'International Law' is irrelevant to the Jewish People's survival.

In a world that is easily manipulated and corrupted, history teaches us that the Jewish state must look out for itself and Jews across the world — and we Jews must be firmly grateful for it.

IDF Chief Herzi Halevi salutes a fallen soldier at a cemetery in Israel. (photo: IDF/X)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using this link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/international-law-jewish-people-survival

---

This past week was another walk across the antisemitic woods for Israel and the “international” justice system — which effectively holds zero authority and is largely employed by people who need to justify their paychecks by proverbially shuffling papers and uttering quasi-dramatic things to media outlets eager to disseminate this melodrama to a largely gullible, non-critical thinking audience.

If this sounds like a lot of confusing, mumbling words, that is because last week’s International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s operations in Rafah was even more bewildering.

On Friday, the day that the International Court of Justice announced its “directive,” Israel simultaneously carried out a large airstrike in Rafah’s Shaboura area, one of the neighborhoods located about halfway between the Israeli border and the coast where the IDF began operating against Hamas earlier in the week.

Call it a coincidence, I call it a message — the International Court of Justice has no bearing on what Israel can and cannot do, precisely because Israeli policies are in accordance with “international law,” the Geneva Conventions, and so forth.

Thus, any bureaucratic gymnastics at the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court — which last week sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, citing “war crimes” — are ultimately antisemitic, because they apply to no other country on this planet, just the Jewish one.

If you, like me, thought the International Criminal Court’s announcement for said arrest warrants was utterly ridiculous, the International Court of Justice’s ruling was even more laughable. It said, in part, that Israel should “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

In other words: Israel must not commit genocide. No sh*t, Sherlock. We Jews do not need the International Court of Justice to lecture us on a word that was invented by a Jew to describe one of the worst atrocities ever committed on planet Earth, against the Jewish People — you know, the Holocaust.

Israel has never engaged in genocide or attempted to do so, and it is not engaging in such a practice now. Far from it. Israel has taken more precautions to minimize Palestinian civilians casualties than Palestinian leaders have ever done for their own people, past and present.

In fact, the only players interested in exacting genocide as a matter of policy are Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Qatar.

Yet it is the Jewish state — and not these other actors — that is being lectured to hold its genocide horses, which are nowhere to be found in our stable. And no, the “violent settlers” in the disputed West Bank are not in favor of genocide or ethnic cleansing either, at least not the vast majority of them.

Why the International Court of Justice is wasting time and money dealing with this utter nonsense is anyone’s guess. Who is bribing them to do so? Who is threatening their lives, implicitly or explicitly, if they do not move forward with these absurd charades? And whom among these “justices” is a flaming antisemite?

For one thing, we know that Justice Nawaf Salam, the President of the International Court of Justice, has made vile remarks about Israel. In 2015, he wrote about the Jewish state: “Unhappy birthday to you, 48 years of occupation.”

As an administrator of law, one would hope Salam knows that, according to law, there is no “occupation” — and those who claim there is an “occupation” either have no understanding of the real-world situation on the ground, a twisted definition of “occupation,” or they are more interested in spewing Jewish blood libels than in speaking the truth.

Unsurprisingly, Salam is from Lebanon, a country that has exponentially been hijacked by Hezbollah, another terrorist organization sponsored by Iran which vows to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.

Meanwhile, International Court of Justice Judge Georg Nolte of Germany wrote: “The measure obliging Israel to halt the current military offensive in Rafah is conditioned by the need to prevent ‘conditions of life that could bring about [the] physical destruction in whole or in part’ of the Palestinian group in Gaza.”

Again, this is beyond obvious. It is like telling a middle-aged adult to look both ways twice — no, three times!! — before crossing a busy street.

But the fact that the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and many other “international” organizations are so unbelievably antisemitic should be a signal to every Jew across the world: Without the State of Israel, you would be toast.

Most Jews cannot even contemplate such a sentence. They are too busy in their day-to-day lives, like us all. But what happens when parts of their day-to-day lives are stripped from them, such as their security at synagogues, extra taxes placed on Jewish citizens, restrictions of practicing any form of Judaism, and a host of other burdens that have been placed on a variety of Jews in a variety of countries during the last 2,000 years?

Before 1948, the Jews had to seek “shelter” from other countries and peoples, some of whom were very kind to our people. We can never forget that there are good people in the world who are willing to risk their lives for us. Some of them are celebrated at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial; these people are known in the museum as the “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Today, there are many people who are also strong supporters of the Jewish People and the State of Israel, even if they oftentimes are lost among the louder noise of our haters, some of whom are openly antisemitic, and others who cowardly hide behind the banner of “anti-Zionism” because they do not have the “courage” to candidly hate us Jews. And yes, we are all aware that there are “Jewish anti Zionists” — many of whom are, unfortunately, modern-day versions of the kapos.

There is also something we must never forget — and it is not just the Holocaust. While the Nazi Germany genocide was so obviously horrific and quite recent, relatively speaking, the fact is that there were many (countless) other times in Jewish history that featured some harrowing version of brutality, persecution, and attempted genocide against Jews during the last 2,000 years.

Since the Holocaust happened less than a century ago, it is far less likely that “another Holocaust” will transpire in the foreseeable future, and far more likely that other types of brutality, persecution, and even attempted genocide against Jews will resurface in the coming years. For they already are.

Yet many Jews are purely unfamiliar with and/or ignorant of these other types of brutality, persecution, and attempted genocide — which makes their precursors all the more difficult to recognize.

There is also a desire for many of today’s Jews to simply “think happy thoughts” regardless if reality is blatantly screaming at us the opposite. And right now, the reality in the West is screaming at the Jews loud and clear: Your glory years here are over.

They say you should tell people what they want to hear when you want to help yourself, and you should tell them the truth when you want to help them. Thus, I am trying to help all the Jews who are living in “LaLa Land,” naively thinking that they will be spared the immense burdens of being Jewish in non-Jewish countries. I truly wish we Jews today were “different” than our ancestors, both modern and ancient. Unfortunately, we are not.

Not all is doom and gloom, though. Thankfully, we have a Jewish state, something that millions of Jews between the fall of the Second Temple and 1948 did not have. To be living in the time of Israel is an utmost privilege, and we must not take it for granted. This Jewish state needs all Jews to be engaged politically and socioeconomically.

Naturally, many Jews will shrug this off, feeling untouchable in their middle-to-upperclass lifestyles, where they are part of mainstream society and well-assimilated. In liberal democracies, some Jews who are Ashkenazi (of European origin) or simply “White-looking” have tried to blend in as “White people,” with the privileges that so-called White people enjoy.

By doing so, these Jews have made it exponentially harder to examine historical antisemitism or the ways in which antisemitism still plays out. Without this examination, there is a shroud of ignorance and invisibility around antisemitism.

If Jews and non-Jews do not understand or recognize this phenomenon, not only is the possibility great of it reoccurring and worsening, but Jewish anxiety and vulnerability will be perpetuated.

Hence the rise of political Zionism in the 1800s and the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, both of which arose out of a very literal response to thousands of years of Jewish anxiety and vulnerability, culminating in the Holocaust. Hence the belief that Jews have a moral right and historic need for self-determination in our indigenous homeland.

We can debate whether we are a religion, an ethnicity, a people, or a collective, but this debate is a distraction. The Jewish world changed for the better in 1948 — and that is a matter of fact.

We can imagine going back in time and sitting in a 19th-century European coffee shop, debating whether or not we should immigrate to our indigenous homeland to help build a modern-day Jewish state. We can also imagine living in a world where we exclusively traveled from one continent to another by ship, but I have no desire to do either.

Does the Jews’ right of self-determination clash with the Palestinians’ same right? No, it does not. Has the Jewish state taken steps that have deteriorated the hopes of a two state-solution? Perhaps, depending on how you look at it. Israel is a deeply imperfect country, just as all countries are.

But if you call yourself a Jew while being relatively unengaged with the Jewish state, and while not doing increasingly more to tap into the Jewish state — well, that is an act of self-sabotage.

There are those who would say that criticisms of Israel are signs of disloyalty. I disagree. Of course, there are questions of tact, intellectual honesty, and looking at the entirety of Zionist history (since the mid-1800s) and Jewish history, going back thousands of years.

If the blood libels being levied at the Jews among those at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are of any magnitude, it is this: Now more than ever, we need everyone among the Jewish People to plug into the Jewish state — because the Jewish state needs you, and you need it, even if you cannot see so today.

Israeli society has also learned a valuable lesson in international jurisprudence, namely that there is gap that always exists between trial and justice. The “international judicial system” is a powerful one that represents interests which are sometimes hidden from the litigators’ eyes.

As the wisest of U.S. judges, Learned Hand, once admitted: “As a litigator, I was more afraid of legal proceedings than anything else, except perhaps illness and death.” And, as is known in legal circles: “Laws are like spider webs: The weak are caught in their web, while the rich and powerful tear them apart.”

These insights become more valid when you know the statements of the jurists who established the courts in particular and international law in general. The ambition was not only to do justice but also to ensure world peace and bring an end to wars. Seriously.

In the 1950s, many legal giants published books and articles that promised, like any average beauty queen, “world peace through the law.” That was the promise, but what we see now is the generator breaker. Not only do these courts not do justice, they also keep peace away — including peace for the Jews, both in Israel and outside of it.

When the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court indicts the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister for “war crimes,” he is helping the continuation of the wars by comparing those who have committed crimes against humanity and those who seek to defend themselves against them. Between those who use their children as human shields when they come to kill other children and those who do everything they can to protect all children, theirs and their enemies.

Indeed, when you prevent victims from defending themselves, you encourage violence, not peace. And when you do not distinguish between the two sides, you show that you are asking for one thing: not justice, but peace. Peace that will allow the current world order to continue to exist — a world order that has become easily influenced by dangerous Muslim actors (i.e. Iran and Qatar) which have a vested interest in antisemitism and thus, delegitimizing the Jewish state on the way to its destruction.

An increasingly weaker Jewish state, no less a destroyed one, is terrible news with disturbing ramifications for the Jewish People, all Jews included — regardless of political persuasions, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), levels of assimilation, and the like.

Thus, we Jews are left with one choice, really: to make the best of our lonely place, a sliver of land in a frighteningly volatile region. The great Israeli stateswoman, Golda Meir, used to joke about Moses, saying: “He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.”

But Meir was also keenly aware of the dire significance of Israel’s existence and strength, as well as of the desperate need for true safety among the Jewish People, which became one of her now-legendary quotes: “We refuse, absolutely, to be the only people in the world which consents to having its fate decided by others.”

---

---