Law, Violence, and the Abyss Ahead

​By Dyab Abou Jahjah
International law was never born as a universal covenant. It was crafted in the aftermath of war, but its vocation was always political: a tool to punish the defeated and restrain the unruly, never to bind the powerful. The Third World learned this early. Colonial wars raged, coups were sponsored, entire nations were starved — and the law remained silent, or worse, complicit.

Law spoke loudly in Nuremberg, but fell mute in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Congo, in Latin America. It prosecuted the enemies of a certain order, but never its guardians. For decades, the Global South lived under this contradiction: law proclaimed as universal, but practiced as selective.
Now comes Palestine. Gaza is not just another crime; it is a mirror held up to humanity. A genocide broadcast in real time, its perpetrators protected and applauded. Here, the mask has slipped. International law is mocked in daylight, its judges sanctioned, its courts ridiculed. The very frame that was supposed to restrain violence is being humiliated — not by the weak, but by those who built it.
And what happens when the frame collapses? Violence escapes. It spreads. Murder becomes ordinary, political violence becomes grammar, and the world slips into a state where no argument can survive without a corpse attached to it.
This is the threshold we are crossing. Political violence is no longer the monopoly of states or insurgencies. It is becoming the common language of our age, legitimized by the silence over genocide.
So the question before us is stark. Either Palestine buries international law once and for all — exposing it as nothing more than a colonial instrument, a mask for raw power — or Palestine forces its transformation into something it has never truly been: a universal shield, a law for all humanity, not just for the convenient few.
History is speaking. Either Gaza becomes the graveyard of international law, or its birthplace anew. And if we fail, then the future of humanity is already written in Leonard Cohen’s haunting words:
“ I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder .”