August 16, 2024
Source: Global Justice in the 21st Century
Image by U.S. Department of State, Public Domain
[Prefatory Note: This is the text of an interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute modified for clarity and style, with no changes in substance.]
Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I have the pleasure of having an interview today with Professor Richard Falk, who has done another interview with us earlier. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton, among other positions he holds in institutions around the world, mostly peace related. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine. So, given the circumstances that we have today in the Middle East, it’s a very timely moment to have a discussion with Professor Falk. So let me begin with that. Professor, the assassination of Haniyeh today in Tehran is clearly a sign that Israel is trying its best to get an all-out war with Iran started, but also, it’s the fact they just killed the person who was leading negotiator with Israel for peace in Palestine. So what are your comments on that?
Prof. Falk: I agree with your final sentences that this is certainly either gross incompetence on Israel’s part or a deliberate effort to provoke a wider war. And a shady effort by Israel to compel the engagement of the United States in Israel’s multiple struggles in the region. One should also refer here to the double assassination. Not only Haniyeh, but Nasrallah’s right-hand assistant and prominent military commander, Fouad Shukra, who was killed 2 or 3 days ago, in Beirut. And so now Israel in successive inflammatory assassinations attacking the capitals of Lebanon and Iran, certainly signaling an almost intentional search for some kind of escalatory response. The Supreme Leader of Iran has already declared that that Iran will arrange — he didn’t go into detail — arrange an appropriately harsh response, in retaliation for Israel’s criminal act. In the Lebanese context, Nasrallah and Hezbollah deny the Israeli justification for the attack, which was the missile that landed in the Golan Heights a few days earlier, killing several Syrian children playing on a soccer field. It almost certainly was not intended as the target by whoever fired the missile, which is still being denied by Hezbollah. The very explosive situation in the Middle East — perhaps the assassinations were motivated by the wish to distract attention from Israel’s failure to destroy Hamas and Netanyahu’s unpopularity in Israel. At best, this is a very dangerous way of proceeding because a multi-state war in the Middle East will bring widespread destruction , including likely attacks on Israeli cities, something Israel has avoided over the course of its existence. This may yet be a dramatic turning point for the worse in the whole experience of Israel’s defiance of international law, international morality and just plain geopolitical prudence.
Mike Billington: You have been a very outspoken supporter of the role of the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and their rulings, including the decision on the South African petition that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza; the issuing of arrest warrants on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders; and more recently, the verdict that the entire occupation of the Palestinian territories has been illegal from the beginning, ordering it to end the occupation and withdraw the settlements. But of course, Israel has ignored them totally, while the US and the EU have equally ignored them. As you pointed out in one of your articles, Bibi Netanyahu even said “No one will stop us,” from driving all the Palestinians out or killing them. What can be done overall to deal with the Gaza genocide?
Richard Falk: Well, it is, of course, a terribly tragic moment for the Palestinian people who are faced with this grotesquely sustained and executed genocide, that has now gone on for more than nine months on a daily basis. As your question suggests, Israel has been crucially backed up throughout this process by the complicity of the liberal democracies, above all the US. And so long as that power relationship persists, it’s very unlikely that an effective intervention on behalf of Palestine, or to stop the genocide, can be organized and implemented. From that point of view, these judicial rulings, although they give aid and some comfort to supporters of Palestine are not able to influence the situation on the ground, which continues to be horrifying. At the same time, the rulings are important in depriving Israel and the West of complaining about Palestine and Hamas as violators of international law, including ‘terrorist’ accusations. In other words, by reliably finding that Israel is in gross violation of international law and by issuing arrest warrants, global judicial procedures deprive these aggressive countries from opportunistically using international law as a policy instrument the way they have against Russia in the Ukrainian context. It also influences media discourse and civil society behavior, particularly activists throughout the world, who feel vindicated and challenged to do more by way of pro-Palestinian solidarity initiatives.
There exist a variety of initiatives underway in civil society that not only brand Israel as a rogue state, but also propose nonviolent acts of boycotting, divesting, and shows of opposition, highlighted by the activism of students in university campuses around the world giving rise to repressive responses by pro-Israeli elites in and out of government. This has become quite a distinctive phenomenon — even during earlier student activist periods involving South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, there wasn’t nearly as much passion or such animated expressions of civil society activism. This is now a near universal reaction, including a growing portion of citizens in the country whose governments are complicit in supporting Israel’s commission of genocide.
Also prresent is a contested and growing gap between what the citizenry wants and the government is doing. This gap was highlighted and dramatized by the scandalous, honorific speech that Netanyahu gave last week to a joint session of Congress, where he received a hero’s welcome, frequent standing ovations, thunderous applause and cordial meetings in the White House with Biden and Kamala Harris. It was widely observed that Harris abandoned protocol by not attending the joint session of Congress over which the vice president ordinarily presides whenever a foreign leader is making such an address, and the Netanyahu visit was met be large protests in the streets of Washington.
Mike Billington: Your friend, and mine, Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder and the head of the International Movement for a Just World based in Malaysia, has written a letter to all member nations of the UN noting, as you have also, that the West is ignoring the evil in Gaza, and called on the UN General Assembly to act upon Resolution 377, which, as I understand it, allows the General Assembly, when the Security Council fails to take action to stop a disaster against peace, to act in its own name, to deploy forces, I think unarmed forces, to intervene. You are, among other things, a professor of international law. What is your view of this option?
Prof. Falk: There is that option, that was adopted in the Cold War context of the Korean War, with the objective of circumventing future Soviet vetoes. GA Res. 377 was thought initially to give the West a possibility of nullifying the Soviet veto and mobilizing the General Assembly to back Western positions. As the anti-colonial movement proceeded, the US in particular became more and more nervous about having an anti-capitalist General Assembly empowered to act when the Security Council was paralyzed. To my knowledge that Resolution 377 has never been actually invoked in a peace – war situation. I think there is a reluctance to press the West on this kind of issue, because it would require, to have any significance, a large political, military, and financial commitment, as well as a difficult undertaking to make effective. So I’m not optimistic about such a move to empower the General Assembly . I think the law can be interpreted in somewhat contradictory ways, as is often the case, particularly where there’s not much experience. But I don’t think the political will exists on the part of a sufficient number of governments to make the General Assembly act on behalf of Palestine. I think in general making the UN more effective and legitimate, empowerment of the General Assembly would be desirable and should be supported by people that want to have a more law governed international society, but preferably without relying on this Cold War precedent.
Mike Billington: On that broader issue, do you have any hope or any expectation that the UN in general will be reformed in the current crisis situation internationally?
Prof. Falk: I’m skeptical about that possibility. The forthcoming UN Summit of the Future on September 22-23 is dedicated to strengthening the UN. This is an initiative of Secretary-General Guterres that seeks to discuss some ambitious ideas about UN reform, enlarged participation by civil society and more democratic, transparent procedures for UN operations. But my guess is that the Permanent Members, and probably including China and Russia, will not push hard for such major development. Each of the P5 states seems to believe that their interests are better protected in a state-centric world, even if geopolitical managed, than they would be in a more structured world system operating according to a more centralized authority structure. It might become even more susceptible to Western domination and manipulation than is the case with present arrangements.
Mike Billington: On the US situation, you issued a public letter to Kamala Harris soon after Biden dropped out of the race. There and elsewhere, you have denounced what you called the “diluted optimism” of President Biden, who talks about American greatness and the great future America is looking forward to, and so forth. You called it: “a dangerous form of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national circumstances and a stubborn show of a failing leader’s vanity.” you express some hope that Kamala Harris will dump the Biden team of Blinken and Sullivan. Who do you think could possibly come to be her advisors? Who could, in fact, change the failed direction of the Biden-Harris administration?
Prof. Falk: You raise a difficult issue, because effective governance involves balancing various pressures from without and within the apparatus of the state. I think Harris knows and respects these constraints, aware that even an elected leader is restricted, encountering resistance if public policy dissents from the main tenets of the Washington Consensus. Harris’s policy choices are restricted because those that are prominent enough to be eligible for confirmation in the top jobs are either conforming to this geopolitical realism, or they’re regarded as too controversial to get by the congressional gatekeepers and survive media objections. In fairness to Harris, or any leader for that matter, it’s a difficult undertaking to make American foreign policy particularly more congruent with the well-being of people and more oriented toward sustaining peace in a set of dangerous circumstances that exist in different parts of the world. And, of course, the Israeli domestic factor is probably also at least a background constraint. In light of this, the best that I could hope for, realistically, is some critical realist personalities like John Mearsheimer or Anne-Marie Slaughter, or possibly Stephen Walt. These are people that have been more enlightened in their definition of national interest and more critical of the Jewish lobby and of other manipulative private sector forces. But they’re strictly, and properly, categorized as realists, A more progressive possibility, but probably still too controversial for serious consideration, would be Chas Freeman despite his distinguished diplomatic background. Obama wanted to give him an important position in the State Department. But he was perceived even in 2009 at that time as sufficiently controversial as to be blocked, and Freeman’s proposed appointment was withdrawn. Obama himself is an outside possibility. He’s privately let it be known that he’s quite critical of the way in which Israel has behaved in this period. He is oriented toward domestic policy yet would like to promote a more peaceful, less war oriented world. But whether he would be willing to play that kind of role, having been previously President is uncertain, and whether Harris would want such a strong political personality within her inner circle remains uncertain. Possibly, if he was willing, he could be the US Ambassador at the UN or some kind of other position. But it’s strange that in a country of 330 million people, there are so few individuals can both back a progressive foreign policy agenda and get by the gatekeepers, a part of whose job is to make sure that more progressive voices are not appointed to top foreign policy positions. So, for instance, someone like Chomsky or Ellsberg, if heallthy, would be perhaps amenable to serving in a Harris government. And she might be eager to chart a somewhat independent path and give more sensitive attention to foreign policy and more support to the people that have been suffering from inflation and other forms of deprivation resulting from a cutback in social protection that has occurred in the last decade or so.
Mike Billington: In a more general sense, you’ve been critical of what you call the “incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there, beyond American borders, at a time when the US role has never been more controversially intrusive.” As you know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the head of the Schiller Institute, has initiated an International Peace Coalition (IPC) which is aimed at addressing that problem, bringing together pro-peace individuals and organizations from around the world, many of whom have different political views, but to put aside those differences in order to stop the extreme danger of an onrushing nuclear conflict with Russia, and also possibly with China, and to restore diplomacy in a West which has fully adopted the imperial outlook of the British Empire, which they now call the “unipolar world.” How can this movement be made strong enough to make those kinds of changes in the paradigm?
Prof. Falk: That’s an important challenge. There are other groups that are trying to do roughly parallel things. I’ve been involved with SHAPE [Save Humanity And Planet Earth], the group that Chandra Muzaffar is one of the three co-conveners along with Joe Camilleri [and myself]. But it’s extremely difficult to penetrate the mainstream media, and it’s very difficult to arrange funding for undertakings like your own, that challenge the fundamental ways that the world is organized. The whole point, I think, of these initiatives is to create alternatives to this kind of aggressively impacted world of conflict, and to seek common efforts, common security, human security, that humanistically meets the challenges of climate change and a variety of other issues that are currently not being addressed adequately. But this kind of development depends, I think ultimately, on the mobilization of people. Governments are not likely to encourage these kinds of initiatives. The question needs to be rephrased: how does one mobilize sufficient people with sufficient resources to pose a credible challenge to the political status quo in the world?
Mike Billington: In that light, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has also called for the founding of what she called a Council of Reason, reflecting back on the Council of Westphalia, which led to the Peace of Westphalia, where people of stature, as you indicated, are brought to step forward and speak out at a time when that kind of truthful, outspoken approach is sorely lacking and very, very much needed. What’s your thought on that?
Prof. Falk: I think all such initiatives help to build this new consciousness that is more sensitive to the realities of the world we live in. There has been, as you undoubtedly know, a similar Council of Elders composed of former winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and a few selected other individuals, but it hasn’t had much resonance either with the media or with government. It’s very difficult to gain political space and non-mainstream credibility the way the world is now structured, as empowered by a coalition of corporate capitalism and militarized states. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about what can be achieved. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t struggle to do what at least has the promise and the aspiration to do what’s necessary and desirable. And the Counsel of Reason, presumably well selected and adequately funded, and maybe with an active publication platform, could make contributions to the quality of international public discourse. It’s worth a try, and I would certainly support it.
Mike Billington: I appreciate that. What are your thoughts on the peace mission undertaken by Viktor Orban?
Prof. Falk: Well, I don’t have too many thoughts about that. It seemed to coincide what many independent, progressive voices were saying. In any event. The interesting thing about Orban’s advocacy is that he’s the leader of a European. state, and therefore his willingness to embark on such a journey and to seek ways of ending the Ukraine conflict is certainly welcome. He, of course, has a kind of shadowy reputation as a result of widespread allegations of autocratic rule within Hungary. I don’t know how to evaluate such criticisms I haven’t been following the events in Hungary, but he’s portrayed in the West as an opponent of liberal democracy. And for that reason, he doesn’t receive much attention from the media or from Western governments overall. Orban’s message seems too deserve wider currency, but whether he can deliver that message effectively seems to me to be in fairly significant doubt. I think the Chinese are in a better position to make helpful points of view toward ending the Ukraine War.
Mike Billington: You’re saying that he is accused of being against “liberal democracy.” Do you think criticism of liberal democracy is wrong?
Prof. Falk: No, no. I consider myself a critic of liberal democracy. But I think liberal democracy remains powerful in the West because it’s linked to corporate capitalism on the one side, and the most militarized states on the other side. The liberal façade of these Western states purports to be guided by the rule of law and human rights, presenting an attractive image to many people who close their eyes to the contradiction in the behavior of these states, especially in foreign policy.
Mike Billington: You’re generally very pessimistic about the US election, saying that you saw the choice — this was before Biden dropped out — but you saw it as “a warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” That’s pretty strong. You welcomed Biden dropping out, but do you see any improvement in the choices today?
Prof. Falk: Yes, I see at least the possibility of an improvement, because we don’t know enough about how Kamala Harris will try to package her own ideas in a form that presents an independent position. It’s conceivable it would even be to the right of Biden, but I don’t think so. Her own background on domestic issues is quite progressive and at the same time pragmatic. As a younger person, she has a mixed record, to say the least while serving as prosecuting attorney and attorney general in California. But I think there is a fairly good prospect that she will be more critical of Israel during the last several years as Biden’s vice president. She has already indicated a determination to not support Israel, at least openly, if they engage in a massive killing of Palestinian civilians. She probably feels she is walking a tight rope to avoid alienating Zionist funders and others who would be hostile should she show a shift to a more balanced pro-Palestinian position.
Mike Billington: You referred to Trump in that passage as a warmonger. But on the other hand…
Prof. Falk: No, you misunderstood me. Biden is the warmonger.
Mike Billington: Oh, a “warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” I got it. So those terms were both as a description of Biden.
Prof. Falk: I would never call Trump “peace minded,” but he has at various points suggested an opposition to what he and others have called “forever wars,” these US engagements in long term interventions that always seemed to have ended up badly, even from a strategic point of view, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump is so unpredictable and unstable that I wouldn’t place any confidence in his words or declared interntions. He does seem determined to move the country in a fascist direction if he’s successful in the election. And if he isn’t successful, he seems to want to agitate the country sufficiently so that it experiences some level of civil strife, or at least unrest.
Mike Billington: Well, he clearly is insisting that there must be peace and negotiation with Russia on the Ukraine issue. Do you see any hope that he would also negotiate with China in terms of the growing crisis there?
Prof. Falk: I doubt it because of his seeming perception of China as an economic competitor of the US, and as one that, in his perceptions has taken advantage of the international economic openness to gain various kinds of unfair economic advantages. I think he is, if anything, more likely to escalate the confrontation with China and at best to put relations on a very transactional basis, which suggests that only when it was to the material benefit of the US would the US Government in any way cooperate with China even for the benefit of the public good.
Mike Billington: Of course, we saw just recently in China that the Xi Jinping government brought many diverse Palestinian factions together in Beijing, and that they did come to an agreement. What are your thoughts on the agreement that they came to and what effect will that have?
Prof. Falk: It seems helpful. I hope it lasts. There have been prior attempts, mostly in the Middle East, mostly with Egypt playing an intermediary role, especially before the present Sisi government. And none of these earlier unity arrangements have lasted. There is a lot of hostility rivalry among the PLO, Fatah Hamas, and several other Palestinian factions. It relates to the religious – secular divide, differences of personality, patterns of corruption, and opposed adjustments to Israeli criminality. It was encouraging to me that Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, condemned the assassination of Haniyeh. That, I think, was an early confirmation of the potential importance of this Beijing Declaration and the successful, at least temporarily successful, effort at bringing these Palestinian factions together in common struggle. And from the Palestinian point of view, unity has never been more important as a practical matter to achieve and sustain any hope of statehood or realization of their right of self-determination. The entire future of Palestinian resistance probably depends on being able to have a more or less united front to sustain hopes that a post-Gaza arrangement will be beneficial for Palestine.
Mike Billington: You recently signed an appeal which was issued by the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, which has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for alleged complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel. What are your expectations for that effort?
Prof. Falk: The ICC, the International Criminal Court, is much more susceptible to political pressure than is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is part of the UN and came into existence when the UN was established back in 1945. The ICC was established recently, in 2002. It doesn’t have many of the most important countries among its members or signatories to its treaty, the so-called Rome Treaty. It would be a pleasant surprise if the Chamber of ICC judges follows the Prosecutor’s recommendation and issues these arrest warrants. Already, Netanyahu has given the recommendation of the prosecutor an international visibility by denouncing them and calling on the US and, and the liberal democracies to bring pressure on the ICC to avoid issuing the warrants. And that reflects the strong impression that even though Israel defies international law, its leaders are very sensitive about being alleged to be in violation, especially of international criminal law and particularly of the serious offences alleged to have taken place in Gaza. The basis for recommending arrest warrant for Israeli leaders doesn’t extend to cover the elephant in the room — genocide. It enumerates other crimes that Israel, that Netanyahu and Gallant, are said to be guilty of perpetrating, and does the same thing for Hamas, in trying to justify issuing arrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders. Of course, they don’t have to worry about Haniyeh anymore, and I think, I’m pretty sure he was one of the three Palestinians who were recommended as sufficiently involved in the commission of international crimes on October 7 to justify the issuance of arrest warrants.
Mike Billington: As I mentioned, you were the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine from 2008 to 2014. During that period, you were regularly declared by Israel to be an anti Semite for things you said and did during that time. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that at this point. Also, the current person in that position, Francesca Albanese, is also under attack from Israel. What do you think about her role today?
Prof. Falk: Well, as far as my own role is concerned, the attacks came not directly from the government, but from Zionist oriented NGOs, particularly UN Watch in Geneva and some groups in the US and elsewhere, all in the white Western world. I mean, all the attacks on me. And of course, they were somewhat hurtful. But this kind of smear is characteristic of the way in which Israel and Zionism has dealt with critics for a long time. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader in the UK, has been a victim of such a smear and defamatory campaign. It’s unfortunately a tactic that has had a certain success in branding one as lacking in credibility, and thus not fit to be listened to by the mainstream. Israel and its Zionist network are not interested in whether the allegations are truthful or even grounded in factual reality. This effort has as its primary aim the deflecting the conversation away from the message to the messenger.
And they’ve done, shockingly and without shame, the same thing with Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur. Francesca is an energetic, dedicated, very humanistic person and gives no signs of anhy kind of ethnic prejudice, much less anti-Semitism. She’s written very good reports in the time she’s been the Special Rapporteur, and bravely and forthrightly confronted her attackers.
It’s a real disgrace that this unpaid position at the UN is dealt with in such an irresponsible and personally hurtful way. The special rapporteurs enjoy independence, which is important in such roles, but they’re essentially doing a voluntary job, that frees them from the discipline of the UN, but also makes them vulnerable to these personal attacks that are intended to be vicious. The UN does nothing very substantial to protect those of us that have been on the receiving end of this kind of ‘politics of deflection.’ UN passivity reflects a core anxiety within the UN bureaucracy centered on losing funding from the countries that support Israel.
After I finished being Special Rapporteur, I collaborated with Professor Virginia Tilley to produce one of the first detailed reports in 2017 examining contentions of Israeli apartheid. The report was denounced by Nikki Haley [US Ambassador to the UN] in the Security Council soon after its release. I was singled out by her as a disreputable person undeserving of serious consideration. The UN secretary General Guterres, newly appointed at that time, was publicly threatened by Haley with withholding US funds if he didn’t remove our report from the UN website, and to our regret he complied. He removed the report, though it was already the most widely read and frequently requested report in the history of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, which is a regional commission of the UN.
Mike Billington: And who was it that ordered it removed?
Prof. Falk: Guterres. Yes. Removal caused a stir. The head of this UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), was a civil servant named Rima Khalaf who resigned her UN post as a consequence of what was done. Our report was commissioned as an independent academic study. We were treated as scholars and not as UN civil servants. But the report was sponsored and accepted by a UN agency, and thus could not entirely escape its association with our conclusions that were controversial at the time.
Mike Billington: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we close?
Prof. Falk: No, I think we’ve covered a lot. I would hope that things will look better in a few months, but I’m not at all confident that they will. They could look a lot worse if this wider war unfolds in the Middle East. And if they are new tensions that come to the surface in the Pacific area. I find myself clinging to this marginal hope that Kamala Harris will not only win the election but surprise us by being more forthcoming in promoting an enhanced image of what a liberal democracy means internationally.
Mike Billington: Let us hope. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to do this at a critical moment, with your own personal role in the Middle East having been so important historically and still today. So we’ll get this circulated widely. And let’s hope that, in fact, we do see a big change at a moment where the crisis is such that you would think people would be stepping forward all over the world to stop the madness.
Prof. Falk: Yes but they need — I found that they need the entrepreneurial underpinning. They have to have the support, sufficient funding. Support so that their words will have weight. This unfortunate, but it’s one of the political dimensions of the imperative: ‘follow the money.’
Image by U.S. Department of State, Public Domain
[Prefatory Note: This is the text of an interview with Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute modified for clarity and style, with no changes in substance.]
Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I have the pleasure of having an interview today with Professor Richard Falk, who has done another interview with us earlier. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton, among other positions he holds in institutions around the world, mostly peace related. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine. So, given the circumstances that we have today in the Middle East, it’s a very timely moment to have a discussion with Professor Falk. So let me begin with that. Professor, the assassination of Haniyeh today in Tehran is clearly a sign that Israel is trying its best to get an all-out war with Iran started, but also, it’s the fact they just killed the person who was leading negotiator with Israel for peace in Palestine. So what are your comments on that?
Prof. Falk: I agree with your final sentences that this is certainly either gross incompetence on Israel’s part or a deliberate effort to provoke a wider war. And a shady effort by Israel to compel the engagement of the United States in Israel’s multiple struggles in the region. One should also refer here to the double assassination. Not only Haniyeh, but Nasrallah’s right-hand assistant and prominent military commander, Fouad Shukra, who was killed 2 or 3 days ago, in Beirut. And so now Israel in successive inflammatory assassinations attacking the capitals of Lebanon and Iran, certainly signaling an almost intentional search for some kind of escalatory response. The Supreme Leader of Iran has already declared that that Iran will arrange — he didn’t go into detail — arrange an appropriately harsh response, in retaliation for Israel’s criminal act. In the Lebanese context, Nasrallah and Hezbollah deny the Israeli justification for the attack, which was the missile that landed in the Golan Heights a few days earlier, killing several Syrian children playing on a soccer field. It almost certainly was not intended as the target by whoever fired the missile, which is still being denied by Hezbollah. The very explosive situation in the Middle East — perhaps the assassinations were motivated by the wish to distract attention from Israel’s failure to destroy Hamas and Netanyahu’s unpopularity in Israel. At best, this is a very dangerous way of proceeding because a multi-state war in the Middle East will bring widespread destruction , including likely attacks on Israeli cities, something Israel has avoided over the course of its existence. This may yet be a dramatic turning point for the worse in the whole experience of Israel’s defiance of international law, international morality and just plain geopolitical prudence.
Mike Billington: You have been a very outspoken supporter of the role of the International Court of Justice, ICJ, and their rulings, including the decision on the South African petition that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza; the issuing of arrest warrants on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders; and more recently, the verdict that the entire occupation of the Palestinian territories has been illegal from the beginning, ordering it to end the occupation and withdraw the settlements. But of course, Israel has ignored them totally, while the US and the EU have equally ignored them. As you pointed out in one of your articles, Bibi Netanyahu even said “No one will stop us,” from driving all the Palestinians out or killing them. What can be done overall to deal with the Gaza genocide?
Richard Falk: Well, it is, of course, a terribly tragic moment for the Palestinian people who are faced with this grotesquely sustained and executed genocide, that has now gone on for more than nine months on a daily basis. As your question suggests, Israel has been crucially backed up throughout this process by the complicity of the liberal democracies, above all the US. And so long as that power relationship persists, it’s very unlikely that an effective intervention on behalf of Palestine, or to stop the genocide, can be organized and implemented. From that point of view, these judicial rulings, although they give aid and some comfort to supporters of Palestine are not able to influence the situation on the ground, which continues to be horrifying. At the same time, the rulings are important in depriving Israel and the West of complaining about Palestine and Hamas as violators of international law, including ‘terrorist’ accusations. In other words, by reliably finding that Israel is in gross violation of international law and by issuing arrest warrants, global judicial procedures deprive these aggressive countries from opportunistically using international law as a policy instrument the way they have against Russia in the Ukrainian context. It also influences media discourse and civil society behavior, particularly activists throughout the world, who feel vindicated and challenged to do more by way of pro-Palestinian solidarity initiatives.
There exist a variety of initiatives underway in civil society that not only brand Israel as a rogue state, but also propose nonviolent acts of boycotting, divesting, and shows of opposition, highlighted by the activism of students in university campuses around the world giving rise to repressive responses by pro-Israeli elites in and out of government. This has become quite a distinctive phenomenon — even during earlier student activist periods involving South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, there wasn’t nearly as much passion or such animated expressions of civil society activism. This is now a near universal reaction, including a growing portion of citizens in the country whose governments are complicit in supporting Israel’s commission of genocide.
Also prresent is a contested and growing gap between what the citizenry wants and the government is doing. This gap was highlighted and dramatized by the scandalous, honorific speech that Netanyahu gave last week to a joint session of Congress, where he received a hero’s welcome, frequent standing ovations, thunderous applause and cordial meetings in the White House with Biden and Kamala Harris. It was widely observed that Harris abandoned protocol by not attending the joint session of Congress over which the vice president ordinarily presides whenever a foreign leader is making such an address, and the Netanyahu visit was met be large protests in the streets of Washington.
Mike Billington: Your friend, and mine, Chandra Muzaffar, who is the founder and the head of the International Movement for a Just World based in Malaysia, has written a letter to all member nations of the UN noting, as you have also, that the West is ignoring the evil in Gaza, and called on the UN General Assembly to act upon Resolution 377, which, as I understand it, allows the General Assembly, when the Security Council fails to take action to stop a disaster against peace, to act in its own name, to deploy forces, I think unarmed forces, to intervene. You are, among other things, a professor of international law. What is your view of this option?
Prof. Falk: There is that option, that was adopted in the Cold War context of the Korean War, with the objective of circumventing future Soviet vetoes. GA Res. 377 was thought initially to give the West a possibility of nullifying the Soviet veto and mobilizing the General Assembly to back Western positions. As the anti-colonial movement proceeded, the US in particular became more and more nervous about having an anti-capitalist General Assembly empowered to act when the Security Council was paralyzed. To my knowledge that Resolution 377 has never been actually invoked in a peace – war situation. I think there is a reluctance to press the West on this kind of issue, because it would require, to have any significance, a large political, military, and financial commitment, as well as a difficult undertaking to make effective. So I’m not optimistic about such a move to empower the General Assembly . I think the law can be interpreted in somewhat contradictory ways, as is often the case, particularly where there’s not much experience. But I don’t think the political will exists on the part of a sufficient number of governments to make the General Assembly act on behalf of Palestine. I think in general making the UN more effective and legitimate, empowerment of the General Assembly would be desirable and should be supported by people that want to have a more law governed international society, but preferably without relying on this Cold War precedent.
Mike Billington: On that broader issue, do you have any hope or any expectation that the UN in general will be reformed in the current crisis situation internationally?
Prof. Falk: I’m skeptical about that possibility. The forthcoming UN Summit of the Future on September 22-23 is dedicated to strengthening the UN. This is an initiative of Secretary-General Guterres that seeks to discuss some ambitious ideas about UN reform, enlarged participation by civil society and more democratic, transparent procedures for UN operations. But my guess is that the Permanent Members, and probably including China and Russia, will not push hard for such major development. Each of the P5 states seems to believe that their interests are better protected in a state-centric world, even if geopolitical managed, than they would be in a more structured world system operating according to a more centralized authority structure. It might become even more susceptible to Western domination and manipulation than is the case with present arrangements.
Mike Billington: On the US situation, you issued a public letter to Kamala Harris soon after Biden dropped out of the race. There and elsewhere, you have denounced what you called the “diluted optimism” of President Biden, who talks about American greatness and the great future America is looking forward to, and so forth. You called it: “a dangerous form of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national circumstances and a stubborn show of a failing leader’s vanity.” you express some hope that Kamala Harris will dump the Biden team of Blinken and Sullivan. Who do you think could possibly come to be her advisors? Who could, in fact, change the failed direction of the Biden-Harris administration?
Prof. Falk: You raise a difficult issue, because effective governance involves balancing various pressures from without and within the apparatus of the state. I think Harris knows and respects these constraints, aware that even an elected leader is restricted, encountering resistance if public policy dissents from the main tenets of the Washington Consensus. Harris’s policy choices are restricted because those that are prominent enough to be eligible for confirmation in the top jobs are either conforming to this geopolitical realism, or they’re regarded as too controversial to get by the congressional gatekeepers and survive media objections. In fairness to Harris, or any leader for that matter, it’s a difficult undertaking to make American foreign policy particularly more congruent with the well-being of people and more oriented toward sustaining peace in a set of dangerous circumstances that exist in different parts of the world. And, of course, the Israeli domestic factor is probably also at least a background constraint. In light of this, the best that I could hope for, realistically, is some critical realist personalities like John Mearsheimer or Anne-Marie Slaughter, or possibly Stephen Walt. These are people that have been more enlightened in their definition of national interest and more critical of the Jewish lobby and of other manipulative private sector forces. But they’re strictly, and properly, categorized as realists, A more progressive possibility, but probably still too controversial for serious consideration, would be Chas Freeman despite his distinguished diplomatic background. Obama wanted to give him an important position in the State Department. But he was perceived even in 2009 at that time as sufficiently controversial as to be blocked, and Freeman’s proposed appointment was withdrawn. Obama himself is an outside possibility. He’s privately let it be known that he’s quite critical of the way in which Israel has behaved in this period. He is oriented toward domestic policy yet would like to promote a more peaceful, less war oriented world. But whether he would be willing to play that kind of role, having been previously President is uncertain, and whether Harris would want such a strong political personality within her inner circle remains uncertain. Possibly, if he was willing, he could be the US Ambassador at the UN or some kind of other position. But it’s strange that in a country of 330 million people, there are so few individuals can both back a progressive foreign policy agenda and get by the gatekeepers, a part of whose job is to make sure that more progressive voices are not appointed to top foreign policy positions. So, for instance, someone like Chomsky or Ellsberg, if heallthy, would be perhaps amenable to serving in a Harris government. And she might be eager to chart a somewhat independent path and give more sensitive attention to foreign policy and more support to the people that have been suffering from inflation and other forms of deprivation resulting from a cutback in social protection that has occurred in the last decade or so.
Mike Billington: In a more general sense, you’ve been critical of what you call the “incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there, beyond American borders, at a time when the US role has never been more controversially intrusive.” As you know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the head of the Schiller Institute, has initiated an International Peace Coalition (IPC) which is aimed at addressing that problem, bringing together pro-peace individuals and organizations from around the world, many of whom have different political views, but to put aside those differences in order to stop the extreme danger of an onrushing nuclear conflict with Russia, and also possibly with China, and to restore diplomacy in a West which has fully adopted the imperial outlook of the British Empire, which they now call the “unipolar world.” How can this movement be made strong enough to make those kinds of changes in the paradigm?
Prof. Falk: That’s an important challenge. There are other groups that are trying to do roughly parallel things. I’ve been involved with SHAPE [Save Humanity And Planet Earth], the group that Chandra Muzaffar is one of the three co-conveners along with Joe Camilleri [and myself]. But it’s extremely difficult to penetrate the mainstream media, and it’s very difficult to arrange funding for undertakings like your own, that challenge the fundamental ways that the world is organized. The whole point, I think, of these initiatives is to create alternatives to this kind of aggressively impacted world of conflict, and to seek common efforts, common security, human security, that humanistically meets the challenges of climate change and a variety of other issues that are currently not being addressed adequately. But this kind of development depends, I think ultimately, on the mobilization of people. Governments are not likely to encourage these kinds of initiatives. The question needs to be rephrased: how does one mobilize sufficient people with sufficient resources to pose a credible challenge to the political status quo in the world?
Mike Billington: In that light, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has also called for the founding of what she called a Council of Reason, reflecting back on the Council of Westphalia, which led to the Peace of Westphalia, where people of stature, as you indicated, are brought to step forward and speak out at a time when that kind of truthful, outspoken approach is sorely lacking and very, very much needed. What’s your thought on that?
Prof. Falk: I think all such initiatives help to build this new consciousness that is more sensitive to the realities of the world we live in. There has been, as you undoubtedly know, a similar Council of Elders composed of former winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and a few selected other individuals, but it hasn’t had much resonance either with the media or with government. It’s very difficult to gain political space and non-mainstream credibility the way the world is now structured, as empowered by a coalition of corporate capitalism and militarized states. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about what can be achieved. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t struggle to do what at least has the promise and the aspiration to do what’s necessary and desirable. And the Counsel of Reason, presumably well selected and adequately funded, and maybe with an active publication platform, could make contributions to the quality of international public discourse. It’s worth a try, and I would certainly support it.
Mike Billington: I appreciate that. What are your thoughts on the peace mission undertaken by Viktor Orban?
Prof. Falk: Well, I don’t have too many thoughts about that. It seemed to coincide what many independent, progressive voices were saying. In any event. The interesting thing about Orban’s advocacy is that he’s the leader of a European. state, and therefore his willingness to embark on such a journey and to seek ways of ending the Ukraine conflict is certainly welcome. He, of course, has a kind of shadowy reputation as a result of widespread allegations of autocratic rule within Hungary. I don’t know how to evaluate such criticisms I haven’t been following the events in Hungary, but he’s portrayed in the West as an opponent of liberal democracy. And for that reason, he doesn’t receive much attention from the media or from Western governments overall. Orban’s message seems too deserve wider currency, but whether he can deliver that message effectively seems to me to be in fairly significant doubt. I think the Chinese are in a better position to make helpful points of view toward ending the Ukraine War.
Mike Billington: You’re saying that he is accused of being against “liberal democracy.” Do you think criticism of liberal democracy is wrong?
Prof. Falk: No, no. I consider myself a critic of liberal democracy. But I think liberal democracy remains powerful in the West because it’s linked to corporate capitalism on the one side, and the most militarized states on the other side. The liberal façade of these Western states purports to be guided by the rule of law and human rights, presenting an attractive image to many people who close their eyes to the contradiction in the behavior of these states, especially in foreign policy.
Mike Billington: You’re generally very pessimistic about the US election, saying that you saw the choice — this was before Biden dropped out — but you saw it as “a warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” That’s pretty strong. You welcomed Biden dropping out, but do you see any improvement in the choices today?
Prof. Falk: Yes, I see at least the possibility of an improvement, because we don’t know enough about how Kamala Harris will try to package her own ideas in a form that presents an independent position. It’s conceivable it would even be to the right of Biden, but I don’t think so. Her own background on domestic issues is quite progressive and at the same time pragmatic. As a younger person, she has a mixed record, to say the least while serving as prosecuting attorney and attorney general in California. But I think there is a fairly good prospect that she will be more critical of Israel during the last several years as Biden’s vice president. She has already indicated a determination to not support Israel, at least openly, if they engage in a massive killing of Palestinian civilians. She probably feels she is walking a tight rope to avoid alienating Zionist funders and others who would be hostile should she show a shift to a more balanced pro-Palestinian position.
Mike Billington: You referred to Trump in that passage as a warmonger. But on the other hand…
Prof. Falk: No, you misunderstood me. Biden is the warmonger.
Mike Billington: Oh, a “warmonger and a mentally unstable, incipient fascist.” I got it. So those terms were both as a description of Biden.
Prof. Falk: I would never call Trump “peace minded,” but he has at various points suggested an opposition to what he and others have called “forever wars,” these US engagements in long term interventions that always seemed to have ended up badly, even from a strategic point of view, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump is so unpredictable and unstable that I wouldn’t place any confidence in his words or declared interntions. He does seem determined to move the country in a fascist direction if he’s successful in the election. And if he isn’t successful, he seems to want to agitate the country sufficiently so that it experiences some level of civil strife, or at least unrest.
Mike Billington: Well, he clearly is insisting that there must be peace and negotiation with Russia on the Ukraine issue. Do you see any hope that he would also negotiate with China in terms of the growing crisis there?
Prof. Falk: I doubt it because of his seeming perception of China as an economic competitor of the US, and as one that, in his perceptions has taken advantage of the international economic openness to gain various kinds of unfair economic advantages. I think he is, if anything, more likely to escalate the confrontation with China and at best to put relations on a very transactional basis, which suggests that only when it was to the material benefit of the US would the US Government in any way cooperate with China even for the benefit of the public good.
Mike Billington: Of course, we saw just recently in China that the Xi Jinping government brought many diverse Palestinian factions together in Beijing, and that they did come to an agreement. What are your thoughts on the agreement that they came to and what effect will that have?
Prof. Falk: It seems helpful. I hope it lasts. There have been prior attempts, mostly in the Middle East, mostly with Egypt playing an intermediary role, especially before the present Sisi government. And none of these earlier unity arrangements have lasted. There is a lot of hostility rivalry among the PLO, Fatah Hamas, and several other Palestinian factions. It relates to the religious – secular divide, differences of personality, patterns of corruption, and opposed adjustments to Israeli criminality. It was encouraging to me that Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, condemned the assassination of Haniyeh. That, I think, was an early confirmation of the potential importance of this Beijing Declaration and the successful, at least temporarily successful, effort at bringing these Palestinian factions together in common struggle. And from the Palestinian point of view, unity has never been more important as a practical matter to achieve and sustain any hope of statehood or realization of their right of self-determination. The entire future of Palestinian resistance probably depends on being able to have a more or less united front to sustain hopes that a post-Gaza arrangement will be beneficial for Palestine.
Mike Billington: You recently signed an appeal which was issued by the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, which has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, for alleged complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel. What are your expectations for that effort?
Prof. Falk: The ICC, the International Criminal Court, is much more susceptible to political pressure than is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is part of the UN and came into existence when the UN was established back in 1945. The ICC was established recently, in 2002. It doesn’t have many of the most important countries among its members or signatories to its treaty, the so-called Rome Treaty. It would be a pleasant surprise if the Chamber of ICC judges follows the Prosecutor’s recommendation and issues these arrest warrants. Already, Netanyahu has given the recommendation of the prosecutor an international visibility by denouncing them and calling on the US and, and the liberal democracies to bring pressure on the ICC to avoid issuing the warrants. And that reflects the strong impression that even though Israel defies international law, its leaders are very sensitive about being alleged to be in violation, especially of international criminal law and particularly of the serious offences alleged to have taken place in Gaza. The basis for recommending arrest warrant for Israeli leaders doesn’t extend to cover the elephant in the room — genocide. It enumerates other crimes that Israel, that Netanyahu and Gallant, are said to be guilty of perpetrating, and does the same thing for Hamas, in trying to justify issuing arrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders. Of course, they don’t have to worry about Haniyeh anymore, and I think, I’m pretty sure he was one of the three Palestinians who were recommended as sufficiently involved in the commission of international crimes on October 7 to justify the issuance of arrest warrants.
Mike Billington: As I mentioned, you were the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine from 2008 to 2014. During that period, you were regularly declared by Israel to be an anti Semite for things you said and did during that time. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that at this point. Also, the current person in that position, Francesca Albanese, is also under attack from Israel. What do you think about her role today?
Prof. Falk: Well, as far as my own role is concerned, the attacks came not directly from the government, but from Zionist oriented NGOs, particularly UN Watch in Geneva and some groups in the US and elsewhere, all in the white Western world. I mean, all the attacks on me. And of course, they were somewhat hurtful. But this kind of smear is characteristic of the way in which Israel and Zionism has dealt with critics for a long time. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader in the UK, has been a victim of such a smear and defamatory campaign. It’s unfortunately a tactic that has had a certain success in branding one as lacking in credibility, and thus not fit to be listened to by the mainstream. Israel and its Zionist network are not interested in whether the allegations are truthful or even grounded in factual reality. This effort has as its primary aim the deflecting the conversation away from the message to the messenger.
And they’ve done, shockingly and without shame, the same thing with Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur. Francesca is an energetic, dedicated, very humanistic person and gives no signs of anhy kind of ethnic prejudice, much less anti-Semitism. She’s written very good reports in the time she’s been the Special Rapporteur, and bravely and forthrightly confronted her attackers.
It’s a real disgrace that this unpaid position at the UN is dealt with in such an irresponsible and personally hurtful way. The special rapporteurs enjoy independence, which is important in such roles, but they’re essentially doing a voluntary job, that frees them from the discipline of the UN, but also makes them vulnerable to these personal attacks that are intended to be vicious. The UN does nothing very substantial to protect those of us that have been on the receiving end of this kind of ‘politics of deflection.’ UN passivity reflects a core anxiety within the UN bureaucracy centered on losing funding from the countries that support Israel.
After I finished being Special Rapporteur, I collaborated with Professor Virginia Tilley to produce one of the first detailed reports in 2017 examining contentions of Israeli apartheid. The report was denounced by Nikki Haley [US Ambassador to the UN] in the Security Council soon after its release. I was singled out by her as a disreputable person undeserving of serious consideration. The UN secretary General Guterres, newly appointed at that time, was publicly threatened by Haley with withholding US funds if he didn’t remove our report from the UN website, and to our regret he complied. He removed the report, though it was already the most widely read and frequently requested report in the history of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, which is a regional commission of the UN.
Mike Billington: And who was it that ordered it removed?
Prof. Falk: Guterres. Yes. Removal caused a stir. The head of this UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), was a civil servant named Rima Khalaf who resigned her UN post as a consequence of what was done. Our report was commissioned as an independent academic study. We were treated as scholars and not as UN civil servants. But the report was sponsored and accepted by a UN agency, and thus could not entirely escape its association with our conclusions that were controversial at the time.
Mike Billington: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we close?
Prof. Falk: No, I think we’ve covered a lot. I would hope that things will look better in a few months, but I’m not at all confident that they will. They could look a lot worse if this wider war unfolds in the Middle East. And if they are new tensions that come to the surface in the Pacific area. I find myself clinging to this marginal hope that Kamala Harris will not only win the election but surprise us by being more forthcoming in promoting an enhanced image of what a liberal democracy means internationally.
Mike Billington: Let us hope. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to do this at a critical moment, with your own personal role in the Middle East having been so important historically and still today. So we’ll get this circulated widely. And let’s hope that, in fact, we do see a big change at a moment where the crisis is such that you would think people would be stepping forward all over the world to stop the madness.
Prof. Falk: Yes but they need — I found that they need the entrepreneurial underpinning. They have to have the support, sufficient funding. Support so that their words will have weight. This unfortunate, but it’s one of the political dimensions of the imperative: ‘follow the money.’
Richard Falk
Richard Anderson Falk (born November 13, 1930) is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees. He is the author or coauthor of over 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Since 2005 he chairs the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
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