[Prefatory Note: This interview was conducted on behalf of Fayn Press by an independent Turkish journalist, Semin Gumusel, on August 19, 2025. It was published initially in Turkish and can be found at link: https://www.fayn.press/prof-richard-falk-gazzeyi-yalnizca-halklarin-direnisi-kurtarabilir/The English version posted below has been somewhat modified, mainly for style.]
Q<How can Israel and Netanyahu be stopped at this moment?
That is a question that has haunted the world for the past two years, and worried peace and justice activists for a much longer time. The most obvious issue is to how to persuade the US government and EU countries to withdraw their support in response to Israel’s abusive occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. It remains crucial for any hope of an adequate, if belated, international response to the Gaza genocide for European countries do more than just step back but encourage the imposition of collective sanctioning measures through the UN or by a coalition of the willing. It is of even greater relevance to bring pressure on the US Government to stop shielding Israel and to join in a genuine effort to overcome the current famine that is threatening death by starvation to most of the surviving Palestinian population trapped in Gaza.
The political atmosphere regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza has changed over the course of the last five months, that is, after Israel broke the ceasefire on March 13 of this year. A much larger segment of the public, including in previously complicit countries, is increasingly disturbed by Israel continuing genocide, especially by the cruelty of inducing deliberate starvation, the manipulation of the humanitarian aid, and perhaps most of all by converting the food distribution centers into killing fields. The overall impression produced by Israel’s tactics is one of death of innocent people and destruction of their habitats and cultural heritage with a ferocity that is unprecedented in human history. Prior genocides were never before as widely and vividly witnessed around the world in real time. The Israeli response to October 7 has been exposing the eyes and ears of the entire world to daily images of atrocities, as well as the complicity of the Western liberal democratic governments and the feebleness of UN genocide prevention efforts. This represents a moral collapse by Western governments and reveals the deficiencies of international law and the UN in the face of clashes between humanitarian concerns and strategic interests. If this dynamic results in Israeli post-genocide occupation of Gaza and the expulsion and repression of surviving Palestinians, this tragic failure of moral internationalism will be completed. Such a result will keep reviving memories of generations to come with graphic descriptions of this appalling behavior that was tolerated and significantly enabled by the West, particularly by the former European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies. The work of documentary and fictional filmmaking will undoubtedly preserve and disseminate this dark and scandalous chapter in human history.
We alive now cannot evade responsibility for taking what action we can that is directed at securing Palestinian rights as well as resisting Israel’s crimes. The urgent question before the world is ‘how to translate opposition to this ongoing experience of criminality into effective action of opposition given existing emergency conditions?’ The humanitarian emergency can only be address by an immediate response of sufficient magnitude. We have little time to plan and intervene protectively if we are serious about engaging to save the surviving Gazan population of an estimated two million persons, most of whom have already been severely malnourished and traumatized by almost two years of relentless wholesale onslaught conducted with minimal constraint.
What has been happening in Gaza should not be treated as a ‘war,’ which presupposes a somewhat symmetrical struggle between two sides. The conflict unfolding in Gaza is more accurately portrayed as a ‘massacre’, or even as ‘a military hunting expedition.’ It is so one-sided in its characteristics, with one side having its choice of options as to the most hyper-modern weaponry and targets, and the other side vulnerable and helpless, with few options other than to seek shelter and pray to survive. To use the language of war for such a conflict is to normalize Israel’s behavior by raising technical questions of the law of war as to whether it has exceeded the limits of ‘self-defense’ or ‘military necessity.’ Such issues can be argued indefinitely by lawyers for and against, thereby minimizing the horror that is transpiring. Language matters as it allows advocates of abhorrent behavior to hide the true nature of their true motivations that account for the tactics deployed to destroy the identity, livelihood, memories, and lives of an entire people and at the same time engage in ethnic cleansing to clear the land of its native population. The recourse to force of this intensity and duration given the context cannot be explained by reference to Israeli security or even revenge, but only by reference to territorial ambitions and depopulation that long infused the Zionist Project, which has delayed implementation until an opportunity was present,.
In the case of Gaza there’s a special feature that this violence is concentrated in a tiny area occupied after the 1967 War and subject to international humanitarian law with Israel being a provisional occupying power that has now been declared by the International Court of Justice in 2024 to have flagrantly abused its authority and role from the perspective of international law. This supreme international tribunal in a near unanimous judgment concluded that Israel was legally obligated to withdraw its military presence and political administration altogether from occupied Palestinian territories and allowed it a year to do so. The year expired on July 19, 2025, and given the refusal of Israel to comply, this authoritative judicial opinion instructed the UN and its Members in their individual capacities to take steps to implement Israel’s withdrawal. What is now established is that Israel has no legitimate foundation for exercising control in either Gaza or the West Bank, and has itself become an unlawful occupant. Israel not only refuses to comply with the ICJ decision but has announced plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank, directly violating an important legal constraint found in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. So far there are no signs at the UN or elsewhere that there exists a sufficient political will to do anything that would really make Israel feel obliged to comply.
There are some symbolic gestures that have been recently made by several important European countries including Germany, France and the UK reacting to the official confirmation of famine in Gaza and the reports of children and others dying of starvation. But in terms of stopping an extremist leader like Netanyahu and the Zionist movement that has captured control over the governing process and the citizenry in Israel, and there is little indication that anything in the short term can or will be done to mitigate the suffering in Gaza, or to avert what seems to be worse to come. There is a slender hope that the increasing pariah or rogue status of Israel will induce an unexpected willingness of Israel’s leaders to compromise the further pursuit of maximalist goals in exchange for a pledge to normalize Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Middle East, a revival of the Abraham Accords initiated in the last year of Trump’s first term as the US president.
People have started advocating, including here in Istanbul, about forming a UN protective force that would intervene with sufficient capabilities to protect the Gazan population perhaps by a peacekeeping presence deployed at the borders between Israel and Gaza, as well as between Israel and the West Bank. It is doubtful that this will happen so long as U.S. and Israeli opposition remains as firm as in the past 22 months.
At the same time, it may be the best hope aside from an Israeli course correction, and it’s certainly worth exerting public pressure that might make Israel do something radically inconsistent with its behavior before and after October 7, but history is full of surprises, reflecting an inability to know the future and thus forced to live with uncertainty on every level of human existence. But uncertainty is no excuse for passivity in the presence of evil. What seems a phantasy hinged to Israel’s willingness to change its behavior, accepting an arrangement committed to enforcing international law and accepting a stable and just peace that would also promise the political as well as the physical reconstruction of Gaza is neither probable nor impossible.
Such a scenario is what we should struggle to achieve at this point even though most self-confident experts would dismiss its relevance as an idle utopian fantasy, and move on to plan some incremental feasible face saving adjustment that would not attempt to address the underlying maladies.
Q>If genocide cannot be stopped what is the outcome Israel seeks? When do you think Israel will stop this military operation increasingly labeled as ‘genocide’ in public discourse?
In my view Israel’s undertaking was not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all by security considerations. Israel had ample capabilities to address whatever security threats existed after October 7, and assuming that Israel didn’t let the attack happen so as to have the pretext for such a response, it would merely be a matter of enhancing border security, well within Israel’s defense capabilities. Israel received warnings that this attack was coming. Including a New York Times front page story about the degree to which Netanyahu had been made aware of the preparations in Gaza for launching this attack. As well, the Egyptian intelligence reportedly warned Netanyahi in the days before the attack. The world deserves an international investigation of the October 7 events, including what preceded and what followed, to obtain a better grasp of what motivated Israel to act as it has.
Ordinary persons should at least entertain the possibility that Israel wanted the pretext for initiating such a large-scale response that it would begin the end game for the Zionist project, which means grabbing as much land as they could acquire in terms of what was in some sense withheld from Israel by the international consensus favoring a two-state solution. The Israeli made no secret of wanting to have one Israeli state with Jewish supremacy and allowing only the Jewish people as having a right of self-determination. This is set forth in Israel’s Basic Law adopted by the Knesset in 2018. As Israel has no constitution, the Basic Law is the highest form of legislation and the most difficult to amend and repeal. It internalizes and acknowledges the apartheid regime Israel has long relied upon to deal with Palestinians living in Israel or in the occupied territories or even as refugees. It has been complemented by episodic seizures of Palestinian land and periodic expulsion of Palestinians.
On the West Bank there’s been an increasing spillover from the Gaza violence, mainly evident in the upsurge of settler violence directed at making life unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank and encouraging a movement among the many militant settler communities that are very well represented in the Netanyahu coalition to annex the West Bank and to occupy substantial if not the whole of Gaza and in the process to find ways to remove as many Palestinians as possible, either by forced expulsion or by some kind of ‘voluntary’ arrangement with another country that would accept them, possibly being bribed to do so by economic incentives. Several African countries have been talked about in this way but so far none have been persuaded to accept an influx of Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homeland.
But Israel and specifically the Zionist movement has always been animated by the idea of a single colonized Israel state that has the characteristics of a settler colonial undertaking. Such a project has been pursued at the very moment that colonialism has collapsed elsewhere in the world. Hence, it hardly surprising that there’s more resistance from the Palestinians to a historical attempt to engage in a new colonial undertaking during what is often referred to as a post-colonial era.
This persistent resistance of Palestinians has given rise to a vicious circle linking resistance to more and more severe repression taking the form of apartheid. No matter what its name Israel has devised a system of racial domination and exploitation that is based on ethnicity not on class but on identity determined to be either Jew or non-Jew. Aside from Israel’s resolve to exert discriminatory submission on the part of the Palestinians, its ambitions are more extensive, involving land and racial purification that depends on a continuous process of ethnic cleansing.
And when apartheid doesn’t succeed in achieving the ends that are being sought there has been a strong tendency of settler colonial movements to embrace a logic of genocide of varying degrees of severity depending on circumstances in each instance. Recourse to genocide often came about because it seemed the only way that the settler colonial undertaking could find stability and achieve homeland security. All settler colonial settler states have commenced their existence with an often unconsciously constructed apartheid-like structure, which if resisted over a long period would tend to transition to genocide or in a few instances the abandonment of the project. The US and Canada illustrate a transition to genocide, Algeria and South Africa illustrate a transition to withdrawal after resistance from within and without seemed to formidable to ignore.
As such what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories is not a new phenomenon, it happened in all the white British breakaway colonies Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand. They each experienced this sequence of apartheid followed by genocidal policies to marginalize the native peoples within their territories, and if long stabilized, by rituals of apology without the slightest intention of redressing legitimate grievances of surviving descendants of the victimized native population.
One has to understand that against the background of several centuries of history, genocide has never been effectively stopped by the international community. Even the Holocaust in Germany was tolerated until Hitler launched a war against Poland and then attacked the Soviet Union. It was only then that Germany was delegitimized as a sovereign state. Even during World War II, the allied powers notoriously refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camps, although some historians question this interpretation of Allied conduct with regard to the Nazi genocide.
In the background of the Gaza genocide is the extensive experience that countries in the West have had of consolidating the ambitions of dominant racial elites by any means unless there exists within or without some sufficient strategic interest with the ability and will to stop them.
A final thing aspect of this approach to Gaza is to mention at least that after the Cold War, Islam became the next enemy of the Global West. It is relevant to take note of the striking fact that all the countries that were complicit with Israel’s genocidal behavior are from the white West and all the countries and movements that support the Palestinian struggle come from the Global South or from governments or movements originating in Islamic neighbors of Palestine. In other words after the end of the Cold War, there emerged in the faultlines of the Middle East an inter-civilization struggle for land, energy reserves, trade routes, and hegemonic status.
Q>So we shouldn’t wait patiently for the international community to act. International organizations and geopolitical actors have never acted effectively to stop this or any previous genocide. History tells us almost everything we need to know, or does it?
The organized international community has never been designed or empowered to stop genocide. It has always in the past reacted after the fact. With digital communications this could change but obstacles to fashioning effective responses remain. If enough agitation arises in civil society it might effectively bring pressure on some governments to change their policies so as to support an anti-genocide protective intervention under international auspices, and act to provide an implementing capability. This might require the coordinated imposition of sanctions with demands for consent to deploy armed blue helmet protective forces.
This happened in a limited way regarding Apartheid South Africa which was strategically allied with the UK and the US. But the internal politics of these two countries turned so strongly against apartheid that these governments, despite their conservative governments under the leadership of Thacher and Reagan, complied with the wishes of their citizens rather than pursued their strategic interests. The Israeli case is different as Zionist lobbies, especially AIPAC, continue to be effective in asserting leverage over US policy toward Israel.
Q> Is it possible for the completely different Gaza plan to what Trump proposed in his promotional video- Gaza riviera – on social media to come true? A plan where Gaza is fully emptied, and Palestinians leave their land…
We’re living at a time of radical uncertainty so that what seems impossible may become actualized in ways that it’s currently difficult to anticipate. The crystal ball used to predict the future is even foggier than usual. We are destined to live in an atmosphere of ambient uncertainty with respect to future developments, but this does not relieve us from responsibility to struggle for what we believe is right and just. Precisely because a benign future is not foreclosed, as engaged citizens dedicated to a humane future our responsibility to act on behalf of justice is an imperative of moral conscience.
Reinforcing this general idea of political responsibility are concrete factors.Trump is sufficiently narcissistic, unpredictable, and impressionable that he could launch a major campaign to prove that this vision of a Middle East Riviera comes at least partially into being. It now seems unlikely because it’s not wanted by any of the relevant actors and it seems reminiscent of the the imperial side of the colonial era. Such a proposal poses an awkward question for advocates: ‘by what possible right has the U.S. to take over a territory with which it has not had any relevant historical connection or prior reasonable claim. Trump has made similar bizarre threats about American ambitions to exert sovereignty over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and undoubtedly others will be added to this notorious list.
Q>Netanyahu thinks he’s winning. Is he really winning, Israel is really winning?
No. Without doubt Israel prevails on the battlefield they have no opposition, they kill lots of people, they destroy lots of structures, disrupting the life and heritage of Gaza in a totalizing manner. At the same time, they basically lost what the onslaught set out to achieve beyond the devastation of Gaza. Recourse by Israel to this level of violence was supposed to exterminate Hamas, yet after two years of horrifying violence Israel finds itself with no choice but to negotiate with Hamas and to reach a deal to achieve a ceasefire and hostage exchange. In the background, of course, is Israel’s insistence on excluding Hamas from any governance role in Hamas, an extreme case of rewarding the main wrongdoer and further punishing the devastated victim.
Beyond this, there are all sorts of civil society and even governmental pushbacks by former supporters, including a flurry of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Even Israeli tourists are subject to angry protest. They have recently been denied the right to get off tourist ship in the harbors of Greek islands. More and more Israeli applicants are denied visas in an increasing number of places. IDF soldiers are facing threats of criminal prosecutions in several countries that have universal jurisdiction.
The whole legitimacy of a Zionist Israel is very much in doubt and its legitimacy challenged at this point. There are moves afoot to suspend Israel participation in UN activities or even to expel Israel from the UN. Several prominent Israelis are beginning to talk in a very strong way at least domestically against Netanyahu not only because of the failure to obtain the release of the remaining hostages but for broader issues of behavior that has ruined the reputation the whole idea of a a Jewish democratic state.
This Gaza genocide is the worst thing that has befallen diaspora Jews since Hitler. It brings authentic antisemitism rather than the fake weaponized antisemitism that is relied upon by the Zionist networks around the world to discredit Israel’s critics including of Jews such as myself. I was somewhat victimized this fake version of antisemitism while serving as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, but not in the serious way Francesca Albanese has been. However ethically inappropriate, it is the tactic Israel devised to divert attention from critical messages of unlawful behavior to the fake antisemitism attributed to the messenger to undermine his or her credibility.
Israel earlier in its answered substantive criticisms but it became so obvious that it was violating the rights of the occupied Palestinian people in numerous ways that it began adjusting its approach. Although reckless and disreputable the tactic was quite effective as a diversionary tactic. Fortunately, its overuse has weakened these fake accusations, and made the practice understood to be defamatory in unacceptable ways, especially in international arenas.
Q>How will history record the world’s silence and it’s allowing all this to happen?
Of course, much will depend on the eventual political outcome that remains unclear, especially whether what emerges from such a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza leads to ‘Greater Israel’ and realizes Netanyahu’s vision of ‘the new Middle East’ or whether Israel faces such pressures on its economic viability and political legitimacy that it renounces the apartheid features of Zionism, and moves finally towards a genuine accommodation with Palestine that acknowledges the Palestinian right of self-determination. The unexpected transformation of racist South Africa from an apartheid structure of governance to a constitutional democracy is an instructive and hopeful precedent. It should also lead us to understand that at this stage Israel has yet to win or Palestine to lose. The conflict and struggle goes on even though future Palestinian prospects for a justice-driven peace have never seemed bleaker. As earlier expressed, the ‘certainties’ of the present are often transformed in unanticipated way as the realities of the future unfold.
If Israel prevails and manages to normalize its relations in the Middle East and with the world and is again accepted as a legitimate sovereign state, recollections derived from the events of the past two years may be airbrushed to an extent that their gruesome realities become marginalized in the public imagination as became the fate of native peoples in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. I do not see this as happening, at least not in the near future, unless there is an upheaval in Israel that drastically changes the outlook of Zionism or repudiates Zionism altogether, and I do not see this happening, although it remains a less remote possibility than it did two years ago.
Evaluating the future perception of this post October 7 experience is also difficult currently. Israel’s leadership was warned by various friendly governments of an impending Hamas attack, yet appears to have chosen to let it happen so as to have a pretext for a violent response. In fact, Israel instantly over-reacted without taking any account of the context or its complacency about border security. We should remind ourselves that the context included a harsh blockade of Gaza since 2007 that induced widespread misery, periodic Israeli military incursions causing devastation, and a refusal even to respond to Hamas diplomatic initiatives for a long-term ceasefire lasting up to 50 years. The Zionist Project made political use of the October 7 attack to launch its endgame based on territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinian occupied territories and adjustments by way defusing the so-called ‘demographic bomb’ set to explode at some point due to higher Palestinian than Jewish fertility rates. The solution was to be found by way of ethnic cleansing which meant coercing the departure of as many Palestinians as possible. In effect, carrying out the last stage of any durable settler colonial project by Israel presupposes provoking a second Nakba of mass expulsion on the long suppressed Palestinian nation that despite all has remained resilient and resistant.
If Israel succeeds, as now seems likely, it will not bring peace but lead to new forms of Palestinian resistance. This will be viewed as the greatest failure of modern times to bring an end the colonial era in a civilized manner. It will be objectively seen as one of the cruelest abuses in history, made worse by the material and psychological support given to Israel’s prolonged genocide by the Western liberal democracies that had so proudly championed the development of human rights and genocide-prevention after World War II. It will be looked back upon from many perspectives, including as a sequel to the Cold War in which Israel safeguarded the Middle East for Western exploitation and continuing encroachment, as well as containing the spread of the kind of radical Islam favored by Iran. In the process the West sacrificed commitments to international law and global justice for the sake of geopolitical priorities and Western racial cohesion. It also exhibited unabashed moral hypocrisy by invoking international criminal law to bash Russia for its border-crossing attack on Ukraine while shielding Israel from compliance with the rulings of the most respected international tribunal. In this process international law was doubly damaged first by backing Israel’s Gaza campaign and secondly by making clear that international law was to be taken seriously only as a policy and propaganda instrument to be reserved for use against adversaries and rivals, but to be evaded in the event of unlawfulness by friends and allies.
Q<Could you please tell us about the Gaza Tribunal that you’re the president? Who launched it? Who are the members? And what is your aim?
To respond adequately, would require a long response. I will be brief and encourage those interested to read ‘The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal’ for a more detailed account of the perspective of our effort. https://chng.it/nf5gKSCmG8 [See text of Declaration, attached]
A group of sponsors, affiliated with the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (ICYF), a civil society organization affiliated with the Conference of Islamic Cooperation and possessing UN credentials, approached Hilal Elver and myself to accept this role of organizing a civil society tribunal devoted to documenting and increasing pressure on Israel and its supporters to stop the genocide, and possessed the funding needed to make it happen. We on our part insisted on political independence and full respect for our identity in the shaping of the work of the GT, which emphasized our resolve to operate as a civil society initiative that had no connections with governments or with active politicians and diplomats. GT is administered by a Steering Committee, and its members include Palestinian NGO representatives, public intellectuals and civil society activists, former UN Special Rapporteurs and former UN officials, and retired diplomats.
We believed such an initiative justified as neither the UN nor states acting individually or collectively were able to end the genocide or impose sanctions on Israel. Our standpoint was informed by the failure of Israel to comply with international law or the ruling of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, as supplemented by the failure of the UN to close the enforcement and accountability gaps, principally due to the right of veto possessed by Israel’s leading supporters in the Security Council.
The undertaking of the GT is to expose three gaps in a workable system of global governance: enforcement of law, accountability of perpetrators and complicit actors, and the refusal of states and their institutions to heed the global public interests and adapt national interests as needed. GT also aims to establish a documentary record of the genocide free from media manipulation and self-censorship in the format of an archival record that will be published in due course. The purpose to the extent possible is to insulate public discourse from state propaganda and special interests, particularly in the domain of the arms industry. The overriding immediate goal of GT is to legitimize civil society activism in the face of continuing Israeli criminality and the humanitarian emergency threatening the future of Palestinians in Gaza, and more recently in the West Bank. Such a goal also involves opposition to efforts to suppress peaceful protest activity and punish critics of Israel as has been happening in North America and many European countries.
To be clear this is a peoples tribunal, not a conventional court of law. This will be evident in the final session of the GT in Istanbul (Oct 23-26, 2025) by the centrality of a Jury of Conscience, charged with arriving at a final verdict and preparing a written judgment. This framing signals an emphasis on justice rather than on the more technical approaches to law applied by governmental and inter-governmental courts. Ironically, the GT by encouraging people to act both to exert pressure on governments and by participating in solidarity initiatives has more enforcement capabilities than do traditional capabilities in this kind of situation.Email
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