This piece highlights the role of the media in priming audiences for genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. While the themes illuminated here regarding mainstream media coverage of the Middle East have long been endemic, the Gaza genocide brought them into acute view. The piece also presents three television interviews with the author, Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, Professor at the Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice, and Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge. The select interviews, which are part of a significant archive of such interviews featuring Palestinian interlocutors and mainstream Western media outlets, are dated to November 13, 2023, February 10, 2024, and January 17, 2025. The introductory remarks reflect the significance of Palestinian interlocutors being able to speak for themselves, the hostilities they face as they serve as both experts and media correctives, the endemic bias of media outlets, as well as the double standards at play in comparison to other guests often saying similar things. This introduction emphasizes how the media’s construction of narratives that enabled the genocide is as significant as the political and legal orders also at play.

At the foundation of knowledge production is the question of who exactly is doing the producing, on what basis, when, where and for whom? Are all views equal? Whose views are or ought to be included? And with what implications? In this 2025 LJIL Lecture, Professor Ardi Imseis meditates on these and other related questions through the prism of one of the most pressing international legal and moral issues of our time: Palestine.

Self-immolation has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of political protest in the age of media, capable of moving people across vast distances into collective action. In 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty US Air Force serviceman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This essay reads Bushnell’s self-immolation as an act of resistance to US governmentality by using the disciplinary choreography of the American soldier against itself. The essay describes how Bushnell stages a disassembling of the American soldier to reveal an entanglement between the reproduction of the American way of life and the production of Palestinian death in Gaza. Further, the essay argues that Bushnell’s act does not simply protest the genocide in Gaza but performs what I call the ungovernable aesthetics of dying: an immanent, embodied critique of an apparatus of governance that normalizes genocide as a means of managing its possible resistance. Gaza, then, becomes a lens through which the structure of American biopolitical governance becomes inescapably legible. When Bushnell burns the soldier’s body, he transforms it into an exothermic process and, in doing so, releases an affective force that moves people across distances, producing a collective refusal of the American way of life.

The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.

This essay examines media bias, U.S. foreign policy, and the selective application of international law in the context of the Gaza Genocide. The author argues that Western governments and mainstream media outlets have consistently misrepresented Israel’s actions, framing them as defensive while erasing a history of Palestinian suffering and rights. Headlines, reporting practices, and editorial decisions shape public perception, creating a persistent disconnect between what occurs on the ground and what is widely understood in the West. Drawing on media analysis, the author highlights how firsthand reporting, social media, and grassroots activism have challenged entrenched narratives. Ultimately, the Gaza Genocide exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called rules-based international order and the notion of a free press, and underscores the need for an accountable media in confronting atrocities.

There is increased public attention directed to the topic of weapons trade and this is a positive development because enhanced scrutiny holds a promise of bringing more accountability to the field that has long been obscure. This article reviews the possibility of criminal prosecutions of corporate officials for supplying weapons to Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or a similar forum. The Nuremberg Trials planted seeds for such an endeavour by holding several industrialists criminally liable. Yet, modern international criminal law has so far largely stayed away from defining the scope of individual criminal responsibility for corporate officials. The case studies in this paper reveal that the moment is not ripe for commencing actual investigations at the ICC. Nonetheless, a future consensus is slowly building through (often failed) attempts to use legal or policy avenues to define the standards of conduct in the weapons trade.

In the US, engaging in scholarship and advocacy on Middle East issues, certainly on Palestine, has long attracted attacks from campus and off-campus organizations and individuals. However, a near consensus has emerged that the threats to academic freedom that we are witnessing today are unprecedented, as it is now the US government that is leading the assault. The weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those engaged in teaching about Palestine and/or in pro-Palestine advocacy has become a battering ram utilized by the political right to achieve a central goal: taming or destroying American higher education as a locus of critical inquiry and potential opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. What does the current moment mean for us as members of a Middle East studies community? How have the challenges we face evolved and how are today’s attacks different from those of the past? This essay addresses the evolution of these growing threats in the US as well as longer-standing threats in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region in the context of the role and work of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) in responding to them.

This article explores how emotions can affect policies of hostage rescue and recovery. Any hostage rescue/recovery strategy must consider the relative weights of at least three major goals: 1) maximising chance of recovering/rescuing the hostages; 2) punishment of the kidnappers; and 3) avoidance of collateral damage and killing of bystanders. This article will show how an understanding of emotion can help explain why one of these goals comes to dominate another, why one goal fades in importance. The article will argue that a specific combination of two emotions – anger and contempt – drives the elevation of the punishment goal above that of maximising chances of hostage recovery while also greatly diminishing any value of collateral damage avoidance. The article considers these issues with a short case study of hostage taking at Attica Prison in 1971, which serves as a link to the main case – Israel’s post–October 7 hostage policy towards Gaza.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

Armed conflict devastates children across all regions and ideologies – inflicting profound and lasting harm on their bodies, minds, and developmental trajectories. While all sides may commit atrocities, the experience of children is tragically consistent: they are the least responsible, yet often the most harmed. This article traces the evolving global understanding of war’s impact on children, charting a journey in modern history to present-day realities. It begins with the landmark 1996 UN report by Graça Machel, which exposed the wide-ranging and systematic nature of the effects of war on children – where violence, displacement, and severed attachments force children into premature adulthood. Building on this, the 2009 and 2013 UN efforts codified the “Six Grave Violations” against children in armed conflict, now central to global monitoring and advocacy. Despite these frameworks and legal protections, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 2024 UN Secretary-General’s report shows violations have surged – up 21% in the past year alone. To bring these patterns into focus, the article concludes with a case study of Gaza. Chosen for its immediacy and visibility, Gaza is emblematic of the ongoing failure to shield children from war’s worst impacts. Similar suffering persists in Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine. The article calls for an urgent, universal imperative: end hostilities to protect children. A trauma-informed, attachment-sensitive approach – grounded in lessons from Rwanda, Bosnia, and Syria – is essential. Clinicians, humanitarians, and policymakers must place children at the heart of all post-conflict recovery and accountability efforts.

The Gaza war, which started on 7 October 2023 through the horrendous attack by Hamas on Israel, has caused a depressing measure of human suffering on all sides. As far as Israel’s use of force is concerned, this war also constitutes a challenging case for the application of the jus contra bellum. This chiefly arises from the genuine legal uncertainty concerning the applicability of the right of self-defence when an armed attack by a non-state organisation emanates from the territory of a state that has proven unable to prevent said armed attack. Arguably, the situation in the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023 presents the rare variation of such an ‘unable host state scenario’ where the non-state armed attack (by Hamas) against a state (Israel) has originated from a territory (the Gaza Strip) destined for the realisation of the right to self-determination of a people (the Palestinian people). In such a case, the dilemmatic conflict that underlies the uncertainty about the applicability of the right of self-defence is between the legally protected interests of the state that is the victim of the armed attack and those of the ‘host people’ of the non-state attacker.

This article critiques the assessment by exporting states of assurances that exported arms will not be misused by recipient states, with a focus on the Gaza conflict. First, the article develops a transferable framework for evaluating assurances. Building on the arms export obligations in the Geneva Conventions, and the implementation of those export obligations in the Arms Trade Treaty and EU Common Position, the article synthesises a due diligence test. It also draws on assurance assessment in another field where assurances are routinely given to overcome risk: when assurances attempt to address the risk of mistreatment to an expelled person implicating non-refoulement. The methodology for assurances assessments in risk prediction has been developed extensively in that area and closely resembles a similar approach emerging for arms exports. The article articulates the relevant criteria for assessing assurances when completing a due diligence risk assessment for arms exports and then applies that framework to the US arms exports in relation to the Gaza conflict. Under National Security Memorandum 20, the United States released a public report on its assurances assessment, offering a rare partial glimpse into the use of assurances in arms exports and an opportunity to examine whether assurances are being assessed in alignment with international practice. The result of the article is a clear practical checklist for lawful reliance on assurances and a tentative conclusion that the assessment by the US was not in compliance with international standards.

The article is set against the near absence of external protection responses to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Querying the interplay between four recognised international legal norms in the context of armed conflict, it seeks to provide doctrinal clarity in a context where the range and interaction of diverse legal standards may generate uncertainty or claims of apparent norm conflict: the prohibition on forced displacement, the right to leave any territory, non-refoulement and the right to return to one’s ‘own country’, including as part of the realisation of a collective right to self-determination. The article posits that a future realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination has been coopted by external actors as a justification for infringing, in an immediate and tangible sense, the individual rights of Gazans to leave the strip in order to seek and to enjoy elsewhere protection from rights violations, some of which breach jus cogens norms. This latest manifestation of ‘Palestinian exceptionalism’ has had dire consequences for individual Palestinians and, unless unwaveringly rejected, could detrimentally affect those fleeing future armed conflicts.

This essay approaches Palestine not as a laboratory or a problem to be solved, but as a paradigm that elucidates the persistent and cumulative violence of settler colonialism, genocide, and dispossession. The author explores the collapse and distortion of time under siege, the fragmentation and resilience of bodies amid relentless violence, and the radical power of storytelling in the face of attempted erasure. Weaving together images from Gaza’s hospitals, refugee camps, schools, prisons, and graveyards, this essay documents both the horror and tenacity of everyday Palestinian life. It situates the ongoing Nakba within global trends of authoritarianism and repression, including the assault on academic freedom and criminalization of solidarity. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian defiance, memory, and narrative offer vital lessons in apocalyptic times.