How Can We Prosecute Israel and Challenge Its Impunity?

Since the signing in Washington on 26 June of the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel, under the auspices of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is competing with Vice President J. D. Vance, in charge of the negotiating track with Iran—a debate has emerged over Article 13 of the agreement. Under this provision, Lebanon and Israel commit themselves to refraining from “hostile or harmful actions in international political or legal forums.”

Such a commitment would effectively mean refraining from taking legal action against Israel despite the crimes it has repeatedly committed on Lebanese territory, particularly since 2023. These include the killing of thousands of Lebanese civilians, among them hundreds of children, as well as dozens of paramedics, journalists, municipal employees and humanitarian workers; the destruction of tens of thousands of homes in towns and villages in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa, as well as in Beirut’s southern suburbs; the contamination of soil and water; and the continued occupation of six hundred square kilometres of Lebanese territory, where Israeli forces continue to demolish homes and civilian infrastructure.

When war in the Middle East is told in the language of those who wage it

Since 7 October 2023, a significant share of French audiovisual media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza, and subsequently of the war in Lebanon, has revealed an inability to inform accurately, as well as a deeper crisis in the categories through which the Middle East is rendered intelligible.

What has prevailed across a majority of television channels is therefore not merely an editorial political bias, a compassion asymmetry, or a hierarchy of urgencies. It is a genuine reconfiguration of the gaze. The Israeli narrative of the war, together with its military terminology, was adopted and then gradually detached from history, the social sciences, and international law.

From that moment on, the societies targeted by the “Israeli operations” ceased to appear as inhabited worlds, shaped by social relations, memories, institutions, aspirations, and by individual as well as collective experiences. They became spaces of “surgical” intervention, theatres of manoeuvre, maps saturated with objectives and risks. The consequence of such a shift was decisive: by substituting a cold commentary for politics, this coverage did not merely impoverish analysis; it also helped render acceptable extreme forms of violence and criminality.

Ziad Majed: Since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one region of the world

The Arab world is going through one of the darkest periods in its history. Lebanon is at war, society is fractured, and the South is threatened by a lasting Israeli occupation. The April 8 massacre — 357 dead and nearly 2,000 wounded — adds to the litany of tragic dates that have marked the country’s chronology from 1975 to the present day. The ceasefire between the United States and Iran, signed on April 8, remains particularly fragile and does not include Lebanon, at least for the time being. The opening of direct negotiations between Tel Aviv and Beirut is deeply dividing society and casting Hezbollah as more threatening than ever. At the regional level, despite the multitude of reports by international organizations and experts accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and denouncing an apartheid regime, each day seems to carry us a little further away from a just solution in Palestine. As for Syria, although the Assad era is over, the country’s future remains uncertain. While each situation follows its own logic, there nevertheless remains the sense of a “Levantine,” and more broadly Arab, destiny shared in hardship.

A Franco-Lebanese political scientist and researcher, and the author of Le Proche-Orient, Miroir du Monde (La Découverte, 2025), Ziad Majed has lived in France since 2006, where he heads the Middle East Studies Program at the American University of Paris. Together with the intellectual and journalist Samir Kassir — assassinated on June 2, 2005, in an attack widely attributed to the Assad regime — the novelist Elias Khoury, and activists from different generations, he co-founded the Democratic Left Movement in 2004 and took an active part, in 2005, in the Independence Uprising. In L’Orient-Le Jour, he analyzes the roots of the current cataclysm.

Interview by Soulayma Mardam Bey.

Francesca Albanese et la bassesse des puissants

La rapporteuse des Nations unies sur les droits de l’homme dans les territoires palestiniens occupés, Francesca Albanese, se trouve une fois encore exposée à une campagne politique qui la prend pour cible, à la fois comme personne, comme incarnation d’une éthique juridique, et comme position indépendante, refusant toute transaction au rabais avec le droit international et les exigences qu’il impose s’agissant des Palestiniens et des crimes israéliens perpétrés à leur encontre.

Article publié dans le Club de Mediapart

A Palestinian doctor named Hussam Abou Safiya

What makes the image of Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya walking through the rubble of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza toward two Israeli tanks so iconic? Is it the universal elements of human tragedy that transcend geographical and temporal boundaries? Or is it the specific context, both geographical and temporal, that makes it a profound and accurate representation of the Gazan epic and the conditions of occupied Palestine in late December 2024, when the photo was taken?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the image encapsulates both dimensions: it is anchored in its unique space and time, yet it transcends them. It captures a moment of extraordinary cruelty that is at once universally human and distinctly Palestinian. It is the moment when a doctor emerges from the ruins of his destroyed hospital, after the killing or deportation of his patients and staff, and walks in his white coat toward the perpetrators of these crimes – Israeli soldiers entrenched in armored machines of death atop the rubble.

The assassination of Nasrallah and Israeli impunity

 Interview with Ziad Majed[1] in Mediapart, following the Israeli attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut, which killed the Secretary General of Hezbollah and dozens of Lebanese civilians.

Interview by Ilies Ramdani.

Mediapart: What do you think about the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah?

Ziad Majed: There are no red lines for the Israelis. They can kill whoever they want and strike wherever they want. The problem goes beyond the figure of Hassan Nasrallah. There is a state that crosses all boundaries and borders to murder and bomb, often with the complicity of the Western world.

Like many Lebanese, I have always been opposed to Hezbollah for political, cultural and ideological reasons, and over the past decade for its military involvement in Syria at the request of Tehran in support of the criminal regime of Bashar El-Assad. The party has also been accused of carrying out assassinations in Lebanon.

However, it enjoys popular legitimacy within the Shia community, which has been traumatized by successive Israeli invasions of Lebanon since 1978 (five years before the party was founded) and a long history of military occupation of the south (which lasted 22 years), followed by a war in 2006. As a result, Hezbollah has had a seat in parliament since 1992, runs elected municipal councils, holds ministries and runs its own social services.

The assassination on Friday of its secretary-general, Nasrallah, carried out by Israeli officials who have themselves been accused of crimes against humanity by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and dozens of human rights organizations, is further proof of the 'exceptionalism' that places Israel above international law. All the more so as the air raid devastated an entire residential area on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital, leaving dozens of civilians trapped under the rubble. Six multi-storey buildings disappeared because of the power of the bombs.

So a large proportion of the Lebanese people are angry, like the Palestinians who have suffered decades of occupation, colonization and now a genocidal war in Gaza under the passive gaze of the 'international community'.

On the occupied West Bank and the ongoing Israeli military campaign

 Ziad Majed's interview on France 24 - English, August 30, 2024

Living with Genocide

Every day for the past six months, an average of 200 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Every day for the past six months, homes, schools, hospitals, ambulances, universities, factories, bakeries, shops, markets and farmland have been bombed, burned or looted.

Death hangs over Gaza like a dark cloud, like a legendary monster. We see it, we live with it, we receive on our screens the images and the cries of its victims. The atrocities, the agony and the tears become notifications on our social networks and news that we watch while drinking coffee, working, shopping or waiting for good weather.

It's as if we've become accustomed to witnessing live genocide just a few hours from home. It's as if what we're seeing is a foretaste, a déjà vu. And even though we're aware of it and overwhelmed by it, sometimes all we can do is delay starting our computers or turn off our cell phones to interrupt the broadcast of the massacres in progress.

The "Zone of Interest" between Palestine and Syria and the human condition

 The film "Zone of Interest" by the British director Jonathan Glazer, winner of this year's Oscar, has caused considerable controversy among writers and professionals in the fields of culture and cinema in Britain and America. Not because of its content, cinematography, or character construction, but because of what its director said when he received the Oscar.

Glazer (who is Jewish by birth) stated that the understanding of his film is not only achieved by dealing with the past or historical atrocities, but also by viewing it in the context of what is happening in Gaza today. He expressed his rejection of the use of the "Holocaust" to justify ongoing wars, dehumanization, and the perpetration of crimes.

In response, more than a thousand cinema personalities who identified themselves as Jewish rejected the comparison they said he made between the Nazi Holocaust and the war in Palestine since October 7, 2023.

On the other hand, intellectuals and progressive Jewish organizations defended Glazer, arguing that the refusal to confront the past with the present and the attempt to confiscate the memory of the "Holocaust" are nothing but attempts to hide the crimes and the "genocidal war" waged by Israel against the Palestinians.

Naomi Klein, the Canadian feminist journalist and academic, wrote a powerful article in The Guardian in which she compared people's habit of living close to the genocide they know is happening (separated from its horror by a wall), as depicted in the film, with our lives today, just a few walls away from Gaza, where acts of genocide have been occurring for almost six months now, yet no one has intervened to stop them.

The Selfie of Extermination

A vision of horror emerges from this photograph.

Taken by Tsafrir Abayov on February 19, 2024, it shows a group of female Israeli soldiers taking a selfie in front of the macabre rubble of a pulverized neighborhood in the Gaza Strip.

On his Instagram page, the photographer didn't specify the exact location of the shot. But thanks to his “neutral” presentation of this extraordinarily violent image, we know it came from northern Gaza. He hashtagged it, used Israeli military terminology, referred to the "gendered" identity of military personnel, and, of course, specified his camera type, lens size, and sensitivity level.

The absence of a location on this photo, and on another equally gruesome series that followed in the same photographer's album, is likely related to Israeli army censorship orders. It may also be due to negligence on his part. Finally, it may be that the scale of destruction in Gaza is such that taking a selfie in front of the ruins of its cities and refugee camps has the same connotation and meaning: "We photograph and smile for the lens, revealing what we have done to the places and houses. All that remains are the ghosts of those who disappeared after a massacre or deportation”.

Gaza, the world and us

Since October 8, 2023, we have been witnessing the deadliest and most brutal war ever documented and broadcast live. In 15 weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army (60% of them children and women), and more than 80% of the population of 2.2 million Gazans, besieged on 360 km2 and already victims of 4 wars and a long blockade (since 2007), have been displaced and crammed into the southern part of the devastated territory[1].

The figures, reports, videos and testimonies published and regularly updated by the various UN agencies, humanitarian and human rights organizations, as well as by the brave Palestinian journalists and photographers on the ground, show us the suffering, the famine, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, the cuts in water, fuel and electricity, the inhuman sanitary conditions and the ordeal of the sick, the wounded, the amputees, treated with makeshift means and operated on without anesthesia.

Can We Speak of a “Genocide” in Gaza?

Since the start of Israel’s most brutal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (following the Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians on October 7, 2023), some media and governments have turned international and humanitarian law into a point of view or opinion expressed by non-specialists.

As a result, terms and concepts each with a very specific meaning, such as war crimes or crimes against humanity (including ethnic cleansing) or genocide, have become terms and concepts used interchangeably to qualify certain conditions or, often, to deny the “correctness” of these qualifications.

The following text recalls the definitions of the crimes in question and examines to what extent they apply to the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip.

Ziad Majed in Orient XXI

To read the article, please click here.

La guerre à Gaza et la déshumanisation des Palestiniens

Les développements de la guerre à Gaza, le droit international, la déshumanisation des Palestiniens, le terrorisme et l'occupation, thèmes évoqués lors d'une émission sur France Info Tv, modérée par Patricia Loison, avec Alban Mikoczy, Anthony Bellanger et Ziad Majed.

Première Partie

Deuxième Partie

La guerre à Gaza et les risques d'un second front

 Emission les enjeux internationaux sur France Culture.

Invité: Ziad Majed

Iran and its four Arab fronts

Foreword

This text seeks to read the strategies adopted by Iran in the Middle East since the year 2003, especially in Arab arenas that have witnessed open political, sectarian, and military conflicts[1]. In these conflicts, Iran has old and new weighty allies that it supports or has intervened directly in order to protect and guarantee their supremacy.

The text focuses on four arenas: Iraq and Syria, where Iran has escalated its direct intervention since 2011; Lebanon, where Iran’s most powerful local ally has been employed in the Syrian conflict; and Yemen, where Iran is trapping Saudi Arabia in a war that will be very hard to win.

The arms trade and Israel's attack on Gaza - International Appeal

An appeal by Nobel Peace laureates, intellectuals, diplomats, artists and jurists to "implement a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid".

Israel has once again unleashed the full force of its military against the captive Palestinian population, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, in an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression. Israel's ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems from the vast international military cooperation and trade that it maintains with complicit governments across the world. Over the period 2008-19, the US is set to provide military aid to Israel worth $30bn, while Israeli annual military exports to the world have reached billions of dollars.