‘In accordance with international law’ guarantees Israel’s impunity

Praising the bare minimum in terms of statements in support of Palestine has long been treated like a diplomatic breakthrough. BRICS’s New Delhi Declaration was no exception. Following the 18th  summit held in Delhi, BRICS referenced Palestine in its statement among many other political concerns and reiterated all the rhetoric largely associated with the UN. However, despite the trajectory from the 1947 UN Partition Plan to genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry praised BRICS for its “positions and reaffirmations in support of the Palestinian cause.” In accordance with international law, of course, even though international law has not yet once been implemented to protect the colonised from the coloniser. 

According to WAFA news agency, the PA’s Foreign Ministry noted BRICS’s positions “as consistent with international law and relevant United Nations resolutions, stressing the need to translate them into practical and concrete steps.” That call does not consider the UN acting against international law when it allowed Zionism to create its enterprise in Palestine. If the Partition Plan is not addressed, none of the subsequent decades of international law violations up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza can be truly addressed. 

BRICS’s statement could easily pass off as UN hyperbole. Supposedly offering an alternative to Western geopolitics, its stance in Palestine still departs from the two-state paradigm. “We reaffirm our support for the State of Palestine’s full membership in the UN in the context of the unwavering commitment to the two-state solution,” the statement partly reads, before drifting off into the usual rhetoric of “two States living side by side, in peace and security.” Like the UN, BRICS does not address colonialism and the impossibility of implementing the two-state paradigm. 

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The same goes for Gaza. BRICS made a statement against the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and merely expressed concern about plans that “may prejudice the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and legitimise or prolong occupation.” That is what the Board of Peace is doing, with compliance from the UN, of course. The UN laid the groundwork for the current forced displacement, but BRICS does not address that. On the contrary, it is breaking down the entire structure of colonialism and its violence into manageable snippets for statements, without taking action in accordance with international law.

BRICS is offering nothing new in terms of purported support for Palestine; its stance as asserted in the New Delhi Declaration  is identical to international institutions protecting Israeli colonialism and expansion.  

Meanwhile, the PA is busy lauding political positions that affirm the erasure of the Palestinian people, be it through diplomacy, genocide or a combination of both. The two-state paradigm is obsolete; any political stances derived from that framework merely buy time for Israel’s colonial expansion. In that regard, Israel has the international community as its accomplice, for as long as international law is referred to, any institution condemning Israel is considered to have fulfilled the stipulated criteria for being allegedly pro-Palestine.

 The PA, with its insistence on the two-state paradigm, subscribes to the same stance that enables Israeli colonialism in Palestine.

BRICS has not elevated itself diplomatically, which is why the PA has dedicated enough time to praise its stance, in the same way it does on countless occasions where Israel is protected through insistence on obsolete frameworks, always, of course, ‘in accordance with international law’.  

BLOG: Rendering the two-state paradigm obsolete required international complicity with colonialism

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