Day 292 roundtable: Does international law even matter?

This week, the recorded death toll in Gaza surpassed 39,000 – with the actual fatality count expected to be much higher – as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington, where he received multiple standing ovations from members of the US Congress.

During the news segment at the top of this week’s livestream, Nora Barrows-Friedman reported on Israel’s new ground invasion into Khan Younis, the southern Gaza district where at least 70 Palestinians were massacred on Monday and nearly half a million have been ordered to flee.

But no safe place in Gaza exists. And Palestinians whose lives are spared by Israel’s attacks are contending with hunger, thirst and disease.

In a development that has health implications far beyond Gaza, the highly infectious polio virus – which can cause paralysis, lifelong disability and even death in young children – was recently detected in sewage water samples collected in Gaza.

Gaza’s resilience

Our first guest this week, The Electronic Intifada contributor Aseel Mousa, described the guilt she feels in Egypt, where she evacuated earlier on in the genocide, knowing that her loved ones are going without food and clean water back in Gaza.

Mousa pointed out that Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are displaced from their homes, have to queue for hours to use a toilet or access water and food.

Those fortunate enough to remain in their homes have gone without electricity for nearly a year after Israel cut the supply of power and fuel to the territory in an act of collective punishment in early October.

“I don’t know what else we can do about the situation in Gaza. People are being killed, injured, displaced, starved, all kinds of violations … and the world is still silent,” Mousa said. “What else can I say?”

But despite the unimaginable circumstances Palestinians are being made to live through, “we can see the resilience of the Gaza Strip,” Mousa added.

Whereas UN officials estimate that it will take 15 years to clear the rubble in Gaza City alone, Mousa pointed out a recent interview with Asem Alnabih, an engineer and spokesperson for the Gaza City Municipality, who said that Palestinians could remove the rubble in all of Gaza within a year if they had the appropriate equipment, labor force and funding:

Palestinians have no “other choice but to work with their own hands to get out the rubble and to rebuild Gaza,” Mousa said, adding that she intends “to clean my home, my office and even the street” when circumstances allow.

She recounted how her 15-year-old relative who recently visited Gaza from Oman, where she lives, “can’t wait to go back” to help clean Gaza’s now rubble-strewn streets.

“So when I say that all the people of Gaza – elderly women, men, children – want to share in cleaning Gaza and rebuilding it, I mean it,” Mousa said.

World Court’s “extraordinary gift”

Following their conversation with Mousa, hosts Nora Barrows-Friedman and Ali Abunimah were joined by Michael Lynk to discuss the latest international legal developments in the effort to stop the genocide and Israel’s decades-long subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Lynk is a professor of law at Western University in Canada and from 2016 to 2022 served as the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory.

He described the political pressures being brought to bear on the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor announced in May that he is applying for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, respectively, and three Hamas leaders.

In a sign that Washington’s closest ally when it comes to Israel might be acting more independently, the UK’s new Labour government is expected to “to drop the previous government’s objections to the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s pursuit of an arrest warrant” for Netanyahu, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

“The sun rises slowly, I’m afraid, with respect to international law,” Lynk said.

But last week’s advisory opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice, the UN’s judicial organ also known as the World Court, is an “extraordinary gift” to the global movement for justice in Palestine, Lynk added.

That advisory opinion, which was requested by the UN General Assembly in late 2022, declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be illegal, which Lynk said “was not a foregone conclusion.”

Before this most recent advisory opinion, “there had been a number of declarations coming from UN bodies saying that aspects of the now 57-year-old occupation were illegal,” such as the annexation of East Jerusalem and the building of settlements.

“But never has a UN body said that the occupation itself is illegal,” Lynk said. He noted that the advisory opinion also states “that the occupation had to end completely and as rapidly as possible,” contradicting the whole premise of the Oslo process towards a negotiated two-state solution.

“Rights, not realpolitik”

The advisory opinion also says that states must ensure “to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end” – what may be reasonably interpreted as a call for an arms embargo and other sanctions.

There is “a wide menu of items” that the UN can consider with regard to arms trade, trade agreements, cultural agreements and other agreements with Israel. While there may be little hope for such advocacy in the US at present, the European Union is Israel’s single largest trading partner.

Action from below will determine whether there will be “a substantive rethinking in Europe that will begin to unwind those relationships as long as Israel shows no appetite whatsoever in wanting to heed the direction of the International Court of Justice, and what will soon be the direction of the General Assembly,” Lynk said.

He said that a resolution to the question of Palestine must be “based on rights, not on realpolitik” and “led by the United Nations and not by the United States.”

“That may seem like a pipe dream now. But it seems to me that’s a valid claim to be made by civil society organizations everywhere,” Lynk added.

And while international law is beset with limitations “largely imposed by powerful international actors,” according to Lynk, Palestinian human rights groups have been at the forefront of advancing legal frameworks situating Israel’s rights violations in the contexts of settler-colonialism and apartheid.

Efforts by those organizations helped paved the way for the groundbreaking “Anatomy of a Genocide” report issued by Lynk’s successor as special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, in March.

In that report, Albanese situates the genocide in Gaza within the dynamic, structural process of settler-colonialism, with genocidal extermination and annihilation representing the peak of that process.

“We cannot say enough in praising them for getting us to where we are today,” Lynk said of those human rights groups.

Resistance and reconciliation

Following the guest interviews, Jon Elmer delivered his weekly Gaza resistance report, with his analysis focusing on southern Rafah, the main battlefield space at present, as well as Gaza City.

“Ten months into the war,” Palestinian factions in Gaza are “able to fight just as well as from day one… if anything we see improvements because the command and control is firm,” Elmer said. “The fighters have experience and know how to move, and that’s what we’re seeing” in the Gaza City area, he added.

Elmer also discussed Saturday’s historic Yemeni drone strike on Tel Aviv that was aimed at the US embassy branch in the city:

The ability of regional resistance organizations’ drones and other devices to go undetected by Israel’s surveillance systems “is something we’re going to keep our eyes on, because it’s going to be a significant part of this war,” he said.

Following the resistance report, Ali Abunimah provided an analysis of the Beijing Declaration signed by 14 Palestinian factions in China on Tuesday, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed as a breakthrough after years of impasse.

The agreement is ultimately aspirational and fails to bridge the irreconcilable positions of the pro-resistance factions, on the one hand, and Fatah, on the other. The latter, led by Mahmoud Abbas, dominates the Western-backed Palestinian Authority that serves as a policing arm of the occupation.

So while it will yield little material change, there are noteworthy aspects to highlight.

Abunimah said that the “role of China is significant because it shows Beijing once again directly challenging the monopoly long claimed by the United States on any diplomacy in the region.”

“China as a rising world power is also sending an important signal by treating Hamas as a full and legitimate part of the Palestinian political scene,” Abunimah added, “and not demonizing it and sidelining it as a so-called terrorist organization, like Israel, the United States and the European countries.”

“And the deal has an important declaratory effect of robbing any legitimacy from the American-led planning for a so-called day after in Gaza,” Abunimah said – a point also observed by Omar Karmi, associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, in his analysis of the agreement.

“So the main message of the Beijing Declaration is that Palestinians and Palestinians alone have the right to decide their future on their land,” according to Abunimah.

US elections

While global shifts may be underway that portend an opening for new international relationships with the Palestinian people, US policy still plays an outsized and uniquely harmful role in their subjugation by Israel.

But there too an unprecedented situation is unfolding, with US President Joe Biden, considered a co-author of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, announcing on Sunday that he is dropping out of the 2024 election.

Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who has emerged as the more marketable candidate for a Democratic Party that has alienated large segments of its core constituency due to the genocide, Abunimah said.

But Harris’ pernicious record, whether it be spreading mass rape atrocity propaganda or pandering to AIPAC, according to Abunimah and Barrows-Friedman, gives very little reason to think she will be any more sympathetic to Palestinians than her boss.

Nor will she stand up to Netanyahu in Washington, according to Michael F. Brown, associate editor for The Electronic Intifada.

“Palestinians remain ‘lesser than’ for Harris, Democrats, Trump and Republicans,” Brown writes. “Voters sickened by Israeli apartheid and the Gaza genocide have no good presidential choices from the two major parties.”

The Electronic Intifada’s Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program and this author contributed writing and production. Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.

The Electronic Intifada associate editor Asa Winstanley is off and will return to the livestream next week.

Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.