Photo: Volker Türk, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, briefs the U.N. Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East, alongside Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, April 4, 2025. Credit: Loey Felipe/U.N. Photo.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Another day, another libel against Israel in the name of international law.
The U.N. Human Rights Office has issued a report detailing what it calls Israel’s “systemic discrimination" against Palestinians in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as eastern Jerusalem.
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before," declared the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.
This is the lie constantly deployed by Israel’s enemies to demonize and destroy it.
It ignores the fact that every restriction on the Arabs living in the “West Bank" is imposed by Israel only to prevent the murderous terrorist attacks that the Arabs living there perpetrate against Israeli civilians almost every day.
Ludicrously, it accuses Israel of practicing apartheid-a system that discriminated against South Africa’s own citizens in every aspect of their existence-in territory that is not even part of Israel.
Even though the geopolitical map is currently in flux due to the convulsions in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and now, in Hezbollah’s close ally, Venezuela, the campaign to delegitimize Israel continues with the same old same old.
The entire global humanitarian nexus has long been weaponized to destroy Israel in an alternative and more promising sphere than military activity. This is because liberal universalism has become the West’s secular religion.
Western civilization is rooted in the moral and social principles of the Bible. For decades, however, progressives have turned against the West’s core principles and worshipped instead at the shrine of international law. This has become an overarching and unchallengeable political instrument to govern the world in the way the West tells itself it should be run.
The Trump administration’s exfiltration of Venezuela’s former president, Nicolás Maduro, from Caracas provoked instantaneous condemnation on the grounds that it was an illegal act since it breached international law. Such critics claim that international law underpins the “rules-based global order" that stands between the world and the chaos of “might is right" adventurism.
This is clearly an illusion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and marched into Ukraine while the rules-based order of international law was supposedly being upheld on the Security Council-by none other than Putin.
International law didn’t stop Syria’s former president, Bashar Assad, from butchering half a million of his fellow citizens, nor Iran’s Islamic regime from waging a terrorist war on the West for the past half-century. And China’s president Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan if, like Putin, he thinks he can get away with it.
Instead, international law is used against Israel in a manner that perverts law and corrupts justice in transnational courts, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Judge Julia Sebutinde, the ICJ’s Ugandan vice president who has persistently voted against the majority on the court in its rulings against Israel, has pointed out that it repeatedly exceeded its powers to make them.
As for the ICC, its issue of warrants in November 2024 for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, represented an outrageous abuse of process.
The move was based on false allegations fed to the court by NGOs that form a poisonous echo chamber of Israel-hatred around the United Nations-the central pillar of the universalist establishment and which is itself obsessively hostile to the Jewish state.
Yet according to UK Lawyers for Israel, the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan-who has subsequently been mired in torrid accusations of sexual harassment-“asked the court to ignore any information or evidence other than the material he originally filed in his applications for arrest warrants," which UKLFI say breached the ICC’s own rules.
A key reason why so many well-meaning people hate Israel is that they believe every word uttered by the humanitarian nexus of the United Nations, international courts and NGOs.
This nexus has become synonymous with conscience, and international law is its catechism. It’s believed to be true and right and good in the way that many religious believers regard their faith as totally beyond challenge.
What follows, therefore, is that because international law has turned against Israel, the Jewish state is widely believed to stand for illegality and evil. Not only is this as false as it is revolting, but international law is itself built on sand.
Its sources are set out by the ICJ. This defines it as being based on international agreements, conventions and custom, general principles of law “recognized by civilized nations" and the teachings of “the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations."
The U.N. charter, which is signed by all member states, is regarded as having the force of law. But this is tendentious.
International agreements like the U.N. charter are effectively contracts between parties that sign them and thus pledge to abide by their principles. That’s not the same as law, which it’s a duty to obey because its authority is absolute. By contrast, international law has no ultimate authority because it has no identifiable jurisdiction.
Certainly, the rule of law is essential to a civilized society. But that involves laws passed within the jurisdiction of a democratic nation and that are therefore rooted in the consent of the people.
International law, rooted instead in agreements between states, is essentially politics by other means.
As a result, it has become weaponized as “lawfare" by people with a malign agenda against Israel. Yet many lawyers, including progressive Jews, firmly believe that it’s a righteous means of constraining tyrants and bringing them to justice.
One such is the storied British law professor Philippe Sands, who represented “Palestine" in the case brought against Israel at the ICJ in 2024.
But the case he was fronting was a malicious one, based on patently false assertions about Israeli “apartheid," the illegality of Israeli “settlements" and other alleged Israeli violations of international law.
It also trashed previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs to resolve all issues through direct negotiations. It thus voided the fundamental international legal principle stipulating the need to gain Israel’s consent.
The case rested upon Sands’ assertion that the Palestinian Arabs, like all peoples, had an absolute right to self-determination.
But the Palestinian Arabs are not “a" people. Palestinian national identity was invented in the 1960s as a strategy for Israel’s destruction. Its real agenda lies in what the Palestinian Arabs teach their children-the goal of exterminating Israel and the cultural appropriation, or theft, of the Jews’ own unique and ancient history in the land.
The ICJ case is a glaring example of how international law repudiates justice and truth in concert with its “human rights" enablers.
At the center of this web of hate squats the United Nations.
People believe its self-designation as the ultimate custodian of peace and justice in the world. This is because it represents most of the world’s countries, and so plays into the pleasing fantasy of the brotherhood of man.
But most countries are dictatorships, kleptocracies or other human-rights abusers. These dominate the U.N. General Assembly, while the presence of tyrannical Russia and China on the U.N. Security Council makes a mockery of holding the world’s malefactors to account.
Last year, what was the number of times the General Assembly condemned Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, Turkey, Hamas, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon or Venezuela? Zero. The number of times it condemned Israel? 15.
In its increasingly brutal crackdown against the current insurrection in Iran, the Tehran regime has killed at least 36 protesters. The number of U.N. resolutions or emergency sessions about this? Zero.
International law isn’t the pathway to a fairer and more civilized world. In its ferocious weaponization against Israel, it has been turned into the negation of justice and the legal instrument of evil.
The rules-based order has expired in disgrace. The only “might" it constrained was the ability of the victims of aggression to defend themselves. The only rule that should govern tackling evil is instead to bring about its total defeat.