Introduction
I had already started writing this essay when Abdelwahab El-Affendi published a remarkable article on the Al Jazeera website, titled “Where is the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in Gaza?” El-Affendi plainly says everything there is to say regarding the question: Where are the defenders of the responsibility to protect as Israeli occupation forces systematically exterminate and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians?
Academics typically begin by defining and contextualizing their concepts (in this case, the responsibility to protect). I will not do this, for at least two reasons. First, we have an abundance of literature on this very question. Second, what is the point? This essay is not intended for publication in an academic journal. It is more a series of reflections on a specific question related to the principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P). There is little use in exhausting space in discussing the definition of R2P, not only because of the nature of this essay, but also because I recall what I confided to a colleague days after the start of Israel’s unscrupulous war on Gaza: “How could we now enter the classroom and tell young students, including Palestinians: ‘Our lesson today is about humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect.’?” Perhaps I was wrong, but my colleague was undoubtedly not when he replied, “It would be like going to a funeral to console a man who has lost his only child and starting to talk about the blessing and joy of children.”
I will focus here more on the legal debate over the relevance of R2P for the Gaza Strip and the rest of occupied Palestine, or, to use the debate’s terminology, the “applicability” of the principle of R2P to the case of Gaza. This debate did not begin after 7 October 2023. Already during the Israeli war on Gaza in July 2014, various academics and practitioners were discussing the question, some of whom participated in an online symposium hosted by the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, to which we will later return.
