Art of the Week: Rheim Alkadhi, The Sea, 2022
The peoples of the world are rising up — and putting their lives on the line for Palestine. A rogue state in a rogue world order runs amok, making Gaza "the hungriest place on earth" according to the United Nations, shooting starving Palestinians who try to claim meagre aid. But this grotesque violence — which amounts to genocide according to Dr Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars — is generating unprecedented resistance from citizens worldwide who refuse to stand by.
This week, the Madleen — a UK-flagged sailing boat carrying 12 activists including Greta Thunberg and Franco-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan — was forcibly intercepted by Israeli Occupation Forces. Its humanitarian aid was confiscated and much of its crew detained in solidarity confinement — but the Freedom Flotilla Coalition refuses to back down. More humanitarian vessels are expected in coming days to set sail for Gaza.
Other citizens seek to break the blockade by land. Thousands of people from across the world, including Progressive International’s member DiEM25, traveled to Egypt this week to pressure its government to deliver food to desperate Gazans through the Rafah crossing on its border.
For the State of Israel, the threat of food reaching the Gaza Strip is so great that Defence Minister Israel Katz has ordered Egypt to block the arrival of these “jihadist protestors” — and so it has. The government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been detaining, interrogating, and deporting any international visitors suspected to be participating in the humanitarian March to Gaza.
In Cairo we can see the international architecture of the Gaza genocide. The bombs, drones, and barbed wire are all products of a war machine that operates through a global supply chain that makes dozens of countries and thousands of companies complicit at best, and criminal participants at worst.
Few countries illustrate this complicity better than France. President Emmanuel Macron pretends to champion the cause of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and Palestinian statehood more broadly. Alongside Saudi Arabia, Macron plans to host a conference next week in New York that calls on states to recognise Palestine as “a moral duty and political requirement.”
Meanwhile, France continues to play a critical role in the traffic of arms to Israel. This week, the Progressive International, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and a range of French civil society organisations presented a groundbreaking report to the National Assembly that documents the traffic of over 15 billion armaments from France to Israel since October 2023. The report, which received prominent media coverage in France can be read in full here.
French workers are now taking the matter of complicity into their own hands. On 4 June, dockers in the CGT union discovered that 19 pallets of submachine gun spare parts were to be loaded at the port of Marseille-Fos onto the Liberian-flagged ZIM container ship CONTSHIP ERA bound for Haifa, Israel. The dockers located the deadly container, set it aside and refused to load it onto the ship to Haifa. In a powerful statement released by their union branch, the dockers announced “the dockers and port workers of the Gulf of Fos will not participate in the ongoing genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government.” Following the lead of the French workers, the port workers of Genoa, through their union USB, coordinated a garrison at the Port of Genoa, with the aim of preventing the docking of the CONTSHIP ERA. The workers issued a statement that they “do not want to be complicit in the genocide that continues in Gaza” and called for citizens to join their picket against the container ship and participate in a general strike on 20 June. In solidarity with their French and Italian counterparts, the Greek dockworkers at Piraeus Port in the ENEDEP union announced that they were in “constant contact and at the disposal of our colleagues for any needs” and affirmed that they “will not be the link in the chain of blood that unites the governments that support genocide in Palestine.”
The following day, the French dockers discovered that another two containers with military cargo were set to be loaded onto the CONTSHIP ERA. The workers, through their union, announced that the cargo was gun barrels manufactured by the Aubert et Duval company in Firminy. The workers blocked those two additional containers.
Yet as the people of France take one step forward in solidarity with the people of Palestine, its government — like so many across the world — takes two steps back. After calling Palestinian statehood a “moral duty,” France has now abandoned the claim. The United Kingdom has done the same, while German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul told a press conference that recognising Palestine would send a "bad signal."
The United States, at least, no longer pretends to play both sides. On Tuesday 10 June, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Bloomberg that the US was not pursuing an independent Palestinian state, telling the BBC that if "Muslim countries" wanted a Palestinian state they should give up their land to "host it."
But a group of states is now rising to the occasion, seeking to match the courage of their peoples with the actions of their governments. They call themselves The Hague Group.
In January, days after Trump returned to the White House, nine states of the South were convened in the spirit of Bandung in The Hague by the Progressive International to enforce international law through coordinated state action to end the genocide and ensure justice and accountability. They formed The Hague Group to take “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures” across courts, ports and factories to end the genocide and uphold international law.
Among the members of The Hague Group are Southern states taking material action where Northern states offer only empty words. Malaysia broke the material supply chain of Israel’s violence by imposing a maritime ban on Israel-affiliated vessels and barring them from docking at Malaysian ports. South Africa brought Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over breaches of the Genocide Convention. Colombia has not only stopped all weapons purchases from Israel but also suspended coal exports to Israel.
The statement adopted following the January meeting committed The Hague Group member states to: uphold the arrest warrants issued against Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court; prevent provision or transfer of arms, munitions and related equipment to Israel, where there is a clear risk that they might be used to violate international law; and prevent the docking of vessels at any of their ports where there is a risk of the vessel being used to carry military fuel and weaponry to Israel.
“Israel’s violations go beyond the mass murder and persecution of Palestinians,” said Anwar Ibrahim, Prime Minister of Malaysia, ahead of the gathering. “They strike at the very foundations of international law, which the global community has a duty to defend.”
This week, Colombia and South Africa — acting as Co-Chairs of the Group — announced they would host an Emergency Conference “to halt the genocide in Gaza”, calling on states from across the world to join them in Bogotá on 15-16 July.
The meeting will both bring together founding members and invite new nations to join the bloc in its effort to defend international law and defend the July 2024 judgment of the International Court of Justice to stop all actions "that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
But to make The Hague Group’s emergency conference a success, we need you — friends, allies, and members of the Progressive International — to take action: to send letters, to make calls, and to take to the streets to demand that governments across the world join The Hague Group and take concrete action to end this genocide.
“The time for hollow words and ceremonial summitry has long passed,” Co-General Coordinator David Adler said to the French National Assembly when delivering the Progressive International’s new report. Now, as The Hague Group prepares its emergency conference, we have a singular opportunity to turn words into actions, promises into policies, and states into representatives of our collective humanity.
We cannot miss it.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
