The sheer brazenness with which countries
ironically recognized as being sovereign states by international law ignore
international law even in regard to human rights that seeks to place boundaries
on said sovereignty reflects the impotency of international law, and thus even
that which recognizes national sovereignty itself. For the rest of us,
continuing to believe that upcoming cases before the International Court of
Justice, the UN’s court, are of consequence and thus even worth paying attention
to, demonstrates abject stupidity, as if we were herd animals without learning
curves. Admittedly, the stubborn, self-aggrandizing governments are ethically
worse than the world’s population that lets such governments blatantly and even
explicitly ignore judicial rulings of the International Court of Justice (and
the European Court of Human Rights), but culpability can also be gleamed from
the public’s truly pathetic irrational belief that another case against a
country that has just ignored a verdict of that very court might just work in
curtailing human-rights abuses and outright, even genocide-scale, aggression
that outstrips even the sin of retaliation. Either I am blind or the proverbial
emperor is not wearing any clothes.
As a case in point, in January,
2024, the International Court of Justice announced its preliminary ruling on Israel’s
military incursion into Gaza. “The state of Israel shall . . . take all
measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the
scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention,” the court announced.[1]
The court had not reached a verdict on whether Israel was committing a
genocide, and but was saying that one could be in progress and thus Israel is
obliged to see that it does not, and this includes allowing more humanitarian
aid to reach the Palestinians. The health ministry in Gaza had reported that thousands
of women and children were among the more than 25,000 people killed in Gaza by
the Israeli army, which did not “differentiate between civilians and Hamas
fighters.”[2]
In addition, more than a million Palestinians there had become homeless.
Because only 1,200 Israelis had died in the Hamas attack in October, 2023, the
scale of the harm in Gaza is beyond the scope of “an eye for an eye” and
retribution or retaliation.
Because we humans have flawed
judgment concerning punishment for those who harm us, John Locke of the 17th
century in Europe claimed that a major legitimating function of a government is
in providing impartial judges so that vigilantes don’t have to dispense justice
in their own cases. He wrote, “it will be objected, that it is unreasonable for
men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to
themselves and their friends . . . therefore God hath certainly appointed
government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.”[3]
We are too violent a species to be able to be fair judges against people who
have rendered us as victims. I submit that this holds for sovereign states,
which are in a state of nature, Locke insisted, with each other because there
is no higher human power that can restrain their lust for violence that goes
beyond justice and even retaliation. This is precisely why an international
court with no enforcement power, such as in the UN having its own military
force with which to “remind” wayward states that they had agreed to be bound by
international law. The lack of any such army is, I submit, the proverbial
elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize and discuss. By the way,
this is precisely why I view my non-academic short essays as a form of charity
to my species in spite of itself. I don’t ask whether it deserves
it—only whether my ideas can possibly help it. I suppose I am benevolent in
spite of myself, for I am human, all too human.
Before the court’s preliminary
decision, Israeli Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu had said that Israel’s “commitment
to international law is unwavering,” and yet he added that the “charge of
genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent
people should reject it.”[4]
He would doubtless not be a fair judge in his own case, as he would doubtless
throw that case out without letting it be heard. This is precisely why an
international court is crucial, and, furthermore, that it must have a direct enforcement
mechanism such that its verdicts will stick rather than be dismissed by a
guilty defendant.
In its preliminary decision (not
yet ruling on whether Israel was committing a genocide), “the court said Israel
must restrain from the destruction of infrastructure, should support more humanitarian
aid into the besieged Gaza strip and prevent calls to commit genocide against
the Palestinian people.”[5]
In reaction to the decision, Netanyahu said, “Israel has an inherent right to
defend itself.”[6] Exactly
two weeks later, he announced that he had “ordered the military to prepare a
plan to evacuate civilians from Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion” of
the city.[7]
Rafah had been home to 280,000 people, but the addition of other Palestinians made
homeless in other parts of Gaza increased the city’s population to 1.5 million.[8]
Forcing that many people to move in a short time span could itself be considered
a violation of human rights if not part of a genocide. Also, the planned invasion
itself would likely violate the court’s decision, which specified that Israel
must not destroy the infrastructure in Gaza any further.
As for the court’s insistence that
Israel let in more humanitarian aid, Israel actually “imposed financial
restrictions on the main U.N. agency providing aid in the Gaza Strip, a measure
which prevented a shipment of food for 1.1 million Palestinians” in Gaza.[9]
Not even on a humanitarian basis was the Israeli government willing to heed the
decision of the court whose jurisdiction Israel had agreed to, and whose law
Netanyahu himself had said he respects so much.
There should thus be scarcely any doubt as to whether Israel would adhere to the court’s decision on a case set to begin on February 19, 2024 “into the legality of Israel’ 57-year occupation of land sought for a Palestinian state.”[10] Rather than focusing on Israel’s war with Hamas, that case concerns “Israel’s open-ended occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.”[11] Palestinian representatives planned to “argue that the Israeli occupation is illegal because it has violated three key tenets” of international law: “the prohibition on territorial conquest by annexing large swaths of occupied land,” the “Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” and the prohibition of “a system of racial discrimination and apartheid.”[12] In reading about the upcoming case, I felt an instantaneous rush of hope that the issue that had led to the Hamas attack in 2023 might finally be definitively decided by a neutral court rather than by the warring parties themselves by sheer might and strife in lieu of weak negotiations and weak allies on both sides. I had momentarily neglected to consider Israel’s response to the court’s preliminary decision—namely in dismissing or ignoring it outright and perhaps even going even further by adding a forced exodus from Rafah before another ground invasion. If you tell another person not to sneeze in your face and yet it not only happens again, but at an even closer range, you would naturally conclude that it will happen again unless some obstacle is brought to bear on that person. My point is that an international system in which there are no viable and enforced constraints on state-actors is incompatible with there being real obstacles on the wayward states. Relying on pressure from allies or even an impromptu coalition “of the willing” is not reliable enough to count on as a counterweight to such a severe flaw in the very fabric of an international system of unfettered sovereign nation-states.
1. Thomson
Reuters, “Israel
Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on
Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26,
2024.
2. Ibid.
3. John
Locke, “The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True,
Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” in The Selected Political
Writings of John Locke, Paul Sigmund, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co,
2005): 17-125, sec. 13, p. 22.
4. Thomson
Reuters, “Israel
Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on
Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26,
2024.
5. Brad Dress, “Netanyahu Casts Off Genocide Case, Vows to Push
Ahead Against Hamas,” The Hill, January 26, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Najib Jobain and Josef Federman, “Israel
Seeks to Evacuate Palestinians Jammed into a Southern Gaza City Ahead of an
Expected Invasion,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
8. John Gambrell and Phil Holm, “From 200K to 1.5M
People: Startling Images Show the Ongoing War’s Impact to This Small Area in
Gaza,” The Associated Press, February 8, 2024.
9. Julia Frankel, “Israel
Is Holding Up Food for 1.1 Million Palestinians in Gaza, the Main UN Aid Agency
There Says,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
10. Mike
Corder and Julia Frankel, “Top
U.N. Court to Hold Hearings on Legality of Israeli Occupation,” The
Associated Press, February 18, 2024.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
