The ICJ convicts itself

Israel is not on trial with the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) verdict. Indeed, these institutions have put themselves on trial.

It is a familiar take for the Jews. While often lost sight of, anti-Semitism is not a verdict on the Jew, but on the anti-Semite. So too it is with these rulings.

But the consequences, which are never good for the Jews, eventually cause the destruction of the antisemite, not the Jews. Israel will work with Congress, already raw and negative from the ludicrousness of many of these institutions — which installed over the last year Saudi representatives as the head of the women’s’ rights committee, North Koreans as the head of human rights committee, and Iran as head of disarmament committees, — to blacken the name of ICC and ICJ. Their excesses of absurdity will lead to their finding themselves in a battle to simply to survive.

True, the hyenas have had their victorious moment in the ICJ in The Hague. So too in the Spanish foreign ministry. But the laughing of hyenas does not feed or sustain them.

Indeed, the hyenas are oblivious to the real consequences which will obtain as a result of the ICC and ICJ behaviors. This is the watershed moment that history will mark as the death of the international structure. Useless UNGA demonstrations were one thing — such as the infamous 1975 Zionism is Racism resolution — but corrupting core operational structures is another.

The U.S. will learn the threat from this quickly. If Israel can be called genocidal and a war criminal for its clearly self-defensive war in Gaza, despite a genuinely unprecedented — truly beyond unprecedented — effort to protect and feed residents of a hostile (indeed actually genocidal) population, then every single military action any Western country will take going forward will certainly fall short of the high bar of morality Israel has set and will thus be equally called genocidal and a war crime.

And that is not a theoretical threat being raised by the ICJ and ICC; indeed, that is the intention behind setting this precedent. This is a war on US sovereignty no less than Israel’s, because the freedom of the United States as sovereign is the ultimate target.

So what happened today was not really that Israel was convicted, but the international structures — by stripping Israel of its right to determine and act on its self defense — have sentenced themselves to organizational death by declaring war on the concept of national sovereignty’s the most rudimentary attribute: self defense.

The internal implications politically in Israel and the U.S. are immense. One of the key thrusts in judicial reform — which former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Shaqed, and the Israeli right more broadly campaigned on in 2020 — was the overreach of the IDF Legal Corps in micromanaging the operations of IDF soldiers. Israeli soldiers’ lives were endangered by such restrictiveness. The key argument those demonstrating on the left against legal reform last summer posited was that it is the only way to avoid ICC and ICJ action; the hyper-restrictive and over-inflated role of the legal corps was a sort of “legal bullet-proof vest” for Israeli soldiers and leaders.

In general the thrust of the reforms over the last 30 years in Israel was to bring Israel in line more with the European court structure and away from the Anglo-Saxon, in part to align Israel with the ICC, the international legal systems, and a “community of values” rather than the bottom up “inalienable rights” approach of the Anglo-Saxons.

This verdict by the ICJ is a watershed failure internally of the pro-European community camp in this internal Israeli debate too that will result in backlash back to the Anglo-Saxon camp.

It also brings to a head the issue of jurisdiction of these international bodies regarding Gaza and Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”), which in turn brings to a head the issue of the applicability of the Geneva Convention to any of those territories. The Geneva Convention kicks in only at the request of a High Contracting authority, but no such authority exists over all these territories. Their sovereignty is either undetermined or Israel’s — which of the two is open to debate — but either way the territory lacks any High Contracting Authority other than the successor to the League of Nations Mandate, which is … Israel. The verdict ironically thus will force Israel to take a much harder line on that, force it to resist international efforts to apply jurisdiction without authority to do so, and push Israel instead to again insist on reasserting the status of the territory as undetermined sovereign under the Mandatory restrictions (administered vs occupied territories).

The consequence of all this means that Israel and the US will begin to stop acting toward these institutions, such as the ICJ in the ICC, as legitimate bodies which can be convinced.

They will retreat into a hard line toward them and simply respond that those institutions have eliminated their residual legitimacy. Israel in this context will certainly work closely with Congress to pass legislation in America, that guts these bodies of all authority and financing, using the United States position of power.

These structures, and the entire world order built around them has convicted itself. That world order that increasingly asserts its supranational authority over sovereign states is very unpopular in the US since it confronts the spirit of 1776 and indeed does pose a threat to our sovereignty. This will cause an eruption to such an extent that U.S. elites who still see value or are tied in their interests to these bodies will feel so threatened that they will do anything to pull the ICJ and ICC back.

Either those who still hope in the U.S. to work with these international bodies succeed, and those bodies now pull back to still what they have done, which makes a mockery of what happened just now, but more likely the genie is out of the bottle, and the U.S. will itself get into a twilight war against these institutions.

Everyone in the U.S. knows that Israel’s bar of morality was so high that we in the U.S. will not meet it in future conflicts. So this ruling shuts us down as much as it does Israel.

In other words, Israel will now likely work with the political structure in the U.S., led by Congress, to make the ICJ and ICC ruling a self-inflicted organization death sentence.

Again, these institutions, not Israel, are on trial. The antisemites are on trial, not the Jews.

Wurmser is also a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute in Jerusalem