The recent escalation of Israel’s Zionist project of ethnic cleansing of Palestine has emphasised the multiple paradoxes in the decades-long political stalemate in the Middle East, which is unique in the amount and extent of suffering heaped on its peoples. Notable also are the paradoxical levels of external complicity and indifference.
Influential foreign actors assist the perpetrators of atrocities
but pay little attention to the mounting numbers of victims, except when they
turn up as refugees at their doorstep. They do not care when Palestinians are
thrown out of their homes or bombed into oblivion, packed into a no-man’s land.
But they rise up in unison when the perpetrators are threatened.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the circumstances surrounding
the obscene legal travesty of the double dispossession the Palestinians of
Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. Already driven out of their homes as the
Jewish Zionist immigrants auto-proclaimed the state of Israel in 1948 and
prevented from ever reclaiming their original homes, they are about to be turned
into refugees again on the pretext that the homes they have lived in for
decades legally belong to illegal Jewish settlers, according to the rigged
Israeli judiciary system.
Protests against this brutal dispossession have been ignored for
years and it was only when Hamas fighters in response started launching rockets
at Israeli cities that Israel, and the rest of the world, stood up and
listened.
This is the abiding paradox of the current international system,
which champions peace and justice but only listens to those who have guns. When
the United Nations was set up in 1945, its guiding principle had been to
contain war and violence in general and mass atrocities in particular. Haunted
by international inaction in the face of the Holocaust, the UN hastened to
adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The UN Charter provided for peacekeeping and armed intervention
against aggressors – principles that were implemented, significantly, first in
Palestine a couple of weeks after the establishment of Israel and later on the
Korean Peninsula, in Lebanon, Cyprus, etc. However, with the paralysis of the
UN during the Cold War and the rather disappointing outcomes of interventions,
the push for such action was weakened.
The post-Cold War proliferation of atrocities and acts of genocide
(in Rwanda, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, etc)
provoked a lot of clamouring for active intervention to stop such mass
violence.
Spurred both by a rise in atrocities and the partial success of
interventions in Iraqi Kurdistan (1991), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia
(1992-1995), Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and East Timor (1999), the debate gained
momentum. In 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted, establishing the International
Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes, and
crimes against humanity.
In 2001, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, Special
Advisor to the UN Secretary-General Mohamed Sahnoun and their colleagues in the
Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (ICISS) published the landmark report The Responsibility to
Protect.
The commission was in turn inspired by a 1996 book titled
Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa, produced by the
Brookings Institution and edited by the veteran Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng,
arguing that state sovereignty should be conditional on fulfilling obligations
of human rights protection.
The ICISS report, with its rather ambitious subtitle: Ending Mass
Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, reiterated the slowly evolving consensus that
it was no longer acceptable to stand by and watch atrocities being televised
live in this era of global media.
It advocated the “responsibility to protect” doctrine (R2P) that
affirmed the responsibility of the wider international community for taking
“timely and decisive” measures to protect endangered civilians when their state
– bearer of the primary responsibility for protecting its citizens – is found
“manifestly failing” to fulfil its duty. Appropriate and proportionate coercive
measures, properly authorised by the UN, can then be taken as a last resort.
The R2P doctrine was formally adopted by the UN General Assembly
at the 2005 World Summit. The unanimous adoption meant that Israel also
endorsed it, as did many Arab countries, like Sudan, which later became a main
target of the doctrine.
Nevertheless, the evolving fragile consensus around R2P continued
to wobble. Divisions over the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq were a key factor,
given the prominence of the US and the UK as R2P advocates.
Some saw the doctrine as fundamentally flawed, even disingenuous,
a combination of resurgent imperialism and the “war on terror” or as an attempt
to sell militarism and neo-colonialism as humanitarianism.
By its very nature, the doctrine appeared wilfully selective,
never being applied to the powerful states. Its moralist language was depicted
as naïve, condescending, and so permissive as to justify intervention at the
slightest pretext.
From the other side, some advocates decried the watering down of
the doctrine to appease the sceptics, leading to the loss of its original ethos
of urgency and non-consensual military intervention. This signalled a return to
normal UN and international practices of fitful and selective, patchy and
piecemeal interventions.
Regardless of mounting scepticism, the doctrine continued to enjoy
support and was invoked formally in the NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011.
These developments, especially the NATO military campaign in
Libya, provoked some negative reactions, in particular from Russia and China,
while the ICC’s indictment of some African leaders, including Omar al-Bashir of
Sudan, also brought resistance from African and Arab countries.
However, in spite of Arab and African solidarity with al-Bashir,
Arab and African countries have endorsed the Palestinian Authority’s decision
to join the ICC in April 2015. The court’s affirmation that crimes in Palestine
fall under its jurisdiction issued in February this year was also widely
welcomed. During the assault on Gaza in May, ICC prosecutors announced that
they would be monitoring the conflict for possible war crime charges.
It is a supreme irony that the most ardent proponents of the
responsibility to protect and the ICC, in particular Western democracies, have
been very hostile to applying the doctrine in Palestine. This vocal opposition
is an admission that serious crimes are being committed. In an interesting role
reversal, arch-liberals who have always defended justice are practically
advocating impunity for perpetrators of some of the most heinous crimes in the
book, while former sceptics have now converted to the ICC.
Being lukewarm towards humanitarianism was the signature of the
Trump era and the rise of pathological populism in Europe and the Americas.
These trends have not only advocated turning a blind eye to atrocities abroad,
but even presented tyrants like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Egypt’s Abdelfattah
el-Sisi as role models. They negatively impacted human rights in established
democracies and more so in relatively fragile ones in Eastern Europe, Asia,
Latin America, etc.
Given that left-wing populists have also been among the leading
critics of R2P as imperialism in disguise, this has significantly narrowed the
scope of support for genuine humanitarianism. However, there are signs of a
revival of humanitarianism and human rights advocacy, strengthened by the surge
in principled activism among the youth all over the world. It is that surge
which carried President Joe Biden to power in the US and is now pushing Western
governments to change their stance on Palestinian rights.
The international reaction to the last attack on Gaza is a
positive sign of a major shift back to active humanitarianism. Palestine could
become a focal point in this resurgence. A number of considerations favour the
application of R2P in Palestine.
First, Israel is the first state that had been created by a UN
resolution. Its refusal to adhere to the terms of that resolution undermines
its own legitimacy. More to the point, the UN is directly responsible for the
suffering and dispossession of the victims of that decision. The UN and the
international community must account for those sins and act to stop the current
“robbery in progress”. This is aside, of course, from the specific
responsibility of major international actors for more substantive moral,
political, financial and military complicity in these crimes.
Second, even from the Israeli perspective, applying R2P to
Palestine should be desirable. The whole constructed narrative for a Jewish
state was/is to offer a refuge for a category of people who had suffered
persecution and enmity. Therefore, it is at least incongruous and morally
perverse that the state that is supposed to protect against atrocities indulges
in an abundance of atrocities that resemble the fascist entity from which many
of its citizens sought refuge. A repressive state is not an ideal refuge for
anyone.
In any case, a state does not exist or function in a void. Its
very existence depends on a mutually supportive network of states sharing
values of mutual protection. The survival of any state depends on the good will
of others, especially its neighbours. A state where key politicians and a
majority of citizens reveal patterns of cruelty, chauvinism and ugly
self-centredness, paints itself as a villain. And we know what fate most
narratives reserve for villains.
If brute force is what protects communities and states, Nazi Germany would still be here. They are not.
