Photo by Johannes Schenk

In the Orwellian world in which we now dwell, countries and groups that uphold international law are labeled terrorists or supporters of terrorism, while those that commit unspeakable crimes, flagrantly violating international and humanitarian laws, remain unlabeled and unpunished.

What the last year and a half in Gaza has glaringly demonstrated is how little the United States cares about upholding international law. And that its outpost, Israel, continues to operate lawlessly outside international rules and moral norms. In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been breaking the law for Israel.

Unlike his predecessor, however, who attempted to hide or disguise his breach of international and U.S. laws, the Trump White House overtly and brazenly violates both.

The United States continues to provide lethal weapons for Tel Aviv’s engineered humanitarian catastrophe despite the fact that it is a signatory to the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” known as the Genocide Convention, a binding treaty which established a “responsibility to protect” obligation on state parties, whether they ratified it or not.

The Convention defined genocide and definitively recognized it as crime. It also criminalized complicity and established duties on state parties to take measures to prevent and to punish perpetrators.

In addition to the above treaty, the 1945 U.N. Charter, 1949 Geneva Conventions, as well as other binding U.N. documents established a collective “responsibility to protect” against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The obligation was meant to insure that the international community never again, as it did during World War II, failed to act.

History will harshly and rightly judge those countries and officials who have failed to fulfill their moral as well as their legal obligations to end the genocide. And it will heap praise on those who did.

Unfortunately, no one has asked why the United States has been battering and mercilessly penalizing countries and groups that have been faithfully upholding their obligations under Article I of the Convention to “prevent and punish genocide.”

To counteract the Orwellian distortions that frame Israel’s ongoing atrocities it is important to give recognition to those who have acted on their moral and legal obligations under international law.

In a world where powerful nations act with impunity, some have acted to end the genocide: Ansar Allah (also known as Houthis) in Yemen; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Islamic Republic of Iran and South Africa.

Resistance to oppression has been central to their identities and it is what has united them in solidarity with Palestinian resistance movements. They have paid a great price for carrying out........

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