Iain Morrison

There is a sentence that almost never appears in Western coverage: Under international law, a people under military occupation have the right to resist that occupation. This is not a controversial claim. It is in the United Nations Charter. It is in the Geneva Conventions. It has been affirmed repeatedly by the UN General Assembly, explicitly referring to "all available means, including armed struggle." It is the same principle invoked to describe French resistance to Nazi occupation as heroic rather than terrorist. It is so uncontroversial that it doesn't need to be stated when applied to almost any other occupied people in history. When applied to Palestinians, it disappears. Not because it became false. Because the people who control which sentences appear in the news made a decision about which populations are permitted to have legally recognized rights that are spoken aloud in prime time. That decision is political. The silence around it is also political. The pretense that both are journalistic is the lie inside the lie.

Henry Kissinger died at one hundred years old. In his bed. After a life that included, by documented record: the secret bombing of Cambodia, the facilitation of the coup that brought Pinochet to power, the green light to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, and the continuation of a war he privately knew was unwinnable because losing it before an election was politically inconvenient. He died at one hundred years old and was eulogized by heads of state. This is not an aberration. This is the terminal destination of a system that has no external enforcement mechanism for the people at the top. International law exists. It has courts. Those courts have, with some consistency, prosecuted African heads of state and Yugoslav military commanders and Rwandan génocidaires. They have not prosecuted an American. Not one. The law, like most things, is differently weighted depending on which direction you're looking from. Kissinger died at one hundred. In his bed. Understand what that means about where the consequences actually live.