SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: ISRAEL/US: a toxic relationship

Yodysseus

ISRAEL/US: a toxic relationship By unlawfully enabling Israel's "contagion" of "lawlessness" in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, the United States of America has been hoisted upon its own petard: it has made itself weaker (by, for example, undermining its soft power, such as its ability to command compliance with its sanctions (e.g., Russia's ability to circumvent sanctions on the sale of its oil and natural gas), and its ability to influence and thereby shape the actions of other nations to align with its own interests (e.g., the reactionary rise in the influence of the BRICS)) and has undermined the peace of its allies by signaling that the order and security established by international law has been replaced instead with the chaos and fear of the jungle. 2024.12.11, Professor Ben Saul (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, and Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney in Australia), press conference of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (UN OHCRH): “The problem here, of course, is that Israel … has enjoyed impunity for many, many decades, which has emboldened it to become increasingly violent and increasingly lawless. … It’s not just that there have extreme violations which have been well documented, so we well all over the past 14 months have seen deliberate attacks on civilians, indiscriminate attacks, disproportionate attacks, starvation, denial of humanitarian relief, suppression of NGOs and UNWRA …, a complete lack of credible accountability through the Israeli military and civilian justice system. That’s all pretty obvious and on the record. What I find more shocking in a way is that—I’ve been working on humanitarian law for 25 years, I’ve cooperated technically with the Israeli defense forces on many occasions in the past, and I know they have excellent lawyers, very, very good international humanitarian lawyers, so—when they unleash a campaign of violence like this, they know what they’re doing. … Israel has enabled this violence by [revising its rules of engagement by adopting frivolous interpretations of international humanitarian law] to impose a cloak of legality on what they’re doing [that is a complete farce] … This is a part of a historical pattern. It’s the same story if you go back on the way Israel has sought to legalize its settlements in the West Bank, housing evictions, exploitation of Palestinian natural resources, claims to territory, etcetera. And the problem of course is [m]uch of this has gone unchallenged by the states that matter and that can have a real influence to change Israel’s behavior on the ground. … [T]his is something which is expanding, a kind of contagion that’s going well beyond the occupied Palestinian territory. In the past year, many of us have commented publicly on the kind of lawlessness that Israel has also been unleashing on its neighbors. So, if you think on just in recent days in Syria, destruction of the Syrian air force when there are no pilots …; the attacks in the buffer zone in the Syrian Golan Heights. We’ve seen in Lebanon indiscriminate attacks through the pager explosions; attacks on Hezbollah banks, calling them military objectives when they’re just financial institutions. And, again, it goes back to [Israel’s] exploitation of [their lawyers’ knowingly frivolous] interpretations of humanitarian law. In Iran, attacks on multiple occasions which are not in self-defense according to international law. So, of course, all of this is enormously destructive of the international legal order. If lawlessness on this scale and of this extremity has no consequences then it sends a signal to everybody else that you can behave in the same way, and the whole system begins to break down. It’s encouraging that a bunch of countries have sought to hold Israel to account and it’s a very strong legal movement on many, many fronts. But, ultimately, you need the states that matter to bring the pressure to bear on Israel. Germany and the United States supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill the Palestinians. … [O]ver many decades, the Israel military justice system has proven in most cases utterly incapable of holding Israeli nationals to account. When prosecutions are brought in rare cases, they often end in very light penalties relative to the severity of the crimes. … We should demand that all victims receive the accountability and reparation they’re entitled to … The problem has been of course that the US has presented red lines to Israel, Israel breaks them repeatedly, and there are no consequences from the US. [I]srael has called the US’s bluff, it knows it has rock-solid political support in the US political system no matter what it does, whether it torches people in military custody, whether it obliterates most of the public infrastructure and housing in Gaza, kills over 40,000 people [directly], displaces everybody pretty much, it can keep doing. Unless the US, who is the only one in the position to make Israel really change things on the ground, it’ll keep doing it. And, as I mentioned, we’ve seen it emboldened in the neighborhood as well in a bunch of other countries. … On Germany, … unfortunately, [t]he Germany intelligence agency has listed the whole Boycott Divestment Sanction movement worldwide as an extremist organization and subjected it to intelligence investigation and surveillance. Lots of Western countries … impose sanctions [but] only on their geopolitical adversaries … We never impose sanctions on our friends. And, yet we say that sanctions are also tools to enforce human rights and international law and against violations of humanitarian law. It’s no wonder that vast parts of the world [including the global south] feel like the international justice system is discredited because you’re just using it law using it as a political tool of your own foreign policy, you’re not serious about applying the legal tools you have to enforce international law in an impartial, independent manner. Of course, that has ripple effects everywhere, because people say, when you ask us to sanction Russia on Ukraine, why would we do that if you’re not doing that on Israel or other situations where your friends are lawless under international law. … There is absolutely no basis under international law to preventively or preemptively disarm a country you don’t like [which Israel has been doing over the last several days]. [I]f that were the case, it would be a recipe for global chaos because lots of countries have adversaries they would like to see without weapons. This is completely lawless. There is absolutely no basis in international law to do it. But it’s a continuation of what Israel has been doing in Syria for at least a decade. So, many, many hundreds of preventive attacks have been launched by Israeli forces in Syria to destroy Hezbollah weapons, dumps, storage facilities in circumstances where there is no armed attack from Hezbollah on Israel from Syria. … But you can’t just follow your enemy wherever they are in the world and bomb them in some third country, which has been Israel’s approach. It’s also done, of course, in other ways, we’ve commented on this previously, through campaigns of assassinations of adversaries in third countries, including in quite a number of cases, of civilians. I mean think of the multiple assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists over the last ten, fifteen years. These aren’t military targets. Even if it were a war, you couldn’t kill them. And, yet, that is what Israel has a long history of doing to its adversaries.”