(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Melanie Phillips - A recent hearing of the Commons foreign affairs committee demonstrated that Israel's defenders and its critics appear to inhabit entirely different planets. The committee's chair, Labour MP Emily Thornberry, asked, "What's the optimistic future for a Palestinian mother in Gaza, what's the best thing that could happen?" In any moral universe, the best thing that could happen would be for the mother to stop telling her children that their duty was to murder Jews and martyr themselves in the process, as so many Palestinian Arab women boast of doing. For some committee members, there were simply no facts that could dent their certainty that Israel was behaving like a rogue state. When lawyer Natasha Hausdorff, legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, stated that the IDF observed higher standards of humanitarian law than any other army in the world - a view backed by numerous international military experts - Labour MP Alex Ballinger dismissed this as "outrageous" and "a staggering claim." There's now an unchallengeable idea among the educated classes that trans-national legal bodies and laws stand for truth and conscience. But that's not how it works at all. Trans-national bodies - such as the UN or International Criminal Court - represent a world dominated by tyrannies and dictatorships, many of which want democratic Israel destroyed. That's why the UN, particularly UNRWA (its agency for Palestinian refugees), seems to have been infiltrated by Hamas, appoints human rights abusers to its Human Rights Council, and employs people with a record of antisemitic statements, such as the rapporteur on the "Occupied Palestinian Territories," Francesca Albanese. At a deeper level, the notion that developed after the Holocaust that international laws and institutions would deliver justice was fundamentally flawed. Law derives its authority from being passed by parliaments representing the will of the people. International laws and tribunals, which have no such inherent jurisdiction, lack that legitimacy and therefore inescapably become instruments of politics rather than law.
2025-05-11 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive