Driving Climate Accountability

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The...

min read

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The recent two-day international summit on ‘The Future of Environment and Climate Dynamics’ inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hosted by the National Green Tribunal in New Delhi, brought together jurists from 17 nations to explore this expanding role of the judiciary in climate governance. The Delhi summit underscored that courts and specialized tribunals are no longer mere arbiters of dispute but have become active, institutional drivers of climate accountability, translating abstract ecological commitments into enforceable, day-to-day legal remedies. Judicial Environmentalism This phenomenon of judicial environmentalism is understood as a structural response to a longstanding deficiency in execution. Although developing nations are generally at the forefront of establishing ambitious statutory goals, from renewable energy development to forest preservation, the bureaucratic apparatus that is responsible for enforcing these goals has usually faltered in the face of political compromises and enforcement difficulties. Several specialized institutions, like the National Green Tribunal in India, were specifically established to fill this gap. By combining judicial expertise with technical assessment, tribunals have created a forum where regulatory inertia can be challenged directly by citizens, local communities, and non-governmental entities. The gathering of jurists from 17 developing and emerging nations indicates that this is not an isolated experiment, but a developing trend in the Global South, where the judiciary is taking the initiative for transforming legislative goals into tangible ecological protection. Fundamental principles like the public trust doctrine, intergenerational equity, and the polluter pays principle are at the base of this judicial transformation. In the past, these ideas were merely present in the introductory part of legislative texts or in international declarations. However, in recent times, courts began to convert abstract legal concepts into practical solutions. The use of the public trust doctrine helps courts remove full power from governments regarding the reclassification of sensitive areas like wetlands and forests for industrial purposes. The evolution of the principle of intergenerational equity means that courts gain the right to examine whether certain industrial activities will have negative consequences for future generations. Moreover, this operational jurisprudence has drastically changed the mechanisms of climate finance and corporate accountability from its original form. In various jurisdictions across the Global South, specialized environmental courts have ceased conducting the standard practice of issuing cease-and-desist orders. Instead, these courts have begun creating compensation schemes whereby polluters have to pay for damage done to the environment for a specified amount, and these funds are devoted to local ecosystem restoration projects. By linking monetary liability, which has to be paid by polluters, to ecological restoration, courts make sure that polluters bear financial responsibility that prevents them from causing damaging actions. This judicial practice has made sovereign states and state agencies accountable for their failure to enforce the law, creating an obligation to control different processes in an open manner and in a constant manner. A Regional Engine The collaborative dynamics highlighted during the summit point toward the creation of a cross-border judicial framework across the Global South. Problems arising from the deterioration of trans-border river basins, air pollution, and exposure to vulnerable coastal areas disregard borders. At the same time, negotiations related to functioning in these shared spaces are full of political and diplomatic problems. However, judicial systems, similar in terms of principles of law and constitution, provide an unconventionally effective way of aligning institutions. Hence, judges share their protocols, processes, and interpretations of laws and thereby lay the foundations of a distinctive jurisprudence aimed at the conditions of the Global South. This framework is particularly significant in balancing rapid economic development with environmental conservation. According to the proceedings, countries of the Global South face the challenge of addressing poverty and the disproportionately negative effects of climate change, which is largely attributed to historical industrialization in other places. By incorporating the principle of the right to a clean environment as part of their constitutional and human rights, judicial institutions aim to ensure that economic growth does not come at the cost of ecology and those suffering in society. The involvement of international judges in the proceedings demonstrates the growing recognition of judicial enforcement as an important tool of justice and accountability, which should be applied to both national governments and international obligations. Ultimately, the proceedings hosted by the National Green Tribunal demonstrate that judicial environmentalism has evolved from a reactive mechanism into a proactive, institutionalized engine of climate governance. As executive machinery continues to navigate competing electoral priorities and political constraints, the responsibility of maintaining the delicate balance between human development and planetary preservation increasingly rests upon the strength of the courtroom. By enforcing strict administrative accountability, defining clear technical parameters for regulatory compliance, and asserting the primacy of ecological constitutionalism, specialized tribunals across the Global South are establishing a transformative paradigm where judicial oversight bridges institutional gaps, ensures long-term regulatory integrity, and guarantees that the rule of law serves as the ultimate safeguard for present and future generations. (The writer is a columnist and policy researcher with a focus on South Asian geopolitics, India’s foreign policy, and the Indo-Pacific. Views personal.)

Founding Fictions: Israel, Colonialism and the Weaponisation of History

Shoumojit Banerjee

Jun 21, 2025

5 min read

In this series, we examine some of the most enduring myths surrounding the Arab-Israel conflict by tracing their historical roots and political consequences.

Israel and its Discontents - PART - 1

Israel’s birth is often polemically smeared as a vicious land grab, but sober history tells another story.

Was Israel born in sin? That question has echoed with increasing shrillness across social media feeds, elite university campuses and sections of the ‘liberal’ media since October 7, 2023 - when the Palestinian terror group Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians - till this month, when Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched ‘Operation Rising Lion’ against Iran’s embattled Islamic regime.

A familiar litany of accusations accompanies this central question: that Israel is a ‘settler-colonial project’ founded through ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinian Muslims, and that it functions today as a heavily-armed, US-backed colonial outpost intent on maintaining the West’s hegemony in West Asia.

The historical truth, of course, is considerably more inconvenient to that narrative.

A good starting point to dissect the central question of Israel’s troubled birth would be to examine the Jewish state’s own ‘Historikerstreit’ (a public and bitter historian’s war) that occurred in the 1980s over the country’s founding myths and was sparked by the first Lebanon War. This academic dispute would be significant in shaping historical narratives and the camps in which the world is divided today.

On one side of this dispute stood historian Shabtai Teveth, a defender of the traditional Zionist narrative. On the other were the so-called ‘New Historians,’ most notably Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. These scholars challenged the view that Israel’s early conflicts were not purely defensive, while taking serious aim at Israel’s traditional self-image as a blameless haven beset by hostile neighbours.

Morris’s 660-page masterwork, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987) painstakingly laid bare uncomfortable truths about forcible expulsions of the Palestinian Muslims by Jewish militias and remains a landmark work of the 1948 ‘Nakba’. Likewise, his 2008 book ‘1948: A History of the first Arab-Israeli War’ remains a seminal analysis of that defining moment.

Yet even Morris, the most judicious and harshest critic of Israel, became disillusioned with the Palestinian leadership. After a lifetime of watching Palestinian leaders walk away from peace deals in 2000, 2001 and 2008, Morris concluded that the root problem was not occupation but the Palestinian refusal to accept any Jewish state at all.

The history of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations is littered with missed chances, nearly all of them on the Palestinian side.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed the first two-state solution. It would have awarded roughly 80 percent of the land to the Arabs and a small sliver to the Jews. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini - and the Arab leadership rejected it outright, responding with armed rebellion not only against the British, but against any vision of coexistence with the Jews.

In 1947, the United Nations approved another partition plan under Resolution 181. This time, the Jews were offered 55 percent of the land, the Arabs 45 percent. Again, Arab leaders responded with violence. The Jews, they insisted, did not deserve even one inch of Palestine.

Despite successive Arab defeats in 1967 and ’73, Yasser Arafat rejected generous offers in 2000 and 2001 that would have given the Palestinians a state comprising 95 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas said no to a virtually identical proposal from Ehud Olmert in 2008.

If today’s anti-Israel narratives thrive on myth, it is in part because of al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the ideological architect of some of the earliest and most violent forms of Palestinian rejectionism.

In 1929, it was al-Husseini who inflamed tensions around the Temple Mount, spreading the false rumour that Jews intended to seize the al-Aqsa Mosque - a lie that culminated in the massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron. He played a similar role in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, which not only targeted Jews but also assassinated Arab moderates willing to compromise. And during World War II, al-Husseini reached Berlin, where he lobbied with Hitler personally to prevent Jewish children from escaping to Mandate Palestine, and helped recruit SS units among Bosnian Muslims, aligning Palestinian nationalism with anti-Semitism in its most virulent form.

That his rise to prominence was enabled by a British Zionist makes the episode doubly ironic. In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine and himself a supporter of Zionism, appointed al-Husseini as Grand Mufti, hoping to placate Arab unrest and integrate Muslim leadership into the British administrative fold. It was a decision that would haunt the Mandate for decades.

The end of the 1948 War resulted in three refugee problems – two of which were resolved and one – the Palestinian one – festers. The initial flight of Palestinian Arabs in late 1947 and early 1948 occurred amid civil war, following the Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan and violent attacks on Jewish civilians. The Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’ which resulted in the expulsion or fleeing of anywhere between 7.11-7.26 lakh (as per UN figures) is indeed a searing part of Palestinian memory. Today, there are 5 million refugees on rolls of the UN.

But the narrative that it was the product of a premeditated Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing, centred on Plan Dalet, wilfully ignores both chronology and causality. Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah (the pre-state Jewish militia) in March 1948, was not a blueprint for ethnic cleansing but a military contingency designed to defend Jewish areas and open supply lines to besieged Jerusalem. Abuses certainly occurred, most notoriously at Deir Yassin, but there is no evidence of a general policy of expulsion.

Additionally, some 70,000 Jews were expelled from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Arab cities such as Hebron and Nablus. However, they were absorbed within the newly created state of Israel.

A third and far larger (and violent) exodus had followed in the ensuing years: nearly 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab countries - from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, and elsewhere amid rising anti-Semitism, confiscation of property and state-sanctioned intimidation. These Jewish refugees were resettled, mostly in Israel. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they were absorbed into national life rather than warehoused into inherited victimhood.

Coming to the birth of Israel, harsh critics of Israel like the Jewish historian Avi Shlaim (foremost among the ‘New Historians’) have long painted Russian Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘Iron Wall’ strategy as proof that Zionism was inherently aggressive and colonial from the outset. But this caricature strips the idea of its context. Writing in 1923 amid growing Arab hostility to Jewish immigration, Jabotinsky had (presciently as it turned out) argued that no Arab leader would accept a Jewish national revival voluntarily.

His ‘Iron Wall’ was not really a call to annex territory or expel Arabs, but a realist doctrine which stated that only when the Arabs understood that the Jewish community was there to stay - and capable of defending itself - could real negotiations begin. Far from rejectionist, Jabotinsky believed that once security was assured, political compromise would follow. He called explicitly for equal rights for Arabs in the future Jewish state and rejected notions of ethnic supremacy.

Meanwhile, treatment of Palestinian refugees varied starkly across the Arab world. Jordan granted them citizenship and access to public services. Lebanon, by contrast, imposed restrictions on employment, movement and property ownership, thus effectively confining generations to squalid camps. In Syria and Egypt, Palestinians were granted few rights and used as diplomatic pawns. For many Arab regimes, preserving refugee misery served not humanitarian aims, but a darker political function to keep the Palestinian issue unresolved and Israel permanently delegitimised.

(Tomorrow, we examine the contested legacy of the Deir Yassin massacre, the mythology of victimhood and Jewish extremism, from the militancy of Irgun and Lehi to present day hardliners.)

Driving Climate Accountability

Founding Fictions: Israel, Colonialism and the Weaponisation of History

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