In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a war crimes arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his actions in Ukraine. “It is justified and it is a very important point,” US President Joe Biden said then. A year later, the ICC prosecutor requested another arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then Biden’s response was radically different: “It’s intolerable.”
In March 2022, the Biden Government also celebrated the precautionary measures imposed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered Russia to stop its military operations in Ukraine, ensuring that the highest UN court “plays a fundamental role in the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” When two years later the same court issued precautionary measures for Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah, the US remained silent, Israel ignored the order and Biden was forced to defend the Israeli operation – which he had previously described as a “red line” for Washington and at that time he defined it as a “limited” offensive.
There is more. When Putin announced the illegal annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia, Biden came out the same day announcing new sanctions. “The US condemns the fraudulent attempt to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory. “Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter and showing its contempt for peaceful nations around the world,” he said. But when in July of this year the ICJ declared the Israeli occupation of Palestine “illegal” and defined Israel’s policy as an attempted “annexation” that violates the principle of the prohibition of the use of force in international relations and whose objective is to “create irreversible effects on the ground” to “remain indefinitely,” the US criticized the court’s ruling, calling it too “broad” and stating that it “complicates efforts to resolve the conflict.”
Based on the ICJ ruling, the UN General Assembly shortly afterwards approved a resolution denouncing the Israeli “violation” of the territorial integrity of the Palestinian territories. Isolated, the US voted against the text, along with only 13 other countries in the world. In the case of Ukraine, however, he was one of the main promoters of a resolution approved by a very large majority in the General Assembly in defense of the “principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity represented in the UN Charter,” Biden said then. . “History watches us. “The lack of support for Ukraine at this critical time will not be forgotten,” he added.
There is also a certain imbalance in Washington’s reactions to attacks against blue helmets deployed in different parts of the world. In March, eight soldiers from the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo were injured in an attack. “The silence of the international community in the face of such brazen actions – by one of the main participants in UN peacekeeping [Ruanda]— is equally dismaying,” the US ambassador to the UN Security Council said at the time.
Biden has maintained that same silence after Israel’s continued “deliberate” attacks against the blue helmets deployed in Lebanon. At a press conference about Hurricane Milton, a journalist asked the president if the US is asking Israel to stop attacking UN soldiers, to which Biden answered briefly: “Totally and absolutely.” For his part, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, only declared his “great concern” about these attacks, without elaborating further on the implications of an attack against peacekeepers, while dozens of countries around the world have condemned the actions. Israel’s illegal activities and its request to withdraw from the UN mission.
The US and EU have imposed several rounds of “unprecedented” sanctions against Russia for its aggression against Ukraine and violation of international law. Not so against Israel, although the speech of the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, has distanced itself greatly from the American line—and even from the line of the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.
For both Biden and Von der Leyen, the only culprit for the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza is Hamas. This was reflected by both in their speeches on the occasion of the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks against Israel, in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250, most of them civilians.
The new international (dis)order
On its website supporting Ukraine, the US—which has imposed multiple rounds of sanctions against Russian leaders since the beginning of the invasion, while publicly defending Israel’s actions in Gaza—argues that “all members of the international community are subject to common standards and must face the consequences if they fail to fulfill their solemn commitments.” “These principles extend beyond Ukraine. These principles extend beyond Europe. These principles are the basis of the international order that the United States and our allies and partners have built together and sustained.”
“What Ukraine and Gaza are testing is the alleged moral universalism on which the international order is based and its translation into common standards in international law,” José Antonio Sanahuja, professor of International Relations at the Complutense University of Madrid. “This moral universalism should lead to the condemnation of the aggressors, as well as those who violate International Humanitarian Law with their conduct in hostilities.”
For his part, Carlos Corrochano, professor of critical theories of International Relations at the Sciences Po university in Paris and author of the book Keys to global politics (Arpa), maintains that “the discourse of universalism has historically been used by Western elites to justify imperial and colonial projects and purposes.” “But this Eurocentric universalism is not the only possible universalism. Like any political concept, the meaning of the universal is in dispute and the left must recover it as a battlefield, moral compass and political horizon,” he adds in statements to this newspaper.
“This very complex operation must begin with a condemnation of any double standards. That is: the firmest and most energetic condemnation, of course, of the hypocrisy of the European establishment, which has no problem condemning in the strongest terms Russia’s imperialist aggression against Ukraine, while legitimizing the regime’s non-existent ‘right to respond’. of [Benjamín] Netanyahu. But also to the double standards of the camp left that, despite condemning the genocide in Palestine, is lenient in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine,” says Corrochano.
Sanahuja affirms that what we are seeing in current conflicts is “the breakdown of the most basic norms of the international order.” “The war of conquest returns against the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, apartheid is reaffirmed (at least for those who have not wanted to see it) and we once again have before us crimes against humanity, on a massive scale, or genocidal violence,” says the professor. Meanwhile, “the United Nations is wallowing in impotence and exercises as necessary and laudable as the recent ‘Pact for the Future’ could be a kind of Titanic orchestra that tries to keep multilateralism alive when it is already sinking,” he adds.
“I refer to this situation as a new ‘interregnum’ in which the old does not finish dying and the new cannot be born,” says Sanahuja. In this context, “international politics becomes even more realistic and cynical, and that is the attitude that, beyond the elites, societies adopt.”
Cemetery or hope of international law
A good part of Palestinian and international civil society is fighting so that Gaza does not become the “cemetery of international law,” as the renowned Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani told elDiario.es. Faced with the double standards of the United States and its European allies, this international law has become the last hope.
“Despite its numerous traps and numerous limitations, international law is one of the tools that can most easily be redirected towards progressive ends,” Corrochano tells elDiario.es. “International law, despite the shadow that hangs over its colonial origins, is the only gap in the current world-system that allows us to influence and advance towards a different one, the only common language that can give us specific victories in a global order which is adverse to us,” he explains.
“In recent months we have tested the limits of the institutions of international law, whether the ICJ or the ICC, but we have also seen that international law can produce discourses that were unthinkable a short time ago, that it can be put at the service of emancipatory causes and that its content is really in dispute,” says the Sciences Po professor.
Corrochano believes that the discourse has completely changed after the Gaza war. “This hypocrisy has only deepened the discredit of the West. The ‘rules-based global order’ that Western elites claim to defend is today defended, in reality, by a large part of the Global South.” South Africa’s suit against Israel for genocide at the ICJ is the perfect example, he maintains. “He already said it.” [Gustavo] Petro in the middle of the Davos Forum: ‘The slogan freedom, equality and fraternity that popularized the French Revolution is no longer based in Paris, but in South Africa.’”
In this sense, Sanahuja tells this newspaper that these double standards also exist in the Global South. “There is talk of the moral and political bankruptcy of liberal internationalism in the West—and it is real and perhaps irreversible, as P. Mishra or C. Nguyen argue—but the Global South, the Arab countries, etc. They have also incurred double standards and the hypocritical, partial and selective use of legitimizing arguments in defense or to criticize one another. Ukraine has some support, insufficient and very measured, but Palestine, in particular, is very alone.”
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