“Israel represents the Western beachhead in the Islamic world”

By Richard Falk, Prof. Emeritus of International Law, Princeton; former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) organized an online forum on March 2, 2026, titled “Epstein and the Bottomless Depravity of the Elites – Urgent Need for a Cultural Renaissance!”. Richard Falk held a speech here, which we present below.

It is a great honor for me to be part of this Schiller Institute conference. I had the opportunity to listen to the presentations of Panel 1, and I think they were extraordinarily rich discussions of how troubling the present world crisis is, and how it really does endanger the entire species, the destiny of humanity in a way that has never been quite so vividly challenged. I think it is a brilliant move to associate the Epstein disclosures as a kind of metaphor for the way in which war and violence and corruption are shaping contemporary history.

It’s something that is deeply distressing, but also is part of a necessary diagnosis of what has to change if a positive response is to be generated and forthcoming. And I think I want to start my comments with some clarifications of the underlying diagnostic issues. I very much agree with the idea that Helga Zepp-LaRouche set forth so clearly of the need for a new architecture of peace and development as a foundation, a necessary foundation, for a viable framework of global governance that is premised on justice for all, and for turning this notion that there are only winners and losers in history, into a framing of international relations in terms of seeking to make all political actors winners, and to have a benefit for their peoples. I think it’s extremely important to understand that World War I and World War II were essentially regional wars within the West.

They’re called world wars because the West was controlling or dominating the rest of the world. What Iran, and Israel’s genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, give us a glimpse of is this new phenomenon of inter-civilizational war. Israel represents the Western beachhead in the Islamic world, and as several of the speakers this morning alluded to, the Huntington ideas of a clash of civilizations is now being enacted in a very menacing manner. That menacing manner is captured by the fact that the opening claims of the U.S. and Israel violate the most fundamental elements of a humane, law-oriented approach to the relations of sovereign states. I would put a great stress on the deliberate assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, because here is the notion that a person who is regarded as a representative of God and of something deeply spiritual should be the object of a deliberate assassination, is to strike at the essence of what an inter-civilizational war is about.

That is different from the regional war within the West that was first fought in relation to Germany and then became the Cold War, but it was always a Western internal struggle, with spillovers to the rest of the world, but the antagonists in both of those world wars were part of Western civilization. This is something new, because what it portends is an era of inter-civilizational war, and Modi’s visit, which was just alluded to, is another dimension of that, where a Hindu leader of India befriends a genocidal Western leader in order to connect the suppression of Muslims in India and, even more grossly, in Kashmir. This is another dimension of inter-civilizational warfare that’s extremely disturbing and distressing. I’ve devoted my life to the promotion of an international law framework for the foreign policy, first of all, my own country, the U.S., and more generally of the world, but I have had no illusions that such a vision of a peaceful world was shared by the foreign policy elites, not only of the U.S., but of the other powerful countries. There’s a lot of wishful thinking about what the UN was established to achieve. That architecture of security and a peaceful development was basically giving concrete institutional embodiment to a vision of the future that was controlled by the winners of the war.

It was not an institution structured to achieve peace, because that would make no sense, of giving the most powerful and dangerous countries not only the control over the decision power of the Security Council, but over the enforcement of the ICJ and ICC’s judgments of the capacity to amend the charter. This was a winner’s idea of keeping the control of war and peace ultimately in the hands of the winners of World War II, and that meant that there was a primacy given to geopolitics, and a subordination of law that was to apply to the rest of the world. This kind of thinking, which is still very foremost among the foreign policy elites of the world, also was present in the war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo, where only the crimes of the losers were investigated and scrutinized, and the crimes of the winners were ignored.

Nuclear weapons, as a result, were given a provisional legitimacy, despite the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has been reproduced in the so-called Trump plan for the end of the Israel-Palestine struggle, by rewarding genocide and punishing its victims. That’s another way of saying that what counts is the expression of military dominance, not what is beneficial to people, or in accord with the embodied principles of justice.

We need to get rid of the illusions that we have something positive to reproduce in the present crisis situation. It’s the same thing about the U.S. saying the vision of the founders is something that the U.S. has departed from, which is certainly true, but it overlooks the fact that the founders were responsible for genocidal policies against the native peoples of the land they settled on and occupied. They were colonialists, they were settler colonialists. And beyond that, many of the founders and early presidents were slaveholders. Slavery was part of that initial kind of claim that was delusionary, that America was an exception, that somehow or other, whatever it did, it could do no wrong. And that deception still is very prevalent in the popular culture of the country, and we really need to get beyond that if we are to achieve this new architecture, which we need desperately.

And one of the aspects of this is the groupthink within foreign policy elites that is epitomized by the Henry Kissinger perspective on law and morality, which is premised on a dogmatic acceptance of political realism, which is a cover for military agency in the history of the human species. And that view is still almost impossible to contest in the inner circles of the leading countries of the world, with the possible exception and partial exception of China. We can learn, in order to get the alternative architecture, I think one of the early moves toward making that not just a dream, but a political project, is to learn from China. We don’t have to imitate China. They have their own internal deficiencies, but we can learn a great deal from China about the importance of renouncing military agency as the basis of prosperity and of security. And until we learn that, I’m very doubtful that there will be a way to make this vision of a different peace and development architecture into a political project that has a chance of realization. The only alternative is the power of the people to rise up and challenge this, but that requires more time than I think this human species has, to address these fundamental dislocations.

And I will conclude by saying that we need to disabuse mythologies of what is possible in order to create a transition to this alternative peace and development framework. Because until it becomes a political project and not just a vision of peace-minded, justice-minded visionaries, it will remain a frustrated dream. Thank you very much, and I apologize for going over my time.