location entitled by international law to immunity from attack.

Such provocations risk a devastating wider war. Iran has declared its intention to retaliate rather than be passive in the face of Israeli military strikes and assassination of prominent Iranian military commanders, and other violations of Iranian sovereignty by Israel. Given this background, Biden publicized reassurance of support for Israel’s provocations acts as a signal to Netanyahu, facing frustrations in Gaza, rejection by Israelis, and possible imprisonment in Israel on past charges of corruption, to embark upon a wider war with Iran in ways that will exert great pressure on the US to become actively involved in the military operations likely to result and divert attention from policy failures of Israel during these past months.

2—How do you analyze this intensifying of pressure by United States against Israel now?

It seems belated, and partial at best, and easily managed by Tel Aviv without any changes in its approach to Hamas or Palestinian statehood. As suggested, it could tempt Netanyahu to embroil Israel, but also Iran, in a regional war with global dimensions. As suggested, Netanyahu is extremely unpopular among Israelis, with growing protests against his leadership. These factors undoubtedly creates temptations on Netanyahu’s part to divert attention from the failure of Hamas war policy, both as a military operation and in making Israel a pariah or rogue state in the eyes of the peoples of the world, and an increasing number of governments in the Global South.

Given reports of Netanyahu’s defiant response to these ‘pressures’ from the US are coming  come too late and even now have an ambiguous impact, taking too abstract a form, not including an arms embargo or international peace force, and not raising even a possibility of support for UN-backed sanctions. I would conclude that Biden’s much publicized warning to Netanyahu presaging a US shift will not have significant humanitarian or peacemaking influence on Israel’s resolve ‘to finish the job’ by an attack on Rafah that produces devastation and many casualties in that beleaguered city giving hazardous shelter to more than ten times its normal population of somewhat more than 100,000. And could, paradoxically make things worse if Netanyahu seizes upon Biden’s apparently unconscious message to Tel Aviv that the time may have come to shift the eyes and ears of the world to a confrontation with Iran.

3- I am preparing a special article on 6 months of war. How do you evaluate the impact of the last 6 months in the efforts of a peace process in the future and in the relations between Israel and Palestinian people?

At this point, there seems no credible positive scenario for future Israel/Palestine relations. An Israeli consensus, not just the government, is deeply opposed to the establishment of a viable Palestinian sovereign state while the world consensus insists on establishing a Palestinian state with international borders and the enjoyment of equal rights in all respects, including security as Israel. The Palestinian people have not been consulted by either side of this nationalist cleavage and seems more and more inclined to opt for a single secular state with equal rights of both peoples as long favored by independent Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said.  

The UN attempted to impose a two-state solution in 1947 without taking account of the Arab majority indigenous population, and it led to failure, periodic wars, and much suffering. In my view, a sustainable future for both Palestinians and Jews depends on a peace process, with neutral international mediation, and respect for the right of self-determination in the framework of negotiations between legitimate, self-selected representatives of both peoples acting in a unified whole of their own devising.

At present, neither Palestine nor Israel, for differing reasons, is in any position to represent their respective constituencies in a manner that is either legitimate or effective. More specifically, Palestine remains divided between the PLO/Palestine Authority leadership in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza, with additional elements seeking participation in representing the Palestinian people, including the 7 million refugees and exiles. Israel, in contrast, has had a coherent political elite during most of its existence, but now must act to soften tensions between religious and secular constituencies that have been intensifying in recent years to be a credible partner in the search for a political compromise that clears the path to sustainable peace for both peoples based on coexistence, equality, and effective internal and regional security arrangements jointly administered. Stating these conditions highlights how difficult it will be to make the transition from apartheid/genocide realities to the sort of solution roughly depicted.

The South African case, although vastly different, is instructive. It points to two factors that make what seems impossible happen in circumstances that swwm hopelesss: the release from prison of a unifying leader; a majority recognition that a win/win outcome for both peoples rests on genuine compromise and non-interference by third party governments and international institutions.

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