The author is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina.
ISTANBUL
The Gaza Tribunal final session, held at the Istanbul University campus on Sunday, concluded with a powerful statement of indictment of Israel and its backers by experts, witnesses and Jury of Conscience, and called for global solidarity to support and protect the Palestinian people. While presenting abundant evidence for the international legal judgement of genocide charge against Israel and its backers, such as the US and Germany, the Gaza Tribunal's deliberations also shed light on the ideological roots of the legitimization of Israel’s genocidal assault by its European and American allies. There are multiple lessons the initiative teaches us about the weaponization of historical myths and lies, as well as distorted ethical and philosophical concepts to justify the live-streamed genocide of Palestinian populations by Israel.
Lessons of Gaza Tribunal
The first important lesson of the Tribunal is the fact that the genocide we are witnessing is not a single event that started on Oct. 7, 2023, but a century-long process which begins with dehumanization and ends with erasure. During this century-long assault on Palestinian populations by European imperial regimes and the Zionist project of Israel, there were many moments of violence, segregation, systematic weakening of the victim population, mass annihilation, denial and erasure. Thus, genocide is best understood, besides international law, through a state crime paradigm which centers on human rights violations committed in pursuit of state organizational goal.
The second lesson is the fact that the Israeli state was created as a settler colonial project imposed by European imperial expansion to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, symbolized by the British Empire's proclamation and implementation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Cosmopolitan Palestinian populations composed of Muslims, Christians and Jewish Arabs were equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire before WWI. There was no clash among different religious communities in Palestine, and Zionism was not an ideology of the native Palestinian Jewish minority populations. Our experts emphasized that Israeli settler colonialism relies on an internal logic of genocide towards indigenous native populations of the occupied lands, formulated by the biggest lies about Palestine repeated by Zionist propaganda, namely: "Palestine is a land without people promised to a people without land." This was never true. According to this logic, native Palestinian populations had to be expelled and erased as the only way to ensure the majority domination of Zionists in the proposed state. This internal logic of genocide has continued and been "normalized" since the beginning of the British colonial rule over Palestine about a century ago.
Third, the Gaza Tribunal has shown how Israel and its partners attributed the cause and blame of the genocide to the Palestinian victims, who are described as native people who had no right to self-defense and resist against the settler colonial rule imposed on them by the British Empire and then by Israeli governments. The Israeli regime presents its genocidal actions as a necessity to create absolute security for the future of their state and justify mass murder and mass destruction in Gaza as collateral damage. "The right to self-defense of the Israeli state" became the most repeated legitimization of genocide. The participants said complete destruction of homes, schools, universities, hospitals, infrastructure and culture is important to the genocidal process to destroy the Palestinian identity. In addition to the destructive side of Israeli colonization, Gaza Tribunal members emphasized Israel's strategy of Judaization of Palestine through the discipline of archaeology to promote the erasure of the history of indigenous Arab natives who inhabited Palestine for thousands of years.
Betrayal of the so-called rule-based international order
The fourth thing one has learned through the Gaza Tribunal is that it exposed the moral hypocrisy of the Israeli claim to build a homeland for Zionist settlers from Europe and America in Palestine by destroying the homes of native Palestinians through the process of domicide. While showing the link between the logics of homemaking for Zionist settlers and home destruction of native Palestinians, members examined the specific targeting of Palestinian universities, educational institutions, libraries, archives, intellectuals and journalists as scholasticate, while Israel continued to receive Western support for its own universities. The Gaza Tribunal described how the livestreaming overkill of Palestinians in Gaza has relied on a global betrayal of the "rules -based international order" built after WWII, and the immoral backing of Israel's depiction of Palestinians as deserving to be erased.
The fifth important emphasis of the Gaza Tribunal is its exposition of how the Israeli strategy of genocide denial in occupied Palestine by juxtaposing the negative experience of erasure with the falsified narratives of change, construction and revival. This can be best seen in the foundational myth that Israel made the desert bloom (something frequently repeated by European leaders supporting Israeli crimes), with no acknowledgement of Palestinian agriculture and a prosperous Palestinian society before colonial occupation. An example of this is the way Israel planted trees and tried to create a forest over destroyed Palestinian villages and towns from the ethnic cleansing war of 1948 Naqba, not only to erasure Palestinian memory but also to build a museum dedicated to the memory of the victims of genocide of European Jews, on top of the very lands where the memory of Palestinian lives were erased.
The sixth lesson of the Gaza Tribunal is its focus on the significance of the weaponization of the theory of uniqueness of the Holocaust by Israel and its backers to defend the genocidal destruction of Palestinian populations. Claiming that the genocide of the European Jewish population by Nazi Germany was a singularly unique evil, the Israeli regime and its supporters, such as Germany, then argued that Israel could never be guilty of similar crimes. The majority of genocide scholars object to this uniqueness thesis, and note the similarities between the Holocaust, the Naqba of Palestinians in 1948 and many other forms of racialized mass violence inflicted by European empires in their colonies of Africa, Asia and Western hemispheres. By positing the unique victimhood of European Jews in modern world history, the Israeli regime and its sponsors ask the indigenous Arab populations of Palestinians to give up their lives and homeland for Zionist settlers as compensation and atonement for Nazi crimes despite the fact that Palestinians had nothing to do with European antisemitism and the German Empire’s crimes during WWII. By abusing this theory of the uniqueness of the Holocaust experience and identifying the Jewish religion with the Israeli state and Zionism, pro-Israeli governments silence and demonize any critique of Israel’s genocide as antisemitic hate crimes.
The seventh lesson is about the sinister attempt to legitimize the genocide in Gaza as a "battle of civilization against barbarism," a language commonly used to observe in earlier colonial genocides of native Americans and Africans. The Gaza Tribunal rejected presenting the current genocidal assault in Gaza as a continuation of a thousand-year conflict between members of two faith traditions of Islam and Judaism, or as a clash between two civilizations. In fact, the language of "clash of civilizations" itself, as formulated by Bernard Lewis, was produced partly to reject the claims of Palestinians for justice and human rights. The Gaza Tribunal highlighted how the word civilization versus barbarism function as a replacement for older colonial ideologies of racial hierarchies to dehumanize the Palestinian victims and minimize their suffering and death.
The Gaza Tribunal became an important venue to examine the intellectual dimensions of global community’s failure to morally denounce, indict and stop a genocide in the first quarter of the 21st century, despite the expressed determination to stop and prevent genocides since the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948. This initiative teaches us that the moral principal of humanity should never again allow a genocide regardless of who the victims are and who the perpetrators are.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy