By Robert Inlakesh

Palestinians who have already suffered a genocide will not even possess the ability to get accountability through international legal bodies under such a vision.

Under the guise of diplomacy, the US Trump administration is crafting agreements that will permit war criminals a full license to slaughter civilians in both Gaza and Lebanon. All of this has been welcomed by the same “international community” that claims to care for international law. 

On June 26, a deal was brokered by the United States between Israel and Lebanon, causing an enormous amount of controversy as the document offered a direct Lebanese recognition of Israeli sovereignty. While the agreement has a number of implications on the future of the Lebanese State and its sovereignty, what has largely been missed is that the deal includes granting full legal immunity to the Israelis for their past and present war crimes in Lebanon.

Clause 13 of the agreement, which the US-proxy government in Beirut signed, commits the Lebanese State to abandon its rights under international law that enable it to pursue legal justice against Israel for its countless war crimes. This was the direct outcome of the US-brokered agreement, which not only will the Lebanese Army fight Hezbollah on Israel’s behalf – to rob their own nation of the ability to defend itself – but that the families of nearly 10,000 killed across Lebanon since October 7, 2023, do not even have the option of fighting for justice in the courts.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” (BoP) was recently revealed to be pushing through a draft proposal that will grant its members and affiliates sweeping immunity. Under such a vision, every single member of the BoP, its administrative affiliate, in addition to employed Palestinian technocrats, the planned international military forces that will invade Gaza and non-resident contractors, will be granted get out of jail free cards.

Palestinians who have already suffered a genocide will not even possess the ability to get accountability through international legal bodies under such a vision.

In short, we are returning to the same explicitly racist systems of hierarchy that existed under the former Western European colonial power. Palestinian and Lebanese life has been demoted under the global Trump dictatorship – which has overridden the United Nations with the UN’s own cowardly consent – to the degree that there is not even the veneer of an existing legal system that can act as an avenue to pursue justice.

The Law of the Jungle

While the US Trump administration and its Israeli partners are evidently at the forefront of the collapse of international law, they alone are not the only guilty parties involved.

If a mass murderer frequently used their friend’s vehicle to mow down crowds of pedestrians in the United States, but was let go by the court because the judge, jury, and police were intimidated by the owner of the vehicle, then the collapse of the system is not dependent upon only the criminals. This is why courts and laws exist, so that criminals are punished, because the criminal is never going to voluntarily punish themself. Although this explanation seems simple, it appears as if it is too tall an intellectual challenge for the Western corporate media to tackle it – or rather, they simply represent the jury in the above-mentioned comparison.

It was the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that voted for the creation of the BoP after all. Although they abstained, registering their verbal dissatisfaction with the move, both Russia and China refused to take a stand to prevent the collapse of the international order, allowing the approval of the UN’s own death certificate to pass. 

Following this, the US created a body called the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) that was supposed to fall under the control of US Central Command, operating with the purpose of monitoring the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire agreements. Instead, it functioned as a US-Israeli jointly controlled military facility where dozens of nations sent their forces to watch daily Israeli ceasefire violations, including war crimes, as if it were a video game and refused to punish the mass murder of over 1,000 people.

Every step of the war, the neighboring Arab nations and Western powers aligned with the US have greenlit every war crime, implicated themselves in many of them directly, while working to ensure that no legal mechanisms can exist to even allow the victims to appeal for the sake of their slain loved ones.

The United Nations has not only failed as a project, much as the League of Nations did before it, but the body itself has also been used as a cloak that justifies the unthinkable. The Geneva Conventions have become meaningless; national sovereignty is a thing of the past; there is only the powerful and the powerless.

Under such a system, there can no longer be any virtue signaling about laws or morality from the collective West. If they seek to behave like lawless warlords, then it is only natural that they are going to be treated like lawless warlords by the groups who resist.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.