No Justice in Imperialist Courts
“Settler colonialism is an ongoing project of erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to replace them with settlers, who claim to own and dominate the land.” -The Red Nation
Israel, like the United States, is a settler colony built on stolen land. Unlike the US, Israel hasn’t yet established full control of the land, and so it’s been forcibly removing the indigenous Palestinian people since the colony’s founding in 1948. The European colonization of North America began the process of extermination back in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, so they had a 500-year head start. Anglo-American colonization of North America and beyond to global capitalist and imperialist expansion, established (with its European allies) the “political world order” as we know it today.
Settler colonialism is a specific type of colonialism. Some have even argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a colonial war too. It’s just that Russia isn’t necessarily trying to seize land for its own settlers to move to, like Israel’s settlements. Russia is trying to acquire the populated land of another country rich in natural resources.
All types of colonialism are related though and can best be understood as attempts to secure what Adolf Hitler called “Lebensraum” or “living space.” War for territorial expansion, the ghettoization of Jewish communities, even the extermination camps of the “Final Solution” were undertaken as part of the Nazi’s settler colonial project to expand “living space” for their own version of the middle class “American Dream.”[1]
That’s what we’ve been witnessing in Israel for decades. For some Zionist settlers from the US, suburban life has become far too expensive. So they move to Israeli settlements to encounter American Dream there instead. Genocide is palatable if it means seeing the familiar expansion of US-like strip malls and big-box stores in the Israeli suburbs. It also suggests that colonial violence of this nature produces broad spiritual death, just like in the United States.
As a response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, South Africa has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. “The hypocritical onslaught at The Hague against the state of the Jews that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust…is a moral low point in the history of nations,” Netanyahu argued in response to the trial. Of course, settlers like Benjamin Netanyahu don’t believe in justice, and when pressed, attempt to invert victimhood in a heavy-handed manner to paper over their own heinous crimes. In fact, his claims of some sort of Jewish identity seems reduced to the “white mask” of the colonizer. It is a mask that Zionists have always worn, and one that persists in the colonial mentality of the US ruling class and their most fervent subjects.
The Criminals and the Courts
The ICJ, like the International Criminal Court (ICC), was born as a response to the Nazi Holocaust in an attempt to stop it from ever happening again. This doesn’t mean international law is going to come to anyone’s rescue, but Netanyahu’s genocidal hypocrisy becomes especially apparent when one compares him to the late Ben Ferencz.
Ferencz, who was also Jewish, had been the last living Nuremberg Trial prosecutor until his death in April 2023 at the age of 103. Ferencz was among those who led the charge for the ICJ and was responsible for the creation of the ICC too, believing it to be necessary in the fight for global justice. Unfortunately, even in the scores of obituaries after his death, only one mentioned his opposition to the crimes against humanity committed by the USA.
In a 2019 documentary called “Prosecuting Evil,” Ferencz pointed out that he and Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara co-authored an article in the New York Times mid-December 2000 urging that then President Bill Clinton have the United States join the ICC. McNamara knew full well that in the US becoming a signatory, he could be tried for crimes against humanity because of his role in the US anti-communist war in Vietnam. Clinton signed on, but then George W. Bush quickly withdrew in 2001.
In the documentary, Ferencz puts it bluntly, saying the Nazi Lebensraum of “anticipatory self-defense” and a “war of aggression” was an “argument the Pentagon would make today.”[2] The same can be said for Israel. Even though the US has not rejoined the court, ‘Genocide Joe’ wanted Putin tried there for crimes against humanity in 2023. The ICC went so far as issuing an arrest warrant. Would they do the same for Biden and Netanyahu?
Unfortunately, the United States, Russia, China, and Israel do not recognize the court. So, it’s clear that international law won’t stop the genocide. But by going back to these courts’ connection to the Nuremberg Trials against the Nazis, we can see what their global task should be and why we need a revolution instead.
The Nuremberg Trials were not used to prosecute crimes against humanity committed by the US or the USSR, for example, nor were the major corporations that funded the Nazis and subsequently benefited from slave labor, as they were originally intended. Had they, the trials would have quickly led back to US corporations and the Wall Street investment firms that profited from Jewish slave labor, while supporting fascism over the so-called “democracy” at home.
The trials would have ended up at the feet of John Foster and Allen Dulles, from their days as partners at a law firm called Sullivan & Cromwell. Allen was reluctant to support the Nazis back in the 1930’s, but not John Foster. Among other forms of support, John Foster built the nation’s most famous America First organization with famed Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindberg. He also helped broker major trade deals to support the Nazis financially, even after US law made that illegal.[3]
Both brothers left the law firm to lead the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) during WWII. As the war began drawing to a close, they led a team that hired Nazis into that OSS and the FBI.[4] After the war ended, Allen was tapped to run the newly formed CIA in 1946. A few years later, John Foster was appointed head of the State Department. They were the architects of the US foreign policy still practiced today, and they did it with the same strategy the Nazis utilized in Germany, as well as with actual Nazis on the payroll.
Real Justice is Revolution
Has anyone counted all the crimes against humanity committed by the US state and its corporations around the world since those trials at Nuremberg? Isn’t the continued existence of this North American settler colony a crime against humanity unto itself? How many wars of aggression cloaked in lies have been waged on the people of the world? Can its capitalist economy and 1% even afford to justly compensate? What about reparations for slavery, and the damage done to global ecosystems?
If there were any true justice, and the US state was tried at The Hague and found guilty of these crimes today, the only reasonable verdict would require the abolition of the settler colony known as the US, the liquidation of its corporations and stock markets. It would require nothing less than a revolution, which is why justice can never be achieved through a system of “international law” designed and controlled by the very perpetrators of violence and injustice.
This same standard can and should be applied to all imperialist nations and their corporations around the world. How many have committed crimes against humanity? How many nations and corporations are colonizers themselves? We need a global revolution against all the colonizers and their genocidal nightmares of various middle class “dreams.”
Instead of Netanyahu’s colonizer whiteness, we need the revolutionary socialism of Abram Leon. Forced into hiding by the Nazis, Leon was a Jewish Marxist who resurfaced in order to organize miners, trying to shut down the Nazi war machine. Before he was captured and eventually exterminated in one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Leon described WWII and the Holocaust as “the greatest social explosion the world has ever seen.” He believed it was “finally preparing the liberation of the most persecuted pariahs of our planet.”[5] He believed it would lead to global revolution.
The camps were indeed liberated, just not soon enough to save him and the six million other Jewish people. But his hope for global revolution still lives on, now in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Palestinians have become “the most persecuted pariahs on our planet” and the Zionist colonizers pursuing Lebensraum, including with their colonizer partners in the USA, have become the fascist perpetrators.
Abram Leon’s belief in the possibility of global revolution rested on this: “The ghettos and the yellow badges do not prevent the workers from feeling a growing solidarity with those who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering.”[6] From his own lived experience in Auschwitz, which went from a concentration camp to one for mass extermination, so too has Gaza gone from the world’s largest open-air prison to a site of mass extermination.
Though Abram Leon didn’t get to experience the global revolution he believed in, instead dying in a Nazi gas chamber, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is giving rise to worldwide solidarity. It is we who must feel that growing solidarity. Indeed, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is a harbinger of the fascism that is coming for all of us. In this way, Palestinians are “suffering most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering.” From the River to the Sea is the path by which we all become free.
NOTES
[1] Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016), pp. 13-14, 28, 325.
[2] Barry Avrich, Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz, Canada, Melbar Entertainment Group, February 22nd, 2019.
[3] Nancy Lisagor & Frank Lipsius, Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell, (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1988). P. 119-159. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2017).
[4] Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2014).
[5] Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). P. 254.
[6] Ibid, 254.
Atlee McFellin lives in East Cleveland, Ohio and is originally from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was raised in no small part by his late maternal grandmother who was born into a middle-class Catholic family and grew up in Hitler’s Germany.
