How can other states constrain a rogue state that’s practising crimes against humanity? Could such a rogue state be re-formed and rehabilitated? As we watch Israel implementing apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide, these are pertinent questions for Australia and other states that are, at least nominally, committed to equal human rights for all people.

Israel, in claiming to be making war on Hamas, has killed more than 84,000 Palestinians from October 2023 to January 2025 ( estimate by international scholarly study), mostly innocent civilians including tens of thousands of children. This could be a vast undercount. As I write, the slaughter – by bombs, missiles, artillery, snipers and starvation – is being expanded. That Israel is committing genocide is widely recognised by most genocide experts (including many Jewish) and the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

Some possible actions to constrain and rehabilitate Israel are suggested by the past transformations of colonial White South Africa and Nazi Germany.

Under apartheid, the White South African government classified all South Africans into one of four ‘racial’ groups based on appearance, known ancestry, socioeconomic status, and cultural lifestyle: ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Coloured’, and ‘Indian’. It segregated public facilities, places of residence and employment by ‘race’. It legislated against marriage and sexual relationships between members of the different groups. It forcibly relocated millions of black South Africans from their homes to ten so-called ‘tribal homelands’ or Bantustans, stripping them of their South African citizenship and their few remaining civil and political rights.

The United Nations and individual states drew world attention to the inhumanity of apartheid in White South Africa. They campaigned against it by legitimising popular resistance, promoting anti-apartheid actions by governmental and non-governmental organisations, instituting an arms embargo, and supporting an oil embargo and boycotts of South Africa. That pressure re-formed and rehabilitated it as a new, multi-coloured South Africa where, at least in theory, all its people have equal rights and a democratic system of government.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, key individual Nazi leaders and organisations were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremburg Trials. These can be seen as together forming a de facto trial of the Nazi state and a confirmation that Nazi Germany would not be permitted to re-emerge. Re-unification of East and West Germany in 1990 created a democratic German state that recognises the crimes of the former Nazi Germany.

During visits to Berlin, I visited the major exhibition on ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ at the German Historical Museum. It was brutally frank, even including a model of a concentration camp with gas chamber. It offered no excuses.

In the eyes of the international community, White South Africa and the former Nazi Germany had lost their right to exist. Eventually, this was also recognised by most people in each state. So, the rehabilitation of a genocidal country is sometimes possible, although rehabilitation through a world war must be avoided. Even peaceful rehabilitation is not inevitable, as witness the past genocidal destruction of many Indigenous societies around the world by colonialism, where former colonial powers continue as largely unrepentant neocolonial powers that are, in several cases, still racist.

For example, like Israel today, the forerunner to the United States was a colonial enterprise in terms of its destructive impact on the North American Indigenous population and its slavery of Africans. The US evolved into a powerful neocolonial state imposing its will on foreign governments, including democratically elected ones, and foreign states, by economic power, subversion and war (see here, here and here).

A moral position is that Israel has, through its crimes against humanity, lost its right to exist as a racist state conducting ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. However, like the former White South Africa and the former Nazi Germany, it could eventually regain the moral right to exist if it were recreated as a single democratic state in which all people, former Israelis and Palestinians, had equal rights.

Unfortunately, this pathway contradicts generations of Zionist propaganda that the Jews are the ‘chosen people’ who are entitled to their own state on land occupied by another people. Throughout history, such colonialism has been implemented using racial discrimination, enforced by state power, where the original inhabitants are demonised as ‘other’, primitive and unworthy of equality. This is the current situation in Palestine.

So, the desire to transform Israel from a rogue to a just state is unlikely to come from most Israelis. As in the case of South Africa, it would have to be forced upon Israel by states that are committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, supported morally by Jewish communities living outside Israel and the growing protests within Israel against the genocide.

A high barrier to such a transformation is the financial, military and political support of Israel by the United States, unwavering since Israel’s creation in 1948. Lobbying and funding of US politicians and the mass media by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) further strengthens the bond between the two states, which have much in common, in addition to their lip service to democratic decision-making.

The US treats Israel as an extension of its geopolitical power, its ‘deputy sheriff’ holding the fort in the Middle East. Specific benefits to the US include ensuring its access to Middle East oil and gas, suppressing Iran, acting as a US base in the region, and providing profits for US industries. In the words of former US President Joe Biden, when he was a senator in 1986, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”

Nevertheless, an alliance of states committed to the human rights of all people could potentially rehabilitate a reluctant, arrogant Israel. While this strategy is developed over time, the most urgent task is to assemble a multi-national convoy, escorted by naval and air forces, to supply Gaza with food and medical supplies.

Rehabilitating Israel is just a small part of a much larger challenge. According to Jason Hickel, Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, “A capitalist economy requires constant imperialist wars because it has to constantly suppress prices and wages and reorganize production in the global south around accumulation in the core. That is ultimately the system that we have to overcome.”