Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As the world watches, one of history’s greatest crimes has taken form.  Inaction, complicity and silence in the face of genocide have caused profound suffering to the Palestinian people.  No final reckoning or redress would be equivalent to the scale and magnitude of Israel’s depraved criminality.

Inevitably there will be a final accounting for those who advanced an environment in which a member of the Israeli parliament felt emboldened enough to boast:  “Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night … And nobody in the world cares.”

The time is past due to state unequivocally that Israel has, since it declared statehood in 1948, been terrorizing the Palestinian people and that the U.S. and its Western allies have, because of their overwhelming support for Israel, been active participants in that terror.

Israeli violence clearly fits America’s own definition of “domestic terrorism.”

Washington’s leading law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, defines it as: “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups [regimes] to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences such as political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

Palestinians have suffered incomprehensible horrors because U.S. politicians, political influencers, public and corporate media have failed to provide the historical context that gave rise to the insurrection of 7 October 2023.  Absent that history and discussion of Palestinian resistance grounded in international law, they have made Israel’s indefensible response appear warranted.

The failure to inform has essentially given Israel license to commit genocide and all manner of atrocities in Gaza and has enabled U.S. authorities to suppress opposition to the war on American college campuses.

The media, for example, has accepted without question, the government’s illegitimate designation of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as “terrorism” and national liberation groups like Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) as terrorist organizations.

In so doing, by equating Palestinian resistance with terrorism, they have eased the way for authorities to use the “support for terrorism” accusation to crush dissent and to arrest pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Scholars and activists, like Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, held without due process for over two months in a Louisiana detention center, have been arrested on grounds that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy and security.  In reality, Khalil’s “crime” was standing up for truth and Palestine.

With some basic fact-finding, the media would have learned that resistance to occupation is legally reinforced under international law.   And that the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocol I explicitly affirm the legitimate right of the occupied to resist occupation as part of the right to self-determination.  Resistance includes armed struggle in situations of colonial domination, foreign occupation and against racial regimes.   The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Convention also gave legal legitimacy to the “resort to arms by national liberation movements.”

In addition, they would have discovered that the U.N. General Assembly has passed numerous resolutions recognizing the legitimacy of armed resistance as a means of oppressed peoples to achieve self-determination and independence.

Israel is a colonial foreign and racial regime that has brutally dominated Palestinian lives for eight decades and according to international law, resistance to it is justified.

The Palestinian rebellion could also have been understood differently if the media had presented comparable cases, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943—an historical act of Jewish resistance against their Nazi occupiers during World War II.  We would be hard pressed today to find anyone who would question the righteousness or legitimacy of that rebellion, as they have regarding the uprising of 7 October.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939, for instance, German authorities began to concentrate Poland’s Jews, estimated at three million, into a number of crowded ghettos located in cities throughout the country.  The sealed-up Warsaw ghetto warehoused approximately 350,000 people in a densely packed two-mile area of the city.

Jews who had not died of disease, starvation or deportation to extermination camps fought back against Nazi Germany’s final effort to transport them to death camps.  Although they recognized that victory and survival were unlikely, they refused to surrender.  After 29 days of fighting, 13,000 Warsaw Jews and 17 German soldiers were killed.  After the Nazi occupiers destroyed the entire ghetto, their final act was to blow up the historical 1878 Warsaw Synagogue.

The Jewish fighters knew full well the outcome of their defiance.  They chose, however, to determine how they would die—Treblinka or resistance.

After years of degradation, Palestinian resistance forces also made a choice to break out of the dehumanizing ghetto in which they had been held hostage for 58 years.  Although they, too, knew they were up against a powerful brutal army, they chose a “Gaza Ghetto Uprising” over unending oppressive confinement.

As Israel moves closer each day to completing its long-cherished goal of killing as many Palestinians as the “civilized world” will permit, it is critical to magnify the fact that according to international law, people under colonial or foreign occupation have a legitimate right to armed struggle to obtain their freedom and sovereignty.

Had the October insurrection been placed within the context of international law, perceptions may have been different and the violence of the last 19 months might not have happened.  Most importantly, 68,000 Palestinians would not have been massacred and ancient Gaza would not now be an environmentally devastated wasteland.

It is essential to recognize that Palestine is one of the few countries in the world remaining under direct military occupation and colonial rule.  Using the auspices of the newly established United Nations, the British officially handed off their colonial mandate in Palestine to the Tel Aviv regime in 1948.  Since then, Israel’s plan to seize and control all of historic Palestine and forcibly remove the indigenous population, has never ceased.

In addition, attention should be focused on the 19 July 2024 International Court of Justice  Advisory Opinion ruling that Israel is unlawfully occupying and is not entitled to sovereignty over any of the the Palestinian territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza).  The Court also mandated that Israel end its occupation, desist from creating new settlements, evacuate existing ones and provide full reparations to Palestinian victims; and once again affirmed the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Israel has, however, only intensified its violence since the ICJ ruled and after the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that gave effect to the Court’s Advisory Opinion.

In Resolution ES-10/24, the General Assembly demanded that within 12 months from the adoption (18 September 2024) of the resolution that Israel end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and meet its obligations under international law.

The United States and its European allies have joined Israel in giving the ICJ and the U.N. General Assembly the “digitus impudicus,” as they ignore the Court’s mandate that all states must recognize the unlawfulness of the occupation and refrain from aiding Tel Aviv in maintaining the occupation.

International law is unmistakably on the side of Palestine.  Until now, it has been primarily textual representation, not action.  Legalities have not stopped Israel from murdering Palestinian resistance leaders, dropping thousand-pound bombs on non-combatants to kill one man.

Resistance is a right of the oppressed.  Mahmoud Khalil, in a letter to his newborn son, has eloquently given voice to that right and to the Palestinians who were, who are and who will be:

“The struggle for Palestinian liberation is not a burden; it is a duty and an honor we carry with pride.  So at every turning point in my life, you will find me choosing Palestine.  Palestine over ease.  Palestine over comfort. Palestine over self.  This struggle is sweeter than a life without dignity.  The tyrants want us to submit, to obey, to be perfect victims.  But we are free, and we will remain free.”