By Dan Kovalik
Dan Kovalik examines how Western support for Israel’s genocide dismantles human rights protections, threatening Palestinian survival and fundamental freedoms worldwide.
After World War II and the Holocaust, the nations of the world came together to create an international legal structure to protect basic human rights and to prevent such terrible events as war and genocide from ever happening again. The very first binding convention to which the nations of the world agreed was the Genocide Convention of 1948, genocide being considered then, and up till recently, one of the paramount evils which could not be tolerated in a civilized world.
The Genocide Convention is a relatively short and simple agreement which prohibits various acts carried out to destroy a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. The acts enumerated in the Convention include killing, infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, imposing conditions of life calculated to physically destroy a group and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
This Convention was ratified by the vast majority of the then-existing states (many other states would later come into being through the process of de-colonization that followed), including the United States and later Israel.
For the following decades, the West held itself out as the exemplar of human rights and the protector of the world from those states who were said to violate human rights and international law norms. Of course, the West’s claim to these roles was always marked by rank hypocrisy given its own monumental crimes, especially against the peoples of the Global South.
One need only consider, as just a small example, the US’ terrible and totally unprovoked wars against Korea and Vietnam, which followed quickly after WWII and which claimed millions of lives; France’s brutal occupation of Algeria; and Belgium’s colonial domination of Congo, which claimed the lives of 10 million Congolese.
Still, the fact that the West at least paid lip service to human rights and made human rights an issue in debates about world affairs gave people around the world an instrument they could use in their struggle against oppression, including oppression by the West itself.
Quite tragically, Israel’s post-October 7, 2023, genocide against the Palestinian people – a genocide backed to the hilt by the West, and especially the United States, Britain and Germany – has destroyed the very notion of human rights, and all of us are more vulnerable a result.
Israel, with the active support of a number of countries and the tacit acceptance by the remainder, has crossed every red line which was thought to be inviolable before October 7. Thus, with the entire world witnessing on a daily basis via the internet, Israeli soldiers kill and maim children for sport; regularly rape prisoners, including children, sometimes with dogs and sometimes on camera; intentionally starve out hundreds of thousands and corral an entire population in an ever- shrinking concentration camp known as Gaza.
And, permitted to engage in these atrocities against Palestinians, they are now carrying them out against Europeans, Americans and others who come within their grasp. Indeed, no one is safe from Israel’s crimes.
Thus, reporters from mainstream Western media outlets are assaulted and sometimes killed. Humanitarians from around the world who try to bring modest amounts of humanitarian aid to Gaza are captured by Israel, beaten and gang-raped, with no protest from their home countries.
Meanwhile, Western countries which used to pride themselves on protecting freedom of expression are regularly beating, arresting and jailing their own citizens for peacefully protesting the genocide.
In short, the progress which we believed we were making in terms of basic human rights – progress manifested not only by post-WWII human rights instruments but also by the Magna Carta, the US Constitution and the French Revolution – is crashing upon the shoals of the Palestinian genocide. And so, in a very real way, the fight for the survival and independence of the Palestinian people is, as many have recognized for some time, a fight for our own liberation.
– Dan Kovalik is a human rights lawyer, author and lecturer who teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. A Columbia Law School graduate, he served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers for 26 years. His books examine international human rights and US foreign policy, including The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela.