Guidelines Puffed Up as Law: Should under the Subterfuge of Must

During the coronavirus pandemic (2020-2022), Arizona’s Ducey administration allowed bus and light-rail employees to go maskless even though they were in close contact with the public. Bus drivers were even getting sick. The “rationale” of the Phoenix transit authority was that the federal regulation is “just a mandate.” Because the word mandate means “an authoritative command,” the rationale that being a mandate renders a law or government regulation as optional can only be spurious at best; this is a case of arrogant ignorance that can’t possibly be wrong about itself in the member-state that ranked 49^th out of 50 on public education. As an authoritative command, a law, even as implemented in regulations, has what Kant called necessity in that law itself cannot be bent; it stands firm in itself as law. In contrast, a guideline connotes flexibility rather than necessity. It follows that enforcement must pertain to laws (including regulations) but not to guidelines. I contend that what are commonly referred to as international laws are actually international guidelines. Such “laws” lack viable enforcement mechanisms and thus are actually guidelines for governments engaged in international relations.

Calls that governments need to respect international law even though no enforcement mechanism exists are actually expressions of a moral desire that such “laws” should be respected in the international arena. That what is actually a should is typically expressed in terms of must by government officials around the world only adds to the mistaken belief that a viable world order exists and thus that aggressors such as Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, and America’s Trump—all of whom have wantonly disregarded international law—pose no threat. A law without a credible means of enforcement—and not just by volunteer “enforcers”—is not a law; as in Hobbes’ state of nature, such a “law” can be said to have the force of an ideological moral desire against opponents.

In the wake of the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuela’s sitting President Maduro, E.U. foreign minister Kallas issued a statement, which reads in part: “The E.U. recalls, that under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be upheld.”[1] The word must implies at the very least that penalties apply if the must is dismissed by a state that violates the law or Charter. As had been clear for decades, even countries in the UN could easily ignore the Charter with impunity within the UN, and the veto-powers in the Security Council need only veto a proposal to see to it that it cannot be violated because it has not passed. So, what Kallas really meant is that governments around the world should uphold the principles of international law and the UN Charter. Notice that she used the word principles, which do not constitute law, so she contradicts herself in applying the word must. For someone to say, you must follow that principle, is not the same as saying, you must follow the law. Only the latter connotes or implies that violations will be punished—not even that there might be penalties. Those exist even if law enforcement does not catch a particular culprit.

Kallas’s statement can be critiqued on moral grounds, which is certainly ironic because her foreign-policy stance is laudable; I submit that militaristic heads of government should be restrained internationally, lest the world falls back into the dark ages. In using the word must, the E.U.’s foreign minister was doing exactly what Nietzsche calls attention to in his critique of modern morality, in which “Thou shalt not” is used as a club of sorts to beguile the self-confident strong into unilaterally not acting on their strength. Were he alive, Nietzsche would probably council the sitting U.S. president not to feel shamed or guilty from Kallas’s infliction of must, which can only mean should in referring to international law and anything to do with the United Nations given the utter lack of enforcement. Without that, the world is left with international guidelines rather than laws, and the UN is left standing on the sideline utterly impotent from the self-inflicted initial wounds of the veto-mechanism in the Security Council and the lack of any UN armed forces or police adequately empowered as force to enforce UN resolutions. The same goes for the International Criminal Court, the ICC, whose arrest warrants for Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu were being either ignored around the world or even actively fought against (by the Trump administration). An arrest warrant that depends on voluntary enforcement by third parties (i.e., governments around the world) is not a warrant in any sense of that word. Again, a misleading use of words.

A problem with using words that are bear on a global order misleadingly is that the appearance of there actually being an order internationally, as distinct from “might makes right” as the de facto default, is illusionary. In actuality, when Putin invaded Ukraine, Netanyahu inflicted an inhumane holocaustic genocide on the people of Gaza, and Trump captured the sitting president Venezuela, the status of international law was epitomized by the word should rather than must. The moral desire for international constraints on raw militaristic aggression is of course laudable, but that desire itself does not constitute recognition of there being international law. To portray the former as the latter is dishonest. 

It is also counter-productive from the standpoint of what would be needed for the family of nations, or more practically a coalition of “the willing” among the political unions and sovereign states of the world, to design, approve, and activate institutions, including possibility a global federation along the times described by Kant, that are capable of instituting and enforcing law internationally. Officials of such institutions as have enough governmental sovereignty to enforce international law even with boots on the ground if necessary could indeed say must without merely expressing a moral desire. Out of such self-confident strength at the global level, albeit with institutional checks on tyranny at that level from a qualified majority of countries, which would all be semi-sovereign, the precedents being incurred in favor of “might makes right” by Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump could potentially be reversed and once again set as outliers internationally. Such rogue nations could be relegated and effectively expelled from the family of nations both economically and politically. 

That a holocaustic—yes, holocaustic—severity of suffering was unleashed by a genocidal government in the Middle East for years in the so-called modern era (after the Enlightenment!) is itself testimony enough that the post-World War II global order’s international organizations, including the International Criminal Court and the UN, including its top court, was by 2023 utterly impotent. Out of this power vacuum, militaristic aggressors on the world stage could easily sense that low-hanging fruit could be easily plucked with utter impunity. It is precisely at such a point that the ground is fertile for a new world order to be promulgated and enacted so as to constrain angry men who are bathed in power. Human nature itself is the root cause behind the cycle of world orders through history punctuated by intervals of unimpeded military aggression, such as by the three blind men, driving drunk with power, in the mid-2020s.

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1. Maria Tadeo, “EU Calls for Respect of International Law as Trump Remains Vague on Venezuelan Transition Plan,” Euronews.com, 4 January 2026.

The United States: Complicit in Genocide

In December, 2024, Amnesty International, a highly reputed human rights international organization “found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.”[1] The International Criminal Court (ICC) had recently issued arrest warrants for a former defense minister and the sitting prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, and the UN’s high court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had also ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank violates international law. When Amnesty’s report came out, the ICJ was considering whether to declare a genocide in Gaza. Considering the series of determinations against Israel in Gaza, did it matter that the ICJ had not yet ruled specifically on genocide? Formally yes, but the currency of formal rulings and determinations regarding Israel based on international law had lost considerable de facto value, given Israel’s ongoing infliction of such widespread and dire suffering on civilians in not only Gaza, and Russia’s attacks in Ukraine (the ICC had already issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s sitting president. Oddly, news that Israel was committing an apartheid genocide seemed at the time to be old news, whereas that the U.S. was complicit, as an accomplice in providing the weapons, in a genocide was news.

So even legalists can let themselves hold that Israel was indeed treating the Palestinians in Gaza (and even the West Bank) to a genocide, and thus that the United States Government was acting as an accomplice by continuing to sell weapons to Israel used in Gaza. Agnes Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, said at the time of the organization’s resounding report, “Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.”[2] It may be said that Amnesty had uncovered the true motive of the Israeli ministers of state in destroying residential housing such that over 2 million Gazans were by then in camps and in restricting how many food trucks could enter Gaza even as famine existed in 2024. As harsh as this determination is, it is not clear that a report even with damning findings would “serve as a wake-up call to the international community” even though Callamard said it would.[3]

Because Israel had likely “heard it all before,” and so had the world with respect to the rather extreme vengeance of the Israeli Knesset, as if the millions of Gazans had all been culpable in Hamas’ killings and kidnappings in 2023 as Israel’s president had said back then, Amnesty’s report is perhaps more striking in how it characterizes the role of the U.S. than in finding indications of a genocide in Gaza. “States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time,” Callamard went on, “must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide.”[4] At the time, the U.S. was the most glaring or significant of the accomplices, though the E.U. was hardly blameless. Even though it had been no secret in the United States that President Biden was strongly in favor of selling weapons that had been and could be expected to be used by the Israeli military in Gaza, the complicity in Israel’s genocide had not hitherto reached the consciousness of public discourse in America.

As for the fine print, Amnesty noted in its report that the organization had “examined Israel’s acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts.”[5] The effort was neither shotty nor unsystematic, and it took “into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation.”[6] The report’s basic conclusion is that the Israeli government was intent on eradicating Palestinians in Gaza (for they could not leave!).

The fecklessness of international law had been readily apparent, given the obvious lack of any legal enforcement mechanism; that the U.S. had played a major role in the genocide was not often realized and digested. It may be a factor in President Biden’s very low approval ratings and the fact that Kamala Harris lost Michigan while Jill Stein of the Green Party did noticeably well there—Stein long having been a recurrent presidential candidate with no hope of winning but very useful nonetheless in providing voters with a way to vote against their government being complicit in genocide. As startling as this sounds, its exuberance would surely fade and the inherent weakness of international law once again become the undercurrent of discontent not only in the U.S., but in the E.U. as well. Amnesty’s report can be interpreted as saying: Yes, it can get this bad—this painful—in a world in which international law is law in name only (i.e., sans regular enforcement).

1. Amnesty International, “Amnesty International Investigation Concludes Israel Is Committing Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” Amnesty.org, December 5, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Facing a Hot and Hostile Planet

On October 24, 2024, Tjada McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, and formerly in the Obama administration working on global hunger, spoke at Harvard on wars, hunger, and climate change then going on around the world. The pandemic had been a setback. In a world of pandemics, climate change, war, and hunger, there is no us and them. Lest this utopia be taken too realistically, 200,000 more people worldwide were hungry after the pandemic than before it. Since 1946, the highest number of state conflicts was in 2023. It was then that Russia invaded Ukraine and Israel decimated much of Gaza. In 2024, the UN’s high court found both aggressors to be violating international law, but they continued undeterred and with impunity. In the context of an epic crisis of displacement of civilians, with 339 million people globally having to rely on humanitarian assistance in 2024, the impacts of climate change exacerbated hunger and conflict in several states, especially in Africa. I contend that a serious obstacle was systemic, specifically in an antiquated global order relying on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Even the E.U. was not immune.

In her talk, McKenna said that decades of conflicts on land-access in Africa had been made worse by the impacts of climate change.  By 2024, there had been four failed rainy seasons in Somalia. In northern Kenya, similarly occurring droughts followed by heavier rains causing flooding exacerbated hunger.  Progress against hunger and diseases such as polio had been made prior the pandemic, but even so, 2023-2024 could be characterized as a time of catch-up in terms of global humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, voters worldwide in 2024 were most concerned then about increasing cost of living around the world. France and Germany decreased the global aid budgets in 2024, though I contend that focusing on E.U. states without considering the humanitarian spending at the federal level had by 2024 become  incomplete as well as antiquainted. Russia, by the way, was paying Moldovan voters and feeding them disinformation so to sabatoge Moldova in gaining statehood in the European Union while political opposition to supporting Ukraine's military was building in the United States. In short, politics was staying pretty close to immediate self-interest.

Therefore, the international system based on nations acting alone in self-interest (i.e., political realism) was not enough to address the global problems of political manipulation, climate and conflict. The U.S. Congress had dedicated $1.1 billion to preventing conflict around the world in 2019, but this was just a drop in the bucket. "A recommitment to international law and the international criminal court worldwide is necessary," she said in closing.

Thus far, I have presented McKenna’s views, albeit with a few caveats from myself. I submit that the talk was not utopian, for McKenna was hardly optimistic concerning countries taking on militaristic aggressors whether unilaterally or through global institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. “Conditions are right for bad actors,” she said, by which we might think of Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel in going too far with impunity internationally. McKenna said the world order was cracking, especially in terms of accountability. Unabashed optimism would not be appropriate, given the failures globally in 2023 and 2024 to hold Russia and Israel accountable and stop the wholesale and deliberate militaristic attacks against civilians. 

Nor was McKenna at all optimistic on a system based on sovereign nation-states mitigating climate change. A record amount of carbon emissions by humans in 2023 had made a mockery of a global approach that relies on voluntary targets, the very notion of which presupposes the absolutist version of governmental sovereignty being applied to each nation-state. I would simply add to McKenna’s lecture more of an emphasis on the need globally to reform or reconstruct the global order, such that national sovereignty would no longer be the basis, given that inherently global exigencies had already rendered the post World War II world order deficient and obsolete. 

On the Reach of the International Criminal Court

Deeply hindered by the lack of enforcement mechanisms, international law can too easily be evaded or violated outright by government officials of countries who easily sense the ability to act so with impunity. Was the president of Mongolia such an official, and thus to be considered as blameworthy, when he did not have Russia’s President Putin arrested as soon as he touched down on Mongolian soil and sent to the International Criminal Court in 2024 for war crimes committed in Ukraine, including forcibly taking Ukrainian children to Russia? Is Mongolia’s acquiescence just another case of the implacable impotence of international law?

On September 2, 2024, Russia’s President Putin arrived in Mongolia. Despite “calls by the EU, the ICC, and Ukraine for him to be arrested, Putin was instead warmly welcomed.”[1] The International Criminal Court (the ICC) had issued an arrest warrant for Putin 18 months earlier, and, because Mongolia had signed the ICC Rome Statute, the country had “the obligation to cooperate with the court.”[2] In fact, the court relied on country signatories to execute the court’s decisions, “including in relation to arrest warrants,” according to ICC spokesman Fadi El Abdallah.[3] The E.U. position was that “Mongolia is a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC since 2002 with the legal obligations that it entails.”[4] This would seem to put the government of Mongolia in a bind, but I contend that the government acted correctly from the standpoint of international law.

The argument that the government of Mongolia was in a bind runs as follows. According to the ICC spokesman, “In case of non-cooperation, ICC judges may make a finding to that effect and inform the Assembly of States Parties of it. It is then for the Assembly to take any measure it deems appropriate.”[5] In short, the Assembly could take punitive action against Mongolia for refusing to hand Putin over to the ICC. Even so, government officials were naturally hesitant to arrest the Russian president because Mongolia was “heavily dependent on [Russia] for fuel and electricity.”[6] Also, any measure adopted by the ICC Assembly would not come with an enforcement mechanism, since the ICC relies on the countries that have signed the Rome Statute for voluntary enforcement.

The tension between Mongolia’s economic reliance on Russia and the legal obligation under the Rome Statute to arrest Putin can be dissipated on a more fundamental level by realizing that Russia was not a signatory of the Rome Statute, and thus Putin’s arrest warrant was null and void. Mongolia’s obligation was to arrest anyone from a country whose government had signed the Rome Statute and was thus under the jurisdiction of the ICC. In such a case, the ICC’s deeply flawed enforcement of punitive measures enacted by the court’s Assembly would be the major issue.

At a basic level, the ICC is binding only on the countries whose governments signed the Rome Statute. Government officials of other countries are as though in a Hobbesian state of nature with respect to the court’s jurisdiction. So government officials like Putin and Netanyahu could legally dismiss the ICC and even that court’s signatory countries; it is not a question of the latter’s non-cooperation with the court, but, rather, the court’s own jurisdiction. To hold government officials like Putin and Netanyahu accountable, the world had, at least as of 2024, to rely on the voluntary economic, political, and even militaristic efforts of countries, signatories or not, to protect human rights from war crimes and crimes against humanity.  How much humanity there is in leaving such important constraints to the varying and shifting political and economic interests of countries around the world is a question whose answer, at least as of 2024, did not yet reflect well on our species. Even the UN’s court, the International Court of Justice, lacked an enforcement mechanism for its verdicts. Russia and Israel were countries in the UN, but not even a global international organization could constrain Russia and Israel as they allegedly committed war crimes in 2024.

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1. “Putin Arrives in ICC Member State Mongolia without Being Arrested,” Euronews, September 2, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Unenforced Law: The International Court of Justice Declares Israeli Occupation Illegal

On July 19, 2024, the UN’s court rendered an opinion to the UN’s General Assembly on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem. The Israeli government wasted no time in publicly dismissing the International Court of Justice even though the UN had created Israel. As if the creature is greater than its creator, which is a rather unbiblical view, Israel’s prime minister had dismissed two earlier verdicts of that court against Israel’s military incursion into Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of more than 35,000 and displaced over a million Palestinian residents. What are we to make of international law itself? Can we rightly call it law even though no enforcement mechanism necessarily exists for it? By necessarily, I mean something more than a voluntary coalition of willing countries, which of course cannot be counted upon.

At the end of 2022, the UN’s General Assembly requested that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “render an advisory opinion” concerning “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”[1] A year and a half later, the ICJ issued its landmark opinion. ICJ President Nawaf Salam said the court had found that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal. . . . The State of Israel is under the obligation to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”[2] Accordingly, settlement activity should end and existing settlements should be given up in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The court also mandated the payment of reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by the occupation. The ICJ indicated that Israel’s “policies and practices amount to annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and that Israel was “not entitled to sovereignty” there.[3] Additionally, according to the BBC, “the court said Israeli restrictions on Palestinians in the occupied territories constituted ‘systemic discrimination based on, inter alia, race, religion or ethnic origin’” and Israel “had illegally exploited the Palestinians’ natural resources and violated their right to self-determination.”[4]

In reaction to the exhaustive opinion on which the court had been engaged since early 2023, Israel’s prime minister called the decision one “of lies.”[5] It is precisely on account of such jejune denial (frankly, that could be expected from a teenager) that international law and courts are necessary. Incidentally, lies, or fabrications, pertain to facts, whereas the court issued an opinion. Netanyahu’s category mistake may be indicative of a knee-jerk reaction. His other category mistake was to reference Jerusalem as the homeland of Jews, whereas the court’s opinion pertains to Israel and thus Israelis. A religious claim is distinct from a political or legal one, and the court (and the General Assembly) were solely concerned with the latter. The court also held that governments helping Israel in its occupation are also culpable, and the United States also promptly criticized the court’s decision, which was, at the very least, inconvenient politically.[6]

In issuing a judicial opinion for the General Assembly, the court noted the nonbinding nature of the decision. But is any international law, even if in the form of a verdict by an international court, binding on any sovereign country?  The nonbinding feature of the court’s opinion is thus a red herring, sidestepping the proverbial invisible elephant in a room. The sheer fecklessness of international law itself begs the question of whether it is indeed law or something less, such as a guideline that governments can take or leave at will. To be sure, even immaturely dismissing a mere guideline as exhaustively undertaken—at least in terms of time—cogently (i.e., internal consistency) reasoned, and complete as that of the ICJ here is (or ought to be) blameworthy. Yet given the severity of the infractions committed by Israel in its longstanding occupation, something stronger than a guideline is warranted. So we have arrived face to face with the question of whether a law that cannot be enforced is nonetheless a law.

Kant refers to the law of reason owing to the necessity of reason. Two plus two simply cannot equal five. That the answer is four has necessity. So too does law, according to Kant. But a law does not have necessity if it cannot be enforced—if people can ignore a law with impunity. It can of course be objected that the kind of necessity that a fact of reason enjoys in the human mind does not apply to the sort of social reality that covers social organization. But it contracts reason to say, we’re passing a law and we know that it cannot and will not be enforced. In other words, to claim that something is a law and furthermore that no enforcement mechanism exists or can be counted on nullifies the something being a law.

Unless or until there is such a thing as international law, governments will be free to accept or reject the opinions of international courts as just that: opinions. Unless or until national sovereignty is qualified rather than absolute, governments will be subject to might, as that of Ukraine has been subject to Russia’s might since Russia began its invasion by taking Crimea in 2014. Indeed, Israel acquired Palestinian land as a result of the 1967 war, and the Israeli government was conveniently taking this result of might not only as right, but also as if it were a fact of reason immune to the error of falsification.

In the want of political development beyond the nation-state, the global system will remain stymied in a Hobbesian state of nature in spite of having an institutional infrastructure. Without international law, it is actually rather amazing that international relations are not more chaotic than they are. Even were there a global federation of nations, Kant claims that peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. I submit that it would be more probable were the federal level of such a federation to have the military (and economic) means to enforce international law. Without any such means, the UN cannot claim to have or much less to enforce international law. Heading into 2024, the governmental heads of Russia and Israel knew this only too well, and thus could exploit the common misconception that there is such a thing as international law.

See: "Israel Legalizes Illegal Settlements on Palestinian Land."

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1. “Request for Advisory Opinion,” General Assembly resolution 77/247 of 30 December 2022.
2. Raffi Berg, “UN Top Court Says Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories Is Illegal,” BBC, July 20, 2021.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Kanishka Singh, “US Criticizes ICJ Opinion on Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territories,” Reuters, July 20, 2024.

Euroskeptic Federalism: Obstructing the E.U.'s Recognition of Palestine

Just because U.S. federalism deposits foreign policy exclusively with governmental institutions at the federal level does not mean that that domain cannot be shared between state and federal governments in a federal system. This was precisely the case in the E.U. as it struggled to come up with a unified response to Israel having ignored the verdict of the World Court—the UN’s court—ordering Israel to cease and decease from invading Rafah from May 24, 2024 onward. Meanwhile, two of the E.U.’s states were poised to recognize Palestine. Such emphasis on the state governments playing the leading role is fraught with difficulties even though in theory there is on reason why foreign policy cannot be a competency, or domain, that is shared at the state and federal “levels.” In federalism, the federal and state governmental systems are on par, rather than one of the governmental systems being above the other, so “levels” is misleading. Even so, a lot can be said for delegating foreign policy to the federal level. This can be seen from the state and federal reactions in the E.U. as Israel continued its invasion of Rafah just after the World Court had ruled that Israel would be violating international law and the UN’s charter in continuing the offensive.

Two E.U. states, Ireland and Spain, were poised to recognize Palestine as a sovereign country—34,000 dead and 800,000 on the brink of starvation in Rafah had in the judgment of the two E.U. state governments paid sufficient dues to be recognized as a distinct nation rather than as a part of Israel. Rather than urging the European Council to meet to take a decision on a federal policy on Israel as it ignored the verdict of the World Court and even bombed a Palestinian re-settlement camp, the E.U.’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, merely “threw his full weight to support the International Criminal Court,” whose prosecutor was “seeking an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and Israel’s defense chief.[1] Borrell didn’t even mention the verdict of the UN’s court ordering Israel to cease its invasion of Rafah. Even so, Borrell’s criticism of the Israeli vitriol against the prosecutor may be sufficient to justify a federal response to Israel, especially considering its bombing of the resettlement camp. “The prosecutor of the [ICC] has been strongly intimidated and accused of antisemitism—as always when anybody, anyone does something that Netanyahu’s government does not like,” Borrell said.[2] Israel’s foreign policy chief even accused the government of Spain of continuing the Inquisition and even with “rewarding terror” in recognizing the Palestinian state.[3]

The accusation of “rewarding terror,” which alludes to the anti-occupation guerilla operation of Hamas on October 7, 2023, blatantly ignores the terror inflicted subsequently by Israel mainly on Palestinian civilians in Gaza that went well beyond the number of Israelis killed and taken hostage in October. The implication is that Israel had the right to inflict “collective justice” on an entire population many times over, and thus that any resistance internationally could only be borne of prejudice against Jews and an intention to reward Hamas for its October incursion. Were John Locke, a European philosopher of the seventeenth century, alive, he would doubtless tell the world, Look, I told you that a victim should not be entrusted with carrying out its notion of justice on a victimizer. I would add that the victimizer in this case had long been the victim because of the Israeli occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). The E.U. could at least have taken a stance against Israel’s infliction of its warped notion of reciprocity, rather than leaving it to the state governments.

At this point, I need to get very precise to convey the depth of the sordid mentality that I contend calls out for both federal and state condemnation in the E.U. On May 24, 2024, the UN’s top court ordered: “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”[4] Months before, Michael Fakhri, the UN’s leading expert on food, had warned that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza by restricting aid even after the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel could not do so. “Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime,” Fakhri said in February, 2024; “Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian.”[5] The Human Rights Watch organization had reported in December, 2023 that several Israeli cabinet ministers had made statements in public “expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel.”[6] Back in October after Hama’s attack, the president of Israel had publicly stated that every resident of Gaza could justifiably be blamed for the incursion. John Locke was right: given human nature, victims should not be allowed to enact their own sense of justice. In ignoring two rulings of the UN’s top court, the Israeli government demonstrates that Locke’s political theory can (and should) be extended to the international level.

Two degrees of separation exist between the ruling of the International Court of Justice on May 24, 2024 and Israel’s bombing of a resettlement camp just days later. “Footage obtained by CNN showed the camp in flames, with scores of men, women and children frantically trying to find cover from the nighttime assault. Burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage.”[7] It should be stressed that the camp was for residents who had already been displaced. Literally, there was no where for the people already displaced to go. Because the attack, made incidentally without warning, occurred in clear violation of the UN court’s recent verdict—and the Israeli ambassador to the UN had just a week or so earlier shredded a copy of the UN charter at the podium of the General Assembly—the very validity of the UN itself and especially its court could not have suffered a more blatant defeat. The very notion of international law without an enforcement power had been reduced to being an oxymoron.

Just because U.S. federalism deposits foreign policy exclusively with governmental institutions at the federal level does not mean that that domain cannot be shared between state and federal governments in a federal system. This was precisely the case in the E.U. as it struggled to come up with a unified response to Israel having ignored the verdict of the World Court—the UN’s court—ordering Israel to cease and decease from invading Rafah from May 24, 2024 onward. Meanwhile, two of the E.U.’s states were poised to recognize Palestine. Such emphasis on the state governments playing the leading role is fraught with difficulties even though in theory there is on reason why foreign policy cannot be a competency, or domain, that is shared at the state and federal “levels.” In federalism, the federal and state governmental systems are on par, rather than one of the governmental systems being above the other, so “levels” is misleading. Even so, a lot can be said for delegating foreign policy to the federal level. This can be seen from the state and federal reactions in the E.U. as Israel continued its invasion of Rafah just after the World Court had ruled that Israel would be violating international law and the UN’s charter in continuing the offensive.

Two E.U. states, Ireland and Spain, were poised to recognize Palestine as a sovereign country—34,000 dead and 800,000 on the brink of starvation in Rafah had in the judgment of the two E.U. state governments paid sufficient dues to be recognized as a distinct nation rather than as a part of Israel. Rather than urging the European Council to meet to take a decision on a federal policy on Israel as it ignored the verdict of the World Court and even bombed a Palestinian re-settlement camp, the E.U.’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, merely “threw his full weight to support the International Criminal Court,” whose prosecutor was “seeking an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and Israel’s defense chief.[8] Borrell didn’t even mention the verdict of the UN’s court ordering Israel to cease its invasion of Rafah. Even so, Borrell’s criticism of the Israeli vitriol against the prosecutor may be sufficient to justify a federal response to Israel, especially considering its bombing of the resettlement camp. “The prosecutor of the [ICC] has been strongly intimidated and accused of antisemitism—as always when anybody, anyone does something that Netanyahu’s government does not like,” Borrell said.[9] Israel’s foreign policy chief even accused the government of Spain of continuing the Inquisition and even with “rewarding terror” in recognizing the Palestinian state.[10]

The accusation of “rewarding terror,” which alludes to the anti-occupation guerilla operation of Hamas on October 7, 2023, blatantly ignores the terror inflicted subsequently by Israel mainly on Palestinian civilians in Gaza that went well beyond the number of Israelis killed and taken hostage in October. The implication is that Israel had the right to inflict “collective justice” on an entire population many times over, and thus that any resistance internationally could only be borne of prejudice against Jews and an intention to reward Hamas for its October incursion. Were John Locke, a European philosopher of the seventeenth century, alive, he would doubtless tell the world, Look, I told you that a victim should not be entrusted with carrying out its notion of justice on a victimizer. I would add that the victimizer in this case had long been the victim because of the Israeli occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). The E.U. could at least have taken a stance against Israel’s infliction of its warped notion of reciprocity, rather than leaving it to the state governments.

At this point, I need to get very precise to convey the depth of the sordid mentality that I contend calls out for both federal and state condemnation in the E.U. On May 24, 2024, the UN’s top court ordered: “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”[11] Months before, Michael Fakhri, the UN’s leading expert on food, had warned that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza by restricting aid even after the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel could not do so. “Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime,” Fakhri said in February, 2024; “Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian.”[12] The Human Rights Watch organization had reported in December, 2023 that several Israeli cabinet ministers had made statements in public “expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel.”[13] Back in October after Hama’s attack, the president of Israel had publicly stated that every resident of Gaza could justifiably be blamed for the incursion. John Locke was right: given human nature, victims should not be allowed to enact their own sense of justice. In ignoring two rulings of the UN’s top court, the Israeli government demonstrates that Locke’s political theory can (and should) be extended to the international level.

Two degrees of separation exist between the ruling of the International Court of Justice on May 24, 2024 and Israel’s bombing of a resettlement camp just days later. “Footage obtained by CNN showed the camp in flames, with scores of men, women and children frantically trying to find cover from the nighttime assault. Burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage.”[14] It should be stressed that the camp was for residents who had already been displaced. Literally, there was nowhere for the people already displaced to go. Because the attack, made incidentally without warning, occurred in clear violation of the UN court’s recent verdict—and the Israeli ambassador to the UN had just a week or so earlier shredded a copy of the UN charter at the podium of the General Assembly—the very validity of the UN itself and especially its court could not have suffered a more blatant defeat. The very notion of international law without an enforcement power had been reduced to being an oxymoron.

Meanwhile, the E.U. was hamstrung at the federal “level,” thus leaving it to a few state governments to take the heat from Israel—vitriol that itself could be characterized as reverse-prejudice. In no way, form, or manner could objections to Israel’s warped notion of collective “justice” and its abject dismissal of the two verdicts of the UN’s top court be characterized as anything akin to the Nazi prejudice against the Jews. Accordingly, the moral impetus of the German government to defend Israel had been paid in full and so even that state could act salubriously in recognizing a Palestinian state and castigating Israel’s government as an ongoing instance of state-sponsored terror. German guilt no longer needed to forestall a federal E.U. policy, and the stakes in terms of the severity of the Israeli government’s dangerous mentality practically demanded such a policy. For the E.U. could hardly count on the U.S. to be the world’s “policeman”; the Biden administration and the Congress had squandered that role in aiding and abetting Israel’s overkill. The U.S. president’s claim that prosecution of Netanyahu at the ICC would be “outrageous” is startling enough; Netanyahu’s need to one-up the president by claiming that such prosecution would be “beyond outrageous” just shows how right Locke was. The world should have the means to enforce international law against a government that is out of control, whose self-awareness is so abjectly warped in defensiveness, and such a government’s ally should by no means be tasked internationally with being the world’s policeman just because it carries a big stick. Indeed, the U.S. was enervating international law by shipping weapons to Israel and thus enabling a bruised bully on the world stage, thanks to the campaign war-chest of the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) and the unprincipled fecklessness of the American federal government and the vast majority of its electorate. Clearly, the E.U. could no longer count on the U.S. to police the world, for the “policeman” had become an accomplice.

In short, if even such atrocious behavior as regard the International Court of Justice and the civilians in Gaza as Israel’s Netanyahu and his government relentlessly evinced with utter impunity could not bring forth a foreign policy at the federal level of the E.U., then something must surely have been wrong regarding the ability of the E.U. to have foreign policy at all. Making such policy too difficult at the federal level risks Europe being torn asunder by a foreign evil when it can be claimed that the E.U. has a moral imperative to act as the “adult in the room” to stop an evil power abroad, especially given the fecklessness of international law and courts at the time.  

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1. Raf Casert, “E.U. Ties with Israel Nosedive Ahead of Spain, Ireland Recognizing Palestinian State,” The Huffington Post, May 27, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Abbas Al Lawati, “UN’s Top Court Orders Israel to ‘Immediately’ Halt Its Operation in Rafah,” CNN.com, May 24, 2024 (accessed on May 27, 2024).
5. Nina Lakhani, “Israel Is Deliberately Starving Palestinians, UN Rights Expert Says,” The Guardian, February 27, 2024.
6. “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch, December 18, 2023.
7. Mohammad Al Sawalhi et al, “Israeli Strike that Killed 45 at Camp for Displaced Palestinians in Rafah a ‘Tragic Mistake,’ Netanyahu Says,” CNN.com, May 27, 2024.

8.Raf Casert, “E.U. Ties with Israel Nosedive Ahead of Spain, Ireland Recognizing Palestinian State,” The Huffington Post, May 27, 2024.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11.Abbas Al Lawati, “UN’s Top Court Orders Israel to ‘Immediately’ Halt Its Operation in Rafah,” CNN.com, May 24, 2024 (accessed on May 27, 2024).

12. Nina Lakhani, “Israel Is Deliberately Starving Palestinians, UN Rights Expert Says,” The Guardian, February 27, 2024.

13. “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch, December 18, 2023.

14. Mohammad Al Sawalhi et al, “Israeli Strike that Killed 45 at Camp for Displaced Palestinians in Rafah a ‘Tragic Mistake,’ Netanyahu Says,” CNN.com, May 27, 2024.

On the Impotency of International Law in a System of Sovereign States: The Case of Gaza

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 17^th 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.

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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.

On Israel’s Public Relations Campaign against the Charge of Genocide

In theory, state media is more vulnerable to doing the bidding of its sponsoring government than are privately owned media companies. In practice, governments are able to pressure even private news outlets to sway public opinion for political purposes. Even allied governments can pressure the government of a country in which a private news company resides in terms of what stories to air and when to air them, in order to sway that country’s public opinion, and even global public opinion. The sudden appearances in print, online, and on television news networks of former Israeli hostages being interviewed just after the International Court of Justice had announced on December 29, 2023 that Israel would be tried on charges of genocide in Gaza. Not coincidentally, I submit, emotionally-charged hyperbole was used to pull emotional “heart-strings” in order to convince the world, including the justices at international court, that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 had been so bad that even Israel’s extremely disproportionate military attacks in Gaza were justified and thus should not be considered to be genocidal. Besides the logic being flawed, for the infliction of such disproportional harm was not justified, and even a justified genocide would violate the Convention on Genocide, which Israel had agreed to be bound. In short, I suspect that much was happening behind the scenes not only in Israel, but also in the U.S. Government and even private media companies in the U.S. immediately following the Court’s announcement.

On December 29, 2023, the International Court of Justice announced that South Africa had filed papers accusing Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” because “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”[1] On January 2, 2024, a spokesperson for the Israeli government “announced that representatives of the country would appear very soon before the court to defend Israel’s position.”[2] Being a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which had been adopted by the UN’s General Assembly in 1948, Israel was not only subject to the court’s jurisdiction on genocides, but also obligated to send representatives to the Court when a defendant. In anticipation, Israel unleased a public relations offensive, which included not only Israeli media outlets, but also American ones too, perhaps from pressure from Washington, an ally of Israel. Not having proof of the complicity, I am basing my hypothesis on the very convenient timing involved, as well as the fact that multiple interviews were published and aired within days of the Court’s announcement.

Admittedly, the first casualty in war is truth, but even subjectivity goes only so far before it becomes hyperbolic or otherwise excessively manipulative (i.e., used as a weapon of sorts) by twisting the meaning of words beyond recognition. In fact, the 20^th century philosophical phenomenologists, including Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre overrated human subjectivity in using it to anchor their respective philosophies. Those philosophers and others like them may have been unduly pessimistic on the potential of human reason because the horrors in the Nazi Holocaust had followed the optimism in the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. As Nietzsche wrote, a philosopher is not a person of one’s day. This means that a philosopher worth one’s salt thinks outside the box, as it were, and so one’s philosophy is not unduly delimited by one’s immediate context. In short, the decadence in the bloodiest century so far had swallowed the philosophical phenomenologists. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers allowed themselves to become reductionists in obsessing on language.

Israel’s government responded to being charged with genocide by exploiting the worst of the 20^th century to stir the world’s emotions against South Africa’s accusation of genocide. In particular, the Israeli government spokesman announcing that Israel would send representatives to the court described South Africa’s accusation as “a blood libel” against what The Times of Israel labeled as “the Jewish state,” as if the South African ministers were antisemitic.[3] The intended allusion was to the Jewish origins of the state due to the blood of the Holocaust, and an implicit claim may have been that the heirs of victims cannot become victimizers, which is not so. Indeed, vengeance against current adversaries can be intensified by resentment of the unspent justice against past aggressors. Such disproportionate vengeance is not fair to the contemporary enemies unless they were also the past aggressors. The Israeli government spokesperson suggested such a link in labeling the South African government as an heir of the Nazis.[4]  In being aided by South Africa, the Palestinians in Gaza too could be vicariously linked to an old enemy. I would not be surprised to find press reports of the Israeli government ministers referring to Hamas as Nazis so as to justify expending even the unrequited vengeance in the previous century following the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Israeli spokesman’s “heirs of the Nazis” comment was wildly off the mark. Real heirs would not have waited to see Israel’s wholesale destruction and killing in Gaza before attempting a genocide against not only Israelis, but Jews anywhere. Also, filing an accusation in an international court pales in comparison with what heirs would have done, and is not even close to what the Nazis actually did to Jews in Europe. In actuality, the South African government had pointed to the obligation of any signatory to the Genocide Convention to report possible genocides to the court. With more than 1.8 million Palestinians displaced from their homes and Gaza residents facing the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,” according to the UN’s emergency chief, Martin Griffiths[5], the natural human sentiment of disapprobation—a visceral emotional reaction of revulsion—had more than enough stimulus to be activated worldwide, including in South Africa. Hume refers to such an activation to be what ethical judgment is, underneath—a visceral emotional reaction rather than a Kantian contradiction of reason. In heeding an ethical obligation, the officials in the South African government were hardly heirs to the Nazis.

Another allusion to the Nazis occurred just three days after the court had announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide. Jake Tapper of CNN headlined a former Israeli hostage, Mia Schem, who had been held in Gaza for a harsh 55 days at the home of a Palestinian family (hence thankfully rape was not committed). Schem, a young, beautiful woman who obviously deserves much sympathy for her ordeal as a hostage, nonetheless shamelessly described her ordeal as incorrectly as “a Holocaust.” 

The deliberate misappropriation of such an emotionally-tinged word—and that an Israeli of all people would use the word opportunistically and inaccurately beyond recognition—suggests an underlying motive to manipulate public opinion. Ironically, survivors of the real holocaust would probably bristle at the attempted comparison. What you experienced for 55 days is nothing like what we experienced in Nazi Germany, the retort might insist. The implication that the Palestinians in occupied Gaza—a “ghetto” so called by Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich (who also said on the day after the court’s announcement that “Israel must reduce” the Palestinian population there to 100,000-200,000 from 2.3 million[6])—are like Nazis conveniently denies the decades of oppression exacted by Israel on the residents of Gaza and the obvious difference between the attack by Hamas of October 7, 2023, including the taking and holding of hostages, and Nazi Germany’s many atrocities over more than a decade.

Besides exaggerating in furnishing a label for her ordeal as a hostage, Schem extrapolated in generalizing concerning the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza. Interviewed on Israeli television on the day the court announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide, she accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being a terrorist. “Everyone there are(sic) terrorists . . . there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said.[7] She based her empirical claim on the acquiescence of the wife and child of the man who had held Schem in his home. No auditor would make such a projection to a population of numbers based on such a small sample size. After Hamas’ attack of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 were taken hostage, Israeli President Herzog had claimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” as Israel was ordering 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes.[8]  The implication to be drawn from both statements is that retribution against every Palestinian there would be justified. Indeed, reports from the UN suggest that precisely that was occurring.

Gemma Connell, Gaza team leader for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), referred to conditions in even north Gaza as, “No food, no water, very little medical supplies.”[9] By January 4, 2024, many people in southern Gaza had been “displaced not once, not twice, but six or seven times,” according to Connell. With 2.2 million people in Gaza “in desperate need of help,”[10] South Africa was on firm ground empirically as well as ethically, whereas Schem’s attempt to justify the wholesale annihilation of the Palestinians living in Gaza was empirically and ethically spurious. In outlining plans for Gaza after the Israeli military attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant said on January 5, 2024 that the Palestinian “entity controlling the territory” would “build on the capabilities” of “local non-hostile actors” already present in Gaza.[11] Clearly, not every Palestinian in Gaza was a terrorist, and did not deserve the onslaught of Israeli “collective justice” as if they were.

I contend that Schem’s interviews were part of a coordinated PR offensive by Israel that reached as far as CNN in America. CNN interviewed another former hostage, Doran Asher, days after the Court had announced the accusation of genocide. She was more accurate in labeling the infliction of “psychological warfare” on her during her 50 days of captivity in Gaza.[12] CNN claimed in its headline, "This is what she wants you to know." My question is, who else wanted the world to know?  Who would have had the motive and political power to see it it that you hear or read her story?

That she wanted to tell her story would not have been sufficient to get her on CNN, which would surely not have been acting solely on her behalf. 

It can also be asked what did not make it onto CNN. For instance, the American media had been practically silent in putting the Hamas attack in the wider context of decades of harsh Israeli occupation of Gaza, maintaining it as a subjugated “ghetto.” Not that enduring such harsh conditions for so long justifies the killing and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; rather, the context is explanatory, and could have resulted in a global public opinion less dismissive of Israel’s vastly disproportionate destruction of Gaza. The omission of proper context can point back to CNN’s bias or the media company’s role as part of a broader PR campaign possibly being pushed by the Israeli government to set public opinion against the accusation of genocide in Gaza in spite of the facts on the ground there.

In conclusion, Israel’s attempt to manipulate global public opinion (and even the justices at the International Court of Justice) may have eventuated into the following narrative: The entire population of Gaza committed a holocaust by killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 more.  Every civilian in Gaza is culpable, and thus is a legitimate military target and deserves to be homeless and starving. Furthermore, any serious effort to hold Israel back from its extremely disproportionate “collective justice,” which is an inherently flawed ethical theory because even people living in the same geographical area do not all have the same beliefs, values, and ideology, is to be discredited as “blood libel.” Unfortunately for Israel’s credibility in its PR offensive, much more blood had flowed in Gaza than in Israel, and this alone, rather than any antisemitism, had brought South Africa to the International Court of Justice. While it is easy to throw public-relations “bombs” such as Holocaust, Nazi heirs, and terrorists, such irrationality is expedient, and thus may end up working against Israel’s interests. For instance, by inserting Nazi-era terms into the public discourse, calls for a genocide of the Jews could be transformed  from constituting hate speech to being merely countervailing political speech. Additionally, the hyperbole could ultimately undercut Israel’s credibility at the International Court and in the court of world opinion. Viewing an opposing political position on the war as antisemitic even though Israel’s military response had been so very disproportionate could erode Israel’s credibility further. The attack of October 7, 2023 was indeed horrific, as were the ensuing experiences of the Israeli hostages, but so too was the ironic banality of evil in the decades in which Israel occupied Gaza as a “ghetto” subject to the flawed ethical concept of collective justice. To say it has not been a fair fight, even taking the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 into account, is not to be antisemitic. Rather, the charge is political, as were the interviews given by freed Israeli hostages.

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1.. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023; Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
2. Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Heather Chen and Eve Brennen, “Famine in Gaza ‘Around the Corner,’ as People Face ‘Highest Levels of Food Insecurity Ever Recorded,’ UN Relief Chief Says,” CNN.com, January 6, 2024.
6. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is a ‘Ghetto’ For Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
7. Amy Spiro and Michael Horovitz, “Freed Hostage Mia Schem: ‘I Experienced Hell. There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza,” The Times of Israel, December 29, 2023.
8. Paul Blummenthal, “Israeli President Suggests that Civilians in Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 13, 2023.
9.  Michael Rios, “’No Food, No Water, Very Little Medical Supplies’: UN Aid Worker on Devastating Conditions in Gaza,” CNN.Com, January 4, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Amir Tal, “Israeli Government Divisions Burst into Open as Ministers ‘Fight’ over Post-War Plans,” CNN.com, January 5, 2024.
12. Christian Edwards and Bianna Goldryga, “Freed Israeli Hostage Says She Endured ‘Psychological Warfare’ during 50 Days of Hamas Captivity,” CNN.com, January 4, 2024.