A cruel flaunting
Section 67a of the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea! Of course!
Since the mass murder on the Mavi Marmara, who hasn’t been on tenterhooks to discover what legal justification Israel’s apparatchiks would take? What recherché citation proving uncontroversial uncontroversiality? The San Remo Manual, eh? Your move, rest of world.
But, many of the global aghast say, this is a disgrace, a traducing of the law. Opponents of execution-style killing of unarmed activists (who were giving medical attention to their own attackers) have overwhelmingly expressed their grief & rage in legal terms, denouncing Israeli actions as piracy, the blockade of Gaza as illegal, the force used as murderously disproportionate, the justifications as bogus, &c.
This outpouring of juridicalised condemnation is, of course, completely comprehensible. Along with the rest of Israel’s grotesque bullshit, faced while we remember the dead with the utterly odious Mark Regev’s oleaginous, glib rehearsals of legal doctrines he had neither heard
of the day before nor gives a tupenny fuck about now, or watching the eagerness with which an apologist for slaughter chirpily fans juridical references (all ‘Hi there!’ informality & friendly lo-fi bobbly camerawork, as if these imperial murder-shills were actors in some adorable Brooklyn indie comedy), the eagerness to disprove such lawyerly manoeuvres on the turf they claim is just one of the things one wants, violently, to do.
…
