I’ve been watching a lot of Israeli TV for the last couple of weeks. It’s informative — and the contrast with U.S. media is dramatic. One phrase I hear fairly often from, well, a lot of people, is “international law,” and why Israel is violating it. Generally, only Israel.
This has me thinking about this whole notion of “international law.” It seems like a great idea: some set of rules that everyone, every country or non-governmental organization like Hamas or (redundantly) UNRWA agree on. If international law is to mean anything, it has to be enforced — with real consequences.
The trick here is the part about “enforceable.” Laws that can’t be enforced are merely suggestions.
Once we started the whole notion of international law, going back at least to the Congress of Vienna or longer, groups started to consider how it could be turned to their own advantage.
Look at the current unpleasantness: Hamas commits human rights violations every minute of every day — attacking civilians, butchering babies, storing and firing munitions from civilian areas, and concealing combatants under hospitals and schools. Under international law, these are war crimes for which, in more confident times, there would have been hanging offenses. But if you hear the phrase used at all, it seems to be consistently and ignorantly used against Israel, Ukraine, and the United States. Ignorantly, in particular, because a lot of supposed violations of human rights and the laws of war actually aren’t. For example, cutting off Hamas’s power and water: This is called a siege. We also call this sanctions. Like all sanctions, the point is to make life difficult for the country and its people.
The reason for this trope is pretty obvious: the U.S. and Israel actually care about international law. Many adversaries only pay attention to international law when it is a useful club with which to beat their opponents. At heart, it’s a scam, a swindle.
Like most scams and swindles, the reason it works is economic. There’s no payoff to enforcing international law — it's the opposite, as the U.S. and Israel have found out so many times.
The economics are that war is expensive, and the international law scam is a way for countries like Iran and gangster mobs like Hamas to cut their own costs. Murder a few hundred Jews. Oh, it has some costs — bullets and trucks — but then you retreat to Gaza and claim international law as your defense.
The international law scam has been a good strategy; it’s often a good strategy, as Russia and Iran have proven. But it’s only a good strategy until you convince your opponent that the international law scam has gotten too expensive.
When this happens, you drop back to the real economics of war: wars continue until one side or the other decides it’s too expensive to continue.
The only real course Israel has at this point is to convince the Palestinians in Gaza that the war is too expensive to sustain. But that doesn’t mean killing some Hamas members because that’s no big cost to the leaders of Hamas in their palatial homes in Qatar or their subsidized homes in England. It’s got to be when the actual population of Gaza throws Hamas out. Failing that, it has to become so expensive that Hamas simply can’t continue the war, whether the population supports it or not.
(If you're interested in getting Israel news from a non-U.S. source, I've been watching il24 and TV7Israel.)
