Gaza broke the system
Future historians will cite Gaza as the point we turned away from international law and collective empathy to brutish tribalism
Fifty years from now, history and political scientist professors[1] will use “Gaza” as shorthand to denote the world’s shift from one international paradigm to another.
The year 2023 may well serve as a marker of a historical infection point, much as we (through our Euro-centric lens) refer to 1648, 1815, 1848, 1945 and 1989.
In short, Gaza marks the turn from an international order with institutions and laws designed to proscribe war crimes, atrocities and famine, to one in which such transgressions are celebrated as markers of political virtue.
Let’s start with famine.
THEN: For people of my generation, the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia was a Big Deal. It sparked a global cultural moment. “Do They Know It's Christmas?”[2] and “We are the World” featured the day’s biggest musicians (and some of the most banal lyrics), raising awareness and funding. These UK and U.S. rock stars came together the next summer for Live Aid, a transatlantic mega-event.
Political leaders responded with a mix of action and excuses for inaction. But they didn’t celebrate the famine. No one justified it as inherently the fault of the victims. No one gave those who caused the famine the honor of addressing a Joint Session of Congress.
NOW: Hunger in Gaza has reached "astonishing levels," according to the World Food Programme (WFP), with a third of the population of just over 2 million people in Gaza currently going multiple days without eating. The UN Secretary-General labels Gaza a "horror show" marked by "a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times."
Today, standing up against famine is a liability. Criticizing suffering imposes a political cost. Scorning the victims get political gain.
This past week, a Congressman said of reports of hunger in Gaza: “starve away.” When asked how he sleeps at night he responded, “I sleep fine.”
Congressional committees aren’t holding hearings on starvation in Gaza. They’re holding hearings to attack those who speak up about starvation in Gaza.
In the 1980s, musicians who used their voice to end famine in Ethiopia were lauded as principled. Today, musicians who used their voice to end famine in Gaza are ostracized.
Let’s look at ethnic cleansing and genocide.
THEN: The 1992-95 war in Bosnia was a constant on our television screens, playing out in real time. Policymakers and politicians actively debated whether ethnic cleansing and genocide were happening. In December 1992 – two and half years before the Srebrenica massacre -- the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning “the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide.” No country opposed the resolution. The U.S. voted yes.
We also witnessed the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, Kosovo in 1999, and the Rohingya in 2017, each with elements of genocide and ethnic cleaning. Awareness of atrocities against the Uyghurs was slower, due to the severe restrictions on information by the Chinese government. But the U.S. government did declare it a genocide in 2021.
Politicians did scream for action even if it did not come. We’ve studied the cases, to learn the lessons, to try to stop it from happening the next time.
NOW is the next time. It’s happening today. In Gaza. We watch it unfold in real time.
Today, standing up against atrocities is a liability. Criticizing war crimes imposes a political cost. Embracing ethnic cleansing gets political gain.
The U.S. president has endorsed a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He said of Gazans, “I think they want to die… You’re going to have to finish the job.”
Mere expression of sympathy for people suffering in Gaza is sufficient to have a person subject to deportation. Or being denied a visa to visit the United States.
Political leaders use the power of the state to compel universities to punish those who dare exercise their right to express solidarity with those suffering depredations.
In the 1990s, students who protested ethnic cleansing in Bosnia were left alone by the government. Free speech was respected. Today, students who protest ethnic cleansing in Gaza are targeted by the government. Free speech is punished.
Breaking of the international system
The term “rules-based international order” may be met with an eye-roll these days but it is vital to remember it was created for a reason. The institutions and legal regimes created in the wake of World War II (the 1945 inflection point) were intentionally and explicitly just that: designed to prevent future wars, limit the scale of harm, and provide justice for international crimes.
Refugee agencies (UNHCR and UNRWA) were created to deal with refugees and displaced persons. WFP was established to address food crises. International Justice mechanisms (ICJ, ICC) were stood up to hold governments and individuals accountable for violations of the rules. Those rules were codified as international law through a range of human rights instruments adopted through the UN system, in parallel with the body of international humanitarian law that predated World War II and expanded after.
Gaza serves as a singular refutation of all that.
American politicians, using the power of the U.S. government, actively subvert UN institutions and the relevance of international law in Gaza. They exempt the Israeli government from international law. They indemnify Israeli decision-makers.
UNRWA, the only lifeline of international aid to Palestinian refugees for decades and mercilessly attacked by U.S. politicians for that very reason, is out. WFP is out. These agencies have expertise in knowing how to get humanitarian relief where it needs to go. In their place, the U.S. and Israeli governments created a pop-up (called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) which is not doing the job. And Gazans are starving to death. It feels very intentional.
The Israeli military has been accused of repeatedly violating the laws of arms conflict in its operations in Gaza, and of committing human rights abuses. Rather than abide by the U.S. government’s obligations under international law to encourage Israeli compliance with such laws, U.S. politicians give the Israel government an exemption from those laws.[3]
Further, American politicians have relentlessly attacked UN institutions – from UNRWA to OHCRC and the UNHRC to the UN General Assembly and Security Council – who have credibly and fairly assessed Israeli government compliance with international law. Rather than directly address “anti-Israel bias” as they claim, they have chosen to denigrate the entire UN system. That feels intentional too.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the logical evolution from the Nuremburg Trials. But because its staff dared to investigate allegations of war crimes by Israeli officials per its mandate, it has been subject to severe penalties by the U.S. government – so much that it cannot even use Microsoft products on its computers. Never mind that the ICC has acted to hold accountable those implicated in atrocities in Russia, Myanmar, Sudan and elsewhere. All those investigations and prosecutions are at risk because U.S. politicians want to exempt one county from the rules.
From John Birch to America First, there has always been a segment within U.S. politics wanting to take the UN down. Israel has provided them a useful cudgel. Now with Gaza, that goal is operationalized into reality.
This is why I predict that Gaza will be the word invoked by future generations to denote the dismantling of international institutions and laws, and the abandonment of the universal principle that all humans deserve the same measure of equality and dignity. It will symbolize the turn to what comes next: a new paradigm of international relations where people’s only recourse to abuse of power and might is not law and norms, but even more power and might. Or abject surrender.
Cheerleading for atrocities
The impetus for the entire post-WWII order, and the guiding principle for all the institutions and laws established thereto, was the following basic moral principles:
War is bad
War crimes are bad
Famine is bad
Human rights abuses are bad
Genocide is bad
While the history of the past eight decades is chock-full of cases where these principles were ignored and violated, they were still acknowledged principles.
Even when U.S. politicians were voting for war, arming human rights abusers or turning a blind eye to mass starvation, they still operated in a political paradigm that held that war, atrocities and starvation were bad things.
Not any more.
Now, you hear U.S. politicians eagerly hoping all Palestinians die and saying “we should kill ‘em all,” calling for Gaza to be nuked as “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” were, cheering “starve away.” And the U.S. President endorsing ethnic cleansing.
It’s now good politics to be a cheerleader for war crimes, atrocities and famine.
Lament for what comes next
Politicians are not only deconstructing the international system, they’re abandoning the moral framework it was founded on.
A pillar of that framework was “Never Again!” – a key impetus for the institutions and laws set up after WWII was to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust. And yet today, some of those who claim to own the inheritance to “Never Again!” are the ones complicit in the war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, which Israeli-American genocide scholar Omer Bartov now labels a genocide. In a repudiation of the principle of universality, they apply “Never Again!” just to themselves, not to anyone else. I wrote about this a year ago in “The Intellectual Property of “Never Again.”
However latent are the optimistic bits of my soul, I still harbor crumbs of hope that our better angels will spark a comeback for collective empathy. But I fear that the next phase of human history will be characterized more by Hobbes than by Lemkin.
[1] Assuming that university professors in the future are allowed to discuss topics not approved by the Ruling Party, which is NOT the way things are trending.
[2] From today’s perspective, a cringingly Christian-centric mindset.
[3] In addition, the U.S. government and Congress has refused to apply its own national laws regarding limitations on arms exports in relation to human rights abuses and impeding humanitarian aid.