[News] How international law is used to cover up Israeli settler-colonialism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 How international law is used to cover up Israeli settler-colonialism

*Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ is wrongly evoked within the context of
its occupation of Palestinian territories.*

   - [image: Shahd Hammouri]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri>
   Shahd Hammouri <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri>
   Lecturer in International Law at the University of Kent

Published On 10 Dec 2023
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/10/how-international-law-is-used-to-cover-up-israeli-settler-colonialism
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[image: A screenshot of a video showing Israeli soldiers raising the
Israeli flag on a beach in Gaza in November 2023 [Al Jazeera/Screenshot]]
A screenshot of a video showing Israeli soldiers raising the Israeli flag
on a beach in Gaza in November 2023 [Al Jazeera/Screenshot]

On October 7, Israel announced it was “at war”. Following an attack on
southern Israeli towns and settlements, the Israeli government declared it
was launching a “large-scale operation to defend Israeli civilians”. Two
days later, its defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a full blockade
of Gaza, cutting off supplies of electricity, fuel, water and food; “We are
fighting human animals,” he said
<https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza>
.

Since then, more than 17,700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli
bombardment of the Gaza strip, more than a third of them children. More
than 1.7 million people have been displaced within the enclave, with
civilians having no safe zone to flee to.

Amid this death and destruction, the dominant narrative in Western media
and political circles has been that this is “a war”, Israel has the “right
to defend itself “against “terrorism”, and the Palestinian plight is a
“humanitarian” issue. This framing of what is going on – backed with
language borrowed from international law – completely distorts the reality
on the ground.

Everything that is happening now in Israel-Palestine is taking place within
the context of colonisation, occupation and apartheid, which according to
international law, are illegal. Israel is a colonising power and the
Palestinians are the colonised indigenous population. Any reference to
international law that does not recall these circumstances is a distortion
of the story.
Israel: A coloniser

The status of Israel as a colonising state was clear in the early days of
the United Nations. It is notable that much of the peculiarity of the case
of Palestine, and in turn, its susceptibility to misrepresentation and
manipulation, is that it was colonised at the moment when mass-colonisation
of the Global South was theoretically ending.

For example, the representative of the Jewish Agency, Ayel Weizman, one of
the main actors in enabling the Zionist project, described
<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-211525/> what was
happening at that time as Jewish “colonisation of Palestine” during the
hearings of the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, as the
recognition of the state of Israel was being deliberated.

Resolutions issued by the UN General Assembly during the 1950s-1970s tended
to couple Palestine with other colonised 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,
notably the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the
Palestinian people”.

Similarly, the case of Palestine was also portrayed as a close relative to
the case of apartheid South Africa. For example, Resolution 2787 of 1971
said that the General Assembly “confirms the legality of the people’s
struggle for self-determination and liberation from colonial and foreign
domination and alien subjugation, notably in southern Africa and in
particular that of the peoples of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and
Guinea [Bissau], as well as of the Palestinian people by all available
means consistent 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, prompted the UN
Security Council Resolution 242, which in its preamble emphasised “the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called for the
“withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict”.

However, the resolutions’ deliberate ambiguity in referring to “territories
occupied” in the English version of the text, has been used by Israel to
justify its occupation and annexation for over half a century. It also
paved the way for Israel to start building settlements – something
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human
rights in the Palestinian territories, defined in her report A/77/356 as
“colonising” the West Bank.

The context of colonisation and occupation was brushed to the side with the
signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which was presented to the
international agreement as a “peace agreement” that put an end to the
“Palestinian-Israeli conflict”. It, of course, did no such thing.

The oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people at the hands of
their Israeli colonisers continued.
The right to defend and the right to resist

Removing the context of colonisation and occupation has facilitated the
portrayal of Palestinians as exclusively being one of two categories:
“victims” of a humanitarian crisis or “terrorists”.

On the one hand, framing the plight of the Palestinians as a humanitarian
concern covers up its root causes. As multiple UN and rights organisations
reports have pointed out, the Israeli occupation and apartheid have
devastated the Palestinian economy and pushed Palestinians into poverty.
The focus on the humanitarian element perpetuates aid dependency and
sidelines demands for accountability and reparations

On the other hand, the narrative that presents Palestinians as “terrorists”
obfuscates the reality that the Israeli army’s goal has always been the
eradication of the “Palestinian problem” by any means possible, including
ethnic cleansing, subjugation, and displacement. It also denies the
Palestinian people the right to resist, which is outlined in international
law.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stresses in its preamble that “it
is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last
resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights
should be protected by the rule of law”. In effect, this means that
rebellion against tyranny and oppression when human rights are not
protected is acceptable.

Similarly, many UN General Assembly resolutions from the 1950s-1970s, the
First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions, and the case law of the
International Court of Justice, provide evidence for the legitimacy of
peoples’ struggle by all means at their disposal in the exercise of
self-determination.

Of course, as they resist in whichever form, Palestinians are bound by the
rules of the conduct of hostilities in international humanitarian law.

The denial of the right to resist for the Palestinians goes hand-in-hand
with Israel and its allies constantly evoking the Israeli “right to defend
itself”. But Article 51 of the UN Charter, which legitimises armed
aggression in the name of self-defence, cannot be invoked when the threat
emanates from within an occupied territory.

The International Court of Justice re-affirmed 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 point out 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 been blatantly
apparent over the last two months as Israel has resorted to cutting off
food, water, medical supplies, electricity and fuel – all essential for the
existence of the population of Gaza.

According to international humanitarian law, Gaza is occupied by Israel and
the latter cannot claim self-defence as a legitimate reason for its
aggression against a threat that emanates from within a territory it has
effective control over.

In this sense, Israel is perpetrating war crimes, crimes against humanity,
and the crime of genocide in Gaza not in the context of “self-defence”, but
of occupation. The Israeli army has undertaken the indiscriminate and
disproportionate use of explosive weapons, forced displacement of over 1.7
million people in Gaza, the cutting off of fuel, electricity, food, water
and medical supplies, amounting to collective punishment.

Unfortunately, these crimes are not an anomaly, but a part of the continued
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 death toll in Gaza, Israel and
its supporters have frequently evoked the laws of war, throwing around
terms like “voluntary human shields” and “proportionality”.

Apart from the flawed arguments and lack of evidence that these claims
suffer from, they also rely on a set of norms that were codified by
colonial powers and are outrageously outdated.

The laws of war were put together during colonial times to regulate the use
of force between sovereign states. The colonies were obviously not
considered sovereign equals, and the laws were designed to maintain
domination over the indigenous peoples, territories and resources.

These laws do not account for asymmetry in power between parties to a
conflict. They do not respond to the technological changes in warfare. They
are not designed to account for economic and political interests shaping
war. Over the last 75 years, significant efforts have been made to
challenge these shortcomings, but states of the Global North systematically
undermined them.

This is not surprising given that most contemporary wars happen outside the
Global North, and profits coming from the business of war predominantly
feed into Global North economies.

It is not in the interest of powerful states to update these laws in a
manner that corresponds to the reality on the ground. Instead of updating
the laws of war to decolonise them, over the past 20 years, the Global
North has imposed a new framework that accommodates its “war on terror”.

It is, therefore, not surprising that as Israel is exterminating
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the mainstream international legal
reaction has reflected a continuing colonial attitude which disregards
distortions and misrepresentations and refuses to call things by their name
– settler colonialism, resistance, and the people’s right of
self-determination.

The only way out of the cycles of brutal violence is for the colonial
context in Palestine to be fully and unequivocally acknowledged. Israel
must end its colonisation, occupation and apartheid in Palestine and engage
in reconciliation and reparations.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.*
------------------------------

   - [image: Shahd Hammouri]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri>
   Shahd Hammouri <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri>
   Lecturer in International Law at the University of Kent
   Dr Shahd Hammouri is a Lecturer in International Law at the University
   of Kent and an international legal consultant. Her research is focused on
   war economies and critical theory. She is the author of the forthcoming
   book 'Corporate War Profiteering and International Law'.
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