Israel is still the world’s scapegoat

Is Israel really orchestrating a mass famine in Gaza? That is one of the charges currently being investigated by both the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Ever since South Africa accused Israel of committing a genocide against Gazans in December 2023, Israel and its leaders have come under intense scrutiny from these international bodies, particularly in regards to the blockade of food and aid.

It is telling that Israel is the first and only country to have been charged with the war crime of starvation. Naturally, blockades of food and other forms of aid are and have been common throughout the history of warfare. This raises two obvious questions. First, do the accusations stand up? And second, why is Israel being singled out for punishment?

These are certainly serious claims. Earlier this week, Tom Fletcher, who is in charge of the United Nations’ relief operation in Gaza, claimed that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours if aid did not reach them. The week before that, Fletcher made a speech excoriating Israel at the UN Security Council. ‘Every single one of the 2.1million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip face the risk of famine’, he said. ‘One in five faces starvation.’ Throughout Israel’s war on Hamas since 7 October 2023, humanitarian agencies have warned of the risk of famine. In recent weeks this aspect of Israel’s supposed ‘genocide’ has particularly come to the fore. The reality is that, so far at least, it remains a ‘risk’ only.

There is no doubt that the war has, as wars do, brought hardship, danger and bloodshed to the people of Gaza. But Israel has made sure that, despite various periods of blockade, enough aid has gone into the region to prevent starvation. There is even a current plan for Israel to deliver aid directly to Gaza. Ironically, this plan is being blocked by the UN itself, which likely resents being left out of the aid-distribution process. The UN’s controversial United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) had previously been administering aid there, but was banned by Israel after it emerged that some of its staff members had taken part in the 7 October massacre.

It is also worth noting that the world seems to have forgotten about the countless other famines that have been occurring elsewhere. Last week, US president Donald Trump announced the end of 13 years of sanctions against Syria. These sanctions – which were backed by the EU, UK, Canada and Australia among others – have had a devastating impact on the Syrian people. By 2024, according to the World Food Programme: ‘A total of 9.1million people are food insecure. Both maternal malnutrition and acute malnutrition in children under five are at global emergency thresholds.’

It is generally accepted that Western economic sanctions, alongside the impact of civil war, worsened living conditions for Syrian civilians to the point of starvation. Yet where were the calls to put the US, the EU, the UK or anybody else in the dock for the consequences of their actions? Instead, the international community has congratulated itself on its role in bringing down the Assad regime.

So why has Israel been singled out by the ICC and the ICJ, as it battles to cripple the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza? For starters, Israel is seen as an easy target for these international bodies – a kind of ‘low-hanging fruit’. This is largely because Western opinion has already cast it in the role of the villain in its conflict with Hamas. In the broader international arena, Israel is seen as the archetypal wrongdoer.

Of course, the reality is very different. Israel is the only democracy in the turbulent Middle East. It is also the only Jewish state in the world. It is currently engaged in a war against an anti-Semitic enemy that wishes to wipe it off the map. Israel is not a ‘colonial’ or genocidal oppressor, as is so often claimed, but a country marked by its own tragic history of invasion, violence and suffering. Yet with few sympathisers left on the world stage, Israel ends up being the convenient focal point for global indignation.

That is not the end of the story. The ICC’s aggressive stance against Israel is also a sign of deeper troubles among international institutions. In the era following the Second World War, a network of progressive lawyers, non-governmental organisations and activists – often working through the UN – set out to champion universal rules of warfare. Their goal was to dismantle the traditional notion of state sovereignty in favour of global accountability. However, that postwar consensus is now unravelling. Even the US, once a pillar of that world order, has resorted to sanctioning the ICC, claiming it plays favourites against both the US and Israel.

In fact, from the beginning, the ICC has struggled to earn universal support. While it was established as a guardian of international justice, major powers such as the US, China, India and Russia never signed up to it. Hungary has also recently signalled its discontent by removing itself from the ICC after a visit from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At their core, projects like the ICC and ICJ are a globalist challenge to national sovereignty and are deeply undemocratic. Laws gain moral authority from being passed by elected representatives of the people – something that international tribunals simply cannot replicate. Without democratic backing, these institutions too often fall prey to political agendas, rather than serving as unbiased arbiters of justice.

Against this backdrop, the prosecution of Israel has transformed into a high-stakes test for the credibility of bodies like the ICC and ICJ. This could be seen playing out at the ICJ hearing against Israel in The Hague last month. While lambasting Israel’s actions against Gaza and the UN, Palestinian counsel Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh urged the court to reassert the moral compass of the UN Charter. She warned that the international order was crumbling and expressed the ‘continuing desperate hope that international law might finally prevail’.

We should hope that these organisations continue to lose their clout. Then they will no longer be able to unjustly target a sovereign state like Israel for exercising its right to self-defence. The collapse of these hollow institutions cannot come soon enough.

Rob Killick is a London-based writer. His Substack, Civilisation or Barbarism, is at rkillick.substack.com