Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect

The absence of a clear, sustained, and powerful invocation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in response to Israel’s vicious assault on Gaza reveals the fundamental weaknesses of the doctrine and affirms Hobson’s (2022) arguments about R2P’s insularity and detachment from reality. We are now over three months into a military assault that many experts have labelled as a genocide (Government of South Africa 2023) and the R2P has played no significant role in debates over how to respond. It is estimated that over twenty thousand Palestinians, including more than eight thousand children, have been killed since Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israeli communities surrounding Gaza on October 7. Much of Gaza City and many of the refugee camps-turned-neighbourhoods across the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble, with the promise that more, and worse, is to come in pursuit of the goal of eliminating Hamas. Israel’s campaign is now recognised as having generated civilian deaths at a rate higher than any other war of the twenty-first century (Leatherby 2023).

The claim that ‘we really didn’t know’, so common in the wake of previous genocidal assaults (Woldt 2021), does not seem to be available to any reasonable observer of this case. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised to cut off water, food, and electricity to the ‘human animals’ within this small piece of land that is home to two million people (Karanth 2023). Over the period since then, calls for the total annihilation of the Gaza Strip and the people within it have been regularly aired by Israeli politicians and military figures (Narea and Samuel 2023). Leaders of the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union, amongst others, continue to provide moral support and military assistance to the Israelis on the grounds that Israel ‘has the right to defend itself’ against terrorism. The hypocrisy and double-dealing of Western powers in their response to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza has intensified to a point that there is now widespread scepticism about the ongoing value of human rights and international law in general (Malik 2023).

So why is R2P largely absent from the debate around Israel’s genocidal assault? Despite the intensity and significance of this violence, there have been no calls whatsoever from any R2P-related group for the imposition of sanctions or no-fly zones to restrain Israeli actions, nor any kind of military intervention to protect the Palestinians against the mass atrocities that are being perpetrated against them. To their credit, both the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) (2023a) and European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (ECR2P) (2023) have signed on to open calls for a ceasefire. But aside from this, many of the R2P’s most vocal advocates have been largely silent, aside from some strongly-worded social media posts from GCR2P director Savitna Pawnday and more calls for ceasefire and humanitarian access in the GCR2P’s monthly ‘Atrocity Alert’ and ‘R2P Monitor’ publications (GCR2P 2023b; 2023c).

The largely tentative approach to condemning Israel’s atrocities stands in stark contrast to the intense, public lobbying for sanctions and intervention led by the GCR2P in early 2011, following Muammar and Saif Gaddafi’s calls to eliminate rebel groups that had revolted against his rule (GCR2P 2011a). In response to Gaddafi’s speech, widespread claims about the likelihood of genocide circulated in the global media and formed an important part of the call for military intervention. At that time, an open letter from the GCR2P called for sanctions and the imposition of a no-fly zone, both of which were subsequently implemented under UNSC resolutions 1970 and 1973 (GCR2P 2011b).

The Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (APR2P) has only mentioned Gaza in its regular reports on the region to warn of the hate speech it may be inflaming in Southeast Asia (APR2P 2023). Interestingly, this warning does not extend to Australia or New Zealand, where extreme anti-Islamic sentiment is regularly aired and has the potential to produce actual physical violence, as the 2019 Christchurch mosques massacre illustrates. This kind of selectivity and partiality in deciding on areas of focus or applying moral or legal principles is, I will argue, not just one of several criticisms that could be made of R2P but is representative of the fundamental weaknesses of the doctrine as whole.

The director of APR2P, Alex Bellamy, published a short piece on the fate of R2P several weeks after October 7 (Bellamy 2023). It makes no mention of either Hamas’ attack on October 7, nor the mass atrocities that had been perpetrated by Israel in the weeks since. More importantly, Bellamy follows what appears to be an emerging trend on the part of R2P advocates toward accepting the loss of influence of the doctrine. As Bellamy puts it, ‘[t]oday, R2P is widely considered too controversial to be used as a vehicle for either activism, practice, or institutional reform aimed at protecting vulnerable populations from atrocity crimes’. Likewise, the co-director of the ECR2P, Adrian Gallagher, claimed in a social media post on X on October 19 that ‘No-one in their right mind thinks the RtoP norm is doing well’, while retaining an optimism that it could come to mean more in the future.

My contention here is that optimism about the future of R2P is misplaced and that while it is true that many have pronounced the death of R2P prior to the current violence in Gaza (Rieff 2011; 2014), its fundamental weaknesses have never been so clearly and unequivocally exposed as they are today. And the primary weakness is that it is a partisan political doctrine that masquerades as a universal moral norm. Bellamy’s (2023) Just Security piece is illustrative of this, listing as it does the countries that ‘routinely perpetrate atrocity crimes’ (‘Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, or permanent members of the Security Council such as Russia and China’) alongside ‘States they cooperate and trade with – such as South Africa, Brazil, and India’ as being uncomfortable with ‘a principle that threatens to bring down the collective will of the U.N. membership onto their heads should they turn their guns on their own citizens to retain power’.

In identifying these states as atrocity-committers and opponents of R2P, Bellamy sums up exactly the kind of blindness to the failings of R2P identified by Hobson (2022). For Bellamy, mass atrocities take place exclusively in authoritarian states, not in the confines of liberal democracies like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or, perhaps, even Israel. In response, I would argue that R2P is controversial not because the states he lists are afraid of its power, but because those liberal democracies are not subject to its rules. Bellamy does offer a tepid critique of Western powers failing to intervene – and portrays this as a ‘both sides’ failure of will to prevent atrocities – but what underlies even this criticism is a bedrock, binary view of non-Western, authoritarian states as committers of atrocities and Western states as interveners. The ‘moral untouchability’ of R2P identified by Fassin (2011) and drawn upon by Hobson (2022), turns out not to really be about claims to humanitarianism in general, but a much narrower claim that understands humanitarian values to be a possession of liberal democratic states. Yet even this narrow moral untouchability falls apart when liberal democracies become the purveyors of mass atrocity crimes and genocide, as they have done in Gaza.

Gaza shows that there is not, in fact, ‘‘a massive gap between government by atrocity and liberal democracy’’, as Bellamy (2021, 13) argued in an earlier defence of R2P. It shows that this is not even a valid or useful spectrum. What we see clearly today – and what should already have been clear from at least the last hundred years of human history – is that liberal democracies are as willing to commit and support mass atrocities as any other state when they think their interests warrant it. Even further, Gaza shows that the language of a militarised humanitarianism can be deployed to defend and advance ethnic cleansing and genocide as much as it can to oppose it. Gaza thus reinforces the view that ‘the West’ cannot maintain a sense of moral superiority over any other actors in international society today. Gaza graphically reveals the essential partiality of the humanitarianism of R2P.

Gaza, for all of this, is just the latest and most comprehensive lesson on the inescapable politics that underpins the R2P, or indeed any other claim to the legitimacy of a militarised humanitarianism. Bellamy (2023) is therefore right to say that the R2P faces a political, rather than moral, problem; it always has done because it has always been a political, rather than moral, doctrine. But the substance of that problem is not, as he suggests, that authoritarian states are unwilling to have their sovereignty challenged and that political work is needed to hold them to account; rather the problem is that the militarised, interventionist dimension of R2P is inherently political and never challenged the violent face of sovereignty in the first place. I have written on several occasions of this sovereign politics that masquerades as a critique of sovereignty; a power politics that wears the garb of humanity and morality (Moses 2014). As a politics that always necessarily presents itself in thoroughly Schmittian terms as a friend/enemy distinction (Schmitt 2007), it can never coherently serve the interests of humanity. Instead, it always operates in the service of the perceived interests of those who wield the necessary physical power to conduct interventions and lay claim to the moral legitimacy of their actions. In this sense, it was not Libya or even Gaza that killed the R2P; rather, the R2P never existed in the way its advocates suggested. R2P never represented the universality it claimed. It could never escape the inherently anti-universal reality of militarised politics and this reality was always on show through the inevitably selective and uneven application of its principles over the last two decades. Cynicism lies not in the recognition of this reality (Bellamy 2018, 108), but in its denial.

In the end, the true test of the value of any norm is not whether it is useful in situations where it aligns with the interests of the powerful; rather, it is when it runs against those interests. By this measure, it is not only the R2P that has been proven to be of at best marginal value in relation to Gaza. We could also say that the entire edifice of international humanitarian law, human rights law and humanitarianism in general is in question. In every case, it is the politics of military force that cannot be reconciled with the universal values these norms claim to represent. The logical conclusion from this is that if we are serious about the promotion and protection of those universal values, they cannot be framed in relation to ‘legal’ or ‘legitimate’ uses of military force. Instead, what is required is a serious and sustained commitment to war abolition through the cultivation of a pacifist ethos for humanitarianism. While in the past I have suggested that a pacifist ethos could help to bring R2P in line with its universal claims (Moses 2019), I no longer believe this to be a useful ambition. After Gaza, the R2P no longer represents a viable normative agenda for humanitarianism in general, as the burden of its unbreakable association with the military power of the United States and NATO is now more evident than ever.

This, therefore, is not a call to allow more states to take up arms for humanitarian reasons, for to do so would be to reinforce and replicate the problems outlined here. Our responsibility now is to stand against the interests that seek war, regardless of whether that war comes in what we view as an authoritarian or humanitarian package. Traditional humanitarian groups such as the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières will continue to do invaluable work in treating victims of war in as neutral and impartial manner as they can. But a more progressive humanitarianism should focus on work against militarisation, focus on campaigns that expose the pernicious political economy of militarism, and develop messaging that insists that the regulation of warfare is not enough. Instead, we must fix our normative sights on the abolition of war.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Moses

Jeremy Moses is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His research interests are in the ethics of war and intervention, with a particular focus on realism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and military technology. His publications include the book Sovereignty and Responsibility and articles in journals including Review of International Studies, International Politics, Cooperation and Conflict, Critical Studies on Security, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Digital War.