On October 7, Israel announced that it was “at war.” Following an attack on towns and settlements in southern Israel, the Israeli government said it was launching a “large-scale operation to defend Israeli civilians.” Two days later, his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a complete blockade of Gaza, cutting off electricity, fuel, water and food supplies; “We are fighting human animals,” he said.
Since then, more than 17,700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip, more than a third of them children. More than 1.7 million people have been displaced inside the enclave, with civilians having no safe zone to flee to.
Amidst this death and destruction, the dominant narrative in Western media and political circles is that this is a “war,” that Israel has the “right to defend itself” against “terrorism.” » and that the fate of the Palestinians is a “humanitarian” question. This description of what is happening – supported by language borrowed from international law – completely distorts the reality on the ground.
Everything that is currently happening in Israel-Palestine takes place in the context of colonization, occupation and apartheid, which are illegal under international law. Israel is a colonizing power and the Palestinians are the colonized indigenous population. Any reference to international law that does not recall these circumstances is a distortion of history.
Israel: a colonizer
Israel’s status as a settler state was clear from the first days of the UN. It is remarkable that much of the uniqueness of the case of Palestine, and hence its vulnerability to misrepresentation and manipulation, lies in the fact that it was colonized at the same time as the mass colonization of the global South was theoretically coming to an end.
For example, Jewish Agency representative Ayel Weizman, one of the main contributors to the Zionist project, described what was happening at that time as “Jewish colonization of Palestine” during the Special Committee hearings. of the United Nations on Palestine in 1947., while the recognition of the State of Israel was being deliberated.
Resolutions issued by the United Nations General Assembly in the 1950s and 1970s tended to associate Palestine with other colonized nations. For example, Resolution 3070 of 1973 declared that the UNGA “condemns all governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples, in particular the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the Palestinian people “.
Likewise, the case of Palestine has also been presented as a close relative of the case of apartheid South Africa. For example, Resolution 2787 of 1971 said that the General Assembly “confirms the legality of the struggle of the people for self-determination and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign enslavement, notably in southern Africa and particularly that of the people of Zimbabwe and Namibia. , Angola, Mozambique and Guinea (Bissau), as well as the Palestinian people by all means available and compatible with the Charter of the United Nations.
Following the 1967 war, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights resulted in the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 242. UN, which in its preamble underlined “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territories by war” and called for the “withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied during the recent conflict”.
However, the resolutions’ deliberate ambiguity, in the reference to “occupied territories” in the English version of the text, has been used by Israel to justify its occupation and annexation for more than half a century. It also paved the way for Israel to begin building settlements – which Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, defined in her report A/77/356 as a “colonization” of the West Bank.
The context of colonization and occupation was put aside with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, presented to international agreement as a “peace agreement” ending the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict”. Of course, it came to nothing of the sort.
The oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israeli colonizers continues.
The right to defend and the right to resist
The removal of the context of colonization and occupation has facilitated the representation of Palestinians as belonging exclusively to one of two categories: “victims” of a humanitarian crisis or “terrorists.”
On the one hand, presenting the plight of the Palestinians as a humanitarian concern masks its root causes. As several reports from the UN and rights organizations have highlighted, the Israeli occupation and apartheid devastated the Palestinian economy and plunged Palestinians into poverty. The emphasis on the humanitarian element perpetuates aid dependency and sidelines demands for accountability and reparations.
On the other hand, the narrative that portrays Palestinians as “terrorists” obscures the reality that the goal of the Israeli military has always been the eradication of the “Palestinian problem” by any means possible, including ethnic cleansing, enslavement and displacement. It also deprives the Palestinian people of the right to resist, which is enshrined in international law.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes in its preamble that “it is essential, if man is not to be forced to resort, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that the rights of man are protected by the rule of law. “. In effect, this means that rebellion against tyranny and oppression when human rights are not protected is acceptable.
Likewise, numerous resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly from the 1950s and 1970s, the First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions and the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice provide proof of the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples by all parties. means at their disposal in the exercise of their functions. of self-determination.
Of course, when resisting in any form, Palestinians are bound by the rules for the conduct of hostilities of international humanitarian law.
The denial of the Palestinians’ right to resist goes hand in hand with the fact that Israel and its allies constantly speak of the “Israeli right to defend itself.” But Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which legitimizes armed aggression in the name of self-defense, cannot be invoked when the threat emanates from within an occupied territory.
The International Court of Justice reaffirmed this principle in its advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territory (2004).
It is important to emphasize that even though Israel unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it still exercises effective control over the territory. This reality has become starkly evident over the past two months, as Israel has moved to cut off food, water, medical supplies, electricity and fuel – all essential to the existence of the population of Gaza.
According to international humanitarian law, Gaza is occupied by Israel and the latter cannot invoke self-defense as a legitimate reason for its aggression against a threat emanating from territory over which it exercises effective control.
In this sense, Israel commits war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide in Gaza not in the context of “self-defense”, but of occupation. The Israeli army has indiscriminately and disproportionately used explosive weapons, forced the displacement of more than 1.7 million people in Gaza and cut off access to fuel, electricity, food, water and medical supplies, which constitutes collective punishment.
Unfortunately, these crimes are not an anomaly, but part of the ongoing systemic violence inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people over the past 75 years.
Outdated laws of war
In trying to justify the shocking civilian casualty toll in Gaza, Israel and its supporters have frequently invoked the laws of war, using terms like “voluntary human shields” and “proportionality.”
In addition to the erroneous arguments and lack of evidence from which these assertions suffer, they also rely on a set of standards codified by colonial powers and scandalously outdated.
The laws of war were developed during the colonial era to regulate the use of force between sovereign states. The colonies were obviously not considered equal sovereigns and the laws were designed to maintain dominance over indigenous peoples, their territories and resources.
These laws do not take into account the asymmetry of power between the parties to a conflict. They do not respond to technological changes in warfare. They are not designed to account for the economic and political interests that shape war. Over the past 75 years, considerable efforts have been made to address these shortcomings, but Northern states have systematically undermined them.
This is not surprising given that most contemporary wars take place outside the North and profits from war trade primarily fuel Northern economies.
It is not in the interest of powerful states to update these laws so that they correspond to the reality on the ground. Instead of updating the laws of war to decolonize them, over the past 20 years the North has imposed a new framework that accommodates its “war on terror.”
It is therefore not surprising that as Israel exterminates Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the dominant international legal response reflects a persistent colonial attitude that ignores distortions and misrepresentations and refuses to call things what they are. – settler colonialism, resistance, and the people’s right to self-determination.
The only way out of cycles of brutal violence is to fully and unequivocally recognize the colonial context in Palestine. Israel must end colonization, occupation and apartheid in Palestine and engage in reconciliation and reparations.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.