Palestine and global resistance to genocide. No peace without justice and total withdrawal of occupying troops.
Using its incomparably superior military might and US support, and the active complicity of the EU, the Israeli Army in the service of Netanyahu’s far-right government used retaliation for the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack as a pretext to kill, starve, and forcibly displace Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They destroyed their homes, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure at a scale unprecedented in recent history. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) about 2 000,000 Palestinians displaced, 180,000 are injured while more than 69,000 are presumed to have lost their lives. Over the past year, Palestinian life in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Occupied Territories has been upended, and the conflict has bled into Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. The reaction has been global with Palestine at the forefront of the geopolitical stage and fundamental for workers around the world, as demonstrated by the port workers’ blockades in Italy, the general strike in Spain, the Global Sumud Flotilla and the massive global protests.
Despite the horror being inflicted on Gaza, we have seen the continuing inspirational fighting resistance of the Palestinian people, as well as an unprecedented movement of global solidarity with Gaza.
in this edition…
Democracy, Truthfulness and Internationalism versus the Genocide in Palestine
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of the Zionist project of establishing a settler-colonial Jewish ethnic state in historic Palestine, but world leaders have done nothing to prevent or punish it. One reason is a widespread failure to understand the crucial importance of democracy and support it. Second, the Zionist propaganda network has concealed the truth and spread lies about the genocide, and complicit leaders and media have failed to uphold truthfulness. Third, the West and even leaders of former colonies and sections of the left have allowed international law that could be used to support Palestinians to be undermined. Most working people of the world want to end the genocide in Gaza, and should work for boycotts of, divestment from and sanctions against Israel until a democratic Palestinian state is established, from the river to the sea
International law: A legal system like no other and its restitution in Palestine
The article investigates international law as a legal system that is decentralised, has been co-opted by colonial powers but it now sheds the co-optation institutions and rhetoric, because the resistance in Palestine and their allies followed the structure of this law in order to be enforced. The article uses basic law theory to explain how a legal system without established enforcement works and why the failure of the UN’s system to prevent the genocide in Palestine was an in-built characteristic of the organisation but not of the legal system. The study focuses on resistance and its function in international law and how the rules concerning resistance not only provide pathways for success to the oppressed but also support the legal rules to be truly implemented. Resistance in the Eastern Mediterranean separated the legal system from its co-opted representations and offered a material chance of restoring it.
Nameless graves, regulated funerals, and cemetery erasure: Memoricide in Palestine
For more than half a century, Israeli authorities have withheld Palestinian bodies, burying them anonymously in concealed ‘cemeteries of numbers’. Drawing on legal records, forensic assessments and ethnographic research, this article documents systemic mismanagement that breaches the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Regulations and Israeli jurisprudence on the dignity of the dead, and examines restrictions on funerals and the erasure or repurposing of Palestinian burial grounds. Framed by necropolitics (Mbembe), necropolitical violence (Bargu) and grievability (Butler), it argues that these practices, by normalising sovereign control over death and mourning, constitute memoricide – the deliberate erasure of collective memory.