Israel’s (or the Zionist entity’s) ongoing extermination of the Palestinian population in Gaza and its uprooting of the population in the West Bank, with the backing of the United States and other Western governments, is the primary instance of genocide in the twenty-first century. It has destroyed any pretense of a commitment to universal human rights on the part of the West and has brought imperialism and settler colonialism in their most brutal forms right before the eyes of the entire world. An indication of the opposition to these developments in the world at large is revealed by the fifty-fifth Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories presented to the United Nations (with an introductory note by UN Secretary-General António Guterres) on September 20, 2024. The Special Committee (first established in 1968) is composed of three members, consisting of the permanent representatives to the United Nations from Malaysia, Senegal, and Sri Lanka. Its reports are reviewed by the Special Political and Decolonization Committee (Fourth Committee) of the United Nations General Assembly.
The Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, representing the highest level of United Nations investigation into the genocide in Palestine, was ignored by the Western governments, and information on it was essentially censored by the Western media. The final conclusions of the report, for that very reason, are well worth quoting at length:
69. The developments in this report lead the Special Committee to conclude that the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide. The targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid—resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths—and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law. Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza, while in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli colonial settlers, military and security personnel have continued to violate human rights and humanitarian law with impunity. Senior Israeli government and military officials must be held accountable, including for using dehumanizing language and inciting violence.
70. The multiple violations of international law by Israel in its war on Gaza; its apartheid system of injustice in the occupied West Bank, within the broader context of its decades-long occupation-cum-annexation of Palestinian and Syrian Golan territories; and its ongoing defiance of binding Security Council resolutions and orders of the International Court of Justice, gravely weaken the international rules-based system. Obligations established under international law to limit the barbarity of war and protect human rights, including the right to self-determination, are under threat by Israel’s violations and by the fact that other States are unwilling to hold Israel accountable and continue to provide it with military and other support. (United Nations Sixty-Ninth Session, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, September 20, 2024)
Despite these ongoing mass atrocities, which invite comparison to all of the previous mass genocides in history, the so-called Western democracies, that is, the historic colonial/imperialist countries at the core of the capitalist world economy led by the United States, continue not only to offer direct economic and political support to Israel in its policy of extermination but also provide it with expedited arms shipments, including some of the most lethal weapons in existence, such as thousands of MK-B4 two-thousand-pound bombs. Moreover, they have only increased their support as Israel has once again invaded Lebanon (“Exclusive: US Has Sent Israel Thousands of 2,000 Pound Bombs since Oct. 7,” Reuters, June 29, 2024).
Given the continued backing of Israel by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western countries, despite the genocidal war of extermination aimed at the Palestinian people, the opposition to the West in the United Nations human rights community, driving a wedge between those upholding universal human rights and the Western imperial powers, is perhaps greater than at any time in the history of the United Nations. On March 26, 2024, Italian international lawyer Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, delivered her report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in Geneva, in which she declared “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.” On October 23, 2024, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, South African physician Tlaleng Mofokeng, declared that world leaders supporting Israel’s actions against the Palestinians “must carry this genocide with shame.” These statements by UN officials were in line with the World Court’s verdict that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention (“Rights Expert Finds ‘Reasonable Grounds’ Genocide Is Being Committed in Gaza,” United Nations, UN News, March 26, 2024; “‘They Must Carry this Genocide with Shame’—UN Urges World Leaders to End the Genocide,” Palestine Chronicle, October 26, 2024; “Gaza: World Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide,” Human Rights Watch, January 10, 2024).
Perhaps the most notable act of dissent over Palestine by a leading human rights figure in the United Nations, however, has been carried out by Craig Mokhiber, an American human rights specialist with more than three decades of experience (including serving as a UN specialist in Palestine where he lived in the 1990s) and until 2023 director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. On October 28, 2023, Mokhiber wrote a resignation letter, ahead of a planned retirement, to Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In his resignation letter he wrote:
The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules. This is a text-book case of genocide.…
We in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution.… [Supporting instead] One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. (Craig Mokhiber, “Resignation Letter of Craig Mokhiber Director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,” L’Art Rue, October 28, 2023, lartrue.org)
Since resigning from his position, Mokhiber has attempted to bring to bear his specialized knowledge on the collective West’s role in Palestine on public discussions. A major intervention on his part was his publication of “WEOG: The UN’s Settler Colonial Bloc” in September 2024. Much of the work in the United Nations is carried out by five official “regional groupings.” Four of these are simply geographically based: those representing Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The fifth grouping, however, is organized not on a regional basis, but on an imperialist/settler colony basis. It includes twenty-four countries from Western Europe (together with Turkey), plus the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, and, for a time, included apartheid South Africa. This is known as the Western Europe and Other Group (WEOG). The “Other” stands for settler colonies, though the group misleadingly presents itself as consisting simply of the “Western democracies.” The United States often treats itself as an “observer,” not formally belonging to this or any other regional grouping. But Washington has been assigned by the United Nations to the WEOG regional grouping and participates in the voting there, where it rules the roost.
In essence, WEOG, as Mokhiber demonstrates, is “the white world bloc.” Its claim to represent “Western democracies” is invalid on numerous points. Although constituting 11 percent of the world population, WEOG includes three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and altogether has a total of seven out of fifteen seats on the Security Council. It dominates numerous UN bodies. The post of Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs is traditionally held by an American, the office of Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator by a British representative, and the position of Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations by an official from France. WEOG, and particularly its “OG” component, Mokhiber explains, leads the way “in the defense of colonialism, apartheid, and political Zionism, and in opposition to Indigenous rights, the anti-racism agenda, Palestinian rights, and to the right of development.” It is the leading defender of mercenaries used in military interventions, and of the imposition of “unilateral coercive measures (like sanctions).” OG members, particularly the United States and Israel, are the strongest opponents of the UN’s official global program to combat racism, based on the Durban Declaration (Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024).
Mokhiber has also published an article entitled “Western Media Outlets Are Complicit in Israel’s Genocide and Must Be Held Accountable,” in which he explains that “the ruthlessness of Israel’s genocide machine in Palestine, and the direct complicity of the U.S., UK, and other Western governments are the two key pillars in the horrors being perpetuated against the Palestine people (and the attacks on human rights defenders around the globe).” But there is also “an essential third pillar: the role of complicit Western media corporations knowingly disseminating Israeli disinformation and propaganda, justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity, dehumanizing Palestinians, and blacking out information on the genocide in the West.” He observes that “Israel now holds the world records for the murder of journalists, of aid workers, of UN officials, and of healthcare workers” (Craig Mokhiber, “Western Media Outlets Are Complicit in Israel’s Genocide—and Must Be Held Accountable,” Mondoweiss, August 25, 2024).
It is a sign of the utter hypocrisy and iniquity of the historic colonial/imperialist countries at the core of the world capitalist system that the courageous role being played by numerous human rights officials in the United Nations (including former UN officials) in the context of the genocide in Palestine is largely hidden from the Western population.
The year 2024 is Michael D. Yates’s eighteenth year as director of Monthly Review Press, now the longest tenure of any director of the Press. (Past Monthly Review Press directors include Leo Huberman, Harry Braverman, Jules Geller, Susan Lowes, Christopher Phelps, Andrew Nash, and Brett Clark.) As an economist, labor educator, and general social critic, Yates has brought his very considerable talents to the Press, including close editing of manuscripts and acquiring new manuscripts, resulting in a very distinguished list of radical books, some of them award-winning. He notes with pleasure that his role as director of the Press has allowed him to become a “citizen of the world with connections to people in many countries.” At MR we are proud and deeply grateful to have him as director of the Press. Due to his leadership and hard work, Monthly Review Press is equipped to address both the growing crises and the new revolutionary possibilities of our time.
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Corrections
In “Notes from the Editors,” October 2024, page 64, first paragraph, line 10: “between 1995 and 2021” should read “in 2021.”
In “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” November 2024, page 13, third line from the bottom: “between 1995 and 2021” should read “in 2021.” On page 18, last paragraph, third line, “between 1995 and 2021” should read “in 2021.”
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