Get the obituary ready for international laws and conventions

The ongoing genocide in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, including Jerusalem, is throwing up evidence on a daily basis that the rule of law is breaking down in the international arena. At the same time, laws in nation states are being used and abused in order to stifle support for the legitimate Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination.

Israel has shown its contempt for international laws and conventions since before its creation on Palestine land in 1948.

The Zionist militias carried out acts of terrorism against the Palestinian people and the British Mandate occupation authorities in the run up to the occupation state’s “declaration of independence”. Terrorist leaders Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir went on to become prime ministers of Israel; neither dared to visit the UK, though, where they were still wanted for terrorist acts against British troops and police officers.

This contempt is obvious today, not only in the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed every day in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Jerusalem. You don’t have to be killing people to commit such crimes. Every Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories is a war crime; every settler is a war crime; and the transfer of every Palestinian detained in the West Bank to a prison inside the occupation state is a war crime. Even the fact that major human rights organisations — B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — have declared that Israel has passed the threshold for designation as an apartheid state should trigger some sort of international response, because apartheid is akin to a crime against humanity. But it hasn’t.

The whole world knows that this is happening, and yet Israel is allowed to act with impunity.

Why? European guilt about the Holocaust? Germany committed that awful genocide, but Palestinians are paying the price. So ingrained is this guilt, that the German government continues to support Israel politically and economically, even as it calls for an investigation into the occupation state’s massacre of Palestinian first responders. No matter what it does in terms of violations of the rules of war, “Germany stands by Israel…” said the Federal government on 19 March, when there was already enough evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the so-called Israel Defence Forces — much of it circulated on social media by arrogant soldiers confident that they will avoid prosecution — to convict the state and its leaders many times over if international law really means anything.

READ: Israeli impunity: Genocide, occupation and apartheid

Sadly, though, it doesn’t; not as far as what Israel has been and is doing to the Palestinians is concerned, that is. The occupation state continues to have apparent immunity from prosecution. Yes, South Africa could lodge a case at the International Court of Justice alleging genocide; yes, the ICJ could say that a “plausible genocide” is taking place; and yes, the court could direct Israel to ensure that genocidal acts do not take place, but… the Israeli leadership could simply ignore the court and continue to kill Palestinian men, women and children.

Furthermore, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban has today welcomed his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu to Budapest with blatant disregard for the arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister issued by the International Criminal Court last November. Hungary has today said that it is withdrawing from the ICC. What does that, Germany’s standing with Israel and the UK’s Royal Air Force flying “at least 518 surveillance flights around Gaza since December 2023” — flights which are “shrouded in secrecy” — tell us about international commitment to the rule of law?

Ever since 7 October 2023, governments in the West have discounted Israel’s decades-long, brutal military occupation of Palestine.

What happened on that day was a symptom of that occupation, not the reason for the ongoing genocide. Israel has been ethnically cleansing, killing and oppressing Palestinians since before the occupation state came into being on stolen Palestinian land in 1948. The Gaza Genocide is, we might say, the dreadful, yet logical conclusion of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Indeed, its leaders and supporters have made it clear in statement after statement that they want to clear the Palestinians out of Gaza; no doubt the slow genocide in the West Bank and Jerusalem will speed up if and when they achieve their goal in Gaza.

Ethnic cleansing is happening before our eyes. Genocide is happening before our eyes. Violations of the laws and conventions which most of the rest of the world have to abide by are happening before our eyes. And yet the international community is powerless to stop Israel doing whatever it wants, whether in Palestine, Syria or Lebanon.

Does that mean that international law must be changed? Or should the international institutions tasked with implementing the law be changed? Reform of the United Nations is long overdue; the Security Council’s “permanent members” — the US, the UK, France, Russia and China — need to become ordinary members subject to the same cycle of membership that other states have to go through. The veto that the five permanent members hold needs to be abolished.

That would be a good place to begin to make the changes that are essential if international laws and conventions are to have any meaning whatsoever. If not, we can start to write their obituary now.

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