by WALDEN BELLO
Richard Falk is universally regarded as one of the top minds when it comes to international law. Yet his views are not only unwelcome in establishment circles, but even among many left-leaning liberals.
Falk was once the darling of liberals, someone whose left-of-center views were seen as important in “balancing” conservative and centrist views in debates, seminars, and TV programs. He was, in short, one of the establishment’s favorite critics of American foreign policy.
That is, until he crossed several red lines. The most consequential of these red lines was moving from abstract legal critiques of Israel’s policies in the Middle East to one of active sympathy with the Palestinian people’s struggle, and especially when he had the temerity to call Israel’s fundamental strategy of governance by its name: “apartheid.”
The Zionist Lobby’s Bete Noire
The Zionist lobby went after Falk with a vengeance, trying to systematically destroy his reputation by painting him as a “self-hating Jew” and as an ideological if not clinical outlier by twisting his stands on events like the Iranian revolution, which they maliciously sought to paint as support for Islamic theocracy.
When that did not work, they went on to wage a silent but effective campaign among both political and ideological powerbrokers to deprive him of opportunities to air his views in the liberal media. The vitriolic whispering campaign against Falk was a lesson in how power can derail challenges to its hegemony by reason in the service of a just cause.
And yet the very act of using political and ideological power to restrict access to the public has shown the attractiveness of Falk’s views. Like most efforts at censorship, the Zionist campaign ended up popularizing the ideas it sought to discredit.
Today, the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state is more widely accepted than ever, eroding further Israel’s legitimacy in the community of nations and making it more than ever dependent on the military support of its patron, the United States, on the deployment of indiscriminate brute force, even against children, and on the resort to assassination of foreign leaders and scientists as the principal arm of foreign policy. The effort to silence Falk and other pro-Palestinian voices, such as that of Phyllis Bennis, a brilliant colleague with whom he has worked closely, has merely given much wider credence to his characterization of Israel as a state gone rogue.
The balance of the struggle between brute power and reason in the service of justice is assessed by Falk in his summing up of his stint as the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Occupied Territory:
“During these six years I often asked myself ‘was it worth it?’ and my answer was ‘yes, but…’ I was less interested in the personal costs associated with career and some friendships, than with whether I was actually making any sort of contribution to the Palestinian struggle for their rights under international law, and more existentially, to the empowerment and emancipation of Palestine from a long period of collective victimization. On this question my conclusion was mixed. I felt that over the course of my mandate, the Palestinian reality on the ground had worsened and the chances for a negotiated, fair, and sustainable peace had almost disappeared. In this regard, my efforts as special rapporteur seem to have done nothing to reverse these Israeli behavioral trends adverse to Palestinian prospects.
Yet on the level of public discourse, which helps shape world opinion, I think my efforts had some effect in clarifying the real nature of what was at stake in these highly contested sets of circumstances where geopolitics was cruelly thwarting elemental justice. Public discourse is a vital site of struggle in this kind of situation, with ideas, images, and language exerting influence, and often eventually altering the balance of forces in ways that are hard to measure and discern but often seem decisive in shaping political outcomes… I felt I must be doing a good job when the Weizmann Institute in Los Angeles listed me in 2012 as the third most dangerous anti-Semite in the world on their list of ten. I trailed only the Supreme Guide of Iran and the Turkish Prime Minister, Erdogan.”
Falk’s struggle with the Zionist lobby is the centerpiece of this remarkable memoir of one of the most renowned civil society activists of our time, whose career spanned the Vietnam War, the rise of the environmental movement, the struggle against dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the massive U.S. intervention in the Middle East under George W. Bush, the rise of the far right in both the global North and the global South, and the climate crisis.
Foreign Policy In Focus for more