Photo by India Hambloch

“Resistance is futile,” Fintan O’Toole wrote in The New York Review of Books, referring to countries in the Western Hemisphere forced to accept U.S. hegemony. But is resistance really futile today? “At the moment, there are so many moving pieces that doing something for the sake of doing something could be a massive waste of energy,” a friend wrote to me. Multiple moving pieces – political, social, and economic – are all mixed together, discouraging some efforts at resistance and making others seem “a massive waste of energy.” Yet creative and potentially meaningful forms of resistance are taking place.

A striking example of creative resistance comes from Switzerland, where around twenty Swiss lawyers have taken the extraordinary step of turning international law against their own foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis, by submitting a “communication” to the International Criminal Court (ICC). (A “communication” to the ICC is not a formal indictment.) The lawyers accuse Cassis of complicity with Israel in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza. They argue that Cassis, as Switzerland’s foreign minister, bears responsibility for Swiss policies that violate the Geneva Conventions and fail to uphold International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This is the first time a Swiss minister has been named in a case submitted to the ICC in The Hague.

IHL and Switzerland are so closely linked that this initiative carries significant symbolic weight. The 1949 Geneva Conventions, which established international legal protection for human rights during armed conflict and require the humane treatment of soldiers, prisoners, and civilians, are called the Geneva........

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