Israel Studies

Many who care about Israel have learned to stop caring about international law. After all, for forty years, Arab states, members of the Non-Aligned Movement and the former Soviet Union, have ceaselessly and atrociously manipulated international law so as to turn Israel into a pariah state among the nations. The UN's infamous resolutions equating Zionism with racism are only the best known examples.¹ Each spring, when the UN Commission on Human Rights rolls out its allegations of Israeli human rights violations, this political body holds Israel to a far higher standard than it does states that have demonstrated far less commitment to the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.² For good reasons, many who love Israel have honed their contempt for international law.³

It can be hard to remember how much energy and optimism Jewish leaders invested in the development of international law in the two decades immediately following the Shoah. Those leaders recalled all too well what had happened when the first international legal system, the League of Nations, had disintegrated and left Nazi Germany without check, to treat its citizens in its own way. Now, it is hard to remember that it was the American Jewish Committee that convinced the states' representatives at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 that human rights should become one of the pillars of the UN's mission. Or that it was René Cassin, president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, who drafted the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or that a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term "genocide" and pushed through the UN Genocide Convention. Or that two generations of American Jewish leaders saw international law as one of the cornerstones of their Never Forget/Never Again program, consistent with core Jewish values like tikkun olam, ger lo tilhaz, b'tselem elohim, kevod haberiyyoth, mippene darkhe shalom, and ben adam l'havero. [End Page 115] For most of these leaders, support for internationalism in no way conflicted with their support for Jewish nationalism. They saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the State of Israel as the twin births of 1948—both dedicated to making Jews safe from persecution.⁴

If Israelis and their allies in the Diaspora have, since 1967, largely given up on international law, however, the rest of the world has not. The success of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia led, in 2002, to the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Even without American ratification of the ICC statute, international criminal law is arguably stronger now than at any time since the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Remembering Jews' historical commitment to international justice, we can only observe with grave concern the extent to which Israeli and international law have gradually gone their separate ways over the proper approach to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In particular, the issue of the settlements has raised the conflict between the two legal systems to its highest pitch. The tension has grown so acute that, if it is not alleviated soon, it may have severe consequences for Israel's future peace and security.