Rethinking International Law After Gaza Symposium: International Law Beneath the Rubble – Academic Complicity in Gaza Genocide

Rethinking International Law After Gaza Symposium: International Law Beneath the Rubble – Academic Complicity in Gaza Genocide

[Bana Abu Zuluf is a Palestinian PhD researcher in International Law at Maynooth University, Ireland]

In Gaza, the sky continues to rain fire as international law remains paralyzed. The scholars and institutions that uphold its legitimacy—those who claim to champion justice—are biding their time. They await the ICJ’s judgment as though a ruling from the Hague could stop the Gaza omnicide as if calling genocide by its rightful name requires a court’s permission. But the violence in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond isn’t waiting; it is active, unrelenting, and intensifying. As we speak, Gaza’s children are buried under the rubble of homes bombed by a military that operates with impunity. The massacre stretches far beyond the ‘borders’ of the Strip—its reach now extends to Beirut and Jnoub, where Israeli airstrikes have claimed many more lives. While scholars wait, the bodies pile up.

This inaction is not coincidental; it is the outworking of the colonial logic underpinning the international legal system, its norms, and its operations. International law is inseparable from the colonial projects that birthed it, and any attempt to engage with it without acknowledging this character is an exercise in deceit. The disillusionment with international law is not new. What is new, however, is the growing recognition that international law—often touted as horizontal and objective—is a tool wielded by powerful states vertically and subjectively, principally to perpetuate global inequities.

International law in the age of neoliberalism presents itself as ahistorical, denying its attachment to power, racism, and colonial theft. Borrowing the words of  Issa Shivji, ‘The contemporary neo-liberal discourse has one fundamental blind spot. It treats the present as if the present has had no history.’ This is particularly true in the case of Palestine, where the erasure of history is central to the perpetuation of colonial narratives diluting the demarcation between colonizer and colonized in international law. The obsessive focus on 7 October 2023 as the genesis of all evils is an example of this ahistorical practice. By decontextualising Palestinian resistance and framing Israeli settler colonialism as a ‘conflict’ between two equal sides, and by insisting on legal neutrality and individual criminal responsibility, legal institutions effectively erase the settler-colonial context in which this violence occurs: Mainly, that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began with the Nakba and accelerated with the current genocide as the logic underpinning the creation of the ‘Israeli’ settler colony and its maturation. 

We are now faced with the stark realization that international law is not merely impotent in the face of genocide; it is complicit in its continuation. As Palestinian bodies are obliterated, academic institutions and legal scholars continue to debate and deliberate, not merely in ignorance but in complicity—entangled in the very machinery of violence that is shredding the lives of the people they claim to defend.

Disregarding international law when it comes to Israel and the dehumanization of Palestinians enduring genocide allows international academic institutions to speak on Palestine with both Palestinians and international law in absentia. Meanwhile, international legal scholars, working within these institutions and tasked with interpreting these events, often fail to grasp the unrelenting nature of zionism—a force indifferent to permission, unburdened by moral reckoning, and free from the institutionalized barriers that restrain others, mainly the victims of it.

Despite the absence of a bona fide material threat, zionism feeds off a manufactured existential threat arising from antisemitism to justify eliminatory violence against its enemies. We see how institutions attach great significance to this manufactured fear, whether through adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, defunding UNRWA, or supporting material existential threats against Palestinians. This is how liberal institutions become hubs of anti-Palestinian racism decorated in ‘concern’ for the well-being of zionist feelings. 

How many institutions conditioned Palestinian participation on a pledge to condemn Hamas at least as much as they condemn zionist afflicted genocide? How many institutional pseudo-declarations of Palestinian humanity were steeped in Islamophobia? An Oxford University website page regularly updates its statements reflecting the university’s stance: 

In light of the appalling human consequences of the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, its hostage-taking and Israel’s subsequent military action, we express our profound sympathy for those currently suffering in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. 

The university’s vocabulary is anything but neutral, naming a single ‘appalling’ attack while Palestinians and now Lebanese experience a ‘subsequent military action’. Epistemic violence and necropolitics, visible in these instances, are practiced through the normalization of zionist colonial violence against Palestinians by circumventing institutional accountability.  Through their neoliberal modus operandi, Western academic institutions not only normalize anti-Palestinian racism but actively contribute to the systems that sustain it.  Take Jewish birthright trips, facilitated by academic institutions. Not only do they whitewash zionism but they promote future settlement and the continuation of zionist settler colonialism.

Western academia has perfected the art of deploying the language of inclusivity, diversity, and equity to preserve the sanctity of its role in the imperialist world order. The academic-industrial complex—an intricate web of institutions, scholars, and funding mechanisms—sustains an order that is as violent as it is polished. This same order that promotes these liberal values of inclusion, actively indulges itself, so openly, with anti-Palestinian racism. An example of enshrined institutional anti-Palestinian racism is, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism which acts as a strategic barrier in Western academia, framing critiques of Israel and zionism as antisemitic while censuring Palestinian narratives. 

By codifying this narrow understanding into institutional policies, universities effectively silence dissenting voices and further entrench anti-Palestinian racism, creating an atmosphere where solidarity with Palestinian rights is criminalized. In this context, the IHRA not only perpetuates a culture of fear but also highlights academia’s complicity in the ongoing erasure of Palestinian suffering. Palestinian scholars of international law, working within this framework, are caught in a dilemma that simultaneously demands their participation in that same violent order while erasing their agency. In other words, Palestinian IL scholars are asked to normalize zionism, adhere to institutional respectability politics, and distance themselves from the Palestinian struggle for decolonization, all in the name of protecting ‘free speech’ or ‘academic freedom’. 

The silencing, though, is not a mere exercise of power and an exertion of institutional coloniality, it is also an act of intentional muddying of institutional agency and complicity. We have no position on the ‘matter’ even if the matter is outright genocide in violation of international law, therefore we are innocent bystanders. A requirement of this type of ‘non-position’ is direct repression of solidarity with Palestinians. We condemn all violence, coexists with we condemn protests against genocidal violence. By promoting this cynical logic, academic institutions maintain that support for Palestine constitutes a negation of one’s civility and belongingness to these institutions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the treatment of pro-Palestine activists today is that of outlaws.

Exclusion Through Faux Inclusion

Palestinian scholars of international law are particularly vulnerable to the sharp end of this colonial enterprise, facing a paradoxical relationship with these institutions that is deeply troubling. On one hand, Palestinian scholars are courted as symbols of diversity, incorporated into identity reductionism to give a veneer of legitimacy to these institutions.  In the rare instances they are invited, they are courted to conferences, given platforms, and presented as evidence of institutional commitment to ‘global’ and ‘inclusive’ legal scholarship. On the other hand, their capacity to influence or reshape the debate—especially when it comes to the colonial legacies of international law—remains severely limited. These scholars are encouraged to theorize Palestinian suffering, but only in ways that conform to the sanitized frameworks of international law that depoliticize and abstract the very colonial violence from which that suffering emerges: mainly zionist genocidal settler colonialism. 

Take, for instance, the IL scholar’s acknowledgment of the Palestinian right of return, which, though crucial, dodges the fundamental question: where exactly do uprooted Palestinians return to? To the land they were violently uprooted from? To a Bantustan? Or, worse still, to an imagined state confined within the 1967 borders? This avoidance reflects a lack of political reflexivity, obscuring the harsh truths of zionist settler colonialism while maintaining the illusion of engagement with the Palestinian plight.

During the Gaza Genocide, the pro-Palestine movement lost various ‘reputable’ scholars to think tanks and liberal formations proving how distant their once decolonial and hopeful works are from their careerist calculations. Neoliberal identity politics is what has paved the way for Achille Mbembe to utilize his identity -as an imagined ‘decolonial’ scholar- to argue that the context of zionist settler colonialism has become too much of a zero-sum game for his liking.

Therefore hoping and wishing to speak or, borrowing from Edward Said, to ‘narrate’ from and within these violent and racist institutions will eat away the significance of any Global South scholar’s work. It is because these institutions act as fodder between the scholar and real material change acting as tools of containment and counter-insurgency. The result is a pernicious form of racism that is deeply embedded within the structures of academic discourse. This racism is not always overt, but it is no less destructive for its subtlety. It operates through the exclusion of Palestinian voices from certain conversations, the silencing of radical critiques, and the persistent pressure to conform to institutional expectations. This is how anti-Palestinian racism becomes normalized: not through outright denial, but through the managed inclusion of Palestinian scholars in ways that neutralize their political agency.

The Legal Façade: Appealing to Western Morality While Genocide Persists

Even with the South Africa v. Israel ICJ case now open and ICC arrest warrants in place, neoliberal institutions remain willfully blind. International legal bodies, like the ICJ, delay any definite recognition of the genocide unfolding in Palestine, citing the sanctity of ‘legal procedures.’ Despite the overwhelming evidence, they choose the path of ruse processes over urgency, as if the machinery of genocide pauses for court rulings. Legal scholars and institutions stand idle, waiting for formal declarations, as though the weight of a legal verdict could undo the slaughter that happens in real-time. But this waiting, this fixation on the process, becomes its own violence—enabling institutions to mask their complicity behind the facade of law, all while the massacre continues without pause. 

This legal inertia serves as a form of anti-Palestinian racism by positioning Palestinians in a perpetual state of ‘waiting’—waiting for international law to catch up, waiting for courts to acknowledge their suffering—while they endure ongoing violence. In contrast, Israel’s actions are granted immediate legal and diplomatic validation, often framed as necessary measures to protect its ‘sovereignty’. This historical disparity in legal responses enshrines Palestinian dispossession and erasure within international law itself. 

And so, we wait. We wait for the ICJ to finally recognize genocide, for the UN to muster the political will to isolate Israel, for academic institutions to divest from complicit military industry. But the truth, as we now must admit, is that international law and appeal to Western sensibilities will not stop the genocide. The ICJ, the ICC, and the entire infrastructure of international law were never designed to protect the colonized or the oppressed. As Mohsen al Attar aptly describes, we must scrutinize the role international law plays not just as a flawed system, but as ‘a system designed to fail the colonized’. 

The ‘Iron Wall’ of Western Academia 

The response of universities to protests, encampments, and direct action was to mimic Jabotensky’s Iron Wall by isolating and criminalizing further the Palestinian movement through hate speech and anti-protest policies, developing counterinsurgency measures together with state forces, and suspending students and staff for demanding an end to institutional complicity in genocide. A clear example of that is the threat of deportation of Mamdou Tal from Cornell for protesting against the hosting of weapons manufacturer Boeing and L3Harris’s presence at the university’s career fair. Both companies are involved in the creation of weapons components used and tested by Israel on Palestinians. In a world where the massacring of tens of thousands of brown people matters, protesting the military industry should not be controversial. However, Cornell, like other institutions dependent on the military industry, promotes a career fair as the ‘free’ marketplace, and pro-Palestine activists’ disruption of capital warrants Mccarthyism

This is not a glitch in the system of international law or academia. It is the system. The Iron Wall doctrine, which argued for an unyielding zionist military defense against any Palestinian resistance, has extended itself into the intellectual sphere. The Iron Wall is not just a military strategy but an intellectual fortress, erected to protect zionism from critique. And it is the Western academy, alongside Israel’s most prominent universities, that maintains this wall. These institutions ensure that criticism of zionism remains sanitized, stripped of its potency, hidden behind euphemisms of ‘conflict’ and ‘security.’

The refusal to call what is happening in Gaza, genocide, is not an oversight or an adherence to ‘objective’ legal processes. It is a defense mechanism, built into the very fabric of academic discourse. International law scholars in the global north, far from being neutral observers, become gatekeepers, enforcing the walls of Jabotinsky’s intellectual fortress. By refusing to name Israel’s crimes for what they are, these scholars ensure that zionism remains beyond reproach, cocooned in a protective layer of legalistic debate and academic obfuscation.

Therefore, the assumption that the veneer of liberalism and tolerance or the promise of ‘constitutional’ right of free expression lacing these institutions should warrant a different, more lenient response against critiques of zionism, is naive about the historical evils of the liberal tolerance of fascism and the violent status quo, an inquiry way beyond the scope of this piece. The liberal facade of the institutional Iron Wall as a bastion of academic freedom mirrors the casuistic reasoning used to defend Israel’s colonial iron wall, under the guise of safeguarding Israel’s ‘democracy’. 

Neoliberalism’s Colonial Heartbeat: Protecting the Status Quo

Neoliberalism, as practiced in the academy, operates on the assumption that all voices can be incorporated into the fold, so long as they abide by the rules of the game set forth by the Western ruling class. In this case, the ruling class upholds zionism, whether through IHRA, the university board statement, or the academic-military-research pipeline. Samir Amin describes this cabal as a ‘clergy’, an academic clergy, devised to give a semblance of legitimacy to the ruling class through intellectual levers of power. The neoliberal veneer of inclusivity is not a commitment to justice but a strategic mechanism designed to maintain power, manage dissent, and counter-insurgency. It co-opts Palestinian scholars and activists, incorporating them into the very institutions that continue to actively participate in their oppression whether by virtue of their entanglement with the military industry or through advancing Western imperialist propaganda. 

The fact is that advocating for Palestine within a neoliberal institutional setting requires us to recognize that neoliberalism turns human rights into anti-rights and human beings to Orwellian ‘unpersons’ if it serves the ruling class. The difficult truth is that Palestinians cannot appeal to the sensibilities of the Western ruling class even with the tools of international law simply because the ruling class’s raison d’etre is to maintain this coercive hierarchy. For Palestinians, the very tools of international law are blunt instruments in the face of occupation and genocide. Perhaps, just as the notion of ‘academic freedom’ in academic institutions was never intended to safeguard pro-Palestinian voices, international law was never designed to protect Palestinians. Undeniably, anti-Palestinian racism is a shared element in both frameworks.

Conceding Palestine: The Nihilism of Palestinian international law scholars

Palestinian IL scholars, who hold on to the promises of IL, face a conundrum in that they support Israel’s Western allies in their argument that the Palestinians have a moral obligation to follow IHL, but they neglect to acknowledge that Israel is not and will not be under the same obligation due to its status as an imperial outpost. Effectively, by highlighting Israel’s impunity, these same scholars fail to materially change the equation beyond the liberal tool of critique. Their vilification of resistance as contrary to IL along with their condemnation of Israel functions along the line of liberal counterinsurgency. In this instance, to believe in international law despite its visible foundational and procedural failures in Palestine is a form of nihilism. Conceding Palestine’s liberation from the genocidal zionist entity at the altar of Western pseudo-morality should not be the job description of Palestinian scholars in Western institutions. 

Nihilism is defined by its goal of demise. Therefore, justifying international law’s incompetence or advocating its potential during uninterrupted massacres is a willful participation in nihilism. Palestinian scholars must demand better than ‘legal recognition of genocide’, a ceasefire, or Western declarations of Palestinian humanity. Instead of being glued to the pledge of accountability through the complicit global north international community, we must remember that the parent of a martyr, the child trapped under the rubble and the displaced family deserve nothing less than an immediate end to the genocide instead of the promise of pseudo-justice. 

What is the virtue of an ICJ finding that Israel has committed genocide, years after the fact? In Palestine, we have a saying that ‘those with their hands in cold water are not like those with their hands in the fire’. Demanding patience from Palestinians is nihilistic violence. The flaws of international criminal law mechanisms are many but worse of all is its inability to put a halt to the worst of crimes. For a movement for Palestinian liberation that is full of hope, international law is hopeless. 

Beyond Epistemic Justice: The Need for Vigilant Anti-zionism

What, then, is the way forward? To address anti-Palestinian racism, we must go beyond simply granting Palestinians space to speak. The goal cannot be mere participation in a system that perpetuates colonial erasure. It must be the dismantling of that violent system altogether. To ask Palestinians to ‘wait’ longer under the rubble, to tolerate zionism and its ‘sword on the neck’ borrowing from Ghassan Kanafani, and to coexist with the system that aided and abetted their genocide is indefensible.

If Palestinians are to move beyond the suffocating confines of international law, they must reframe their struggle not through the lens of legality, but through the moral compass of anti-zionism. The right of return, the dismantling of zionism, and the end of the settler-colonial state are not legal claims—they are moral imperatives grounded in the historical injustices committed against the Palestinian people. It is in the reorganization of the world, and the reimagining of a decolonized future, that Palestinian emancipation lies.

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