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<h1>How international law is used to cover up Israeli settler-colonialism</h1><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><em>Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ is wrongly evoked within the context of its occupation of Palestinian territories.</em></p><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-article-b-l" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/picture2-1702213341.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Shahd Hammouri" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri">Shahd Hammouri</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Lecturer in International Law at the University of Kent</div></div></li></ul><div class="gmail-article-dates" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Published On 10 Dec 2023</span><span aria-hidden="true"><br></span></div><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/10/how-international-law-is-used-to-cover-up-israeli-settler-colonialism">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/10/how-international-law-is-used-to-cover-up-israeli-settler-colonialism</a></font></div></div></div><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2F0epfpj"></a></div></div><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Twitter" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=How%20international%20law%20is%20used%20to%20cover%20up%20Israeli%20settler-colonialism&source=sharethiscom&related=sharethis&via=AJEnglish&url=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2F0epfpj"></a><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"></div></div><div class="gmail-responsive-image"><img src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/wide-clean-1699543803.jpg?resize=770%2C513&quality=80" alt="A screenshot of a video showing Israeli soldiers raising the Israeli flag on a beach in Gaza in November 2023 [Al Jazeera/Screenshot]" width="440" height="293" style="margin-right: 25px;"></div>A
screenshot of a video showing Israeli soldiers raising the Israeli flag
on a beach in Gaza in November 2023 [Al Jazeera/Screenshot]<div class="gmail-wysiwyg gmail-wysiwyg--all-content gmail-css-ibbk12"><p>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,” <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza" target="_blank">he said</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="gmail-israel-a-coloniser">Israel: A coloniser</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For example, the representative of the Jewish Agency, Ayel Weizman, one of the main actors in enabling the Zionist project, <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-211525/" target="_blank">described</a>
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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
<p>The oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people at the hands of their Israeli colonisers continued.</p>
<h2 id="gmail-the-right-to-defend-and-the-right-to-resist">The right to defend and the right to resist</h2>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Of course, as they resist in whichever form, Palestinians are bound
by the rules of the conduct of hostilities in international humanitarian
law.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="gmail-outdated-laws-of-war">Outdated laws of war</h2>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2"><em><strong>The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.</strong></em></p>
</div><hr><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/picture2-1702213341.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Shahd Hammouri" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/shahd-hammouri">Shahd Hammouri</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Lecturer in International Law at the University of Kent</div><div class="gmail-article-author__desc gmail-css-1wt8oh6">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'.</div></div></li></ul>
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