Reality check on Palestinian Rights

The potential toppling of Binyamin Netanhahu as Israeli prime minister is even more important than it looks because it follows closely on two significant changes in the Israel/Palestinian political landscape earlier this year.

These changes were the replacement of Donald Trump, prepared to do whatever Netanyahu asked him to do, with President Biden, who is reverting to the traditional pro-Israel US posture, but without endorsing a fanatical far-right agenda. Secondly, the outcome of the 11-day Gaza “war” in May showed that the Palestinians cannot be marginalised and ignored as Trump and Netanyahu tried to do.

The permanent fall of Netanyahu remains highly uncertain, but if it does happen, it will end the career of the most powerful Israeli politician since its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Netanyahu, first elected prime minister in 1996, was the pioneer for a generation of populist nationalist leaders, with many features in common, who have since popped up all over the world. All rely on exacerbating and exploiting polarisation, and inflating real and imaginary threats for their own political advantage.

Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and likely successor, Naftali Bennett, is to the right of his former boss, but will lack his personal authority and international connections. Overall, the three new factors in the situation – the departure of Netanyahu, the arrival of Biden and re-emergence of the Palestinian question – have produced a period of maximum fluidity in Israeli/Palestinian politics.

Bennett may want to prove to his far-right followers that he has not betrayed them by launching airstrikes on Gaza if a single rocket is fired from there, and may push ahead with the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The centre-left in his eight-party coalition may not oppose this in their desperation to get rid of Netanyahu and they want, in any case, to give priority to improving relations with the Biden administration.

Most likely the anti-Netanyahu coalition is too fragile to do anything that will split it – “a Government of National Paralysis”, as one observer described it, though this does not make it markedly different from its predecessors. Yet preserving the present Israel/Palestinian status quo is not as benign or risk-free a policy as it might sound, for the situation is deteriorating. Israeli settlers and security services are putting escalating pressure on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel itself. It was aggressive new evictions and restrictions that provoked the Palestinian upsurge last month.

Foreign governments sense that the Israel/Palestinian confrontation is erupting once again, and have returned to spouting moth-eaten cliches about “a two-state solution”, safe in the knowledge that this is not going to happen. On the contrary, such empty and discredited rhetoric about a non-existent peace process serves only as an excuse for not seeking practical ways to improve the lives of the seven million Palestinians – the same number as Israeli Jews – living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Pursuit of a chimerical Palestinian state that, in any foreseeable political situation, is not going to be more than a collection of beleaguered Bantustans, has become a culpable diversion from seeking equal civil rights and personal security for Palestinians.

A ground-breaking examination of an alternative option is spelled out by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the US/Middle East Project in a detailed study called Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo. This proposes a rights-based approach, notably freedom for the Palestinians from dispossession and discrimination and the assertion of their right to freedom of movement. This would confront and seek to reverse what the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have both denounced as a system of apartheid, enforcing inferior status on Palestinians.

The study points out that this rights-based approach “has the benefit of being more consistent with the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy posture”. It would foster much increased sympathy for the Palestinians in the US, particularly in the Democratic Party and among anti-Trump Americans.

One can see this radical shift in opinion in much of the US media, such as The New York Times, which carried pictures of each of the 67 Palestinian children killed in Gaza in May on its front page. An intelligent even-handed documentary on the origins and course of the Israel-Palestine conflict called The Tinderbox by filmmaker Gillian Mosely has just started being shown.

Despite very real changes, it is naive to expect Israel to dismantle restrictions on Palestinians, regardless of who is prime minister, because the balance of power is tilted so decisively in favour of Israel. Netanyahu may be disliked by a large swathe of Israeli voters, but his policies towards the Palestinians are popular.

Israel’s political and military strength, though, is not the sole reason why the Palestinians have been unable to put up more effective resistance to discrimination and the denial of their human rights. Israeli dominance is more vulnerable than might at first appear, as was shown by the recent mass protests and strikes in Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Prolonged peaceful mobilisation of millions of Palestinians on the streets, wherever those streets may be, is their most powerful card and one which Israel would find it difficult to counter.

“This is a moment for the Palestinians to get their act together,” says one veteran commentator. “But their Achilles’ heel is the poor Palestinian leadership. The Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah is politically paralysed, a sort of Israeli proxy regime running a few semi-autonomous zones.” Hamas may have increased its credibility among Palestinians by confronting Israel last month, but it has no effective political strategy and its sectarian Muslim ideology makes it easy to isolate internationally.

Surprisingly, it may be in its relations with the Palestinians rather than the Israelis that the Biden administration could do most good without spending much political capital in the US – something it is averse to doing. It should stop pretending that the PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who has not held an election since 2005, represents more than an authoritarian clique. It should support the democratic election of real Palestinian representatives and not supinely accept the repeated postponement of elections.

Everywhere between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the US should support equal rights and oppose the subjection of one community by another. It needs to roll back some of Trump’s measures favouring Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but steer away from pretending to disinter a moribund peace process in pursuit of a final settlement which nobody believes in and which has become a charade, excusing inaction on real issues.

As for the Palestinians, there are opportunities in the current turmoil, hobbled though they are by their useless leadership. This is not going to be displaced or relax its grip on formal power any time soon, but it could be bypassed. The best way forward for the Palestinians would be to establish a broad-based civil rights movement to mobilise their communities everywhere, using their great numbers to challenge systemic oppression and prevent further erosion of their rights. 

PALESTINA

Israel's constant harassement and violence against journalists in Palestinian Occupied territories.

The dust has barely settled from Israel’s latest bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip, but the post-traumatic stress has only just begun. A new round of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that is, on top of the trauma of decades of occupation and daily humiliations, and the bombings of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2019.

Shocking reports have been surfacing from during the bombardment and since the ceasefire over the past few weeks. A 14-year old Palestinian boy committed suicide following the death of all his family members. Eleven of the 67 Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, aged between five and 15, were participating in the Norwegian Refugee Council’s “psycho-social programme aimed at helping them deal with trauma”.

It is not just children traumatised. Palestinian youth know their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are also suffering, keeping up a brave face as they deal with their long-term PTSD. Nobody can become resigned to such continuous systemic violence.

I did not experience this recent onslaught, but I have been under Israeli bombs, and it brought its own PTSD, mild and not comparable to what the Palestinians have experienced, but enough to relate. Indeed, when I watched the Israeli bombing of the 11-storey al-Jalaa tower – which also housed Al Jazeera and the Associated Press – it triggered flashbacks.

In the July 2006 war on Lebanon, I was volunteering with the Syrian Red Crescent at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria. We would flag down vehicles coming from Lebanon to offer people water and food, and ask if they needed any medical attention. What struck me the most was the anguish, the deep pain in the faces of elderly women in the front passenger seat, fleeing bombs and conflict for the umpteenth time, having experienced the 1976 and 1982 Israeli invasions, the civil war, and other Israeli attacks.

Every bombing reopens wounds, causes the heart to beat faster. Before crossing back into Lebanon in August 2006, I had only heard bombs in the far distance – the IRA bombing in London in 1993, in Cyprus the Americans shelling Lebanon in 1984, and the bomb that killed Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2004. But I had never seen or heard a one tonne bomb.

On my first evening back in my apartment in Beirut, I sat down to try to relax in the lounge before dinner. Then the bombs began to drop. My body shook, it felt as if I was physically lifted from my seat. My heart did more than the rumba, it was ready to pop out of my chest. It scared the living daylights out of me. I leapt from the couch, grabbed my passport and some cash, and was ready to leg it out of the building when I realised the bombs were dropping on Beirut’s southern suburbs (dahiyeh), several kilometres away.

That night, after quaffing a few strong drinks, I went to sleep. An hour later I was nearly shaken out of bed; another onslaught of US-made bombs being dropped by Israel. I drifted off again. Around 5am, the same jolt as the bombing started again. A psychological onslaught for those not immediately under the bombs. That morning I put cellotape across all the windows in case they were blown in, to prevent being wounded by shattered glass.

Some days later I was working on the seventh floor of a building overlooking the dahiyeh. We all looked up from our desks as Israeli jets hit one, then two then three high-rise buildings that disappeared from sight, clouds of dust obscuring the southern Beirut skyline. Seeing a 40-plus metre building being reduced to less than 10 metres of rubble is, for lack of a better word, extraordinary, or as the US propagandists call it, shock and awe. It is not something you want to see again, apart from maybe a controlled demolition.

There were to be some 30 bombings and assassinations in Beirut between Hariri’s killing and 2014. Each one I heard brought up bile, and what had gone before. Israeli overflights would do the same, especially the sonic booms that caused windows to warp in and out, car alarms to go off, and people’s hearts to race – is it another bombing?

For me, that I had some form of PTSD became apparent in late 2006 when I tried discussing that summer’s events with family. They could not really relate. For a while I was only truly comfortable interacting with people that had experienced the same.

That I was emotionally rattled by it all became apparent when I was in McLeod Ganj, near Dharamsala, in India. Watching a harrowing documentary about Tibetans escaping across the Himalayas to India, I had to go out on the balcony I was so overwhelmed with emotion. Another trigger was a visit in 2011 to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – about the 1945 atomic bombing of the city. A superb museum, with a clear mandate of no more nuclear weapons (it correctly lists Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons on its map of nuclear warmongers). At the exit there were computers to write to your mayor to express your opposition.

The museum has ample grounds to let one reflect. I sat on a bench very near the site of the explosion that immediately killed around 80,000 people, and thought of nuclear war, the July 2006 war, the one tonne bombs. Emotion welled up inside, and I thought no one should ever experience such horror ever again.

In the museum’s bookshop I had acquired the first of the 10-part manga series Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa, loosely based on his own experiences as a Hiroshima survivor (the books should be on every school library’s shelves). On finishing it on the train on the way out of Hiroshima, the tears that I had been suppressing for days finally flowed. I had to go to the toilet to avoid the curious gazes of my fellow passengers, and to cover up my embarrassment, although there was nothing to be self-conscious about really.

But that is the problem with PTSD, it can rear its head at any time, and in strange ways: being emotional, sad, suddenly angry. I cannot fully imagine what Palestinians, Lebanese, Afghanis, Yemenis, Syrians have experienced for far too long. The toll is ultimately unquantifiable, but it has made Palestinians have one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world – as discussed in the latest Latitude Adjustment podcast.

But as Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabar has argued, here and here, the Palestinians’ experience goes beyond the PTSD label, being largely a Western construct: “PTSD better describes the experiences of an American soldier who goes to Iraq to bomb and go back to the safety of the United States. He’s having nightmares and fears related to the battlefield and his fears are imaginary. Whereas for a Palestinian in Gaza whose home was bombarded, the threat of having another bombardment is a very real one. It’s not imaginary. There is no ‘post’ because the trauma is repetitive and ongoing and continuous.”

I fit into that category with returning soldiers, as many foreign correspondents know only to well, exemplified in Andrew Feinstein’s brilliant documentary about the global arms trade and the damage it causes, Shadow World.

What is particularly scary about ongoing trauma is that it can be handed down to to the next generation, through epigenetics. While psychotherapy may reverse epigenetic changes caused by trauma, for Palestinians and those experiencing ongoing occupation and conflict, there is no post-trauma. It is ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder. The dust from the bombings never truly settles.  

s

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas

 

Reality check: Israel's Leadership "Change" for Worse?

Meet Naftali Bennet 

Israel’s prospective “change government” is a coalition of unlikely partners with only one goal in mind – changing the country’s prime minister. But will ousting Benjamin Netanyahu from power lead to positive change in Israel, or for that matter Palestine?

The long journey that led to the formation of this motley coalition, including four national elections and tough protracted negotiations, has demonstrated that in a confident and prosperous Israel, personal ambition trumps politics, and politicking outweighs ideology.

In fact, it was Netanyahu who first revealed unrestrained willingness to pursue any and all paths to further his personal ambitions and interests. It was he, after demonising any cooperation attempt with Palestinian Arab parties as un-Zionist, who pursued a coalition agreement with the United Arab List to preserve his premiership. And it was he who helped organise and legitimise the most openly racist elements in the Israeli society, ensuring they pass the threshold and enter the Knesset.

But Netanyahu “the magician” seems to have lost his magic. He has gone too far, lied too much, and stepped over too many associates to stay on top.

Indeed, nothing explains the formation of this new coalition of political extremes better than animosity – the animosity of political leaders exacting revenge against the man who once and again deceived or outright burned them.

Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, the prospective prime minister and finance minister, respectively, have both previously served as Netanyahu’s chiefs of staff. Gideon Sa’ar, the prospective justice minister, was once his cabinet secretary. Even Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, who are spearheading the coalition effort to oust Netanyahu from office, have both been ministers in his cabinet in the past.

But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. After years of feeding on his minions like a scorpion, Netanyahu’s offspring are out to devour him in a twisted ritual of political Matriphagy.

Once Netanyahu is neutralised and unable to mount a comeback, the “change government” will, for all practical purposes, lose its raison d’etre.

The coalition partners have merely agreed to disagree on the big issues, and are unlikely to agree to any consequential policy change, let alone a new national agenda, transformative or even transitional.

Expect instead lots of political wrangling on major changes to the welfare state, for example.

Lieberman, the prospective hardcore secular nationalist finance minister, may insist on shifting budgets away from the religious parties’ associated schools and institutions.

Whether Prime Minister Bennett, himself a religious orthodox Jew, will opt to block any such moves or encourage them in order to weaken his competitors among the other religious parties, remains to be seen.

But Bennett won’t be able to make any sudden or extreme moves on more consequential issues, such as settlement expansion or annexation, without risking a coalition implosion.

With a majority of no more than 61 out of 120 parliament seats, any defection by any displeased eccentric could lead to the undoing of the “change government”.

It is therefore anyone’s guess how this evolves or rather devolves in the coming days and weeks. But if you thought it couldn’t get any worse than Netanyahu, think again.

Bennett, the former leader of a prominent settler group and a fanatic whack who prides himself on killing Arabs, has even fewer scruples than Netanyahu.

Paradoxically, his party failed even to cross the threshold necessary to have any seats in the Knesset in the April 2019 elections.

Now he is destined to become prime minister.

PALESTINA

Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested over the past month and a half in occupied East Jerusalem, in what lawyers said was a direct response to the Israeli police force losing its standing.

The escalation, which began after Israeli security forces banned Palestinians from accessing the Damascus Gate area, has spread to include violent Israeli repression of sit-ins in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, a “Death to Arabs” march by Israeli settlers, several mass incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a deadly 11-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, mob attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a widespread arrest campaign that has targeted at least 2,000 Palestinians within Jerusalem and the occupied territories.

Many of the arrests carried out in occupied East Jerusalem are based on what Palestinians published on their social media, particularly videos where they ridicule Israeli forces. According to lawyer Nasser Odeh, pursuing Palestinians because of what they post on their social media accounts is not new.

It is a sign of weakness, not strenght, of Israel. The ceasefire on May 21 has, for now, brought the its war on Gaza to an end. However, this ceasefire is not permanent and constant Israeli provocations anywhere in Palestine could reignite the bloody cycle all over again. Moreover, the Israeli siege on Gaza remains in place, as well as the Israeli military occupation and the rooted system of apartheid that exists all over Palestine.

This, however, does not preclude the fact that the 11-day Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip has fundamentally altered some elements about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, especially the Palestinian Resistance, in all of its manifestations.

Let us examine the main actors in the latest confrontation and briefly discuss the impact of the Israeli war and the determined Palestinian resistance on their respective positions.

‘Mowing the grass’ is an Israeli term used with reference to the habitual Israeli attacks and war on besieged Gaza, aimed at delineating the need for Israel to routinely eradicate or degrade the capabilities of the various Palestinian resistance groups on the street.

‘Mowing the grass’ also has political benefits, as it often neatly fit into Israel’s political agendas – for example, the need to distract from one political crisis or another in Israel or to solidify Israeli society around its leadership.

May 2021 will be remembered as the time that ‘mowing the grass’ can no longer be easily invoked as a military and political strategy by the Israeli government, as the Gaza resistance and the popular rebellion that was ignited throughout all of Palestine has raised the price by several-fold that Israel paid for its violent provocations.

While Israeli military and political strategists want to convince us, and themselves, that their relationship with Gaza and the Palestinian Resistance has not changed, it actually has and, arguably, irreversibly so.

The Palestinian fight for freedom has also been fundamentally altered, not only because of the unprecedented resilience of Palestinian resistance, but the unity of the Palestinian people, and the rise of a post-Oslo/peace process Palestinian nation that is united around a new popular discourse, one which does not differentiate between Palestinians in Jerusalem, Gaza, or anywhere else.

Palestinian unity around resistance, not peace process, is placing Israel in a new kind of quandary. For the first time in its history, Israel cannot win the war on the Palestinians. Neither can it lose the war, because conceding essentially means that Israel is ready to offer compromises – end its occupation, dismantle apartheid, and so on. This is why Israel opted for a one-sided ceasefire. Though humiliating, it preferred over-reaching a negotiated agreement, thus sending a message that the Palestinian Resistance works.

Still, the May war demonstrated that Israel is no longer the only party that sets the rules of the game. Palestinians are finally able to make an impact and force Israel to abandon its illusions that Palestinians are passive victims and that resistance is futile.

Equally important, we can no longer discuss popular resistance and armed resistance as if they are two separate notions or strategies. It would have been impossible for the armed resistance to be sustained, especially under the shocking amount of Israeli firepower, without the support of Palestinians at every level of society and regardless of their political and ideological differences.

Facing a single enemy that did not differentiate between civilians and fighters, between a Hamas or a Fatah supporter, the Palestinian people throughout Palestine moved past all of their political divisions and factional squabbles. Palestinian youth coined new terminologies, ones that were centered around resistance, liberation, solidarity and so on. This shift in the popular discourse will have important consequences that have the potential of cementing Palestinian unity for many years to come.

The popular revolt in Palestine has taken many by surprise, including Israel’s allies. Historically, Israel’s Western supporters have proven to be morally bankrupt, but the latest war has proved them to be politically bankrupt as well.

Throughout the war, Washington and other Western capitals parroted the same old line about Israel’s right to defend itself, Israel’s security and the need to return to the negotiation table. This is an archaic and useless position because it did not add anything new to the old, empty discourse. If anything, it merely demonstrates their inability to evolve politically and to match the dramatic changes underway in occupied Palestine.

Needless to say, the new US Administration of Joe Biden, in particular, has missed a crucial opportunity to prove that it was different from that of the previous Donald Trump Administration. Despite, at times, guarded language and a few nuances, Biden behaved precisely as Trump would have if he was still  President.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and his circle of supporters represent a bygone era. While they are happy to claim a large share of whatever international financial support that could pour in to rebuild Gaza, they do not represent any political trend in Palestine at the moment.

Abbas’s decision to cancel Palestine’s elections scheduled for May and July left him more isolated. Palestinians are ready to look past him; in fact, they already have. This so-called leadership will not be able to galvanize upon this historic moment built on Palestinian unity and resistance.

The Palestinian Authority is corrupt and dispensable. Worse, it is an obstacle in the way of Palestinian freedom. Palestine needs a leadership that represents all Palestinian people everywhere, one that is truly capable of leading the people as they attempt to chart a clear path to their coveted freedom.

The incredible amount of global solidarity which made headline news all over the world was a clear indication that the many years of preparedness at a grassroots level have paid off. Aside from the numerous expressions of solidarity, one particular aspect deserves further analysis: the geographic diversity of this solidarity which is no longer confined to a few cities in a few countries.

Pro-Palestine solidarity protests, vigils, conferences, webinars, art, music, poetry and many more such expressions were manifest from Kenya to South Africa, to Pakistan to the UK and dozens of countries around the world. The demographics, too, have changed, with minorities and people of color either leading or taking center stage of many of these protests, a phenomenon indicative of the rising intersectionality between Palestinians and numerous oppressed groups around the globe.

A critical fight ahead for Palestinians is the fight of delegitimizing and exposing Israeli colonialism, racism and apartheid. This fight can be won at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), UNESCO and numerous international and regional organizations, in addition to the countless civil society groups and community centers the world over.

For this to happen, every voice matters, every vote counts, from India to Brazil, from Portugal to South Africa, from China to New Zealand, and so on. Israel understands this perfectly, thus the global charm offensive that right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been leading for years. It is essential that we, too, understand this, and reach out to each UN member as part of a larger strategy to deservingly isolate Israel for ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas

 

UN & ICC must not continue to whitewash Rogue Israel repeated crimes

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. 

Rogue Apartheid State of Israel: Whitewashed Pure Evil?

During the recent 11-day cruel Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the Middle East, South Africa-born US comedy show host, Trevor Noah, drew fire from pro-Israel groups for highlighting the power imbalance between the Israeli army and Palestinian resistance groups, and suggesting that this imposed a moral obligation on the former to moderate its response.

Comparing it with a fight between his teenage self and his then baby brother, Noah argues that regardless of the justifications offered by either side, the stronger party bears a higher responsibility. In essence, killing 248 Palestinians, more than a quarter of them children, injuring thousands more, flattening the homes of nearly 100,000 people and destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure during a pandemic in order to stop rockets that killed a total of 12 Israelis, including two children, seems like a massive overreaction.

Predictably, supporters of Israel have focused on what they spun as a suggestion that Israel should refrain from deploying its full capabilities to prevent an attack on its population, many arguing that the issue was less about a disproportionate response and more about a necessary one.

Noah and his detractors base their arguments on a similar premise – that there is a legitimate conflict over Palestine with both sides presenting exceedingly complex, competing, but roughly equal claims to the land. Starting from there, they refuse to engage with the substance of what Noah describes as “one of the difficult stories that has existed in our lifetime” and instead focus on whether Israel is overreacting.

This framing is more than a little problematic. By consigning the root causes into the mists of ancient complexity and inscrutability, it erases the distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed and, at best, presents the violence by both as equally legitimate, or worse (and more commonly), delegitimises Palestinian resistance while legitimising the Israeli response, even when urging restraint.

It is similar to that of US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who tweeted: “Many will tell you Israel has a right to defend itself, to safety and security, but are silent on whether Palestinians have those rights too. Until we can defend the rights of Palestinians just as we do Israelis, we have no leg to stand on when it comes to justice or peace.” Presenting this as a contest between legitimate rights to self-defence, even when one is asserting that on behalf of the Palestinians, is another way to equivocate, rather than state the obvious: while this may not be a battle between two military equals, as the casualty figures make clear, it is also not a struggle between equally legitimate claims.

It is impossible to think Israel and the Palestinians occupy the same moral ground if one considers the context of more than 70 years of dispossession, military occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Only one side has consistently violated UN resolutions and defied the international community. Only one side is occupying the land of the other and has been accused by international human rights groups as well as global icons, including South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of committing the crime of apartheid.

Noah’s assertion that “Israel vs Palestine … has stumped everybody” is also mistaken. It really hasn’t. The outlines of an eventual deal – the return of occupied land in exchange for peace – have been obvious for well beyond 30 years and in that period, again one side has been the main obstacle to an agreement.

In his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former US President Jimmy Carter details how Israel has, at almost every turn, refused to implement agreements reached with the Palestinians while at the same time continuing to grab more land and impose an ever more onerous policy of apartheid under the guise of securing its citizens. He writes: “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement … In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.” What could be said to have stumped everybody – “everybody” here largely meaning Americans – is how to maintain colonial occupation and dispossession while retaining a veneer of respect of the rights of those being occupied and dispossessed.

In his book, Born A Crime, Noah details some of the indignities of living in the country that gave the world the term apartheid. I am sure he would bristle at the characterisation that apartheid South Africa was the site of an inscrutable, 300-year-long conflict between two societies with equal claims to the land rather than of a struggle against a racist, oppressive, colonial system. He probably would not accept that “who’s right and who’s wrong depended on where you start measuring time” or that the problem was simply an overreaction by the white South African government against the “terrorists” as Pretoria and its Western allies described those who refused to acquiesce in their own oppression.

It should be as obvious to Noah, as it is to his countrymen, what an anti-apartheid, freedom struggle looks like. There is little that is difficult to comprehend about ethnic cleansing or the resistance to one’s property being stolen and their identity erased via a brutal military occupation. The struggle of the Palestinians for land, dignity and freedom is no different from that of Black South Africans, or indeed the anti-colonial struggles across the continent. It is not about an imbalance of power but about the oppression that imbalance preserves.

In short, regardless of however measured – or even necessary – the Israelis feel their response to Palestinian resistance was, it could never be legitimate. There is no right to oppress that is opposed by an equal and opposite right not to be oppressed. There is only the latter.