Castigating NGO’s: An American Israeli-Surrogate on Gaza Reconstruction

Besides international law, international organizations, or NGOs, function internationally beyond the reach of the nation-state. From the standpoint of national sovereignty, the sheer existence of the NGO as an institutional arrangement can be viewed as a potential threat and thus smartly to be expunged. One strategy that a country’s government bent on protecting national sovereignty could use to discredit NGOs is to label them using the turbo-charged “T” word, even in the case of an NGO that is oriented exclusively to providing humanitarian aid. By 2026, Israel had decimated the infrastructure and buildings in its occupied Gaza strip, and Russia had been bombing residential buildings in Kiev and other large cities in Ukraine for four years, so it could not be said that humanitarian aid was not needed in the world. Parts of Africa ravaged by draught and war, such as in Somalia, were also in vital need of humanitarian aid. To discredit NGOs providing such assistance, whether in terms of shelter, food, or medicine, meant being open to the charge of callous disregard for the suffering of very large numbers of people.  The case of Gaza—in particular, the position of the Trump administration on NGO’s being involved in the reconstruction of the strip—demonstrates the harm that is involved in turning the NGO institution-type into a controversial and even suspicious thing in order to do the bidding of a belligerent ally while removing a potential external threat to national sovereignty.

In a closed-door meeting in July, 2026 with European and Arab government officials in Brussels oriented to how nearly €900 million would be distributed to reconstruct the Gaza strip, “US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, called for a radical overhaul of financial support for Gaza.”[1] Although he was not an official of the U.S. Government, he doubtless had the U.S. President’s backing in calling for a fundamental shift from the UN’s standard approach in order to “turn the tide” against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and other NGOs that the U.S. and Israel believed were aiding Hamas.[2] In fact, Kushner dismissed outright the Gaza aid initiatives carried out so far as being “designed step by step by NGOs and terrorists.”[3] It would certainly be news to the UN that UNRWA was actually so tainted. Of course, Kushner and his two task masters meant to discredit the very existence of the United Nation. The day before, U.S. Secretary of State Rubio had announced that the U.S. would attempt to dismantle the International Criminal Court in what could be interpreted as a wider mission to discredit international law itself and thus give carte blanche to any country’s unimpeded sovereignty.

Even though Kushner sought to discredit the UNRWA and NGO’s in general, he can be viewed as ethically compromised in that he was, whether in effect or intent, representing Israel, or at least the position of its prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, that the UN was to be a target. Domestically in the U.S., Kushner was widely viewed as partisan, for he was married to President Trump’s daughter and, more directly, was on Trump’s Board of Peace, “the controversial body . . . expected to oversee the Strip’s reconstruction.”[4] That mega-project likely included lucrative financial investments by the Trump Organization and Kushner’s own investment firm related to prospective luxury resorts on the Gaza-coast. Furthermore, Kushner was a close friend of Netanyahu and thus would likely have been doing his partisan bidding as well, especially in casting suspicion on a UN agency as aiding groups that Israel considered to be “terrorist.” In his speech, “Kushner made a clear link between the current humanitarian aid system and the indirect financing of Hamas, claiming that a consistent flow of money has fallen into the hands of Hamas, which used it to buy weapons, build tunnels, and develop rockets.”[5] It is no accident that Israel was accusing “UNRWA of connections with terrorist groups” even though the UN agency had denied “diverting any aid.”[6] Of course, decimating an entire strip the size of Gaza, which included entire cities, could be considered terrorism because civilians tacitly deemed by apartheid Israel to be “subhuman” had been targeted by Israel’s military, and thus government. Therefore, Kushner’s application of the “T” word is itself indicative of his one-sided stance, and therefore of his questionable credibility even besides the financial interest of his firm, in directing, in effect, the international reconstruction effort that was formally launched at that very meeting.

The significance of Kushner’s (and thus America’s and Israel’s governments’) complaint goes beyond the reconstruction of Gaza under American and Israeli supervision, for in castigating a UN agency and other international NGO’s, Kushner can be interpreted as attempting to sideline international organization itself. The unspoken assumption may be that anything beyond national sovereignty is inherently suspicious, or at least a threat to such sovereignty. Moreover, any potential external obstacle is best taken out, or sidelined, in the interests of national sovereignty. Such a strategy protects national actors who are or may be aggressive internationally, as evinced in 2026 by the U.S. in Iran, Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and even Lebanon, and Russia in Ukraine. It was no accident, in other words, that international organization itself would be sidelined by the Trump and Netanyahu administrations. At the time, the ICC had a warrant out for Netanyahu’s arrest. Whereas the U.S. had been instrumental in the founding of the UN and thus could be regarded as betraying the international body, the U.S. had not ratified the Rome Statute and thus could attack the ICC from the outside, and U.S. Secretary of State Rubio had recent done just that. Again, Netanyahu's fingerprints could be seen upon careful enough inspection.

Therefore, the problem with Kushner’s speech is not merely that he was acting as Israel's surrogate in attacking the UN; even more important is the fact that he included even the UN itself in his attack on NGOs, and was thus urging the collapse of the post-World-War-II global order that had stood for international law rather than unimpeded absolutist national sovereignty. It is indeed telling that “(d)isarming Hamas was a central theme of Kushner’s speech”[7], as this emphasis was undoubtedly as per the wishes of his Israeli friend, Ben Netanyahu, who had been behind the decimation of Gaza and the homelessness of over a million residents. It should not be forgotten that the purpose of the meeting was to begin the task of turning €900 million into real construction “on the ground,” especially as the Gazans had already been relegated to tents and would soon be forcibly sent to heavily-guarded concentration-camp-like compounds in Gaza built by Israel and reminiscent of other camps  on another continent at another time. 

Perhaps the operative question is when humanity would be spared such inhumanity even in cycles, and look forward to international and thus unbiased humanitarian aid and reconstruction. Discrediting international organizations, and especially the UN, was not the way to build confidence globally that any such turn-around would be coming anytime soon. Given Israel’s sordid role in Gaza and the enabling by the Trump administration, those two countries arguably should not have had such a large role in a €900 billion project in Gaza. Afterall, Israel’s occupation itself of Gaza was in violation of the UN, to which Israel was, at least on a de facto basis, still a member.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “Exclusive: US Wants ‘a New Approach’ to Rebuild Gaza, Kushner Told EU Ministers,” Euronews.com, 16 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

On the Politics of International Real-Estate Projects: The Case of Albania

During times of global peace, it is easy to suppose that increased economic interdependency between countries reduce the likelihood of war due to the ramifications on the business projects. By a similar logic by analogy, a couple could suppose that by getting married, the increased interdependence would make breaking up more difficult, and thus less likely. What is overlooked here is that emotions, whether in a romantic relationship or between governments, can, if allowed to go unchecked, break through the parchment barriers that we set up as if they could constrain even intense, ongoing emotions. A couple using marriage as a substitute for going to couples-counseling could actually make a break-up more likely once in the marriage. Similarly, peace abroad and domestic tranquility can be thwarted by international real-estate development projects themselves. Such a situation was unfolding in Albania in mid-2026.

In early June, “Edi Rama told Euronews that opposition to a proposed real estate project on [Albania’s] southern coast linked to the Trump-Kushner family is being amplified by bots, antisemitic narratives and hostile external forces to fuel tensions in Albania.”[1] Israel had been incessantly “crying wolf” as if international criticism of Israel’s militaristic aggression against the people of Gaza were antisemitic, so Rama’s label can also be viewed as misapplied hyperbole intended to discredit political opposition. Because the protests against the proposed real estate project came largely from environmental groups, it is unlikely that Rama’s claim that “antisemitic narratives” were “being promoted by the ‘enemies of Israel and Albania’ is true.[2] In actuality, the environmental groups were objecting to the project being located on a hitherto protected small island.

To be sure, that the planned luxury resort’s financing involved Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, was also rich fodder for the critics, and even though Kushner is Jewish, it would be a stretch to label protests against his involvement to be antisemitic. Indeed, the label antisemitism had ironically been weaponized by Israel’s Netanyahu, who still faced an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. Rama’s own narrative that there was an alternative narrative sourced in the “enemies of Israel and Albania” that the project was based on a “hidden dean between me and Bibi Netanyahu through Jared Kushner to bring Palestinians to that area, which is a total fantasy,” can be subjected to scrutiny, especially as Rama felt the need to add that Albania “has a very proud history of saving Jews, of never having antisemitic feelings.”[3] Indeed the political-linguistic “red herring” device goes beyond even such statements.

The whole Albania thing can be viewed as a diversion or even distraction from the more serious case of Jared Kushner’s involvement in luxury real-estate development projects then being put together to turn Gaza into a resort area, sans Palestinian residents. The Trump-Kushner-Netanyahu axis was much more evident in that case than in Albania, and the business and political stakes were much greater than those pertaining to a resort on a small island in Albania. Being a de facto or tacit accomplice to a genocide, even if in standing to gain financially from it, renders Kushner much more culpable than he stood to be in Albania. So, it is interesting that the latter galvanized more political protests than the former, as if the latter were more unethical than the former. To be sure, targeted political protests against one resort stood more of a chance of success than voiced criticism of turning Gaza into a resort area, especially given the sheer political power backing up the latter. Is it ethical, however, to bypass cases of much greater harm just because the chance of success is less? Furthermore, is it ethical to “take the bait” by focusing on a lesser harm at the expense of retaining a focus on the more egregious case?

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1. Marina Stoimenova and Maria Tadeo, “Rama Alleges ‘Hybrid War’ Behind Protests Against Kushner-Linked Coastal Development,” Euronews.com, 6 May, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

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.

Pope Leo’s First Christmas Message: On International Relations

That severe, systematic inflictions of suffering on whole peoples were going on in the world even on Christmas Day in 2025 did not require a papal announcement for people the world over to be informed of those atrocities. Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza had been going on with international impunity for years. The suffering in Yemen and Sudan was less well-known, but substantial nonetheless. Speaking out against the sordid state-aggressors on the first Christmas of his pontificate, the pope provided an alternative basis for international relations that is so antithetical to military invasion and genocide that the message could seem utopian and thus practically of no use whatsoever. Because “might makes right” had made such unimpeded “progress” even in becoming the default and status-quo, the principle of humble compassion to the humanity to one’s detractors and even outright enemies could seem like a fairy tale. 

The full essay is at "Pope Leo's First Christmas Message."

Rewarding Invaders with Profit: The Case of Russia in Ukraine

Operant Conditioning in Psychology, the theory advanced by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s, holds that punishment and reinforcement can change behavior. Positive reinforcement is more likely than punishment to see a given behavior repeated. With regard to the U.S.-Russian plan announced in November, 2025, to end the war in Ukraine, E.U. officials were concerned that if Russia would benefit from the plan, Putin would be more likely to stage other invasions in Eastern Europe. Positive reinforcement financially could make invading profitable, a point that would not be lost on government officials of countries desirous of territorial expansion.

At an international security conference held in Canada on November 22, 2025, some U.S. senators voiced concern that the plan worked out by Trump and Putin would reward aggression. U.S. Sen. Agnus King said as much during a panel discussion. The proposed plan, which the government of Ukraine was considering at the time, “rewards aggression. This is pure and simple. There’s no ethical, legal, moral, political justification for Russia claiming eastern Ukraine.”[1] Sen. McConnell, a former Majority Leader, put out a statement on the dangers of Putin viewing the plan as a win for him.

Besides what future responses Putin might have to the positive reinforcement in having gained territory in eastern Ukraine, the moral question of whether invaders should be rewarded politically and even financially for going to war seems simple enough, especially as it can be argued that a moral duty exists for every other government around the world to make Putin and Russia pay for having invaded Ukraine. As E.U. President Von der Leyen said, might should no longer be allowed to be the decider of rights to territory.

The switch from Russia paying a price to gaining financially (in additional to territorially) was apparent from the E.U.’s vantage-point concerning that Union’s plan to make Russia pay literally for Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction from the Russian financial assets blocked then in Europe. “In a dramatic reversal for the EU, the US-led plan suggests the Russian assets would be unblocked, releasee, and turned into an investment platform handled by [the U.S.]. The language implies the Kremlin would not only be spared from paying war damages in a future settlement but also benefit commercially.”[2] Two separate funds would be created from the €300 billion in “the immobilised assets of the Russian Central Bank.”[3] One fund would “finance Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and another [fund] shared by the US and Russia [would] develop ‘joint projects in specific areas’”, with both Russia and the US getting the profits.[4] 

That part of the American-Russian plan for peace directly contradicts the Von der Leyen’s position that Russia should not benefit from having invaded another country in Europe. Absent a strong UN that could have acted so as to remove the Russians from Ukrainian territory (and the Israelis from Gaza), relying on disincentives so Putin (and Netanyahu) and any other officials of other governments would think twice before sending troops out. If Putin’s government is allowed to profit and gain additional territory by invading Ukraine, which the internally-weakened E.U. seemed powerless to prevent in 2025, then the fact that both Putin and Netanyahu “won” at the expense of Ukraine and Gaza even in terms of profits from investments is itself a good argument that a stronger international order was needed to stave off the worst that goes with absolutist national-sovereignty. 

Put another way, with the E.U. hampered by the state-vetoes in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., and with the international organizations such as the UN without any governmental sovereignty whatsoever, a world in which so much harm has been unleased by national governments with utter impunity and even positive reinforcements may need a world federation as Kant advocated. Such a global body would have to be capable militarily of removing an invader and stopping a genocide, rather than merely delivering humanitarian aid to civilians.

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1. Rob Gillies, “US Senators Slam Trump’s Russia-Ukraine Peace Plan as Rewarding Aggression,” AP News.com, November 22, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

The UN in the US: Trump Bans Abbas

Should the UN’s General Assembly and Security Council be located in New York City? Both New York and the Union in which New York is a member-state have assumed the obligation of being proper hosts to people from around the world who come to the UN for its business. Even though that international organization has displayed an impotence in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli military incursion that has decimated Gaza and its residents, having an international forum in which talking can take place is not for naught. As an open speaking club of sorts, the United Nations permits adversaries and allies alike to make their views known to each other and the rest of the world. Even though the very existence of the vetoes in the Security Council styme action, that members of the UN so easily get away with violating resolutions renders the entire resolution-process de facto nugatory in real significance. So essentially, the UN building in New York City enables diplomats and heads of governments alike to speak out and with each other. It is vital, therefore, that the US take an expansive approach to issuing visa-waivers so institutional members of the UN can be as well represented as they desire to be. In this regard, the host—the United States Government—should refrain from applying its partisanship in international disputes by restricting the waivers to cover the bare essentials of personnel coming to the UN in New York from abroad.

After having suspended a program that had allowed injured Gaza children to come to the U.S. for medical treatment, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “revoked the visas of a number of Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization officials ahead of the [September, 2025] meeting of the UN General Assembly” even though the two groups had previously been represented.[1] An official at the U.S. State Department said that Palestinian President Abbas and roughly 80 other Palestinians would be denied entry into the US to attend the UN General Assembly’s upcoming session. “Abbas’ office . . . was astonished by the visa decision” and insisted that the decision “violated the U.N. ‘headquarters agreement’.”[2] Palestine had enjoyed non-member observer-state status since 2012, so restricting the non-visa waiver for Abbas especially was indeed a violation of the “UN headquarters agreement.”

That Israel declared Gaza City to be a “combat zone” on the very same day attests to the salience that the Israeli militaristic incursion into Gaza would likely have in the upcoming session, and thus to the need for the Palestinian position—that of the victims (for a genocide is not a war)—to be well-represented both for the sake of fairness itself and so any possible deals can be struck amid full discussions and negotiations “behind the scenes.” The Trump administration held a lopsided position in considering the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, in which over a thousand people died and hundreds of Israelis were taken hostage, to be too horrendous, but the Israeli attacks and perpetrated genocide and even holocaust in Gaza in which tens of thousands had already died and over a million more intentionally subjected to starvation as somehow warranted and thus deserved. In the regard, the monetary footprints of the American Israeli (and Israeli government) lobbyist political action committee in Washington can be inferred as it is probably that Netanyahu was behind the new restrictions on the Palestinian delegation.

It would be only natural for most countries of the General Assembly to object to such blatant unfairness; after all, Netanyahu rather than Abbas was wanted by the International Criminal Court. Additionally, 147 of the 193 countries (not “member states,” as the UN is an international organization, whereas the E.U. and U.S. are not) in the General Assembly already recognized Palestine as a country; a few E.U. states were even set to recognize Palestine as a country in the upcoming session, where Abbas was to take part in a high-level meeting, but Netanyahu did not approve, and even in spite of the genocide or even holocaust that his government was unleashing on Gaza’s 2 million residents, the Trump Administration remained sycophantic via the AIPAC Israeli lobby in Washington.

If indeed the real source of the visa-waiver infringement was the war criminal who at the time was still wanted by the ICC and whose militaristic actions had already violated the UN Charter many times over, the utter abject unfairness in Netanyahu being able to attend (and even speak at!) the General Assembly even as Abbas would be barred due to the “host” country, more than sufficient cause would exist for the General Assembly to hold a debate and vote during the upcoming session on whether another host-country should be found to replace New York.

Switzerland, having earned a reputation of neutrality, could better be counted on than New York, whose membership in the US now compromised that state’s ability to serve as a host. Unlike New York, Switzerland was staying out of the EU so to protect and ensure neutrality in international affairs. Such built-up or accumulated reputation can be understood as a long-term intangible asset that takes considerable effort to build but can be ruined by a single expedient decision that is in line with the immediacy of power and money. Were the General Assembly to let the US Government get away with doing Israel’s bidding even as Israel was declaring Gaza City to be a combat-zone (wherein only one side is allowed to fight), the credibility of the UN itself would be on the line. Unable even to enforce its own resolutions, the UN would be even more compromised, if that was possible. Even just in its capacity as a forum for talking, the UN would fall short if only aggressors and their enablers are able to speak. Such a decrepit institutional condition of the waning post-1945 world order could be dangerous, as power abhors a vacuum, especially in a Hobbesian state of nature wherein might makes right and maintains control of the doors. It should not be forgotten that no international police department existed as of 2025, hence the US Government could get away with putting international partisanship above neutral hospitality even when such partisanship was enabling a genocide and holocaust.

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “US Revokes Visas of Palestinian Officials Ahead of UN General Assembly, State Department Says,” Euronews.com, August 29, 2025.
2. Kanishka Singh and Ali Sawafta, “US Bars Palestinian Leader Abbas from UN as Allies Back Statehood,” Reuters.com, August 30, 2025.

Russia Damages E.U. Diplomatic Offices: Implications for International Law

Even though the Vienna Convention of 1961 includes protections for diplomatic and consular properties in active war-zones, Russia’s attack of 629 missiles and drones on Kiev, Ukraine, came within 50 meters of the E.U.’s diplomatic offices there late on August 27, 2025, severely damaging them but killing nobody in the E.U.’s delegation. The two bombs that hit nearby were enough to give the Europeans the impression that President Putin of Russia did not consider himself bound by international law in war. To the extent that fighting between two sovereign countries, Russia and Ukraine, fits Hobbes’ infamous state of nature, international law is really not law at all, for jurisprudence, including mutually acknowledged rights, requires an overarching polity to enact and enforce laws. So the E.U. could not enjoy a right to be sparred death and destruction at its diplomatic offices in Kiev during the war there, but the Union could claim another right at Russia’s expense within the E.U.’s territory.

After the bombing, the E.U.’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said of it, “It shows that the Kremlin will stop at nothing to terrorize Ukraine, blindly killing civilians—men, women and children and even targeting the European Union.”[1] Even though it was not clear that two bombs going off in the vicinity necessarily means that Putin was targeting the E.U., António Costa, chairman of the European Council, which represents the state governments, stated, “The EU will not be intimidated. Russia’s aggression only strengthens our resolve to stand with Ukraine and its people.”[2] In return for the E.U. having just come in close contact with brazen Russian military might, E.U. President Von der Leyen “promised to tighten the screws on the Russian war machine with a 19^th package of EU sanctions.”[3] That so many so-called packages had already not worked gives little credibility to what a 19^th might do in terms of making a difference to Russia’s war calculus.

Fortunately, Von der Leyen said that the E.U. would work at the federal level “on new ways to further mobilize Russia’s frozen assets, worth about €210 billion, that are “on EU soil, to finance Ukraine’s defence capabilities and reconstruction.”[4] Even though international law put constraints on confiscation of the funds, and an E.U. spokesperson said the efforts would continue to pertain to “the windfall profits, rather than the money itself,” I contend that if it can be proved that Russia had violated international laws militarily in Ukraine, the E.U. should be released of any legal and moral obligation not to confiscate the frozen Russian assets.[5] It would be unfair to Ukraine, as well as the E.U., were international law to be applied to only one side while the other ignores the very existence of law internationally in line with how Hobbes describes the state of nature prior to any social contract.

It was obvious at the time that Ukraine could use any additional military support that could come from the E.U. confiscating the frozen Russian assets in the E.U., but perhaps even more significant would be the decision that could be taken on whether international law itself pertains to the war. In deciding that no law applies to both sides because of a lack of de jure and de facto recognition by both sides and enforcement, the question of even whether there is such a thing as international law—whether jurisprudence applies in a domain in which enforcement mechanisms are lacking, whether institutionally, as by a militarized international federation or a coalition of the willing.

The lack of any enforcement can be distinguished from a weakness in enforcement or even an abject failure of an extant enforcement effort. That no enforcement mechanism existed at least as of 2025 on international law arguably renders such “law” as merely wishes by some people or organizations. If Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu were able to treat international law as such, this is all that would be required to render international law as something less than law itself. For other people to continue to refer to international law would be an error predicated on a mere wish rather than being a statement of fact. A dictum could be presented to the world wherein international agreements cannot, or at least should not, be labeled as law unless credible enforcement mechanisms exist; by credible, I mean likely to be efficacious in constraining culprit governments. In short, federal officials of the E.U. should not feel constrained by international law on confiscating the frozen assets, just as Russia’s President Putin had been ignoring international “law” in having invaded a sovereign country. With so many obvious attacks on civilians and kidnapping of Ukrainian children, taking them inside Russia far from Ukraine, the very concept of international law goes out the window.

Applied to Russia and Israel in 2025, the invasions would have had to be stopped with the invaders pushed back for there to be such a thing as an international law against invasion (or targeting civilians). To claim that there is such a thing as international law while a genocide or even holocaust is underway unimpeded involves cognitive dissidence, if not an abject refusal to think at all. In Cameron’s film, Titanic, an employee of the ship tells third-class passengers that they cannot go through a passageway only to be knocked into the rising water by Dawson. Without enforcement, the employee can only be regarded as strongly expressing a desire. Similarly, a food-aide or medical-aide worker in Gaza could shout again and again at Israeli tanks, you can’t come into Gaza City, but if those tanks keep rolling in, it is not as though the worker would be supposing that a law is being broken, for there is no viable enforcement to force the Israelis out of Gaza; not even a coalition of the willing had emerged to do so in more than a year. Netanyahu could easily dismiss such shouting as pleas rather than even a demand, much less a law. Anyone watching the tanks continue onward would regard any onlooker making a demand as crazy. I submit that it is just as crazy to refer to international law in the context of the Russian and Israeli invasions in the mid-2020's.

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1. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Delegation in Kyiv Severely Damaged by Shock Wave of Russian Strike,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Summons Russian Envoy after Strike Damaged the Bloc’s Delegation in Kyiv,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.

On Presumptuous Pride: Netanyahu Castigates Europe

While conducting a genocide and even a holocaust in Gaza from 2023 through at least the summer of 2025, the Israeli government was in no position to launch diplomatic threats against either the E.U. or any of its states for recognizing a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state.[1] At the time, the warrants issued by the ICC for the arrest of Netanyahu and a former defense minister were still outstanding, and no doubt more warrants would be issued for other culprits in the Israeli government and military. I applaud Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, who have had the guts to protest publicly on behalf of human rights in Gaza and against Israel's savage militaristic incursion into Gaza and the related death of tens of thousands and starvation of millions. The human urge of self-preservation is astonishing in that as of August, 2025, so many residents of Gaza were still alive. So, for Netanyahu to charge government officials in the E.U. with being antisemitic is not only incorrect and unfair, but highly presumptuous given the severity of the atrocities unleashed by Netanyahu and his governmental cadre. Regarding both the Israeli protesters and the Netanyahu government, distinguishing the ethical from the theological domains, which are admittedly very much related, is helpful.

The full essay is "On Presumptuous Pride." 

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1. Tal Shalev et al, “Israel Launches Diplomatic Attacks on Its Western Allies Ahead of Palestinian Statehood Recognition,” CNN.com, August 20, 2025.

Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."

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1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.

Underneath the Rhetoric: Israel’s Hatred of Palestinians

Official public statements by a government’s officials obviously trade on rhetoric—manipulation by wording being a part of statecraft—but when the rhetoric is so self-serving and divorced from facts on the ground (i.e., empirically), wording can be indicative of the underlying mentality, which is real. I submit that the statements of Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu and Israeli foreign-ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein in May, 2025 amid the Israeli military offensive in Gaza reveal the surprising extent that hatred can warp human perception and cognition without the warping itself being grasped by the very people in its grip.

Facing pressure from the E.U. and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. in May, 2025, the Israeli government made a decision that the media described as lifting of the two-month-old Israeli ban on humanitarian food and medicine entering Gaza as over a million residents there were facing starvation and a lack of medical care. The so-called lifting of the blockade in actuality consisted in allowing in less than ten trucks on the first day, and between twenty and forty on the second day, with none being able to distribute through distribution centers. As a result, the food—a mere trifle spread over 1.2 million souls—did not reach any hungry mouths. Incredibly, Netanyahu admitted publicly that he was intent to allow in just enough food and medicine that would relieve the Israeli government of the pressure from its allies. Whereas during the ceasefire earlier in 2025 when Israel was allowing 600 trucks into Gaza per day, the “lifting” of the blockade would only permit a maximum of 100 trucks. In essence, the crime against humanity of exterminating a people was ongoing, given how far short 100 trucks’ worth of food (and the trucks also contained boxes of medicine and medical supplies) is in being able to feed 1.2 million people. Meanwhile, the Israeli military was upping its bombing in Gaza, with 100 residents killed on one day and 48 on the next day after the “lifting” of the blockade. In effect, the Israeli government’s cabinet was increasing the demand for medical supplies and medicine while intentionally minimizing the number of humanitarian trucks that could enter Gaza and making it very difficult for the trucks that did get in to unload at distribution centers such that the food and medicine could reach the actual residents of Gaza. Netanyahu’s stated goal of riding Gaza of Palestinians continued unfettered.

It is in that context that the E.U. took the decision to review the “wide-ranging trade and cooperation pact” with Israel “over its intensified offensive in Gaza.”[1] The E.U.’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, stated on May 20, 2025 that the E.U. “would examine if Israel has violated its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which defines the trading and diplomatic relations” bilaterally.[2] That the Israeli military had already killed over 50,000 residents of Gaza over more than a year begs the question of what took the E.U. so long even just to review the agreement. The constitutional, or basic law, provision for unanimity on foreign policy in the European Council and the Council of the E.U. and that the E.U. state of Hungary had been serially exploiting its veto-power on the federal level is the obvious explanation.

Less well-known, however, is the sheer gradualism in the machinery of any government, federal or unitary, in reacting beyond words in ways that a strong enough to make a real difference “on the ground.” Aggressor regimes around the world benefit from the refusal of legislatures to off-set the inherent gradualism of government by enacting a fast-track option. Both in reacting quicker to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the E.U. could arguably have made a difference, whereas entrenchment is much more difficult to counter after a year.

Ongoing entrenchment has the benefit to the aggressor of being able to set the contours of debate concerning the militarization of an occupation or an outright invasion and extermination of a people. For example, in responding to the E.U.’s decision just to review the agreement, Marmorstein of the Israeli government wrote on social media that the “war was forced upon Israel by Hamas, and Hamas is the one responsible for its continuation. Ignoring these realities and criticising Israel only hardens Hamas position and encourages Hamas to stick to its guns.”[3] There a number of problems with this reply.

Firstly, whether or not Israel rejects the decision of the E.U. to review the trade and diplomatic agreement, the decision is solely for the E.U. concerning its own review, so this is not something for the counterparty to accept or reject. Secondly, not even Hamas—not to mention the 1.2 million residents of Gaza—forced Israel to kill over 50,000 and decimate entire neighborhoods. Nor did any counterparty force Israel to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza as people on a mass scale were starving. Behind the rhetoric is a warping of social reality in being incorrect in terms of being forced to make decisions, as if at gunpoint. Thirdly, the extremely disproportionate number of guns and bombs that Israel had over Gaza undercuts the claim that Hamas was “sticking to its guns,” and that this forced Israel to disproportionately bomb and kill in Gaza, especially during its offensive in May, 2025. Fourthly, the claim that Israel was militarily on the defensive is so contrary to the facts that, beyond the rhetorical use of the claim, it points to a rather severe cognitive and perceptual warping. I submit that hatred is the underlying culprit behind the cognitive and perceptional displacement.

Shortly after Hamas’s unjustified attack and kidnapping on October 7, 2023, the president of Israel said publicly that every resident of Gaza was culpable. Such over-reach of accusation, even considering that Hamas had democratic legitimacy in Gaza, bespeaks hatred, and is consistent with the UN’s finding of reason to believe that Israel was guilty of the crime of trying to exterminate a people, which is easier to prove than genocide. Furthermore, Netanyahu’s admission that he would allow only a minimum of humanitarian food-aid into Gaza in May, 2025 and only to satisfy the U.S. and E.U. points to an underlying hatred like smoke suggests the presence of fire. 

Also indicative of hatred in the Israeli government, Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, said at the time that the Israeli government was “rejecting” the E.U.’s decision to review the trade and diplomatic agreement: “A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement.”[4] This revealing glimpse both of the intent of Israel’s cabinet and what atrocities had been going on in Gaza strongly implies that hatred was a, or even the motivator, for what else other than sadistic pleasure could explain killing babies as a pastime. Furthermore, the statement belies the claim that Israel was being forced by its adversary to hit, and hit hard in Gaza. The refusal to take responsibility for one’s own decisions and even blame a counterparty as if it had made the decisions or forced them is suggestive of a sordid character and even delusion. It is probably that Israeli government’s officials have continued to be so angry and demeaning of a people deemed in effect (and ironically!) as sub-human that the policy of extermination has continued unabated even by the so-called lifting of the blockade of humanitarian aid that might keep the population from continuing to shrink as intended and desired by the Israeli officials. 

It is no wonder that the ICC has issued arrests warrants; it is more astonishing that the world has allowed the Israeli officials to continue to commit war crimes and a crime against humanity with only slight pressure to let some humanitarian aid into Gaza. While certainly not as culpable, the E.U.’s delay in even reviewing its agreement with Israel is astonishing. Is there a threshold of atrocity beyond which a coalition of countries would take immediate action against an aggressor-state? Given the impunity of not only Israel, but also Russia in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that there is such trigger even when a squalid, hateful, and over-reactive aggressor-character is on the loose as if it were in Hobbes' state of nature. 

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1. Euronews, “Israel ‘Completely Rejects’ EU Decision to Review Trade and Cooperation Deal,” Euronews.com, May 21, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Astha Rajvanshi, “Ex-Israeli General Hits Out at Government for ‘Killing Babies as a Pastime’ in Gaza,” Nbcnews.com, May 20, 2025.

Beyond Description, Atrocious, Inhumane: The New Normal?

“The situation for Palestinians in Gaza is beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond inhumane.”[1] So wrote Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, on May 17, 2025. He could have been looking at films taken when the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945 at the end of World War II. It was a shock to the world back then. The scale of the inhumane atrocity of over a million people living in rubble and starving by design in the next century raises the question of whether extreme inhumanity toward a group in searing hatred was becoming normalized, and thus tolerated by the world absent even a coalition of the willing to step in and counter what even democracy could inflict.

At the very least, the impunity enabled by Israel’s major ally pointed to a fatal flaw in the post-World-War II world order, including the United Nations. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union made the world vulnerable, given the bias in there being one less superpower. “A policy of siege and starvation makes a mockery of international law,” the head of the UN wrote.[2] He added that annexation and settlements in the Palestinian territories are illegal, and “nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” or, I might add, of any people.[3] Yet even such strong phraseology is but dry parchment while Israel killed over 100 residents of Gaza on next day—bombing a hospital no less in an attack called Operation Gideon’s Chariot.

To be sure, the Israeli government announced it would “allow a ‘basic amount of food’ to enter Gaza ‘to ensure a famine crisis does not develop’ after blockading the territory for 10 weeks.”[4] Lest humanity be presumed to be the motive, Israel’s IDF made the recommendation “out of the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting” as Israel’s army expanded its presence in Gaza.[5] A similar logic may have been behind Eichmann’s frustration that there simply were not enough ovens so the number of people gassed daily had to be reduced. In both cases, group-identification led to viewing some humans as not human.

It is as if the world and especially the Israelis learned nothing from the disclosure of Hitler’s brutality, for by the 2020s, group-identification itself had still not come to be viewed as dangerous, especially when the obsession becomes reductionistic, and large-scale, planned-out atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine were allowed to go on. Eerily, were the Russian government successful in riding Ukraine of Ukrainians and the Israeli government successful in exterminating the Palestinians in Gaza, would the rest of the world blink? More likely, the tyranny of the status quo would turn a blind eye and go on as if nothing atrocious had happened.

I think it very likely that not even Guterres’s strong words would be enough to translate any political will into action to forestall the victimizers even by the UN. The lesson is perhaps that having strong allies can indeed enable a government to enact Nazi-level atrocities with impunity while the rest of the world looks on as if collectively helpless. What was shocking in 1945 may be viewed going forward as a precedent rather than a “never again,” line in the sand. Remembering past systematic atrocities by governments, whether of Hitler or Stalin, that were oriented to punishing or even eliminating a people out of hatred doesn’t help if such large-scale inhumanity is actually (i.e., de facto) to become precedent. In the midst of destructive, large-scale technology and the banality of efficient state organizing, the world could do worse than come up with a new world order in which having a powerful ally does not give victimizing governments a de facto veto over countervailing efforts to protect peoples from being exterminated out of sheer hatred.

John Locke knew that one rationale for government is that victims make lousy judges of their respective aggressors. That governments might view themselves as victims and leash out hyperactive vengeance may not have occurred to Locke, or even to Kant, who stated that a world federation would only possibly but not probably ensure world peace. It seems that political development beyond the nation-state needs to catch up to the modern reach and intensity of government being used as a tool of hatred. Even in 2025, Putin’s hatred of Ukrainians and Netanyahu’s hatred of Palestinians were of such intensity that both men should have been rendered unfit for office by international if not by domestic means.

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1. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, LinkedIn.com, May 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Wyre Davies and Rushdi Abualouf, “Israel Says It Will Allow Basic Amount of Food into Gaza, Ending 10-week blockade,” BBC.com, May 18, 2025.
5. Ibid.

Malcolm X on Gaza

Malcolm X (né Malcolm Little) visited the West Bank and Gaza during his lifetime, including many refugee camps, a hospital, and a mosque. He had talked on Palestine, and his trip “deeply transformed him.” He wrote a critique of Zionism shortly before he was killed. Black Nationalists in the U.S., including De Bois, had viewed the Jewish fight for self-determination and nationhood as a struggle like that of Black Americans in the United States. Malcolm, however, advocated for the Palestinians because of how the Jewish nation had materialized at the expense of Palestinians, as many had been thrown out of their houses with little or no notice when the state of Israel was founded. Former victims had become victimizers, and the UN had failed to oversee the transition, which could easily have been anticipated to be rough. As tempting as it is to discuss the atrocities being committed in Gaza in 2024-2025, the thread running throughout Malcolm’s political philosophy is also worthy of attention. I submit that the sheer extent of intentional civilian casualties and injuries both in Ukraine and Gaza render Malcolm’s political philosophy anything but radical in retrospect.

Malcolm’s political ideology had a lot to do with Black Nationalism. This resonated for him with the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territory. He did not rule out armed struggle on either front. He “embedded” the Palestinian cause into Black identity; in fact, Black-Palestinian solidarity was a movement. Also, anti-Zionism was set as part of the anti-colonialism movement, which involved post-colonial states in Africa. African states and Arab states in the Middle East did not reconcile. Malcolm wrote against Israel’s efforts to drive a wedge between the Middle East and Africa. For example, decades after Malcolm’s life, in the 21^st century, Israel supported South Sudan to destabilize Sudan.

In short, Malcolm expanded his thinking and perspective to include internationalism in a way that dovetails with his positions (changed due to his trip to Mecca[1]) on civil rights in the United States. It was not lost on him that a formerly-oppressed group in Europe became a colonizing, racially-discriminatory state within its own borders, and that that state was even interfering with post-colonial states in Africa so they would not form a coalition with the Arab states in the Middle East. 

Ironically, the thread running through Malcolm’s domestic and internationalist political philosophy can be encapsulated by a saying that U.S. Senator Alan Simpson, ironically a Republican, often stated on the Senate chamber: “I’m for the little guy.” In the midst of the blatant, naked state aggression going on with impunity in the international arena especially in 2024 and 2025, the world needs fewer enablers of aggressors and more voices standing up for the little guys. This would hardly be as radical as Malcolm’s political philosophy has been characterized. Calls for the global community to resist Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Netanyahu’s crime against humanity of extermination by armed struggle could hardly be considered as radical, given the extent and depth of the intentional atrocities against civilians occurring with profane, damning impunity.

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1. It would be interesting to compare that transformation with the one while Malcolm was in Mecca. Interestingly, the “Mecca transformation” was hardly mentioned at a conference on Malcolm X at Yale in 2025. Nevertheless, I have included material from the conference’s session on “Malcolm and Gaza” in this piece.

Exploiting the E.U.’s Vulnerability to Enable an Atrocity Abroad

On April 3, 2025, Viktor Orban, prime minister of the E.U. state of Hungary, ignored not only the arrest warrant on Ben Netanyahu, the sitting prime minister of Israel, but also the E.U. law in the Rome Statute that requires the E.U. states to act on such warrants issued by the ICC (the International Criminal Court) by arresting people wanted by the Court. The provision in the Rome Statute of the E.U. requires all state governments to arrest people who are wanted by the ICC.  Orban doubtless knew that he could exploit union’s vulnerability with impunity because, like the U.S. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the E.U. relied so much on the state governments to abide by and implement federal law and regulations. By ignoring the Rome Statute, he put the E.U. itself at risk.

The full essay is at "Exploiting the E.U.'s Vulnerability."

The UN: Israel Guilty of Reproductive Genocide

On March 13, 2025, the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report based on evidence of incessant incidents and Israeli strategic bombings to the UN Human Rights Council. “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination,” Chris Sidoti of the Commission stated.[1] This statement is oriented to particular incidents, albeit recurrent; the report goes on to charge the Israeli government with genocidal methods targeting the ability of the Palestinian population to sexually reproduce itself. Ironically, such methods may bring to mind the methods used in Nazi Germany, including those used by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” to wantonly kill and strategically sterilize undesirables. It need not be a truism, however, that the descendants of victims become victimizers, though I suspect that studies on intergenerational psychology attest to the phenomenon. Also ironically, culpability with an intergenerational cause is also a theme in the Hebrew Bible. Thirdly, it is ironic too that Yahweh may have the last word on the Israeli transgressions, as this too is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible’s faith-rendering of the history of Israel. It would be odd indeed were Yahweh behind a sort of rendering of justice against the Nazis by having Israel inflict severe pain on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Put another way, that justice did not catch up to every Nazi aggressor does not mean that excessive, and thus unjust, harming of innocents can complete the cycle of justice. In fact, both the literal “overkill” by Israel and Russia’s war crimes in invading Ukraine—both with impunity—raise the question of whether omnipotent Yahweh gives a damn, or even whether it is actually sheer fiction.

In the Commission’s report released to the UN on June 14, 2024, whose coverage includes the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and does not excuse Hamas for its atrocities against Israelis. Even so, the Israeli government ignored the Commission’s requests for information even on those crimes. That the UN had created the state of Israel must also be considered in assessing the refusal. The report also states that the attack by Hamas “and the subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza must be seen in context. Those events were preceded by decades of violence, unlawful occupation and the denial by Israel of the right of Palestinians to self-determination”.[2] The “unlawful occupation” is especially relevant, as it attests that the political and military “playing field” was hardly level. The Israeli government had taken advantage of this macro advantage for decades, and the Commission’s report on the genocidal sexual and reproductive crimes against humanity following October 7, 2023 should be put in this context. In other words, those crimes were not part of an even “tit-for-tat” between two equal adversaries. Moreover, 45,000 to 55,000 killed or starved for 1250 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 is so extremely one-sided that the slant in the underlying geo-political and military paradigm can be reckoned as being culpable, as well as the party enforcing it.

Therefore, it is vital to go beyond particular instances of the crimes. Even as the March, 2025 report includes incidents, the macro-level of genocidal sexual tactics is not ignored. Of the former, “two days of public hearings held in Geneva . . . featuring victims and witnesses of sexual and reproductive violence and medical personnel who assisted them, as well as civil society representatives, academics, lawyers and medical experts” went into the report.[3] The report asserts that “forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault” were “standard operating procedure” of the Israeli Security Forces in Gaza.[4] Furthermore, the report maintained that “forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and violence to the genitals, were committed either under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel’s top civilian and military leadership.”[5] From a human standpoint, it is only natural that the anger of Gaza residents towards Israelis and Israel going forward must be such that any proximity, such as is an aspect of military occupation, is itself problematic and essentially infeasible. That such anger can be expected to be intergenerational also rendered continued occupation unfeasible. This is not to say that the residents of Gaza should be moved; a coalition of the willing globally could step in to see that no Israeli enters the territory, which, fortunately, shares a border with Egypt.

The report on the sexual and reproductive tactics also covers crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and this also renders continued occupation untenable. Specifically, the Commission reported “that Israeli forces had systematically destroyed sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities across Gaza, including Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, Al Basma centre, in December 2023.”[6] Additionally, it was no accident, according to the report, that “(t)ank shelling destroyed about 4,000 embryos at the clinic that reportedly assisted 2,000-3,000 patients a month.”[7] According to Sidoti, “certainly, their commanders knew and the commanders would have known that there were tanks operating within that vicinity and firing on buildings and fired on a healthcare facility that was clearly marked.”[8] To be sure, it is possible that the Israeli government had intel that Hamas was using the clinic as a shield. Even if this were so, the report includes other instances of tactics of reducing the number of Palestinians in Gaza, such as direct attacks on maternity wards, “combined with the use of starvation as a method of war,” that have negatively “impacted all aspects of reproduction.”[9] Imagine the reaction were such a design and intent applied by an occupying power on Israel; it would not take long at all for the Israeli government to charge such an occupier with committing Nazi atrocities on the Jews. The asymmetry itself points back to the tilted playing field.

From its collection of evidence, the Commission could detect a systemic pattern. The report “finds that the destruction amounts ‘to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention, including deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”[10] The very notion of collective justice (and injustice) is based on the fallacy that there are no innocents in a population. Immediately after the Hamas attack, the president of Israel commited this fallacy and connected it with his stated determination that every resident in Gaza should suffer as a result of the Hamas attack. The reaction of governments around the world was to step back and let this fallacious reasoning be implemented on the ground in Gaza by embittered Israeli leaders and soldiers. It is as in Hobbes’ Leviathan in that a sovereign power can do whatever it wants. Yet even in Hobbes’ political theory, even though a country’s sovereign power has the last word in interpreting scripture, everyone is subject to God’s judgment.

The doctrine in Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in Zion,” is that the “time will come when fearfulness will surprise the sinners in Zion, because they will know that they are going to be cast into a devouring fire, which they must suffer forever ad ever, and which none can endure.” Edwards’ most famous (or infamous) sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is based on Deut. 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” This can be said of the Israelis who are culpable in ordering or committing genocidal acts well in excess of reciprocal harm in an eye for an eye. The Palestinians are largely if not all Muslims, so it cannot be believed that Yahweh would be in favor of the killing, starvation (e.g., blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in 2025), deprivation of utilities (e.g., cutting off electricity), and reproductive abuse. It is not as though the deity were saying to Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu, Go and rid the Land of Israel of those people who worship other gods, as is the biblical story of Yahweh directing the Hebrews to circle Jericho seven times and kill even the women and children who worship Baal because they do not worship Yahweh. Rather, it seems that Yahweh would eventually punish Israel (i.e., collective divine justice) for having violated the Commandment against killing, especially if the magnitude is well beyond tit-for-tat.

For a God-fearing Israeli, and the rest of us, Yahweh once again punishing Israel for its transgressions is not something that any person can or should take on as if delegated by that deity to enforce divine justice. Indeed, such a horrendous assumption renders theocracies dangerous. We are all, human, all too human, and thus we don’t have the omniscience to be God’s enforcers. This is not to say that governments cannot or should not act to enforce international law, especially given the impotence of the United Nations, but absent this, there is faith that Yahweh will have the last word in holding Israel accountable here rather than only in the hereafter. Instead of willful arrogance, humility, self-restraint, and contrition are the appropriate attitudes of people of faith who have so violated divine (and international) law. It can even be said that serving rather than attacking one’s enemies unlocks the door to the kingdom of God, but even this is subject to willful intransigence out of jealousy and spite.

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1. “Rights Probe Alleges Sexual Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
2. “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including
East Jerusalem, and Israel,” Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General, The United Nations. June 14, 2024.
3. Rights Probe Alleges Sexual Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.

The ICC Indicts Israeli and Hamas Officials: On the Perils of Absolutist National Sovereignty

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and the military commander of Hamas on November 21, 2024. With the world having had centuries wherein national sovereignty has been the basis of the international order, the heads of national governments could be expected to instantly bolt from just being indicted by an international court. Since the world woke up in 1945 to learn of the Nazi atrocities against Slavs (20 million), Jews (6 million), intellectuals and gays, whether murdered in concentration camps or on the proverbial street, as well as reading as years went by of Stalin’s mass-graves from his government’s mass-murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and even Russians, the hegemonic doctrine that the sovereignty of a state should be absolute has been barely subject to any resistance. So, when the ICC has issued arrest warrants, it has been up to national governments around the world to enforce the warrants by arresting the heads of other governments charged with having violated international law. This weakness in the constraint on what would otherwise be absolutist national sovereignty attests to the marginal degree to which that doctrine has actually been questioned since 1945. In other words, the international order can be said to occupy a rather uncomfortable ‘betwixt and between’ position with respect to whether the sovereignty of countries should be constrained internationally. Not until international law comes complete with real enforcement powers will the world be able to say that heads of governments (and of state) are no longer in a state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes in his tomb, Leviathan.  

In the case of Israel and Hamas, the nature of their respective crimes is such that the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty can legitimately be discarded and replaced by a doctrine of relative national sovereignty. The ICC’s judges said there were “reasonable grounds” that the three defendants bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity since October 7, 2023,[1] when Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped a couple hundred more. In (over) response, or retribution as “punishment,” the Israeli military had killed over 44,000 residents of Gaza and made over a million more homeless by the time the ICC issued its warrants. Israel even dropped bombs on the tents being used by the homeless residents. The scale alone of the suffering can be seen as an indictment on the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, which had been able to protect more than one head of a national government in the world.

In fact, during the very month in which the ICC announced the three warrants, Russia’s President Putin signed a revised, more flexible government policy on when the country’s military could use tactical nuclear weapons and was still having the military bomb civilian targets. Even the U.S. Embassy in Kiev was no longer safe from becoming a target. To be sure, the ICC had already issued an arrest warrant for Putin, but it was an easy matter for him to avoid being arrested. Netanyahu too could be expected to easily evade capture. Besides being able to stay in their respective countries, they could safely visit the respective allies. Often missed is the hesitancy that other, third-party governments, have in arresting the heads of other governments. Besides not wanting retaliation, it is easy for a country’s government to ignore the ICC’s requests. The ICC’s enforcement mechanism has been, in short, like a bad joke.

The weakness of the E.U. federal system only made the arrests of the three defendants within that territory especially unlikely. Put another way, that the ICC would have to depend on the E.U. to hold its states accountable demonstrates just how weak the court’s enforcement mechanism was when the court issued the warrants. Hence, the BBC noted at the time, “Netanyahu and Gallant do not face any immediate threat of prosecution.”[2] Even though “if either of them set foot in any [signatory country to the ICC’s jurisdiction], the two men “must be arrested and handed over to the court.”[3] The E.U.’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, “said the ICC decision was binding on all E.U. member states.”[4] Nevertheless, “Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said . . . he would ignore an arrest warrant issued by [the ICC] for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”[5] Orban’s refusal to recognize the validity of federal law would imperil the E.U. were his decision to go against the E.U. requirement to eventually become the norm with respect to E.U. law in the state governments; it could turn into something akin to the Nullification Crisis in the early 1830s in the U.S., when it too had a young federal system and had to contend with South Carolina’s Nullification Acts. Orban’s disrespect for E.U. law (including regulations and even directives, which the states have some discretion in implementing) is a microcosm of the disrespect for international law (and arrest warrants) that had become the norm at the global level by 2024; otherwise, coalitions of countries would have literally pushed Putin out of Ukraine and Netanyahu out of Gaza, as the U.S.’s coalition had pushed Saddam Hussain out of Kuwait in the early 1990s.

It is precisely such a lack of respect for the international court and international law itself that led Netanyahu’s office to condemn the ICC’s warrants against the prime minister and the former defense minister as “antisemitic.”[6] Of course, the warrant against the commander of Hamas’s military was not said to be a case of prejudice against Muslims. In fact, Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, objected that the ICC was placing “the State of Israel and the murderous leaders of Hamas in the same row, and thus legitimizes the murder of babies, the rape of women and the abduction of the elderly from their beds.”[7] The ICC was not legitimizing the events of October 7, 2023 because the court issued a warrant for a Hamas high official too.

The court found reasonable grounds that Hama’s Deif was “responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form[s] of sexual violence; as well as war crimes for murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and other form[s] of sexual violence.”[8] While this may seem duplicative, crimes against humanity are legally distinct from war crimes. Regarding Netanyahu and Gallant, the court found reasonable grounds to believe that they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”[9] If the Israeli government officials still needed an explanation for why the court was putting them in the same criminal category with the Hamas official, perhaps contrasting 44,000 dead and over 1 million homeless with 1,200 dead and only a few hundred homeless (i.e, taken as hostages)—many of whom had been able, unlike the Gaza residents, to return to find a house or apartment building still standing. Just the fact that Israeli officials objected to the equivalence in the ICC’s charges leveled against Israeli and Hamas officials even though Israel’s military response had been disproportionately aggressive and destructive suggests just how warped human judgment can be, and just how dangerous the doctrine of absolutist sovereignty is as applied to national governments under which government officials can act with the sense of impunity from international law having “teeth” internationally. Even that such a misplaced doctrine had by the 21^st century become a part of the status quo in the global order does not bode well for human nature, which the doctrine contradicts.  That both the presidents of Israel and the United States called the ICC arrest warrants against Israeli officials “outrageous” boggles the mind, given the scale of destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza.[10] Put more directly, a species capable of such mental feats devoid of reason should not grant absolute sovereignty to any human being. Giving absolute sovereignty to people heading a government that has nuclear weapons is a bad idea, and yet the world, out of fear, has not stood up to keep that from continuing.

Given the salience of greed the thirst for power that are so indelible in human nature, the U.S. was still selling military weapons to Israel and the Biden administration had not courageously resisted the notoriously strong American Israeli lobby (the AIPAC). So the U.S. Government had a vested economic and political interest doing two things at the expense of human rights and international law: 1.) being the single veto at the UN Security Council against a resolution the day before that would have stipulated an immediate ceasefire, the removal of Israel’s military from Gaza, and the unconditional release of the hundred or so remaining Israeli hostages being held by Hama; and 2.) rejecting the ICC’s warrants for the two Israelis (but curiously not the one against the Hamas commander)—both in the same week! Countering the vested interest of the U.S., the E.U., a third party to the dispute/war, more objectively stated that all three warrants should be respected and enforced.[11] Given the magnitude of killing and destruction in Gaza, going much beyond the heinous acts of Hamas on October 7, 2023, the position of the E.U.’s foreign minister could indeed be viewed as being relatively objective, mature, and even ethical.

Lest it be objected (as it was by Israel and its enabler, the U.S.), that neither the U.S. nor the sovereign state of Israel had signed documents agreeing to be covered by the ICC’s jurisdiction, “the court [had] ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza because the UN’s secretary general had accepted the Palestinians” constitute a member of the UN.[12] Just because Israel does not recognize the Palestinians politically does not mean that the UN and the ICC could and should not do so.

Lest it be objected that the ICC, as a court of last resort, is “supposed to act when domestic courts cannot, or will not, genuinely investigate or prosecute serious international crimes,” Israel had had a bit more than a year to do so, but had not even charged Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[13] Especially given the judicial reforms that the prime minister had successfully had the legislature adopt, it would be highly unlikely that the judiciary would ever hold Netanyahu accountable even for corruption.

In short, like Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu and the U.S.’s Biden conveniently rejected the very validity of international law, and perhaps that position is fair because law without an enforcement mechanism can only really be a resolution or policy befitting an international realm with no sovereignty having been delegated to it from the world’s countries, whose government officials have gotten used to enjoying the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty serving as the bedrock of the global order. Reading slowly through the detailed charges promulgated by the ICC might get a person to reconsider whether, given human nature, the world hasn’t made a mistake in allowing it to become the status quo and thus enjoy considerable inertia even in the face of horrendous atrocities in Gaza as well as Ukraine with the perpetrators—national governments and their respective officials—being able to act with the smug sense of impunity. It is a pity that the national governments adopted, whether explicitly or by not rejecting it in action, such flawed doctrine as an important geo-political element of the status quo. Even if the world comes to realize that the squalid doctrine has enabled abuses of power by national governments, the very nature of the status quo suggests that the doctrine will nevertheless still be likely to enjoy considerable inertia as the power behind the thrones because of the political (and even military) energy needed to dislodge the artifice.

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1. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes," BBC.com, November 21, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Tansin Paternoster and Evelyn Dom, “European Leaders Give Mixed Reactions on Netanyahu’s War Crimes Arrest Warrant,” Euronews.com, November 22, 2024.
6. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes.”
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.; Jaroslav Lukiv, “Biden Says ICC War Crimes Arrest Warrant ‘Outrageous,” BBC.com, November 22, 2024.
11. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes.”
12. Ibid. 
13. Ibid.