by Caroline B. Glick
The Soviets were convinced that by laundering Palestinian terrorist propaganda through the U.N. system, the Palestinian cause would weaken and divide the Western alliance.
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| Exterior of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the seat since 1946 of the International Court of Justice, in February 2012. Credit: Jeroen Bouman/International Court of Justice. |
The announcement by the International Criminal Court on Thursday that it is issuing international arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant indicates that the bottom has fallen out of the international system. The institutions formed in the wake of World War II to create and preserve a liberal, international rules-based order never worked the way they were supposed to work. But today, they are no longer simply feckless, corrupt and dysfunctional. They are malign and dangerous. Rather than advance freedom, human rights and life, they serve tyranny, terror and murder. The system is beyond repair.
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis and Jews around the world were stunned to see the international response to the atrocities of the day. They expected the nations of the world to stand with Israel in revulsion and rejection of the Palestinian’s quest to annihilate the Jews. Instead, millions took to the streets of the West’s major cities marching in support of the Palestinian murderers, rapists and kidnappers who tortured, raped mutilated, immolated and murdered 1,200 Israelis that day and kidnapped 251 more.
After a couple of weeks of crocodile tears and declarations of solidarity with Israel, Western leaders began warning Israel not to commit war crimes, and demanding that it feed and care for the very people who had just committed a one-day Holocaust.
Jews from Tel Aviv to Berkeley to Sydney wondered aloud, “How have things come to this?”
On the face of things, it made no sense. But if we had paid closer attention in the decades leading up to Oct. 7, we would have recognized the pattern. Palestinians massacre as many Jews as they can get their hands on because the more Jews they murder, the more richly the international system rewards them.
Most observers choose Nov. 10, 1975, as the date the worldwide system began its decline from mere fecklessness to malignity. That day, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 that designated Zionism—the Jewish national liberation movement, and the foundation of Jewish peoplehood and Judaism for the past 4,000 years—a form of racism. It didn’t happen in a vacuum though. It was the culmination of a years-long process that saw Palestinian murderousness reach what was until then unprecedented depths of depravity, followed by the beginning of the U.N. system’s embrace of the Palestinians, and their goal of annihilating the Jewish state and its citizens.
Following the PLO’s massacres of children in Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot in 1974, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution legitimizing Palestinian terrorism. It then invited PLO terror chief Yasser Arafat to address the body. During his infamous “Gun and Olive Branch” speech in November 1974, Arafat threatened to continue his terror onslaught if the worldwide community failed to embrace his goal of destroying Israel. Shortly thereafter, the General Assembly passed a resolution giving the PLO observer status to the United Nations.
The following year, the PLO carried out two more sensational terrorist attacks. The U.N. General Assembly responded by passing Resolution 3379, and so declared Israel and its people illegitimate.
‘Anti-Americanism at heart of anti-Zionism’
Far from being a deviation from the norm, the international system’s decision to stand with Hamas and the Palestinians following Oct. 7 followed a half-century of precedent. The more Jews the Palestinians murder—and the more gruesomely they murder the Jews—the more support the Palestinians receive from the international system.
Arafat, his henchmen, heirs and state sponsors all understood two basic things. First, they understood that Europeans were tired of feeling guilty about their history of genocidal Jew-hatred. The Palestinians tapped into a deep-seated European desire for expiation for the crimes the continent committed against the Jews both during the Holocaust, as well as in the centuries of organized European persecution and murder of Jews that preceded it.
By accusing the Jews and their state of committing the crimes the Europeans had committed against the Jews (and that the Palestinians sought to continue committing against the Jews), the Palestinians permitted the Europeans to feel comfortable—even good—about their murderous past.
The second thing the Palestinians and their Soviet state sponsors realized was that by making Jew-hatred socially acceptable again, they would tear apart the West. The European embrace of the Palestinians against the Jews would drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. And that, in turn, would force the United States onto the defensive for its support for the Jewish state and its people.
In The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Walter Russell Mead documented how American support for the Jewish state preceded the establishment of the modern-day state of Israel by nearly 200 years. It was borne of the founding fathers’ desire to form a New Jerusalem. The “Liberty” in which the United States was “conceived” was the liberty of the laws of Moses that mandated the establishment of limited government of man ruled by God’s Divine laws.
For those Americans, the re-establishment of the Jewish commonwealth in the Promised Land would be a fulfillment not only of God’s promise to the Jewish people but proof of the justness of the United States of America, which was modeled on that commonwealth.
The Soviets were convinced that by laundering Palestinian terrorist propaganda through the U.N. system, the Palestinian cause would weaken and divide the Western alliance. Under pressure from Europeans and European-influenced American elite, anti-Zionism would undo America’s sense of its own morality and weaken its social cohesion to the point where Americans would be driven apart. Some would internalize the anti-Americanism at the heart of the anti-Zionism, and others would refuse to do so.
In short, Palestinian terrorism and its concomitant propaganda and political warfare made Jew-hatred socially acceptable again for Europeans; it engendered anti-Americanism in Europe and among the Eurocentric American elite, splitting American society apart.
From 1974 when the Palestinians were first rewarded for massacring Jews with observer status at the United Nations until 2024, when Israel’s war for survival against Palestinian mass murderers was declared a war crime and a crime against humanity by the ICC, the Palestinian cause of genocide gradually took over the U.N. system, and its associated agencies and satellite organizations like the U.N. Human Rights Council and the ICC. The only thing blocking its complete takeover and attendant moral and strategic destruction of the post-war system was America’s refusal to join in the fracas. In other words, the international system was perpetually just one change in U.S. policy away from being devoured completely by Jew-hatred.
Enter the Biden administration.
‘Hostile, unlawful acts against Israel’
Since Oct. 7, the outgoing Biden administration has been playing a game of footsie with the U.N. system. While paying lip service to Israel’s right to self-defense, President Joe Biden and his advisers have enabled and emboldened the world body and its agencies to side with Hamas by refusing at every turn to take any action against agencies siding with or aiding and abetting Hamas.
Consider UNRWA. On Oct. 7, UNRWA employees in Gaza participated in the atrocities. As the weeks and months passed, it became apparent that UNRWA was Hamas’s diplomatic and welfare arm. Its infrastructure was enmeshed in Hamas’s terror infrastructure. Its personnel were Hamas personnel. And this was by design.
UN Watch revealed this week that in 2017, then UNRWA head Pierre Krähenbühl met with Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror commanders in Beirut and pledged to work with them in full partnership. Krähenbühl , who now heads the International Committee for the Red Cross, emphasizes the “spirit of partnership” between UNRWA and the terrorist organizations. He urged them to keep the cooperation private to avoid angering UNRWA’s donors and endangering its funding.
Although the administration cut off funding to UNRWA after its employees’ involvement in the Oct. 7 atrocities was exposed, the U.S. State Department has repeatedly extolled UNRWA, promised to restore funding and threatened Israel with arms embargoes if it cuts off the U.N.’s in-house terror group. So the administration’s actual policy is to support UNRWA even as its terrorist activities have become undeniable.
Then there is the International Court of Justice. Two months after Oct. 7, the ICJ began to adjudicate South Africa’s allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the scandalous allegation, the ICJ agreed to hear the case. So today, Israel is on trial for the crimes Hamas and its supporters carried out against the State of Israel.
While decrying the trial, the Biden administration did nothing to intervene on Israel’s behalf with the ICJ. It placed no pressure on South Africa to withdraw its case.
By taking no action against the ICJ or South Africa, the Biden administration indirectly but clearly supported their decision to place Israel on the dock.
Last week, the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism revealed that the South African government and African National Congress (ANC) governing party are bankrolled by Hamas, and its state sponsors Iran and Qatar. So in effect, South Africa is acting as their agent. The actual party accusing Israel of genocide is Hamas, which actually continues its war of genocide still today.
Finally, we come to the International Criminal Court. For the past 15 years, the ICC has been working with Palestinian terrorists to build a legal fiction where Israel, which is not a member of the ICC and over whom the ICC has no jurisdiction is a terrorist organization; and the terror-infused, PLO-controlled, and Hamas aligned-Palestinian Authority is a sovereign state empowered to give the ICC jurisdiction over Israel.
Recognizing the threat the ICC posed not only to Israel but to the United States itself, during his first term, President-elect Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that required sanctions be imposed on ICC staff in the event the institution issued arrest warrants against U.S. military personnel or U.S. allies, including Israel.
Upon entering office, Biden canceled the Executive Order. He refused to reissue it following ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s announcement last May that he intended to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. When the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill legislating the sanctions that appeared in Trump’s executive order, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) blocked it from being launched in the Senate.
Through its actions, the administration actively protected the ICC—and indirectly encouraged the ICC in its hostile, unlawful acts against Israel. And, just to be clear, the act in question is kidnapping. Netanyahu and Gallant have committed no war crimes and no atrocities. The ICC is acting without legal authority, outside the bounds of international law, with no evidence of any crime save claims from terrorists who are themselves war criminals. Its decision to issue international arrest warrants under the circumstances renders the ICC nothing more than a kidnapping ring. And every ICC member nation that agrees to execute the warrants is a member of the ring.
By enabling the international system to escalate its war against Israel and its people, the Biden administration completed the process initiated 50 years ago at the United Nations. Although Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have repeatedly protested their commitment to protecting the liberal world order, their actions in office have transformed the U.N.-based system into a mechanism for the advancement of the genocide of Jews and the destruction of the Judeo-Christian civilization.
These institutions are now beyond repair. They cannot be reformed, only dismantled. To this end, Israel, the Jews and the world are lucky that Trump has the courage to clean up the mess his predecessor is leaving and dismantle the now-broken international system that is Biden’s legacy.
Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of
the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator
for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is
the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security
Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of
Statesmanship. She appears regularly on U.S., British, Australian and
Indian television networks, including Fox, Newsmax and CBN. She appears,
as well, on the BBC, Sky News Britain and Sky News Australia, and on
India's WION News Network. She speaks regularly on nationally syndicated
and major market radio shows across the English-speaking world. She is
also a frequent guest on major podcasts, including the Dave Rubin Show
and the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Source: https://www.jns.org/the-international-system-is-broken-beyond-repair/
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