The Hodeidah Tribunal
A fictional story of Victor’s Justice
[Dear Readers: For a few months I’ve imagined writing a speculative novel or novella of a post-genocide world in which a group of heroes travel the world catching the war criminals and enablers behind the current genocide. The last act of the story would be the actual trial, which would give me the chance to show how much of the Nuremberg Trial text applies directly to the situation we find ourselves in today. All of which is to say, this scene is rather stripped of the elements of dramatic writing, but it could nonetheless be considered an excerpt of a future book… ]
A favorite target of the now shattered US empire, the old port city of Hodeidah was hit with saturation airstrikes in the final months of the war that liberated the Middle East from occupation. At the very end, the aircraft carrier USS Trump’s F-35s emptied their bomb bays on a final destructive run, after which the Trump left the Red Sea and ran into ‘mechanical troubles’ in the Mediterranean. It never got home. But Hodeidah was rebuilt - with a set of buildings rebuilt in the old style - and in it, a palace custom-built for the express purpose of holding the proceedings that were about to occur.
In the vast, main hall, the prisoners sat together in a glass-encased defendants’ box to the right.
The panel of judges shuffled inscrutably onto the elevated stage. Wardah and the other prosecutors sat directly across from their legal opponents: Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian lawyers defending the war criminals in the dock, their Western advisors sitting directly behind them. The proceedings were in Arabic, the jurisprudence Islamic, and so the defense team had deemed it best to have Arabs be the faces and voices of the defense and let the Westerners work behind the legal front line.
A pale, thin man with an impeccable haircut sat in the defendant box wearing a familiar smirk. The younger woman beside him leaned forward, twirling her hair and looking bored, appearing confident that nothing would befall her from this silly court. Watching them, Wardah found herself unbothered by their inaudible whisperings and incomprehensible complicities. As the leader of the Yemeni prosecution team, she felt a responsibility to history, to the past, to the living, to the survivors, to the children who would have to rebuild the nation and whose grief cried out for justice. Like hers.
When the room quieted and the bailiff signaled to her that her turn to speak had come, she walked to the podium and looked at the judges, ignoring completely the assembled criminals on display to the side.
“When the first Nazis were defeated, some of them faced a trial. One of the prosecutors, whose words I will quote here today (1), said that that trial had a grave responsibility because the Nazi crimes were so calculated, so malignant, so devastating, that civilization could not tolerate their being ignored because it could not survive their being repeated.
“They were repeated. And that American man, Justice Robert Jackson, said that instead of vengeance, putting the Nazis on trial, was a tribute which Power paid to Reason. Like Resistance fighters in the field who did not shoot down the Israeli Nazi enemy helicopters when they came to evacuate their wounded, like the men of Ansarallah who assured the crew of the Galaxy Leader that they would not be harmed but treated according to Islam, we too will pay tribute to Reason here today and to religion also, by seeking justice instead of vengeance.
“The law, my predecessor said, must not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people, but must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. I could say, evils which leave no screen in the world untouched.
“The men that your honors are here to judge, are, like my predecessor called the German Nazis, ‘living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.’
“Under the banner of ‘Zionism’, these men took from their own people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards their opponents, anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, all Arabs and Muslims, and indeed anyone else who stood in their path, they directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since… the previous trial of this kind. They excited the Western ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They replaced all rules and laws of war ever developed with their own Dahiya doctrine of mass murder of civilians, their Hannibal doctrine of killing their own people, and their Samson option of trying to blow up the world rather than lose the land they stole from others. They have demoralized and morally compromised the entire West beyond recognition. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
“Like my predecessors at the Nuremberg Trial, we had to do an immense amount of legal work in a short amount of time. Less than a year ago, this Palace of Justice did not exist and the building that had stood here had been bombed. We too may suffer from incomplete research and would have benefited from more time, for the crimes were immense and the evidence for them as well. Our case is adequate for you to judge.
“Also like the last time Nazis were tried, the nature of these crimes is that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men and women has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. We, too, must draw a line between just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war.
“These defendants have gone to great lengths to avoid being caught and tried. They did not extend the favor of a trial to the tens of thousands they tortured in their prisons. But they will be given a fair opportunity to defend themselves. We accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
“And like the previous Nazis, these modern versions are not accused of yielding to the normal frailties of human beings. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.
“The Israelis performed their crimes and posted them as trophies on social media sites. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.
“The Jewish people should know by now that we Muslims do not hold them in fear nor hate. In our religion they are the people of the book. And if we are not awed by what the so-called ‘Jewish state’ has done to our people in war, Jewish people have long been truly integrated and celebrated in our lands and protected by just rulers of the Ummah. It is Zionism that led a portion of the Jewish people astray. Zionist aggression has left the whole region in ruins. Zionist readiness to pledge the West’s word without hesitation and break it without shame has fastened upon Western diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Western arrogance has made the very phrase ‘Zionist’ a taunt - a word which used to be both proudly claimed and banned for use as an insult - that will be thrown at Westerners for generations. The Zionist nightmare has given the word a sinister significance that will linger: the Jewish, no less than the Muslim world has accounts to settle with these defendants.
“The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, through to the 1973 war, the invasions of Lebanon starting in the 1970s, Israel seemed invincible. All the Arab armies were vanquished in five days of 1967, overrun by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. All of Palestine from the river to the sea was under occupation. Parts of Syria and Lebanon, a huge part of Egypt. The Zionists built colonies in the lands they occupied and displaced the inhabitants. They committed unspeakable massacres where they went. Aggressive wars, wars of colonization, war crimes, crimes against humanity, which the nations of the world had renounced.”
Wardah looked at her notes, wondering if she was belaboring the point. Hadn’t the war settled the issue? Wasn’t it a different world now? No, she would make this presentation as if she still lived in a world where the most obvious truths about Zionism required nearly impossible standards of evidence. So she continued.
“This war did not just happen - it was planned and prepared for a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The authors of this war achieved a stupendous work in organization. Our case will show these defendants all uniting in a plan they knew could be accomplished only through genocide. Their planning of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples - all these are ends for which they acted in concert and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.
“The case as we present it here will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. But unlike the old Nazis, who used lesser folk as tools, Zionism created through careful design of the education system and media structures, a population that celebrated genocide, that self-organized to deny aid convoys and attack unarmed Palestinians in mobs. This design was a constant work-in-progress and it is the designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with these agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war, whom we hope to reach. As for the masses who participated in the crimes organized by their betters, they must be forgiven after telling their truth in a different set of proceedings, in Palestine, that will follow these. The pursuit of punitive justice against a genocidal majority would not lead us anywhere good, in the view of the prosecution.”
Wardah paused to take a sip of water, before continuing (2).
“One question that we must address first is, why not use the existing tribunals? The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? Why did we choose to bring the criminals here, to stand trial in our region, rather than in New York, at the United Nations? Because these bodies have failed. When South Africa brought the case, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocide after several months. These defendants ignored the order. The ICJ ordered a stop again before the Rafah invasion. The defendants ignored the order. The International Criminal Court prosecutor, after years of inaction, found himself unable to distinguish between aggressor and victim, and asked for arrest warrants against both. The defendants ignored these - they said Israel never signed on and the Americans had a law threatening to invade the Hague if any American were tried at the ICC. These are the courts of racism, the courts of injustice, the courts of inequality. We believe that all are equal before God and our concept of justice cannot accept that some of God’s children are above the law.
“We will leave it to the Palestinian prosecutor to go through the history prior to October 7, 2023. The Deir Yassin massacre and the many other massacres of the Nakba, the crimes of aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing throughout the decades. The way that the Western countries and institutions of international law, human rights, and free expression that were supposed to protect the vulnerable, all conspired to create a separate standard for Israel that let them commit any crime against our people. They are the best authority on this history and they can set it out for you.
“We focus instead on the systematic nature of the crimes committed by these defendants in the post-October 7, 2023 genocide war.
“The South Africans showed video and provided an extensive dossier full of these defendants going on record publicly ordering their soldiers to commit genocide. They said there would be no food, water, or electricity going to the civilian population; they cited biblical passages calling for the murder of women, children, and livestock; they made trophy videos of the destruction of homes, buildings, hospitals, water infrastructure, farmers’ fields. The destruction and stopping of aid trucks became a scene for partying. No attempt was made to cover up. This was the most unashamed, open celebration of genocide we have seen.
“But what the South Africans could not say was what we know: that the Resistance operation of October 7 was not an operation to kill Israeli civilians, but to take military prisoners alive to try to obtain a prisoner exchange, Israeli military captives in exchange for thousands of Palestinian captives who were held - tortured and starved and done to death - in the Zionist prisons until they were liberated at the end of the war. And as the Zionist newspaper Ha’aretz reported on July 7, 2024, in Yaniv Kubovich’s report “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, most of the Israeli civilians (3) who were killed on that day were killed by Israel, applying the Hannibal Directive. The genocide was built on a lie, a lie that was taken up, developed, and repeated by some of the defendants here today.
“We are bringing this case before you, your honors, because Western institutions of rights and justice chose to self-destruct rather than hold Israel accountable. We mentioned the ICJ, ICC, UN, and the Western media: all have lost their credibility, which is why we are holding the Tribunal here and in this form. But it is not just these institutions that have lost their credibility. The very conceptions of the conduct of war and diplomacy have been corroded and must be rebuilt from zero. It is for this reason that the prosecution of these defendants is so necessary.
“Regarding the conception of war. The Zionists put forward the following norms for the conduct of war:
All civilians, including children, are fair targets if a claim can be made that they are close enough that killing them is necessary to kill a combatant target. The shorthand they used was, ‘Hamas uses human shields’. Their Israeli army used actual human shields, tying children to military vehicles and forcing them to go into tunnels and houses, but were not held accountable for this.
The Zionists also put forward the notion that they can use any type of weapon, including two thousand pound bombs, for any purpose, including trying to kill an unarmed person in a tent. They removed any notion that a particular weapon might be overkill for the task for which it is used. In their conduct of war, they can use whatever weapons they choose.
In their view, if they can make a claim that any protected group of people or infrastructure might be used by a combatant, that it can be targeted. This includes all hospitals in Gaza, all medical personnel, all journalists, all food supplies, all water supplies, apartment buildings – everything, as per the Biblical quotes about Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites who is to be wiped out man, woman, child, and livestock.
Military censorship and manipulation of information is always present but in the view of the defendants, systematic and structural lying is merely a part of the war. Several of the defendants repeated a completely fake story about Resistance members eating lunch around the corpses of a family they’d murdered. This was before the thousands of trophy photos of Israelis posing with the toys and underwear of families they’d murdered, in the incitement period of the genocide.
In their zeal for extreme force protection, their soldiers target the unarmed and avoid combat with armed combatants. On the other hand, they kill their own soldiers and civilians if there’s any chance they might become captives (who could then be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners). This is the Hannibal Directive we mentioned earlier. They have institutionalized cowardice in war.
“We wish to punish the defendants for all of these: targeting of civilians, systematic lying to incite genocide, destruction of infrastructure, and total disproportion of weaponry. We wish to punish these crimes to eradicate this whole conception of war from history, so that if there are wars that must be conducted in the future, they are conducted according to laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, use weapons that are proportional, do not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, and - even if information is controlled during war - do not use lies to incite genocide.
“In terms of diplomacy, the defendants allowed a successful exchange of prisoners in November of 2023. But then, after a pause, they resumed the war, recaptured the Palestinian prisoners and resumed their torture, and methodically targeted the remaining Israeli captives to kill them. In one operation they murdered three Israeli hostages in cold blood. In another operation they rescued three hostages while killing several others and hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Whenever ceasefire negotiations reached a point of near success, the Israelis would add new clauses and insist on continuing the war as a condition of a ceasefire! These are contrary to the principles of good faith negotiation. To the United Nations, the Israelis sent a buffoon to accuse the countries of the world of terrorism. The West vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions and when they finally accepted one, they allowed Israel to ignore it.
“We wish to punish the defendants for abusing negotiation and diplomacy to continue the genocide, so that these conceptions of negotiation and diplomacy are also left behind and the world can move forward on better ideas.
“In 1975, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which argued that Zionism was a form of racism. The Israeli representative to the UN stood before the gathered nations and tore the resolution to shreds, just as the Israeli representative took a miniature automatic paper shredder to the UN charter in 2024.
“As you know, UN Resolution 3379 was repealed in 1991 (4). While the United States was laying waste to Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and dared to propose a “linkage” of Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait with Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, the resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism was repealed through US pressure. Your honors also know that when our country, Yemen, voted against the US invasion of Iraq, we were told that this was “the most expensive vote we ever cast” and we suffered sanctions for it (5).
“3379 should never have been repealed. But today I am asking your honors to go further. I am asking your honors to rule that Zionism is not just a form of racism, it is a criminal enterprise, one which ultimately requires genocide to continue, and which therefore must be ended. Doing justice here will be a first step.”
Wardah looked at the other prosecutors: her counterparts from Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. To her, they seemed satisfied, and she felt she had presented her case well. The judges gave little away from their expressions, and Wardah again did not favor the criminals with her gaze.
The presiding judge called for adjournment until the next day, when the Iranian prosecutor would present his case.
Notes
(1) The first part of Wardah’s speech is basically a reproduction of Robert Jackson’s opening remarks at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Wardah alternates between quoting between quote marks, paraphrasing with modern updates, and quoting without quotation marks.
(2) If you read Justice Jackson’s speech, the middle part of the speech is the history of the Nazi party, its rise to power, and its conduct of WWII. This section of Wardah’s speech is not a copy/paste with find/replace of Jackson’s speech, but instead a part of the case as it is imagined would be laid out at a tribunal run by the Axis of Resistance.
(3) Ha’aretz was very late to report this. There were some reports in the Israeli media here and there and these were assembled carefully by Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, and The Cradle. I did my own modest assembly of a few Western sources on substack in October.
(4) I made part of a video about Resolution 3379, its rise and fall.
(5) Amply documented. E.g. Ian Williams, “A Costly Vote? Yemen Paid a High Price for 1990 Security Council Veto.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 2010.
Excellent! Quite cathartic and much needed. Don't know how you managed to hit most of the salient features of Zionism/Israel...but you did it. You weaved in the Dahyia, Samson, Hannibal, Hague doctrines, the destruction of the aid trucks, the IDF tiktokers, ...and much more. You pulled in ICJ, ICC, UN. I would like to see more of the psychological impact of Zionism on the general Israeli psyche and how they live in a bubble, and the moral corruption of their character. Can't wait to see how you build up the chapters and the main characters.
Super start! Who would you have the movie be directed by?
This is good - there's something humanizing about presenting facts and argument through character. And as you imply, a fuller use of dramatic elements would change things, ideally intensifying the full human condition of both the moment and the matter at hand. It's much stronger, in my view, to do as you do here in incorporating facts directly into the imaginative text, as is commonly done in novels but often to all-too-limited extents, rather than resorting to the somewhat clumsy technique of attaching factual footnotes to an imaginative text, though that kind of technique is not without its redeeming qualities, and is less commonly done.
I take on a similar normative focus and aesthetic challenge in my own direct issue-based imaginative writing - currently serializing a liberatory partisan literary thriller novel, "Most Revolutionary," in which the left partisans fight for as much as possible under the sun. I do foreground some of the factual basis with a brief note at the beginning of Chapter One, and since the novel centrally involves an assassination attempt against a US President and a not unexpectedly incompetent Secret Service, I've added a brief note also in response to the recent Trump assassination attempt, with the Table of Contents, on the role and power of liberatory fiction: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/most-revolutionary-table-of-contents
Otherwise, I deliver the facts entirely within the imaginative context of the story, which is an effort to help realize a revolutionary world. And I think that's what your pieces does here too - it helps create the mindset and the conditions of a better world and future, in an affecting and challenging way.