Above photo: US President Joe Biden joins Israel’s Prime Minister for the start of the Israeli war cabinet meeting, in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023. Miriam Alster/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.
Former UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber says the support of powerful western countries for Israel could qualify for the crime of complicity in genocide.
Editor’s note: This interview was recorded prior to the Jan. 26 ICJ ruling.
The International Court of Justice has just issued preliminary measures against Israel for the crime of genocide in Gaza. The ruling follows weeks of anticipation and months of international outcry for Israel to face accountability from the UN. While much remains undetermined, this is a critical development in a time when the integrity of international institutions has been thrown into crisis by their ineffectiveness in the face of Israel’s slaughter. Former director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his position last fall in protest of what he called the UN’s “failure” to protect Palestinians, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on the weaknesses of the UN in the face of US and Israeli impunity.
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned on Oct. 31, stating that, “Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He noted that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, Yazidi in Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Rohingya in Myanmar.
He wrote the high commissioner, “We are failing again. The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethnonationalist, colonial, settler ideology and continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging based entirely upon their status as Arabs, leaves us no room for doubt.” Mokhiber added, “This is a textbook case of genocide,” and said the US, UK, and much of Europe were not only refusing to meet their treaty obligations under the Geneva conventions, but were also arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic cover for it.
“We must support the establishment of a single democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” he wrote, adding, “and therefore the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler colonial project, and an end to apartheid across the land.”
Mokhiber, a lawyer who specializes in international human rights law, had worked for the UN since 1992. He led the high commissioner’s work on devising a human rights-based approach to development, and acted as a senior human rights adviser in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Sudan. In the 1990s, he lived in Gaza.
Indifference to genocide, however, is the norm, not the exception. The international community did little to halt the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. It is watching passively as hundreds of Palestinians are being killed and wounded a day while Israel blocks food, medicine, fuel, and other basic supplies from entering Gaza, where up to 85% of the 2.3 million inhabitants are now homeless.
The very few voices that denounce genocide pay with their careers. Josh Paul, who worked in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in the State Department for more than 11 years, resigned due, as he wrote, to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel. Tariq Habash, a top advisory at the Education Department, resigned in January, saying he could no longer serve an administration that had put millions of innocent lives in danger.
But despite protest letters within government agencies, including the State Department and AID, there is no mass exodus. Why do we decry genocide as the crime of crimes, teach class after class on the Holocaust, and yet do nothing to halt it when it occurs? Why are there so few people willing to stand up and call out the institutions and governments for their silence or complicity? Did we learn nothing from history?
Joining me to discuss the historical indifference to genocide and what is taking place in Gaza is Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
So let’s begin with that question, Craig. It isn’t new. Rwanda. I was in Bosnia. Why? Why? And then we can go back to the lessons of the Holocaust, which have been a staple in university curricula, and yet here we are witnessing, undeniably, a holocaust. And as you wrote in your resignation letter, the United States is not only not moving to stop it, but is arming those who are carrying out the genocide itself.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, that’s right, and that is the difference, Chris. Because if you look at what the United States and the United Kingdom did when the genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, we know from leaked diplomatic cables that they actually instructed their diplomats not to use the term “genocide” because they knew, as a matter of international law, that if it were genocide they would be compelled to act, to prevent it, to stop it, and to punish it. And so their crime at that time was a failure of their obligation of prevention under international law.
What we’re seeing in Gaza now is much worse because the United States and the United Kingdom and some other Western powers have actually been complicit in the genocide. That’s a separate crime under the Genocide Convention, the crime of complicity. And that’s because the United States, as you know, during this genocide, has been actively providing economic, military intelligence, diplomatic support. It’s been using its veto at the Security Council to stop a ceasefire. And after each veto, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of more Palestinians lose their lives in the genocide.
We’ve seen the US even use its podiums in official institutions of the State Department and the Defense Department and the White House and the National Security Council to disseminate Israeli propaganda for genocide, including justification of war crimes like bombings on hospitals and so on.
So that is actually a higher level of accountability. It is the crime of complicity, and it is a step up from the failures of the West, of the United States during past genocides. And my big fear is that the position taken by powerful Western states has begun to corrupt international institutions and to cow them into a fearful silence.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about what happens internally within these institutions. And as I have noted before, I was in Sarajevo during the war, so that was 300 to 400 shells a day, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day. I only do that by comparison. In Gaza, we’re talking about hundreds of dead and wounded a day. So the savagery of the Israeli carpet bombing is unlike what we have seen.
I think you’d have to go back to maybe Bosnia. I don’t know where you would go back to, but it is at such a horrific level. I think 60, 65% now of the housing in Gaza has been destroyed. It’s an undeniable, at the very least, a war crime, but I think it’s undeniably genocide.
Let’s start with the UN. You worked for many years in the UN. What’s happening internally? The secretary general has made statements calling quite forcefully for a ceasefire, but talk about institutionally, what we don’t see.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, that’s right. And that was what struck me most when I penned my final letter to the United Nations on departing in October, is that if you had such a clear case, such a clear case on its face of genocidal intent spoken by Israeli leaders, and genocidal action implemented on the ground, and the UN was afraid to even use the word “genocide”, then the very norms and standards upon which that organization were founded were very much at risk.
And this is because Israel had already, in October, abandoned its decades-long strategy of incremental genocide, which I think was designed to preserve Western sponsorship, and they moved in 2023 to an expedited destruction of the final remnants of Palestine, as they say, from the river to the sea. And Gaza was experiencing that most of all, but we had seen it throughout the year already in the West Bank with attacks by the Israeli military, mass arrests, pogrom in Hawara Village, wholesale ethnic cleansing of West Bank villages.
And this was all being brought to our desks every single day, and yet I saw this very trepidatious, almost silent approach on the part of the political corridors and the political leadership of the UN.
And the way it really manifests itself, and you’ll see it even now, more than 100 days in with this mass annihilation of a civilian population, you’ll hear from senior UN leaders these pat phrases about a two-state solution somewhere down the road and calls for humanitarian assistance. In other words, the safe language of genocide.
But what you won’t hear from them is any talk at all about the root causes, about the actual crimes, about the realities of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, persecution, apartheid, occupation, dispossession, inequality, ethnonationalism, these things that are at the root of the Palestinian experience and all of historic Palestine, and now genocide itself. That is not a part of what you’re hearing from the secretary general and the senior leadership of the organization.
You’re also not hearing any condemnation of Israel. You’ll hear appeals for more humanitarian aid, as I said, but you won’t hear a condemnation in the way you have heard direct condemnations of Russia in Ukraine, condemnations of Hamas’s activities using every adjective that one can conjure up, and yet no condemnation of Israel’s crimes, because Israel is sponsored by powerful governments of the West, and because senior UN leaders are afraid.
What we also see is an abandonment of the specifics of international law in favor of more amorphous political references. The two-state solution is a part of this. Don’t hold Israel and its partners to account under the specific requirements of international law.
And that really has led to, I think, an abdication of responsibility by key institutions. You wouldn’t even know at this moment that there is a genocide prevention office in the United Nations because it’s been completely silent during this genocide happening on their watch.
Similarly, the special adviser on Children in Armed Conflict — Before we even get to the International criminal court, which is not a UN institution but has a politically corrupted prosecutor in Karim Khan, who has refused to take seriously his mandate and to prosecute crimes committed by the Israelis.
So this is… I have pointed out the irony of the fact that this past year was the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, but it was also the 75th anniversary of the adoption of apartheid in South Africa, and the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in Palestine. And what you see already at the birth of these institutions and these norms is a double standard that was born, that was birthed, really, into a colonial contradiction that has continued to influence their implementation up until today.
But if you can have an actual genocide with clear genocidal intent declared, not by peripheral actors, but by Israel’s president, prime minister, seven of its cabinet ministers at least, the senior military leadership. And then what the acts that they promise being carried out with genocidal fury on the ground and repeated by Israeli soldiers, and then perpetrated as they are described, and still not have the courage to call it genocide, then there’s no such thing as genocide. There never was any such thing as genocide, and there never will be again, and we will have lost a vital international legal protection for the worst crimes.
Chris Hedges: You talk about fear. So let’s say they did stand up, the Genocide Office, the secretary general, and named this genocide for what it is, named the apartheid state for what it is. What would happen to them?
Craig Mokhiber: Well, their fear is that they will then suffer the slings and arrows of a very abusive network of Israeli lobby groups that will do their very best to slur individual UN officials as antisemites, supporters of terrorism, and so on. And I’ve been through that several times in my own career.
Chris Hedges: Just to interrupt, they’ve already done that to the secretary general. They’ve already accused him of being an antisemite and called for his removal.
Craig Mokhiber: For the mildest of critiques, in which he said that this happened in a particular context. So you can imagine what happens if you actually speak out against the crimes as they’re occurring on the ground. And people in the UN are used to this. So that piece of it is very real.
And of course, you’re a busy UN official who’s trying to implement programs and get a job done, and you have to invest, then, a lot of time in pushing back against these attacks by these Israel lobby groups — Which, when I started in the UN, had zero influence. But today, much like in Western governments, have grown in influence and have adopted tactics that can be quite effective in intimidating senior UN officials into silence.
But at the same time, you have to worry about suffering consequences from powerful UN member states, especially the United States, the United Kingdom, states of the European Union, who will démarche the leadership, who will bring a lot of pressure to bear, and will say to you, look, when the time comes for the budget committee to meet on the resources you want to fight against racism, to provide protection in a particular area, we’re going to remember this in the budget committee. And so there is no firewall between the normative mandates of UN agencies on the one hand and the budget committees, which are entirely political, on the other hand.
And then, of course, there are personal career considerations. There is a sense, in some parts of the UN, and here the political corridors of the UN, that not offending powerful political actors is a form of political acumen, that that actually shows a certain wisdom, and that speaking up on behalf of the norms and standards of the organization in a way that irritates some of these powerful actors shows that you are not a sophisticated player in international diplomacy.
When, in fact, the charter, the universal declarations, the main treaties of the organization mandate the organization to defend these principles and to defend the peoples of the United Nations that, in a world of realpolitik, is not always what you are seeing in those cases.
And those who do it will be left out to hang, to swing. If you’re suddenly attacked by the Israelis, the Americans, Israel lobby groups and others, you will not be defended by the organization, and you may well be in jeopardy of your job as well. So it’s quite an effective technique.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the United States, it’s a little different from the United Nations. Careerism plays, of course, as much an element in this. Samantha Power, who wrote A Problem From Hell on genocide and excoriated those US officials and bureaucrats who didn’t stand up, whether during the Holocaust or Rwanda or anywhere else, of course has now remained silent, she’s out of AID.
But you also have, as you noted, an active participation by the United States in furthering the genocide, especially in terms of bypassing Congress twice to sell munitions to Israel. Cutting off of that supply chain would instantly make Israel’s assault extremely difficult, if not impossible. Let’s talk about what happens internally within the US government.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, I don’t have a window into what happens internally. What I see is the face that they bring into the United Nations, which is often a face which is quite stern when the organization seeks to speak out against Israeli abuses.
When I criticize the UN, I have to say I’m criticizing the political leadership of the UN, some of the intergovernmental bodies like the failed Security Council, which has been rendered completely impotent by the use of the US veto, the leadership in the Secretary General’s Office, heads of agencies, and others.
What I’m not criticizing are those people inside the organization who are there for ideological reasons, who are there because they hate poverty, they hate war, they hate human rights abuses and inequality, and so they’re working day in and day out to try to defend those norms and standards and working in solidarity with human rights movements and peace activists all around the world. But they have been abandoned by the political leadership in cases such as this.
And I’m certainly not critiquing the more than 150 UNRWA workers in Gaza who have been annihilated by Israeli bombs in just about 100 days, many of them murdered with their families, who, in my eyes, are heroes who are doing their very best to serve the community and lost their lives by staying and suffering those slings and arrows.
But the United States, when it deals with us, it comes carrying a stick. And that stick is not just about the budget. It is about a very aggressive… And I’ve always said that to be a diplomat in the State Department, you don’t have to have any diplomatic skills because you come with power, you come with carrots and sticks.
And those same carrots and sticks that are used to affect the voting in the General Assembly, for example, amongst states, including small developing states that need foreign assistance or are politically challenged, those same kinds of carrots and sticks are used inside the UN by the United States to pressure UN officials to either be quiet on a particular issue or speak out on a particular issue.
For the US government, human rights are a political tool to wield against its adversaries, but always there to defend the impunity of its perceived allies and friends. And there’s an irony in it, Chris, too, because for all the talk about US leadership on human rights in the International Human Rights Program, the US is an outlier because of its opposition to most of the international Human Rights Program.
They’re opposed to economic and social rights as rights. They’re opposed to the right to development. They’re opposed to the abolition of capital punishment. They are the one state on the planet that is not a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the only international treaty protecting the human rights of children. Only the United States, out of 193 countries, has not ratified that. They have a generally weak ratification record.
And they oppose the International Criminal Court, and have even passed legislation, the Hague Invasion Act, it has been nicknamed, that, if any of their people or their allies are indicted and arrested, that they will invade the Netherlands in order to liberate them.
So the US leadership on human rights is not what I would call “leadership”. And I’ve said in the past, that if that’s leadership, we wish they’d follow for a while. So they’re not great friends of the human rights part of the United Nations.
And we know from leaked diplomatic cables that when the Goldstone Commission, [inaudible] inquiry was investigating human rights abuses some years ago, they deployed their entire global diplomatic mechanism with a massive investment in order to obstruct the investigation, and then to discredit it when it was completed. And so it is, with protection in the occupied territories across the board, always opposed by the government of the United States, as well, as I said, the United Kingdom and some other European allies.
Chris Hedges: You’re referring to the Goldstone report by the South African judge, which was quite courageous in investigating and documenting Israeli war crimes. But finally, Goldstone himself was forced to repudiate his own work. The pressure was intense.
Craig Mokhiber: Intense and personal, and smears and slanders, and threats of not allowing him to visit relatives inside Israel. And this is a prominent Jewish South African lawyer, self-declared Zionist, supporter of Israel, with family members in Israel, and they went after him.
He’s been criticized for giving in to the pressure, but I think a lot of those criticisms come from people who have not been subjected to that pressure, which can be extremely nasty, and even dangerous. We’ve all been subjected to these armies of online trolls and the threats that come along with that once the lobby unleashes its fury on you for daring to speak out about Israeli atrocities. And so I have no criticism for Justice Goldstone, only sympathy that he was beaten into submission, figuratively, in that way.
Chris Hedges: Consequences. What are the consequences? This is the genocide of our time. Israel is talking about months more of pulverizing Gaza using starvation as a weapon. All of Gaza’s hungry. I think the last UN figure I read, 500,000 Palestinians and Gaza were classified as being starving. I guess one, where do you think it’s going? And two, what are the consequences of not intervening? All the US does is speak about what they’re going to set up once it’s over.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, I think the consequences are already being realized. I think Israel is already realizing its genocidal objectives. It has effectively destroyed Gaza. It moved systematically from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip. It has destroyed most housing, most civilian infrastructure: hospitals, schools, mosques, clinics, ambulances, graveyards, courthouses, monuments.
The purpose is very clear by the action, even if you didn’t listen to their genocidal statements, that they’re trying to erase Palestinian civilian life in Gaza to make it impossible for the survivors to have a normal, dignified life there, a process that started more than 15 years ago with the siege already, but has now been, as I say, expedited into all out genocide there.
And there’s very little left of the Gaza Strip that would allow… You mention starvation. This is actual starvation in a piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea, something that we have not seen before, imposed starvation, imposed disease. The numbers of those who have died, who have been annihilated here, are going to grow very significantly.
The military attacks are continuing. We’ve received notice today of moves now toward Rafah, the southernmost town in all of Gaza, where virtually the entire population has now been concentrated in an area that can really only sustain a few thousand.
And now, we see the move to finish the job. I think Israel is expediting its action toward that end because it knows it cannot continue forever. But I think they’ve already succeeded in destroying Gaza and destroying life in Gaza.
And now what they will look is to manage the aftermath, which they hope will result in keeping the situation bad enough that those who do survive will voluntarily leave through the Rafah border, and either die in tents in the Sinai or be absorbed in the diaspora elsewhere in just the latest, as the South African case points out, just the latest in a series of ethnic purges that started in 1947. And it’s really continued, punctuated throughout history up until this moment.
Consequences is the open question. We’ve seen a failure of international institutions. We’ve seen the political corruption of the International Criminal Court, which has been delaying the bringing of consequences for Israel for years, and that situation has only gotten worse under Karim Khan. We have seen a failure of the United Nations to deal with this for what it is, which is a genocide, as opposed to just a humanitarian challenge caused by an earthquake or another war between two warring powers.
But we see also a glimmer of hope in what South Africa has done in bringing the case to the International Court of Justice, the World Court. And there, there could be consequences. We expect any day now, really, to receive an order by the Court on the provisional measures that have been brought by South Africa.
Those provisional measures could make a difference. They call for cessation of military activities, an end to the siege, bringing in the humanitarian relief and aid that is needed, preservation of evidence, allowing fact-finding missions in. That could make a huge difference for the survivors and bring hope of reconstruction.
Now, of course, I fully expect that if the court delivers those provisional measures, Israel will refuse to implement them. The case is then supposed to go to the Security Council for enforcement, where the US will veto it because this is, after all, the US-Israeli genocide because of the degree of complicity.
The case then would go to the General Assembly for an emergency special session. General Assembly, of course, is a democratic body, one country, one vote, where measures could be adopted in a resolution that could either just be a resolution that condemns what Israel has done and encourages everybody to implement the decision of the court, or it could be something more concrete.
It could include calls for diplomatic measures, consular measures, economic measures, political measures, removal of Israel from international organizations, non-recognition of passports. It could set up mechanisms, as they did for apartheid South Africa, to bring more pressure to bear. It could call on individual courts, because this is a crime of universal jurisdiction, to bring criminal action against Israelis. It could set up a tribunal itself.
So there’s a lot that the General Assembly could do, but you can be sure that the US and others will be working very hard to compromise that process to make sure that the GA doesn’t do anything meaningful by pressuring individual delegations not to support anything meaningful.
In the end, Chris, accountability is going to come from us. I have lost confidence in national institutions and international institutions in cases like this, but my confidence has grown in movements in civil society, in people, in boycotts and organized divestments and sanctions, in the anti-apartheid movement which is growing by leaps and bounds, and the courageous efforts of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, and If Not Now, who took over Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty, of the millions who are marching in capitals around the world, including in places where those marches are banned. And they do it at risk of arrest and beatings by police because they refuse to go along.
This is what changed things in the struggle against apartheid when South African apartheid was supported by the United States right through the 1980s. It was people in churches, in synagogues, in mosques, in movements, in labor unions that made the difference. I expect that’s where, to answer your question, the consequences will come from, and that’s where all of my hope rests now.
Chris Hedges: Well, and of course, Israel was a strong supporter of the apartheid state right up until the end in an exchange for oil, which South Africa had. They armed the apartheid state, even when everyone else was walking away.
I just want to close by talking about placing this within the long nightmare the Palestinians have endured. You referenced the Nakba in 1948, ’49 when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Thousands were killed in massacres by Zionist terrorist groups. It seems to have accelerated, I think you used the term slow motion genocide, if I remember, slow motion ethnic cleansing, yes. But in terms of scale, I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like this.
Talk a little bit about what this means for the Palestinians. And then of course, we can’t leave out the West Bank because 300 Palestinians have been killed, thousands upon thousands arrested. Settlers, Jewish settlers are seizing Palestinian villages and driving the inhabitants out in the West Bank. But just give us a picture from the Palestinian viewpoint.
Craig Mokhiber: Well, and that’s what’s so important about the South African case, because it points out that what’s happening here is happening in a broader context, and that genocide is a continuum. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who invented the term “genocide” and lobbied for the adoption of the convention, pointed out that it is always a continuum of genocide. It’s not an event that occurs.
And I’ve been arguing the genocide started long ago in Palestine, indeed in 1947 and 1948 with the Nakba, where you saw the wholesale purging, the massacres that you talked about of Palestinian villages, and then just erasing those villages, renaming them, and building Israeli realities on top of them. That never stopped. That continued in the 1950s. It continued then inside the Green Line. It continued then with 1967 in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and now it’s continuing in an expedited way in Gaza as well. All a part of the same ethnic purge.
You cannot have an ethnonationalist state that wants to pretend to be democratic if you don’t have an overwhelming majority of those in your ethnonationalist group. And that means, by definition, it means ethnic purges. It means genocide. There’s no other way to achieve that, and Israel has been doing that now for 75 years.
And there’s no doubt that just the sheer scale of what they’re doing in Gaza is unprecedented even in the Palestinian experience. It has eclipsed what happened in the original Nakba in 1948.
What’s different is that for 75 years, Israel enjoyed absolute impunity for these crimes, and it also was able to dominate the narrative in the West that effectively erased the Palestinians, or gave a description of them as some sort of external force that came in from outer space because it wanted to kill Jews or something like this, not that you had these indigenous people in a place called Palestine who were invaded by settlers from another continent who effectively erased them and has been executing and massacring them ever since. That narrative is finally coming through.
You finally see, even in the West, a greater understanding of the plight of the Palestinian people, of the legitimate cause of the Palestinian people, of the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people. So I think that Israel has overplayed its genocidal hand in this case, and that we’re going to see a lot of push for accountability that we didn’t with previous mass atrocities committed by the Israelis.
It’s not going to come from the official institutions of government or international institutions. And whatever happens in the course, in the case before the International Court of Justice or the domestic case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in domestic courts in the US for US complicity in this genocide, Palestinian people will benefit from this growing movement around the world.
And that solidarity, I think, is where the best hope is of a change in the future, and of abandoning these old, tired slogans about a two-state solution and really looking at something rooted in human rights and equality like a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
Chris Hedges: And just in terms of on the ground for the Palestinians in Gaza, I have friends who have family in Khan Yunis and Gaza City, and they were talking about, along with everything else that Israel was obliterating, they were actually blowing up wells that people use to get… That just shows you at what level they were creating an uninhabitable, virtually uninhabitable environment. What does this mean for the Palestinians in Gaza?
Craig Mokhiber: Wells, farmland, bakeries, water sources, everything that is necessary for civilian life, which is further evidence that this was a genocidal onslaught designed to make survival in Gaza impossible. What it means for the Palestinian people remains to be seen. What it means for the people of Gaza is that most of Gaza will be unlivable for a long time to come, and this was exactly the Israeli plan.
Gaza can be rebuilt. The environmental degradation can be reversed. Gaza can be rebuilt with massive investment. Israel will resist that with everything that it has. And with the backing of the US, the UK, and others, they will want the world to ratify the ethnic cleansing that they carried out in Gaza, just as the world ratified the ethnic cleansing that it carried out inside the Green Line in 1948. That’s what we have to push back against.
But the movement for Palestinian rights and for Palestinian justice and freedom, that’s going to grow, and it’s going to continue as the anti-apartheid movement did.
And so what that means is that the tens of thousands of civilians martyred in Gaza will have been martyred for the cause of Palestinian freedom, and that they will not have died in vain. I do not think in the long term that Israel can continue to use force to maintain its ethnonationalist project in the middle of the Middle East. And I think that the only hope is the hope that comes from people all around the world fighting for this cause of equality, this cause of justice.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Craig Mokhiber, longtime international human rights lawyer, who resigned in October as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
I would like to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.