Condemning the Right to Self Defence:
Iran’s Retaliation and Israel’s Privilege
There is a throbbing complaint among Western powers, including those in the European Union and the United States. Iran is not playing by the rules. Instead of accepting with dutiful meekness the slaughter of its military leadership and scientific personnel, Tehran decided, promptly, to respond to Israel’s pre-emptive strikes launched on June 13. Instead of considering the dubious legal implications of such strikes, an act of undeclared war, the focus in the European Union and various other backers of Israel has been to focus on the retaliation itself.
To the Israeli attacks conducted as part of Operation Rising Lion, there was studied silence. It was not a silence observed when it came to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Then, the law books were swiftly procured, and obligations of the United Nations Charter cited under Article 2(4): “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state.” Russia was condemned for adopting a preventive stance on Ukraine as a threat to its security: that, in Kyiv joining NATO, a formidable threat would manifest at the border.
In his statement on the unfolding conflict between Israel and Iran, France’s President Emmanuel Macron made sure to condemn “Iran’s ongoing nuclear program”, having taken “all appropriate diplomatic measures in response.” Israel also had the “right to defend itself and ensure its security”, leaving open the suggestion that it might have been justified resorting to Article 51 of the UN Charter. All he could offer was a call on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate.”
In a most piquant response, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories stated that, “On the day Israel, unprovoked, has attacked Iran, killing 80 people, the president of a major European power, finally admits that in the Middle East, Israel, and only Israel, has the right to defend itself.”
The German Foreign Office was even bolder in accusing Iran of having engaged in its own selfish measures of self-defence (such unwarranted bravado!), something it has always been happy to afford Israel. “We strongly condemn the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory.” In contrast, the foreign office also felt it appropriate to reference the illegal attack on Iran as involving “targeted strikes” against its nuclear facilities. Despite Israel having an undeclared nuclear weapons stockpile that permanently endangers security in the region, the office went on to chastise Iran for having a nuclear program that violated “the Non-Proliferation Treaty”, threatening in its nature “to the entire region – especially Israel.” Those at fault had been found out.
The President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, could hardly improve on that apologia. She revealed that she had been conversing with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the “escalating situation in the Middle East.” She also knew her priorities: reiterating Israel’s right to self- defence and refusing to mention Iran’s, while tagging on the statement a broader concern for preserving regional stability. The rest involved a reference to diplomacy and de-escalation, toward which Israel has shown a resolute contempt with regards Iran and its nuclear program.
The assessment offered by Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was forensically impressive, as well as being icily dismissive. Not only did he reproach the German response for ignoring the importance of Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibiting the use of force subject to the right to self-defence, he brought up a reminder: targeted strikes against the nuclear facilities of any party “are prohibited under Article 56 of the additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions to which Germany is a party”.
ElBaradei also referred anyone exercised by such matters to the United Nations Security Council 487 (1981), which did not have a single demur in its adoption. It unreservedly condemned the attack by Israel on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor in June that year as a violation of the UN Charter, recognised that Iraq was a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and had permitted the IAEA inspections of the facility, stated that Iraq had a right to establish and develop civilian nuclear programs and called on Israel to place its own nuclear facilities under the jurisdictional safeguards of the IAEA.
The calculus regarding the use of force by Israel vis-à-vis its adversaries has long been a sneaky one. It is jigged and rigged in favour of the Jewish state. As Trita Parsi put it with unblemished accuracy, Western pundits had, for a year and a half, stated that Hamas, having started the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 bore responsibility for civilian carnage. “Western pundits for the past 1.5 days: Israel started the war with Iran, and if Iran retaliates, they bear responsibility for civilian deaths.” The perceived barbarian, when attacked by a force seen as superior and civilised, will always be condemned for having reacted most naturally, and most violently of all.
Self-Defence and Acceptable Murder
Netanyahu Dreams of Regime Change
These are the sorts of things that tend to be discussed in bunkered facilities and grimy locker rooms. Now, very much in the open and before the presses, the head of state of one country is openly advocating murdering another head of state before news outlets with little reaction. Lawbreaking has become chic, and Israel has taken the lead.
The pre-emptive, illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by Israel was not merely an attempt to arrest an alleged existential threat from yielding fruit (that weapons of mass destruction canard again); it was also a murderous exercise of institutional decapitation. Instead of receiving widespread condemnation in the halls of Washington, Brussels and other European capitals, there was cool nonchalance: Israel was within its right to limitlessly expand its idea of self-defence, a concept now so broad it has become a crime against peace.
We have seen how that self-defence so far operates. In Gaza, it functions on the level of starvation, the levelling of critical infrastructure, the killing of scores of civilians in each strike, the displacement of populations by the hundreds of thousands, the murdering of aid workers, and shooting those desperately in need of humanitarian aid as it is rationed by private security companies.
Regarding Iran, the flexible scope of Israeli self-defence includes the killing of a thick layer of military leaders, preferably while sleeping in the bosom of their families. Such figures include Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces; Hossein Salami, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the air force wing of the IRGC; Esmail Qaani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force; and Ali Shamkhani, an aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Of the scientists associated with Iran’s nuclear program, some 25 are on the assassination list, what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu libellously designated “Hitler’s nuclear team”. Thus far, the murders of 14 have been confirmed by sources cited in the Times of Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces have published some of their names, including nuclear engineering specialist Fereydoon Abbasi; physics expert Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi; chemical engineer Akbar Motalebi Zadeh; and nuclear physicist Ahmadreza Zolfaghari Daryani. Many of the figures are said by Israel to have been the intellectual progeny of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the touted father of the Iranian nuclear project.
Having killed the father in 2020, Israel has, with biblical brutality, sought to exterminate the brood and rob the cradle. With a mechanical formality bordering on the glacial, an IDF statement declared that, “The elimination of the scientists was made possible following in-depth intelligence research that intensified over the past year, as part of a classified and compartmentalized IDF plan.”
The attacks have broadened, suggesting a nationwide program of destabilisation. Oil and gas facilities have been struck, including the world’s biggest gas field, the South Pars. Not satisfied, Defence Minister Israel Katz promised to attack Iran’s media outlets, having an eye on Iranian state broadcaster IRIB: “The Iranian propaganda and incitement mouthpiece is on its way to disappear.” True to his word, the outlet was attacked even as TV anchor Sahar Emami was broadcasting, a crime captured in real time. In doing so, Israel replicates its own efforts in Gaza, which have seen the killing of 178 journalists since October 2023, the most lethal conflict ever recorded for media workers.
Netanyahu will not stop there. He smells the vapours of regime change and societal chaos, and, as his American counterparts did on eve of their illegally led invasion of Iraq in 2003, merrily feeds the notion that foreign interference can masquerade as liberation. “I believe the day of your liberation is near,” he haughtily proclaimed to Iran’s downtrodden subjects.
His most wishful target yet remains the religious leaders of the country. In an interview with ABC news, the Israeli PM was frank that killing Khamenei would not escalate the conflict so much as end it. He had been reluctantly dissuaded from doing so by US President Donald Trump, according to Reuters, Associated Press, Axios and Israel’s Channel 13. To Axios, a US official said that the administration had “communicated to the Israelis that President Trump is opposed to that. The Iranians haven’t killed an American, and discussion of killing political leaders should not be on the table.” Given Israel’s elastic stretching of self-defence, such restraint is likely to change.
Not wishing to be too modest, Netanyahu would have you think that he has done the world a moral service. “I’ll tell you what would have come if we hadn’t acted,” he boasted in a video message. “We had information that this unscrupulous regime was planning to give the nuclear weapons that they would develop to their terrorist proxies. That’s nuclear terrorism on steroids. That would threaten the entire world.”
These words are a chilling echo of the rationale used by the George W. Bush administration in attacking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, ostensibly to disarm him of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that had already been eliminated. (The US had, as cheer leaders and supporters, those other fine students of international law: the United Kingdom and Australia.) As part of Washington’s “Global War on Terror”, President Bush explained in his 2002 State of the Union address that North Korea, Iran and Iraq constituted an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” By seeking WMDs, such states “could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.” Many justifications for using force in international relations, especially regarding the language of illegal war, are reruns of plagiarism.
For Netanyahu, killing Iranian leaders and the scientific intelligentsia was a salvaging antidote, a point he was trying to impress upon his US allies. “Our enemy is your enemy… We’re dealing with something that will threaten all of us sooner or later. Our victory will be your victory.” Forget international law and its contrivances, its disciplining protocols and hindering conventions. In its place, an unvarnished rogue state which, by any other name, would be as criminally dangerous.
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