Just because U.S. federalism
deposits foreign policy exclusively with governmental institutions at the
federal level does not mean that that domain cannot be shared between state and
federal governments in a federal system. This was precisely the case in the
E.U. as it struggled to come up with a unified response to Israel having ignored
the verdict of the World Court—the UN’s court—ordering Israel to cease and decease
from invading Rafah from May 24, 2024 onward. Meanwhile, two of the E.U.’s
states were poised to recognize Palestine. Such emphasis on the state
governments playing the leading role is fraught with difficulties even though in
theory there is on reason why foreign policy cannot be a competency, or domain,
that is shared at the state and federal “levels.” In federalism, the federal
and state governmental systems are on par, rather than one of the governmental
systems being above the other, so “levels” is misleading. Even so, a lot can be
said for delegating foreign policy to the federal level. This can be seen from
the state and federal reactions in the E.U. as Israel continued its invasion of
Rafah just after the World Court had ruled that Israel would be violating
international law and the UN’s charter in continuing the offensive.
Two E.U. states, Ireland and Spain,
were poised to recognize Palestine as a sovereign country—34,000 dead and
800,000 on the brink of starvation in Rafah had in the judgment of the two E.U.
state governments paid sufficient dues to be recognized as a distinct nation
rather than as a part of Israel. Rather than urging the European Council to
meet to take a decision on a federal policy on Israel as it ignored the verdict
of the World Court and even bombed a Palestinian re-settlement camp, the E.U.’s
foreign minister, Josep Borrell, merely “threw his full weight to support the
International Criminal Court,” whose prosecutor was “seeking an arrest warrant
against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and Israel’s defense chief.[1]
Borrell didn’t even mention the verdict of the UN’s court ordering Israel to
cease its invasion of Rafah. Even so, Borrell’s criticism of the Israeli vitriol
against the prosecutor may be sufficient to justify a federal response
to Israel, especially considering its bombing of the resettlement camp. “The
prosecutor of the [ICC] has been strongly intimidated and accused of
antisemitism—as always when anybody, anyone does something that Netanyahu’s
government does not like,” Borrell said.[2]
Israel’s foreign policy chief even accused the government of Spain of continuing
the Inquisition and even with “rewarding terror” in recognizing the Palestinian
state.[3]
The accusation of “rewarding
terror,” which alludes to the anti-occupation guerilla operation of Hamas on
October 7, 2023, blatantly ignores the terror inflicted subsequently by Israel mainly
on Palestinian civilians in Gaza that went well beyond the number of Israelis
killed and taken hostage in October. The implication is that Israel had the
right to inflict “collective justice” on an entire population many times over,
and thus that any resistance internationally could only be borne of prejudice
against Jews and an intention to reward Hamas for its October incursion. Were John
Locke, a European philosopher of the seventeenth century, alive, he would doubtless
tell the world, Look, I told you that a victim should not be entrusted with
carrying out its notion of justice on a victimizer. I would add that the
victimizer in this case had long been the victim because of the Israeli
occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). The E.U. could at least have taken a
stance against Israel’s infliction of its warped notion of reciprocity, rather
than leaving it to the state governments.
At this point, I need to get very
precise to convey the depth of the sordid mentality that I contend calls out for
both federal and state condemnation in the E.U. On May 24, 2024, the UN’s top
court ordered: “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any
other action in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza
conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part.”[4]
Months before, Michael Fakhri, the UN’s leading expert on food, had warned that
Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza by restricting aid even
after the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel could not do so.
“Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime,” Fakhri said in
February, 2024; “Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian
people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian.”[5]
The Human Rights Watch organization had reported in December, 2023 that several
Israeli cabinet ministers had made statements in public “expressing their aim
to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel.”[6]
Back in October after Hama’s attack, the president of Israel had publicly
stated that every resident of Gaza could justifiably be blamed for the incursion.
John Locke was right: given human nature, victims should not be allowed to
enact their own sense of justice. In ignoring two rulings of the UN’s top
court, the Israeli government demonstrates that Locke’s political theory can
(and should) be extended to the international level.
Two degrees of separation exist
between the ruling of the International Court of Justice on May 24, 2024 and Israel’s
bombing of a resettlement camp just days later. “Footage obtained by CNN showed
the camp in flames, with scores of men, women and children frantically trying
to find cover from the nighttime assault. Burned bodies, including those of
children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage.”[7]
It should be stressed that the camp was for residents who had already been
displaced. Literally, there was no where for the people already displaced to
go. Because the attack, made incidentally without warning, occurred in clear
violation of the UN court’s recent verdict—and the Israeli ambassador to the UN
had just a week or so earlier shredded a copy of the UN charter at the podium
of the General Assembly—the very validity of the UN itself and especially its
court could not have suffered a more blatant defeat. The very notion of
international law without an enforcement power had been reduced to being an
oxymoron.
Just because U.S. federalism
deposits foreign policy exclusively with governmental institutions at the
federal level does not mean that that domain cannot be shared between state and
federal governments in a federal system. This was precisely the case in the
E.U. as it struggled to come up with a unified response to Israel having ignored
the verdict of the World Court—the UN’s court—ordering Israel to cease and decease
from invading Rafah from May 24, 2024 onward. Meanwhile, two of the E.U.’s
states were poised to recognize Palestine. Such emphasis on the state
governments playing the leading role is fraught with difficulties even though in
theory there is on reason why foreign policy cannot be a competency, or domain,
that is shared at the state and federal “levels.” In federalism, the federal
and state governmental systems are on par, rather than one of the governmental
systems being above the other, so “levels” is misleading. Even so, a lot can be
said for delegating foreign policy to the federal level. This can be seen from
the state and federal reactions in the E.U. as Israel continued its invasion of
Rafah just after the World Court had ruled that Israel would be violating
international law and the UN’s charter in continuing the offensive.
Two E.U. states, Ireland and Spain,
were poised to recognize Palestine as a sovereign country—34,000 dead and
800,000 on the brink of starvation in Rafah had in the judgment of the two E.U.
state governments paid sufficient dues to be recognized as a distinct nation
rather than as a part of Israel. Rather than urging the European Council to
meet to take a decision on a federal policy on Israel as it ignored the verdict
of the World Court and even bombed a Palestinian re-settlement camp, the E.U.’s
foreign minister, Josep Borrell, merely “threw his full weight to support the
International Criminal Court,” whose prosecutor was “seeking an arrest warrant
against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and Israel’s defense chief.[8]
Borrell didn’t even mention the verdict of the UN’s court ordering Israel to
cease its invasion of Rafah. Even so, Borrell’s criticism of the Israeli vitriol
against the prosecutor may be sufficient to justify a federal response
to Israel, especially considering its bombing of the resettlement camp. “The
prosecutor of the [ICC] has been strongly intimidated and accused of
antisemitism—as always when anybody, anyone does something that Netanyahu’s
government does not like,” Borrell said.[9]
Israel’s foreign policy chief even accused the government of Spain of continuing
the Inquisition and even with “rewarding terror” in recognizing the Palestinian
state.[10]
The accusation of “rewarding
terror,” which alludes to the anti-occupation guerilla operation of Hamas on
October 7, 2023, blatantly ignores the terror inflicted subsequently by Israel mainly
on Palestinian civilians in Gaza that went well beyond the number of Israelis
killed and taken hostage in October. The implication is that Israel had the
right to inflict “collective justice” on an entire population many times over,
and thus that any resistance internationally could only be borne of prejudice
against Jews and an intention to reward Hamas for its October incursion. Were John
Locke, a European philosopher of the seventeenth century, alive, he would doubtless
tell the world, Look, I told you that a victim should not be entrusted with
carrying out its notion of justice on a victimizer. I would add that the
victimizer in this case had long been the victim because of the Israeli
occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). The E.U. could at least have taken a
stance against Israel’s infliction of its warped notion of reciprocity, rather
than leaving it to the state governments.
At this point, I need to get very
precise to convey the depth of the sordid mentality that I contend calls out for
both federal and state condemnation in the E.U. On May 24, 2024, the UN’s top
court ordered: “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any
other action in Rafah which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza
conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part.”[11] Months
before, Michael Fakhri, the UN’s leading expert on food, had warned that Israel
was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza by restricting aid even after
the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel could not do so. “Intentionally
depriving people of food is clearly a war crime,” Fakhri said in February, 2024;
“Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole
or in part, simply for being Palestinian.”[12]
The Human Rights Watch organization had reported in December, 2023 that several
Israeli cabinet ministers had made statements in public “expressing their aim
to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel.”[13]
Back in October after Hama’s attack, the president of Israel had publicly
stated that every resident of Gaza could justifiably be blamed for the incursion.
John Locke was right: given human nature, victims should not be allowed to
enact their own sense of justice. In ignoring two rulings of the UN’s top
court, the Israeli government demonstrates that Locke’s political theory can
(and should) be extended to the international level.
Two degrees of separation exist
between the ruling of the International Court of Justice on May 24, 2024 and Israel’s
bombing of a resettlement camp just days later. “Footage obtained by CNN showed
the camp in flames, with scores of men, women and children frantically trying
to find cover from the nighttime assault. Burned bodies, including those of
children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage.”[14]
It should be stressed that the camp was for residents who had already been
displaced. Literally, there was nowhere for the people already displaced to go.
Because the attack, made incidentally without warning, occurred in clear
violation of the UN court’s recent verdict—and the Israeli ambassador to the UN
had just a week or so earlier shredded a copy of the UN charter at the podium
of the General Assembly—the very validity of the UN itself and especially its
court could not have suffered a more blatant defeat. The very notion of
international law without an enforcement power had been reduced to being an
oxymoron.
Meanwhile, the E.U. was hamstrung
at the federal “level,” thus leaving it to a few state governments to take the
heat from Israel—vitriol that itself could be characterized as
reverse-prejudice. In no way, form, or manner could objections to Israel’s
warped notion of collective “justice” and its abject dismissal of the two verdicts
of the UN’s top court be characterized as anything akin to the Nazi prejudice
against the Jews. Accordingly, the moral impetus of the German government to
defend Israel had been paid in full and so even that state could act
salubriously in recognizing a Palestinian state and castigating Israel’s
government as an ongoing instance of state-sponsored terror. German guilt no
longer needed to forestall a federal E.U. policy, and the stakes in terms of
the severity of the Israeli government’s dangerous mentality practically
demanded such a policy. For the E.U. could hardly count on the U.S. to be the
world’s “policeman”; the Biden administration and the Congress had squandered
that role in aiding and abetting Israel’s overkill. The U.S. president’s claim
that prosecution of Netanyahu at the ICC would be “outrageous” is startling
enough; Netanyahu’s need to one-up the president by claiming that such
prosecution would be “beyond outrageous” just shows how right Locke was. The
world should have the means to enforce international law against a government
that is out of control, whose self-awareness is so abjectly warped in defensiveness,
and such a government’s ally should by no means be tasked internationally with
being the world’s policeman just because it carries a big stick. Indeed, the
U.S. was enervating international law by shipping weapons to Israel and thus
enabling a bruised bully on the world stage, thanks to the campaign war-chest
of the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) and the unprincipled
fecklessness of the American federal government and the vast majority of its
electorate. Clearly, the E.U. could no longer count on the U.S. to police the
world, for the “policeman” had become an accomplice.
In short, if even such atrocious behavior as regard the International Court of Justice and the civilians in Gaza as Israel’s Netanyahu and his government relentlessly evinced with utter impunity could not bring forth a foreign policy at the federal level of the E.U., then something must surely have been wrong regarding the ability of the E.U. to have foreign policy at all. Making such policy too difficult at the federal level risks Europe being torn asunder by a foreign evil when it can be claimed that the E.U. has a moral imperative to act as the “adult in the room” to stop an evil power abroad, especially given the fecklessness of international law and courts at the time.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Abbas Al Lawati, “UN’s Top Court Orders Israel to ‘Immediately’ Halt Its Operation in Rafah,” CNN.com, May 24, 2024 (accessed on May 27, 2024).
5. Nina Lakhani, “Israel Is Deliberately Starving Palestinians, UN Rights Expert Says,” The Guardian, February 27, 2024.
6. “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch, December 18, 2023.
7. Mohammad Al Sawalhi et al, “Israeli Strike that Killed 45 at Camp for Displaced Palestinians in Rafah a ‘Tragic Mistake,’ Netanyahu Says,” CNN.com, May 27, 2024.
