On October 7 2023, the Palestinian joint operations room — the name given to operations planned and conducted by all resistance groups in Gaza (Hamas, PFLP, DFLP and Palestinian Jihad) — launched a major offensive, the first of its kind, in the occupied territories. For the first time in history, they broke out of Gaza and into ‘Israel’, methodically cleaning out military bases in the settlements surrounding Gaza and taking Prisoners of War for later negotiations.
Instantly, and as is usual with the Zionist entity, this act of resistance was called a ‘terrorist attack’ in their media, and repeated by the Western governments (chiefly the United States — incuding ex-President Barack Obama) to be then picked up by our media. Le Monde, ABC, BBC, CNN are among the biggest outlets that have abandoned all journalistic integrity and simply repeat the “official” (Israeli) narrative, unchallenged.
The only media groups that have retained some integrity, it should be noted, are press agencies like Reuters, AP and AFP who have simply called the operation a “Hamas attack”, although they also fail to correctly identify that this was a joint operation, and not the sole product of Hamas leadership.
The reason they “forget” the other resistance groups is to equate the whole of Gaza with Hamas. In this way they are still serving the interests of ‘Israel’ as it relentlessly bombs Gaza and displaces millions further towards the Egypt border.
We will go into the weasel words and loaded language the media uses to push a narrative under the guise of objectivity in a later article.
I have long stopped believing that international law was ever meant to be anything more than well wishes. No offense to human rights lawyers. I think both human rights and international law, the guarantor of those rights, are a great idea on paper. But they don’t work in reality. Without a body capable of bringing criminals to justice, there is simply no way to enforce these laws.
And which country would want to willingly submit its leaders to prosecution?
As a designer, my philosophy is that if something has no use — if people don’t use it, if it serves no purpose — then it should be done away with and replaced by something that’s actually effective.
International law is an idealist concept. Not idealist as in it “follows an ideal”. I mean idealist in the philosophical sense; in the meaning that having the right ideas (in this case writing a body of law that all countries will conform to) will be enough to lead to material change (those countries will actually obey international law).
I’m a materialist, standing at the complete opposite. My point of view is that first, we get a mechanism to actually enforce international law, and then we can have the international law.
After World War 2, it was necessary to judge (some) Nazis. But no framework existed under which this could be done: everything the Nazis and SS did was legal under their laws. How could a French or American lawyer prosecute a German national for things committed in Poland which were not even considered crimes in that (occupied) territory?
The Nuremberg Trials established that there could be acts so vile, so major, that they would transcend national borders and could be prosecuted by the ‘world’ itself. We call those crimes against humanity.
Some state leaders, a handful at most, have been tried under international law since Nuremberg. Most of them come from Africa (PDF download source). We’ll get back to why that is.
To try someone under international law, you actually need to get them to court. Again, no state will send its leader to be tried by a foreign, ‘international’ court. No police or army will legitimately say “We recognize the ICC ruling and will hand over our President”.
The ICC can issue all the arrest warrants it wants against Putin, they also rely on Russia or the countries he visits to arrest him and bring him to the Hague.
This is why all cases at the ICC have involved defendants from Africa — a continent wholly in the Global south. There, it’s much easier for more powerful, imperialist countries (such as the USA, Canada, and the Western European countries who received aid under the Marshall Plan) to bring ‘criminals’ to court. African leaders, who are still largely operating under the tutelage of neo-colonialism, often have to travel to Europe or North America for business or political reasons.
This is how Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, ex-vice President of the DRC, was ultimately arrested. He was sent to the ICC by Belgium for war crimes allegedly committed during the war against the Central African Republic (2002-2003).
Bemba was acquitted of all charges in 2018, 10 years after his arrest — a decade he spent jailed in Scheveningen, Netherlands. It’s interesting to see that at no point the DRC was consulted on this arrest; Belgium transferred him to the ICC when he set foot in Brussels.
President Obama, however, was allowed to freely travel to Belgium without facing any arrests, despite his many war crimes — a long tradition for US Presidents. I have talked about this before, but what radicalized me was the murder of US-citizen Anwer Al-Awlaki in Yemen, who was assassinated by an Obama-ordered drone strike in 2011 targetting him specifically. As a US citizen, he should have received due process and a fair trial. Instead, he was unceremoniously bombed to nothingness.
The ICC is, mind you, only one part of the imperial system that allows the West to project its hegemony over the entire world. Another part of this system when it comes to the judiciary is the International Justice Court, which is a civil court of the United Nations that hears cases between countries. It should be noted the ICC is technically supposed to be independent and is not attached to the UN in any official way.
I think now more than ever, we are seeing the breaking down in real time of the modern incarnation of international law that the UN gave us after World War 2.
I don’t believe that in today’s world, as things stand at the moment, there can be a way to actually enforce international law objectively and universally, no matter which form they take.
How would enforceable international law actually work? Would there be a stateless group of mercenaries whose sole purpose for existing is to quietly kidnap criminal heads of state to be tried? This group is called the Justice League, and it exists only in the comic book universe.
We rely on the honor system for the ICC to work because that’s the only system international law can work under. We selectively issue warrants for African politicians and leave our own war criminals alone, who are guilty of the same - if not worse - crimes.
International law thus poses a very difficult challenge. Either you believe in international law, and can’t reconcile that it seems to apply to some countries but not others. Or you don’t believe in international law, and then logically shouldn’t use it to make a point about how an event was legitimate because it was legal under international law.
However, I don’t believe that our leaders — who have actual power — believe in international law any more than I do. And if they allow themselves to wave it around so selectively, then I will give myself that privilege too.
On October 7, when the joint operations room launched their unprecedented operation on their occupied territory, they broke no laws.
The UN has at various times reiterated that Palestine was occupied, and thus fell under Occupation Law. It has also at various times repeated that armed struggle is legitimate in the course of fighting against an occupation.
There are many cases where I find international law insufficient. It’s written mostly by the victors, after all. International law doesn’t think settler-colonialism exists, for example. It doesn’t think imperialism in the 21st century exists either. It’s a wholly individualized set of laws that looks at tangible actions: “you’ve killed civilians, therefore you broke the law” — implying that if you settle a territory without killing its population (much like how Palestinians were forced out into Gaza and the West Bank), you have committed no crime. If you fund death squads in Nicaragua to replace a democratically-elected president with your own pawn, you’ve committed no crime — the pawn has. As far as the ICC is concerned, your hands are clean.
This is how the backers of Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, evaded justice. He himself was charged by his country of Chile and arrested in London in 1998, far after the Thatcher years, but only sent back to Chile in the year 2000. As the ICC did not exist at the time (And the ICJ only settles disputes between countries), we can only imagine what they would have said had Chile pushed for an arrest warrant to be issued against its former dictator and butcher.
This article was a quicker bonus read before my weekly article comes out this Friday: ‘Even the dead still have blood to spill’, out November 17.