Does international law still matter?

The powerlessness of the ICJ to enforce its ruling has dealt a lethal blow to the progressive-globalist fantasy that global injustices can be redressed by international legal bodies

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As expected, Israel and its Western backers and enablers — first and foremost the US — have completely disregarded the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) recent ruling, which stated that Israel’s actions in Gaza may plausibly constitute genocide, and consequently called upon the Israeli authorities to “take all reasonable measures within their power to prevent genocide” — including “desist[ing] from… killing members of the [Palestinians in Gaza]”, which effectively amounts to calling for a ceasefire, and “tak[ing] immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

Israel responded by killing at least 174 Gazans in the following 24 hours, and stepping up its charges against the UNRWA, the UN humanitarian agency mandated to provide humanitarian assistance and protection to the Palestinian population, by claiming that 12 UNWRA staff members were involved in the Oct. 7 attack. Even though Israel provided no evidence to back up its allegations — which, even if true, would pertain to just 0.04% of the UNRWA’s 30,000-strong workforce (more than 150 of which have been killed in Gaza over the past three months) — several Western states (including the US, UK, Germany, Italy and others) immediately reacted by suspending their funding to the UNRWA.

In other words, following the the ICJ’s ruling — which, it should be noted, is legally binding — that Israel must “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to the Gazan population in order to prevent (the worsening of the) genocide, Western states responded not by cutting ties with, or at least applying pressure on, Israel, but rather by defunding the only agency providing basic humanitarian support to the Gazans — i.e., by accelerating the genocide. The callousness almost beggars belief.

“Our humanitarian operation, on which 2 million people depend as a lifeline in Gaza, is collapsing. I am shocked such decisions are taken based on alleged behavior of a few individuals and as the war continues, needs are deepening & famine looms”, the UNWRA’s head Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X. “Palestinians in Gaza did not need this additional collective punishment. This stains all of us”. He also claimed that defunding the UNRWA could be “violating” the Genocide Convention.

What Israel and Western nations are telling us with their actions is that the ICJ’s ruling isn’t worth the paper it’s written on: Israel will continue its military operation in Gaza and even double down on its war on the UNRWA, and there’s nothing the ICJ, itself a UN body, can do about that.

Many will lament that this undermines the legitimacy of the entire international legal order underpinning the ICJ. This is true — but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the ICJ-Israel affaire isn’t in itself imperilling the correct functioning of the system; it is simply revealing the international legal order — and particularly the so-called rules-based order supposedly meant to enforce it — for what it always has been: a mere feature of US/Western hegemony, where the laws/rules only apply to the weak, especially those that dare to defy the hegemon, never to the powerful.

As Arta Moeini, visiting fellow at the Carnegie Council’s US Global Engagement Initiative (USGE), wrote, the concept of international law was always a mirage:

[L]aw is inherently coupled with the sovereignty of a given political authority. It has a natural domain over the domestic sphere. Without a domestic sovereign authority to endow it with jurisdiction and empower it to adjudicate, enforce, and punish offenders — laws are nothing more than arcane texts. They need policing powers and the capacity to use violence and force to be authoritative. The international realm, meanwhile, is fundamentally anarchic — that is, it lacks a sovereign.

Of course, a de facto global (semi-)sovereign did emerge following World War II: the United States — hence creating the conditions for emergence of an apparently neutral international institutional-legal system, the so-called liberal international order. But this was always an illusion, as Moeini notes: