Ex-UN Official Reveals True Scope of Gaza Genocide Plans | Craig Mokhiber

## A genocidal project in plain sight The conversation with Craig Mokhiber reframes Gaza not as a sudden catastrophe but as the latest phase in a long-running, genocidal project. The central claim is stark: what is unfolding in Gaza is not an aberration or a series of isolated military operations, but the culmination of an eight-decade strategy aimed at the erasure — physical, cultural, and historical — of a people. That assertion forces a reorientation in how we judge institutions, laws, and political rhetoric. If genocide has no speed limit, as the discussants noted, then slow attrition, legalistic camouflage, and episodic massacres are all part of the same continuum. The moral urgency shifts from debating whether genocide is happening to asking how a global order built after 1945 has allowed such a project to persist and accelerate. ## Two United Nations: legal conscience and political complicity One of the most consequential themes in the exchange is the bifurcated nature of the United Nations. The UN is not a single, monolithic actor; it contains within it competing logics. On one side stand the independent judicial and human-rights mechanisms — special rapporteurs, treaty bodies, and the International Court of Justice — which, over decades, have developed a robust, law-based critique of Israel’s policies and of the denial of Palestinian rights. On the other side are the political corridors — member-state coalitions, the Security Council, and diplomatic practice — where power politics often override legal norms. This split explains much of the paradox of contemporary international life: the law says one thing; power implements another. Mokhiber emphasizes that the legal voice in the UN has never fully dominated, even when its findings were clear. Yet, he also points to an important reversal: legal mechanisms that once felt tokenized are now gathering force. ICJ proceedings alleging genocidal acts, ICC arrest warrants, and repeated condemnations from credible human-rights organizations signal that legal institutions are beginning to pierce the wall of impunity that has long shielded powerful allies. The reconciliation of legal judgment with political will remains the essential unresolved question. ## The erosion of a postwar legal order A second thread traces how the international legal order, painstakingly built after World War II, has been undermined by both state practice and selective enforcement. For decades, the Palestinian question occupied a central place in the UN’s agenda: resolutions, observers, and special agencies like UNRWA attempted to address displacement and occupation. Over time, however, those legal commitments were diluted by diplomatic maneuvering — notably the Oslo framework — which recast political bargaining as the primary route to resolution and effectively sidelined core legal claims such as the right of return, equal citizenship, and reparations. Mokhiber’s critique is that Oslo functioned less as a solution and more as a tactical maneuver to manage and pacify a problem that demanded accountability. The legal architecture that protected human dignity and prohibited mass displacement was gradually hollowed out by politics. Where law once offered a standard against which state action could be judged, it increasingly became an instrument of deferred justice. The consequence is twofold: first, legal norms lose potency when their enforcement is inconsistent; second, the reputational and material supports for settler-colonial projects remain intact when political patronage protects them. ## Settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the logic of annihilation A crucial analytical pivot in the discussion situates the Israeli project within a broader family of settler-colonial formations. Settler colonialism, unlike other forms of expansion, requires the elimination or suppression of an existing native polity to make way for the newcomers. Mokhiber insists that Zionism — as implemented in state policy over many decades — shares essential features with 19th- and 20th-century settler movements elsewhere: dispossession, demographic engineering, cultural erasure, and legal regimes designed to entrench the settlers’ dominance. This framing refuses to treat violence in Palestine as an isolated ethnic or religious conflict and instead places it within a global pattern where the racialized hierarchies of empire and white supremacy shaped statecraft and law. The composition of diplomatic blocs, such as the “WEOG and Others” grouping that includes the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, was noted as revealing: an alignment that is less about geography and more about shared imperial histories and sympathies. Seen this way, practices of protracted displacement, incremental deprivation, and occasional cycles of extreme violence are not anomalies but instruments in a long-term strategy of demographic transformation. ## Genocide as continuum: fast and slow manifestations The speakers distinguish among different temporal forms of genocide — rapid, hidden, and open — and argue that Palestine has experienced all three at various moments. The massacres and sieges that make headlines are the catastrophic peaks in a landscape shaped by decades of slow attrition. The Nakba of 1948 was, in this account, an expedited phase of destruction intended to purge as many Palestinians as possible. The subsequent decades saw a shift to low-intensity, structurally embedded forms of destruction that were easier for Western publics and policymakers to accept, or to ignore. That tactical oscillation — sometimes brutal and overt, sometimes bureaucratic and incremental — is what allowed the project to be both sustainable and politically palatable. But the reversion to overt, large-scale assault in recent years demonstrates that the underlying goal has not changed: the elimination of Palestinian presence and rights on the land. Given this, the debate about whether current events constitute genocide is not just academic; it is a question about how the international community chooses to name and therefore to respond to systemic and ongoing forms of destruction. ## Law, politics, and the multivalent path to accountability Despite the grim diagnosis, the conversation offers a pragmatic view on pathways to challenge impunity. Legal action matters: ICJ proceedings, ICC investigations, and UN human-rights findings can delegitimize abuses and provide a record indispensable for future accountability. Yet law alone is unlikely to dismantle entrenched patronage and military might. Historical parallels — especially the end of apartheid South Africa — underline the power of combined strategies: grassroots resistance, international solidarity movements, economic pressure, and diplomatic isolation, all working in tandem with legal pressure. Mokhiber, reflecting senior UN experience, underscores that these instruments are complementary. Law gives moral and institutional standing to claims; mass mobilization changes the political calculus of sponsor states; and targeted economic and cultural boycotts can make continued complicity costly. The lesson is that legitimacy has shifted: broad global opinion favors a rule-of-law response and respect for Palestinian rights. The remaining obstacle is the concentration of military and political power in a narrow set of Western capitals — a problem to be met by sustained coalition-building across civil society and state actors willing to respect legal constraints. ## What responsibility now requires If the analytic frame is right, the implications are profound for scholars, policymakers, and citizens. First, accepting the genocidal continuum reframes policy priorities: immediate humanitarian relief is vital, but so is strategic pressure aimed at ending the legal and structural mechanisms that enable removal and dispossession. Second, the renewed efficacy of international legal mechanisms should be nurtured, not ta

Ex-UN Official Reveals True Scope of Gaza Genocide | Craig Mokhiber Genocide has no speed limits nor time constrains. The two-year long slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza is but the latest phase of a Holocaust that has been going on for nearly a century. The deliberate and collective plan to erase an entire people physically, culturally, and even strike them from the historical record is much older than "October 7". The complete destruction of this ancient Arab civilisation is systematic and perpetrated not only by the Israelis. It's the effort of white-settler colonial Europeans to pull off just one more time the annihilation of an indigenous population the way the European's exterminated already three other continents. Today I’m talking to Craig Mokhiber, the former Director of the human rights office at the UN Headquarters in New York, who in October 2023 quit the agency publically, over the already unfolding artrocities in Gaza and what most of us today recognize as the beginning of the Gaza Genocide. Craig's Article: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/yemen-is-acting-responsibly-to-stop-genocide-and-the-u-s-is- bombing-them-for-it/ #M3 When they say we have shared values with Israel, they don't mean democracy and human rights. I mean, Israel has never been a state which exemplified those. It's not a democracy. It's an apartheid regime. It's an oppressive authoritarian regime. A large proportion of the people it controls live under a military dictatorship. A large proportion of the people who have a right to be a part of the polity are not even allowed to come home from the diaspora. So it's never been a democracy. It could never be a democracy unless it were to abandon Zionist ideology and say, yes, as I have always advocated, by the way, we need a single democratic secular state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. But it will not do that because that erases the whole project, which is a different ideological project altogether. The enthusiastic support for that is because of shared negative values like colonialism, like white supremacy, like the domination of the West over the rest of the planet. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the Human Rights Office at the UN headquarters in New York, who in 2023 quit the agency publicly over the already unfolding atrocities in Gaza and what most of us today recognize as the beginning of the Gaza genocide. The grim and horrendous situation in Palestine, as well as the role of international law, is what we want to discuss today. So, Craig, welcome. -- 1 of 19 -- #M3 Thank you, Pascal. Nice to be with you. #M2 Nice to have you because, as I've told you before, you're one of those voices that dares to speak out. And you also put things into an international law context, which I appreciate very much. Although there are people who say the current situation shows that international law doesn't matter, I would disagree. But you've been working in this field for 30 years. Can we maybe begin with your assessment of the situation? Have you ever seen something that resembles the current situation in Palestine? #M3 I have not. I've never seen a situation that resembles the current situation in Palestine. And I've never seen a situation, not just in my 32 years at the UN, but my 40-plus years in the international human rights movement, where the entire international legal regime, the entire international human rights system, was so precarious and rendered so precarious by the very situation that we're talking about in Palestine. There have been ups and downs. There have been difficult decades when even the UN, at least the political offices of the UN, abandoned what was the more principled approach to Palestine, one based in international law, one based in international human rights, all in the name of this Oslo ruse, this amorphous political process that was never intended to and never could have delivered justice for the Palestinian people, at least not in a legal or a moral sense. Those were very difficult times as well because the international community lost the plot. They forgot about the rights of the Palestinian people throughout all of those years. But, you know, there is a history before Oslo, which is the entire length of time from the beginning of the UN or the destruction of Palestine in the Nakba and the founding of the State of Israel. Until Oslo started, you actually had an international community that was very focused on the rights of the Palestinian people, their right to self-determination, and opposition to the colonization of Palestine, as well as Zionism as a form of racism and colonialism. All of that was pushed back onto the back burner and beyond by the Oslo process, which I think was exactly, tactically, what it was intended to do by many of its sponsors. But we have emerged from that. Oslo has been left long ago in the dust. What we're seeing now is the culmination of an 80-plus year process of genocide against the Palestinian people, perpetrated not just by their Israeli colonizers, but also by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other complicit states. In the process, there has been the intentional dismantling of what was a nascent legal order set up brick by brick since the Second World War. So no, I've never seen a moment quite like this one in my lifetime. -- 2 of 19 -- #M2 This is a very sad assessment, but we do need to talk about the intricate role of the United Nations in the entire process because the whole founding and the legal recognition in the UN of Israel and the recognition of Palestine and then the recognition of the Palestinian territories as occupied, and so on, after '67. This is intricately always connected with the UN, including a special agency, UNRWA, that was supposed to be an aid network for Palestinians. So there have always been these two sides, right? And what is your assessment of the complicity or the involvement—let's call it involvement—of the UN in this entire catastrophe? #M3 Well, the UN has had a schizophrenic relationship with Palestine from the very start. That's because whenever you talk about the UN, I always remind people, you have to say which UN you're talking about. If you're talking about the political corridors and some of the intergovernmental bodies, they have been entirely complicit. They share in the original sin of the dispossession of the Palestinian people in the beginning of their long-sustained Nakba since 1948 until today. There was always another UN, which was a UN made up of independent human rights mechanisms, judicial mechanisms like the International Court of Justice, special rapporteurs, treaty bodies, those sorts of things. They have always taken a principled, law-based, human rights-centered approach to the question, but their voice has never in the past dominated. Now, I have to say, the volume of those voices is rising today in ways that do provide some encouragement. For the first time in history, we're seeing holes in the wall of impunity that the West has built around their Israeli project in the Middle East. Israel has enjoyed absolute impunity for its entire existence. The Israel exception is something that was born at the same moment that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born. 1948 was when the Declaration was adopted and was also when that state was established by the West and placed above international law. And that impunity, that wall of impunity, has been defended ever since. It's been hard to break through and to try to see some light through that wall of impunity. But just in the last decade, year and a half, while we have witnessed historic horror in Palestine, we have also witnessed the first glimmers of hope, of accountability, and of some change in direction. And this I say because it is simply a fact that today Israel is on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice. Its leaders are the subject of arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, including extermination in the International Criminal Court. They have been condemned, their violations and crimes documented by every independent international human rights mechanism at the United Nations. They have been found by the International Court of Justice and all human rights organizations with any kind of credibility at all to be perpetrating apartheid across the land. And having found that the occupation itself in the West Bank and Gaza is entirely unlawful and must be ended entirely and quickly, this is a completely different world from where we were just two -- 3 of 19 -- years ago when Israeli impunity was absolute. That impunity continues, and Western support for that impunity continues, which is why the impunity continues, but it's being chipped away piece by piece. And I think if we can continue a sustained movement for justice, for human rights, for a norm- based international order over the brute use of force, which is all we have witnessed so far, there is hope not just for accountability, but for liberation for the Palestinian people. #M2 Okay, I'm glad to hear that from you, because some people get very cynical and say, look, this proves that human rights law and even humanitarian law don't work. It's just the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. But we have had this human rights law now for 80 years, and the situation would be even worse if we didn't. I mean, there is this second part of the UN, right? The judicial part, and people like you who advocate for jus cogens norms and the overriding power of those, stand in contrast to the political bunch. And of course, the UN is both. It's a very, very imperfect organization, but that's what we've got. Do you think that there will be UN mechanisms that will help in the end to end this tragedy, or do we have to look for other means, like public opinion, for instance? #M3 Well, all of the above. I mean, it's true, as the saying goes, that the master's tools can never be used to free you from the master. I forget the exact quote, but they are one set of tools in the toolkit, alongside political action, popular movements, legal action, and things like boycott, divestment, sanctions, protest, civil disobedience, and resistance. All of these things taken together contribute to the process of liberation. One of them on its own, history tells us, is never enough, but the collective force of all of these things brings hope of some justice in the end. I always think about the South African apartheid case. I think it's illustrative of the role that international law and international institutions can play when operating in solidarity with an oppressed people. You had a situation where right up through the 1980s, countries like the United States and others in the West were supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. But the people in those countries organized themselves—churches, unions, social movements, and others. They eventually were able to create enough pressure on their own states that the policy of support for apartheid changed. In the process, they managed to isolate South Africa so much that it was feeling the bite, despite the support it had from powerful Western states, through its economy, cultural and sports activities, and so on, that were excluded from global competition diplomatically. It did not have the respectable standing necessary to negotiate for the kind of trade, the kind of international relationships that a state craves. And so that was a bottom-up, you know, starting with the resistance in South Africa and then social movements across the West, mobilizing in solidarity with that resistance in South Africa, ultimately changed official policy. In the process, they used the -- 4 of 19 -- mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Commission, of the General Assembly, of the apartheid mechanisms that were established, despite the fact tha