Smouldering Semantics

Law privileges remedies such as incarceration and, in the case of the ICJ, satisfaction, restitution, and compensation. Diverse remedies, like divestment and shareholder activism, remain marginal. It is indeed refreshing to me that the protests roiling university campuses do not call for criminal prosecution, or ICJ denunciation, but rather for divestment and thereby open a conversation about wider causal elements. Law also privileges a reductionism--there is one blameworthy entity at fault, namely, the defendant, the respondent, or the accused. Such a parsimonious approach obscures the broader forces that conspire to seed the loneliness and abandonment that, to me, is a sine qua non of genocide and other atrocity crimes. The pain of the Palestinian people in Gaza derives to differing degrees from multiple sources, including the actions (and noteworthy omissions) of many states well beyond Israel as well as the conduct of Hamas itself. In the end, then, the eager embrace of international law and judicial institutions--a premise of this symposium in the case of Gaza--may fail to foreground more expansive language that resonates with broader audiences and addresses the multiple overlapping causes of atrocities.