(Image source: International Humanitarian Law Centre)

The following excerpt comes from Gilbert Achcar’s Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective (University of California Press, 2025). The book examines what led to the war on Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and how the mass death and destruction in Gaza has ramifications globally.

This excerpt comes from Part 1: “Reflections on the Gaza Genocide and Its World-Historical Significance.”

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The end of the Cold War, which saw the meltdown of the Soviet bloc, was seen by the opposite side as a major ideological victory, bolstering the radical alteration of the global balance of power. Predictably, it was seized by the United States, at a time when Reaganite triumphalism was in full spate, as a new historical opportunity to reclaim and revamp the “liberal international rules-based order” under Washington’s firm leadership. Against the backdrop of a brewing US-led war on Iraq, George H.W. Bush, addressing a Joint Session of Congress in 1990, announced a “new world order”:

“We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf [Kuwait’s invasion by Saddam Hussein’s troops], as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times … a new world order can emerge: a new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.

A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”

Today it is difficult not to smile ironically at these lines, which sound more parodic than historic – even though, in the same speech, George H. W. Bush eulogized America’s military power, urging Congress to maintain military spending at a high level, lest some might be tempted to believe that disarmament was back on the agenda.

Bush’s grandiloquence was even followed, during the “unipolar moment” opened by the implosion of the Soviet sphere, by “idealist” efforts – in the sense of international relations theory – to turn the “new world order” into a “cosmopolitan democracy” by way of upgrading the “liberal international rules-based order”. These efforts translated into the creation of a second international judicial body, the International Criminal Court (ICC), with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for four types of crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. The statute of the ICC was adopted in 1998, and the court itself was established in 2002.

Another fruit of the “cosmopolitan” drive to transcend the sovereignty of states, that pillar of the UN Charter, was the UNGA’s adoption in 2005 of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, authorizing

“collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

Adapting to this zeitgeist, Washington inaugurated a series of “humanitarian interventions” in the Horn of Africa, followed by the Balkans. In the latter region, it attached great importance to labelling as genocide the massacre of Bosnians perpetrated by Serbian forces, which was much lesser in its scale and intensity of violence than the Gaza hecatomb whose genocidal character it now obstinately refuses to recognize.

At the same time, in contrast with its displays of liberal good intention, Washington embarked in the 1990s on a course in international relations that would soon provoke a New Cold War. Instead of dissolving itself, NATO for the first time entered a phase of collective military interventionism, and expanded its membership to include an increasing number of states that had formerly been under Moscow’s thumb, including former Soviet Republics. Before the end of that transitional decade, the United States had led its NATO allies into the first major breach of international legality since 1990: the 1999 Kosovo War, launched by circumventing the UN Security Council (UNSC) to avoid Russian and Chinese vetoes. The “new world order” had proved short-lived indeed.

Although the United States and Israel had both voted against the ICC’s Rome Statute in 1998, they both signed it two years later – but never ratified it, thus confirming that their signatures were purely a political tactic. They both officially withdrew from it soon after: the United States in 2002, prior to its invasion of Iraq – its second major breach of international legality, and the most serious such breach between the end of the Cold War and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine (Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016); and Israel at the same time as Washington, as it started multiplying its violations of IHL from 2001 onward, launching a full-spectrum war against the Palestinians to quell the Second Intifada. The “war on terror” – the common banner under which George W. Bush’s administration and Ariel Sharon’s government waged their wars – thus replaced anticommunism as the central pretext for ignoring the rules of the international “rules-based order”.

As for the Responsibility to Protect, its most prominent use was to provide cover for the US-led intervention in Libya in 2011, which quickly overstepped what the UNSC resolution had greenlit, with abstentions from Moscow and Beijing. This precedent led to legitimate distrust of the West’s instrumentalization of R2P, and therefore a blockage of its use in subsequent major cases of large-scale massacre, most prominently Syria. Most importantly, R2P was blocked by Western powers in consideration of the present Gaza genocide. As Jeremy Moses aptly put it in an article on the “political and moral failure” of R2P, in which he discussed why attempts at invoking it for Gaza have remained limited and unheeded,

“In the end, the true test of the value of any norm is not whether it is useful in situations where it aligns with the interests of the powerful; rather, it is when it runs against those interests. By this measure, it is not only the R2P that has been proven to be of at best marginal value in relation to Gaza. We could also say that the entire edifice of international humanitarian law, human rights law and humanitarianism in general is in question.”

The entire legal edifice of the international rules-based order is indeed crumbling. The novelty of the use against Israel, the West’s spoiled child, of this edifice’s two key pillars, represented by the ICJ and ICC, and the negative reaction of most Western powers to their use – thus displaying a flagrant double standard highlighted by the contemporaneity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and by the Western powers’ contrasting reactions to the ICC’s arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu – have conspired to finally discredit the Western liberal pretense. As the Financial Times, a major organ of Western liberalism, complained:

“The elaboration of international humanitarian law was a pillar of the postwar rules-based framework. The creation in the 1990s of tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and later the ICC, as mechanisms to prosecute those accused of war crimes, helped to top out that framework – even if Russia, China and India, plus the US and Israel, stayed out of the ICC …

[M]any developing-world leaders will see the western divisions over [the ICC’s] warrants [against Netanyahu and Gallant] as a sign of hypocrisy and a readiness to pick and choose how to apply international law. The US was already considered complicit by many in the global south for unyielding support for Netanyahu’s far-right government.

This will be all the more damaging as it follows a broader erosion of the courts and domestic rule of law by populist leaders in a series of western democracies – which has now spread to the US. A convicted felon who sought to use the law to overturn the result of the last presidential election has been voted back into the White House.”

This venerable economic journal is absolutely right to connect the erosion of the domestic rule of law with the unravelling of the international rule of law. The world is indeed going through a twenty-first-century version of the past century’s interwar years, which saw the global rise of the far right in the guise of Italian Fascism, German Nazism and related movements. By endorsing the criminal deeds of a coalition of neo-fascists and neo-Nazis ruling Israel, Western liberal governments, political parties and intellectuals have largely contributed to the banalization of the far right. At the same time, they have condoned the whitewashing of the European and American far right’s antisemitism that Benjamin Netanyahu embarked upon several years ago – to the point of trying to absolve Adolf Hitler of the intent to perpetrate a genocide of the Jews, so as to accuse Amin al-Husseini (the Mufti of Palestine, who took refuge in Berlin and Rome between 1941 and 1945) of having suggested it to the Nazi Führer.

The “new antisemitism” attributed en bloc to Muslims, as well as to left-wing defenders of Muslim immigrants’ rights and critics of Israel, has thus come to serve as ideological cover to absolve the European and American far right of their past and present antisemitism, in order to collude with them on the ground of Islamophobia, nowadays the main feature of their racism and xenophobia. In the name of countering this purported antisemitism, a racial double standard is applied, fostering indifference to Palestinian suffering and leading to partake in a new instance of genocide denial. Those Western liberals who have indulged in such cowardly behavior have further discredited their own ideological standing in the face of the global surge of the far right. Thus, they have been digging their own grave.

Atlanticist liberalism is now definitively discredited. Far-right forces are on the rise within the Atlantic Alliance, including the two Atlantic strongholds of resistance to the Axis powers in World War II: the United States, where the far right has now prevailed, and Britain, where it may well prevail in the face of a very pale and uninspiring alternative. The second attempt to revitalize the “liberal international rules-based order” in the post–Cold War era has failed miserably, not because of the far-right surge that in fact came later, but due to the inconsistency, hypocrisy and hegemonic hubris of the upholders of Atlanticist liberalism themselves. Western condoning of the Gaza genocide has indeed been the final nail in the coffin of that purported rules-based order. The Western promise of rule of law made in 1945 and renewed in 1990 is now dead. The law of the jungle reigns supreme. May this relapse of international relations into barbarism be reversed before it leads to a new global catastrophe.

Gilbert Achcar is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books, published in more than twenty languages, include The Clash of Barbarisms, Perilous Power with Noam Chomsky, The Arabs and the Holocaust, and The New Cold War.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 67 of The Revealer podcast: “Understanding Gaza.”