Wilful Ignorance and Israelʼs Genocide Against the Palestinians

Reviewed by: Ibrahim Hewitt, Leicester, UK

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Books Reviewed

• Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations, by Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk.

• The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein.

• Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out, edited by Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappé.

• Palestine in the World: International Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Movement, edited by Sorcha Thomson and Pelle Valentin Olsen.

• The Palestinians and East Jerusalem under Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, by Bruno Huberman.

• Gaza: A History, by Jean-Pierre Filiu.

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As I write these words, never has the dedication in Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine… been so appropriate: “To the People of Palestine in their struggle for fundamental rights.” Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza, and the occupied West Bank (“Israel’s hidden war”), is in full swing. At least 140,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded; civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, including hospitals, schools and homes; access to fuel, food and fresh water has been cut off; and humanitarian aid is either blocked on the nominal border or just trickles in, being entirely dependent on the whims of the occupation state of Israel. Even when aid trucks are allowed into the Gaza Strip, Israeli snipers fire at the Palestinians who clamour to get something to eat, drink or take for pain relief.

There are more than enough war crimes and crimes against humanity in those two sentences to justify protecting human rights in occupied Palestine. The fact that the three authors — Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk — have vast experience between them as UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights in the territory occupied since 1967 makes this book essential reading. With a Foreword by current rapporteur Francesca Albanese thrown in for good measure, this book is arguably the definitive read at a time when the International Court of Justice is not only investigating Israel on charges of genocide in a case brought by South Africa last December, but the World Court has also just issued a ruling that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its settlement policy are “illegal.”

It is astonishing that Israel — of course — denies that there is an occupation, insisting instead on calling the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem “disputed” territories (p.88). And it is even more astonishing that it has taken the ICJ 57 years to issue its landmark ruling.

In Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine Dugard points out that opinions issued by the UN court are “advisory, but laws that they are based on are binding” (p.19). Moreover, according to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, [Israeli] “Settlements are so clearly illegal.”

Falk, Dugard and Lynk all faced obstructions by the Israeli authorities when trying to gain access to the occupied Palestinian territories, as does current post- holder Albanese. Nevertheless, their reports to the UN Security Council make it clear that they were able to observe what Israel is doing to the Palestinians living under occupation. Their chapters in this book read like a roll call of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as less dramatic, but equally disturbing, violations of international law and human rights.

South African judge Dugard points out that, “I know apartheid when I see it” (p.27). Major human rights organisations B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International1 have all accused Israel of passing the legal threshold for description as an apartheid state. Apartheid is akin to a crime against humanity, and yet the US, the UK, the EU and other Western allies continue to give Israel unconditional support. Indeed, Lynk notes that, in 2022, “Michael Ben-Yair, a former Attorney-General of Israel, wrote that Israel had become: ‘an apartheid regime... a one-state reality, with two different peoples living with unequal rights’” (p.62).

Lynk adds that, “International law is not meant to be an umbrella that folds up at the first hint of rain” (p.46) and draws attention to “[t]he remarkable unwillingness of the international community to enforce any of its own laws and resolutions.” This, even though “all States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the