Palestine. The Realm of Indignity and Unreason

Translation of Mireille Fanon Mendès-France (May 27, 2025)

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Message to the Community of States:

In addition to the systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip and the catastrophe befalling its population, hunger and the destruction of medical facilities have been added to the genocidal war. The State of Israel has decided that no Palestinian should remain on their land.

We watch, devastated and overwhelmed by an immeasurable universal shame, the first phase of the ethnic cleansing of the enclave, which is being expanded with the announced plans for the West Bank.

Will you allow the President of the United States to turn Gaza into a "Riviera"?

The Palestinian people are being subjected to genocide, a war of extermination in the sense defined by Raphael Lemkin: “an act of genocide directed against a national group as an entity, and the acts in question are directed against individuals, not as individuals, but as members of their national group.”

If the Charter of the United Nations recognizes the right of a state under attack to defend itself (Art. 51), does this right apply to a power that is exercising an illegal occupation? This is a question that could be debated. In any case, no state has the right to use disproportionate force, as the colonizing state is currently doing. The principle of proportionality implies that an action should not be more devastating than the harm already suffered. However, in its response, the State of Israel has chosen blind violence that violates the principle of proportionality, respecting no balance between the goal—saving the hostages—and the means employed. The real objective: to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible.

If the notion of principle establishes requirements for the optimization of values and interests, while norms and rules are often presented as ontological, logical, or methodological in nature, should not the principle of proportionality prevail over other norms and rules? Is it not even more evident when a prime minister declares that Hamas must be eradicated and, as a consequence, receives the support of a large part of the international community, particularly its Western allies, who, like him, oppose ‘barbarism’? Under these conditions, it is easy for him to determine the threshold of proportionality.

Who is more barbaric? The one who fights against an illegal colonial occupation and for their inalienable right to self-determination…or the one who, out of revenge and above all to achieve far-right expansionist goals, seeks to eliminate an entire people from their land?

Who helps a state commit genocide or large-scale war crimes in a planned and systematic manner? Who closes their eyes, pretending not to know, while bodies pile up under the rubble, or does not see in the depths of children's eyes the inhumanity of a world that claims to be a defender of democracy and human rights?

Why, in the face of this disaster for humanity, do some countries, without any conscience, help the State of Israel by providing military or financial aid?

You cannot ignore the fact that by helping or assisting this country by recognizing its right to defend itself as an occupying power, those countries compromise the international responsibility of their state and become accomplices in the illegal occupation, colonization, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even with respect to the Bedouins in territory under Israeli jurisdiction, not to mention the war crimes committed for more than 78 years, which, despite numerous Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, violate all human rights and the rights of civilian populations in times of war guaranteed by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Next August, on the 75th anniversary of the adoption of this Convention, will you claim that it represents a great advance in the protection of civilian populations, when the Israeli occupation forces are systematically destroying schools, hospitals, shelters, and UNRWA centers, and when the meeting of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, scheduled for March 7, was canceled at the last moment due to the regrettable stance of the Swiss government and Europe?

Is it necessary to remind you that a third state does not need to participate directly in an internationally wrongful act—as the United States, co-responsible for the genocidal war waged by its Israeli ally—to share responsibility for it? It is enough to provide voluntary assistance for the commission of a wrongful act or for its prolongation over time, and this applies to all states that, among other things, allow their companies to sign contracts to sell components or weapons to the State of Israel.

It is evident that one of the direct consequences of an internationally wrongful act is that all subjects of international law are obliged to make reparations. Reparation, which consists of the obligation to erase the consequences of the internationally wrongful act, appears above all as a sanction mechanism for the violation of international law.

Why do you rush to help invaded Ukraine, while Palestine has been abandoned, isolated, walled in, beaten, and ethnically cleansed for more than 78 years, without arousing true indignation on your part?

The dignity of the international community demands that you support the South African state for having recalled the intangible principles of jus cogens (peremptory norms) and that you oppose the attacks and threats to which this country is subjected, particularly from the new U.S. administration.

How do you respond to the fact that the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice have not been respected, much less implemented?

In the name of universality, in the name of the Human Being, are you willing to allow even more hunger, more mass destruction, more population displacement?

Are you not there, as members of the international community, to prevent political power relations from prevailing over the jus cogens norms of international law and international humanitarian law, established to regulate the use of force and protect civilian populations?

We, the Peoples of the Nations, demand that you, the States, as members of the international community representing the Peoples of the Nations, work urgently to establish guarantees that prevent the dismantling of international law, or even the tearing apart of the regulation of power relations, so that international social and international relations are not determined by the dominant role of the United States, whose drift toward the far right is today the main danger looming over the planet.

Be human, if you still can: you have the power to stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people!

The future of our world depends on the future of Palestine.