Tag Archives: Palestine

The ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant: Winning the Legitimacy War

24 Nov

Richard Falk

The ICC delayed the formal issuance of ‘arrest warrants’ for top Israeli

political leaders directing the genocidal assault on Gaza for six months although

it responded affirmatively to a comparable request involving Putin’s alleged criminality in

Ukraine in less than a month after the Russian attack.

Double standards to be sure, yet ICC action is a welcome alternative to either denying the Chief Prosecutor’s recommendation of May 20 or delaying indefinitely to its decision on whether the arrest warrants should be issued. The ruling of ICC Pre-Trial Chamber 1 to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, in view of the overwhelming evidence of their responsibility for severe international crimes comes as big news. It is a mighty symbolic blow against geopolitical impunity and in favor of accountability.

If this ICC action is assessed by its ability to sway Israel’s short-term behavior in directions more in accord with international law, as well as to the majority views prevalent in the UN, the Global South, and world public opinion this ICC decision the cynical dismissal of Sub-Changer as ‘an empty gesture.’  Some argue that the tangible impact of arrest warrants, if any, will be to alter Netanyahu’s and Gallant’s future travel plans slightly. The decision obliges the 124 member states of the ICC to carry out arrests of these individuals should they be so bold as to venture onto their territory. Non-parties, including the US, Russia, China, Israel and others are not subject to this enforcement obligation. We should remember that Palestine is a party to the ICC treaty and thus if either Netanyahu or Gallant were to set foot in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem the governmental authority in Ramallah would be legally obliged to make arrests. Yet it would test the bravery of the Palestinian Authority far beyond its past behavior if it dared arrest an Israeli leader, however clear the obligation and no matter how strong the evidence against him. This assessment of tangible effect misses the point of why this is an historically significant development both for the Palestinian struggle and the credibility of the ICC.

Before putting forth an argument as to why this ICC move is a historic step, it seems responsible to acknowledge several important limitations:

                  –First and foremost, although the Prosecutor’s recommendation to the Sub-Chamber of the ICC was made in May (or eight months after Oct. 8th), it did not include even a mention of ‘genocide’ among the crimes attributed to these two leaders, which is of course the core criminality of the Israeli onslaught, as well as expressive of their role in the enactment of this ultimate international crime;

                  –Another notable limitation is the long ICC delay between recommending the arrest warrants and Sub-Chamber ruling. This was substantively inexcusable in view of the dire emergency conditions of devastation, famine, and suffering existing in Gaza during this interval, and aggravated by Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian assistance provided by UNRWA and other international aid and humanitarian organization to the Gazan civilian population in desperate need of food, fuel, electricity, potable water, medical supplies, and health workers.

                  –Also, the ICC decision remains subject to jurisdictional challenge once the arrest order has been finalized. The Nov 20 acceptance of jurisdiction is in a formal sense provisional as Israel’s objection to ICC jurisdictional authority was made prematurely, but can be made without prejudice despite its denial in the future now that the ICC has acted.

                  –Even in the highly unlikely event that arrests will be made, it is improbable that detention could be implemented, given the US Congressional legislation authorizing the use of force to liberate detainees from ICC captivity if US nationals or the accused as here are nationals of allies. There have been already intimations that some members of the US Senate and House will seek sanctions against the persons of the Chief Prosecutor, Karim Kahn, and the members of the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber. Such initiatives if actualized will further weaken the US reputation as supporter of the Rule of Law in international affairs.

Despite these formidable limitations, this invocation of the procedural authority of the ICC is itself a grim reminder to the world that accountability for international crimes should pertain to all governments and that the evidence against these two Israeli leaders has been assessed by objective and professionally qualified experts under the auspices of an international institution that is empowered by a widely ratified treaty to make a determination on the legal appropriateness of making such a controversial decision.

The ICC like the ICJ has no independent enforcement capability other than compliance by member states, but because the ICC is not part of the UN it at least are rendered, unlike the ICJ without being subject for enforcement to a right of veto that has paralyzed the UN Security Council throughout this period of Gaza violence. This does not mean that implementation will follow or that prosecution will go forward much less that future findings of guilt will be respected, in the event that they occur, as the older more venerable ICJ has found out to its dismay since its establishment in 1945. But both the ICC and ICJ in their judicial proceeding are formally free from ‘the primacy of geopolitics’ that so often overrides the relevance of international law or the UN Charter in other non-judicial venues.

An outcome of the sort that the ICC reached regarding the arrest warrants is a direct and authoritative application of international law, and in that sense produces no counter-arguments but it is subject to crude denunciations. Netanyahu calls the ICC ruling ‘absurd’ and a manifestation of antisemitism, while the American lame duck president, Joe Biden, has called the issuance of these arrest warrants as ‘outrageous’ but never tells the world why. This kind of verbal Israeli lashing of the ICC has in the past been directed at the UN itself in response to criticism of its policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The lasting and redeeming significance of the issuance of the arrest warrants is to help Palestine win the ‘legitimacy war’ being waged to control the high ground of law, morality, and public discourse. Political realists that continue to dominate foreign policy elites in important states dismiss international law and normative considerations in global security and geopolitically inflamed settings as a misleading distraction to interactions that are best guided, and in any event will be determined by the interplay of military force.

Such thinking overlooks the reverse experience of all anti-colonial wars in the prior century that were won by the weaker side militarily. The US should have learned this lesson in the Vietnam War in which it dominated air, sea, and land battlefields and yet lost the war. The weaker side militarily prevailed, that is, it prevailed in the legitimacy war, which more often than not has controlled the political outcomes since 1945 in internal conflicts waged around issues of national and ideological identity of sovereign states.  These outcomes reflect the decline in the historical agency of militarism even in the face of many seemingly breakthrough technological innovations in warfare on the part of aggressor states.

For this reason, yet mainly without this line of analysis, more and more close observers have come to the surprising conclusion that Israel has already lost the war, and in the process endangered its future security and prosperity, and possibly even its existence. In the end Palestinian resistance may achieve victory despite paying an unspeakable price exacted by such a horrifying genocidal assault. If this outcome comes to pass, one of the international factors that will be given attention is this ICC Sub-Chamber unanimous decision to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. In this defining sense the frustrations with implementation of these arrest warrants are not the end of the story, but

are part of a larger historically unfolding narrative of ‘hope against hope.’ ##

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WHAT DRIVES ISRAEL—10/29/24

29 Oct

Prefatory Note This post is a much modified, updated version of my responses to questions posed Murat Sofuoglu, a Turkish journalist associated with TRT World. The dehistoricizing and decontextualization of the Hamas attack of October 7 was spread around the world by the most influential global media platforms and political leaders of the liberal democracies, and led to widespread sympathy for Israel and some months of tolerance of their response despite its legally and ethically unacceptable character. As such the Israeli response was initially sanitized by regarding  Palestinian grievances in Gaza as irrelevent, and also by uncritically accepting Israeli  hasbara that its response to the Hamas attack was solely motivated by security and counter-terrorist considerations, and thus disconnected from the Greater Israel priority and preoccupations of the Netanyahu coalition that came to power at the start of 2023 or more than nine months before the attack.]  


1. Has the Israeli model to secure Jews a homeland in Palestine failed?

I think it is misleading to refer to the Zionist Project in the singular and by reference to ‘a homeland’ as originally pledged in the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917. The minimum pre-1948 goal of world Zionism was to create a Jewish supremist state in Israel with an unlimited right of returns for Jews from anywhere in the world, and the denial of such an equivalent right to the Palestinians who were the native majority population. The Nakba that accompanied the 1948 War involved the forced expulsion from Palestine and permanent refugee/exile status for of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of the portion of Palestine set aside for Israel by the partition resolution of 29 November 1947 UN GA Res. 181. Israeli expulsion politics exhibited the Zionist intention in the fog of war was to ensure a long-term Jewish majority settler population that would enable Israel to claim credibly in its early years to be both Jewish and democratic, the latter proving to become

overwhelmed by the apartheid regime that was convincingly delimited as such over the course of the last decade. The occupation was fully documented as a type of apartheid violating the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This assessment was validated by comprehensive reports, filled with data, prepared by ESCWA, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGO, B’Tselem.

Prefiguring the response of the governments of most liberal democracies was the failure to express any adverse reactions to Israeli apartheid despite their earlier support for the global anti-apartheid movement that exerted so much pressure on the South African government that it pleasantly surprised the world by releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and proceeding rapidly to become a constitutional democracy incorporating legal commitments to racial equality. Why was there no negative international response to Israeli apartheid?  At the very least the apartheid assessments should have led to a demand that Israel withdraw from Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Even earlier, the most that the US Government could manage to say about the relentless expansion of unlawful settlements that ‘it was unhelpful.’  At first, Western governments were reluctant to be even mildly critical of Israel because of their own failure to do more by way of opposition to the Holocaust, inducing a debilitating sense of guilt made more potent by Israel’s domination of the public discourse subtly facilitated by a racist dehumaniization of the Palestinian other as an Orientalized inferior people when compared to the rapid modernizing prevailing temperament in the new Jewish state.

The UN contributed to the Palestinian tragedy by initially proposing partition of a previously colonized national entity without bothering to consult the Arab majority population residing in Palestine that would have certainly been opposed to lending legitimacy to such a fracturing of their homeland. But the Palestinians were never given a chance to vote in a referendum on partition, which itself was an ahistorical imposition of UK colonial interest and methods of control by a logic of ‘divide and rule.’

This post-1945 tragedy was compounded and prefigured the future ordeals of the Palestinian people by the failure to at least secure the promised Palestinian state of equal status to Israel before legitimating Israel’s claims to statehood by diplomatic recognition and admission to the UN as a member sovereign state. The 1967 War aggravated Palestinian grievances by. establishing Israeli de facto control by way of conquest over the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, again given unregulated de facto control by way of the doctrine of Belligerent Occupation, supposedly within a temporary and regulative international law framework set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention and the First Additional Protocol. Israel massively violated its terms of occupation in numerous fundamental ways from Day One. Perhaps, the most flagrant early expression of Israeli territorial unilateralism was its incorporation of East Jerusalem into sovereign Israel as ‘its eternal capital.’ This symbolic and substantive land-grabbing that included Islamic sacred sites has never to this day been accepted by the majority of states, and the Israeli move to establish Jerusalem as the Israeli capital was declared ‘null and void’ in an 2017 Emergency Session General Assembly Resolution (ES-1019) supported by a super-majority of Member states but opposed and then ignored by the US and the main states of NATO [the vote was 129-9-35 (abstentions).

The developments between 1967 and 2024 consolidated Israeli territorial ambitions in occupied Palestine by way of the extensive unlawful settlement movement, a coercive apartheid occupation regime that subjugated Palestinians living under prolonged occupation that culminated in the genocidal and ecocidal assault on Gaza that killed many in real time and totally devastated Gaza as a livable habitat. The settler colonial assessment of Israel disposing the majority native population resembled the pattern of the breakaway British colonials (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) each of which, although New Zealand less so, implemented their colonial encroachments by genocidal tactics in response to resistance, and succeeded in establishing their flourishing and enduring state.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that Zionism, and since 1948, Israel itself pursued a two-track strategy: first, a public hasbara discourse that claimed moderation and pretended to seek a democratic polity and engage in a search for a political compromise on land rights, democracy, and human rights with the native population; secondly, a political strategy that opportunistically advanced by stages to realize the hard core Zionist Project of restoring Jewish exclusive control over the Biblically ‘promised land’ of Jewish tradition at a given time for what it could get by way of an expansionist vision with respect to Israel itself, neighboring countries, and regional geopolitics. Not only did the shadows cast by the Nazi Holocaust in the early years of Israel’s existence inhibit criticism of the settler colonial aspects of Israel’s approach to the indigenous non-Jewish residents of Palestine but Israel’s first political leader, David Ben Gurion a committed secularist, cynically declared ‘Let the Bible be our weapon,’ and in the process claimed a religious entitlement to all of historic Palestine as ‘the promised land’ of Jewish tradition, which has prevailed over the prime norm of colonial decline, that of the right of sef-determination.

After the 1967 War Israel became itself a partner in ‘colonialism after colonialism’ in the Middle East. There emerged a strategic relationship with the United States and Europe that embraced regional security, safeguarding oil and gas reserves for the West, and cooperating with respect to the containment of political Islam, especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). This US led geopolitical limitations imposed on regional autonomy were highlighted by the unprecedented US political commitment to ensure that Israel possessed a military capability to defeat any combination of regional adversaries. Such a willingness to indulge ‘Israeli exceptionalism’ with respect to regional security was  dramatized by looking away while Israel covertly, with European active complicity not only became the sole nuclear weapons state in the Middle East but assumed the role of guardian of non-proliferation when it came to Iran.  As Israel gained in strength and regional acceptance via the Abraham Accords reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency it seemed on a path that would end with a one-state solution under its sole and uncontested dominion.

As Israel gained in political acceptance and self-confidence it became less shy about revealing its nationalist agenda. The 2018 Basic Law, with a quasi-constitutional status, was forthright in claiming Israel as a Jewish State, with the Jewish people exclusively entitled to exercise the right of self-determination (ignoring the rights and relevance of the 20% of its population that was non-Jewish, and Hebrew was confirmed as the only official language. Even extreme Israeli apologists seemed reluctant to any longer claim, what was never true, that “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East.” The net result as of late 2024 is that it is the Palestinians who have become unwelcome strangers in their own historic homeland. Israeli democracy, such as it has become, was clearly in practice and law ‘for Jews only.’ And again the Western patrons of Israel watched from the sidelines as Israel kept enlarging and disclosing its zero-sum vision of conflict resolution, and disregard of the US role as intermediary in the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict.  

2. What is Israel trying to achieve with its ongoing war campaign across the Middle East?

Again, we are challenged to deal with Israel’s mainly undisclosed intentions and what is disclosed is not trustworthy or a small part of the Israeli policy agenda motivating the enlargement of the combat zone. For greater insight we are forced to rely on conjecture to produce some kind of illuminating, yet plausible, interpretation. As with Gaza, Israel claims a right of self-defense. It seeks extra weight by insisting that its enemies are all sponsors or guilty of ‘terrorist’ violence’ and proxy engagements determined to undermine Israeli security, Even if we accept this line of argument Israel’s use of force in Lebanon is disproportional and indiscriminate, self-acknowledged and operationalized as an inflammatory application of the Dahiya Doctrine originally set forth in the Lebanon War of 1982. The Dahiya Doctrine was enunciated by a leading Israeli general, expressing the intention to retaliate disproportionately against security provocations threatening Israeli interests. The Gaza genocide can be viewed as a grotesque and maximal example of Dahiya thinking and practice, although specifically motivated by Israeli extraterritorial security priorities, ethnic cleansing, economic ambitions, regional paranoia, as well as its invariable dismissal of the genuine grievances and armed resistance of adversaries as invariably of a terrorist character.

In certain ethical respects the Dahiya Doctrine is an Israeli adaptation of the logic of deterrence that guided security policy of both US and USSR during Cold War. Its most salient feature was known as Mutual Assured Destruction  (or to critics as MAD). Israel’s adaptation consisted of substituting the threat of genocide for that of nuclear retaliation. The core idea of deterrence is a credibly threatened unacceptably disproportionate response to any fundamental threat to strategic interests or to homeland security of the nuclear antagonists and their close allies.

There is no mutuality in Israel’s approach to deterrence, which is a generalized warning to its regional adversaries of dire results if they dare to attack or provoke Israel. Any regional state purporting to balance Israel hegemonic nuclear capabilities is projected as such a threat, which presupposes a geopolitical right to maintain Israel’s regional nuclear supremacy.

3. Do you think with the current campaign, the Netanyahu government aims to resolve once and for all the Jewish question, fixing Israel’s place in the Middle East? 

It seems as though Israel has been expanding its combat objectives initially justified as retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack by adopting a proclaimed goal of exterminating Hamas. While pursuing this goal Israel engaged in such excessive and indiscriminate violence that its behavior was widely perceived as a transparent instance of genocide committed in real time and including a growing and increasingly activist minority in the civil societies of the Western countries, including many Jews, whose governments most ardently support Israel. Israel has suffered a near total loss of legitimacy as a normal state and is increasingly viewed as a pariah or rogue state to an extent exceeding the condemnation of even overtly racist and oppressive South Africa. This ended when the Pretoria government surprised the world by abandoning apartheid in the mid-1990s, apparently for pragmatic reasons associated with debilitating sanctions that limited South Africa’s participation in world society, including cultural and sporting boycotts that curtailed the freedoms of the ruling white minority.

Israel has handled this international hostility differently and more defiantly than South Africa, partly because it has had the benefit of strong geopolitical support from the governments of the Global West, especially the all-important US. Israel’s security is a matter of strategic importance to the West as a beachhead in the Middle East for the related purposes of ensuring access to oil and gas reserves of the region and containing the spread of political Islam. Thus, the increase of Israel’s war objectives to include Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Iran has also become a battleground in the Clash of Civilizations within the region and is a potent source of instability parallel to the incipient Second Cold War with China and Russia. Whether Israel, with Washington’s backing and probable participation will provoke war with Iran is one of the great uncertainties of this historical moment. Part of this uncertainty involves assessing the relevance of Netanyahu’s personal survival agenda and whether the Religious Right in the governing coalition will push these wider objectives to the point of regional war with dangerous geopolitical risks. An ethical imperative is also continues to be present– not to shift attention away from the ongoing acute human catastrophe entrapping the civilian population of Gaza in deliberately induced death threatening traumas of mass hunger and widespread disease.

What Israel does and refrains from doing in the next few weeks will have a major impact on the prospects for a peaceful future responsive to growing ecological challenges. This in turn may reflect the outcome of the US presidential elections, and how the new leadership handles this dangerous, fragile global situation that combines a prolonged humanitarian catastrophe, ethical and legal gross abuses of civilian innocence, and hazardous neglect of heightened risks of geopolitical encounters and ecological collapses.

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What Can Iran & Palestine Expect from the US Presidential Elections?

23 Oct

[Prefatory Note: The following interview is in responses to questions addressed.to me by Kayhan New Agency in Iran. It is focused on an interpretation of how the forthcoming American elections are likely to affect Iran, and the policies toward the current  combat zone involving Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. X/0]

Kayhan Interview.   10/9/24

1-What impact does the U.S. election have on the Middle East (Israel-Palestine-Iran)?

Unless Trump is elected, which seems now shamelessly plausible, I see no prospect of change. If Trump is elected, he is more likely to encourage Israel to escalate tensions with Iran by way of an all-out military attack on Gaza and Iran, encouraging the use of a 30k blockbuster bomb and even a missile with a nuclear warhead directed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

There are also dangers of such a scenario unfolding if Harris are elected, but somewhat less so. It could be brought about by the Netanyahu government exerting provocative pressures by way of alleged intelligence reports that Iran poses an existential threat to Israeli security and currently possesses nuclear weapons or is close to crossing that red line.

It may be that Iran’s conduct in the aftermath of the elections held on 5 November will have some effect in either calming or. agitating bellicose impulses. If the new President of Iran makes a determined diplomatic effort in the region, possibly centered on cultivating positive relations with Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, it could alter Israel’s calculations, but nothing is certain and nothing should be taken for granted or assumed. 

2-The effects of current events in the Middle East on the American elections?

Recent developments in the Middle East, especially the Gaza genocide and the expansion of the Gaza combat zone to the West Bank in Israel and to neighboring countries including Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are having very little impact on the American election, except for the Muslim-American minority and a small group of progressive individuals, including especially younger Jews. However, this numerically small

number compared to the size of the national voting public it could have an impact greater than one would expect because of its influence in battleground states. This reflects the concentration of Muslim-Americans is parts of the country where the electoral competition is very close, and the failure of these normally pro-Democratic voters to support Harris are strengthening Republican prospects, and hence heightening prospects for a Trump victory. The American electoral system is such that the winner is not chosen by the candidate with the most votes, but by a complex weighted system that gives each state, based on population a certain number of votes, which are so allocated as to give advantages to rural and small states where Trump is most popular.

3-Why student protests have been silenced in America and we dont see any protests in universities?

These protests have not yet been completely ‘silenced’ but certainly have been the targets of pressure from administrators of higher education and the Zionist, pro-Israeli, networks of influence.

Major donors to universities throughout the country with strong Israeli sympathies and ties have exerted their influence, usually hidden from public view. Israeli influence with American political elites is strong within the government and strong private sector lobbies (including military industries, energy). Students and faculty are intimidated, with pro-Palestinian activism leading to negative impacts on their career prospects. At the same time these protest sentiments remain strong among the more educated youth of America, although apparently dormant in the immediate period ahead. It would not be a surprise if a progressive movement outside the two-party system emerges in the near future, and becomes a real force in American political life.

4-Western countries state that the attack by Hamas on October 7 was a violation of human rights laws; Do you think the behavior of the Palestinians was a violation of the law?

Even after a year it remains difficult to have an accurate description of the events on October 7. There needs to be a trustworthy international investigation and report, although this will be opposed by Israel, and without such clarification it will be difficult to make a reliable assessment.

On the basis of what we know or are tole, it is the judgment of the most objective international law experts that Hamas had a right of resistance against an abusive and unlawful occupation of Gaza that had persisted since it was occupied in course of the 1967 War, but that atrocities committed during the attack should be considered legally prohibited, and the perpetrators held accountable. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court recommended to a Sub-Chamber of the ICC that ‘arrest warrants’ be issued for three Hamas leaders on the basis of this legal reasoning, and also for Israeli leaders on a similar basis in the course of their retaliatory onslaught.

My own view accepts the obligation of claimants of a right of resistance, regardless of how strong their entitlement to resist, to comply with the laws of war and international human rights law with respect to the deliberate killing of women and children. Hamas culpability this regard is minor if compared to the magnitude and severity of Israel’s genocidal response, but still criminal.

The division in the world between Palestinian and Israeli supportive governments and political movements exhibits the civilizational dimension of Middle East conflict zone that follows a conflict pattern of the West against Islamic societies. This recalls Samuel Huntington’s 1993 prediction that after the Cold War that there would not be peace, but ‘a clash of civilizations’ situated along the fault lines separating the West from various geographies of the Islamic non-West.  

5-What is your opinion about Iran’s attack on Israel and was it Iran’s right to attack Israel?

I am not familiar with the scale, targeting, damage, and details, but Israel had repeatedly provocatively attacked Iran previously without being itself attacked first, recently most strikingly by its assassination of the Hamas leader, Issmail Haniyeh, while he was visiting Iran to attend the inauguration of Massoud Pezeshkian as the new president. Iran certainly had a reprisal right, although the law of the Charter creates some ambiguity limiting international uses of forces to situation of self-defense against a prior armed attack (see UN Charter, Article 2(4), 51). Yet since many countries have claimed such a retaliatory right of reprisal it seems persuasive to argue that the Charter has been superseded by international practice, and the applicable tests of legality are related to such customary norms as proportionality, discrimination (as to targeting), and humanity (as to civilian innocence).

6-Why, despite the widespread protests in the United States? However, the United States still provides massive financial and military aid to Israel?

On the Middle East agenda, the US government is not being responsive to the people. The latter favor by a sizable majority a permanent ceasefire and a more balanced overall US approach to Israel and Palestine. Yet, the special interests associated with military sales and the policy goals of pro-Israeli lobbying organizations, especially AIPAC, are being accommodated by political elites in the US, and in most European countries.

The US situation is one where the pro-Israeli influence on politics is not balanced by pro-Palestinian influence in the venues of governmental authority (Congress, Presidency), which means that politicians have nothing to gain, and much to lose, if they are sympathetic to Palestinian grievances. Israel has effectively manipulated Diaspora Jews to make strong unconditional commitments to Israel financially and politically. Finally, the Holocaust and antisemitism continue to be deployed to punish those who go out of line by supporting Palestine or Iran.

7-What do you think about Iran’s behavior in supporting Palestine and Lebanon?

If you have any comments or suggestions. opinion, please write to us

I think such support as Iran has given, which is not known with any precision, is far less than what Israel and its Arab friends have received, and is thus legitimate as a reasonable

balancing involvement. Beyond this, by supporting Lebanon and the Palestinian struggle Iran is on the right side of history and of morality, while the US and the former coloniall powers of Europe are supporting the prime instance of 21st Century ‘settler colonialism’ and it genocidal disposition of the majority native population.

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What is Israel Doing in Lebanon? War with Iran? Expansionism? Deterrence by State Terror? Netanyahu’s CV

16 Oct

[Prefatory Note: This post is based on my responses to questions put by a Brazilian journalist working for CORREIO BRAZILIENSE, Rodrigo Craveiro, on October 16, 2024. The focus is on the regional spillover of violence as linked the Gaza Genocide, which itself is still ongoing after more than a year, arousing concerns from internationally reliable sources of starvation and disease prompting adverse reaction from Israel’s supporters. Major states in Europe are threatening Israel with an arms embargo if does not accept a ceasefire, while the US warms Israel that it will cease supplying Israel with weapons if does not facilitate an increase in the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza within the next 30 days.]

1– Today US warned Israel to take urgent steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next 30 days or face losing access to US weapons funding. How do you see that?

From the perspectives of international law, human rights, and the UN such a US move comes far too late, yet from a political perspective of ending the violence in Gaza and the expansion of the combat zone beyond Gaza a cutoff of US weapons support would be a small step in the welcome direction of peacemaking.

It is worrisome that the Gaza warning is framed in terms of the humanitarian catastrophe that continues to befall the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza without mention of a ceasefire or the spillover Israeli violence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

And why a 30 day grace period, and not immediately in view of emergency realities in Gaza that threaten increasing famine and disease, concerns that have received confirmation in recent days from reliable and respected international expert sources.

From experience over the past year, it is too early to tell even whether the US warning to Israel will be implemented. The US Government has warned Israel in the past, most recently in relation to avoid attacking Rafah with its large number of sheltering Palestinians. Israel ignored the warning and nothing was done by Washington to withdraw US support.

Finally, improving the humanitarian situation is vague, and can be satisfied by vague and often unverified and contested self-serving assessments as with disruptions during an agreed pause in the violence to allow delivery of polio vaccines to Palestinians in Gaza.

2– Netanyahu said today Israel owes its existence to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and not to the approval of its creation by the UN. What do you think about it?

Israel has always been guided by a realist belief that national security is a reflection of military hard power rather than be earning a law-abiding reputation. In that sense, Netanyahu is merely declaring what has been obvious at every stage of Israel’s existence and even during the pre-state period of the Zionist Movement.  Only a fool in 2024 would deny that Israel puts its trust in weaponry rather than in legality or morality. By setting military approaches to security against legitimation by the UN as a distinct choice, Netanyahu and leaders before him, have consistently avoided a stance in which Israel’s leaders would contend that both their battlefield success and the UN acceptance as a legitimate state were instrumental is establishing Israel as a state back in 1948, a date long prior to finding an appropriate solution for Palestinian grievances and just aspirations, a great, rarely acknowledged UN failing.

In the recent year or so, Netanyahu along with other Israeli leaders and Western supporting governments have joined in defaming the UN as biased against Israel, even institutionally antisemitic. This is manifested in many ways, but none resented by Israel more than the alleged holding of Israel to standards higher than applicable in the treatment of all other UN members.

Critics of Israel’s approach to security and conflict resolution approach believe the opposite is true, that even at the UN Israel has been able to hide its crimes and expansionism behind thick clouds of obfuscation and geopolitical protection. Palestinians  have a far stronger case against the UN due to its imposition back in 1947 of a partition of their country to achieve a two-state outcome without ever consulting the wishes of the resident majority Arab population, and then failing to secure Palestinian rights in the land allocated for their state, the extent of which was further diminished by Israeli military expansion. The UN has let the Palestinian people suffer despite their acceptance of responsibility as the successor to the British Mandate.  

3– Hezbollah threatened today to  carry out attacks in “all” Israel. Why do you think Israel is facing difficulties to defeat Hezbollah?

It is difficult to speculate on the motivations of Hezbollah, and hence their evident determination to withstand the Gaza-like onslaught that Israel threatened and is now enacting. It may be partly tied to the Israeli assassination of their longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or to a sense of a sacred struggle in the spirit of jihad or to a collective Islamic response to Israel’s recourse to genocide. The support for Israel among the liberal democracies of the Global West is a somewhat analogous collective civilizational stance, although not portrayed as such, especially in the US. On neither side of this most destructive and dangerous encounter since the Cold War can behavior be explained by reference to traditional national interests alone.

Ever since the anti-colonial struggles for self-determination and against Western encroachment have been won by the militarily far weaker side, the realist equation of military superiority leading to political victory has lost its analytic power and explanatory force of how history evolves and  is made. In light of this development, it should be no surprise that Israel has not managed to defeat Hezbollah as yet despite mounting a series of punishing assaults on its Lebanon base area. As the Gaza post-October 7 experience illustrates, the only way to overcome the commitment of a victimized people struggling for a liberating freedom is by engaging in genocidal operations comparable to how the various Western settler colonialist projects dealt with the resistance of native peoples.

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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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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.

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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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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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