People versus Monsters: Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo
In a place scarred by genocide, we gathered as another unfolded in Gaza. This people's tribunal is more than a legal inquiry; it is a moral intervention against the global complicity that enables it.
It could not be a more apt place for this to take place. Amid the grand green mountains and clear rivers, with Sarajevo’s history pressing in as both weight and warning, an assembly was convened.
A group of leading international lawyers, historians, political scientists, former diplomats, policymakers, journalists, and activists met this week, two and a half hours from Srebrenica, where, in 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred over two days, in what is now formally recognized as genocide.
In Sarajevo, a Tribunal was held to examine Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and the complicity of states, corporations, and media systems in a war that has killed over 53,000 Palestinians, displaced close to two million, generated a “pandemic of life-altering disabilities,” and starved a population that has refused to flee or chosen to stay.
In this post, I will share highlights, arguments, and frameworks from the Gaza Tribunal, which I took part in. This is a long piece, because it needs to be. Even within this length, I cannot include many of the important points raised by the distinguished academics and activists who participated, including Abed Takriti, Cemil Aydın, Raji Sourani, Lara Elborno, Raz Segal, Heidi Matthews, Wessam Ahmad, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Jeff Halper, Michael Lynk, and Susan Akram. Please bear with me.
The Gaza Tribunal was established in November 2024 in London, as I wrote at the time, and is presided over by Prof Richard Falk, emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University and former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2008–2014).
It is a people’s tribunal, inspired by the South African anti-apartheid campaign that mobilized international civil society against state impunity, and also by the 1966 Russell Tribunal led by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, which exposed the United States’ war in Vietnam.
The Gaza Tribunal represents another effort to expand the realm of political possibility through civil society, to counteract the inertia of state realism and geopolitical calculation, and to record—without euphemism or erasure—the historical record of a genocide.
People’s Tribunals that are established throughout history have often been dismissed by governments and ridiculed by elites as quixotic or futile. Yet, let us not forget that the Russell Tribunal reshaped public understanding of Vietnam and helped build the political momentum that followed. These tribunals do not derive their power from legal jurisdiction but from civil legitimacy. In a world where formal mechanisms have failed, civil society is the last institution still capable of moral clarity.
Penny Green, professor of law and globalisation at Queen Mary University of London and a member of the Tribunal’s steering committee, captured the political atmosphere in her opening remarks: “We are at a crossroads. As Gramsci observed at the rise of Mussolini, ‘the old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.’”
This is not a humanitarian crisis, she said, but a crisis manufactured by monstrous systems: military, economic, media, legal. And such systems must be fought at every level.
The Tribunal’s main aims
The four-day gathering in Sarajevo had three interlocking aims.
First, to gather evidence of Israel’s criminal responsibility—and that of third-party states and private actors—in perpetrating war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression, and genocide, using both expert and eyewitness testimony.
Second, to examine how dominant international actors shape the language through which violence is made defensible. How historical memory is recast to mask the reality of the ongoing assault on the Palestinian people. How the history of Palestine is distorted. How the memory of European genocide is summoned to silence criticism. How antisemitism is instrumentalised to shield Israeli impunity, while recycled stereotypes of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians work to strip the victims of their humanity.
Third, to expose the tension between the formal commitments to international law by powerful states, especially in the Global North, and their consistent refusal to enforce those norms when geopolitical interests are at stake. Modern international law, though rich in substance, is toothless in practice. Surely, it is not self-executing but should not depend entirely on the political will of powerful states. And, yet, it does.
The post-World War II order, often celebrated as liberal and rules-based, was from the beginning shaped to privilege power over principle. Its breakdown is now visible to a wider public with the rise of authoritarian governments in Europe and Trump’s brand of anti-liberalism and isolationism assumed White House for a second time, but the structure was always designed to accommodate impunity to the powerful.
Falk: Why the Order Fails the Palestinians
Why has the existing international system failed so catastrophically to prevent a genocide unfolding in real time?
Richard Falk argues that the post-1945 international order, anchored by the United Nations, was deliberately crafted to limit its ability to challenge the violence of its most powerful members. The UN Security Council which is the only body with enforcement capacity was undemocratically composed and granted permanent veto powers to the five victorious states of World War II. This gave those states unchecked discretion to act in their own interests, regardless of international law or human rights principles.
One outcome is what Falk describes as the enforcement gap, laid bare by the UN’s refusal or inability to halt Israel’s assault on Gaza. States, most particularly the United States has not only abstained from action but has actively enabled the violence with weapons, funding, diplomatic cover, and intelligence sharing.
This system also created an accountability gap. After World War II, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials prosecuted only the defeated powers. Atrocities committed by the Allies, such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were excluded from judgment. The victors chose the judges and absolved themselves. Taken together, the enforcement gap, the complicity gap, and the accountability gap reveal the design flaws of the postwar system. International justice is not neutral.
The system claims to uphold international law but routinely fails to apply it equally, especially when the interests of powerful states are at stake.
Mokhiber: Israeli ‘exception virus’ and the ‘two UN’s’
International human rights lawyer, and former senior UN official Craig Mokhiber argued that the longstanding exception granted to Israel under international law—and the international system’s complicity in enabling it—dates back to the very foundations of the post-World War II order, the establishment of the United Nations, and the creation of the Israeli state. Mokhiber, who resigned from the UN in October 2023 with a widely circulated letter warning of genocide in Gaza, contends that this exception has deepened over eight decades, becoming a structural feature of the global system.
According to Mokhiber, this “virus of exception” has now thoroughly infected the corridors of international institutions, including the UN itself. While some parts of the UN system—especially the International Court of Justice, independent human rights procedures, and humanitarian agencies—have continued to push back and defend Palestinian rights, the broader institutional response has failed catastrophically. The genocide of the past 19 months in Gaza, and the refusal of key international actors to intervene or even name the crime, have laid bare the extent of this failure.
Mokhiber identifies what he calls the existence of two UNs: one grounded in the norms and values of the Charter and human rights law, and another (more dominant) operating in deference to state power, particularly that of the United States.
Despite historic rulings by the ICJ, principled work by UN special rapporteurs, and the indispensable efforts of humanitarian agencies like UNRWA, the overall response of the international system has been grossly inadequate. The Security Council remains paralyzed by the U.S. veto; the General Assembly has failed to suspend Israel’s privileges or mobilize meaningful protection for Palestinians; and senior UN leadership, including those charged with overseeing human rights and genocide prevention, have avoided using the term “genocide,” preferring instead the safer language of “conflict.”
This institutional silence has enabled the Israeli regime to carry out its campaign with near-total impunity. Fixing these institutional failures is not a technical exercise. It is, as Mokhiber insists, a matter of survival.
Bennis: How activists can use UN decisions
Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international adviser to Jewish Voice for Peace, also touched upon the ‘enforcement gap’ and argued that one of the most severe failures of international institutions lies in their deliberate design to lack any real mechanism for enforcement.
While the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can issue rulings, it has no direct capacity to ensure compliance. This limitation, however, does not make enforcement impossible. Instead, the responsibility shifts to other parts of the United Nations, to individual states, and most importantly, to civil society and grassroots movements.
Drawing on history, she referenced the international campaign against apartheid in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, repeated U.S. vetoes had blocked Security Council efforts to sanction the apartheid regime. In response, newly independent African states and others turned to the General Assembly, which passed a series of resolutions condemning apartheid and calling for sanctions. Although these resolutions were officially nonbinding, they became essential tools for global movements. Activists used them to pressure their own governments to cut trade, banking, military, and diplomatic ties with the South African state.
Bennis argued that a similar model could be applied to the situation in Palestine today. The UN General Assembly resolution from September 2024, which calls on member states to take actions to halt Israel’s violations of international law, including ending arms transfers, could serve as a foundation for such efforts. If social movements succeed in pushing individual governments to implement these measures, a cumulative effect could begin to shift the political climate. This would increase the likelihood of compelling even the United States to reconsider its unconditional support.
This approach does not rely on high-level diplomacy or consensus among powerful states. Instead, it calls for broad-based public mobilization. As with the South African case, it is social movements that can give political force to General Assembly resolutions. What is required is coordinated international pressure to fill the enforcement vacuum left by institutions that have failed to act.
Pappe: Because Israel is organically European
Historian Prof Ilan Pappé argued that recent statements by European leaders—such as the joint warning from the UK, France, and Canada that they would consider “concrete actions” if Israel continued its “egregious” military operations in Gaza—are direct responses to growing public pressure. This, he noted, is evidence that mass protests and civil society mobilization can produce cracks in the otherwise rigid structure of Western complicity. But what sustains Israel’s sense of impunity is not only American backing, it is the deeper, more entrenched role of Europe. A shift in policy from the UK or key EU member states could generate real pressure to halt or delay Israel’s assault. Europe has both the legal instruments and the geopolitical leverage to impose consequences and bring about at least a temporary cessation of hostilities.
The more urgent question, Pappé emphasized, is why this power remains unused. Why are Europe’s political, intellectual, and media elites so unmoved? A group of EU officials recently echoed this concern in a letter to the bloc’s leadership, criticizing the European Union for showing “little or no meaningful action” in response to the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
For Pappé, the explanation lies in the foundational nature of the Zionist project. Zionism and the State of Israel are not external to Europe; they are deeply European in origin and function. The term “Jewish state” often obscures this fact. Israel is, in many ways, an organic extension of Western Europe, embedded in its political architecture and cultural imaginary. The relationship between Europe and its Jewish populations has long been fraught and ambiguous defined by both reverence and persecution, awe and annihilation. After the Holocaust, rather than confronting the antisemitism that had culminated in genocide, Europe’s ruling elites chose to export the so-called “Jewish question” elsewhere. They supported the construction of a Western-style, settler-colonial outpost in the heart of the Arab world.
This decision, driven by a mix of capitalist logic, romantic nationalism, and racial hierarchy, displaced the problem without resolving it. Because Israel was, from the outset, a European project built on Arab land, the suffering of Palestinians has remained structurally invisible to Europe.
Makdisi: The Palestinian Exception in Western Humanism
Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, critiques the post-World War II international order for its deliberate marginalisation of the Palestinian people in the name of liberal humanism. He argues that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was not simply the result of Western settler colonialism, but something deeper: the reinvention of Western moral authority through a Philo-Zionist humanism (a political and moral investment in Zionism as a redemptive project for the West) that, from the start, acknowledged but ultimately dismissed the dispossession of Palestinians. Western leaders, even liberal icons like Eleanor Roosevelt and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, rationalised Palestinian displacement as a tragic but necessary cost. The Nakba, for Makdisi, wasn’t an unforeseen consequence. It was a ‘solution’ to a ‘demographic challenge’ long contemplated by Zionist planners. The refugee crisis it produced became the domain of humanitarianism, stripped of politics and history.
Over time, Palestinians were not only removed from their land but erased from the moral and historical consciousness of the West. And when they insisted on their narrative, they were often recast as anti-Semitic interlopers, arriving inconveniently to disrupt the tidy closure of European history. Makdisi concludes with a guarded hope: perhaps this erasure can be challenged by new generations and new media, but only if the West is ready to universalise its memory, to admit more than one, Eurocentric history.
As seen: While Pappé locates Europe's complicity in the historical scaffolding of Zionism, Makdisi displays the moral and ideological foundations that made such complicity not only possible but palatable. If Pappé’s indictment is focused on Europe’s export of the “Jewish question” and its structural blindness to Palestinian suffering, Makdisi turns our attention to the moral architecture that underwrites the policy failures or colonial complicity. The silence of Europe’s political and intellectual classes, he argues, is the outcome of a postwar liberal order in which the Palestinian was never meant to be seen, let alone defended. This was not simply about enabling Zionist settlement. There is also something called salvaging Western conscience.
The Western Mainstream Media’s Complicity
When we speak of complicity, the role of Western mainstream media stands out as one of the most glaring.
Media complicity in the Gaza genocide manifests in multiple modalities.
The most overt is the targeted killing of journalists. Since October 2023, more than 230 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza. Some were murdered in the line of reporting; others died in airstrikes on their homes. These were not incidental casualties. They were silenced because they insisted on documenting the war from within.
Other forms are more insidious. Scholars have described a pattern of “unpeopling.” It is not only Gaza that is being unpeopled, media discourse itself is being unpeopled, stripped of Palestinian presence, voice, and humanity.
Palestinians are routinely described as being “struck” or “killed,” but rarely “murdered.” Children in Gaza are labeled “minors,” while Israeli children are simply “children.” This linguistic asymmetry is not accidental. It is systemic.
In a similar vein, the constant use of the descriptor “Hamas-run” for Gaza implicitly renders all infrastructure—schools, hospitals, bakeries—legitimate military targets. This framing collapses political distinctions and erases civilian status. In this way, It does not require fabrications to obscure reality; framing alone suffices.
The second major issue is the weaponisation of the journalistic principle of objectivity. First, the concept is hollowed out; then it is strategically applied to an utterly asymmetrical war.
Israeli state narratives are rarely challenged in mainstream news coverage. In the name of so-called objectivity, lies are often given a platform to counterbalance the voices of Palestinians. This creates a grotesque symmetry, a false equivalence, where even the most basic and verifiable Palestinian claims—such as the fact that an entire family has been wiped out in a matter of hours—are treated with suspicion, interrogated for proof, or framed as allegations. Meanwhile, official Israeli statements, no matter how implausible or unsubstantiated, are reported uncritically, often repeated verbatim and granted the authority of fact. This is not objectivity. Journalism does not fulfill its duty by giving equal weight to truth and propaganda and misinformation.
To amplify state misinformation and disinformation under the guise of neutrality is not impartial. It does the inverse.
Remember the uncritical circulation of the false “beheaded babies” story. It made global headlines, was amplified by heads of state and when retracted its purpose had already been fulfilled : to re-inscribe Israeli exceptionalism and Palestinian monstrosity.
I do not believe this is journalistic failure. As Edward Said noted decades ago, media often functions in “perfect synchrony” with colonial policy. That synchrony today extends from talking points to headlines, from editorial priorities to the silencing of Palestinian knowledge.
The role of Big Tech
Beyond editorial choices and colonial frameworks, a newer infrastructure of suppression has emerged in the last decade and a half. Information is no longer controlled solely by newsrooms. It is filtered through platforms governed by the profit motives and ideological whims of a handful of tech executives. Social media platforms, as we very well know now, under opaque algorithms that determine what is seen and what is buried.
Even if traditional media reforms, the flow of information remains subject to these digital gatekeepers. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai wield disproportionate power over global discourse. Censorship is now enacted through algorithmic suppression, monetization thresholds, and opaque enforcement.
Every Palestinian voice, every journalist, activist, and eyewitness must now clear these unseen barriers, as well, to be heard.
**The transcripts of the Tribunal will be open access, and I will share them once they are available. In the meantime, you can browse all related materials here and watch a video recording here.
Refreshing Journalism Thank you for your clear articulation of the purposely altered paradigms in which we are unknowingly emersed. This article brought my head above water. People's Tribunals are contemporary archives of truth in which continued analysis and contrast of the past and present weave understanding of futures yet to come.
Thanks for sharing your impressions of the Gaza tribunal. Another important people's tribunal that Prof. Falk was involved in is the World Tribunal on Iraq, whose final session took place in Istanbul in 2005. Over a period of two years, the tribunal gathered in about 20 cities, and created a historical record of the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq. I think WTI has a special place within the canon of people's tribunals as it both took its lifeline from, but in turn strengthened, the anti-war movement.