May 24: ICJ Orders Halt to Rafah Offensive
IDF finds more dead hostages; Putin floats cease-fire in Ukraine; High times in America
The Big Story
A note to readers: The Scroll will be off on Monday for Memorial Day.
On Friday morning, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to “immediately halt its offensive” in Rafah. The ruling, a response to a renewed application from South Africa as part of its case against what it describes as Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, reads, in its relevant part:
The Court considers that, in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
The ICJ also ordered Israel to “maintain open the Rafah crossing” (which is currently being kept shut by Egypt), allow “unimpeded access to Gaza” of U.N. personnel investigating genocide allegations, and submit a report to the ICJ within a month detailing the measures it has taken to comply with the order. On the bright side, the ruling is not as bad as it could have been: The ICJ neglected to order the cessation of all hostilities in the Gaza Strip, as South Africa asked it to. On the other hand, as Israeli law professor Eugene Kontorovich notes on X, there’s a certain absurdity in the court’s decision to weigh in now: Months ago, when the ICJ declined to order Israel to halt its military operations, the “official” death toll in Gaza was about 40% higher than it is now, since the United Nations was using inflated Gaza Government Media Office figures until earlier this month.
Several Israeli media outlets, citing named and unnamed government sources, reported that the Israeli government was preparing for such an order. An Israeli government spokesperson told Reuters that “no power on Earth will stop Israel from protecting its citizens and going after Hamas in Gaza,” and on Friday, war cabinet member Benny Gantz informed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel would continue fighting in Rafah. The ICJ does not have any power to compel Israel to stop, although its ruling could spark action by the U.N. Security Council, making Israel once again reliant on an American veto.
In flouting the ICJ, however, Israel would simply be following the global trend. A November 2023 blog post on the European Journal of International Law website noted that the ICJ ordered provisional measures in only 10 cases in the first 50 years of its existence, from 1945 to 1995. But it has done so in 15 cases since 2001, ever since declaring that its provisional measures were legally binding in the LaGrand case, in which the ICJ ruled that the United States had violated international law by trying and executing a German murderer and bank robber without informing him of his right to consular assistance (the United States ignored the ruling).
Since LaGrand, the ICJ has been more aggressive about ordering provisional measures against states, who have responded by declining to comply with ICJ orders about half the time, and nearly all of the time in cases that involve war or other critical national security interests. The author of the post, Matei Alexianu, notes that of the five cases from 2018 to 2023 in which the ICJ ordered substantive provisional measures, there was partial compliance in one case (Azerbaijan v. Armenia) and no compliance whatsoever in four. In one of those cases, the ICJ ruled that a 2012 executive order from Barack Obama sanctioning the Iranian financial system was “unlawful” under the terms of a 1955 U.S.-Iranian treaty. As West Point law professor Hitoshi Nasu wrote of that judgment:
The Court is seemingly oblivious to the fact that these financial measures were adopted in response to a series of hostile acts and threats posed by Iran through its surrogate armed groups. It is not the first time that the Court singled out one element within a multifaceted dispute, excluding other contextual elements from its view. … Although this limitation may well be inherent in judicial institutions as a means of dispute settlement, myopic judgments like this run the risk of undermining the confidence on the part of States in the administration of international justice systems.
The tendency of institutions like the ICJ to issue such “myopic” orders, however, should emphasize to the Israelis the existential importance of de-internationalizing the conflict.
Oh, and one more thing. The U.S. judge on the ICJ, Sarah Cleveland, voted in favor of all the provisional measures. Biden nominated Cleveland in 2021 to serve as the State Department’s legal adviser, but she was blocked by Republicans over her belief that abortion restrictions violate international human-rights law.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Itxu Diaz on why the West still needs John Wayne
The Rest
→The IDF recovered the bodies of three more hostages in an overnight operation in northern Gaza announced Friday morning. According to “reliable intelligence,” all three—Orión Hernández Radoux, 30, Hanan Yablonka, 42, and Michel Nisembaum, 59—were killed on Oct. 7. The IDF has also released more information on its recovery of the bodies of four hostages, including Shani Louk, last week. According to a report in The Times of Israel, the hostages were discovered in a booby-trapped tunnel beneath a civilian home in Jabalia—the “refugee camp” that the IDF was savaged for operating in back in November. According to a report from journalist Doron Kadosh quoted in Israel National News, the four bodies were recovered from an UNRWA building constructed with German funding. The IDF has not confirmed the latter claim.
→The IDF also released interrogation videos of two Hamas members, a father and a son, who confessed to raping and murdering women in Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. In his initial interrogation, the father, Jamal Hussein Ahmad Radi, admitted to raping a young woman he found in one of the houses in the kibbutz but said that he had acted alone and subsequently left her crying on the bed. Jamal’s son Abdallah, however, revealed that he and his cousin had also raped the woman and that “my father killed the woman after we finished raping her.”
→Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a cease-fire along the current front lines in Ukraine, according to a Friday report in Reuters citing anonymous Kremlin sources. The sources claimed that Putin believes he has captured enough Ukrainian territory to claim a victory and that he would prefer to “freeze” the conflict in place rather than risk another mobilization that could cut into his popularity at home. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters that Russia does not want “eternal war” but that it considers the territory it has captured—about 18% of prewar Ukraine—as permanently part of Russia. The sources added that Russia’s current offensive is designed to pressure the Ukrainians into negotiations. Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told Newsweek that negotiations are futile until Russia relinquishes the Ukrainian territory now under its control, and he speculated that “Putin is afraid that a protracted war will cause more dissatisfaction … among the Russian elite and in the army.” The following map, from the Institute for the Study of War and Critical Threats, shows Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of May 23:
→Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has paid nearly half a million dollars to a consulting firm run by an employee of the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), the fiscal sponsor of Samidoun, a front group for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Gabriel Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner reports that since 2020, Tlaib’s campaign and her Rooted in Community Leadership PAC have paid $435,000 to Unbought Power, a “grassroots organizing” and “advocacy consulting” firm run by Rasha Mubarak. Mubarak was listed as a press contact for AfGJ in September and in the same month hosted an AfGJ webinar on “Cop City to Palestine” along with Charlotte Kates of Samidoun, who is married to PFLP Politburo member Khaled Barakat. Mubarak, the former regional director of the Central Florida branches of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Young Democrats, also spoke alongside Tlaib at a 2020 webinar hosted by American Muslims for Palestine, which a lawsuit has alleged is a “disguised continuance” of a charity shuttered for Hamas fundraising during the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. AfGJ has been barred from online payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe due to its connections to the PFLP.
→The National Collegiate Athletic Association has agreed to pay $2.8 billion in back pay to former college athletes and to directly pay athletes going forward, The Wall Street Journal reports. The agreement comes as part of a class-action settlement made in response to a lawsuit from a former Division 1 swimmer. The full details have not been made public, but the report describes the agreement as having two parts. First, the NCAA will pay $2.77 billion in damages over the next 10 years, mostly to former football and men’s basketball players from top conferences such as the Big 10 and the Southeastern Conference. Second, schools will pay athletes a portion of the revenue they generate; specifically, they will pay 22% of the average annual athletic department revenue among the top conferences, a sum that experts told the WSJ amounts to about $20 million per year per school. Legal experts also said that attempting to distribute this money on the basis of how much revenue teams or individual athletes bring would likely fall afoul of Title IX regulations, which mandate equal scholarships and benefits for male and female athletes. So we could soon see Big 10 softball players making $30,000.
→Chart of the Day:
That’s from a story in Washington Monthly by Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys on skyrocketing rates of THC consumption. And potency is rising alongside frequency. The authors note that in the 1990s, a person smoking two joints a day would have consumed about 5 milligrams of THC every day. Today, with legal marijuana averaging about 20-25% THC, and vape oils and dabs exceeding 60%, the average daily user is consuming more than 300 milligrams of THC per day—a sixtyfold increase in three decades.
Read it here.
→Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer in the United States. For all of our American readers, here’s a tune to take you into the long weekend:
TODAY IN TABLET:
The End of a School Year Like No Other, by The Tablet Editors
College students reflect on a year of fear, isolation, and poop tents
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Will John Wayne Ride to Our Emotional Rescue?
The post-October 7 West has a patriotism problem
by Itxu Diaz
For better or for worse, what drives the world in 2024 are emotions. While we are also guided by our duties, emotions are what help us make our struggle more than just a moral commitment; it is also an emotional commitment. Irving Berlin explained it well when talking about patriotic songs: “a patriotic song is an emotion, and you must not embarrass an audience with it, or they will hate your guts.”
What is patriotic feeling? The question embarrasses us. But we have centuries of writing on this subject by our forebears. Patriotic love is an extrapolation of filial love. We love our countrymen for the same reason we love our brothers. We feel every corner of our nations as ours for the same reason we feel our family home as ours. We love everything that makes us who we are: the heritage, the tradition, the family teachings, the local culture of the generations that preceded us, the religion we profess.
Patriotism is not only a question of affection, though. It is also a personal commitment, a response to moral codes, and obligations proper to those who enjoy rights in the family sphere as well as in the national sphere.
These virtues are losing their place in the postmodern West. Yet ironically, in the emotionally driven system of meaning and communication of postmodernity, the fact that feelings are elevated over reason is a challenge to traditional norms, but it can also be an opportunity. If today’s young people are more accustomed to relying on their feelings as the ultimate grounding for right behavior, then so-called “traditional virtues” can and should be deployed to persuade the young through the language of emotion rather than reason. This means that well-understood patriotism, a well-founded legacy of tradition, and a good moral education, can also be part of their emotional universe. And the case these virtues make for themselves in that realm is in fact surprisingly strong.
Recently I participated in an experiment to test this thesis. With three children from 8 to 12 years old I watched about 10 John Wayne movies. The actor represents the quintessential American hero, but also the hero of the West, with his courage, love of country, justice, the flag, and so on. I thought first that today’s children would not understand John Wayne’s films, that they would be bored by them, and that they would dislike his attitudes and values as contrary to the norms of woke superheroes celebrated by Hollywood.
I was amazed at what I found. First of all, the children watched Wayne’s films in their entirety, in complete silence, and understanding at all times what was going on: They laughed with John Ford’s humor, cried with Wayne’s defeats, and were thrilled by the military exploits led by the Duke. Even though the narrative rhythms are not the same as in contemporary films, even though the references to values or faith are much more present than in today’s cinema, and even though several of the films were in black and white, the children did not take their eyes off the screen for a moment.
The reason why, I came to think, is that they had never seen anything like it. A hero who doesn’t spend the whole time talking about diversity, tolerance, equality, and all the values we already know and adhere to. A hero who, for better or worse, believes in what he believes in and acts accordingly. A tough guy who makes mistakes, corrects himself, strives to be better, battles his own demons. These were emotions that the children recognized and connected to.
At the end of each movie, I would ask the kids: What do you think of John Wayne’s character in this one? “That he’s a good man who sometimes does bad things. But he always seems to do them for some greater reason: like friendship, love, or fulfilling his duties to his country,” the oldest child told me, after watching John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy. “I like his bravery. He doesn’t mind facing enemies alone,” said the youngest, alluding to the lone hero Wayne plays in so many of his movies. “It’s funny to me how he has such a hard time dealing with girls,” notes the 11-year-old, who has paid special attention to the romantic parts of these films, discovering that Wayne’s character struggles when encountering the world of femininity without despairing or hilariously exposing his brusqueness.
However, perhaps the most remarkable thing about John Wayne is the love he shows, paradoxical as it may seem, in the midst of his usual fighting, punching, and snarling. He is like that “good soldier” Chesterton spoke of: not fighting because he hates what is before him, but because he loves what is behind him.
In 1977, in one of his most famous books of aphorisms, the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila unknowingly foresaw the key to the 21st-century culture wars: “Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Every civilization dies of indifference to the peculiar values on which it is founded.” Many postmodern conservatives tend to think that things preserve themselves. But the so-called culture war, as its name suggests, is a war—not something you do on Twitter to kill time. Instead of actual corpses, it throws up victims and victors in the form of cultures and laws, justice or injustice, freedoms or cancellations. But, as in turf wars, cultural battles always end up shifting borders in one direction or another.
The whole of French author Michel Houellebecq’s work is, above all, an attempt to reflect the decadence of the West. The dangers envisioned by Houellebecq are not so much themselves a lethal threat to Western culture; rather they are a problem for a culture already in retreat, increasingly watered down, dissolved in the multicultural magma, and despised by those who should be defending it as their own. The Islamism that Houellebecq describes, which is seeping through most of Europe with the sponsorship or acquiescence of the political elites of the EU, would not be so threatening to the Old Continent if Europe remained true to its own tradition, its beliefs, its history and its outlook on life. It is the fact that the defenders of the Western heritage are too exhausted and uncertain to safeguard their own traditions that makes the enemies of the West a credible threat.
***
The heinous terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, succeeded in putting the risk of Islamic terrorism and the ideologies behind it back on the Western map. The infamous reaction of numerous pro-Palestinian leftist groups in Spain and the United States, demonstrating against the victims of the attack and joined by hundreds of thousands of college students and self-proclaimed members of “oppressed classes,” have once again made evident the decadence of the West that Houellebecq described so extravagantly and Gómez Dávila predicted.
Islamism has never ceased to threaten the West, and there have been numerous terrorist attacks—and thwarted attempts—in France, Belgium, and Spain in recent years. It is difficult for intelligence services to monitor extremism in Western countries with so-called no-go zones where the police can’t enter. Yet not even this disorderly and chaotic commitment to multiculturalism would be a problem if the inhabitants of these no-go zones did not have among their vital objectives the destruction of the West, the killing of Christians and Jews, and wiping Israel off the map, and if European elites did not persist in denial of this reality.
One of the great differences between how Israel is defending itself against Islamic terrorism and how the West defends itself is the former’s integrity. Israel clearly represents a culture of its own, a tradition of its own, which is also at the very root of Western civilization, and, more importantly, a moral code that limits man’s capacity for destruction. The Israelis have no regrets about their past, and attach an enviable importance to their national sovereignty. And to their credit, they refuse to lie about the nature and motives of their attackers.
On the contrary, both Europe and the United States—albeit at different levels—are immersed in a process of renouncing their own values. This process is much more advanced in European nations, largely because of the irregular success of the integration that the EU entailed, which in the end did not form a true pan-European union. Rather, it has only contributed to watering down the sovereignty of its component nations, making them, at least when it comes to identity, weaker.
In principle, there should be no such tension between patriotic and pro-European sentiments; after all, one can love one’s region or city while still loving one’s country. However, Europeanist elites work hard to limit the nationalism of their members. Perhaps the key, as Huddy, Del Ponte and Davies conclude in their article “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Support for the European Union,” is that “nationalism increases, and patriotism decreases, opposition to the EU.”
Patriotism is also going through difficult times in the United States. A Gallup poll in 2022 found that it is at an all-time low: only 38% of citizens were “extremely proud” to be American. Attacks against the American state come regularly now from both the left and the right, united by a common hatred of their own country, and apparently heedless of the corrosive effects of this kind of feeling. When citizens are emptied of their identity, they lose their sense of reality and risk losing their freedom as well.
When there is a Hamas attack in Israel, Israelis know instantly who is the culprit and who is the victim. When there is an Islamist attack in Europe, the disparity of voices in parliaments and in the media is deafening: The media speak of an isolated case of someone with possible mental problems and do their best to hide the nationality of the terrorist; some politicians demand that the attack not lead to anti-Muslim hatred—as if that has anything to do with it. Other politicians deny any connection to the immigration problems in Europe whenever the attacker is an immigrant or a Muslim refugee. If a European country decides to respond militarily or with police action after suffering a jihadist attack, a good part of its own citizens and political parties will demonstrate in the streets against whomever takes such a decision, and will withhold support to their own security forces.
At what point in history did we decide that it is more important to protect the aggressor than the attacked? In January of last year, a Moroccan illegal migrant broke into two churches in southern Spain with a machete shouting “Allahu akbar,” seriously wounded a priest and killed a sacristan, probably because he thought he too was a priest. The horrifying video quickly went viral on social media. Naturally, everyone condemned the attack, but almost no political party dared to consider that it was an attack against Catholics, and not some random attack. And they did not do so for an absurd reason: fear of being labeled as “extreme” or “right wing.”
Israel knows that it is not possible to stop terrorism if you deny the factual evidence, however unpleasant, even as Western politicians and intellectuals demand that Israel follow their lead and ignore the fact that the people who want to kill them do not share their values. In fact, they glory in the opportunity to slaughter them. A West that recognizes its own moral and cultural heritage should feel the attacks against Jews as an attack against the foundations of its own societies. It should also recognize the fierce patriotism of Israelis in the face of such threats as a virtue that we should rightly seek to share.
Since the UN is part of Hamas, who will observe the UN fighters in the event of a ceasefire? I would propose the United Federation of Planets, as they have intergalactic authority and phasers and 💩.
Why is everyone ignoring this part: "which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"? It was specifically called out in concurrent opinions by two of the Judges.