The situation in Gaza – with horizons of ever evanescent ‘ceasefire’ agreements, the persistence of absolutely critical regional geopolitical conditions, the impotence of United Nations initiatives, the open questions about the degree of autonomy of the competent international courts – does not allow for optimistic estimates of possible solutions. While it is to be hoped that this pessimism will be disproved, especially, or at least, with regard to the inhuman tragic nature of the suffering inflicted on the Palestinian people, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), considers it appropriate to summarise in the following points its position on what has happened since 7 October 2023: in order to ‘account’ for what may have been read as an inexplicable silence, but even more to express and share a ‘judgment on the side of the peoples’: in coherence with what has emerged over these months from the consensus of so many sources and actors, and even more significantly e youth movements, culminated in a protest which has involved, worldwide, hundreds of squares and University campuses and has been violently repressed with the most arbitrary security motivations.
Hamas’s attack on Israel’s neighbouring kibbutzim on 7 October 2023 was, beyond all the contradictory reports describing its excess of violence, unanimously qualified as a crime against humanity. With an equally clear agreement that it was not an unexpected event, but the tragic expression of revolt, against that Nakba that began 75 years ago: coinciding with the slaughter and expulsion of the Palestinian people from the territories assigned to them, in radical violation by Israel of the international agreements that provided for the establishment of two states for two peoples.That ‘catastrophe’ has continued, with increasing violence of denials of any peace agreement and ‘operations’ of bombings, massacres, expulsions and occupation of Palestinian lands and peoples.
The reaction to 7 October by the State of Israel, with a war aimed explicitly at destroying Hamas, resulted in a global attack on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The chronicle of what has become a public show over the following months — documented through highly contradictory versions, and accompanied by the deaths of so many journalists and witnesses from humanitarian organisations — turned into a military operation so openly disregarding the massacre of thousands of civilians, with children and women as the core victims, to evoke the intention of a genocidal process. The evidence of the intolerable ‘disproportion’ of the ‘response’ to the Hamas attack has accumulated in a crescendo of inhuman horrors that have forced even the United Nations to take a stance by asking, to no avail, to consider truce or ceasefire options. The urgency with which the International Court of Justice responded to South Africa’s complaint confirmed the absolute seriousness of the State of Israel’s behaviour and its recognition that what was happening in Gaza was an absolute violation of international law and demanded an immediate ceasefire and the initiation of a formal and independent judgement of the facts, seeking solutions that would prevent the ‘plausibility’ of the genocidal nature of the massacre from becoming evidence ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’.
The hypothesis of a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal initiative, which had been immediately considered, became in this context apparently obvious, but absolutely redundant. Not only could the “evidence” not be more visible: what was happening in Gaza, and in the international geopolitical context — which extended Israel’s responsibility to the explicit and decisive connivance of the United States, the impotence of the organs-institutions of the United Nations, the involvement of silence, and therefore of the progressive complicity’, direct and indirect, of the actors of the international community itself — transformed Gaza into the exemplary documentation of a more comprehensive and profound picture of an international society ’emptied’ of its capacity to recognise, defend, and promote the fundamental right to life of concrete peoples, when these peoples are transformed into ‘object-victims-instruments of conflict’ between legally constituted powers.
The evolution of the ‘punitive’ operation by the State of Israel, deaf to any request of limitation, went from a war of military extermination to the denial of access to even the smallest readily available ‘humanitarian’ resources (food, water, essential health care), and include the evidence of torture practices and mass executions, the programmed cancellation of the most elementary conditions of coexistence: the debates on the technical definitions of crimes appeared to have an even more tragic significance: to be human, even children, by the thousands, officially counts for nothing anymore, if one is declared, an enemy, a terrorist: the time of negotiations can be legal, inevitable, but endless: and no one has to ‘answer’ for what keeps happening. Far from expressing a ‘complexity’ of the context, the smokescreens of discussions on the historical categories of anti-Semitism, Zionism, or the memory of other genocides are perfectly functional in rendering the concrete humans of the ongoing scenarios invisible and irrelevant.
The Palestinian people is in this sense the most visible core and the summarising symbol of the transversal people constituted by all those people-humans who enter, remain, and die in the gaps in the international law of states: in individual countries, or in the ever ongoing massacres such as those of the transversal people of migrants.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has nothing to add to the factual evidence that has accumulated and been acknowledged at the highest levels to add a formal, legally founded judgement in terms of genocide. And the State of Israel, with all its accomplices, direct and indirect, does not need a more or less solemn or formal condemnation to be held responsible. If and when Gaza is sentenced by an international court, it will be a ‘significant’ moment, but one that is tremendously out of time, and essentially ambiguous. The international society that can tolerate being a spectator, for a time that is already all in excess of minimum standards of civilisation, is already responsible for everything that has happened. Its impunity (for Gaza and for all the peoples that Gaza, and the West Bank, represent) is a fact for which a new, more or less different, Nuremberg is not needed. There are no victors who can set themselves up as judges. The many squares and demonstrations of all kinds ‘for Palestine’, especially of those young people who demand a future not just against someone, but for a peace project, call for the courage and transparency of an international law capable of being on the side of peoples as subjects of rights, and not only of victims. Not as judges who look, without haste, at a past that by definition is not reversible: lucidly aware of the terrible partiality and current impotence of a criminal law so ‘dependent’ on powers and policies that do not recognise it.
The tragically real, and symbolic, People of Gaza declares the urgent need and concrete investment of resources to think-create-experiment an international law which could be credible only as an instrument for the future and its emerging challenges and needs.
In its minority position, as a tribune of visibility and voice of the many ‘Palestinian’ peoples, the PPT can only be and tentatively represent, with its practice, this wish. Its hearings and verdicts highlight, as much as possible in real time, the judgement that the peoples make on the violations suffered and indicate through their struggles, resistance, perspectives their priorities’. The unfulfilled and violated needs of existing legal (international and national, public and private) orders are well contextualised and qualified: the focus which becomes every time clearer is on the doctrinal and operational gaps between the legality of laws and the legitimacy of the violated right to lives in dignity: not principally to constate them, but by proposing concrete and pertinent answers, which cannot correspond to legally non -responsive political and economic interests.
With the tragic and resilient nature of their stories, the many ‘PPT Peoples’ had in Gaza the absolute confirmation of their role as the only possible ‘school’ for an international law that must feel itself in urgent search of credibility: if it will ever be possible, with a judgement not resigned to the unpunished arbitrariness of the powerful; above all however, that coincide with a commitment, as part of its deepest, renewed, prospective identity, to be present, with a real-time confrontation, in the struggles of peoples for the inviolability of their lives and self-determination.
The peoples who are the real protagonists of the history of the PPT, and even more the People of Palestine, are perfectly aware of the ‘incredibility’ of the above wish. They share however the wish-methodology – definition given by Eduardo Galeano, a very active member of the PPT – for the horizons: we know, all too well, that they do not have a place-time: as the unmet, vital needs-rights to life, they do exist: as a ‘far away’, they indicate-oblige to a direction.
Gianni Tognoni, Secretary general