A Conversation About Israel With Francesca Albanese

“[To] live outside the law you must be honest,” Bob Dylan wrote in his classic song, Absolutely Sweet Marie.

Dylan’s cryptic, seemingly paradoxical line couldn’t have been clearer, or more straightforward. Criticized for abandoning protest songs and going electric, he would remain true to himself and his art.

In the same way (though in a far more consequential sphere), Israel and the US are now shedding all pretenses about abiding by the law — true to themselves as self-declared ‘exceptional’ states, fully and completely above the law.

Indeed, they flaunt their lawlessness. They’re proud of it.

Israel has been living outside international law for years, certainly since the start of its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, almost sixty years ago – an occupation now declared unlawful by the world’s supreme judicial tribunal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The scope of Israeli lawlessness is breathtaking.

“Israel has openly defied international law time and again, inflicting maximum suffering on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territory and beyond,” a group of eleven human rights experts declared in a December 30 statement.

To whit:

“[C]rimes against humanity including murder, torture, sexual violence, and repeated forced displacement amounting to forcible transfer, war crimes encompassing indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, including objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population and educational institutions and cultural heritage, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the targeting of healthcare workers and health facilities, attacks on humanitarian workers, arbitrary restrictions on access to humanitarian aid, and  attacks on journalists, collective punishment and perfidy.”

“Israel continues to face no real consequences,” the eleven experts wrote, “largely due to protection offered by its allies, who have gone so far as to join Israel in delegitimising international institutions and besmirching Special Procedures mandate-holders.”

The UN rights experts were being diplomatic in their use of the plural. The “allies” they were talking about is the US.

In truth, Israel and its ally are really a single entity — conjoined twins of sorts. Israel-USA.

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Slavishly loyal to the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish State’, Joe Biden and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, were both prepared to countenance what senior US diplomats and State Department experts advised them was unlawful.

Equally ignored by Biden and Blinken — indeed, denied: the ICJ’s January 2024 ruling that Israel’s assault on Gaza was plausibly genocidal.

Less than honest about its contempt for international law, the Biden Administration insisted that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza really was entirely lawful, as preposterous as that assertion was.

Donald Trump, a convicted felon, an enemy of the American justice system, holds the law in complete contempt, and has no problem acknowledging it.

Most recently — clearly embracing the crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide — Trump declared that Gaza was a “demolition site” that needs to be “leveled out” and emptied of its inhabitants; that the tiny enclave, already pulverized, should be bulldozed from top to bottom, then opened up for real estate development – no doubt by himself and his friends.

One of those friends, Trump’s Special Middle East Envoy, Stephen Witkoff, also a real estate developer, agrees.

There is “almost nothing left” of Gaza, Witkoff told Axios.

“People are moving north to get back to their homes and see what happened and turn around and leave,” Witkoff said. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there.” [sic]

Responding to Trump’s and Witkoff’s proposal, on February 11, another group of UN rights experts (three dozen this time) declared:

“Implementing the US proposal would shatter the most fundamental rules of the international order and the United Nations Charter since 1945, that the US was instrumental in creating to restore peace after the catastrophic Second World War and Holocaust. It would return the world to the dark days of colonial conquest.”

On the heels of Trump’s forthright proposal that Gaza be cleansed of Palestinians, the 78-year-old real estate mogul and reality TV huckster issued an even clearer declaration of his contempt for the rule of law — his February 6 Executive Order sanctioning the International Criminal Court.

“The order is an attack on global rule of law and strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system,” yet another group of UN experts declared.

“With this order, the US has empowered war criminals by seeking to punish the ICC, denying justice and reparation to thousands of victims around the world, including women and children”, they said. “This law makes a mockery of the decades-long quest to place law above force and atrocity.”

Gazing on Donald Trump’s words and deeds (and the Israeli policies and practices Trump, Biden and all past US Administrations have supported, to a greater or lesser extent, going back to 1967), some human rights experts think legal ignorance is at play.

“Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation,” Navi Pillay, chair of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told POLITICO.

“Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing,” Pillay said.

Alternatively, Donald Trump, his uber-rich Bros, and Israeli allies know precisely what they’re doing – governing outside the law, and completely honest about it.

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the aforementioned UN rights statements, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

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