Former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk calls October 7 "long overdue." His "logic" could justify 9/11, too. ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, April 07, 2025

Former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk calls October 7 "long overdue." His "logic" could justify 9/11, too.

When China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun called Palestinian armed struggle an ‘inalienable right’ in 2024, it was a gift to pseudo-scholars like Richard Falk, who’ve spent years twisting international law to bless terrorism.

From Countercurrents:

On February 22, 2024, China’s Ambassador to The Hague, Zhang Jun, uttered the unexpected.

“Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is an inalienable right,” the Chinese Ambassador said, insisting that “the struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts”.
...
Zhang’s remarks were situated entirely within international law. Thus, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to discuss the topic in a recent interview we conducted with Professor Richard Falk, a leading scholar in international law and former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine.

“Yes, I think that’s a correct understanding of international law—one that the West, by and large, doesn’t want to hear about,” Falk said in response to the February 24 comments by Zhang.

Falk elaborated: “The right of resistance was affirmed during the decolonization process in the 1980s and 1990s, and this included the right to armed resistance. However, this resistance is subject to compliance with international laws of war.”

This takes us to the events of October 7, 2023, the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation inside what is known as the Gaza Envelope region in southern Israel.

“To the extent that there is real evidence of atrocities accompanying the October 7 attack, those would constitute violations, but the attack itself is something that, in context, appears entirely justifiable and long overdue,” Falk said.

Falk appears to be accepting the Hamas narrative that 10/7 was a purely military operation consistent with international law, that any civilian harm was peripheral and probably not done by Hamas itself but by overeager Gaza civilians. He is trying to distinguish between the supposed military goals of Hamas which he says are perfectly legal and "long overdue" with the atrocities we've all seen (although the full Counterpunch article says they are lies, too.)

To reach this position, Falk has to go through a lot of contortions of facts and of international law. And even if you accept all of his pretzel logic, it still falls apart.

First of all, even the fuzzy justifications for "resistance" do not allow a militia to cross a border and invade another country under international law. The UN Charter (Article 2(4)) bans the use of force against a state’s territorial integrity, and self-defense (Article 51) is a state’s prerogative, not a militia’s. Even Additional Protocol I, Falk’s major source, limits resistance to the occupier’s forces within occupied territory, not a militia’s invasion across sovereign borders

The invasion was illegal, period - unless you claim that all of Israel is illegitimate and every inch of Israeli land is "occupied." Hamas believes this, Falk might, but if he says that out loud, he knows he loses what little claim to legitimacy he still has.

Secondly, it is stretching facts to the point of absurdity to claim that Hamas didn't systematically attack the Nova Music Festival or the civilian kibbutzim.

Thirdly, and most damningly, even if you accept every Hamas lie as truth, and every Israeli truth as a lie, which Falk apparently does, Hamas happily admits that their primary military aim was to take hostages (dead or alive) and swap them for terrorists in Israeli prison. Taking hostages - even if they are soldiers - is a war crime.

No matter how far one stretches the facts, Richard Falk is praising war crimes.

Using Falk's appalling quasi-legal reasoning, 9/11 is more legally justified than 10/7.

After all, the Pentagon is a military target. Al Qaeda justified attacking the World Trade Center as an important economic target that contributes to the American economy and therefore to the US military. This makes the WTC a "more" legitimate target than Kibbutz Be'eri or the Nova festival.

The US had a military presence in Saudi Arabia, which Bin Laden had consistently framed as an occupation. In both cases, a non-state actor suffering under an oppressive occupation by colonial enemies claims it has the right to strike inside their enemy's territory as long as they can justify the attack in military terms and civilians are not framed as the primary target.

But in the case of 9/11, US troops were physically in Saudi Arabia, while no Israeli troops were physically in Gaza, meaning that Bin Laden's claim of "occupation" was stronger than Hamas'.

Moreover, in 9/11, there was no hostage taking as a goal - and you cannot spin hostage taking as anything but illegal.

Some other Falkian defender of Al Qaeda can claim that Bin Laden's objectives were more purely aligned with legitimate resistance than Hamas'. After all, the deaths of the people on the airplanes were also peripheral to the military goals, right?

Here is a case study in how international law is twisted, day after day, by supposed "experts."

The current Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, is no less guilty of using selective and tendentious readings of international law to justify terrorism and delegitimatize Israel than Falk is.

(h/t JW)