First Committee Monitor, Vol. 21, No. 3

Editorial: We Must End Violence to End Violence
14 October 2023

By Ray Acheson

Once again, bloodshed has become the backdrop to the First Committee’s work. Last weekend, horrific violence exploded in Israel and Palestine. On Saturday, 7 October, Hamas attacked Israel with thousands of rockets, broke through the border fence enclosing Gaza, and killed and detained hundreds of Israelis. Hamas’ brutal attacks against civilians are violations of international law and war crimes. In response, Israel has escalated its own war crimes, intensifying its siege of Gaza and carpet bombing the open-air prison it created to effectively imprison more than two million Palestinians for 17 years under the apartheid policies of a settler colonial state.

The catastrophic consequences of Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine largely dominated the First Committee’s interactive “right of reply” segments this past week. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, with both explosive and incendiary weapons, is particularly relevant for the Committee’s work. But the larger dynamics at play all point to the wider issues underscoring all First Committee work, including militarism, colonialism, and hypocrisy.

Language matters

On Monday, two days after Hamas’ attack on Israel, the Israeli delegation delivered its general debate statement to the First Committee. It unsurprisingly addressed the appalling massacre of Israeli civilians. But the Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations also used language infrequently heard in the First Committee, saying, “Hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians have been murdered by barbaric Hamas terrorists in cold blood and many innocent men, women and children have been taken captive by these sadistic savages.”

Descriptors such as “barbaric” and “sadistic savages” are adjectives used by colonisers throughout history against those whose lands they occupy. Such words are meant to impose superiority—the “civilising” force of the occupier is necessary to “tame the savages”—and dehumanise the colonised peoples, making them more disposable, more killable, easier to subject to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Language like this should give First Committee delegates pause and direct their attention toward the context behind last weekend’s attacks—and toward the Israeli government’s response.

Context matters

In a right of reply on 9 October, Israel’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament described some of the violence against Israeli civilians in visceral detail. While heartfelt and impactful, the appeal to humanity inherent in these remarks also concealed certain facts. They concealed the inhumanity imposed upon Palestinians. They concealed Israel’s illegal policies of apartheid and its daily degradation of Palestinian lives, the unlawful detainment and murder of Palestinian civilians, the repeated bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the violations of international law, the impunity for war crimes. These remarks also concealed the fact of colonialism, the root cause and context of this current violence.

To draw attention to root causes is not to condone specific acts of violence, but to point out that there are consequences to violence. In her 9 October remarks, the Israeli Deputy Permanent Representative said that Hamas “broke into Israeli territory and led a ruthless, unprovoked attack on the citizens of Israel.” Yet, as some Palestinians pointed out, the fighters did not so much “break into Israel” but broke out of Gaza, widely known as an open-air prison. Similarly, to describe the attack as “unprovoked” is to deny 75 years of occupation, expulsion, apartheid, blockade, and bombardment. As Israeli journalist Haggai Matar acknowledged on 7 October, “This is not a ‘unilateral’ or ‘unprovoked’ attack. The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza.”

The consistency of the violence of Israel against Palestinians is what led to the current crisis. This is not at all a justification for Hamas’ massacre of civilians or other war crimes committed against Israelis. But as human rights lawyer Noura Erakat notes, while Israel is describing its current assault on Gaza as retaliation for Hamas’ weekend attacks, the state of Israel has already engaged in four large-scale military offensives against Gaza in the past. “During these attacks,” writes Erakat, “Israel has killed entire families—spanning several generations—with missile strikes at their homes. Israel has also repeatedly bombed UN hospitals and schools sheltering civilians, bearing the UN’s unmistakable blue emblem. Despite the litany of well-documented war crimes, no one has been held to account and the siege has only tightened.”

Furthermore, all nonviolent resistance to Israel’s repression has been met with state violence. As Erakat highlights, from “the 40,000 Palestinians who, weekly, participated in the Great March of Return in 2018 demanding their right to return to the homeland they were expelled from and the end of the siege, only to be shot down like birds by Israeli snipers,” to the “thousands of Palestinians and their allies globally who have engaged in boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns aimed at isolating Israel and incapacitating its lethal threat,” to the “civilian flotillas that attempted to break the naval blockade of Gaza as well as the multiple legal challenges within national courts, the International Court of Justice, and now the International Criminal Court,” nonviolent resistance has been met with accusations of “terrorism” and with violent repression by the Israeli state, as well by other governments such as Germany and the United States, which have criminalised the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israeli apartheid. “The message to Palestinians is not that they must resist more peacefully,” points out Erakat, “but that they cannot resist Israeli occupation and aggression at all.”

Impunity and inaction

Israel’s actions have been widely condemned by the international community for many years. Multiple UN resolutions have called for an end to its settlement building and expulsion of Palestinians. The UN human rights commission of inquiry found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to be illegal. The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, has recommended that the government of Israel “complies with its obligations under international law and ceases to impede the realization of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, ending its settler-colonial occupation of the Palestinian territory immediately and unconditionally and making reparations for its wrongful acts.”

Despite all of this, there has been absolute impunity for Israel’s actions against Palestinians. No action at the International Criminal Court. No official curtailment of support for Israel’s apartheid policies. Instead, there has been billions of dollars’ worth of military aid and provision of weapons to Israel from Western governments, including the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada, among others. Many governments also buy weapons and surveillance systems from Israel, including the United States, which also engages in exchanges of training of soldiers and police in what the Jewish Voice for Peace describes as an “exchange of worst practices”.

Furthermore, there has also been repression, intimidation, and blacklisting of Palestinian activists and those standing in solidarity with them. In this current crisis, as many times before, political leaders have been calling anyone who advocates for Palestinians supporters of terrorism. Some countries have moved to criminalise the Palestinian flag and other expressions of solidarity with Palestinian people. Critiques of the Israeli state are often labelled antisemitic as a means of silencing opposition to state violence. “Much like the response to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, which urges people to not financially support the occupation,” writes Joshua P. Hill, “the response to these peaceful rallies shows that at the moment there is no right way to support Palestinians. And that appears to extend even to the basic humanitarian call to not bomb the hell out of countless civilians.”

As human rights defenders have pointed out, “The historical lack of accountability has bred a culture of disregard for international law that directly resulted in the weekend’s violence.” It enabled Hamas to massacre civilians and is now enabling a genocidal response by the state of Israel against all Palestinian people.

War crimes in response

In the Israeli government’s statements to the First Committee, its representatives apply the descriptors of “barbaric” and “sadistic savages” to Hamas fighters. Outside of the UN, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described the Hamas attackers as “human animals,” Major General Ghassan Alian of the Israel Defense Forces said that Hamas had “opened the gates of hell,” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would “return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known.” An Israeli security official told Israel’s Channel 13 that “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents... There will be no buildings.”

While in most of these cases the officials named Hamas as “the enemy,” in the Israeli state’s response to the attack, it has directed its wrath against the entire Palestinian population. Some Israeli officials have been explicit about this. Israel’s Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women May Golan said, “All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza.” It is in line with this kind of thinking that Defense Minister Gallant announced a brutal intensification of Israel’s siege of Gaza, saying it would cut off electricity, food, water, gas, and medicine to the more than two million people living in Gaza. Then the government unleashed a brutal bombing attack against Gaza, indiscriminately destroying apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and other critical civilian infrastructure.

As the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) said in a statement that called on both Hamas and Israel to stop their rocket attacks and airstrikes, “The use of explosive weapons in populated areas is a leading cause of harm to civilians. Civilians are killed and injured, with many experiencing life-changing injuries and yet more suffering psychological harm and distress. Damage and destruction of critical infrastructure including housing, hospitals and schools causes yet further harm. Unexploded ordnance poses an ongoing threat to civilians during and after hostilities have ended and impedes the safe return of refugees and displaced persons.”

Humanitarian workers in Gaza report that hospitals are completely overwhelmed by civilian casualties. More than 400,000 people have been displaced. So far thousands of people have been killed in the bombardment, including hundreds of children. Half of the population in Gaza are children, meaning many more will die if Israel’s onslaught continues. The dead so far also include at several Palestinian journalists, staffers at the UN Palestinian refugee agency, and medics.

Meanwhile, on 10 and 11 October the Israeli military used white phosphorus in both Gaza and Lebanon. Human Rights Watch has verified multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border. “White phosphorus, which can be used either for marking, signaling, and obscuring, or as a weapon to set fires that burn people and objects, has a significant incendiary effect that can severely burn people and set structures, fields, and other civilian objects in the vicinity on fire,” explained the organisation in a press release. “The use of white phosphorus in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, magnifies the risk to civilians and violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk.”

Mass murder is not self-defence

The Israeli state’s use of genocidal language and its ordering and commission of war crimes have set the stage for ultraviolence against the Palestinian people. Collective punishment is a violation of international law. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. During the past week, civilians have been told to evacuate northern Gaza. Those who leave are unlikely to ever be allowed to return; those who stay are likely to be killed. As Itay Epshtain, an international humanitarian law lawyer and advisor to the Norwegian Refugee Council explained, Israel’s evacuation announcement “blatantly disregards the obligation to offer evacuees a place of refuge and guarantee that evacuated will be brought back to their homes as soon as possible. Absent these guarantees, it would not meet the requirement of an admissible evacuation, and would amount to forcible transfer, a grave breach of the [Fourth Geneva] Convention codified as a war crime.”

States have a duty to prevent genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide has been ratified by most states and has been incorporated into international customary law. The International Court of Justice has also ruled that the prevention of genocide is a legal obligation, and that states must use “due diligence,” a concept in international human rights law in relation to the positive obligation of a state to act in response to threats to human rights, including life and security. The Court notes that the duty to act arises “at the instant that the state learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.”

The governments supplying weapons to Israel and those condoning its bombardment, siege, and ground invasion of Gaza are not just failing to prevent genocide, they are actively enabling it. Compounding this material assistance, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned that “rhetoric from high-level officials raises concerns that a message is being sent to the members of the Israeli Defense Forces that international humanitarian law has become optional rather than compulsory.”

Nevertheless, right now it seems like impunity for Israel and support for its war crimes will continue. “The moment Hamas launched its attack,” writes Hill, “wave after wave of sympathy for the Israeli state and the Israeli dead came forth from” across the world. But just two days later, “When the bombs started to rain down on residential buildings in the densely populated open-air prison which people cannot flee, flattening neighborhoods and killing hundreds of civilians, those same people were silent.”

Dominant English-language Western media outlets have amplified this disproportionate sympathy by showing pictures and sharing stories of the Israelis killed or detained, while only showing masses of Palestinians, blurry images, bodies under rubble. On 7 October, multiple news outlets counted those “killed” in Israel, and those “dead” in Palestine. Israelis are murdered, this suggests, while Palestinians just mysteriously die.

The skewed coverage of the violence lends support to the perpetuation of violence against Palestinians. Many of those supporting Israel’s actions against Gaza do so on the basis of Israel’s alleged right to self-defence—but as the representative of the State of Palestine asked in a right of reply at the First Committee on Tuesday, “What is this right to self-defence that allows you to massacre civilians?” The answer is, there isn’t one. International law is clear that war crimes cannot justify war crimes. Atrocities cannot justify atrocities. “Failure of one party to a conflict to abide by the laws of war does not absolve the other party from complying with the laws of war,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

This is a basic tenet of international law, which all delegations to the First Committee claim to respect, which many have spent years building up and promoting. But the unqualified statements by many Western governments that Israel “has a right to defend itself” suggests that Israel is entitled to take whatever action it wants, including committing war crimes and ignoring the right of Palestinians to security, to safety, to life.

Time and again, when the most militarised governments in the world perceive their interests as being threatened, or experience any of the violence they have doled out for decades, suddenly international law evaporates. We can see this with Russia’s unlawful invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine; with the United States’ countless wars, coups, special forces operations, and other military actions abroad; and we see it today with Israel’s attack on Gaza.

Several Israeli and foreign commentators have drawn parallels between Hamas’ 7 October attacks and the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, arguing that no one called for US restraint at that time. Of course, that was the problem. The free pass given to the US government then led to the death of at least 900,000 people, displacement of millions more, war for more than 20 years, environmental devastation, and has cost US taxpayers more than 8 trillion USD. “There is nothing on earth like the fury of the powerful when they believe they have been defied by their inferiors,” writes Jon Schwartz.

The war profiteers know this well. The stock prices of weapon manufacturers skyrocketed last weekend and continue to rise as Israel bombards Gaza and launches its ground invasion. And so, these companies will profit, the governments will remain unaccountable, and the civilians will suffer.

The valuation of human life

This is the way the world is currently ordered. Violence is met with violence is met with violence. CEOs line their pockets as civilians bleed; politicians issue bellicose rhetoric while people’s lives are turned upside down or are ended forever. In the process, humanity is stripped away. It becomes easier to hate each other, more difficult to understand each other. This is particularly so when one group of people oppresses and violates another with impunity. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has written, “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.… Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.”

In response to the Palestinian delegate’s questions about which international laws allow such “inhumane acts,” Israel’s representative answered, “I am not a lawyer. I am a human being.” While perhaps meant to convey the raw emotion inherent in trying to grapple with the recent atrocities experienced by Israelis, these remarks once again conceal the inhumanity imposed upon Palestinians. For if the government of Israel saw Palestinians as human, too, would it act differently in its response to Hamas’ violence?

This question illuminates a key issue underscoring the current crisis: the different value placed on human life. This itself is a tragedy, among (and underpinning) all the tragedies being experienced right now. And it must be reckoned with if there is to be any chance of building true peace and justice.

“We cannot continue justifying the death of Palestinians,” said the representative for the State of Palestine. “That is not possible. That is inhumane. That is racist. That is supremacist. It is not about the religion or the national identity or the origin of them being killed. It’s about them being killed…. Continuing to deny Palestinian humanity and rights is not a way forward. That will always lead to violence.” He argued:

Consistency is the condition of credibility. When one says nothing justifies the killing of Israelis and in the same breath condones the killing of Palestinians, that is morally reprehensible, legally unacceptable, and politically and humanly catastrophic. Palestinian civilians are not less deserving of protection. Palestinian lives are not less worthy of respect. The families of hundreds of Palestinians killed, overwhelmingly civilians … deserve solidarity and compassion…. If you abandon them, you abandon your humanity, you undermine our international law-based order, you serve neither the cause of justice nor the cause of peace.

Disparities in how human beings are treated and perceived is not, of course, unique to Israelis and Palestinians. Menominee organiser Kelly Hayes and Black organiser Mariame Kaba described similarities with how the Black and Native communities are treated in the United States, noting that they see “parallels between this disparity and the manner in which Israeli losses have resulted in a global outpouring of grief and concern, while the murder, kidnapping, imprisonment, surveillance, torture and coercion of Palestinians throughout decades of apartheid have gone unmourned by so many who now demand justice in the wake of Israeli deaths.” They also noted that just as Black and Native incarceration and brutalisation by the police in the United states is characterised not as war but as “peace,” so too are Palestinians expected to live under perpetual violence and have it treated by the world at large as a state of peace.

But repression, injustice, and violence are not peace. And the discrepancy of how people are treated—and how the so-called international community responds to it—have meaning. Palestinians see how politicians around the world condemn Russia for its unlawful occupation of Ukrainian lands, how they call out Russian war crimes and its bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, how they rush to provide military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine—while at the same time, they condone, support, and provide aid to Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian town and cities, its war crimes, its occupation of Palestinian lands. They see how these governments, so quick to provide aid to Ukraine, cut their aid to Palestine and condemn nonviolent protests that call for valuing Palestinian life.

They see how governments speak about Russia’s violations of international law in contrast to Israel’s. For example, in its general debate statement to the First Committee this past week, Belgium said, “Norms, agreements and oversight create a buffer against a world disorder, where might is right and where the self interest of some prevails over the common interest of humanity.” In this context, Belgium argued, “One cannot provide lip service to the principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity and at the same way look away from Russia’s aggression, its illegal war and its blatant disregard of international humanitarian law and human rights.”

Can we imagine applying this universally to the critique of all governments? To uphold the rights of all civilians? Could that be a step toward lessening the violence? Could solidarity with all victims of violence help drain violence of its fuel? Naomi Klein urges this kind of true solidarity in anarticle in The Guardian, in which she calls for “Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred.” An approach “rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” An approach “that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Taking action to break the cycle of violence

It is imperative to prevent further atrocities and loss of life. For this, an immediate ceasefire and a release of those detained by both Hamas and Israel is necessary. A durable and fair peace will only be achieved by eliminating the root causes of violence and oppression. The international community cannot wait for yet another escalation of hostilities to create a realistic path for justice and peace. It must act now.

Despite the repression of those speaking out against the ethnic cleansing and potential genocide of Palestinians, there has been an outpouring of solidarity globally from Baghdad to Paris. Activists in the United States have organised direct actions against companies supplying weapons to Israel, such as L3Harris and Elbit Systems. Some governments have spoken out against Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza.

All members states and the responsible bodies of the UN must uphold the UN Charter and other international law, including by:

Calling for an immediate ceasefire;
Calling for an end to the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by all parties, and for an end to the use of incendiary weapons by Israel;
Demanding that Israel lift the siege on Gaza and ensure access to goods essential to the survival of the people in the enclave;
Demanding that Israel abide by its obligations under international law and make all necessary efforts to protect civilian populations in the Occupied Palestinian territories, and also calling on Israel to end the occupation;
Reinstating humanitarian aid so as to avoid collective punishment of Palestinians by donors and member states;
Initiating a UN-brokered process for peace and justice that centres Palestinian voices and perspectives to enable a move towards peace;
Ending military and other support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its apartheid regime, including by imposing an arms embargo on Israeli weapon imports and exports;
Not criminalising, condemning, or repressing nonviolent action in solidarity with Palestinians;
Implementing the recommendations in the 2022 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; and
Recognising Palestinian statehood.

Delegations to the First Committee have an opportunity to support the above, particularly on the issues related to weapons and armed violence, including by:

Calling on Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and to endorse the Political Declaration on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas;
Calling on Israel to stop its use of white phosphorus and working to strengthen the Convention on Conventional Weapons protocol on incendiary weapons;
Supporting a two-way arms embargo on Israel, as consistent with the Arms Trade Treaty;
Calling on Israel to end the siege, ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide in Gaza and urging all governments to not support these actions and to uphold their legal responsibility to prevent genocide; and
Urging delegates not to use language that dehumanises people or that seeks to justify war crimes and other violations of international law.

More broadly, First Committee delegates would do well to offer their solidarity to all civilians suffering under this rein of violence and to call for action that de-escalates harm rather than exacerbates it. As Joshua P. Hill writes, “We must act. We must do what we can, no matter how little it may seem, to save lives. A ceasefire is the first step. For any of us to abdicate from our responsibility to act is to once again go along silently in the stream of bloodshed.”

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