International law’s double standard: Why are Palestinian rights overlooked?

While international law is occasionally applied against alleged human rights violators, it never protects the rights of Palestinians.

International law as it exists today draws from the wells of Western liberal democracies, particularly the US. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) stands as the cornerstone of international law as it outlines the humanitarian principles by which states should govern.

UDHR

Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who saw the US through the Great Depression and introduced safety nets like Social Security, chaired the United Nations (UN) committee that drafted 30 articles of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms contained in the UDHR.

These included the right to life, freedom of movement, right to a nationality, economic, social and cultural rights, right to an adequate standard of living and the right to be protected from slavery, torture and persecution due to religion, opinions or beliefs.

In 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba, the UN General Assembly adopted the UDHR.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein wrote in the 2015 UDHR foreword: “[The UDHR rights] are the inalienable entitlements of all people, at all times, and in all places—people of every colour, from every race and ethnic group; whether or not they are disabled; citizens or migrants; no matter their sex, their class, their caste, their creed, their age or sexual orientation.”

However, the UDHR never applied to Palestinians who, at the time of its ratification, were being purged from their homes by Zionist colonisers. The occupiers expelled over 700,000 Palestinians in fulfilment of the UN Partition Plan of 1947, drafted as Resolution 181, which called for a separation of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. While Zionist leaders consented to the plan, Palestinians and the Arab League did not.

Read: Palestine and the role of international laws and conventions

The Partition Plan allowed for 52 per cent of the land to go to the Zionist state, with 45 per cent allocated for an Arab state. The remaining three per cent – Jerusalem and Bethlehem – would remain under international control.

This uneven divide of Palestinian ancestorial land did not reflect the population disparity. When the Partition Plan was enacted, approximately 1.3 million Palestinians resided in Palestine, as opposed to 610,00 Jews, who owned less than six per cent of the land.

So, despite the adoption of the UDHR, the same body that produced this humanitarian document presided over the agreement that ethnically cleansed an indigenous population through violent expulsion.

The irony was somehow lost on governing members who failed to see the contradiction in supporting universal humanitarian rights but refusing to grant these same rights to Palestinians.

In Deir Yassin, Tantura and Safsaf, and many other Palestinian enclaves, violations included the massacre and rape of hundreds of Palestinians and the annihilation of entire villages.

During this ethnic cleansing, the UN nations never cited humanitarian law. Also, in 1948, the UN introduced Resolution 194, promising Palestinians the right of return.

However, while the UN body was promising a return for displaced Palestinians, the newly established Zionist regime had since repudiated Resolution 194. “The Israeli cabinet had already agreed on a strict policy of no return for the Palestinian refugees in the previous summer (of 1948) and remained unwilling to budge on this point,” noted Marte Heian-Engdal in her book, Palestinian Refugees After 1948, A Failure of International Diplomacy.

The Genocide Convention

More ironies followed. The Geneva Conventions created international laws against genocide to prevent a repeat of the Jewish Holocaust. This brought about The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention).

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as follows:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It’s hard to imagine how the displacement, massacring and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in their own lands does not fit within the Genocide Convention. Perhaps because those for whom it was written were the perpetrators, violating the laws created to protect them.

Ironically, Israel is a signatory state.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Genocide did not return to the collective consciousness of the UN and its Western partners until the 1990s. By then, massacres in Rwanda and the Serbian town of Srebrenica emerged as iconic failures due to the absence of UN intervention despite the establishment of the Genocide Convention.

As a result, in 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which shifted genocide prevention to a resource for action. In this new formula, the state has the responsibility to protect its people from genocide, and if it fails, UN states have the obligation to intervene.

R2P could have prevented further ethnic cleansing in Palestine, ended the occupation of Palestinians and ensured their rights as articulated in the UDHR and UN resolutions designed to protect them.

Instead, R2P became a weapon of Western hegemony, used to remove Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Rather than protecting Libyans, the US-led coalition abandoned the country to civil war, even though Gaddafi had previously signed ceasefire agreements, which the UN Security Council and NATO rejected.

Gareth Evans, co-chair of R2P, in his 2018 Amnesty International/ANU College of International Law address, stated: “While the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem was being celebrated, the shockingly disproportionate response of Israel to the demonstrations on the Gaza border [left] 60 Palestinian men, women and children slaughtered and as many as 2,000 or more injured – [and] for all Israel’s stated fears, the [Gaza] fence-line [was] not breached and just one Israeli soldier reported as ‘slightly wounded’: a juxtaposition of events described by the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz as an ‘atrocious moral eclipse’ in which ‘Rwanda is coming to Gaza, and Israel is celebrating’.”

Rather than legitimising the rights of Palestinians, R2P proponents ignored Israel’s acts of ethnic cleansing. Instead, the blame for the genocide of Palestinians fell on the Palestinians themselves, who failed to get along with their brutal occupiers.

Read: Israel’s continued bombardment impacts ‘entire international law’: UN

UN reports on Israel’s war crimes

For the US and its European allies, international law was created to protect Western hegemony, not dismantle it. The US relied on international law when President George W. Bush formed a coalition to invade Iraq based on false claims that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction.

However, when it came to the Zionist state, international law failed. UN agencies attempting to document war crimes in the 2004, 2008 and 2014 massacres in Gaza could not withstand the attacks of the Zionist government, and often reports minimised Israel’s defiance of international law, especially that of proportionality.

According to Amnesty International, in 2008, during Operation Cast Lead, four Israeli civilians were killed, along with six Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. In contrast, over 1,400 Gazans were killed, including 300 children, 115 women and hundreds of unarmed civilians.

The UN Human Rights Council issued the Goldstone Report, detailing crimes committed by the IDF in Operation Cast Lead. As Norman G. Finkelstein reported in his book Gaza: “The [Goldstein] report concluded that the Israeli assault constituted ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability’.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) criticised the report as “deeply flawed” and “distorted”. It wasn’t long before the report’s author, Richard Goldstein, himself an ardent Zionist who had made the mistake of documenting Israel’s war violations during Cast Lead, recanted the facts in the report. The Israeli leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rejoiced in their victory over human rights.

Read: Invoking international law to shield genocide and complicity in genocide

Occupation and international law

The International Committee of the Red Cross affirms that an occupying power: “Must not adopt policies or measures that would introduce or result in permanent changes, particularly in the social, economic and demographic sphere”, and the occupier must “maintain as normal a life as possible, in the occupied territory.”

Zionist occupation has never provided such accommodations to the Palestinian population. The right to self-determination, as outlined in the UDHR, has been denied to those living in the West Bank and Gaza.

The social and economic lives of Palestinians have been destroyed. Normal life does not exist in Gaza or on the West Bank.

Further, the Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, along with other international laws, prohibit the seizure of land by an occupying power except to use as temporary tactical outposts or to benefit the occupied civilian population. Israel and the US continue to ignore these laws as Israel grabs more Palestinian land, including the current annexing of northern Gaza.

International law touted self-righteously by the West never prevented the establishment of illegal settlements in Palestine. Israel and its US ally conveniently ignore the international community’s mild condemnations and non-binding resolutions in the face of ongoing ethnic cleansing, genocide and illegal occupation.

International law is meaningless without consequences, and consequences are meaningless if not applied equally.

The West’s enablement of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians speaks to the identity dynamics that prevent an equal distribution of rights for all peoples. The killing of an Israeli civilian is an atrocity; the murder of a Palestinian is a casualty.

It’s time to apply international law uniformly or abandon it altogether if innocent Palestinians continue to be slaughtered by weapons supplied by the US, UK and European Union nations.

Perhaps the second Donald Trump era, which will likely bring with it accelerated destruction of Palestine, will also end the pretence that the West is a champion of human rights and international law. However, the Western alliance will likely never recognise the irony.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.