International law is meaningless.
Law requires enforcement. Without enforcement, it is not law. It is a suggestion.
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This is a guest essay by Ido Singer, the child of a Holocaust survivor who writes the newsletter “When I Should Have Died.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
International law did nothing to protect my great-grandmother from the Auschwitz gas chambers.
She didn’t survive it at all. Rosa Singer was murdered there.
The machinery that killed her was illegal under every moral framework humanity had ever constructed. There were agreements. There were conventions. There were declarations signed by nations with pens and handshakes and official seals. None of it mattered. Not one word of it.
The trains still ran on time to the camps, the world watched, and the law did nothing, because the law could do nothing, because the law was never the thing keeping anyone safe to begin with.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, one of the most clear-eyed analysts working today, said something on “The Winston Marshall Show” that I haven’t been able to stop turning over.
Haviv was a young Israeli soldier, stationed on the northern border, looking into South Lebanese villages where 100,000 missiles and rockets were buried. Hezbollah put them there. Iran funded it. The purpose was explicit: Make any Israeli attempt to disarm that arsenal cost civilian lives. Force Israel into an impossible choice. Then hand the footage to the international community and let the law do the rest.
Standing at that border, Haviv could also see the outposts that belonged to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. United Nations forces — positioned after the 2006 Second Lebanon War specifically to prevent exactly this kind of rearming, mandated to disarm Hezbollah. What those UN forces actually did, for years and years, was nothing. They watched. They coexisted. They became, in his words, human shields who refused to ever challenge Hezbollah.
So let me ask the obvious question that no one in polite company wants to ask: What exactly is international law for?
Haviv’s answer is the most honest one I’ve heard. International law does one actual thing in the world: It allows very safe, very powerful people to feel very morally righteous about their safety and power.
That’s it.
It did not stop Bosnia. It did not stop Rwanda. Four years of massacre in Bosnia, and international law produced nothing but statements and meetings and the particular kind of institutional hand-wringing that substitutes for action when action is too costly for the people not being murdered.
Then U.S. President Bill Clinton personally ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and the war ended — not because of law, but because of force, the same force that the law crowd had been deploring for years while people died. The decision was made after diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Kosovo failed. The military intervention proceeded without a UN Security Council mandate, since Russia and China threatened to use their veto power to block authorization, leading to “debates” over the “legality” of the operation under “international law.”
I grew up in Tel Aviv. My childhood was punctuated by the sound of sealed rooms, suicide bombs, by the particular calculus of Israeli survival, by the knowledge that the people around me had been told, repeatedly, by the international community, to trust the process, trust the framework, trust the agreements. My grandfather Olek survived the war. My great-grandmother didn’t. The lesson my family carried from Poland was not about the redemptive power of international norms. It was simpler and harder and true: Agreements only hold until the person who made them decides they don’t.
Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Everything Iran has built in its nuclear program is a violation of that treaty. Everyone knows this. The International Atomic Energy Agency knows this. The size of the program tells you everything you need to know without a single classified document: too large for research, too small for energy, exactly weapons-program sized. And yet, for 30 years, the international community ran negotiations, signed frameworks, released sanctions and funds, and told itself the process was working.
The process was never working. The Iranians were buying time. They said so, in Farsi, while the diplomats were still in the room.
Here is the core problem with international law, stated plainly: Law requires enforcement. Without enforcement, it is not law. It is a suggestion. It is a best practice. It is a strongly worded letter. Real law works because a community has agreed to delegate force to institutions that protect everyone in that community. I follow the speed limit because I’ve accepted a social contract that includes law enforcement, fines, courts, and consequences. That contract protects me, so it has the right to constrain me.
International law protects no one. So what right does it have to make demands?
What right does it have to tie Israel’s hands while Hezbollah buries rockets under hospitals, then later, launches them into Northern Israeli cities? What right does it have to demand proportionality from a country trying to survive while the other side deliberately uses civilians as infrastructure? What right does it have to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court while almost no Arab country has even signed the Rome Statute?
That last point matters more than people acknowledge. The Arab world demanded that Europe absorb millions of Syrian refugees. Germany, France, and Britain each took in more refugees than the entire Arab world combined. Because the Western nations are signatories to the refugee convention. The Arab states are not.
International law, in practice, is a system where the countries that would behave decently anyway are constrained, and the countries that don’t intend to follow any of it are unconstrained. It arms the bad actors and ties the hands of the good ones. This is not a cynical or fringe position. This is what the evidence shows.
I want international law. I want it badly. I want a world where Iran is constrained by enforceable consequences from arming militias and building nuclear weapons and funding the murder of civilians. I want a world where 200,000 rockets cannot be buried under South Lebanese villages without costs that Iran or Lebanon cannot afford. That would be law — actual law, with actual teeth, backed by actual force, enforced using actual consequences.
What we have instead is a theater of accountability that functions as cover for inaction. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer invokes international law while Iran fires at British sovereign territory in Cyprus. The UN passed resolutions about Hezbollah for 18 years while Hezbollah armed itself to the teeth. The International Criminal Court opens cases against democracies under pressure from regimes that would never submit to its jurisdiction themselves.
My family paid the price for the last time the world confused process with protection. My great-grandmother’s name was Rosa. She was murdered at Auschwitz while the law of nations watched. I am done pretending the framework that failed her has earned the right to lecture her great-grandson.
The only thing that has ever actually kept people safe is the willingness to use force in defense of something worth defending. International law survives, Haviv Rettig Gur said, because Germany doesn’t actually believe it will ever need to fight for its life. The moment Germany faces an existential threat, the lawyers’ committee reviewing each airstrike will disappear overnight.
Israel has never had that luxury. Neither did Rosa Singer.
The difference between them is that Israel decided to never again wait for the law to save it. That decision is the reason Israelis are alive today — not the law, not the framework, not the resolutions, but the willingness to act, at cost, without waiting for permission from institutions that would have watched them die.
My father called that survival. I call it the only lesson that history has ever taught clearly, and that the international community has spent 80 years refusing to learn.
"What we have instead is a theater of accountability that functions as cover for inaction." You nailed it. The UN and the International Criminal Court are two prime examples. If you depend on any international organization to protect your ass, you've already surrendered. Game over. Thanks for a great article.
It is to be remembered that:
1) Hitler came to power legally, and
2) Jewish immigration to British controlled Palestine in much of 1945-7 was illegal.
As Dickens wrote in Oliver Twist in the 19th century, “The law is an ass.”
I would say, in agreement with Ido Singer, that “International law is ass.”