I always thought of the law as a journal where societies capture their ever-changing realities, memorializing the good and making sure the bad doesn’t repeat itself. The law tells us a story about what we’ve done well and also about the actions that have been so brutal, in themselves and in their consequences, that no human being wants to live through them ever again. When something is made into law, there is an agreement that certain values and principles are fundamental to the well-being of a society as a whole.
Many times, the spirit of the law is in the considerations or in the preamble of the law, which provide context for how that agreement came about. Sometimes the context is contained in other documents, like resolutions issued by governing bodies.
These pieces capture a bit of human history in a way that is often poetic. Even when the reality is horrendous, law makers have, at times, the ability to touch your heart and make you believe the law they are making is something they themselves are prepared to stand behind.
In law school we are taught the law as dry as it is and the poetry behind it. Many of us, naïvely, fall for the idea that humans create rules to bring order and principles into their societies, and that the law is the result of a hard learning process that has made us empathetic, better. Some of us, at the time, believed that no one is above the law, that the law is blind to individual interests, to individual powers, to money. We believed that law was about justice.
The international community, perhaps the most complex society of all, is not an exception. The community of states has managed to build its own bureaucracy, has created executive, legislative and judicial bodies, and has put in place a great deal of international rules in all possible areas of the law. In my humble opinion, perhaps one of the most critical and fundamental of all is the area of human rights. International Human Rights Law found a global, unified vision in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Declaration), a list of rights that the whole world agrees are inalienable and inherent to every single human being on this planet. Every. Single. One.
And just as this Declaration came about from the brutality of the Second World War, other agreements have been reached in defense of these fundamental human rights. For example, the members of the international community have reached agreement on the atrocity that genocide is.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) was actually the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, and it reflected the commitment of the world to never again repeat that horrendous piece of human history that is known as the Holocaust.
The poetry behind the Genocide Convention is mostly found in Resolution 96(I) of the UN General Assembly. “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses for humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.”
The preamble of the Genocide Convention followed through. Genocide is “a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world,” the Convention says. The contracting parties recognize that in “all periods of history genocide have inflicted great losses on humanity” and are “convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required”, the Convention states. 153 States are parties to the Genocide Convention. Israel, the USA and Canada, among many others, at different points in time, joined the international effort to say “never again” to genocide.
It has been said that of all the elements of this crime, the most difficult to prove is intent. There must be a proven intent on the part of the perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice. Intention to disperse a group does not count as genocide. Perhaps the difficulty lies on the fact that genocide is not one single act that happens over night. Genocide is a process. It starts with subtle acts of discriminatory control over basic rights of the members of a certain group. And it expands from there, slowly but steadily.
The acts of the terrorist group Hamas on October 7, 2023 were barbaric. No doubt about it. Reliable sources have published that the Israeli government knew of this attack a year in advance, and dismissed it as “aspirational”. Even if true, what happened on October 7 resulted in 1200 lives lost and 260 people taken hostage, and that is 1460 people too many. There appears to be confirmed reports that sexual violence occurred in the Hamas attack, which is also deplorable and condemnable.
Claiming its right to defend itself (as permitted by the UN Charter), the government of Israel has unchained a series of attacks, still ongoing. The problem is that Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks go far beyond a proportional use of force against the attacker. Only two days after the October 7 attack, the Israeli Defence Minister Joav Gallant publicly announced that he “had ordered a complete siege on the Gaza strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
The government of Israel is indeed acting accordingly. American Senator Bernie Sanders summarizes numbers well: More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 82,000 wounded, the majority of whom are women, children or elderly. More than 1.7 million of Palestinians have been displaced from their homes (75% of the population of Gaza). 60% of housing has been destroyed, so a significant number of people are permanently homeless. They don’t have a place to return to. No water or sewer systems. Humanitarian aid is constantly blocked. Starvation is being used as a means of war.
The United States has supported the Israeli government with more than 6.5 billion dollars and large numbers of munitions, including more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles. With the US, many other countries are supporting the Zionist Netanyahu government, either financially, with weapons or with absolute inaction.
Only a few days ago, it became public that Israel has approved the largest land seizure in the West Bank in over three decades. Violence against, and displacement of, Palestinians in the West Bank has always been a regular occurrence, but it has increased since October 7, 2023.
But many seem to forget or ignore that this did not start on October 7, 2023. It has been a process that perhaps begun with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, although others may place the origins even earlier. There is, however, a fact that seems to be undisputed: in 1947 the United Nations voted the partition of the land of Palestine, then under the mandate of the British, into two states. What seemed to the Arabs as an unfair division led to a conflict that ended in a new de facto borders that gave Israel much greater territory over lands that had been historically mostly Palestinian.
It is painfully ironic that, as the world opened space for a Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention in 1948, it also left room for the mass displacement and dispossession of more than half of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israeli forces, came to be known as Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic). Since then, Israel has consistently maintained a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians, maximizing control over land and resources to the benefit of Jewish Israelis and imposing measures to control and decrease their presence and access to land in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (West Bank and Gaza).
A genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes and international law seems to be just poetry. Many are above the law. The law is no longer about justice. The Universal Declaration of Human rights is a list of fundamental rights that only some human beings are entitled to. The Israeli government openly defines Palestinians as human animals and treats them accordingly, and the community of States is divided, as if the law they created was not crystal clear.
Jewish people around the world take the time to teach us that Zionism is not the same as Judaism. I have learned a great deal from Rabbi Waiss about what Judaism is about: peace and love and solidarity. A TikTok influencer (Katie the Jewish American) also has incredible content about what Judaism is about. They all support Palestine and have reasons very well structured to defend their position. But the world does not listen to Jewish people. Some of them are dismissed as traitors. Other non-Jewish people protest peacefully and oppose to what the government of Israel is doing, and they are called antisemitic.
As the State of Israel and its state supporters engage in these state gaslighting, it is also evident that international law is no more than a weak agreement among member states. It doesn’t have teeth. The International Court of Justice itself took a first step in its assessment of the action brought by South Africa, indicating that some of the actions by Israel carry sufficient weight to constitute a plausible genocide. The same court, after the brutal attack on Rafah by Israel, ordered immediate halt of military operations, but there is no one to enforce those decisions. 143 countries have recognized Palestine as a State, but their power in the international context does not seem sufficient to move any needle. I am particularly impressed by Colombia, who recognized the State of Palestine in 2018 and recently broke diplomatic relations with Israel. Ireland is another country that passionately lives by the poetry of international law and stands behind the agreement they are a party to. They will be remembered as being on the right side of history.
The vast majority of countries understand the very basic principle that Palestinians, as the rest of human beings on the planet, deserve freedom of self-determination, deserve a place they call home (especially when they once had it) without having to ask permission from someone else to get in or out of it, without depending on another state to have access to the most basic resources to survive.
But the international community is not a democracy. The majority really does not have a say. Only a few States (US, Canada, Germany, Australia and the UK, to name a few) could use their power to stop the current wave of unspeakable destruction in Gaza. Only a few can make international law truly relevant. But they choose to be complicit, and somehow find justification for their actions in the same laws they are so quick to apply fully in other circumstances, when it is convenient for them.
It turns out that law is not about justice. It is not applicable to all equally. Individual geopolitical interests are worth much more than the lives destroyed in Palestine. International law is just poetry.
And who cares about poetry? After all the law is made to protect human beings, and, Palestinians are just “human animals”, right?
