Signaled Virtue

The ICJ, despite being a UN organ, is not located in New York City. In fact, it is the only UN organ not located in New York City.

ICJ is located in The Hague, a city which also houses the International Criminal Court and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It has garnered a reputation for being the place where multiple attempts at defining and enforcing international law failed successively, until the League of Nations established the predecessor to the current ICJ.

It is, in other words, the city where international law happens. Unsurprisingly, it is in Western Europe.

I imagine most people alive today do not truly comprehend how the Allied victory in the Second World War shaped the world we live in. It is a vastly different world than would have been in the opposite case. The rules and norms which would have governed us would have been entirely different, and our lives would also be quite different. I would almost certainly not be alive.

But this is not a simple case of “the good guys won.” Because the “good guys” here — the Allies, or more broadly the West — collaborated with the Nazis in multiple documented instances.

The U.S. rejected a ship full of Jewish refugees, all of whom were sent back to Germany and a third of whom were slaughtered. Even if you know about that incident, which is not common knowledge, you might not know that Canada also turned them away.

You may know about the Vichy France “puppet” government, led by Marshal Petain. What you might not know is that this regime was voluntarily created, and voluntarily elected to collaborate with the Nazis to help exterminate Jews. 70,000+ French Jews were killed this way.

The local Nazi party of the Netherlands rounded up Jews for the Germans, collaborators arrested Norwegian Jews — I could go on but I think you get the point. While there are many instances of Western individuals and nations helping Jews, the Allies and the West (as much as their victory saved Jews from further destruction) did not have clean hands.

What does this have to do with the ICJ? For one, its placement in The Hague clearly states that international law is not only Western in nature, but also European (after all, it could have been placed in NYC, making it similarly Western but not necessarily European). So, despite many nationalities being represented on the Court, it is clear that the role of the Court is to enforce European norms, because those were the ones created in The Hague. Thus, Europe, through the ICJ, has a once in a lifetime opportunity to cleanse its hands of Jewish blood by focusing the world's attention on Israel's “genocide” and far less on their own actual genocide (which happened in the past unlike Israel's “ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people”). The reason they would want to do this comes about from their own political landscape.

A mixture of two things powers the Western political attitude towards Jews: guilt and resentment. In the first case, the West protects the Jews it once damned to the Nazi gas chambers. For as long as the narrative in the West is that the Jews should not have been subject to the Holocaust (an attitude which will disappear within the next 50 years), Westerners must also hold that what the West did to the Jews (namely, send them marching into the Holocaust) was also bad. This guilt is evident from a general lack of education among Westerners about the West’s collaboration with the Nazis. People in school learn about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s tyrannical rule, not about Vichy France being a voluntary puppet state or the U.S. and Canada sending back refugee ships full of Jews. That part tends to be understated, if taught at all, yet it is implicitly present whenever a Western country denounces a mass shooting at a synagogue or a particularly vile act of antisemitism.

The second point is resentment. For how long must these Jews demand our support? How much money must we pay them? How much special consideration must they receive? Will our debt to Shylock ever be repaid?

The revitalized right wing parties of various Western countries, including the Die Rechte (“The Right”) party, which came as close to a new Nazi party in Germany as was legally permissible, made resentment of the Jewish people part of their platform — in the avatar of Israel. Jews may have initially dismissed these traits as “just” neo-Nazi parties, not acknowledging that the first Nazi Party rose in a very similar way: by creating resentment against Jews. The difference here is that these modern parties have it easier because Westerners are already resentful of Jews for the guilt we induce.

Guilt breeds resentment — one might even say it’s a natural continuation. The guilty party feels as though their victim, despite all grievances having been in the past, continues to hold them liable for it without any hope of absolution. This is especially true with the Holocaust, for which many reparations have been made, but for which there can be no actual absolution. The resentful Westerner feels cheated thus, for having grieved the Jews their ancestors killed and for being supposedly asked to keep grieving forever, they perceive the existence of a double jeopardy or Catch-22 — an intergenerational grift perpetuated by the Jews. (This is, to my understanding, the premise of The Holocaust Industry, the seminal work of Holocaust denier Norman Finkelstein. I only know this from summaries and descriptions because I have no interest in reading it, so I may be wrong.)

This hypothetical Westerner’s perception is, of course, a delusion. No Jew is telling a Westerner to whip himself for the Holocaust. It is not the Jew who creates this resentment, but the Westerner’s own misplaced guilt: as a member of a nation which helped contribute to Jewish death, he feels somewhat responsible for it (or, alternatively, he feels that this Jewish death business doesn’t mesh well with the national story he was raised with), and finds that being tied to his nationality, he cannot erase this guilt. Resentment is the natural continuation.

So if the European supernation bears enormous guilt towards the Jews, leading to resentment, why wouldn’t they take the opportunity to recharacterize the Jews not as victims, but as oppressors, by charging them with genocide?

The answer is simple: Israel (a.k.a., the Jews) isn't committing genocide. There is no legal definition of genocide which permits the Gaza war (as of writing) to be characterized in this way. (There may be slightly more leeway with Hamas's actions on October 7th, but I am skeptical that a single day's work could ever be called a form of genocide.) If Israel's actions were characterized as genocide despite not coming even close to the legal definition, it would directly conflict with the much older understanding of proportionality in warfare (which Israel, as of writing, is following diligently, although the +972 Magazine article detailing the bombing of propaganda production outlets which do not house combatants is outside of my understanding of international law, and may in fact violate proportionality concerns). This would the landscape of international law stuck in an irreconcilable contradiction: warfare that is expressly legal by the standard of proportionality being considered illegal under a grossly expanded definition of genocide.

Of course, if international law has a contradiction in one of its most fundamental areas, it would stand to reason that judgments in this area could no longer be fairly (i.e., objectively) rendered. If that were to be the case, then in this area, international law would be rendered meaningless. Any military action which has an effect on a civilian population could be rendered simultaneously legal (proportionality) and illegal (genocide) so the Court would probably split by the largest bribes paid. The point of law is to be objective and outside these kinds of influences, in order for every party to be subject to a level playing field, which in the long run is enormously beneficial for everyone.

In the short run, however, this is terrible! For Europe to give up its chance to recontextualize history in the form of “those Jews we genocided ended up genociding other people, too, so was what we did that bad?” would result in a massive short term loss compared to a far more abstract long term gain. If the judges on the ICJ understand that, they will not charge Israel with genocide (assuming that, as is currently the case, Israel is not actually committing genocide). If they do not understand that – or if they do and just don't give a damn about long term consequences (“We won't live long enough to see that!”, they may think) – they will charge Israel in this way.