By ISABELA AGOSTINELLI & REGINALDO NASSER*
The Palestinian Question now occupies a symbolic place against an unjust post-colonial order
Despite being a small strip of land measuring 360 km2, with a population of 2,5 million living in sub-human conditions, the Gaza Strip made the Palestinian Question the center of international politics, after October 07, 2023, when the massacres perpetrated by Hamas triggered a large-scale Israeli military action.
There is no longer any doubt among war scholars that Gaza has suffered one of the most devastating bombing campaigns of all time and, consequently, the most intense punishment of civilians in history.
More than 75 thousand tons of bombs were dropped[I] – exceeding the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden and Hamburg during the entire Second World War (1939-1945). These bombs destroyed or damaged more than half of all buildings in Gaza and limited the territory’s access to water, food and electricity, leaving the entire population on the brink of starvation. More than 16 children were killed, while another 22 are missing.[ii] More than 40 Palestinians were killed, but the total death toll—both those directly affected and those indirectly killed by the destruction of civilian infrastructure—could be as high as 186.[iii]
The international community, international organizations and social movements around the world, especially in Western metropolises, began to speak out about the events in Gaza, with great prominence in the global media. In a meeting with Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in November 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lamented that the war in the Middle East was taking the focus away from Ukraine. Indeed, the Palestinian issue has been the most important issue on the international agenda for over a year.
Comparisons between both conflicts, Ukraine and Palestine, have become one of the focuses of global debate, whether from the perspective of geopolitics — that is, around the interests and alliances between States — or the scope of international law, which echoes the discussion about the tragic humanitarian consequences and possible actions to put an end to the atrocities.
Several proposed resolutions have been tabled at the UN Security Council, but many of them have been vetoed, mainly by the US, or have failed to deliver concrete action. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice, by a vote of 15 to two, admitted that it was “plausible” that Israel had committed acts of genocide in Gaza, and the court voted 15-2 to order the state to take all possible measures to end such acts.
The trial before the Court has taken center stage internationally, a crucial test for the United States and its Western allies. Are so-called liberal democracies prepared to hold Israel responsible for the extension of Western power in the Middle East, or do geopolitical and ideological affinities take precedence over law and morality?
The positioning of Western democracies regarding the war in Ukraine is too recent to be forgotten in Gaza. In June 2022, President Biden published an article in which he said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences around the world.”[iv]. The term in English Rules Based International Order (Rules-Based International Order) gained notoriety after the end of the Cold War. More recently, after the invasion of Ukraine, the term has become a mantra.
The foundations of this order were established under the hegemony of liberal thought, after the massacres of the Second World War and the Holocaust, with the creation of the UN and the promulgation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The justification of the States that conceived these international institutions was to improve humanitarian law and, therefore, the legal protection of non-combatants. However, from the beginning, the rules of this order, for the purposes of legal accountability, were valid only for the defeated, which did not happen with the indiscriminate bombings of Dresden or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were not even judged.
Since then, Western democracies have treated the term “rules-based international order” as synonymous with international law. However, sometimes this order is hailed when it serves the interests of countries—for example, when the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Putin for his war crimes in Ukraine. More often than not, however, the “rules” are set aside.
There are hundreds of examples, however, the scale of the humanitarian tragedy resulting from the so-called Global War on Terror, in the immediate post-September 11th, is striking. According to calculations by Costs of War,[v] It is estimated that more than 400 people died violently and around 3,6 to 3,8 million people died indirectly in war zones. Given this, how is it possible to talk about an international order based on international law?
In fact, the term “rules-based international order” should be seen as a powerful ideology that obscures reality and has played an important role in geopolitics over the past few decades. The rules may apply to America’s adversaries, but the US and its allies are free to decide whether or not to participate in this order.
However, we are likely to see a shift in the US’s stance on the rules-based international order. It is no longer a matter of ignoring it, as has always been the case, but rather of deliberately criticizing international institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. On the day that ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced his intention to seek arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Joe Biden not only aggressively rejected the move, but went further, saying that regardless of what the International Criminal Court said or did not say, Israel was not guilty of genocide.
In other words, it is not the “rules-based international order” that is in crisis, but rather the ideology of liberal internationalism that sustains it. Always supported, implicitly or explicitly, by “Western democracies”, Israel has even suggested that the International Court of Justice was complicit in terrorist actions.
If, at the beginning of the Israeli military’s action in Gaza, Israel questioned the veracity of the abundant reports of atrocities that came from a variety of sources, after a while, the Israeli authorities changed tactics and began to justify the actions under the rubric of “military necessity”. Regardless of using the language of humanitarian law of proportionality and minimization of harm, Israel argues that the main objective, superior to any type of harm that could occur to Palestinian civilians, was to rescue the kidnapped civilians and eradicate Hamas and its entire infrastructure.
The unsustainability of the rules-based international order stems not only from the political positioning of the Global South, but also from public opinion in Western cities. None of the principles that define the world order are convincing. The Palestinian question now occupies a symbolic place against an unjust post-colonial order. If international law and the international institutions that support its applicability are no longer the litmus test of legitimacy for the US and its allies, what other guidelines should replace the rules-based international order?
It is still too early to answer this question, but what is happening in Gaza allows us to imagine what an order that allows genocide would be like.
*Isabela Agostinelli is a postdoctoral researcher at INCT-INEU.
*Reginaldo Nasser is a professor of International Relations at PUC-SP. Aauthor, among other books, of The fight against terrorism: the United States and its Taliban friends (Contracurrent Publisher). [https://amzn.to/46J5chm]
Originally published in the magazine WithScience.
Notes
[I] Data available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/4/23/photos-200-days-of-israels-war-on-gaza.
[ii] Data available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker.
[iii] Data available at: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.
[iv] Available in: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/biden-ukraine-strategy.html.
[v] Available in: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.
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