I have discussed previously in this column the importance of international law, and the ways it has been circumvented, perverted or simply ignored by powerful states over decades.
While the US in effect controls power in the UN, we have recently also seen that even the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been unable to put an end to the violence and destruction in Gaza.
The evidence is overwhelming. Israelis have explicitly stated that they would starve people, cut the supply of water, electricity and healthcare, food and even free passage through and across their homes and communities, while bombs and disproportionate firepower rained down on the people of Gaza. We should take people at their word.
Eliyahu Yossian, a member of the Israeli intelligence community, referred to a “flattening” of Palestinian communities and (significantly) that “the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy”. The child eating a chocolate bar today would learn one day to use an AK-47, Yossian said in a Twitter post on December 27.
As reported in the Jerusalem Post on December 17, a local council member in the Israeli town of Metula, David Azoulai, said Israel should make Gaza “look like Auschwitz”. He said Palestinians should be removed from Gazan territory, which should be stripped “completely empty... as a reminder of what was once there. It should resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp”.
The opposite view in the current period is that “all deaths ... are on Hamas”, and as Israeli leader, Golda Meir said in response to historical Palestinian resistance to European settler occupation, “we can never forgive them [Palestinians] for forcing us to kill their children”. In other words, everyone else is guilty of violence and death except the Israelis.
Let us accept that the Israelis are always and forever innocent. There do not seem to be many more “international” instruments that can be used to at least draw formal attention to the wilful destruction of Palestinian lives. We know Israelis have the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, Singapore and Argentina (among others) in their corner. We have learnt that the UN (always has been), and the ICJ appear (for now) to be quite unable to reach a firm decision on allegations of genocide, or effect any enforcement.
As if it has not been apparent for many years, it all has to do with power. It has to do with who has the power and the ability to wield it, who wants power but remains among the have-nots and quite unable to have their side of the story told — other than on social media.
In 1938 British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that power became “the production of intended effects”, and when lay people, citizens and subjects revolted the powerful (either) “yield or rely on naked force”.
Russell lamented in the early 1960s over early European adventures in Vietnam: “The napalm and pellet bombs, the systematic destruction of a heroic people are a barbarous rehearsal. The starving and the suffering will no longer die in silence. We must discredit the arrogant demand that they protect our comfort with their quiet agony.”
Imbalance of power
Given the imbalance of power in international relations it becomes difficult to see how the quite apparent crimes against humanity, or what has been described as genocide, will be addressed through established institutional processes, never mind the echoes of earlier conflicts.
It may be possible to establish a tribunal, such as the one Russell and his colleagues envisaged in 1966 but with more leverage and equal access to power. Such a tribunal would go a long way to expose at a transnational forum whatever injustices and illegalities may be occurring in Gaza.
The Russell Tribunal’s objective in 1966 was not to punish individual perpetrators but to inform public opinion, arouse the highest level of opposition to the war that was so evident on “the smug streets of Europe and the complacent cities of North America”, and ultimately draw attention to the illegality of America’s war in Vietnam.
In a letter to the New York Times in 1963, Russell wrote that American conduct in Vietnam was “reminiscent of warfare as practised by the Germans in Eastern Europe and the Japanese in Southeast Asia”. Five decades later, the same conduct echoes across Palestinian lands.
A question that more and more people around the world, away from the strongholds of power, are asking is whether Israeli actions are illegal. One of the main objectives of the Russell Tribunal was precisely to determine the legality of America's actions, and whether they fell “within the compass of international law on war crimes”.
With the current conflict it is exceedingly difficult to see the Israeli state being punished, or being stopped from reaching its final solution; to remove all non-Israelis from whatever lands Tel Aviv may identify. There is a bit of hope in the words of the late Elie Wiesel’s statement that we may not have justice, but that does not mean we should stop fighting for justice.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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