When Is a Ceasefire Order Not a Ceasefire Order?

 

On Jan. 26, 2024, the World Court ruled against Israel.  It determined that South Africa’s allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is plausible.  The Court then ordered Israel to take measures to ensure that it is not committing genocide while the Court considers the merits of the case. 

The Court ordered that Israel must take all measures within its power to prevent 

• the killing of Palestinians,
• causing bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, 
• deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and 
• imposing measures intended to prevent births among Palestinians. 

Additionally, Israel must "ensure with immediate effect that its military not commit any of the acts" described in the order above, and it must "take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."  

Press agencies around the world are asserting that the Court "stopped short of calling for a ceasefire."  This is a stunning misrepresentation of the Court’s ruling.  It's true that the Court made no use of the term “ceasefire” nor did it directly quote South Africa’s request that Israel “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza,” but Israel cannot comply with the Court's orders and continue its military operations against Gaza.  

Israel has been ordered to immediately ensure that its military not kill, wound, or terrorize Palestinians.  The Court has specified no condition under which Israel may be excused from these requirements.  The Court has effectively -- in the first and second directives of its ruling -- ordered an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.  Despite this, Israel is continuing its war and continues to prevent urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance from reaching Palestinians in Gaza. 

Israel's response should be no surprise.  In advance of the Court proceedings, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that Israel would disregard any adverse ruling from the World Court, saying, “Nobody will stop us.”  If he is right, it will be because the Biden Administration will continue to provide military and diplomatic support for Israel’s war.  During an earlier press conference, Netanyahu thanked Biden for his support, saying the U.S. has provided an essential “diplomatic Iron Dome,” without which Israel could not carry on its war.  He also thanked the U.S. for “constantly sending us vital munitions” and for deploying two aircraft carriers, a submarine, and support vessels to the Eastern Mediterranean.  As long as Israel continues to receive U.S. support, Netanyahu is right: no one will stop them.

Netanyahu's remarks underscore Biden’s complicity in what is, according to the Court, plausibly genocide.  If Israel continues to kill, wound, and terrorize Palestinians or ignore other orders of the Court, further military support from the Biden Administration will make the U.S. a party to the violation of the Court's orders.  Moreover, if the Court ultimately rules that Israel is indeed committing genocide, the U.S. will be complicit in that crime and will be vulnerable to the legal and reputational consequences.

The U.S. can avoid this by immediately suspending military assistance to Israel.  It could then argue that while it supported Israel’s war when genocide was still in question, it withheld that support once the World Court ruled that Israel plausibly is engaged in genocide and enjoined Israel from killing any more Palestinians.  It's highly unlikely that Biden will follow this course, but a lot depends on what he does, particularly for the people in Gaza.

For the record, here is a summary of the key judgements made by the World Court.

• South Africa has standing to bring a complaint against Israel for genocide. 
• South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide is plausible. 
• Some of the provisional measures South Africa is asking the Court to order are relevant to Israel’s alleged genocide; however, the Court has the authority to order whatever provisional measures it deems appropriate.
• The threat to the purported rights of Palestinians in Gaza is urgent and capable of causing them irreparable harm.
• Conditions exist that justify ordering provisional measures to protect the purported rights of the Palestinians in Gaza. 
• The World Court orders that

(1) The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

a.      killing members of the group;

b.      causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c.      deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

d.      imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (15-2)

(2)  The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above; (15-2)

(3)  The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip; (16-1)

(4)   The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; (16-1)

(5) The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip; (15-2)

(6) The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order. (15-2)

Propaganda, All Is Phony?

How do you know?  That's epistemology's central question.  

Rene Descartes inaugurated the modern era of epistemology with two important works, Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).  In Meditations, he systematically challenged anything we might think we know, leaving his readers to doubt everything.  Then with his now famous argument, "I think, therefore I am," he claimed to have salvaged one bit of knowledge:  his own existence.  From this, he claimed to prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the reliability of our perceptions of the external world.  Later that century, others developed principles for uncovering truths about the world, thereby establishing the basis of the scientific method.

Scientists and philosophers of science have been developing and refining the method ever since.  Consequently, our understanding of the physical world has advanced by leaps and bounds, but the rigor employed to investigate the physical world can not always be applied to the social world.  We commonly find ourselves with unique, anecdotal perspectives, subject to information thrust upon us by agenda-driven mass media and largely unregulated social media.  In this context, methods for justifying beliefs about the social world are hard to formulate and even harder to put into practice.  For many of our beliefs, the question remains:  how do you know?  

I. Epistemic Constraints

There was a time when most of us were told about the world by three television news departments, a few radio stations, and a local paper.  The topics they covered and the how they covered them were often fairly indistinguishable.  Some people lament the days when this small number of media sources provided us with a common set of beliefs that gave us a shared understanding of the world.  The Fairness Doctrine, abolished in 1987, required licensed broadcasters to present controversial issues in a manner that fairly reflected different views.  This alleviated most people's concerns about the systematic indoctrination of the public.

In their book Manufacturing of Consent (1988), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain why the Fairness Doctrine had been incapable of preventing a small number of media corporations from narrowing the boundaries of public discourse.  Their central thesis was that media corporations constituted an oligopoly.  Its main purpose was to sell audiences to advertisers.  To be as profitable as possible, they would have to attract a wealthy audience, and their programing would have to ensure that the audience would have a favorable view of the companies that bought time for ads.  Limited time for advertisements meant that most of the nationwide advertising was done by large national corporations.  Consequently, a media ecosystem arose in which large media corporations sold wealthy audiences to other large corporations.  News departments were, of course, free to broadcast what they wanted, consistent with the Fairness Doctrine; but the system in which they operated precluded any serious, consistent criticism of corporate America. 

The proliferation of cable stations began to destabilize the ecosystem.  It became even more unstable with the advent of Web 2.0 in which anyone could become a content creator.  Suddenly, millions of people operated in the system without a monetary stake.  Optimists believed that over time, Web 2.0 would democratize the system.  People would be able to publish information and ideas that were not constrained by the media oligopoly; but this information utopia never arrived.  

Previously marginalized voices remain marginalized, since only large corporations have the resources to reliably reach a mass audience.  Ordinary individuals can reach anyone on the internet, but in practice, they are lost in the ocean of other ordinary individuals.  Just as once upon a time, marginalized voices could mimeograph their message and distribute it on streetcorners, they now can establish their own domain where they can post reports and opinions.  That is, they can distribute their message on their own little cyber-streetcorner.  In contrast, well-financed content creators can push their content to a wide, mass audience.  Web 2.0 has not given us an information democracy.

II. Epistemic Chaos

The failure of the democratic promise is not, however, the worst outcome.  Social information siloes have formed as social media platforms intentionally partition the consumer market to sell specific markets to advertisers.  By customizing search results to feed different information to different people, they create more or less mutually exclusive consumer communities, with natural relationships to specific political messages.  For example, people in the market for guns are a target for NRA propaganda.  People in the market for electric cars are a target for green energy propaganda.  

Parasitic on these consumer/political communities, Web 2.0's millions of new content providers have produced a cacophony of often dubious information sources on the Web, some having no integrity at all.  The lack of any serious online interaction among these information sources and the persistent influence of confirmation bias among people searching the Web have created more than a few contradictory siloes of self-indoctrinating communities. 

It's here that epistemic chaos is born in the creation of "information bubbles."  As described above, bubbles come about through both our own search habits and the algorithms used by search engines.  The result is that different segments of the population are presented with different caricatures of the world containing contradictory basic facts.  People in each bubble come to think their own beliefs are obvious and well-justified.  Anyone outside one's bubble appears to be utterly deluded.  It is true that some bubbles are more misguided than others, but none have a god's eye view of the world.

Beyond these systemic distortions, conscious efforts to shape public opinion are not new in the U.S.  In 1917, Woodrow Wilson created the "Committee on Public Information," aimed at generating support for U.S.'s involvement in World War I.  Since then, the U.S. government has engaged in numerous efforts to influence public opinion.  A briefly declassified 1979 Army field manual on psychological operations (PSYOPS) describes three types of propaganda: white, grey, and black.  White propaganda is truthful information disseminated to conscientiously inform people, grey propaganda is truthful information which, by not telling the whole story, leads people to false beliefs, and black propaganda is, well, simple flat-out lies.  

The PSYOPS manual explicitly forbade targeting the U.S. population with black propaganda; however, in his book, In Search of Enemies, former CIA agent John Stockwell described the common use of black propaganda in foreign countries.  Stockwell worked for the Agency for 12 years in Congo, Burundi, Vietnam, and Angola.  He noted that black propaganda disseminated in foreign countries would inevitably be picked up in the domestic media when they report stories sourced abroad.   

With the advent of Web 2.0, the problem has become compounded by individuals and private organizations -- including political parties and campaign committees -- that intentionally promulgate grey and black propaganda.  With specific strategies to make their messages "go viral," individual and corporate disinformation is passed on unwittingly by others.  In the new Web 2.0 ecosystem, truth has taken a backseat to persuasion, and openly lying about the most well-established facts has become common in politics. 

The license to lie is bad enough without the advent of artificial intelligence.  The internet has been a cesspool of disinformation in politics for a number of years now, but AI now provides people with the ability to create "deep fakes," i.e., fabricated images, videos, and sound recordings that will escape all but the most sophisticated digital forensic scrutiny.  The likely result of the widespread use of AI is that people will have even greater reason to reject any evidence that they choose to disagree with.  We will all become more and more deeply entrenched in our information bubbles, falling prey of confirmation bias and immune to counter arguments.  The answer to the question, "how do you know?" will become, "Well, you never do;" so you might as well believe what is commonly accepted in your social milieu. 

III. Epistemic Virtues

Is there a way to retain some semblance of a connection to reality?  I think at this point the answer is more or less "yes," but one must make a diligent effort to cultivate epistemic virtues.  That's a fancy way to say, one must create habits that allow you to recognize unfounded claims and to establish reliable beliefs.  This involves many things, including the vigorous examination of one's sources of information, their prior perspectives, their institutional limitations, and their track record for accuracy.  It involves high standards for accepting testable claims, appropriate respect for expertise, and the recognition of gradations of justification.  Most importantly, it requires a healthy dose of critical self-examination.  

Maintaining a system of beliefs that roughly conforms to reality is like gardening.  You must prepare the soil to create good conditions for desirable beliefs.  You must keep them healthy and remove any weeds as soon as they appear; but the real problem is global epistemic chaos.  None of us alone can solve that, no matter how diligently we tend our personal gardens.  If there's a broader, social response that can mitigate the growth of the chaos, it certainly isn't clear to me.

Happy New Year

New Year's Eve/Day is my favorite holiday.  For a lot of people, it's a time to turn over a new leaf, to start fresh, to create new habits, to make resolutions that one probably should have made long ago.  It's a time to reflect on one's life, think of the future, and dedicate one's self to becoming a new and better person.  That's never been my thing.  Now and then, I do set personal goals, resolve to begin new habits, and try to become a better person, but to do so only on one specific, socially selected day of the year never made much sense to me.  Mostly, I try to let my life proceed by its own design. (Thank you, John Barlow, for that little bit of wisdom).   

I did make something of a New Year's resolution back in 1980/81, when mostly coincidentally, I decided to become a vegetarian.  I'd been considering it for a long time.  I'm sure I would have done it eventually, but as it turned out, on Dec. 31, 1980, I changed my diet.  I've kept to it ever since.  I'm sure I'll write about the virtues of a plant-based diet later, but this post isn't about that.  It's about time.  Time is what makes New Year's Eve/Day my favorite holiday.  

I find it interesting that we have a holiday that is (or might be) completely dedicated simply to the passage of time.  On New Year's Eve, we count down the hours, then the minutes, and finally the seconds to midnight, whereupon we cheer, set off fireworks, and generally make a foolish noise; kiss the person we love most and drink champagne.  Yes, time is passing, as it always does, but at this moment, it's cause for celebration.  

My fascination with time dates back to my first semester in college when I wrote a paper for my Philosophy 101 class titled, "On the Unreality of Time."  I don't recall the details, but the core idea was that if the present is an infinitesimal moment dividing the past from the future, and if the present is all that's real, then no matter how many present moments we array in a sequence, time has no extension, no duration.  I'm proud to say that I received an A+ on my paper.  I think this accolade alone determined the course of my entire academic and professional career.  My teacher, Diane Blackwell, has a lot to answer for.

And my fascination with time didn't stop there.  In my junior year, I designed an experiment for a psychology class which sought to measure our perception of time.  My hypothesis was that as we attend to more things in any specific span of time, time seems to fly by.  As we attend to fewer things, time drags on.  I got an A- on that assignment.  I also read Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and was introduced to the idea that time, along with space, was a "form of intuition," that is, a fundamental way in which we come to understand the world.  Time is the mental framework that structures our experience.  Reading Kant combined my skepticism about the objectivity of time with my interest in the perception of time.  I went on to read a number of philosophical works about time.  Sadly, I don't have a very good recollection of the various ways philosophers think about it.  Instead, I'm left with only my own rather naive ruminations.  

Broadly speaking, I think of time as being a function of changes in the world and our perception of time as a function of the changes we observe.  A world in which no change ever takes place would be a world without time.  This then leads me to wonder just what change is anyway.  Is it a difference in discrete, sequential states of affairs or is it a continuous blur of becoming?  If it's the former, my freshman paper seems relevant.  The second century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna pointed out another problem with this conception.  If moments in time are distinct, then it's hard to understand causation.  Something about an effect must preexist in its cause or there's no reason that a particular cause would produce a particular effect.  Hume made a similar point.  

The "blur of becoming" conception of change makes better sense to me, but this would make the present a mere analytical construct, since any momentary state of affairs that we might choose to consider (to reify) would amount to a discrete temporal element in a sequence of other momentary elements.  That takes us back to the former problematic conception of time.  The present seems real enough.  It seems more than an analytical construct, so the blur of becoming is a little puzzling too.

I'm left with the sense that Kant was right.  Time and space are simply forms by which we cognize the world, but under close examination, our cognition is not completely intelligible.  At least it isn't to me.  Our ordinary thinking about time does us well enough to navigate the world on a day to day basis, but it's best not to look look at it too closely -- that is, if you're hoping for a clear picture.  Plato worked over these issues in his dialog Parmenides.  It's a notoriously difficult and confusing work, which might be a result of the unintelligibility of a close examination of time or, more broadly, the unintelligibility of Plato's forms.   

Turning to our perception of time, I have in the course of meditating, noticed that as my thoughts begin to settle and as I focus my attention on an unchanging object, my sense of time seems to change.  This is consistent with my college psychology class hypothesis.  As I observe the unchanging room around me, the present appears not to be quite so momentary, but in a peculiar way, drawn out.  This helps me make sense of the blur of becoming, while still retaining a sense of the present.  While the world is in a constant state of becoming, that part I can capture as the present is an ostensibly unchanging circumstance that survives concurrently with changes in my thoughts.  If I attend to the unchanging room, my changing thoughts slip into my subconscious, especially if I am silently repeating the same, single phoneme.  The present, then, arises out of the blur of becoming into the forefront of my experience.  Of course, my mind never becomes so settled as to bring my perception of time to a full stop, but during particularly successful meditation, the present seems to become oddly extended beyond an infinitesimal moment. 

Anyway, time is still a puzzle and the perception of time is puzzle within it.  Happy New Year?