Chaos in Massive Illegal Crossings into the E.U.: The Case of Ceuta

Even though the default absolutist notion of national sovereignty has consistently undercut global efforts to combat climate change and rid the world of nuclear weapons and even war itself, to disregard territorial sovereignty altogether is also problematic. Interestingly, both extremes treat international relations as a Hobbesian state of nature, and disregarding national sovereignty even extends the state of nature to within a country such that even national government is presumed not to exist. Illegal immigration is a case in point. When sixty thousand North Africans illegally entered Ceuta in the E.U. on July 30, 2026, the utter disrespect for the rule of law as well as the E.U.’s territorial integrity and legitimacy was palpable.

The disregard for governmental sovereignty could be seen visually as videos taken at the time on Ceuta’s Tarajal beach “reveal the chaos that accompanied the crossings, showing large crowds running between the breakwater and the roads around the border area.”[1] Sixty thousand people swimming over to a small city of just 19 square kilometers provides a snapshot of just how easily illegal immigration can spiral into mob-rule. Both Plato and Aristotle situate mob-rule as democratic decadence, and thus, like tyranny, to be avoided. As Hobbes argues in Leviathan, there is a good reason for government, given human nature. His theory differs markedly from Locke’s theory of natural rights, save the right of self-preservation that is inalienable according to Hobbes even though a sovereign has even the exclusive right even to interpret divine writ. For Hobbes, no natural rights exist that would limit the authority of a sovereign. None of these four historical philosophers would claim that illegal immigration between modern nation-states is a natural right. In fact, I suspect the four would be appalled at the utter effrontery in ignoring a country’s territorial sovereignty.

The push-back from North Africa backs up the disregard evinced by the people who illegally crossed into Ceuta. That Morocco had regarded the cities of Ceuta and Melilla as “part of its own territory since its independence from France and Spain in 1956” does not justify the strategy of spinning the illegal crossings as part of a dispute on sovereignty, for the people crossing were not doing so to protest that issue.[2] Neither do the social and economic conditions in Morocco justify disregarding another country’s government as if being unemployed justifies illegally entering another country. “One of Morocco’s most popular news outlets Hespress wrote that ‘the waves of incursions into Ceuta and the attempts to cross that later extended to Melilla have brought back to the fore the debate on the social and economic situation in the areas bordering the two enclaves. . . . What happened once again shines a light on the cities’ connection with their Moroccan environment and the complexities of their historical and sovereignty dossier.’”[3] Dossier? The attempt to primp the statement using misplaced diplomatic language flies in the face of the sheer chaos on the ground in Ceuta on 30 July, 2026. Disagreements on a “dossier” do not justify tens of thousands of illegal crossings in utter disregard for the laws and government of the receiving city, state, and federal union.

The existence of the latter, the European Union, in which Spain, which in turn includes Ceuta, is a state, enabled the North Africans to exploit a vulnerability in the federal system, for states’ rights ideologues (i.e., Euroskeptics) had been successful in blocking a stronger federal role in patrolling the E.U.’s territorial borders. The extant state-centric bricolage of immigration laws could easily be exploited without the Commission being able to fill the gaps. The Schengen Agreement, which allows for the free movement of people within the E.U., is flimsy at best. In the wake of the chaos in Ceuta, “Italy’s Interior Ministry . . . ordered the closure of the [state’s] sea and air borders with Spain, temporarily suspending the Schengen free movement regime” between the two E.U. states.[4] Imagine if Texas were able to close its borders to people coming from California were its government to suddenly open the flood-gates to illegal immigrants coming up from Mexico to California. We don’t have to imagine the government of Texas sending illegal immigrants from that U.S. member-state to Illinois.[5] Were the U.S. border subject only to a Schengen-like agreement between some of the member-states, chaos could be expected not only by interlarding migrants, but also between the states. The refusal of the E.U. state of Italy to accept people arriving from another E.U. state undermines the E.U. itself, and demonstrates just how fragile its state-dominated federal system has was even the case in 2026.

The statement at the time by Antonio Tajani, a state official of Italy, relates the state’s unilateral suspension of Schengen regarding the E.U. state of Spain to shoring up the E.U.’s borders: “The temporary suspension of Schengen with Spain is a necessary choice to safeguard the security of our citizens and defend the European borders.”[6] By “our citizens,” Tanjana was referring to those of the state of Italy, the interests of whom are not necessarily the same as those of E.U. citizens throughout the Union. This difference—between the interests of a part and the whole of which the part is just a part—is precisely why the protection of E.U. borders warranted more federal authority, rather than just the Schengen “patch-work” that could so easily be undone by “necessary” choices by state governments. In the U.S., the federalizing of regulating interstate commerce occurred because states such as New York and New Jersey were penalizing trade from each other by instituting duties under the Articles of Confederation. Whereas that confederation, which lasted from 1981-1789, consisted of fully sovereign countries, the E.U. states are semi-sovereign, just as U.S. states are because both the E.U. and U.S. have enumerated competencies or powers reserved for the federal level. By acting like a confederation with regard to border control, the E.U. played into the hands of Morocco and its citizens who illegally crossed into the E.U., such that E.U. citizens were vulnerable even to the excuse that bad economic conditions in a country outside of the E.U. gives rise to a natural right to enter the E.U. illegally as if no governments existed in Ceuta, Spain, and the E.U. itself even with respect to its borders.

Were unemployment a suitable justification to enter another country illegally, there would be chaos in both the E.U. and U.S. as it would be “open season” from Africa and Central America to cross international borders as if they did not exist. To disregard the laws of another country by entering without its government’s permission is so presumptuous in fact that the underlying mentality alone can be treated as a red-flag. The vulnerability in the E.U.’s state-centric federal system was particularly exposed because the government and state media of Morocco enabled such a mentality by citing a sovereignty dispute and bad domestic social and economic conditions as if these justify illegal immigration. In short, the E.U. should not have had to rely on the Schengen Agreement, which was as of 2026 only between some but not all E.U. states anyway. Even treating the sovereignty dispute as a Moroccan-Spanish concern belies the structural integrity of the E.U. as a federal union in which the E.U.’s borders are properly a matter of concern to the Union rather than just its states.

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1. Chaima Chihi, “Sovereignty, Sarcasm, Blame: How North Africa Reacted to Ceuta Crisis,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Gabriele Barbati and Greta Ruffino, “Italy Suspends Schengen with Spain over Ceuta Migrant Crisis, Closes Air and Sea Borders,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.
5. In fact, Chicago’s O’hare Airport closed its regional-bus transit facility to accommodate the incoming immigrants from Texas.
6. Gabriele Barbati and Greta Ruffino, “Italy Suspends Schengen with Spain over Ceuta Migrant Crisis, Closes Air and Sea Borders,” Euronews.com, 31 July, 2026.

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.

The U.S. Dismantling the International Criminal Court: International Law in the Cross-Hairs

The Rome statute, a treaty that went into effect in 2002, established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in order to bring accountability even to high officials of governments who flaunt international law by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of July 14, 2026, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the American high representative on foreign policy and diplomacy, announced the intent of the Trump administration to stop at nothing less than dismantling the ICC, the U.S. had not ratified the treaty and thus was not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. However, Americans on the soil of countries that had ratified the treaty could be arrested there and sent to the ICC in the Hague if charged with having violated international law abroad. Back on U.S. territory, any such culprits would be beyond the reach of the ICC and any of the governments that were obliged by treaty to make arrests on their respective soils to implement warrants issued by the ICC. I contend that U.S. sovereignty was neither diminished or threatened by the existence of the court and the governments obliged to implement the warrants. In fact, the Trump administration may have been acting as a proxy for a foreign regime, two high government officials (at least) had been charged by the ICC and yet were still flaunting their immunity in Israel and the United States. Protecting the accused in another country of such horrendous crimes as a holocaustic genocide and falsely claiming that the ICC was an existential threat to American sovereignty as Rubio claimed on social media are not in the best interests of the U.S. even just in terms of reputational (and political) capital in international relations. Political expediency geared to protecting culprits of such a severe crime is at the very least short-sighted. In steering a large ship, a captain should look beyond the bow, as per the fateful example of the Titanic in 1912 attests. Enlightened self-interest goes a long way, whereas a narrow, contractual self-interest is apt to be hit head-on at some point. In July of 2026, the E.U. warned the world of the reckless American steering, but like a drunk driver, full of hubris liquor, the warning would go unheeded in the Hobbesian ideological belief that there is no such thing as international law in the state of nature. The bigger picture considers whether international law itself would survive the collapse of the post-World-War-II world order, which includes the ICC as well as the enforcement-impotent United Nations even concerning its own rulings and votes! Such self-inflicted impotence evinces Nietzsche’s conception of weakness, which is epitomized by celibate priests who yet seek to dominate even the strong. Netanyahu and Putin could easily flaunt the U.N. and be confident in remaining untouched by the ICC and even the feckless governments that were obliged to enforce the court’s arrest warrants. The global order was backsliding ironically as progress in technology was revolutionizing daily life in the twenty-first century.

In a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2026, “Rubio vowed to ‘dismantle’ the court, claiming it posed ‘an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.”[1] He viewed the court and its supporters in other governments to be, as he put it, “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts and the force of so-called international law.”[2] In other words, the court, he claimed, was hardly neutral, as it was very partisan in being anti-American and was determined to eviscerate U.S. sovereignty from the face of the Earth.

Perhaps New York City Mayor Mamdani’s recent threat that he would have the Israeli security minister Ben-Gvir arrested and sent to the ICC in the event of the Israeli official stepping foot on NYC soil, and the related political-monetary power in Washington, D.C. of the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) had something to do with motivating the Trump Administration to launch its full-blown attack on the ICC, for the claim that the ICC had or even could impinge on U.S. sovereignty even though the United States had not ratified the Rome statute and thus was not subject to the court is wholly without validity or merit. Accordingly, Rubio’s claim that the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system” can be dismissed as propaganda intended to protect top Israeli officials from being held accountable for having ordered a genocide in Gaza even though the occupation itself violated international law, if there actually was such a thing.

To be sure, the American high representative for foreign policy was no idiot. A clue to his rationale, albeit flawed, lies in the U.S. State Department’s statement that the U.S. Government would “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”[3] The key lies in the targeting of American servicemen or officials. Because “Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans,” the ICC’s claim to having “the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest” is invalid.[4] The key here is operating on behalf of, for such language alludes to Americans operating abroad, and thus possibly in countries that were subject to the ICC at the time and thus were obligated by the Rome statute to make arrests on their own soil to implement outstanding ICC warrants. The particular nationality of a foreigner in one of those countries does not matter on whether one can be arrested there; the reach of a foreigner’s home government does not extend so to exempt citizens from arrest; for that would be in violation of another country’s sovereignty. Neither is the more subjective “national interest” of the U.S. sovereign in other countries, which are not even subject to U.S. law.

Rubio is simply incorrect in asserting that ICC-based arrests in countries treatied to the Rome statute threaten “every aspect of our political and legal system” even though the ICC at the time did have jurisdiction over Americans who were (operating) in such other countries (excluding being physically inside a U.S. embassy, which is considered U.S. territory). Because the U.S. had not ratified the treaty, anyone on American soil could not be touched either by the ICC itself or any of the governments obliged to implement ICC warrants on their own respective territories, so the American political and legal system were not in danger of being torpedoed by the court.

In fact, the State Department’s statement’s threat to increase scrutiny of countries “that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”—meaning that such assistance would be terminatedcan—can be interpreted as a lack of respect or even recognition of the national sovereignty of other countries; at the very least, the U.S. Government was announcing its intent to manipulate other governments even though they were treaty-bound to recognize and enforce ICC arrest-warrants.[5] The sordid nature of the motivation of the Trump administration may go even deeper than encroachment, which was not exactly a new tactic with respect to pressuring and even threatening other governments to do the bidding of the U.S. Government.

Kenneth Roth, formerly with Human Rights Watch, wrote at the time that the Trump administration wanted “to be able to commit war crimes with impunity even on the territory of governments that have joined the International Criminal Court.”[6] Given the support of Israel amid its genocide in Gaza, allies being able to commit even crimes against humanity, which go beyond war crimes, can be added, at least as a possible motivation. Roth, however, saw in Rubio’s position a “quest for impunity for American war crimes abroad” using national sovereignty as a subterfuge to hide his true intent.[7] Ironically, according to Roth, Rubio was ignoring “the sovereign right of other nations to invoke the ICC for crimes committed on their territory.”[8] Not only is American sovereignty unperturbed by ICC arrests made in other countries, as they are not subject to U.S. sovereignty or even American “national interests,” but also those countries are well within their national sovereignty to arrest foreigners on their soil even on warrants issued by the ICC, provided that the country had ratified the Rome statute.

Imagine the Japanese government protesting to the U.S. Government regarding the arrest of a Japanese citizen in New York City who has just unsuccessfully set off a means by which thousands of people would be killed. Certainly Japan would not even attempt to claim that the arrest violates Japan’s sovereignty, because New York (and U.S.) sovereignty, not that of Japan, apply in New York City. The American federal system, like that of the E.U., had governmental sovereignty at both the federal and state levels, with direct effect of both rather than just through the state governments. The claim that Japanese sovereignty trumps either in New York City could not seriously be considered as credible by anyone, and yet Rubio’s piece and the State Department’s statement were taken seriously enough by the E.U. for it to issue a warning against the position against the ICC in Washington. The adage, the emperor is not wearing any clothes, seems to apply well here, and yet high governmental position itself seems to come with the assumption of being fully clothed.

So much for the American case for dismantling the ICC. Hardly noticeable in Rubio’s op-ed in the newspaper, but perhaps the most important part of the piece, is his reference to “so-called international law.”[9] Did you catch that in the quote above? If not, you missed the larger, and much more significant claim by the U.S. Secretary of State that international law is, at best, a misnomer without any actual referent. Overlooking the truly significant in being captivated instead with a political “dog-fight” may be a human proclivity that is hard-wired in our nature, but we also have the ability to reason and reflect, and even to pick out the truly significant even amid sensationalism that titillates our emotions. If I am right, very few people indeed picked up on Rubio’s ideological position on international law itself. He was indicating by the inclusion of “so-called” that nothing that can be called law exists beyond the sovereignty of a country.

Relatedly, Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that rights, except that of self-preservation, are conditional on there being a sovereign power. Arguably, Russia’s Putin in Ukraine, Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza (and even the settlers in the West Bank), and even America’s Trump (and Israel’s Netanyahu) tossing bombs into Iran evinces a refusal to recognize the validity of international law. What counts is national power in political realism; not even international norms can or should get in the way of governments single-handedly advancing the strategic interests of their respective countries. This is tantamount to a return to Hobbes’ state of nature, internationally.

In a world in which governments have and have exclusive control over nuclear weapons, nature can indeed be nasty, brutish, and short. Furthermore, the lack of any respected international “requirements” to limit carbon emissions could also be expected to push the planet beyond even the inhabitable zone of humans, as the 2021 film, Silent Night, suggests. More immediately, however, draught, flooding, heatwaves, and even sub-optimal food production (and thus starvation, as in Africa) could be expected as governments continued to ignore the voluntary targets set in the Paris Accords even as the species’ global population continued to increase at an annual rate estimated by the UN of roughly 0.8% to 0.9% when the population stood (in July, 2026) at approximately 8.3 billion. Just a century before, that figure was estimated to be between 1.75 billion and 1.93 billion. The exponential growth rate itself may suggest that humanity was out of control with respect to its population on Earth, given its natural resources and ecosystems. According to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a maximizing, schizogenic, variable can pierce the equilibrium, homoeostatic, steady-state of an ecosystem, and even the Earth’s atmosphere itself. Our species had become such a variable amid the economic engine of commercial revolution, which gave rise to climate change, as industry greatly expanded during the twentieth century. Even so, the Paris Accords were voluntary, given the value (and priority) put on national sovereignty.

An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, interestingly known both as a political economist (whereas Adam Smith had been known as moral philosopher!) and Christian clergyman, predicts dire consequences from a species failing to restrain its own population growth but being hemmed in by nature through starvation, war, and disease. Indeed, the Romantic period of intellectual history in the 1800s would see nature portrayed even in Turner’s paintings as having the last word over the classics steeped in reason and human intentionality.

Therefore, both with respect to nuclear war and climate change, both of have their basis at a time when national sovereignty was still absolute and nationalism was so in vogue, especially in Europe, international relations in the twenty-first century could not afford to be based on and confined to the sovereignty of individual countries. Rubio’s political stance on the very existence of international law even as a concept is therefore dangerous, and at the very least is not in line with the sapiens in homo sapiens, for sapiens, sapientis is the form of the Latin adjective, wise. Dismantling the ICC, and thus giving impunity a free hand in war crimes and crimes against humanity, is a move in the direction of Hobbes’ state of nature, in which everyone lives in fear of being killed.

Perhaps in a Hegelian-modified way of looking at the broad expanse of human freedom and responsibility through history, our species is perhaps hardwired, or habituated, to taking a step back after having taken a step forward, before being willing to take yet another step forward. Putin, Netanyahu, and even Trump can be viewed as representing a step back, in aggressive fear, but this too shall perhaps pass, hopefully before humanity obliterates or exterminates itself. But lest we rest too assured that a new, stronger, and thus better enforced international order of institutions arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the fire being set by the Trump administration, a well as those set by Russia’s Putin in Ukraine and Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza and even the West Bank (by refusing to hold violent settlers accountable), Kant’s claim that world peace would only be possible, but not probably, were a world federation, presumably with enough governmental sovereignty of its own, albeit with checks and balances to obviate tyranny, to enforce its laws on governments that have abused their national sovereignty that has been retained. A world federation wherein all sovereignty resides in the national governments, a non-plena federation in the Latin of Althusius’s early seventeenth-century theory of federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire, would be an exercise in futility and thus not worth even attempting, as already demonstrated for the world by the conduct over many decades since World War II of the veto-wielding powers on the UN Security Council at the expense of the very credibility of that international organization. Indeed, the decimated credibility played right into Rubio’s coded allusion to international law being not worthy of the label. Therefore, what might a real global order look like, once the full step back has run its course?  

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1. Emma De Ruiter and Gavin Blackburn, “EU Says Threats Against ICC ‘Unacceptable’ as US Launches Campaign to ‘Dismantle’ Court,” Euronews.com, 14 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

Israel Kidnapping at Sea: On Absolutist National Sovereignty

In the dark of night on June 9, 2025, Israeli military forces intercepted The Madleen, a yacht operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), a political-activist group oriented to getting food and medicine to the residents of Gaza in Israel. Activists from the E.U., Brazil, and Turkey were on the boat until they were forced onto an Israeli boat and taken to Tel Aviv’s airport, where they were pressured to sign a document that they had entered Israel illegally and agreed to be deported. Once back in the E.U., its activist Greta Thunberg told reporters that Israel had committed “an illegal act by kidnapping us on international waters and against our will, bringing us to Israel, keeping us in the bottom of the boat, not letting us getting out and so on.”[1] She had agreed to give her written consent to be deported (even if that meant being permanently banned from Israel, she likely would have welcomed the stipulation), but she refused to admit that she had entered Israel illegally. She had, after all, been kidnapped in international waters. Being forced to enter a country by its government, whose officials reason nonetheless that the entrance is illegal, merits the spotlight on enquiry, as this actual mindset can be said to be pathological in nature. I submit that pathology with governmental sovereignty is never a good mix.

Of her kidnapping in international waters north of Egypt, over 100 miles from Israel, Thunberg humbly relativized her own plight by adding, “But that is not the real story here, the real story is that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and a systematic starvation following the siege and blockade now, which is leading to food, medicine, water—that are desperately needed to get into Gaza—is prevented from doing so.”[2] Her priority in directing attention to the condition of the residents of Gaza is eminently valid; even so, I contend that it should not totally eclipse the glimpse afforded to us by the public response of the Israeli foreign ministry to Israel’s interception of the boat and abduction of its occupants.

As if Israel’s blockade off the coast of Gaza extended into international waters, the ministry “insisted the blockade,” and thus the interception of the boat, “was ‘consistent with international law.’”[3] Stating furthermore that “unauthorized attempts to breach” the blockade “were ‘dangerous, unlawful, and undermine ongoing humanitarian efforts,’” as if one small humanitarian effort would undermine others as if “collective justice” would mean that all aid would then be blocked, the foreign ministry was stating, in effect, that motive is sufficient for such a breach even while a boat is still in international waters, just north of another country rather than off Israel’s coast.[4] As against the international illegality of surrounding a boat in international waters, harassing its passengers, spraying them with a white irritant, and forcing them to leave the boat and be taken to Israel (as they were not yet even in Israeli waters), motive of intent to eventually violate Israel’s blockade by approaching Gaza from the sea means that Israel did not actually violate international law. Treating motive as an unauthorized attempt to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza even outside Israel’s waters is a misuse of the military doctrine of preemption, which in turn can be traced back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq two decades earlier.

Accusing the kidnapped of illegally entering Israel adds insult to injury. Furthermore, such a cognitive warping as, “I forced you here and you came here illegally” implies that the Israeli government had acted illegally, since that government’s action caused the illegal entry. In addition to twists of reason, the ministry’s statement reveals something heinous about the mental boxes of the powerful whose use is not subject to a higher authority and whose unrelenting, still unspent hatred toward another group warps perception and judgment as well as clear thinking. The resulting dissidence reflects back on extraordinary arrogance fed by over a year of de facto impunity internationally in decimating a captive population. “Drunk with power” is yet another way of characterizing the presumption of arrogance, which, sadly, is human, all too human. Yet even before the conflagration in Gaza, before the dreadful yet much more limited attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, an Israeli government presumed itself entitled to go into another sovereign country and kidnap Adolf Eichmann, so even though he, unlike the humanitarians on the boat, deserved his fate in court, the pattern of hyperextending beyond Israel’s borders to kidnap non-Israelis can be discerned, and this pattern suggests a sordid mentality of extenuated self-entitlement. Such a mentality running a sovereign government is problematic internationally, and thus this case reasonably comes under the purview of the international community.

From this case study’s glimpse of a problemed mentality of government officials in a foreign ministry, the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which not only Israel, but the U.S., Russia, and China have held onto as if it were a sacred dogma, can and should be up for review. Absent any international coalition of willing countries to militarily enter Gaza to protect and feed the residents, and Israel’s ongoing naval blockade of food and medicine, which strongly suggests a motive to exterminate the population so Jewish settlements could repopulate Gaza, proposals to check national sovereignty at the global level, whether by removing vetoes from the UN Security Council, making resolutions by the General Assembly binding on countries, or establishing a rival institution capable of governance and enforcement to at least some degree should be considered. To Kant’s point that an international federation of countries would make peace merely possible but not probable can be added the crucial element of whether such a federation would have some governmental sovereignty of its own with which to act as a real check on abuses of national sovereignty by national governments.

In short, the kidnapping in international waters by a national government with impunity reveals for us a mentality that is dangerous when it can draw on national sovereignty to act out aggressively as a predator. That such a sordid mentality is able to enjoy Hobbes’ proverbial state of nature of “dog eat dog” (so life is short and brutish as there is no superordinate power) should be a sign that the post-World-War-Two world order was in dire need of serious reform or being replaced outright such that abuses of absolutist national sovereignty could be checked by limited yet effectual authority beyond the nation-state yet accountable to a super-majority, with minority rights protected by an international court whose rulings could be enforced against the resistance of guilty national governments.

The implications of the decision that was taken by the Israeli government as if its jurisdiction extended into international waters brings up more than merely that government’s legitimacy, for the world order itself could then be perceived as woefully inadequate, even broken. Constructing the UN in the wake of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and in the midst of the nuclearized Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not go far enough, and thus underestimated the depravity of human nature drunk with unlimited national sovereignty.

Indeed, the motives and actions of Israeli officials against the innocent residents of Gaza at the scale of an entire people to be moved or else exterminated answers the question asked in the wake of the Second World War of whether the world would learn its lesson. Evidently, Hitler did not sufficiently jolt humanity into engaging in sufficient political development internationally, for Netanyahu’s cadre can arguably be placed in the same class as the Nazis. In a way, the impunity enjoyed by Israel and its very likely ability to continue as a nation makes this case more dangerous than that of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of human rights, for the lesson going forward could be that crimes against humanity do pay off.

Even in refusing to go back to its 1967 borders, Israel as a country had been in violation of international law for decades, again with such blatant impunity that the country’s government went on the offensive against a subjugated and captive population of Muslims. The mentality is the same as that of kidnapping foreigners in international waters only to accuse them of illegally entering the country: Ignoring the violation of international law as to borders (as well as the rulings of international courts on the occupation of Gaza) only to go on the offensive in bombing and starving entire cities in Gaza. The mentality of aggression in this case is two degrees of separation from the normalcy of recognizing and atoning for one’s own previous actions. It is astonishing that the hubris of arrogance does not trip over itself as if running on stilts while throwing rocks. Such a mentality renders the absolutist version of national sovereignty not only dangerous, but deeply flawed from the standpoint of human nature.  

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1. Jaroslav Lukiv and David Gritten, “Greta Thunberg Deported, Israel Says, after Gaza Aid Boat Intercepted,” BBC.com, June 10, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. 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.

 

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 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.

Toothless International Human Rights: Genocide in Gaza

It strains credulity to believe that vengeance against the Palestinian residents of Gaza was not among the motives of the Israeli government’s ministers in retaliating for the Hamas attack against occupation on October 7, 2023. Within days, Israel’s president publicly accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being guilty. Because it cannot be assumed that every resident of Gaza who had voted Hamas into office was in favor of the attack, and the residents who had voted for the PLO could even less be assumed to be supportive of Hamas, the Israeli notion of collective justice is ethically flawed. Deficient as a subterfuge for the very human instinctual urge to inflict disproportionate vengeance, the espoused justification did not hold South Africa off from charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At the time, both South Africa and Israel were parties to the Genocide Convention. Because the ICJ was at the time the principal judicial body of the United Nations, the UN’s lack of enforcement power—notorious even on resolutions passed by the Security Council—meant that even a conviction could send the message that a national government can get away with even genocide.

In its accusation, South Africa claimed that Israel was “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” in that “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”[1] At the time (at the end of 2023), over 21.5 thousand people had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, far outstripping the 1,200 Israelis who had been killed by Hamas and the 240 hostages during that period.[2] The disproportionality alone eviscerates claims of retaliation and thus “justice.” That a significant number of the Palestinians killed were innocents, including children, and 85 percent of the 2.3 million Palestinians there had been left homeless[3] and at least as many without sufficient food and medical care supports South Africa’s claim that “there are ongoing reports of international crimes, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes, being committed as well as reports that acts meeting the threshold of genocide or related crimes as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, have been and may still be committed in the context of the ongoing massacres in Gaza.”[4] Also in the final days of 2023, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich publicly accused the “2 million people” in Gaza of aspiring “to destroy the State of Israel” so only a few hundred thousand should be allowed to remain there.[5] Hence, South Africa’s government stated that it was “gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants.”[6]

One way to massively decrease population, the use of “indiscriminate bombing” was, according to U.S. President Biden, being used by Israel. Even though the unguided bombs could get at Hamas’ underground tunnels, the use of such bombs, especially in a densely populated urban context, was prohibited by international humanitarian law. American intelligence assessment suggested “that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used . . . have been unguided.”[7] The Israeli government put out the following statement: “Israel is committed to international law and acts in accordance with it, and directs its military efforts only against the Hamas terrorist organization and the other terrorist organizations cooperating  with Hamas.”[8] Astonishingly, the statement added that Israel had been making “every effort to limit harm to the non-involved and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.”[9] This flies in the face of the nearly 2 million residents who had been displaced from their homes and with the extent of starvation. Just weeks before South Africa’s application, thousands of Gaza residents desperate for food had mobbed food-aid trucks in the city of Rafah.[10] Even Israel’s finance minister admitted that Gaza was a ghetto (so decreasing its population was justifiable).[11] Masha Gessen, who won the Hannah Arendt prize for speaking truth to power as Arendt did during the Eichmann trial, wrote that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”[12] That Gessen was herself Jewish and had lost ancestors in the Holocaust did not stop her from “catching hell” for her statement. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT also caught hell for asserting that the context (of the war) could make political speech redressing Israel’s genocide with a corresponding one against Israel protected as free (rather than hate) speech, while Yale caved. Even a Yale alum can tip his hat to Harvard in the hope that Yale might take a lesson rather than fortify its truth, and instead humbly improve.

For its part, the Israeli government was in denial. As South Africa’s charges were made public, the state founded for victims of German atrocities had become a victimizer in striking back with vengeful disproportionality, and yet this was too much for the vengeful to see in their mirrors. The Israeli government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs played the antisemitic card in claiming that South Africa was “calling for the destruction of the State of Israel,” which was blatantly untrue.[13] For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu was saying that the attacks would continue for months.[14] Clearly, the Israeli government would dismiss any adverse ruling by the UN’s court on crimes against humanity leveled this time against Israel. For nothing short of a brick wall can arrest such stubbornness, especially when it is fueled by disproportionate vengeance. Yet the UN has shown itself to be utterly feckless, shirking even from standing up to its own members.

The root of the problem that enables a government to commit even a genocide with impunity, or invade another country unprovoked (e.g., Russia) and intentionally bomb civilians, is the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which had come out of the writings of Jean Bodin (c. 1529-1596) in Six Books of the Commonwealth. Given the Reformation-fueled strife of his day, he “was convinced that peace could be restored only if the sovereign prince was given absolute and indivisible power of the state.”[15] The state’s sovereignty was absolute. A century later, Thomas Hobbes carried this political theory further in Leviathan. To be fully sovereign must include having the last say on theological doctrine and Biblical interpretation. Hence, the monarch in Britain is head of the Church of England. In the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, absolute sovereignty was deemed worth the risk of the power being abused in tyrannical rule without any internal check. As for any normative check by other monarchs, none of them would have wanted to see their own absolute sovereignty impinged by an invading prince from another realm.

The norm that a government’s rule is a matter of a country’s internal affairs had survived even into the twenty-first century. The governments of Russia and China had been the most explicit in insisting that this norm be universally accepted. With the advent of human-induced climatic change and modern weapons of mass destruction, however, we might expect the norm to be challenged, but the ongoing impotence of the UN and the want of any serious proposals of reform that would involve national governments giving up some of their sovereignty suggests that the norm still had considerable staying power and would thus require a lot of energy to be dislodged from its privileged status as the status quo default. In other words, even as the harms from unchecked national power have increased tremendously, Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty has remained hegemonic.

So the Israeli government could simply enunciate false claims and not really have to worry about anything more than bad public relations from the charges at the International Court of Justice. Even genocide in retaliation for a much lesser, albeit horrific, attack could be protected by the sovereignty of the Israeli government.

The silent culprit may be the diffusion of responsibility globally as the rest of us watch the ongoing dire situation in Gaza (and Ukraine) as if we were paralyzed from demanding that our respective governments cede some authority militarily to the UN or a new international body empowered to enforce its decisions. The governments refusing to go along could be excluded commercially as well as diplomatically from those who have been willing to be held accountable themselves and thus cede some sovereignty in exchange for a voice (and vote) at the global table.

After more than a century of tremendous technological development—my grandfathers, for instance, witnessed the coming of cars, airplanes, radio, television, huge medical advances, and even computers—the retarded condition of political development really stands out—or should stand out—given the increased global interdependence and threats, including the scale of harm that a government can commit by means of military technology. That Nazi Germany could follow the Enlightenment should give us all pause in the trust we place in our governments, including their police and military forces. If we are Kantian rational beings, so too are we capable of tremendous rage that can snuff out what Adam Smith pointed to as the human imagination enabling sympathy for others in a “fellow-feeling.” Both Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel have recourse to tremendous military force and yet arguably little if any sympathy even in the midst of such large-scale, disproportionate suffering. That the two men can get away with continuing to inflict even more suffering as long as they feel like it is reason enough for the defeat of Bodin’s political idea.

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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.
2. Ibid.
3. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
4. 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.
5. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
6. 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.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. “Chaotic Scenes as People Run after Lorries Carrying Aid in Gaza,” BBC, December 27, 2023.
11. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
12. David Mouriquand, “Author Masha Gessen Receives German Prize Despite Comments Comparing Gaza to Nazi-era Ghettos,” Euronews, December 18, 2023.
13. 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.
14. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
15. “Jean Bodin,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.