Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer based in Haifa. She worked as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team from 2000 to 2007.
As a young student studying international human-rights law in Canada, I spent countless hours learning about genocides and mass war crimes. I strove to understand both how such horrific acts begin and what international structures ensure that they do not happen again.
We learned about self-determination and the right of people to choose their own destiny and leadership. Democracies, we were taught, do not engage in genocide – these heinous acts historically had been the crimes of dictatorships. The aim of the United Nations, we were told, was not only to maintain global peace and security, but also to protect individuals around the world and, in particular, the most vulnerable: refugees and children.
And yet, here we are, a year since the start of Israel’s intensified attacks on Palestinians, with an international system that has proven unable, and its member states unwilling, to protect Palestinians. It bears reminding that most Palestinians remain stateless and that nearly half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are children. Yet despite this, Israel has bombed Gaza intensively: in just the first two months of the campaign, it wreaked more destruction proportionately than the Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War.
Throughout this past year, following Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, Israel has made a mockery of international law: It has bombed hospitals, ambulances and shelters – all illegal to target under international law save for very rare exceptions when they are being used in acts that are “harmful to the enemy.” Israel has dropped bombs on humanitarian workers, medical personnel and first responders, some of more than 41,000 Palestinians killed since October, 2023. A letter in the renowned medical journal The Lancet estimated in July that the real death toll, including indirect deaths, could be five times that number or more.
So callous has Israel’s bombing been that Gaza now counts about 2,000 amputee children, with numerous doctors describing the past year as a war on Gaza’s children. The largest Palestinian city – Gaza City – has been flattened. The Palestinian medical system has collapsed under the weight of Israeli bombs. Israel has not left any universities standing in Gaza either. Gaza is no longer livable and Israeli leaders know it, because that was their intention. Israeli leaders have made clear that they believe Palestinians are “human animals” and that Israel seeks to “thin out” the Gaza population, actions and stated ambitions that prompted the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to conclude in January that a plausible case for genocide exists. Yet the onslaught remains unrelenting.
While Israel has made a mockery of international law, the global community continues to stand by idly, evidently unwilling to stop Israel. Despite ICJ rulings demanding Israel halt any plausibly genocidal action, with one specifically ordering Israel to halt its military action in the Rafah area immediately, Israel persists to this day. States around the world are obliged to uphold international law, but they have resorted to empty hand-wringing with occasional rote condemnations, mealy-mouthed calls for a ceasefire and highly selective symbolic sanctioning of peripheral individuals. The dire facts on the ground make clear, however, that the global community should be pushing for an arms embargo and stringent sanctions on Israel to tangibly motivate an immediate halt and reversal of its abhorrent conduct. Instead, Israeli soldiers gleefully post TikTok videos of themselves blowing up buildings or film themselves torturing Palestinians while Palestinians struggle to document their own genocide in the hope of compelling the world to act. And yet no one has. In short, international law has no meaning – not to Israel, which systematically violates it without consequence, nor to Palestinians, who have never been protected by it.
Many UN delegates walked out on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke to the General Assembly on Sept. 27, combating 'slanders' by a body that has rebuked his country for breaches of international law.Charly Triballeau and Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images
To be clear, this is not the first time Palestinians have been abandoned by international law. In fact, it is the failure of international law’s universal applicability that led to where we are today. Palestinians have lived under a system of Israeli military rule for more than half a century that the ICJ has concluded is illegal because it denies them their most basic rights. Entire United Nations careers have been made by people documenting Israel’s violence – from the violence of an apartheid system that privileges Israelis and denies Palestinians their rights to the brutal decades-long blockade of Gaza, to the daily violence of Israel’s demolitions of Palestinian homes, land theft, checkpoints and the imprisonment of Palestinian children. Every year for more than half a century, Israel has far exceeded the limits permissible under international law – and every year Israel has been allowed to get away with it, with Palestinians being told that they need to “negotiate” their freedom.
I watched with horror as Israel bombed Palestinians in Gaza in 2001 and again in 2008, 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2021. I think about the world we would be in had bombing Palestinians not been normalized. Today, at my home in Haifa, a short two-hour ride to Beirut, I hear Israeli warplanes as they are en route to bomb Lebanon, using the same talking points that were used to justify the bombing of Gaza. My heart is broken.
What if the international community had put the brakes on Israel’s brazen colonial designs? What if numerous UN Security Council resolutions against Israel had been implemented? What if Palestinian lives actually mattered? What if Palestinians had been allowed to realize the promise of self-determination? I know we would not be marking the one year “anniversary” of genocide.
I have spent the past year hearing about what happened to Israelis on Oct. 7 invariably presented as justification for Israel’s unjustifiable actions in Gaza since then. But nothing can justify genocide.
In conversations among Palestinians around the world, we speak about what will result from Israel’s actions. The more optimistic believe this period will lead to Palestinian freedom; the more pessimistic fear more of the same and worse. I vacillate between these two poles daily: stubbornly hopeful that the rules-based world order that I learned about will not sit idly by and permit Israel to get away with genocide and yet also realistically aware that Israel may never be stopped. If the world has shown itself unwilling, or perhaps unable, to stop Israel to date what can change this in the future? When is the “red line” truly crossed? And even when that red line has so clearly been repeatedly crossed, can the world muster the determination and clarity to focus on anything beyond restoring an illusory temporary calm?
I also find myself thinking a great deal about my late father these days. He was nine years old during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He survived the Zionist takeover of his town, the forcible displacement of his family and the erasure of his entire community – what was then his entire world. He was part of the 20 per cent of the Palestinian population that managed to remain in the nascent state of Israel after the Nakba. He grew up forced to acclimate in Israel, the very country that killed or ethnically cleansed his family and friends. He endured the incessant Nakba denial and Nakba apologism that plagues Israel and much of the West to this very day. These historical evasions form the fictitious essence of Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians and remain the stubborn bedrock of injustice to this day.
Dianna Buttu's father was a child when the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 began, but unlike many Palestinians, he remained in what then became Israel. Today, Ms. Buttu lives in Haifa.David Blumenfeld/The Globe and Mail
While the world debates whether Palestinians should have a state or not, and whether we should be free or not – in furtherance of our pernicious dehumanization – I ponder what the future holds for my son (now the same age my father was in 1948) living among people for whom genocide denial and apologism are so commonplace as to be normalized. I think about Israeli soldiers proudly displaying their cruelty on social media, about the callous acceptance by Israel and much of the West of Israel’s bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps; and, most particularly, of the complete societal ignorance of, and evasion of responsibility for, the decades of harmful Israeli actions against my people. How can I or any other Palestinian be expected to co-exist with this ideology? I am reminded of my father being forced in the aftermath of the Nakba to choose between living as a refugee or living amongst those who would later state that they “didn’t finish the job” because 150,000 Palestinians managed to remain in their homeland.
But this time, it isn’t just about being forced to live with unrepentant perpetrators of heinous crimes but also with those who have been cheerleading, including countries that turned a blind eye when we needed help the most. Diplomats and others have turned their sights to the “day after” as though one can speak of a “day after” genocide. In these conversations, Israeli talking points that suggest Israel has the right to select the Palestinian leadership are casually, and hurtfully, regurgitated as truisms. How curious that no one suggests that Palestinians should have any say in choosing Israel’s leadership or that no one dares to suggest removing abhorrent, outwardly racist and ethnic cleansing-advocating coalition members from Israel’s government. Much like the talk of the “peace process” most of this specious talk seeks to assist Israel in evading accountability and, more dangerously and practically, serves to turn attention away from genocide.
Meanwhile, grand international community plans are being concocted for how to “rebuild” Gaza with the optimism that it will be built better than it was before. But while buildings and decimated infrastructure theoretically can be rebuilt, and despite that current estimates estimate it will take 15 years just to remove the rubble, to rebuild the international legal system that erroneously taught us that a legal order applicable to all states exists will take far longer, if it even remains achievable at all. The prophesied rules-based international order has been shown to be a house of cards. With all that Israel has done over the past year, one thing has become abundantly clear: that the phrase “never again” does not apply to Palestinians and never will.
Toby Melville/Reuters
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