The corrupt and feckless United Nations is long past redemption, a decayed bureaucracy masquerading as a moral compass, animated by the same anti-Jewish bigotry that once destroyed Europe. Its latest farce, getting the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare Israel legally obliged to work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is a grotesque parody of justice.
Israel, as a sovereign state, has every right to decide which international bodies it engages with and under what terms. Yet the ICJ presumes to tell Israel that it must cooperate with an agency whose staff participated in the October 7 pogrom, a massacre in which Jews were butchered, burned, and raped in their homes.
It takes a special kind of moral blindness to look at that evidence and decide the problem lies not with UNRWA’s complicity but with Israel’s refusal to pretend that complicity does not exist.
The ICJ has just issued its advisory opinion, the legal world’s version of an op-ed, declaring that Israel, as an “occupying power,” must ensure that Gazan civilians’ basic needs are met and therefore must support UNRWA operations.
It found, with solemn pomposity, that Israel had “not substantiated” its claim that a “significant portion” of UNRWA employees are members of Hamas or other terrorist factions. This reveals the court’s moral illiteracy. It is not the quantity of collaborators that matters but the fact of collaboration itself. How many UNRWA staff members must help slaughter children before it counts as “significant”?
This ruling, of course, is meaningless. Israel is not an ICJ member and does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction. The ICJ also has no enforcement power, only the arrogance of presumption. It issues opinions; the UN repackages them as international law; and the world’s media, ever eager to play stenographer to anti-Israel propaganda, report the outcome as though it were a solemn verdict handed down from Mount Sinai.
The cycle is tedious and cynical. When the UN needs legal cover for its political vendettas, it turns to its own pet court - a chamber where kangaroos dress in ermine robes - and asks for an “advisory opinion.” The judges, appointed by the same governments that bankroll the UN’s dysfunction, deliver exactly what is asked of them.
Israel has rightly rejected the ICJ’s opinion. Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein said that Israel “fully rejects the politicization of international law” and “will continue to defend its citizens in accordance with its own obligations.”
In other words, thanks for the sermon, but we will take care of ourselves. It was the only rational response to a body whose authority is self-invented and whose moral compass points due south.
The US, which is also not an ICJ member, fired an impressive broadside against the ICJ’s finding, calling it “another corrupt ruling.”
The US State Department issued a statement saying:
“As President Trump and Secretary Rubio work tirelessly to bring peace to the region, this so-called ‘court’ issues a nakedly politicized, non-binding ‘advisory opinion’ that unfairly attacks Israel and gives UNRWA a free pass for its deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism. The ICJ’s ongoing abuse of its advisory opinion discretion suggests that it is nothing more than a partisan political tool, which can be weaponized against Americans.”
The UN’s hypocrisy is suffocating. The same UN that cannot enforce a single resolution against North Korea or Iran suddenly rediscovers its voice when the Jewish state is involved.
The same court that finds no jurisdiction over Chinese genocide in Xinjiang or Russian war crimes in Syria now claims the right to lecture Israel about whom it may trust to deliver food.
The very notion that the ICJ can compel Israel to cooperate with a Hamas-infested bureaucracy is as ludicrous as demanding that victims of arson employ their arsonist as fire marshal.
UNRWA, let us recall, is not a neutral humanitarian agency. It is the single most effective incubator of Palestinian radicalism ever created. It runs schools that glorify martyrdom and erase Israel from textbooks. It employs teachers who praise Hitler on social media. It allows Hamas to dig tunnels under its facilities and store rockets in its classrooms. During the October 7 pogrom, more than a hundred of its employees were directly involved in the massacres; others cheered them on.
Calling UNRWA an aid agency is like calling fentanyl a vitamin supplement.
And yet, the ICJ’s ruling effectively launders UNRWA’s reputation. By declaring that Israel has an “obligation” to cooperate with it, the court has given UNRWA an international certificate of legitimacy. The agency’s decades of incitement, corruption, and terror complicity are washed away in a single paragraph of legalese. The bureaucrats who helped radicalize generations of children can now drape themselves in the court’s imprimatur and call themselves victims of Israeli intransigence.
Israel banned UNRWA because every intelligence assessment pointed to infiltration, because every rocket cache and tunnel network pointed to collusion, because every murdered family in Sderot and Kfar Aza screamed that the “humanitarian” veil was a lie. If anything, Israel waited far too long to act.
That the ICJ now pretends to second-guess those judgments is an insult not only to Israeli sovereignty but to basic moral sanity. The court’s conclusion that Israel “failed to substantiate” its allegations says less about the evidence than about the blindness of those who refuse to see. When an international court cannot tell the difference between a relief agency and an accessory to mass murder, the problem is not the evidence but the court itself.
What the ICJ calls “obligations,” Israel rightly calls national suicide. The court can prattle on about humanitarian law while sitting in The Hague; Israel must live in the real world, where Hamas hides in hospitals, uses UN schools as weapons depots, and turns aid trucks into logistical lifelines for terror.
For all the talk of starvation in Gaza, the real famine is one of courage-the courage to say plainly that those who slaughter civilians for God and glory are not victims but monsters, and that those who abet them in the name of “relief” are accomplices, not humanitarians.
The ICJ’s opinion will change nothing. It is advisory, performative, and useless, a press release dressed up as jurisprudence. Its only effect will be to embolden the UN’s propaganda machine and give sympathetic journalists another stick with which to beat Israel.
Diplomats who never lifted a finger when Israelis were butchered in their homes but now find moral passion in aid logistics will cite the ruling endlessly. The same governments that fund UNRWA will congratulate themselves for defending so-called international law.
Israel should continue to treat the ICJ’s ruling with the contempt it deserves. It owes the UN and ICJ nothing. It owes the world explanations only when the world can look at Hamas-at the slaughter of babies, the rape of women, the abduction of families-and call it evil without hesitation or euphemism. Until then, The Hague’s lectures are just diplomatic graffiti.
The tragedy, of course, is not merely bureaucratic; it is civilizational. The UN was founded in the aftermath of genocide to prevent another one. It now spends its energy excusing the people who would commit it again. The institution that once vowed “never again” has become the platform for those who chant “from the river to the sea.”
The ICJ, for its part, serves as the high court of moral inversion, an international sanitarium where law is stripped of justice and justice of truth.
The entire spectacle-UN resolutions, ICJ opinions, press releases, and sanctimonious news coverage-is not about law or humanity. It is about power. The UN cannot destroy Israel militarily, so it wages lawfare through procedure and paperwork. It cannot refute Israel’s moral legitimacy, so it tries to erode it through legal theater.
An institution that has spent more than 75 years turning Jewish self-defense into a crime and Arab rejectionism into a career has no right to hector or lecture. The ICJ’s opinion will join a long archive of resolutions, condemnations, and decrees that make up the paper trail of our age’s moral cowardice.
The UN can keep its verdicts. The ICJ can keep its robes. UNRWA can keep its lies. Israel will keep its right to exist and to defend itself, with or without their permission.
Reposted from the Moral Clarity: Truths in Politics and Culture substack.
Nachum Kaplanholds a degree in politics from Monash University, Australia and has spent 30 years working as a journalist, commentator, speaker, and C-suite media strategist to Fortune 500 companies. He has held senior editorial positions and help set the strategic direction in some of the world’s leading newsrooms, including Reuters and International Financing Review, travelling extensively across Europe, the US, and the Middle East for his work.