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palestine
Rubio, Trump Accused of Criminal Obstruction for Sanctioning ICC Judges
"Sanctioning ICC judges for doing their work on behalf of justice is a flagrant attack on the rule of law," said one critic.
Jun 06, 2025
Human rights defenders on Friday accused U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio of criminal obstruction after Rubio announced sanctions targeting four International Criminal Court judges who authorized an investigation into torture allegations against American troops in Afghanistan and arrest warrants for fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rubio sanctioned International Criminal Court Judges Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza of Peru, Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini Gansou of Benin, and Beti Hohler of Slovenia "pursuant to President Trump's Executive Order 14203." The order was issued in February and sanctioned ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan and accused the Hague-based tribunal of "baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel."
"Have Marco Rubio's State Department lawyers read him Article 70 of the Rome Statute on obstruction of justice?"
"These four individuals have actively engaged in the ICC's illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel," Rubio added. "The ICC is politicized and falsely claims unfettered discretion to investigate, charge, and prosecute nationals of the United States and our allies."
Two of the sanctioned judges authorized a probe of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. The other two green-lighted warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including weaponized starvation and the murder of Palestinians—at least 54,607 of whom have been killed since Israel began its assault and siege of Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The ICC's Assembly of State Parties—the court's governing body—said in a statement Friday that the U.S. sanctions are a "regrettable" effort to "impede the court and its personnel in the exercise of their independent judicial functions.
Kenneth Roth, a professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and former director of Human Rights Watch, on Friday accused Trump and Rubio of "obstructing justice under Article 70 of the Rome Statute," the treaty establishing and governing the ICC.
Christoph Safferling, director of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy—a Germany-based foundation "dedicated to the advancement of international criminal law and related human rights"— said Friday that 80 years after the the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, "obstructing the ICC is an affront to the commitment to justice and the rule of law."
"The court carries forward this legacy and calls for our steadfast support in the fight against impunity," Safferling added.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk
said Friday that he was "profoundly disturbed" by the U.S. sanctions.
"Attacks against judges for performance of their judicial functions, at national or international levels, run directly counter to respect for the rule of law and the equal protection of the law—values for which the U.S. has long stood," Türk added.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union "deeply regrets" the Trump administration's move.
Slovenia's Foreign Ministry said that "Slovenia regrets the announced sanctions by the U.S. government against four judges of the International Criminal Court, including a judge from Slovenia," and "rejects pressure on judicial institutions and influence on judicial operations."
"Courts must act in the interests of law and justice," the ministry continued. "In the current situation we will support the judge, who is a Slovenian citizen in carrying out her mandate." Due to the inclusion of an E.U. member state on the sanctions list, Slovenia will propose the immediate activation of the blocking act."
The E.U.'s blocking statute is meant to protect businesses in the 27-nation bloc from adverse consequences of foreign—particularly U.S.—sanctions.
During the first Trump administration, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sanctioned then-ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Prosecution Jurisdiction Division Director Phakiso Mochochoko for investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. This, even after the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II announced it would not grant a request by Bensouda to open an investigation into the alleged torture of prisoners held in U.S. military and secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.
In 2021, Khan angered human rights defenders by announcing he was seeking approval to resume an investigation into potential war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State—but would exclude alleged crimes perpetrated by U.S. forces.
U.S. and Israeli officials often note that neither country is a party to the Rome Statute. However, the court has affirmedr its jurisdiction "in relation to crimes committed on the territory of Palestine, including Gaza," as well as "over crimes committed by Palestinian nationals inside or outside Palestinian territory."
Responding to the U.S. sanctions, Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said Friday that "this is an attack against international justice and the fight against impunity."
"Governments who believe in a rule-based order must take all necessary measures to protect the four judges against the impact of the sanctions," she continued. "They must assure the ICC of their full support. They must voice their commitment to the independence and impartiality of the ICC clearly and loudly. They must implement all arrest warrants and support the ICC in all its investigations."
"International justice is a battleground. It has been so from the very beginning," Callamard added. "Victims know so all too well. We will keep fighting and resisting all attempts to derail, undermine, destroy the search for justice and the rule of law."
In April, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in a Maine federal court on behalf of Matthew Smith, co-founder of the human rights group Fortify Rights, and international lawyer Akila Radhakrishnan arguing that Trump's sanctions against Khan violate their First Amendment rights.
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Palestine And Its Metaphors
Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Jun 06, 2025
Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.
Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.
So too with nations. So too with Palestine.
Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.
Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.
Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.
We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.
It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.
Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.
The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.
But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.
Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.
They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.
But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.
Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.
Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.
Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.
The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.
It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.
The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.
Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.
Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.
This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.
Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.
To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.
Palestine remembers.
The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.
To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.
Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.
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Devastating Report Details an Occupied Palestine on 'Edge of Erasure'
"The world is witnessing Israel relentlessly starve and bomb Palestinians with total impunity," said one humanitarian worker in the region.
Jun 05, 2025
A new report by a leading Quaker social justice organization urges observers of Israel's bombardment and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and its accelerated annexation of the West Bank to see the "escalating violations" not as isolated pushes for control of the occupied territories but something much more sinister and profound.
According to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), SC), the policies and violence Israel is perpetrating on people across the territories are "systematic and risk the erasure of Palestinians."
The group joined leading humanitarian organizations that have spent years providing aid and services to Palestinians in Gaza—only to have their work impeded and made deadly by the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) attacks—in releasing The Edge of Erasure, a comprehensive look at the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The AFSC surveyed 46 international and Palestinian organizations on their experiences trying to deliver aid and services across Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from March 26-May 28.
The groups were up against Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid in Gaza, which was imposed starting March 2, two weeks before the IDF broke a temporary ceasefire and began intensifying attacks in the enclave.
In late May Israel began allowing in a tiny fraction of the amount of 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza on a daily basis before the war; advocates have said the trickle of relief is far from enough.
During the AFSC's survey, 93% of the groups said they had exhausted or were close to exhausting their aid supply in Gaza, including food, flour, fuel, hygiene kits, medications, and other essentials.
"In the face of such systematic devastation, only a comprehensive, multi-sectoral response at scale can even start to address the overwhelming, man-made humanitarian crisis."
Seven of the groups said their dwindling supplies were partially the result of Israeli attacks, with groups forced to leave materials behind due to forced displacement orders. Others said their supplies are in trucks stuck in Jordan or Egypt without the ability to enter Gaza, and some said that once they've gotten aid deliveries to distribute, they've been unable to hand out medicines because they're already expired.
More than a third of the organizations said their facilities had been directly or indirectly struck by IDF attacks, despite acknowledgement from the Israeli military that humanitarian groups must be "deconflicted."
"In several instances, no prior notification was given before the strikes," the AFSC said.
At least 452 humanitarian workers are among the more than 54,000 people who have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, and eight of the groups reported staff being injured, while five reported workers being killed in Israeli attacks during the reporting period.
While intensifying its bombing campaign and imposing a blockade that international experts said in May had pushed the entire population into a food insecurity emergency, with half a million people facing starvation, Israel has also turned at least 81% of Gaza into "no-go" militarized zones in recent months.
More than two-thirds of the groups said during the survey period that they were no longer able to access certain areas, particularly in northern Gaza as well as the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah.
"Recent Israeli forces' attacks have continued to dissect Gaza into increasingly isolated zones, cutting communities off from basic needs necessary for survival," reads the report. "In many cases, remaining residents have been literally unable to move, due to exhaustion, injury, illness, infirmity, disability, contamination with unexploded ordnance, or lack of alternatives. Some areas are formally cut off or declared inaccessible, while others have been subject to such intensive shelling and forces' attacks that they have been practically unreachable for aid delivery. These conditions effectively impose sieges within the siege, with parts of Gaza inaccessible for humanitarian operations."
Gaza's population is now confined to just 19% of the enclave due to "increasingly expansive forced displacement orders," and people are facing "simultaneous and intersecting crises" including displacement, destruction of housing, destruction of water and sanitation networks, starvation, the loss of 95% of school buildings which had been used as shelters after the war began, and a decimated healthcare system.
Palestinians have also been left without ways to maintain self-sufficiency, with less than 5% of Gaza's cropland now available for cultivation due to the Israeli military's access restrictions and damage.
"The world is witnessing Israel relentlessly starve and bomb Palestinians with total impunity," said Hanady Muhiar, Palestine/Israel country representative for the AFSC. "Israel is weaponizing hunger and destroying a principled humanitarian aid system that could be providing lifesaving goods at scale to the Palestinian people in Gaza. We all have an obligation to prevent genocidal crimes. It is urgent that states, organizations, and individuals take immediate action to stop it."
Meanwhile, the IDF has intensified attacks and demolitions of buildings in the West Bank, with 85% of structures in Masafer Yatta destroyed and over 100 homes in Nour Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps recently ordered demolished. Israeli settlers have also escalated attacks in the territory.
"The deliberate and excessive use of violence, demolitions, and displacement is not merely hindering aid delivery," reads the report, "it risks forcible transfer and entrenching annexation, and the erasure of Palestinians from their land."
Ninety-three percent of organizations in the West Bank reported "a sharp increase in movement restrictions throughout the reporting period."
The Israeli military has rejected the groups' attempts to coordinate humanitarian work, denying nearly 70% of aid movement requests between April 30-May 6.
A 51-year-old woman who spent three decades running a program for children with disabilities at Nour Shams refugee camp described being forced by Israeli soldiers to leave her home.
"The Israeli forces gave me only two hours to collect my things," said the woman. "I was afraid to find someone hiding there. They cut the electricity, so it was dark. Everything is lost. There was a picture of me, a painting made by some artist. They stomped on it and ruined it... Everything is lost now. The parents are desperate. They don't know what to do. I try to give them advice, but it’s not
the same."
The AFSC demanded a permanent cease-fire; an end to the humanitarian aid blockade—which "states with influence" must "use all possible measures" to achieve; an end to Israel's "unlawful presence" in the occupied territories; and boosted funding for the relief response.
"In the face of such systematic devastation," reads the report, "only a comprehensive, multi-sectoral response at scale can even start to address the overwhelming, man-made humanitarian crisis."
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