The growing skepticism towards human rights is rarely concerned with what human rights are supposed to guarantee in their essence: human dignity and fundamental individual and collective rights and freedoms. Yet how (and by whom) these values have been formulated, institutionalized, and instrumentalized matters. Their promotion has enhanced living conditions for parts of the globe’s population while facilitating systems and structures of settler colonialism, discrimination, subjugation, and exploitation of others. As these gaps intensify, skepticism toward the rights framework grows. In today’s world, how could it be otherwise?
Palestine: Where the human rights framework has failed
In the past year, Israel has escalated its genocidal aggression, expediting its systematic, decades-long destruction of Palestinian life and identity and expanding its attacks to Lebanon, which has resulted in additional deaths and devastation.
In the besieged and closed Gaza, one year on, Israel has killed and injured more than 151,992 Palestinians, wiping more than 900 families entirely off the civilian registry while decimating every physical, material, and social aspect of human life. This is the recorded, known figure, with more than 10,000 bodies buried under the rubble. The true toll is likely much higher. In October 2023, Israel relaunched its military aggression against Palestinians under the guise of “self-defense,” with calls for complete destruction by heads of state and government officials, evoking religious grounds and claiming a war between the “people of light” and darkness, which has been compounded by statements of dehumanization (a common longstanding Zionist perception), further demonstrating the State of Israel’s intent for total annihilation and genocide.
Israel has deliberately starved 2.3 million Palestinians, particularly in the northern parts of Gaza, where 400,000 inhabitants are at risk of starving or dying of dehydration amid an escalating pattern of massacres and crimes committed therein in recent weeks. Israel has forced nearly 90% of Gaza’s population into repeated displacement without access to adequate shelter, water, sanitation facilities, or any means of sustenance. The conditions of life that Israel created have been conducive to famine and the spread of infectious diseases and illnesses, including diarrhea, pneumonia, measles, meningitis, hepatitis, and polio. Israel has bombed the tents of the displaced, burning alive those inhabiting them. Hospitals have become frequent targets, causing the deaths of journalists and paramedics on rescue missions, burying ambulances under the sand, and leading to the collapse of the health system. Mass graves have become commonplace.
Elsewhere in Palestine, Israel’s forces—military, police, prison service, and settler militias—continue to attack, abduct, torture, isolate, mass incarcerate, and terrorize Palestinians, including using them as human shields. They have bombed Palestinian homes and destroyed entire neighborhoods and even refugee camps; in other areas, they have appropriated land and property to overtly and rapidly expand the settlement enterprise, further entrenching apartheid and domination. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees continue to endure the permanent-temporary reality of dispossession and exile, with the internationally recognized right of return further undermined through Israel’s attacks on the relief agency UNRWA.
This is merely a glimpse into what Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, causing severe physical and mental suffering, with its methods of warfare, distorting principles of international humanitarian law to justify its open intent to bring about the population’s physical destruction, in whole and in part, in the context of its fragmented and enclaved realities, part and parcel of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba; a crime in and by itself.
In the face of this harrowing hundred years of war, Palestinians continue to broadcast their agony to the world, demanding an end to the state-sponsored and internationally endorsed barbarity. The demands are premised on the legal obligations of states and relevant actors set in international law. The most recent atrocities have precipitated unprecedented waves of solidarity campaigns and actions all over the world—in the streets and on university campuses, before courts, and in front of complicit banks and arms factories—leading, in some cases, to partially halt arms sales to Israel and to divestments from private and public entities that previously enabled Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
Impunity and exceptionalism: Why human rights failed
These mighty actions have not ended Israel and its allies’ prolonged colonization and assault against the Palestinian people. While the dismantling of settler-colonial regimes requires sustained and cumulative efforts, the cost should never be this high. Seventy-six years ago, the international community pledged to uphold and protect human dignity and justice for all and to prevent such atrocities by adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So why have the Palestinian people been denied the most basic elements of human dignity and integrity?
As was once true of apartheid South Africa, Israel does not and cannot survive alone. Its Zionist settler-colonial project could not have been created or sustained had it not been for the political and material support of the international community, including states, corporations, and charities—staunchly from the West but also the East. The international community’s unconditional support for Israel has allowed its colonization and apartheid to intensify into acts of genocide and the widespread persecution of Palestinians.
Ultimately, genocide is “never unleashed without warning,” and it certainly does not happen overnight. What does it mean when the United Nations—whose primary goals are to maintain international peace, promote human rights, and uphold international law—partitioned Palestine in 1947 to allow a self-defined settler-colonial project to formally commence, knowingly denying the local population the right to self-determination and sovereignty over their land and resources? What do we make of the UN Security Council’s role in repeatedly allowing violations of Palestinian rights to persist? Despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression committed against the Palestinian people, the persistent political pressure, threats, and blackmail exerted on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its staff during the proceedings on the Situation in Palestine have led the ICC to fail in fulfilling its mandate to hold perpetrators accountable and deter atrocity crimes. How should we respond to an ICC that appears to have been irreversibly compromised?
Liberation for human rights
The Palestinian people’s struggle to assert their human rights should not be isolated from their struggle for self-determination and liberation from settler colonialism. Recently, the ICJ finally confirmed that Israel’s unlawful occupation violently impedes this right, amounting to segregation and apartheid, and reaffirmed the legal obligations and consequences incumbent upon Israel and the international community to bring it to an end “as rapidly as possible.”
As states and corporations exert capture of the human rights and international law systems, further perpetuating colonial, imperial, and capitalist power dynamics, and at this pivotal point where the international order “stands upon the edge of a knife,” it becomes necessary to question the relevance, effectiveness, and even validity of human rights in their current modality. This is the moment for lawyers, advocates, researchers, educators, and activists to adopt an “emancipatory” approach that rejects the instrumentalization of international law and human rights in the service of structures of oppression. Decentering rights interpretation and standard-setting from insulated offices is vital to challenging the status quo.
This process starts by refusing to have rogue states and institutions, notably those with well-recorded histories of colonization, enslavement, and despotism, dictate human rights and humanitarian law, their interpretation and application. These states have no legitimacy to define principles of proportionality, who qualifies as a freedom fighter, nor who is worthy of humanity.
Now is the time to revive the understanding of human rights as human and moral values rather than theoretical frameworks—a tool that contributes to mobilizing the masses to confront and dismantle the systems leading humanity to perdition. Amidst this calamity, it is imperative to rehabilitate the international human rights framework—maybe then it will truly apply universally.