Israel-Usa: end-of-year message from the “exemplary democracies”
Gianni Tognoni, Secretary General of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
(Article published in Volere la luna)
The reports and analyses of what has been happening for more than two months now between Gaza and the West Bank are so widespread, even in the profound differentiation of interpretations, that no further factual or analytical contributions are required. The perspectives opened by Domenico Gallo in the latest issue of Volere la luna represent, on the other hand, and in a concrete manner due to the precision of the framework of international law that is proposed, the absolutely majority opinions that see an end to the massacre of the Palestinian people as unavoidable and not to be postponed, as a minimal condition to think of a future for which, however, the current perspectives do not go beyond the ritual repetition of old formulas.
Those who do not seem to have any doubts, for a present-future of perfect continuity, are the two States mentioned in the title: their underlying message is, moreover, already clear, perfectly announced and confirmed: ”our decisions are the internal affairs of our countries-interests”. The arrogance-provocation of this position finds clear support in the substantial connivance of the international community of States. Beyond the votes at the UN level, nothing has actually moved at a concrete level. If one makes the comparison with what happened with Ukraine, it seems as if we are inhabitants-spectators (citizens?) of two different worlds-epochs. It is not for nothing that even the declarations of the highest authorities of the United Nations, which for the first time took on tones and terms that responded to the intolerability of the facts and not to the sacred rules of neutrality of diplomacy, were the subject of more or less approving comments, but did not find echoes-confirmations-consequences in the concrete positions of precise criticism with respect to the two States, which remain officially qualified (at least in diplomatic formality) as exemplary democracies, whose reasons are untouchable.
This is not the place to discuss. To know where we are, and if and how something must be thought of for the future, it is necessary to see the implications of what continues to become even more evident. The two democracies that are protagonists in the Gaza and West Bank scenarios certify that they are not held accountable for their policies. International law has no value. Their interpretation of democracy does not include respect for even the most basic and ancient rules of war. New targeting technologies aim to make the elimination of populations more effective. The thousands of children, the destruction of hospitals, and the minimal conditions of survival are an integral and inevitable part of a “defensive response” to an attack that was anticipated and not intended to be avoided. The certainly not accidental killing of so many journalists and poet-intellectuals completes the picture.
This also certifies that a category as ambiguous as terrorism can wipe out the very existence of a people and the lives of all its members: humanitarian considerations are unworkable exceptions.
The invocation of a judgement-competence of an international court (authoritatively formulated by several non-institutional parties) reflects at this point a formality to be discussed in times and ways whose improbability, and even more ineffectiveness, is clear: the discussions on the qualification of the crimes that are at stake – of war, against humanity, genocide – resembles a political-doctrinal debate that disregards the concreteness of the massacres that only translate into more or less accurate statistics where numbers replace and hide the indescribable suffering-death of no matter who.
Exemplary democracies certify that it is enough to qualify someone as an enemy to render irrelevant his being a subject with inviolable rights as a human being. A whole population can be turned into hostages without the possibility of negotiation: the crime of erasing peace as a hypothesis to be pursued is neither prosecutable nor invocable.
What is “certified” in the facts by the democracies most directly involved, and by those that are conniving with their positions as observers or allies, in the Gaza and West Bank scenario (the history and the right of the Palestinian people obliges one not to separate the two situations, for the victims, and for the implications they entail if one wants to think of a way out) has tragic consequences for the credibility of an “international order”. Who will be able to protest-or oppose what one or the other dictatorship-power (more or less disguised as democracy: just think of Turkey, which even offers itself as mediator, or Russia, or the regimes of Myanmar, or India with respect to its own internal affair or to Kashmir…) decide to do with respect to peoples so easily qualified, under whatever definition, as terrorists?
The urgency (of which only the Palestinian people know more directly the unbearable weight, compared to the prospect of months similar to those experienced: and which add up to many years of in-existence as equal partners) to find solutions, is compulsory: but it can only be credible if the global protest manifested by civil society becomes the core of an awareness of the long-term urgency of the community of States to thoroughly change its instruments and institutions.
The 75 years that have passed since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot be “celebrated”: the war of the “exemplary democracies” certifies (…not by itself: but as a tragic indicator of a disorder of civilisation) that the future of “peoples”, not only in geopolitical macro contexts, but within all countries, cannot be guaranteed by current rules. From its small permanent observatory, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has witnessed, along with so many movements experimenting with strategies of liberation from the ever-renewed models of colonialism, how many gaps and omissions there are in a law that has become the violent guarantor of powers increasingly dissociated from human life-dignity. The migrants are the most widespread “Palestinian people” exposed to genocide by stillicide. As are the growing people of the unequal, by one of many wars. Of which the environmental one re-declared at the last COP is a transversal scenario.
This is unfortunately not a new reality. Gaza and the West Bank are the tragically current certification that the minimal credibility of a civilisation that wants to be human is at stake. And perhaps there is no better way to close these reflections than to refer to a book, published in Israel as early as 2006, by one of the great protagonists of Israel’s recent history, Avraham Burg, who was also Speaker of the Knesset. The greatest challenge that the State of Israel must/is facing coincides with the title: “Defeating Hitler”. The profound and authentic memory of the Shoah must not be allowed to translate into its reproduction, internally, and even more so in regional and international scenarios: a pass that justifies and obliges one to understand and forgive all excesses, from apartheid to security paranoia to war.