International Law: An Obituary

A Symphonic Essay in Six Movements

(Symphony No. 2)

I. Adagio: The Eloquent Voice of Surrender

There was a clip circulating online.
A pro-Israel advocate, calm and eloquent, speaking flawless British English.
She explained—according to international law—that Israel is not an occupying power.
She quoted conventions, cited precedents, and spoke with poise and legal fluency.

The clip was shared proudly.
“Look!” someone wrote. “Even the international courts agree—we’re not occupiers!”

This is what passes for a moral victory now.
Not our justice.
Not our freedom.
But our Compliance.

We don’t speak as a sovereign people.
We speak as defendants.
We don’t proclaim our cause.
We recite their clauses.

This is not pride. It is the poise of a well-mannered prisoner.
The eloquence of a condemned inmate begging not to be hanged.

It is the voice of a Jew who does not come to judge, but to be judged.
Who enters the courtroom of global opinion and pleads that her country is not guilty under the statutes of those who would gladly see it dismantled.

Yes, she was right on the facts.
But the facts are not the point.
The framework is the point.
And the framework is surrender.

To defend Israel by the standards of international law is to accept that the Jewish right to life depends on the approval of foreign courts.
That our legitimacy must be ratified by those who watched us burn—and now dare to restrain us when we resist.

This is the problem.
Not that we are treated unfairly.
But that we still seek to be treated fairly by people who have no moral standing to judge us.

That is where the collapse begins.

Because the framework she invoked—this so-called international law—has a long and bitter record when it comes to the Jewish people.

What did the international law do when we needed it most?

Did it stop the trains to Auschwitz?
Did it silence the chimneys?

That same “international law” that stood by while six million perished.
That raised no alarm as gas chambers hummed and smoke rose over Europe.

And today, that same international law did nothing—nothing—to prevent the burning of children in Kibbutz Be’eri.
It did nothing to stop the rape and murder of Jewish women on October 7.

Is this the moral authority you trust?
Is this the system that will come to our defence now?

You fool. You’re playing into their hands.

This is not a neutral arena. This is the battlefield they’ve chosen.
And you show up quoting their rulebook?

And what’s worse, we applaud it.

We share the clip, in Hebrew, among ourselves.
We whisper with pride:
“Did you know we’re not occupiers—even according to international law? Amazing! Let’s show the Gentiles, so they finally see we’re the good guys!”

This is not a strategy.
This is not pride.
This is narcissism.

It is the battered child showing his bruises to the bully, hoping to win mercy through eloquence.
It is the slave asking the master to validate his humanity.

And still, we think we’re clever.
We think if we speak their language, dress in their style, and behave in their court, we’ll finally be accepted.

Let me paint you a picture.

Imagine a Jewish lawyer in 1938 Berlin, brilliant and urbane, standing at gunpoint and leafing through the Nuremberg Laws to prove he qualifies for exemption.
“Look!” he pleads. “According to Paragraph 2, Section 4, I’m not technically a Jew!”

And the officer just smiles, cocks the Luger, and pulls the trigger.

That’s what we’re doing.

They don’t need tanks anymore. They don’t need an invasion.
They have microphones. They have commissions.
They have hashtags and resolutions.

And through your dignity, your poise, and your brilliant arguments, you legitimise them.
You give their courtroom meaning.
You enter their trial, and in doing so, you affirm their right to judge you.

But a Jew who explains himself to his enemies is not a free man.
He is a well-mannered prisoner.

And the deeper tragedy?
We have become proud of our captivity.

We’ve been on trial for 2000 years.
Enough.

But what are we beneath the verdicts?
What is the soul they seek to judge?

II. Andante: The Good and the Suicidal

Israel’s goodness does not flow from the ink of any treaty, nor from the neat geometry of clauses and footnotes. It does not come from Article 49, nor from Protocol X, nor from the shaky consensus of men in grey suits gathering in foreign chambers.

It comes from character. From the soul of a nation that rose from the ashes and chose to build. A free, imperfect, extraordinary state. A country whose moral centre is not in compliance but in creation.

Israel is a country of builders. Of engineers sketching out desalination plants in the sand. Of entrepreneurs raising glass towers above the ruins. Of artists who speak in paint and iron and cinema, who craft beauty out of trauma. Of families who plant trees on land their grandparents only dreamed of owning.

To create is to defy. The entrepreneur is not a conformist—he is a man who sees what others miss, who says no where others chant yes. Creation is not submission to consensus. It is rebellion in the name of life. And that is what Israel once embodied: not the safe path, but the sovereign one.

Our abandonment of this spirit—this daring, defiant energy—is not just a strategic error. It is a betrayal. A betrayal of the very thing that made us good.

Israel is a place where people live for life, not for death. Where the human individual, though battered and pressed, is still sacred.

Across from us stands a culture of ruin. A culture that reveres blood, that wraps its children in shrouds before they can read, that sanctifies murder and calls it martyrdom. Their heroes are not inventors, but bombers. Their teachers are not philosophers, but propagandists of death. Their art is not a celebration of life, but a rehearsal for dying.

This is the moral difference. This is what divides light from darkness, civilisation from savagery. Not some dusty paragraph filed in The Hague. Not some ruling from a court whose judges cannot tell the arsonist from the firefighter.

And yet—how quickly we forget. How desperately we reach for the mirror, asking not whether we are good, but whether we appear good.

We spend millions polishing our image for the world, while the foundations begin to crack. We explain ourselves to journalists who would sooner side with our killers. We dress our moral courage in legalese and PowerPoint slides. We mistake restraint for justice. We trade truth for optics.

And in doing so, we become less good.

Being good is not about being liked. It is not about being praised. Being good is about standing firm when it would be easier to bend. It is about choosing life, again and again, even when death is dressed as mercy.

Every day we forget that, we lose a part of what we are. We send our sons into battle with their hands tied behind their backs, not to defeat the enemy, but to look good on the BBC. We bomb empty fields and congratulate ourselves for our restraint, while our enemies reload. We delay. We negotiate. We apologise. We bleed.

And still we tell ourselves, “This is moral.”

But look closer. Who are we fighting? A death cult. A people who worship graves more than gardens. Who build tunnels instead of schools, who nurse hatred like it’s heritage, who dream not of peace but of fire.

They choose suicide, openly, proudly, as a statement of faith. And we, who claim to love life, imitate them in our own way. We commit slow suicide—not with vests and explosions, but with words and compromise.

They die in the name of hate.
We die in the name of virtue.

And the result is the same. The good is destroyed.
And the deeper horror, the unbearable truth, is this:

We are the ones doing it to ourselves. And we do it in the name of law, the very law that once stood silent while we burned.

III. Trauermarsch: The Law That Watched Us Die

Was the Holocaust legal?

Ask the judges in Berlin. Ask the lawyers who signed the orders. Ask the secretaries who typed out train schedules to Treblinka and called it policy. Everything was done on paper. Everything had a stamp. It was lawful.

And yet ask the international community: Was it illegal? Were there not treaties? Conventions? Principles? There were. They existed. On shelves. In speeches. In theory.

And still the chimneys smoked.
Still, the children disappeared.
Stil, the world watched.

The truth is brutal and simple: the law did not matter. Not then. Not in the ghetto. Not in the camp. And not now.

Because the law did not save us, and Israel was not founded by legal permission.
It was not declared by a court order. It was not the product of compliance.

Israel was founded in defiance.

When David Ben-Gurion stood at the edge of history in May 1948, he did not wait for international consent. The President of the United States warned him:
If you declare a state, we will embargo the region. We will withhold weapons.
Ben-Gurion looked around and saw no court, no army, no treaty willing to save his people.

He saw what mattered:
Six million Jews reduced to ash.
Seven Arab armies poised to destroy the survivors.
Millions of refugees waiting to come home.
A language reborn, a people returning to dust and soil.

And so he acted—not out of legal right, but out of moral necessity.
He did not ask: What does The Hague think?
He asked: What do we owe the dead?

He asked: What do we owe the eight-year-old Menachem from Tarnów,
the boy standing on the deck of a ship off the coast of Haifa,
the last living descendant of his family—
the only one left to carry their name?

That is how Israel was born.
Not from permission, but from resolve.
Not from legality, but from the raw, sacred obligation to live.

And yet now, after October 7, we act as though that history never happened.
A thousand civilians are murdered, and we debate what the UN might say. We bury our children and wait for press releases from the BBC.

The law that once failed to save us now rises only to restrain us.
It speaks not to protect the Jewish child, but to scold the Jewish soldier.
This is not an oversight. This is the function of international law today.

It is not a shield.
It is a leash.

And it is held—not by the righteous—but by our enemies.
By those who bomb us with resolutions and bury us with moral paperwork.
By those who said nothing in 1944, and now demand apologies in 2025.

This is not justice. This is not order.
It is a system built to bind the living in deference to the dead.

And we—survivors, builders, soldiers—are asked to kneel beneath its weight.

But we will not.
Not anymore.

IV. Scherzo: The Theatre of the Absurd

There is no satire more vicious than reality.

Take the United Nations Human Rights Council, for example. Among its distinguished members sit China, Venezuela, Qatar and Libya, not as cautionary tales, but as judges. These regimes, which crush dissent and silence opposition at home, are tasked with lecturing democracies abroad—chiefly, one democracy in particular.

North Korea has a vote. Iran has a vote. Sudan has a vote. And they vote to condemn Israel.

This is not irony. It is not hypocrisy. It is a carefully constructed system of absurdity. It functions exactly as intended.

Then there is UNRWA—the UN agency dedicated to ensuring that Palestinian refugees remain refugees, generation after generation. It does not resettle. It does not resolve. It preserves grievance as policy, victimhood as inheritance. Its textbooks erase Israel, its curriculum glorifies martyrdom, and its teachers train children to view Jews not as neighbours, but as targets.

On 7 October, at least a dozen UNRWA employees actively participated in the massacres. Not bystanders—participants. Some crossed the border. Some held hostages. Some drove them back into Gaza. These are not fringe radicals. These are UN employees. The response from the agency was tepid concern and bureaucratic hand-wringing. Business as usual.

Then there is the International Criminal Court. A body that, while hostages were still trapped underground, saw fit to issue arrest warrants for the prime minister and defence minister of the one country attempting to free them. The Court, of course, added a few Gazan leaders to the list for symmetry.

This is what passes for moral balance: the equivalence of the arsonist and the firefighter.

And presiding over it all, the global media. Israel is scrutinised with forensic zeal. Every explosion in Gaza is a potential war crime. Every Israeli death is “contextualised”. Rockets launched from hospitals are reported with caution; hospitals struck in response are reported with outrage. Allegations against Hamas are to be verified. Allegations against Israel are to be broadcast, front-page, without hesitation.

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region. It is the only country with a free press, an independent judiciary, and regular protests against its own government. And that, precisely, is what makes it vulnerable. It is the only country that can be shamed. The only country that can be pressured. The only one that can be blamed.

This is not justice. This is theatre.
Not law, but farce—staged by tyrants, performed by diplomats, and applauded by those too comfortable to care.
It is a grotesque inversion of the civilised ideal. A world where the moral are judged, and the murderers are protected by lanyards and logos.

And the ticket to this performance?
We pay for it. In taxes. In soldiers’ lives. In silence.

V. The Verdict

We have seen what international law did in the 1940s. We have seen what it did not do. But October 7 revealed what it has become.

International law did nothing to stop the slaughter, the rape, the burning of children in their homes. It had no force, no deterrent, no authority. It stood by, as it always has, in silence. And when it finally did speak, it was not to condemn the killers, but to restrain the Jewish state that dared to defend itself.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is not a matter of poor implementation or bureaucratic delay. It is the system. A structure designed not to defend the innocent, but to discipline them. A language that only activates when the Jew lifts his hand to protect his own life.

International law has proven itself empty.

Not neutral. Not broken. Empty.

It exists only to condemn Jews when they stand, never to protect them when they fall.

This is not an opinion. It is not rhetoric. It is the record. It is the outcome, time and again, from the gates of Auschwitz to the gates of Be’eri. These laws, these courts, these commissions—do not bind us. They do not speak for us. They have no claim on our conscience, no place in our defence. They are not sources of legitimacy. They are the echo chambers of betrayal.

Worse still, the system is no longer passive. It is not merely absent—it is active. It has become the shield of our killers. It enables them to operate with impunity. It grants them legitimacy, immunity, and narrative power. It protects the very infrastructure of terror: the tunnels dug beneath UN schools, the weapons stored inside hospitals, the textbooks distributed by UN agencies that glorify death and erase the Jews entirely. These institutions—UNRWA, the Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court—do not simply fail to stop evil. They enable it. They institutionalise it. They internationalise it.

Some of their own employees took part in the massacre of October 7. They crossed the border with weapons, they held hostages, they celebrated the slaughter. These are not rogue actors. These are products of the very system that claims to uphold human rights. This is not a failure of enforcement—it is complicity. It is structural. It is moral rot.

And yet, we still treat them as moral arbiters. We still quote their rulings. We still build our moral case upon the very edifice that shields those who butcher our children. We still send our diplomats to stand trial in the theatre of the absurd, as if anything they say could ever be received in good faith.

To invoke international law in our defence is not a show of strength. It is not a strategy. It is surrender disguised as sophistication. It is moral self-destruction dressed in a lawyer’s suit. It is an obscenity—and it must end.

VI. Finale: The Return of the Sovereign Jew

We have tanks. We have jets. We have nuclear deterrence.
And still, we behave like the shtetl Jew.

Still we beg. Still we explain. Still we quote from foreign scrolls to prove our worth.
We write op-eds for newspapers that hate us.
We issue legal rebuttals to regimes that burn women for dancing.
We ask what the court in The Hague might think, instead of asking what justice demands.
We are sovereign in territory, but not in spirit.
We have the power of a nation—but the posture of a petitioner.

This is not sovereignty. This is dependency in disguise.
This is not strength. This is the ghetto with a flag.

But it does not have to be so.

There is another standard. One that predates The Hague. One that outlives Geneva.
The standard of morality. Of civilisation. Of truth.
The standard that says: human life is sacred, individual liberty is supreme, and evil must be named and defeated, not debated in air-conditioned rooms.

Israel is not good because it is in compliance.
Israel is good because it is free.
Because it builds. Because it shelters life in a region of death.
Because it values the dignity of the human being, even when the world does not.

We do not need to prove our goodness to tyrants.
We do not need to explain our existence to institutions that stood silent while our grandparents were burned.
We do not need to justify our defence to men who share champagne with our murderers.

We are the children of exile, but we are no longer exiles.
We are the descendants of Menachem from Tarnów, who stood on the deck of a ship and became the final living thread of his family.
And we are also the heirs of the great builders of Tel Aviv—
those who planted boulevards in the sand, who laid down coffee houses and concert halls before a state even existed,
who dreamed not only of refuge, but of beauty.
Of a Hebrew city, modern and free, where Jews would live, not merely survive.

We do not come from nowhere.
We come from longing turned to limestone. From poetry turned to planning.
We are not here to beg.
We are here to build.

And building means breaking with the broken law.
Building means returning, not to international approval, but to moral clarity.
To the unshakable truth that our lives are our own. Our land is our own. Our right to survive is not granted—it is assumed.

This is the final break with the ghetto mindset.
This is the return of the sovereign Jew.

Let the world pass its resolutions.
Let the courts issue their indictments.
Let the microphones howl and the hypocrites perform.

We will stand.
We will build.
We will speak with our own voice.

And we shall no longer ask for permission to exist.
For if we do,
the world shall crumble.

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