Transcription

• Speaker #0

  You're listening to This Week in Palestine. I'm your host, Anne Lucas. Good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. You are listening to This Week in Palestine, and I am your host, Anne Lucas. My dear listeners, with the passing of the one-year mark of the genocide in Gaza, we are living with multiple horrific human milestones. And there is one important milestone that hangs in the balance for the entire planet Earth. It is the question of international law and the international rules-based order. In a year that violated all international parameters for human conflict, where does this international order stand? Or does it stand at all? What about the loudest promoters of international law defiling themselves, namely the United States? This past week, the Quincy Institute hosted an excellent event to discuss these issues with some of the most important minds and voices. The event was entitled Israel's Invasion of Gaza One Year Later, and it featured experts that seemed to say something quotable every 30 seconds during the event. Really, every minute of this is worth listening to and absorbing. There were three experts. First, Francesca Albanese. She, of course, is the special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories. Her connection had some problems during this event, so we don't get to hear from her quite as much as I would have liked to, but her contributions are very important. The second expert is Nora Erakat, a human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers University. And finally, the third expert is Daniel Levy, an Israeli-British-born citizen who served in the IDF and was a negotiator for Israel in 1993. The Quincy Institute hosting the event is a think tank that works on creating a world where peace is the norm and war is the exception. And the host for the event is Trita Parsi. Trita is a tremendous expert on the Middle East in many areas. with a specialty in the relationship between Iran and Israel. His perspectives on questions are always very insightful, and this event was no exception. As always, you should check out the show notes for links to the presenters, as well as more information on the Quincy Institute. And please remember, if you like what you hear today, be sure to follow our podcast and leave a positive review for it. This helps other people like you find the show. I am not going to say any more about this, because we really do have a lot to listen to, so yalla labina, let's go.

• Speaker #1

  Good afternoon and welcome to the Quincy Institute's panel titled Israel's Invasion of Gaza One Year Later. My name is Trita Parsi. I'm the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute, a transpartisan think tank in Washington that promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward... rigorous diplomacy. We favor a national security strategy that is centered on military restraint and diplomacy. Israel began ground operations in Gaza almost exactly a year ago, less than a week after Hamas attacks on October 7th. By now, Gaza has been reduced to rubble. 90% of the population is displaced. Over 42,000 people are confirmed dead, with thousands more likely dead or dying under. the rubble. Moreover, Israel has now also expanded the war into Lebanon, and the expectation is that there will be an attack forthcoming against Iran, which very well may lead the situation towards a larger regional war that also will pull in the United States. Where is the Middle East and U.S. policy towards the Middle East a year after October 7th? Is de-escalation still possible, or has a larger war become more or less inevitable at this point? And what does the past year tell us about the strength or lack thereof of international law, human rights conventions, as well as America's own regulations in terms of when it can and when it cannot arm parties in conflict? So with no further ado, let me introduce our esteemed panelist. Francesca Albanese is an international lawyer serving as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. since May 2022. A former UN official, she's an affiliate scholar at the Institute for my Institute of International Migration at Georgetown University. A UN report that she published in March concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel had committed acts of genocide in Gaza. Noura Erekat is a human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers University. She was co-chair of an independent task force on the application of National Security Memorandum 20 to Israel, a report documenting how U.S. arms to Israel have been used in violation of U.S. as well as international law. And last but not least, Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S. Middle East Project. Daniel was a senior advisor to the Israeli prime minister's office and to Justice Minister Yossi Beilin during the government of Ehud Barak. And he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the peace talks at Taba under Ehud Barak, as well as Oslo B under Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 to 95. Francesca, I'm going to start off with you. In March, you released a report titled Anatomy. of a genocide. It was based on data of five months into the conflict and you concluded, and I quote, there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel's commission of genocide is met. We are now 12 months into the conflict. Killings that made headlines back in February are now largely passing unnoticed, making almost no headlines. How has the conflict and Israel's conduct evolved in the last couple of months since your report? And has it amended or intensified your confidence in your conclusion in the March report?

• Speaker #2

  I think that if I had to choose one word to express what I feel vis-a-vis the past 12 months or six months since I investigated and presented a report, building on the work of others, documenting in a very precise way how the genocide was being committed. And six months forward, I will answer your question and I will tell you what I've seen and how it also qualifies under international law. And there is something extremely dystopic right now in looking at what happens on the ground and having to rationalize it, explain to the world in terms of international law so that it can stop. But however, the feeling that better describes what I have right now inside me. is dismay. If after 12 months we're still talking of conflict, we have a problem. This is not a conflict, it's an assault of an indigenous people who has tried all he could to exist on that piece of land. And you know, to indigenous people, this is something that we Westerners do not understand. But for indigenous people, the land is not where they live. The land is who they are. And this is why you understand the torment that the Palestinians lead. And as Naksba survivors, they have always lived. When you realize the disconnect that has happened between the people on the land and now continues to happen. And while the people are being genocided through acts of killing members of the Palestinians, those in Gaza, through acts of enormous suffering, physical and mental. And do I need to explain the mental suffering of being exterminated or having your home, your school, your bakery, your church, your mosque, whatever it was yours, leveled? This is the trauma, the psychological trauma and the amputated children and the orphans and the torture all across Palestine, not just in Gaza. The majority of the people who have been tortured and even raped are from the West Bank and East Jerusalem on top of all the horrors. those from Gaza. And of course, the destruction, conditions of life leading to the destruction of a people in total in part, no hospitals, no food anymore, no fuel, nothing to resist. Well, everything is being bought. This is a genocide we already knew. And this is the last thing I wanted to say. Over the past six months, the goals to stop this genocide have multiplied. There have been other two sets of provisional measures from the ICJ, and then there was even a Security Council resolution for ceasefire. Nottingham has been implemented. Even now, when we know that because of the ICJ, it's been confirmed that there is no reason to assume that member states are really responsible toward an unlawful occupation that has resulted in annexation, racial discrimination, racial segregation, and apartheid. Thank you,

• Speaker #1

  Francesca. I want to get... back to the ICJ ruling as well as the UN General Assembly resolution and what the implications and impact are. can be expected of that. But I want to go to Nora first and talk a little bit about the American side of the law. You have written extensively on U.S. regulations on lawfare. And several U.S. officials have, of course, resigned in objection, not only to the larger policy, but more specifically because of their accusation that the Biden administration is actually ignoring U.S. law itself, particularly provision 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which stipulates that countries that block humanitarian aid are also ineligible to receive American weapons or security assistance. The State Department's own investigation concluded that Israel was blocking aid, yet Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, proceeded with providing those weapons. Would you put this in context? Because obviously this is not the first time that the United States or any other government has set aside its own laws under certain circumstances. We saw in Iraq, how, for instance, torture was being conducted. We just renamed it enhanced interrogation. But given what's happened in the last year, can you give us an idea of if this is on par with previous setting aside of American law, or if this goes way beyond that, how would you assess it?

• Speaker #3

  Thank you, Trita, and thank you to my fellow panelists, and thank you for your energies and continued labor in this moment to stem this. what has become a colonial genocide in the 21st century that has been live streamed to us in grotesque nature that has only become more cruel to watch and more cruel even in the tactics of elimination and annihilation. I want to take a step back and just say to both bridge what Francesca is saying and what I'm about to say, that both the U.S.'s relationship to Israel, as well as Israel's eliminationist relationship to a native people has been something that we've known on the theoretical level and that we as scholars and activists have very much been advancing on the theoretical level to say this is what the end outcome would look like and what you know our you know intellect you are intellectual Palestinian intellectual tradition and political tradition has also emphasized and yet what we're seeing in this moment and why it's different than any other moment is that everything that we've said on the theoretical level has now come in to an absolute undeniable manifestation on the ground. That, you know, when we say that Israel's relationship to Palestinians is eliminatory, they want to, you know, remove them in order to take their place. They're literally doing that. They're explicitly doing that. They're making it, and if it's not explicit across all of Gaza and all of Palestine, in the north right now, we're watching it happen by burning Palestinians alive. in a bid to fulfill what they, you know, the general's plan, which is to resettle that area. In the case of the United States, it's what we've known since the United States has assumed the position of being Israel's primary ally, taking the place of Britain and France since 1967. Not that they weren't before, but since 1967, and specifically in the context of a U.S. Cold War. Whereby in the course of the 1967 war, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration identifies in Israel a significant Cold War ally that displaces the logic of maintaining a no peace, no war situation of allyship with Arab monarchies and allyship with Israel. After Israel's defeat of the Arab armies, the Johnson administration displaces that logic and assumes Israel as its primary. ally in the Middle East and initiates a two-part policy that still remains in place. The first is to ensure Israel's qualitative military edge so that it can defeat any single military in the Middle East or all of them put together, hence the support for a secretive, a so-called secretive nuclear Israeli capacity. And the second is to initiate that this will be resolved politically. so that there will be a land for peace framework that obviates and in fact situates international law as an impediment to achieving that outcome. And so this has been the theoretical situation that we've seen. It's why the United States has provided Israel with unequivocal military, financial, diplomatic support, and is able to talk out of both sides of its mouth to simultaneously say that they support. For example, a Palestinian, you know, Palestinian independence and simultaneously expand Israel's, you know, settlement enterprise and subject them to a negotiating, a bilateral negotiations process where Palestinians have no leverage whatsoever and are basically asked to submit. that you can surrender or you can continue to go on suffering, right? So this is the theoretical framework that we've provided. And it's one that's been bipartisan. No party has broken out of this mold. In fact, the only time that we've seen any kind of break from this mold, it's been a Republican break when Reagan imposes, you know, sanctions on the sale of cluster munitions to Israel after the 1982 invasion. when the first Bush administration actually conditions U.S. financial support based on a moratorium on settlement expansion. But in the Democratic administrations, it's been the exact opposite. And especially under the Obama administration, I think that this so-called contradictions comes into full bloom when we see the Obama administration use its first veto in the Security Council to veto. a resolution that would have put a timetable on the dismantlement of settlements that the U.S. for so long said that it had opposed. And by the end of that administration, when it actually abstained on Resolution 2334, right, that found that the settlements were illegal, simultaneously increasing U.S. support, financial support to Israel from $3 billion a year to $3.8 billion a year over a 10-year period, right? And so when the Trump administration comes in... Frankly, they're accelerating and making plain what the U.S. had been doing during the duration of that relationship. And in fact, you know, all the things that we bemoan about what the Trump administration did from the moving of the, you know, the apartheid plan, the Abraham Accords to, you know, provide peace without the land that's supposed to be part of that equation. The worst part for most people was the moving of the... U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the end of the Iranian rapprochement agreement and so on and so forth, the Biden administration and frankly, the entire democratic platform, not just Biden, but the entire democratic platform didn't oppose a single one of those policy changes. And they remain in place. And so in this moment, now what we've seen that at the moment that it manifests where, you know, Israel is in fact. violating U.S. laws that it had been in severe violation of from the Leahy Amendment, the Arms Export Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, Section 620I, that conditions the provision of U.S. military support on the access of U.S. humanitarian aid. Now we see the U.S. blatantly, blatantly say that it will not abide by its own laws. It will not defer to its own laws. experts, four out of the seven State Department bureaus on the question of the National Security Memorandum where Israel had to provide assurances that it was actually in compliance with that memorandum that assured that Israel was in compliance with U.S. and international law and thus could be eligible to receive ongoing military aid. Four out of the seven bureaus refused to provide that assurance. We've since found out that Blinken knew that the U.S. humanitarian aid, I mean, I don't know how you can deny it, but now we have on record that Blinken knew that U.S. humanitarian aid was being, that he knew it was being denied and lied anyway. And so we see before us, again, a manifestation of the theory that we've been provided about the U.S., you know, being a part of this now coming to full and, you know, it's undeniable to the point, this is why so many of us insist that this is not merely U.S. complicity and genocide. but that this is also a U.S. genocide against Palestinians.

• Speaker #1

  Thank you, Nora. Daniel, what Nora said earlier on in the answer was also that, you know, she laid out the theory that there actually is a plan. And what we hear oftentimes, a critique of the Netanyahu government, is that he actually doesn't have a strategy, doesn't have a plan. Gantz left the cabinet demanding a plan for the day after. None was forthcoming. He also did not. provide one himself. So essentially a picture emerges in which, you know, Israel is just blindly waging and escalating a war without an exit plan, without a plan for the day after, without an achievable definition of success. But you have, on the other hand, Nora saying that, look, you know, when it comes to annexation and just removal of Palestinians, there seems to be a systematic effort. You have Yossi Alfer, a former Israeli defense intelligence officer, who argues that because the Israelis now view this as an existential fight, Strategic aims beyond surviving are not necessary. And as a result, that's why Netanyahu can continue to do what he's doing. without at least publicly articulating such a plan or strategy? Can you react to that? And where do you land between where Nora described it and where Yossi Alfer describes it?

• Speaker #4

  Let me give credit to you and the work you do at Quincy and thank you for having us. And it's an honour to be with Francesca and Nora. And look, a government, any government, the Israeli government included, has not just... a responsibility but a duty to provide security to its citizens and that's a relevant thing to bring into the picture after the October 7th attack it does not have the right to violate international law at will. That's why you land up getting the urgent provisional measures called for by the International Court of Justice in the South Africa case of violations of the Genocide Convention, and that's where you get the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for the commission of war crimes. So. This is where one has to ask, what is the plan here? And I think it would be wrong, and I think people would be not paying attention if they think this is simply, certainly not just defense, but revenge, and it's existential. I mean, really, does anyone think that Israel's existence is threatened by anything that's going to come out of Gaza? That's not. serious. So here, I think what you have is an alignment of the political and the ideological. I think there is a political plan from Netanyahu. He was in serious trouble after October 7th, as any leader who is in charge when something like that happens would be expected to be, right? the failure of intelligence, the failure of initial response, the hubris that leads you there in the first place. I mean, let's face it. You had a system whereby everyone thought we've got the Palestinians managed, we've got it controlled, apartheid is working, they're done with, we can move on, we can normalize with the Saudis. That's the agenda of the Biden administration adopted from the Trump administration, as Nora set out for us earlier. The hubris was to think that you could do that in perpetuity, full stop. The criminal hubris was perhaps the thing that you could put arsonists into government positions, carry on provocation after provocation. We were reading headlines about pogroms in the West Bank. We saw the continuous provocations at Al-Aqsa, and that that wasn't going to blow up in your face. Right. It happens. Netanyahu is looking shaky politically. And I think a decision was made relatively early. The path to political revival lay as being the indispensable wartime leader who would brook no compromise, who could stare down the world, carry the support of who he needed the support of. And so that's the political revitalizing of the Netanyahu project, staying in power, endless war, I think, or at least war for an awfully long time horizon. But there's an ideology here and it's. Again, it's hardly like breaking news. Israel displaces Palestinians. Breaking news from 76 years ago. Okay. So there is nothing new to this. But what is new, I think, that under these circumstances, with this government, with the international complicity and indifference and failure to hold them accountable, and with the mood that has been generated inside Israel, it's not going to be the same. it has transitioned to an operational phase. The level of destruction, the scorched earth, and it's not just the West Bank, pay attention to what's being done. Sorry, it's not just Gaza, pay attention to what's being done in the West Bank as well. Making this uninhabitable for Palestinians doesn't make sense unless it's seen against the backdrop of, and here, like so many things to do with these actions. The self-incrimination is coming from the transparent designs of the Israeli side itself. We know that government ministries put forward flat plans to force the Palestinian population of Gaza into Egypt. We know that members of the government have plans to ethnically cleanse these areas of Palestinians. So that's the missing piece here. to understand that this has, in the Israeli-Palestinian expanse, an ideology behind it. Then there's the regional piece, right? Here, I think there's been a degree of making it up on the hoof, as we say. There's been a degree of, okay, a regional front opened immediately. That was managed in a calibrated way for several months. In other words, this escalation on the Lebanese side was met with that escalation on the Israeli side, Houthi involvement, even direct Iranian involvement following the Israeli killing of the Iranian officer in the Damascus embassy compound. So that's April. I think Netanyahu sees. that he has not succeeded in restoring deterrence or the mythological Israeli military power, and it's not going well for him. He knows he has this infiltration of Hezbollah comms up his sleeve. We don't know whether these stories of that was about to be detected are accurate or not. But then there is a decision with the Fuad Shukr assassination in Beirut, with the Haniyeh extrajudicial killing. in Tehran, there is a decision to escalate regionally. And so where we are now, and it ties back into things that Nora talked about as well, I think where we are now is that for the US and in terms of what Israel is looking to achieve here, It increasingly looks to me like there are folks in the administration who weren't convinced on the regional escalation front. They allowed the events, the destruction, the devastation in Gaza to continue with impunity. They weren't necessarily looking. In fact, they were probably actively trying to prevent a regional escalation. But they see now an opportunity geopolitically to take the axis of resistance down several pegs. perhaps more than that. That, they feel, would act as a block on Russia and China. It could put a dent in the Russia-Iran axis, which they've talked an awful lot about. So it feels to me like they're seeing some geopolitical benefit here for the US, given that things aren't going well for them in Ukraine and elsewhere. And we're back hearing this language that we haven't heard for a while in the Middle East. these fantasies of how we can reshape the Middle East region. They tried to do it in a way with the Abraham Accords and with the Saudi thing, but now we're back to that Condi Iraq war 03, Netanyahu going to Congress in 2002, I'm looking to get the exact quote, he said there would be enormously positive reverberations across the region, that old 1996 strategy for a clean break paper. I think that's where we're we're at. And just to end with this thought, some people may be listening to us having just read, and I myself just read it, this apparent letter that has been sent by Austin and Blinken to their Israeli equivalents, saying 30 days to get your act together with the humanitarian provision. I don't know whether I'm terribly naive. I still have the capacity to be shocked. But the degree of cynicism. to set a 30-day limit, which coincidentally, Trita, that gets you past the election date. Did you notice that?

• Speaker #1

  Minor detail.

• Speaker #4

  Yeah, right. That calendar coincidence. This level of cynicism, you haven't done this throughout. So, yes, I am still able to be shocked.

• Speaker #1

  Which also suggests, as one of my colleagues, Anil Shilai, pointed out, that there is an implicit admission by the administration. that the Israelis are violating provision 620i given this letter. I want to shift to you, Francesca, on a point on international law. You mentioned it earlier on. Germany is one of the countries most outspoken in favor of Israel and Israel's conduct of the war, a country that otherwise is quite known for its, you know, putting a rather high premium on international law. Today we see a lot... more aggressive efforts to reinterpret law or actually fudge it into meaninglessness. And German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, for instance, just said in the Bundestag that civilian places lose their protected status if terrorists use them.

• Speaker #0

  which I'll let you explain it, but I think it would be very valuable, given your expertise on international law and your authority on this issue, does this German argument presented by the foreign minister, would it hold up in a court of law? Francesca, can you hear me? I think we lost Francesca. So, Noor, I'm going to give that question to you.

• Speaker #1

  Power to Francesca. She's been caring so much. And I know that she was joining us from a place where her connection was not strong. So I'm really glad that you brought that up. I also appreciate this, you know, the fact that this, you know, this letter is an admittance of violation of the Foreign Assistance Act. But this other point for the folks who didn't see it, this German stance that Israel can target civilians if in fact, you know, they have, you know, Hamas. happens to be in those areas. So one of the things that's going on here is the way that Palestine, Gaza certainly out of context, but even Palestine has been completely lifted out of geographic and historical context so that what's lost in this moment is that this remains an anti-colonial struggle for liberation. And one that is part of a global anti-colonial struggle for liberation that defined what we now refer to as Third World Revolt that basically crystallizes in 1955 in Bandung and last throughout the 1970s into the early 80s we see what we might describe the end of it as the fall of apartheid in South Africa and the Palestinian you know treaty their treaty of Versailles put by Mahmoud Darwish and entering excuse me Edward Said and entering into Oslo And so what I want to point out for people is that since the Second World War, the primary form of warfare had not been conventional war between two states, but has been a war between state and non-state actors. One in which that has been insufficient, was insufficiently regulated up until the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the laws of war that would allow us to, you know, that regulated warfare conventionally. Because of that lacuna. And because of the rise of national liberation wars, which are guerrilla warfare in there, you know, by structure, right? It became clear that there wasn't enough law that regulated guerrilla warfare. Either we had to admit that there were no combatants, they were all terrorists, or you had to accept that there were no civilians because a war of the people or war of the masses, so to speak, made them all. part of the war and thus legitimate targets. It was precisely this lacuna which led the group of 77 to initiate the drafting of new treaties in the late 1960s and then catalyze the Red Cross in order to lead that drafting process between 1973 and 1977 so that in 1977 we get the additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions. that basically recognized guerrilla combat and national wars of liberation as international in character, as international armed conflict that gave the guerrillas the right to fight, that recognized them as combatants and that recognized the civilians as having civilian status. In AP1, this is already anticipated. Guerrillas cannot fight, you know, standing right in front of the army. They don't have warplanes. They don't have tanks. Asking them to do that is asking them to be slaughtered. So obviously this was incorporated into the drafting of the additional protocols. And it's anticipated that there are civilians, as defined in Article 50 of AP1, that there will be, that there is a duty upon the guerrillas in order to protect those civilians and not to put them in harm's way, as well as duties on to the other power in order to not harm them. And to... For example, in Article 57, the colonial powers or the states that are at war have the duty to verify an attack, to provide precaution, to refrain from attack, to suspend it altogether, when either they cannot tell if these are combatants or civilians, or if the civilian harm is excessive to the military advantage. All of this has been anticipated. What Israel and its allies, Western allies, colonial powers and formal colonial powers want to tell us is that this is unprecedented and so they have to create new laws of war. That's just not true. They just do not want to apply this anti-colonial regulation to what is an anti-colonial war and in this case has become a full-on genocide because of its displacement. And what matters is that the U.S. and Israel never ratified the additional protocols, remain outstanding objectors, and rather than hold them to account, instead what we see now is a green light for the massacring of civilians.

• Speaker #0

  But Germany did sign it.

• Speaker #1

  Yes, yes. But what we're seeing them say is they just do not want to recognize this. And this changing in the laws of war is something that Israel has been at the forefront of in order to insist that their condition is, in the language of law, sui generis, unlike anything else, where there's no analogy in precedent, giving them the latitude to create no law, where they insist no law exists. That's how extrajudicial assassinations become targeted killings. And so through a series of violations, they want to create new law. And that's what we're seeing. But the U.S. has also joined and has been part of that in its so-called war on terror. So as not to exceptionalize Israel, this is actually what powerful states who have relative military power insist on doing. They're using the law alongside propaganda, alongside their military dominance in order to achieve their stated goals.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you so much, Noura. And Francesca, you are back now, I think.

• Speaker #1

  Yes.

• Speaker #2

  Germany, in some ways, represents an emblematic face in which Europeans find themselves. And the schism there is between civil society or society at large, but I would say civil society and the governments, because Germany has like two raison d'etre. One is the compliance within. international and the other is the security of Israel. There shouldn't be conflict between the two because the security of ensuring compliance with international would also mean in the long term security for the state of Israel. But this is not the point here. This is why Germany is not only in breach of international law, it's in breach of its own foundational principles. And the society has not realized yet what is happening, but in all our democracies that do not stand against the system, there is a level of complicity that shows how much the system is corrupt.

• Speaker #0

  Daniel, you want to go get into this?

• Speaker #3

  I just wanted to jump in on this because it struck me as Nora was talking that what we're seeing is this phantasmagoric combination. of what Nora described, which is this attempt to decontextualize something that should be so familiar to everyone. I'm talking to you from Brussels. I've just come from the European Parliament. Someone came to me at the end of the session we did there and said they just can't wrap their heads around the colonial nature of this. It's the thing that they find most difficult to relate to. So on the one hand, we've got something which is incredibly familiar. uh from history on the other hand we've got something which is horribly new so when i was referring to the us and the the geopolitics and this idea of israel being the hegemon with the backing of u.s allied arab states and putting domestic u.s politics to one side there's something else going on which is the advantage i think we can't ignore that the us and other western powers see in testing the horrendous battlefield of the future and that battlefield of the future is here today and what you hear from palestinians and what you hear from lebanese is this ai automated weapons robotics drones everywhere in the sky the whole time the way this war is being conducted should terrify everyone in terms of what the future which is here today for palestinians uh looks like and there's one but But for me, there's the flip side to that, which is something that, again, Noura brought up, which is the G77, the Group of 77, the non-aligned movement. I don't want to suggest that's coming together again. We live in a different world. But in a way, in some measure, it is how the global south sees. what so many don't see, who can't get into their heads what's going on here or refuse to do so, and how that translated and played out. in the international arena with the case that South Africa took, with the other states that joined that, with some of the states that have downgraded their relations, that have challenged the impunity, and what we saw with the advisory opinion ruling of the International Court of Justice, and how that played out in those who made submissions to the ICJ, and that 19th of July ruling, which is now UN General Assembly 12626, and I insist on telling people, Wrap your heads around that. Read that ruling. Read that resolution. This is how we have to relate to the Palestine-Israel reality today. That's the ruling that says the occupation in its entirety is illegal. And here are the responsibilities of every third party state in order not to be complicit in that illegality.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you so much, Daniel. It raises the question of the power. of international law. There's a question I want to get to in just a second. But since Nora mentioned that what we're seeing here is a systematic effort to actually hollow out international law, we have a question from journalist Branko Marcetich that is asking, mindful of the fact that we so often in Washington hear that we are the defenders of the international order. And then you have countries such as Russia, China, Iran. that are the challengers of the status quo, the challengers of the so-called rules-based international order. Branco asks, is there any precedent for a stage waging this kind of broad, sustained assault on the international order? Not just the way many war crimes committed against civilians, but the seemingly deliberate targeting of protected classes like medics, journalists, aid workers, coupled with verbal and literal attacks on the UN itself in the form of killing UN workers. bombing UN facilities and now attacking peacekeepers. Do we have any precedent of any states having engaged in this type of a conduct, particularly with the explicit support of Western states?

• Speaker #1

  I'm like racking my brain, right? Who's ever done this? And even in the worst human rights abuses, it's never been this blatant. Right. Like I'm I'm I'm very much thinking about the U.S. Bush administration and its war on terror. Right. It flagrantly taking up, you know, extrajudicial assassinations, which didn't become acceptable until Obama came into office. Right. Or the outright torture of detainees and their kidnapping in Guantanamo Bay. The CIA black sites. Right. This insistence. that the U.S. gets to be the world police force and therefore above the law. But even the Bush administration, right, tried to frame it very squarely within the language of law so that they never said, we torture and we have a right to torture. I mean, we get that in the torture memos, but explicitly they were saying, we're just practicing enhanced interrogation techniques, right? So even when they were, the idea of... There's no jurisdiction that applies to Guantanamo Bay. I mean, they were trying to, they also tried to square that very much with an illegal argument, but they didn't necessarily, and even when they said that they had the right to invade Iraq, they didn't say that the UN was a problem. They actually made an argument about preemptive self-defense in a way that they tried to get around the prohibitions that are imposed by the charter definition, the UN charter definition of self-defense. This is in fact, I want to agree with Francesca here. The first time where we see a direct attack on the UN, a block, obviously Francesca has been blocked from entering and other special rapporteurs, but now a block on the secretary general from entering Antonio Gutierrez. We also see a direct attack on the UN trying to call them, you know, anti-Semitic and attack on the ICC as practicing blood libel and attack on the ICJ as also. being anti-Semitic. So I think in this way, it very much is unprecedented that they're ready to take down the entire system with them. And that's literally what's at stake. And, you know, looking around, they're, and they're challenging, they're provoking the rest of the world through these attacks. There's a red line that's placed after the second provisional order that was issued, or the third provisional order in May that was issued with the Kama debacle around Rafah. being a red line, that's when the first tent massacre happened of attacking Palestinians, displaced Palestinians in tents, where those children were burned to death before their flesh melted off their bodies. They're provoking us. They're telling us we're going to attack the UN. We're going to challenge the system. And then we're going to make it even worse. And you will do nothing. So I don't know that we've ever seen this before.

• Speaker #0

  Daniel?

• Speaker #3

  I can only understand to the extent to which I'm able to this in the context of the degree of criminality because of the degree of impunity. I don't think we could be where we are today without that impunity. And for all my criticism of Israeli government's past, this feels like qualitatively different because they can get away with it. But they've been putting this in place. So redating all of this with the threats that we are now aware of. to the former ICC chief prosecutor, Ben Souta, because she was ruling on the justiciability of the Palestinian territories for the ICC. And we saw the thing that I feel very strongly about, if I can be parochial and personal for one moment, on the IHRA, a definition of antisemitism, this putting in place, this effort to totally distort and be able to abuse what constitutes anti-Semitism in ways that I think are terribly dangerous when Netanyahu gets up in front of the UN General Assembly and calls the UN General Assembly a swamp of anti-Semitic bile. I mean this, this is a rogue. actor now. And let's not forget, it's a rogue actor with nuclear weapons that's digging itself deeper and deeper into a zero-sum equation in a part of the world that is not going to accept this behavior ultimately. So I kind of want to also acknowledge just how dangerous this is.

• Speaker #0

  Francesca said earlier on that she, a year into this, feels quite dismayed, mindful of how things have... been progressing. And I think in some ways we're experiencing a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand, South Africa has taken Israel to the ICJ on genocide charges, even though many were skeptical that that institution would really ever effectively address potential crimes committed by allies or states belonging to the West. The mere fact that ICJ took it up, however, already had a chilling effect on Israel in terms of its international isolation. However, at the same time, despite all the UN resolutions and the second ruling by the ICJ, we have not seen any of this having any meaningful impact on Israel's conduct so far. And the question then is, rather than moving towards a world in which these institutions, such as the ICJ, ICC, and international law, actually become more influential in terms of setting the parameters of international law. are we actually moving in the opposite direction in which these institutions are actually becoming more hollowed out in face of raw power?

• Speaker #2

  I will respond to this one because in fact I was listening to the question, I was wondering what were we being asked because I personally, in front of such a question, my fellow panelists might feel differently, but I feel that I should have the crystal ball. to know where we are going. But I do see clearly and with a clarity that almost scares me, but I do see that we are at the moment of transition, that it's a crossroad. I do see what Noura is saying. I mean, she was reading for us how the colonial system and mindset has survived throughout the years and throughout the UN system. And today everyone sees its face and it's not acceptable anymore because there is one important passage that was implicit in what Noura said, but I think it's critical. It's the decolonization era that brought to the adoption of the additional protocol to the Geneva Convention that Noura was mentioning. It was the decolonization, the movement, the decolonial movement. that gained a power that then has been sort of torn down. I'm still wrapping my mind around what has produced this incapacity to react to injustice. But the Global South should have also brought more deeply into the system, not just at the United Nations, but to the trade and political relations that it has with the Global North. And I do see that this system is evident now, and I do see that there are forces opposing it. And these are the ordinary citizens who cannot stomach anymore the killing of children and react to this. And then there is the movement that the Palestinians have built up, because this is another important feature to recognize. I know that many Palestinians feel really defeated at this time, because this is what happens to a body. A people is like a body. When you chop one heart, the rest of the body suffers. And this is happening to the Palestinians right now. I know that they might feel defeated. But for me, the fact that they brought the... They've been shaking the ground for so long that their struggle has not been defeated. They are still there, prominent, and they have mobilized a global conscience around the question of Palestine. The students, again, the BDS movement that has grown internationally and massively against all odds. The fact that there are millions of ordinary citizens protesting. They continue and it seems useless. And then they provoke a change that looked impossible until it became possible. I know it's very, very slow. And I know it has not stopped the genocide, but we need to see the movement that has been created. Because if we see that, we will move on in the face of processing grief that we are in. I know it's not very lawyer language, but we are human beings who are shattered by what happened. And we need to recognize that we are grieving collectively. There is a sense of denial that is moved by rage and then turns into feeling depressed. This is where we are right now. We need to get out of this mode and use all the power and might we have to challenge the system. And legally, we can, both at the international level and also at the domestic level. There is a desperate need for strategic litigations at every state level. against all government authorities who have contributed, participated, provided assistance and aid to Israel while it was committing atrocities and also private entities. This is the challenge all of us have in each country where we live. Thank you.

• Speaker #0

  Since your connection seems to be strong enough, I'm going to ask a last question. I want you to start answering, but I want to give everyone else a chance. to answer as well. And it's regards to something that we at the Quincy Institute care a lot about, which is how all of this has affected America's global standing. We're now in a situation in which when the UN resolution passed that Daniel mentioned earlier on, only 14 countries voted against it, the US included, 141 voted in favor. Out of the 13 countries outside of the US that voted against it, five of them are Polynesian island states that are completely dependent on the United States. It appears to me that the U.S. is as isolated or more isolated on this issue at the U.N. than Russia is on Ukraine. On top of that, you have the United States not running for a second term on the U.N. Geneva, the Human Rights Council in Geneva, fearing, according to Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, they would actually lose the election because of international anger towards America's role in all of this. Francesca, if I can start with you, how do you assess how America's global standing and influence has been impacted in the last 12 months and what can be done to rectify it?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, look, let me start by your consideration on that carries a lot of symbolism, but I'm afraid might carry more symbolism than substance. And it's the US decision not to participate in, not to run for a next term as a represented country in the Human Rights Council, because I really think. that had the composition of the Human Rights Council been different and judging the odds, the US might have run for it. But of course, it would have been confronted with the role it has played at the international level. But excuse me, if member states have so much anger toward the US, do they need to wait for the Human Rights Council to exert that leverage and pressure that it's needed at international level? Can all this be reflected in the economic? political and diplomatic dealing they have with the United Nations first and foremost, and with Israel. So again, it seems to me that we are, this is the run of those who hide behind the finger. And this is how I see member states today, which is not a very, um, neither a sophisticated, not a very commendable image, but this is how I see the system right now, because no one takes responsibility for what is the collective responsibility by definition. So this is where we are right now. And in order to change it, I think that, again, we need to make the people... stronger than they've always thought to be with the international system. This can be an opportunity for really a positive and peaceful revolution that asks for global democracy against what some scholars call global apartheid, a system of domination where one sort of racial group dominates over the others. It could be another racial group. This is why I'm not saying that people in other regions are necessarily better, but this is what's happening. The West is dominating the rest with the US at the top of the imperial design. We can fight it and we must fight it from within using the law as it stands. Noura was talking about both domestic law and international law. And again, we need, we must make sure that these aligns, the politics align with the law as much as possible.

• Speaker #0

  We are out of time right now. So I want to give Daniel and Nora 30 seconds each to reflect on the issue of where U.S. global standing is and what can be done about it. Daniel.

• Speaker #3

  I think what you see is, I don't even want to use the word residual because it is so much more significant than that, American power, hard power. Power to bully, power to use its relations, all in order to advance. Now, we've talked about the U.S. interest there as well. But in order to advance this, what Israel is doing, to run cover for what Israel is doing. But I think if you go beyond that, then so much has been lost. And it will have to rely so much on that brute power and bullying and putting all those efforts because people just don't want to hear it anymore. The anger at the U.S., the anger in places. that you wouldn't expect. The popular boycotts of companies that may even not be involved, but are considered maybe they're a Western company complicit in parts of the world, not just in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world. The reception that Prime Minister Netanyahu received on both sides of the aisle in Congress, one should not underestimate how that played out in the rest of the world. So I think it's done. I actually think the US is done now in terms of any notion of soft. power for an awfully long period of time. That doesn't mean that the US isn't a problem because it's willing to deploy many other things. And that doesn't, as Francesca implied, excuse anyone else from taking responsibility for their own actions.

• Speaker #0

  Nora.

• Speaker #1

  I'm going to echo my esteemed co-panelists and just lift up a couple of things that the highest form of power is that form of hegemonic power. where through some sort of ethical and moral persuasion, we also participate in our own domination. And yet the U.S., right, all of that, the ethical and moral edge that it may have had, that it even had towards Palestinians when in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Anglo-American Commission, Palestinians wanted the Americans to be their mandatory power, right? They saw them as the most fair. And now fast forward, we're over 100 years later, they are literally... the enemy of the world. They are empire. They are a source of so much violence. They have their military base, 750 military bases across the globe. And what they're offering to people is basically outright threats, coercion through direct attacks or through the deprivation of privileges or financial support, which, you know, this is just this is just a lid. a pressure and a lid waiting to be blown off. So I agree it's a matter of time, but in that time, it's going to be what others have described, you know, the darkest time of the end of empire is also the most violent and dark. And that's what we've entered into. So when we think about how does the US regain this, I think it's through the people who live here, who are beneficiaries of empire, who have a responsibility in order to name. that unearned privilege that we have by living in its center and by practicing an incredible amount of humility and shattering American exceptionalism and where we are and who we are to the world.

• Speaker #0

  Again, the event was entitled Israel's Invasion of Gaza. One year later, it was held on October 15, 2024. We are out of time, but I wanted to remind you that it takes a village to produce a show like This Week in Palestine. Special thanks to Bob Funk, and Mohamed Elghoud, with additional thanks to Stan Robinson and Steve Lowe. This Week in Palestine is a production of Truth and Justice Radio, currently at the home of WZBC Student Radio at Boston College. We thank you for spending your time with us today as we continue to work towards Palestinian liberation. See you next week.

• Speaker #1

  Hello, my name is I'm a student at the University of Michigan and I'm a student at the University of Michigan. My dream job is to become a student at the University of Michigan and I'm very excited to be a part of this project. I'm a student at the University of Michigan and I'm very excited to be a part of this project.