The Verdict Of Conscience From The Gaza People’s Tribunal And A Way Forward – OpEd

The day after the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, released her yet another damning and well-researched report, entitled “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” (dated 20 October, 24-pages with 304 footnotes), the Gaza People Tribunal held its final session (23-26 October) on the campus of Türkiye’s oldest institution of higher learning built immediately after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The tribunal’s 4-day-long program was truly impressive as it covered every single essential domain of organized human life, including homes, water supplies, schools, hospitals, clinics, universities, cultural and religious institutions, agricultural land, and natural ecosystems.   The Jury of Conscience found the Zionist settler colonial entity of Israel has intentionally destroyed all-of-the-above domains of the Palestinian society in Gaza.

Understandably, the Gaza People Tribunal’s Statement of Findings and Moral Judgment and the subsequent concluding address by Emeritus Professor Richard Falk steered clear of any obvious parallel between Zionist genocide of the last two years and the Nazi genocide in the heart of Judeo-Christian Europe, typically mis-portrayed as the cradle of Civilization of Reason, Rationality, Modernity and Progress.

But it must be stressed that it is no longer perverse to draw the Nazi-Zionist comparison.    While milking the memories of the Holocaust and crying eternal victimhood of the quintessentially European racism towards the Jews – alas, “antisemitism” – the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis today have, as evidenced by polls after polls, adopted what the genocide scholar Professor Martin Shaw called “the genocidal mindset” towards native Palestinians.

Israel’s bravest journalist Gideon Levy has repeatedly observed that his fellow Israeli Jews have internalized the widespread Pavlovian self-perception of themselves as “God’s chosen people” returning to or retaking the “promised land”.    Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settlement-born messianic Zionist who now leads National Religious Party- Religious Zionism, has openly dismissed international law based on his self-perception of God’s Chosen People.

Similarly, secular Zionists such as the late Golda Meir feel they are above the international law for a different but still warped reason.    As early as 2014, Levy told the Irish Times journalist Lara Marlowe (see ‘Holocaust makes Israelis think international law doesn’t apply’, 11 Sept. 2014), “(t)he Holocaust makes Israelis think international law doesn’t apply to them, because they are the ultimate victims of history; the only victims.”

By all indications, ten years on, the Israeli society today – not simply the state and its organs – is Nazi Germany of 1940’s.

In his authenticated post-WWII interviews (see The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann’s Tapes, BBC), SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann made it crystal clear to Willem Sassen, his fellow exile and the Dutch Nazi journalist, in Bueno Aris, that the Fuhrer ordered “physical destruction” of an entire Jewish population whom the Nazi society viewed as Untermensch (Subhumans) throughout the Nazi-occupied Europe.

Neither Israeli Jews on the streets of Tel Aviv, East and West Jerusalem, or Hebron nor the senior most leaders of Israel attach any worth or value to any Palestinian life.

Earlier this year, in a video-recorded meeting of former heads of Israeli security and military agencies, ex-Israeli Defence Minister and former commander of the Israeli Defence Forces general (rtd.) Moshe Yaalon characterized, chillingly, if disapprovingly, Israeli policies towards Palestinians in Gaza as “Mein Kampf in reverse”.

With impunity, the Zionist entity is pursuing this Hitlerite physical destruction of the Palestinian society in Gaza, and, alarmingly, also in the West Bank.   Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza seriously undermines even the (recognizably colonial) “Gaza Peace Plan” that came into effect on 10 October.  This plan has been talked up by the unhinged US President Donald J. Trump who openly boasted about how “very well Bibi has used the American-supplied weapons” in Gaza genocide.

The images of Gaza in 2025 resemble more like those of the ruined Hiroshima in the aftermath of the 1^st atomic bomb explosion in 1945 than a site of urban warfare in a densely populated cityscape.

The Jury’s verdict noted that Israel’s onslaught far exceeded the Israeli Defence Force’s stated military objective of defeating the armed Palestinian resistance and destroying the latter’s defensive physical infrastructure, which are miles of maze-like underground tunnels deep under the desert sands of Gaza.

The Tribunal offered panellists, journalists and attendees alike a very rich program of side educational events, in addition to the main panels of Palestinians’ own accounts, international expert testimonies, empirical analyses – all designed to document, archive and establish empirical realities that confront perpetrators’ official lies and media spins.

Among these events were a display of powerful political art work by an Israel-assassinated Palestinian cartoonist, participatory collective painting depicting Palestinian resistance over a century, political poetry reading, live acoustic music sessions, open conversations with the widely admired Global Sumud Flotilla activists, book signings and public talks by some of the iconic intellectuals on Palestine including a renowned founder of New History of Israel professor emeritus Avi Shlaim of Oxford University, the University of Colorado law professor Wadie Said whose father the late Edward Said was a renowned exilic intellectual and the author of the groundbreaking Orientalism, and the Tribunal’s Chair Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University.

Whether physically present inside the packed auditorium at Istanbul University, or watching the Final Session on YouTube LIVE, one could not have failed to feel inspired and charged as LSE Professor Christine Chinkin read out the 2,000-words Final Findings and Moral Judgement of the Jury of Conscience, on behalf of the 6-member Jury.

The Jury explained its mission as a “civil society’s response” to, effectively, the categorical failure of states to discharge their legal obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or the Genocide Convention) to prevent and intervene in the gravest atrocity crime, namely genocide.

In the Jury’s words:

“(t)he Jury, guided by conscience and informed by international law, does not speak with the authority of states, but when law is silenced by power, conscience must become the final tribunal.

“The Tribunal is not a court of law so does not purport to determine guilt or liability of any person, organization or state. It is a civil society response to the continuing lack of accountability for the commission by Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. We believe that genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe. Genocide in Gaza is the concern of all humanity. When states are silent civil society can and must speak out.”

Its main recommendations are radical in that the Jury reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people “to choose their modes of resistance to achieve liberation, freedom, and independence” in the face of Zionist Israel’s over half-a-century of brutal colonial occupation with an unmistakable genocidal dimension.   Significantly, while calling for the end to impunity, the Jury “endorses a global, rights-based strategy to dismantle Zionist structures: identify and map the Zionist regime’s sources of power and enabling pillars.”

The Jury calls for building a worldwide movement that weakens, isolates, and dismantles each source through coordinated political, legal, economic, academic, cultural, technological, and social action.

As frail as he physically looked, walking to the podium with the help of a young assistant, the Tribunal’s President Professor Richard Falk who will turn 95 soon, on his part, delivered his powerful call to further global action, against the perpetrating state of Israel until the genocide ends, the apartheid dismantled and accountability is realized.

Professor Falk rightly paid tribute to and drew inspiration from the very Palestinian people whose century-long repression at the hands of the European settler colonizer has awakened the collective conscience of the people all over the world.

It must be stressed, however, that the consciousness awakened and subsequently mobilized as global solidarity for a Free Palestine will need to be a truly revolutionary type.  That is, the informed conscience anchored in the humanist value of anti-Capitalism.  For this Capitalist world where profits come before people has been built around the mass murderous ideology of White Supremacy and the hierarchy of the worth of human populations including “races” and classes.

To its credit, the Jury perceptively observes, “the political economy of genocide is the highest form of hyper imperialism of the 21st century.”

UN Special Rapporteur would concur with the Gaza People’s Tribunal’s assessment of the system which has enabled Israel to perpetrate genocide in Palestine, with blanket impunity.

“The genocide in Gaza was not committed in isolation, but as part of a system of global complicity. Rather than ensuring that Israel respects the basic human rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, powerful Third States – perpetuating colonial and racial-capitalist practices that should have long been consigned to history – have allowed violent practices to become an everyday reality. Even as the genocidal violence became visible, States, mostly Western ones, have provided, and continue to provide, Israel with military, diplomatic, economic and ideological support, even as it weaponized famine and humanitarian aid.”

For peace and humanity’s sake, what needs dismantling is not simply the apartheid and Zionist structures but the White Supremacist-Capitalism, or “racial capitalism”, as the black Marxists have long named it.

• This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS)