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Protests from authoritative sources at the horror in Gaza are growing. A number of professors in genocide and holocaust studies, a handful Jewish, are now condemning as genocide the conduct of Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). There has been reluctance to do so. The majority have not come to this conclusion.
The memory of the Holocaust plays a unique role in Jewish and Western consciousness. It became a constitutive element of Zionism, a rationale for the State of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. There has been disbelief that a State, treated by the West as its outpost in the Middle East, could countenance and undertake ethnic cleansing using methods accused of being genocidal. The legal bar for genocide in international law, beyond war crimes and crimes against humanity, is very high: clear intention, no other plausible explanation for actions whose sole purpose is Genocide. The 15 July New York Times, carries an essay by Dr. Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brown University, Rhode Island. Professor Bartov was a Company commander in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Brown University is amongst the top ten, Ivy League, universities in the USA. He describes how he came to the “inescapable conclusion” that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians”. He cannot be dismissed off-hand. Bartov expresses concern for the future of Israel and the Palestinians and fears wider consequences of what is now happening in Gaza and the West Bank for the “culture of Holocaust commemoration and the politics of memory, education, and scholarship”. He emphasises the importance of Holocaust museums as “models for the representations of other genocides”. This reminded me of moving encounters between Holocaust survivors and survivors of the Rwandan genocide in the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, Beth Shalom, near Laxton in Nottinghamshire, a centre founded by two Christians. Bartov fears that the Holocaust, because of manipulation by the Jewish State, will lose its universal importance for humanity and become an ethnically “specific pre-occupation”. Such worries do not seem out of place. Not just Putin’s war in Ukraine but Netanyahu’s destruction and killing in Gaza, their spurious explanations, are normalizing the abandonment by States of moral restraints in war and the weakening of respect for international law. Attacks on the UN, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the sanctioning of their officials, are authoritarian tactics. The UK is not immune to the zeitgeist. The recent proscription of Palestine Action under the 2000 Terrorism Act raised eyebrows as well as questions. The legality of proscription is determined by judges. No jury who might, as in past cases, acquit for criminal damage needed. No national consensus on the matter. And protest against the proscription is de facto criminalized with many arrests, with implications for any organisations whose members take to the streets or undertake direct action for a cause. Severe damage to property meant to “ influence government” or “intimidate”, falls within the expansive scope of the Act designed to protect national security. Palestine Action activists allegedly used a converted fire-extinguisher to spray red paint onto the turbines of two Voyager refueling aircraft at an estimated cost of £7 million. A judge decided this fell under the 2000 Act. But the obvious threat is the failure of security at RAF Brize Norton whose management should be called to account. Israel’s sophisticated propaganda and lobbying by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) have contributed to Western governments’ failure to curb the IDF’s conduct. And American policy positions knock on to allies such as the UK, Australia and to a lesser degree the EU. Germany for understandable reasons has been highly supportive of Israel though France, and UK Foreign Minister, David Lammy, have been willing to go beyond asserting Israel’s right to self-defense to roundly condemning IDF’s actions. As antisemitic incidents increase nationally, popular protest is closely monitored for hate speech. Whilst the language and tone of Western governments’ support for Israel has shifted markedly, American military support notably has not been withdrawn. Until recently Christian leaders’ reactions to Israel’s actions, with the exception of the World Council of Churches, were mainly limited to encouraging reconciliation whilst expressing compassion for the people of Gaza. Jon Sobrino, the Basque Jesuit theologian, in the 1980s called Salvadorians a ‘crucified people’. On 22 July Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, echoed his religious language: “He [Christ] is there crucified in the wounded, buried under the rubble and yet present in every act of mercy”. After a tank shell hit Holy Family church in Gaza causing three deaths and several injuries, Pope Leo called again for an end to the “barbarity of this war”. The respected Catholic weekly, The Tablet of 5 July published a detailed article denouncing the IDF and Israeli government by peace negotiator and former priest, Oliver McTernan. But its title Israel’s Existential Choice played into Israel’s propaganda that it is fighting for its very existence. The Hamas massacre of 7 October was a barbarous response to repression but neither the belligerent nor less bellicose wings of Hamas represent, if the words have any meaning, an existential threat to Israel. The IDF, with its US military support, could and did reduce Gaza to rubble and successfully waged war on multiple fronts: in Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. McTernan touched on the deliberate starvation of Palestinians trapped in Gaza ‘while we argue over the niceties of whether or not it is right to use the word ‘genocide’. Understandable frustration, but in international law States have to intervene to prevent Genocide. Hence President Bill Clinton’s careful avoidance of the term during the Rwandan Genocide. On 15 July at the General Synod in UK, Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum of Jerusalem described the US-Israeli Humanitarian Foundation’s four feeding centres, open one hour a day, deathtraps for the hungry, as reminiscent of the Hunger Games movies. Hundreds of well-run UN distribution points around the besieged territory were banned by Israel. Gangs now steal food deliveries. In December 2023, the South African government filed an ‘Application of the Convention of the Prevention of Genocide’ in the UN’s Hague International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel – strongly supported by civil society groups. The International Criminal Court (ICC) later issued warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, and a Hamas Commander, Mohammad Deif. The UK says it would do so despite strident opposition from the USA which is not a member. And on 23 July, a Brussels court ordered the Flemish authorities to block components for Merkava tanks being shipped from Antwerp to Israel and banned further such exports - four NGOs filed the case. Bloggers only have words at their disposal carrying at best the modest might of reason and emotion. Two lines taken from a South African poet, Umar Willis, come to mind. “Let the skies belong to the birds again. Not to the metal wings of death”. Naming the horror in Gaza raises several questions: of language, morality, justice and law. Notwithstanding, States appalled at further ‘unacceptable’ or ‘intolerable’ acts must urgently impose more effective sanctions on Israel. Hard-won restraints on the savagery of war, and much more, is at stake.
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The quarterly newsletter Abolish War, produced by the Movement of the same name (MAW), regularly comes through my letter box. The Movement’s founding chairman, the late Bruce Kent, came to national prominence as General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s. Abolish War seems unworldly, almost quixotic. Who could imagine its mission to be achievable?
The short answer is the 10,000 people from many nations gathered in the Hague between 11-15 May 1999, anniversary of Czar Nicholas II’s 1899 Hague Peace Conference. In recognition of the terrible toll of war in the 20th century, they produced an Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st. Century. Presiding over the proceedings was Sir Joseph Rotblat FRS who, in 1944, had refused to work on the atomic bomb. Attending were Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel laureates. MAW was a response by British peace organisations to the Hague conference. The movement began work in 2001 following the conference’s comprehensive agenda: peace education covering the arms trade, conflict resolution, humanitarian and human rights law, bans on child soldiers and land mines. A better known example than the Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st. Century, the Kellogg-Briand (Paris Peace) Pact, was a turning point in international law. Minnesota Senator, Frank B. Kellogg, a lawyer, was US Secretary of State 1925-1929. Aristide Briand served as French Foreign Minister during the First World War and from 1921-1929. The Pact began life as a treaty between the USA and France but was signed on 27 August 1928 in the Quai d’Orsay by 15 nation-states, including the USA, UK, France, Japan, and Germany. By the end of 1929, 57 States including China and the Soviet Union had signed. Article I stated: “ The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another”. Article II: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts…. shall never be sought except by pacific means”. The outlawing of war had been adopted by governments as a principle. Practice would take considerable time. No forceful sanctions were in place. As the much acclaimed The Internationalists: and their plan to outlaw war by Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, Allen Lane, 2017, makes clear, the Pact marked a new stage in the development of international law, the beginning of a shift from one international order to another. The seminal work of Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), known for his elaboration of just war theory, is acknowledged as the foundation of the Old Order of international law. He saw war as a legitimate means of combatting malfeasance abroad: against aggression, to recover debts, righting wrongdoing or resolving disputes. He recognised every belligerent asserted they had just cause and believed, to avoid chaos, the outcome of each war had to be accepted, allowing – not incidentally - trading companies to retain booty captured by piracy (Grotius was hardly otherworldly). In short, in Grotius’ Old Order Might was Right. The Kellogg Briand Peace Pact with its 57 signatories denied these basic premises. The Pact’s intellectual origins lay outside government. Salmon Levinson (1865-1941) was a successful corporate lawyer, a friend of the eminent American philosopher, John Dewey. Arising in the context of the First World War, Levinson’s fundamental legal assertion was that wars should not be considered “upon the same plane of legality without any regard to their origins and objectives”. “We should have, not as now, laws of war, but laws against war; just as there are no laws of murder or of poisoning, but laws against them”. The League of Nations, established in 1920, moribund and dissolved in 1946, was attempting to regulate the conduct of wars and promote disarmament whilst Levinson flooded the country with pamphlets describing inter-state wars as a public crime, and calling for their outlawing. Levinson was not a lone campaigner. In 1924, a Canadian Quaker, James Thompson Shotwell, Professor of the History of International Relations at Columbia University, New York, gathered a group of scholars to create a draft disarmament treaty. In charge of research at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, he adopted the position that “aggressive war is an international crime”. In April 2027 Shotwell lobbied Briand. After much diplomatic manoeuvring between France and the USA, Levinson’s and Shotwell’s parallel initiatives bore fruit in the 1928 Peace Pact. It inaugurated a New International Order - though war was far from outlawed in practice. The Internationalists notes that the final paragraph of the Atlantic Charter (April 1941), added by President Roosevelt, asserted that all the nations “must come to the abandonment of the use of force”. Not long after Pearl Harbour (7 December 1941) Churchill, staying in the White House for three weeks over Christmas, and the Allied Powers, signed a new “Declaration of the United Nations” rejecting war and conquest; 22 other countries signed the UN Charter. Less than four years later 51 nations signed the UN Charter. Shotwell had pushed hard for the provisions of the Peace Pact to form the core priority of the United Nations in a post-war organisation. The Charter’s Preamble committed to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Shotwell’s vision was shared by the dying Roosevelt. The aim of abolishing war did not then seem quixotic. The first session of the UN General Assembly held in Methodist Central Hall, London, in January 1946, was a pivotal moment for international law. The UN provided a means not only to prevent, but also to punish wars of aggression, not unilaterally as in the past, but by forceful interventions authorised by the Security Council – though Stalin’s blocking veto hobbled it - and by what Hathaway and Scott call “outcasting”, meaning primarily the development of progressively effective sanctions. The Internationalists offers a plausible narrative and statistical case that the slow-burning 1928 Peace Pact was behind the massive drop in inter-state wars by the 1950s though subsequently decolonisation, amongst other factors, inaugurated a period of intra-state conflicts, some genocidal. Today we might argue that we are seeing a reversion globally to the Old International Order. Worse. Grotius initiated a systematic framework for international law which key actors are now dismantling. The book doesn’t reflect on, though does chronicle, the extraordinary part played in the pursuit of peace by civil society organisations and leaders. And the outstanding role of a few individuals and organisations. Sadly there is no room to celebrate two other outstanding lawyers of great contemporary significance, Hersch Lauterpacht, 1896-1960 – criminality in aggressive war and Raphael Lemkin, 1900-1959 – the Genocide Convention. If reinforcing international law and peace-building is indeed being reversed, we need to value and respect the efforts of the dedicated, mostly hidden, peace diplomacy of the Vatican and the peace organisations such as Pax Christi and the Movement for the Abolition of War, not treat them as quaint eccentrics. We should listen seriously to what they have to say for hope lives on in the enduring conviction of the few, and not naively, that humanity can, and must, pursue alternatives to war. When Orla Guerin, the distinguished BBC foreign correspondent, broadcasts from a distant land, and Pat McFadden MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is interviewed here in Britain, you know things are bad. But at least you can begin to understand them. And Pat McFadden has that gift for making you think everything is all right: you should go to bed and it will be better in the morning. Everything is under control. But it isn’t.
“Fragile”, “volatile”, “threatening”: three increasingly common words to describe the new world disorder. Floods, fires and heat waves from climate change. MAGA mania, persistent violent religious extremism, the decline globally in democracy and the rise in authoritarian states, all add to the anxiety. The Financial Times (26 June) reports that the Oslo Peace Research Institute counts 61 “state-based conflicts” around the world: the greatest number since 1946. In the words of a former CIA Director, Leon Panetta, we should take heed of “how dangerous a world we live in now”. According to our own current National Security Strategy we must “actively prepare for the possibility of the UK coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario”. Add preparation for the consequences, nationally and globally, of climate warming. Responding to these threats has resulted in removing funding for poverty alleviation in the “developing” world, as well as cutting budgets needed for acute domestic social needs. Intensive care for an economy debilitated by the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and Covid at the expense of the poor. What now needs asking is how to live in the UK’s starkly unequal, morally and materially diminished society, which is deeply mistrustful of government. The wider question of how to live in this fragile, volatile and threatening world is – ethically – no less important. And what of justice for future generations? How should parents prepare their children and grandchildren for further troubled times? What kind of upbringing and education fits today’s deteriorating circumstances? Responding to this question, and not accepting narrow schooling for the jobs market as an adequate answer, should be the strategic priority for our education system — whilst not excluding the development of jobs-related skills. Personal, Social, Health, Relationships and Sex Education, or PSHRSE, is a beginning. But it is fragmented within the curriculum, not sufficiently developed and sometimes treated as an add-on, although since 2020 the teaching of Relationships, Health and Sex Education has been a statutory obligation. And the Government’s own presentation of PSHRSE sends mixed messages. Parts are non-statutory, not required by law, yet the curriculum is said to be “important”, “necessary” and “should be taught” even if only for one hour a week. PSHRSE is vital but rarely in the news except when there’s controversy about sex education. The PSHE Association, the provider of advice on teaching the curriculum, is a membership charity “supporting children’s physical and mental health, relationships, careers and economic wellbeing”. It is funded by the Government and, as the Association’s own mission statement indicates, retains the emphasis on entering the economy and on jobs. But it is not enough for troubled times. Parts of PSHRSE do touch on hotly contested areas in the world outside school, hence guidance and regulation by the Department of Education. Statutory teaching standards “prohibit the promotion of partisan political views”. Schools – like the BBC – “should take steps to ensure the balanced presentation of opposing views on political issues when they are brought to the attention of pupils”. Students may get to look at contemporary politics in these sessions, how systems of governance are put together and work, the different political parties. Whilst different cultures and religions are sometimes introduced by visits to places of worship, many of the urgent contemporary problems we and they face have to be discussed elsewhere. Up to the age of 16, debating societies alone provide an outlet for argument and opposing views. In some traditional subjects opportunities do arise for exploration of contemporary issues. GCSE Geography should provide a scientific account of the causes of global warming. Given the role of disinformation in contemporary society, critical analysis of evidence and documents in History lessons offers training potentially protecting children from social media influence. In discussion of novels, poetry and drama, English Literature provides scope for understanding different social and personal values. At A level there is a gear change when ethics and philosophy, also examination subjects, positively require and encourage debate. This is all well and good. But missing from the curriculum is a sharp focus capable of countering the dominant, driving narrative of might is right, creating a mindscape redolent of divided societies, conflict and the need for militarisation. Conformity to norms based on humane and compassionate values and virtues, whether in national life or international relationships, are fast waning. They are in danger of being lost to future generations unless taught in our classroom. This is not a plea for compulsory religious education in a secular society, though the Abrahamic faiths, and of course others, still make a substantial contribution to retention of norms. The default position – which religious faiths can also fall into – is understanding the world as a binary opposition between “them” and “us”, laying the foundations for conflict and violence. An attractive mindset, because so simple, replaces an isolating individualism with an emotionally satisfying sense of belonging and empowerment. The pithy proposition which opens the 1945 Constitution of UNESCO argues “that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. Putting together a meaningful account of the world, about life, that recognizes the complexity of relationships within society and internationally, both within politics and geo-politics, is demanding. Children and young people need help to develop the necessary insights and to begin to think about such matters. Just consider how difficult democratic governments find integrating the conflicting demands of different human rights within law and acceptable shared national policy. In my own experience of working to prevent violent religious extremism, what’s needed is prolonged cultivation of both emotional and cognitive empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone’s shoes, understand their feelings and perspective on the world. This is not only a diplomat’s and negotiator’s skill: it is perhaps the most important attribute for future generations. And the one we must directly address. What does this mean for teaching in our classrooms? Firstly, the need for a more holistic approach, bringing some coherence to PSHRSE and the contribution of History, Geography, and English Literature, painting a big, normative picture, emancipating PSHRSE teaching from the demands of the job market. The Finnish Government’s approach to education is an attractive attempt to do so. Secondly, whenever feasible, increase creative multi-media approaches to presenting the topic. What better way to broach the nature of disinformation than The Wizard of Oz? Thirdly, raising the status of this more holistic PSHRSE by making it a compulsory GCSE subject. Our education system should be pre-occupied with results, but if the primary one is not a compassionate society that can, with the support of parents, move beyond spurious and dangerous binaries, it will fail our children and grandchildren. See TheArticle 01/07/2025 |
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