What Is Israel Doing in Lebanon? War with Iran? Expansionism? Deterrence by State Terror? Netanyahu’s CV

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Oct 2024

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

16 Oct 2024 – Responses to questions by Brazilian journalist Rodrigo Craveiro for Correio Braziliense. The focus is on the regional spillover of violence as linked the Gaza Genocide, which itself is still ongoing after more than a year, arousing concerns from internationally reliable sources of starvation and disease prompting adverse reaction from Israel’s supporters. Major states in Europe are threatening Israel with an arms embargo if it does not accept a ceasefire, while the US warms Israel that it will cease supplying Israel with weapons if it does not facilitate an increase in the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza within the next 30 days.

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1– Today US warned Israel to take urgent steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next 30 days or face losing access to US weapons funding. How do you see that?

From the perspectives of international law, human rights, and the UN such a US move comes far too late, yet from a political perspective of ending the violence in Gaza and the expansion of the combat zone beyond Gaza a cutoff of US weapons support would be a small step in the welcome direction of peacemaking.

It is worrisome that the Gaza warning is framed in terms of the humanitarian catastrophe that continues to befall the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza without mention of a ceasefire or the spillover Israeli violence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

And why a 30 day grace period, and not immediately in view of emergency realities in Gaza that threaten increasing famine and disease, concerns that have received confirmation in recent days from reliable and respected international expert sources.

From experience over the past year, it is too early to tell even whether the US warning to Israel will be implemented. The US Government has warned Israel in the past, most recently in relation to avoid attacking Rafah with its large number of sheltering Palestinians. Israel ignored the warning and nothing was done by Washington to withdraw US support.

Finally, improving the humanitarian situation is vague, and can be satisfied by vague and often unverified and contested self-serving assessments as with disruptions during an agreed pause in the violence to allow delivery of polio vaccines to Palestinians in Gaza.

2– Netanyahu said today Israel owes its existence to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and not to the approval of its creation by the UN. What do you think about it?

Israel has always been guided by a realist belief that national security is a reflection of military hard power rather than be earning a law-abiding reputation. In that sense, Netanyahu is merely declaring what has been obvious at every stage of Israel’s existence and even during the pre-state period of the Zionist Movement.  Only a fool in 2024 would deny that Israel puts its trust in weaponry rather than in legality or morality. By setting military approaches to security against legitimation by the UN as a distinct choice, Netanyahu and leaders before him, have consistently avoided a stance in which Israel’s leaders would contend that both their battlefield success and the UN acceptance as a legitimate state were instrumental is establishing Israel as a state back in 1948, a date long prior to finding an appropriate solution for Palestinian grievances and just aspirations, a great, rarely acknowledged UN failing.

In the recent year or so, Netanyahu along with other Israeli leaders and Western supporting governments have joined in defaming the UN as biased against Israel, even institutionally antisemitic. This is manifested in many ways, but none resented by Israel more than the alleged holding of Israel to standards higher than applicable in the treatment of all other UN members.

Critics of Israel’s approach to security and conflict resolution approach believe the opposite is true, that even at the UN Israel has been able to hide its crimes and expansionism behind thick clouds of obfuscation and geopolitical protection. Palestinians  have a far stronger case against the UN due to its imposition back in 1947 of a partition of their country to achieve a two-state outcome without ever consulting the wishes of the resident majority Arab population, and then failing to secure Palestinian rights in the land allocated for their state, the extent of which was further diminished by Israeli military expansion. The UN has let the Palestinian people suffer despite their acceptance of responsibility as the successor to the British Mandate.

3– Hezbollah threatened today to  carry out attacks in “all” Israel. Why do you think Israel is facing difficulties to defeat Hezbollah?

It is difficult to speculate on the motivations of Hezbollah, and hence their evident determination to withstand the Gaza-like onslaught that Israel threatened and is now enacting. It may be partly tied to the Israeli assassination of their longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or to a sense of a sacred struggle in the spirit of jihad or to a collective Islamic response to Israel’s recourse to genocide. The support for Israel among the liberal democracies of the Global West is a somewhat analogous collective civilizational stance, although not portrayed as such, especially in the US. On neither side of this most destructive and dangerous encounter since the Cold War can behavior be explained by reference to traditional national interests alone.

Ever since the anti-colonial struggles for self-determination and against Western encroachment have been won by the militarily far weaker side, the realist equation of military superiority leading to political victory has lost its analytic power and explanatory force of how history evolves and  is made. In light of this development, it should be no surprise that Israel has not managed to defeat Hezbollah as yet despite mounting a series of punishing assaults on its Lebanon base area. As the Gaza post-October 7 experience illustrates, the only way to overcome the commitment of a victimized people struggling for a liberating freedom is by engaging in genocidal operations comparable to how the various Western settler colonialist projects dealt with the resistance of native peoples.

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

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