Debatte

  • En
  • De

    • Tag: complicity

    • International Law in times of increasing authoritarianism

      Professor Schabas: “US, Germany, and Others Could Be Held Liable as Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza”, interviewed by Selcuk Gultasli, European Center for Populism Studies, August 30, 2025.

      With regard to Israel’s military actions and settlement violence in the occupied Palestinian territories, the norms of international law and international criminal law speak in clear terms, as hardly ever in law. However, inhumane policies not only in Israel but also in Germany are silencing these norms in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to debate on the basis of better arguments and, let’s be honest, even to name the overwhelming facts.

      In an in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor William Schabas—one of the world’s leading experts on international criminal law and genocide studies and a professor at Middlesex University—gives a detailed assessment of the escalating crisis in Gaza from the perspective of international law, populism research, and global governance. As a descendant of a family of Holocaust survivors, Professor Schabas warns that Gaza is a “litmus test” for the credibility of international justice and the authority of global legal institutions.

      Interviews in which those who have dedicated their entire lives to interpreting and clarifying the law have their say are more important than ever in times like these. They can make the pertinent norms of international law, their negotiation before various courts, and their relevance to the policies of states comprehensible to untrained readers, without losing much of the complexity. Schabas offers readers solid expertise and presents legally sound chains of argumentation.

      With regard to the allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, Schabas makes it clear that court and investigation proceedings such as those currently pending before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have and must have very concrete implications for the decisions of individual national authorities and politicians. Genocide is not an isolated event; it always consists of a series of actions and decisions by many actors, and preventing it is the responsibility of all states that have committed themselves to “never again” with the 1948 Genocide Convention. At the same time, as Schabas also notes, genocide existed long before this international agreement, particularly as part of colonial expansion and racist logic. These events defy the simplistic historical classification of a before and after of a supposedly peaceful and human rights-based liberal post-war order and continue to shape the current world situation.

      The case of South Africa v. Israel before the ICJ is “probably the most serious case of genocide ever brought before the Court.” Schabas argues that the intent to commit genocide can be inferred both from Israel’s military actions and from statements made by high-ranking Israeli officials, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s remarks about cutting off food, water, and electricity supplies to Gaza. “We have more than just a pattern of behavior—we also have statements and clear indications of a policy.” Referring to the ICJ’s established case law, these are all factors that must be taken into account in the final assessment.

      According to Schabas, third countries – the US, Germany, Canada, and others – may also be liable under Article III of the Genocide Convention for supporting Israel with military and political aid. He warns: “To the extent that they provide material assistance of significant importance, they may be held accountable as accomplices to genocide.”

      Now is a crucial moment for the entire future of international justice, such as the ICJ and the ICC. Failure to apply uniform standards in the case of the destruction of Gaza carries the risk of entrenching a “two-tier system of international law” and undermining human rights worldwide: “These institutions are absolutely vulnerable, and they are aware of this. Gaza is a test of their credibility and authority.”

      On all these points, Schabas not only takes the time to explain the legal issues in an understandable way, but also places them in the context of larger global political and legal disputes between individual states and their worldviews and value systems. The ICJ in particular, so Schabas, has recently, after periods of fundamental consensus, increasingly become the scene of such disputes, which increasingly reveal the contradictions and fragility not only of international courts, but of the entire normative and institutional basis of the United Nations—with a Security Council that could not be further removed from the ideal of representation of the entire international community based on equality.

      In a broader context of debates on populism, authoritarianism, and international accountability, the interview makes an urgent call for a rethinking of the legal, institutional, and political frameworks for preventing mass atrocities. Double standards, as currently applied more than ever in law and politics, are not just an unfair application of the law and an unequal distribution of legal responsibility and effective prosecution. Double standards promote and create the illegitimate power of the few over the many and are the cornerstone of any authoritarianism that ultimately subjects all people to its dehumanizing logic.

      Schabas argues that this must be prevented while it is still possible.

      ↗ https://www.populismstudies.org/professor-schabas-us-germany-and-others-could-be-held-liable-as-accomplices-to-genocide-in-gaza/

    • Organized irresponsibility. Judging Gaza in light of Auschwitz

      Organized irresponsibility. Judging Gaza in light of Auschwitz

      Hannah Arendt 1958
      CC BY-SA 4.0; Münchner Stadtmuseum, Archiv Barbara Niggl Radloff

      Immediately after the end of the war in 1945, Hannah Arendt wrote a text entitled Organized Guilt. It was one of the first attempts to politically and conceptually grasp what could no longer be denied: the “administrative mass murder” of millions of people and the systematic and industrially operated attempt to destroy European Jewry. As Arendt wrote, this did not require “thousands of selected murderers” because “total mobilization” implied everyone and thus resulted in the “total complicity of the German people.”

      Arendt did not write as a historian or impartial witness, but as a political thinker. As someone who looks – and judges. “To live truly is to realize this present,” she noted a few years later. She asked how it had been possible for so many to participate and so few to object – and why, after unconditional surrender, so many simply wanted to forget.

      Her thesis: under Nazi rule, guilt was not covered up or suppressed, but organized. It was divided up, depersonalized, morally gutted—in order to destroy responsibility. The line separating the guilty from the innocent, Arendt writes, was blurred so effectively that it became almost impossible to distinguish between those who committed the crimes and those who opposed the killings. It is not the individual who bears the burden of injustice, but everyone—and thus no one.

      “Everyone just did their duty,” said the perpetrators—without cynicism, without remorse. The real achievement of totalitarianism lay in the production of fellow perpetrators. They know and feel no responsibility and perceive themselves merely as part of an apparatus, an order. Arendt quotes a camp accountant: “Did you personally help kill people? Not at all. I was just the camp’s paymaster. What did you think about what was happening? At first it was bad, but we got used to it.”

      When guilt becomes a function, thinking becomes a disturbance. That is precisely Arendt’s point. Conscience was not eliminated, it was reshaped. Language was not destroyed, but recoded. Words such as “Final Solution,” “evacuation,” and “resettlement” served not to deceive, but to exonerate. It was possible to participate in the conversation—without knowing. Or rather, without wanting to know.

      This diagnosis points to the essence of the modern state and its bureaucracy, which integrates every action into a system in such a way that no one needs to say, “I am responsible.” That was Arendt’s early warning—and it is more relevant today than it has been in a long time. Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which we are no longer just witnesses, but accomplices, participants in the blurring of the boundaries of violence and the obfuscation of responsibility.

      It is not only since October 7, 2023, that we have been caught up in a dynamic that eludes any moral language—and at the same time is legitimized by language. International law guarantees the right to self-defense—for Israel as well as for the people of Palestine. It obliges states and armed groups to protect the lives of civilians. The Hamas attack on civilians, which has not yet been fully investigated, and the abduction of hostages to Gaza were crimes against humanity and must be punished as such. However, the fact that the shock and threat to Israeli society – and to Jewish communities worldwide – has been taken as a blank check to respond with further escalation of violence is driving the dynamic into the abyss.

      In Gaza, it can no longer be denied that systematic efforts are being made to destroy the Palestinian people’s right to life, both as a whole and in parts, through the complete destruction of all infrastructure, the starvation of the population, the mass killing of civilians, and the destruction of their natural resources. A besieged death zone—without refuge, without escape, without a future. An ever-growing number of genocide researchers and international law experts have concluded that the criteria for genocide have been met.

      And the language? It works perfectly. It speaks of “precise strikes” or “surgical operations” where civilians are dying in their thousands. Every child killed is potentially a “human shield” or a terrorist in the making. It repeats like a mantra: “Israel has the right to defend itself” – and allows us to sidestep the question of how far this right extends, what it outweighs, where it ends. It asserts: “We are doing what is necessary,” and makes us forget that we are the ones who continue to supply weapons.

      Once again, responsibility is being organized so that no one is responsible. The US supplies weapons, resources, infrastructure, and propaganda support, and during Joe Biden’s presidency, it sometimes declared that it had “red lines,” but these could be crossed without consequence. The UN warns, counts, documents—but its resolutions fall on deaf ears. The EU struggles to find the right words and is divided. The German government also supplies weapons, stands in solidarity with the Israeli government even where civilian life is systematically devalued and destroyed, and only expresses “criticism” when international isolation threatens—criticism that remains largely without consequence.

      Responsibility is not openly denied—it is distributed, blurred, relinquished: through participation, through language, through silence. Structural violence—decades of occupation, blockade, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and resources long before October 7—gets ignored. Instead, a rhetoric of necessity and moral self-assurance dominates.

      Arendt knew that anyone who wants to defend political thought must defend language. Not as ornament, but as a place of judgment. She showed how dangerous it is when terms lose their moral core—and how necessary it is to maintain distinctions: between perpetrator and victim, attack and defense, proportionality and the will to destroy.

      Today, we are experiencing a linguistic regression: criticism is dismissed as mere worldview, and naming violence is considered a threat. Anyone who draws attention to the injustice against the Palestinians is suspected of anti-Semitism. Those who insist on injustice are supposedly endangering security. This reversal narrows the scope of what can be said—until defending the world in Arendt’s sense becomes impossible. For what does not appear cannot become the object of collective action. Where the sayable dwindles, the real is redefined—in the language of war, reality is not described, but made. Terms such as “human shields” ultimately place the blame on the victims. Those who describe a complete siege as “self-defense” shift the blame to where the dead were buried.

      This language is functional. It creates distance, moral relief, approval. In press releases, government statements, and social media, it becomes ammunition: “terror infrastructure,” “safe zones,” “precise operations.” Each of these words stands between us and reality and prevents us from realizing it, as Arendt demanded.

      And this is where history and the present intersect: Arendt’s text was written when the images from the camps were still fresh and Auschwitz was not an abstraction but an immediate reality. She wrote against collective blindness, against the willingness to move on to the agenda of the day. Not in the name of the past, but in the name of a future that was to be different. Today, historical guilt is frozen, without leading to any present political responsibility. Auschwitz has become moral property. The descendants of perpetrators now act as guardians of memory—and derive from this a responsibility that relates solely to Jewish life, not to the Palestinian life under bombs. This is not a lesson from history—it is its instrumentalization.

      Arendt rejected any sacred inaccessibility of history. Memory that does not lead to judgment and action becomes a moral pose: “Never again.” Arendt would have asked critically: Never again what? Only Auschwitz? Or any dehumanization, expulsion, deprivation of rights? She argued for a plural and differentiated conception of responsibility—not exclusive, but inclusive: Those who learn from Auschwitz cannot legitimize disenfranchisement anywhere. Auschwitz must remain a radical ethical warning: Every form of dehumanization must be named, even if it originates from a state to which Germany has a historical obligation. Especially then.

      Arendt distinguished between guilt and responsibility. Guilt concerns perpetrators. Responsibility concerns everyone who is part of a political order and obliges them to think critically, to differentiate, and to exercise judgment. It does not arise from identity, but from being part of the world. Those who live in a political order bear shared responsibility—not because they are all perpetrators, but because they are all members of that order.

      Arendt would not have asked for solutions, but for spaces for action in which responsibility is shared, violence is named, and alternatives become audible. Such spaces exist on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, and in the best case also connect both sides. But their existence is also threatened. In 2021, Israel banned six Palestinian human rights NGOs, including Al Haq in Ramallah, an organization that has documented human rights violations in the occupied territories for many years – committed by both Israel and Palestinians. The language of “security” and “counterterrorism” has been and continues to be used to justify the ban on these NGOs. This language has long been extended to Israeli NGOs that advocate for the rights of Palestinians. Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem were accused of being “traitors” as early as 2016. A new Israeli tax law seeks to impose an 80 percent penalty tax on foreign (Western!) donations to Israeli NGOs. In April, the Israeli police banned the organization Standing Together from showing pictures of Palestinian children killed in a demonstration. And in January, the former German federal government revoked the foreign policy clearance and eligibility for funding of the peace activist organizations Zochrot and New Profile in the middle of their ongoing project period.

      None of this serves Israel’s security – quite the contrary – but it suppresses opposition to human rights violations. The language that obscures those weakens our judgment. Being able to judge is perhaps the most important political virtue, wrote Arendt. It is not loyalty that protects democracy, but the ability to distinguish. Those who want to learn from history must not be content with remembrance. Now is the time to act. To speak anew. To speak clearly. Because reality must not be defused by euphemisms. Arendt knew this. Those who speak of Gaza today should take her at her word.