“‘The post–9.11 Method.’”

America, Israel, and the regime of international lawlessness they inflict on humanity.

Making sadism ‘legal.’ Ben–Givr and his prisoners. (Screenshot.)

19 NOVEMBER—Maybe you saw the video that went public on 1 November wherein Itamar Ben–Givr stands above a row of Palestinian prisoners lying face down with their heads in bags and their hands bound behind their backs. “Look at how they are today, the minimum of conditions,” the ultra–Zionist minister of national security in Bibi Netanyahu’s fanatic-filled cabinet, says as he turns to his entourage. “But there is another thing we need to do. The death penalty to terrorists.”

Those lying on their bellies were reportedly members of al–Nukhba, the special forces unit of al–Qassam, Hamas’s military wing. Ben–Givr, a militant settler who proves, time and again, utterly indifferent to international law, the laws of war, or any sort of accepted norms, wants the Zionist state to kill prisoners of war. This is what it comes down to.

If you haven’t seen the video (and here is a version with good English subtitles), maybe you heard the outrage that subsequently echoed around the world (except in the United States). The footage of the repulsive Ben–Givr has been all over digital media—YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Al Jazeera put it out on “X.” I took the version linked here from CNN, one of the only mainstream American media to cover it.

That was then, this is now: On Monday, 10 November, the Knesset voted, 39 to 16, in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists”—so long, this is to say, they are Palestinians and not Israeli settlers, who have been on an escalated rampage of terror in the West Bank for many months. “Any person who intentionally or through recklessness causes the death of an Israeli citizen, when motivated by racism, hatred, or intent to harm Israel, shall face the death penalty,” the bill reads in part. It disallows any reconsideration of a death sentence once it is imposed.

This vote was on the legislation’s first reading, of which there are to be three per Israeli parliamentary procedure. But by all appearances this proposed statute will become law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government support the bill, according to The Times of Israel and Haaretz. Gal Hirsch, a former I.D.F. military commander and the man who oversaw all the negotiations that led to the recent release of captives on both sides, told Haaretz the bill is “a tool in the toolbox that allows us to fight terror.”

The media coverage was yet more extensive this time—although not, once again, in the United States—and I found it modestly better than one might expect. The BBC had it, reporting that the bill covers “people Israel deems terrorists.” Reuters referred to “Palestinian militants” instead of “terrorists.” These are modest steps in the right direction—away from the Zionist state’s account of what it is doing, this is to say. Al Jazeera also covered the vote, as to be expected. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, reported that Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of the Knesset, got into an altercation with Ben–Givr that nearly came to fisticuffs. I wish it had, to be honest.

And from the corporate press and broadcasters in the United States, nothing on this obviously newsworthy event. From the Zionist-supervised New York Times, its well-staffed Jerusalem bureau notwithstanding—nothing. Whatever happened to “without fear or favor”? It is an idle question, I know, but it comes to mind on occasions such as these. In this case The Times lies by omission.

Anadolu went on to quote Ben–Givr as bragging on social media: “Jewish Power is making history. We promised and delivered.” Jewish Power, Otzma Yehudit in Hebrew, is the party Ben–Givr heads, which counts the infamous Meir Kahane, madman of all Zionist madmen, among its inspirations.

On the N.G.O. side, I was pleased to see Amnesty International step forward boldly. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior research director, stated. “A majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians.” The headline on this report was just as good: “Israel must immediately halt legislation of discriminatory death penalty bill.”

Apartheid Israel will not halt anything, of course; the more indecent the proposition the more certainly this is so. And here we go. On Thursday and Friday, 13 and 14 November, the I.D.F. made mass arrests in the West Bank, all of those detained immediately termed “terrorists.” The Times of Israel put the number at 50, The Jerusalem Post 40. Just to complete the picture, on the Thursday a pack of Israeli settlers descended on a mosque 18 kilometers southwest of Nablus—this just before morning prayers were to begin—and, after scrawling racist graffiti on its walls and burning copies of the Quran, attempted to set the mosque ablaze.

Take a sec, as I did, to consider these events side-by-side, with the law now pending in the Knesset in mind. What are we in for here, 40 or more mass executions at some point not far down the road? And how many after that? And Israeli settlers will go on their terrorizing way?

I am right with Amnesty and all others condemning the racism implicit in legislation that makes the disgraceful Ben–Givr so pleased. But I don’t quite get the reasoning. Would the Knesset bill be O.K. if it also extended to settler violence and, so, wasn’t discriminatory? Not sure I understand the point here.

No, I see a larger matter at issue in this bill. It is this: The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations. The Knesset and the Netanyahu regime, in other words, implicitly argue that Israeli law supersedes what the jurists of international law may count as beyond the boundaries of legality. We are going to make it legal to execute prisoners so long as we call them terrorists, and all we have to do to make this legal is say it is legal by ruling on our own conduct: This is the Israeli position, fairly stated.

This, the consecration of lawlessness in national law, tips us into another line of inquiry altogether. To put the case very simply, where does the Zionist state get off attempting this stunt? This is our question.

And the bitter truth is that the United States, world leader in lawlessness for a long time now, has licensed the Israelis to go unabashedly down this road. We should be clear about this for the sake of our integrity: What the Israelis are about to do is nothing the Americans have not already done.

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The most obvious case in point is the bundle of secret memoranda Justice Department attorneys wrote to construct the legality of the kidnappings, the detentions without charge, the torture, the offshore “black sites,” Guantánimo—the whole horrific schmear—after the 9.11 attacks. The mind goes immediately this occasion, fateful as it has proven.

The commander-in-chief was acting legally in a time of war. The Geneva Conventions did not apply because all those people fighting on their own soil against American soldiers were “unlawful combatants,” and the United States had no obligation under the laws of war to afford them legal protections. The waterboarding, the beatings, the electrodes, the rectal feedings and all that wasn’t torture: It was “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which even got an acronym, E.I.T.s. The black sites were O.K. because they were beyond U.S. borders and the U.N. Convention Against Torture therefore did not apply. So went the Bush II regime’s “reasoning.”

The extent to which these lawyers twisted law and logic into pretzels was truly diabolic, as readers may recall. And the worst of these despicable punks, well-deserving to be named, was John Yoo, who drafted a number of the memos that “authorized” the C.I.A. to torture human beings. Yoo is now 58 and holds an endowed chair as a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. I suppose it follows naturally, given what the late-phase imperium counts important. He should have stood trial, of course, along with a lot of other people the Obama administration refused to prosecute.

Yoo and his colleagues at Justice had a job to do, making lawlessness lawful, and they got it done, at least at home and on paper. My argument is very simple: What goes around keeps going around. There is a straight line, I mean to say, between Washington’s post–9.11 abuses of international law and the vote in the Knesset on 10 November.

Four years ago, a very fine correspondent named Vincent Bevins published a book called The Jakarta Method (Public Affairs, 2021), in which he made the case that the C.I.A.–sponsored mass killings following the 1965 coup that brought Suharto to power in Indonesia reflected the modus operandi of the United States the whole of the Cold War. The book got all sorts of awards and across-the-board accolades, all deserved.

I’m looking for a similar name, a name for how the United States has conducted its business during the two dozen years since the 9.11 attacks and how other nations have taken this as dispensation for the same or worse behavior. There must be one, surely, or there ought to be one in any case, because there is a method to all the madness, lawlessness its defining principle, and Israel is the nation most eagerly—or baldly, better put—adopting it.

After the events of September 2001 John Whitbeck, the international lawyer living in Paris, published an essay on the meaning and instrumentalized use of the word “terrorism” that has been republished many times since in many places. And after two dozen years it is still superbly pertinent. The Floutist reprinted it last year under the headline, “‘Terrorism,’ this insidious word.” Our version of Whitbeck’s piece is here. It begins:

The greatest threat to world peace and civil society today is clearly “terrorism” — not the behavior to which the word is applied but the word itself. Since the word “terrorism” (like the behavior to which the word is applied) can never be eradicated, it is imperative to expose it for what it is—a word.

No nation has made more profligate use of this term than the United States. Its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, F.T.O.s, runs to several pages; President Trump has added 19 names to it so far this year and proposes to add more. Drug traffickers are terrorists; Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, is a terrorist with a $50 million bounty on his head; antifa protesters are terrorists; the immigrant population in the United States, legal and illegal, is infested with terrorists; so are those demonstrating against Israel’s brutalities in Gaza and the West Bank. Label some organization or someone a “terrorist” and all manner of extra-legal behavior is excused. I cannot say the Israelis learned the power of this word from the Americans, but it is from the Americans they have learned how effectively to use it—which is to say, incessantly.

So much of what “the Jewish state” is doing in its Zionist-nationalist phase derives from what the Americans have “legitimized” by doing it first. This is the point we ought not miss as we condemn, altogether rightfully, the Tel Aviv regime of terror.

The Israeli military’s attacks on the Gaza aid flotillas this last summer—drones, fire bombs, eventually the boarding of these vessels and the arrests of their crew and passengers, all of this in international waters: It is sheer piracy on the open seas. Do you think the Israelis would have dared these breaches of law had the Americans not set the bar when it seized the cargo of four Iranian vessels en route to Venezuela four years ago? At the moment the Trump regime is in legal contortions worthy of John Yoo to justify its extrajudicial executions of fishermen sailing in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific—claiming they are, but what else, “narco-terrorists.”

This very unmerry-go-round simply does not stop. This week we read that an Israeli airline no one seems to know anything about has been flying charter flights to South Africa with hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza on board. It is obvious, if you follow the route these people have taken, that the Israeli governmeent and military are behind this scheme. And impossible to imagine they would be getting up to this had the Trump regime not taken to airlifting immigrants to various Latin American nations in recent months.

The U.S. imperium entered an era of desperation after 9.11, and in this condition it has led the world back to a state of lawlessness—flagrantly this time, with an assumption of collective impunity shared among the Western powers and their appendages—that humanity thought it had superseded after the 1945 victories. So has it licensed by its own example others to ignore international law and the institutions created by common effort to define and enforce it.

Israel is not alone in partaking aggressively of this march to chaos. There are terrorists terrorists terrorists everywhere, to listen to the Europeans tell of it. The European Union now debates how it will structure the theft of €140 billion, about $163 billion, from Russia’s frozen assets to keep the war going in Ukraine. No, there are others. But the Israelis are first in adopting—at last I have a name for it—let’s call it “the post–9.11 Method.”

And now we are confronted with what looks as if it is the denouement—diabolic and heartbreaking all at once—of the 9.11 Method as it reaches its dreadful conclusion. The news of the week has been the U.N. Security Council’s vote to approve Resolution 2803, which gives the Netanyahu–Trump “peace plan” the legitimacy of international law. As has been much remarked, this plan puts the perpetrators of a genocide in complete control of post–”war” Gaza and permits its two million people no voice or part in determining their future.

Here is how Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, put the matter in remarks released in Geneva by the U.N. Human Rights Council today:

… I am deeply perplexed. Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence, the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.

This, so serious a strike at the authority of the institution humanity decided to found after the catastrophes of the last century’s first half, is diabolic and heartbreaking all at once. Has the post–9.11 Method just triumphed, at the hands of the Americans and Israelis, over the human cause?

An earlier version of this essay appeared in ScheerPost.

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