10 May U.S. Law Professor “Demands” to Represent Iran in Case Against israel
Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, has “demanded” that Iran let him bring a case against Israel in an international tribunal, according to an Iranian news station. Boyle is quoted as saying:
“I am ready to represent Iran in an international tribunal for trying the Zionist regime on charges of genocide of Palestinians and the blockade in the Gaza Strip,”
I have no idea what court Boyle thinks would have jurisdiction, other than the ICJ. And even if the ICJ had jurisdiction, why would Iran be the proper party to espouse Palestinian claims? Moreover, I think his charge of genocide against Israel is ludicrous. Even if Israel has committed human rights violations against the Palestinians, genocide is of quite another character altogether. And tossing the genocide charge around so loosely undermines the usefulness of the concept. Even President Carter wouldn’t go so far.
It’s a good thing for Boyle that he has tenure….
Ummm…actually,the legal definition of genocide is a very apt description of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians: to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group includes the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival, such as clean water, food, clothing, shelter or medical services. Deprivation of the means to sustain life can be imposed through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, detention in camps, forcible relocation or expulsion into deserts.
Just look at Gaza today.
Just remember when Israeli PM Golda Meir claimed “There are no such things as Palestinains”
One might have heard that as soon as Palestine becomes a contracting party to the Genocide Convention, it would promptly bring an international claim against Israel before the ICJ. Yet this is not the case. But Israel is a party to the Genocide Convention.. And so is Iran. And according to the conventional provision giving jurisdiction to the ICJ – Article IX – Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute. There is no need that the alleged breaches of the Convention be directed against nationals of the claiming State for it to be allowed to bring such a claim. Neither it would be necessary to argue that the obligations arising from the Convention are of an erga omnes nature, multilateral obligations in the sense that the international community as a whole is concerned. The text is quite plain and there appears to be few doubts that Israel and Iran… Read more »
Regardless of the merits of the case, Julian’s remarks imply there is something improper about Iran attempting to vindicate Palestine’s rights under the Convention at the ICJ because they are an unaffected party, however, that isn’t the relevant standard here. Yes, you can normally assume pas d’interet pas d’action applies in IL due to the kind of standard reciprocal, bilateral paradigm. But that is now at the restrictive end of the ICJ’s jurisprudence since cases like Barcelona Traction, where the Court has envisioned generalised standing as a consequence of the nature of obligations erga omnes. The whole idea of erga omnes obligations are that they are owed to the international community of nations, and so violations are, in an important sense, universally risable. Universal and quasi universal treaty regimes already mimic this mechanism with generalised standing clauses that do not depend on a direct effect. Furthmore, The East Timor case may lend weight to Iran’s presumption of a proxy role. In considering the Indonesian counter-claim against Portugal’s standing on behalf of East Timor in that case, Weeramantry and Ranjev gave words to the effect that Portugal’s standing could have been made out regardless of their role as former colonial administrator.… Read more »
She was right. There was not then and is not now such an ethnic group or nation. The idea that the Arabs of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza constitute a discrete group is a fiction created for political purposes.
In any case, since Israel has not created conditions as severe as those described by hass but has in fact supplied many of the necessary items from its own resources (such as 60% of Gaza’s electrical power) and has imposed the restrictions it has only due to the daily commission of war crimes by Hamas, an organization whose charter explicitly calls for genocide, prosecution of Israel for genocide would be ludicrous.
Bill, Golda was, and you are, in a state of denial. The Arabs of this region are as much a discrete group as the Jews that came to Palestine in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, it was Zionism that helped forge a Palestinian identity and consciousness among Arabs of the region. Among other things, Zionism is a modern nationalist ideology and nationalist consciousness and identity is a modern phenonomen in general. In other words, specifically those of the subtitle to Ilan Pappe’s A History of Modern Palestine (2004): “One Land, Two Peoples.” See, for instance the following works of standard scholarship (books, in English): Farsoun, Samih K. (with Christian E. Zacharia). Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Gerner, Deborah J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2nd ed., 1994. Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989. Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Khalidi, Walid, ed. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Masalha, Nur. Expulsion… Read more »
Re: “the daily commission of war crimes by Hamas” These pale in comparison to what Israel has done in the Occupied Territories. Now while it is true that “specific Palestinian acts of indiscriminate violence or violence targeting civilians violate[s] applicable standards of international humanitarian law,” one should keep in mind that “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right.” As Richard Falk has explained, “Since 1967, and with greater defiance during the ongoing phase of resistance which started in September 2000, Israel has refused to accept [the] framework of legal obligations [as articulated in the organized will of the international community by the United Nations Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations]. Its refusal has been pronounced, blatant, and undisguised. Israel has not only failed to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, but it has also continuously ‘created facts’ on the ground that, while clearly in violation of Palestinian rights, are then declared by Tel Aviv and Washington to provide the foundation for a negotiated end to the conflict–such as heavily armed settlements, bypass roads, and security zones in the midst of a future Palestinian state,* and more recently the construction of a massive security fence far… Read more »
Umm, considering that Israel’s own leaders are in fact well-known terrorists — such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir — then the fact that the Palestinians resort to terrorism should not come as a surprise, and furthemore, it has no bearing on the question of whether Israel is engaged in a policy of genocide.
If a bunch of Russians and Brooklynites can claim to be a distinct ethnic group, so can the Palestinians.
Actually, the early Zionists (especially those in Jewish underground militias) brought terrorist techniques to the region in their war for freedom from the British and as part of their arsenal of tactics and strategies in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine led by the well-known “heroes of the Jewish war for independence.” For example, consider “Plan C” (or Gimel in Hebrew) as detailed by Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Israel (2006: 28), the strategy formulated by Ben-Gurion and his aides to “be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone,” as well as “Plan D” (Dalet) several months later, which “called for [the] systematic and total expulsion [of Palestinians] from their homeland:” “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combining and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”—Plan Dalet,… Read more »
P.S. O’Donnell, You presume far too much. I’m quite familiar both the sorts of sources you cite and with the history of the Zionist movement. You can cite any number of biased sources but that won’t change the facts. Citing an idiot like Edward Said is enough to discredit you. He couldn’t even get Arab history right. This isn’t the place and I don’t have the time for a detailed critique of everything you quote or cite, but to take but one example of how bad it is, Richard Falk, in claiming that Israel has refused to withdraw from the Occupied Territories and in so doing has contravened UN resolutions, is completely off the wall. To begin with, Israel has in fact withdrawn from parts substantial parts of the Occupied Territories. Secondly, Israel has offered to withdraw from most of the Occupied Territories – it was the Arabs who refused the deal. Thirdly, the relevant UN resolutions do NOT require Israel to withdraw from 100% of the occupied territories (we know this not only from the wording of the text but from the explicit statements of the authors of the resolution) and make Israel withdrawal contingent on peace and security… Read more »
Bill, It’s clear that I’m acquainted with the relevant scholarship while you evidence no familiarity with same. Calling Said “an idiot” is an abusive ad hominem remark that reinforces the impression that you are out of your league on this topic. I recently defended (at Crooked Timber) Robert Irwin’s criticisms of Said’s Orientalism (1978) in his Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (2006), so I can’t be accused of undue adulation in this regard. Even Irwin has the good sense to note that he has “no significant disagreements with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel….” And of course Richard Falk has impressive, long-standing academic credentials in this area (international law) and his teaching and scholarship have earned him positions consonant with his academic standing and he is thus a reputable and reliable source possessing the requisite expertise in a way that you conspicuously lack. Your understanding of Israel’s policies, positions and negotiations vis-a-vis the Palestinians and the Occupied Territories is so incredibly tendentious it would not be credible anywhere outside the blogosphere. Clearly you’ve never read, and should benefit immensely from, a careful and open-minded scrutiny of Jerome Slater’s “What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,”… Read more »
The discussion is irrelevant to the issue. The appropriate place to test the legality of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians is in an international court of law.
Note that the United States, as abettor, is also on the hook.
hass,
On the contrary, the discussion, for some of us, is relevant to our perception and understanding of how or why this is indeed an “issue,” so in that sense it is not at all “irrelevant.” Indeed, for some, “Israeli atrocities” refers to an empty set, and thus a warrant is lacking for any legal test whatsoever in an international court of law. No one is here questioning the fact that the proper forum to test the “legality of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians is an international court of law,” the discussion was about the denial of atrocities ever having taken place, as well as the kind of beliefs and perspectives that serve, and have served, both psychologically and historically, to buttress such a denial, to give it an air of plausibility or respectability….