Israel's Actions Shake Liberal World Order To Its Core

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Israeli human rights groups say the military had been deliberately blocking aid to give the population no choice but to leave northern Gaza. Israel may now be backtracking under pressure from the United States, which has given Netanyahu's government a 30-day deadline to increase the amount of aid it allows into Gaza or risk losing US weapons funding.

Undermining international norms and rules

Israel's war against Gaza, and now Lebanon, has repeatedly challenged the foundations of the liberal international rules-based order set up after the Second World War, as well as the tenets of international law, multilateral diplomacy, democracy and humanitarianism.

The norms of the liberal world order are expressed in various institutions, such as:

• the UN Charter
• the UN Security Council, with its notionally legally binding resolutions
• the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague
• the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of war
• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), among many others.

Recently, the ICJ ruled Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is illegal and ordered it to withdraw. In response, Netanyahu said the court had made a“decision of lies.”

In a separate case, South Africa brought a charge to the ICJ, alleging Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people over the past year. The world's top court has preliminarily ruled there is a“plausible” case for a finding of genocide, and said Israel must take measures to ensure its prevention.

At this juncture, however, human rights groups and others have argued that Israel has failed to comply with this order, thereby undermining one of the key institutions of the liberal world order.

This is compounded by the fact that few major democratic states have been willing to strongly condemn Israel's failure to comply with international law in Gaza – or have done so belatedly – let alone intervened in any concrete fashion.

In addition, the UN Security Council has failed – primarily due to the veto power exercised by the US – to take any tangible measures to enforce its own resolutions against Israel, as well as the rulings of the ICJ.

This is fuelling widespread perceptions of hypocrisy in relation to the accountability of notionally democratic states for alleged violations of humanitarian law, compared with other nations that don't have great power patrons.

In the early 1990s, for instance, the UN Security Council unanimously passed several resolutions against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait , followed a decade later by resolutions demanding Saddam Hussein's regime comply with weapons inspection mandates.

The US and its allies used these resolutions as the legal justification for their invasion of Iraq. Ultimately, no weapons of mass destruction were found. Then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later said the invasion of Iraq was illegal and contrary to the UN Charter.

However, dozens of UN Security Council resolutions concerning Israel have been passed and not enforced. Many others have been vetoed by the US.

The prosecutors of the ICC have also requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity (in addition to several Hamas leaders, now dead).

The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were met with indignation by some Western politicians. Yet, the West broadly praised the ICC's arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Furthermore, the US Congress attempted to sanction the court over the Netanyahu arrest warrant, once again underscoring the often selective way in which international law is applied by nation-states.

A crisis of legitimacy for the world order

Democratic states like to present themselves as the protectors, and sometimes enforcers, of the liberal world order, ensuring continued international peace and security.