Matt Duss comments on the uncritical backing for Israel from most Western governments:
Repressive regimes claim that references to international law and the “rules based order” are simply cudgels for the West to use against adversaries while giving friends a pass. The US and European response to Israel’s assault on Gaza is proving them right. Disgraceful.
It isn’t just repressive regimes that level this charge. This is one of the problems many other governments have with Western governments when they define certain conflicts as being essential to the maintenance of world order and then completely ignore their own crimes and the crimes of their clients in other wars. Talking about the “rules-based order” has always been a way to apply rules selectively and inconsistently. If maintaining the “rules-based order” isn’t the opposite of upholding international law in practice, it is pretty close.
There have been a few honorable exceptions at the government level to reflexive Western backing. Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke out against Israeli violations of international law this week, and correctly described the treatment of Gaza’s population as collective punishment. This is the bare minimum of what one would expect from governments that profess to care about upholding international law, so it isn’t that impressive, but it is much better than the terrible response from the Biden administration.
The Biden White House is denouncing members of Congress for calling for a ceasefire and attacked calls for a ceasefire as “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” The State Department is reportedly telling its officials to avoid talking about ceasefires and de-escalation. Secretary Blinken has paid some lip service to the importance of respecting international law, but mostly by way of pretending that the Israeli government respects it when everyone can see that it doesn’t. Van Jackson reviewed the administration’s response and concluded, “The White House is putting its power on the side of vengeful ethnonationalist bloodlust and enforcing censoriousness on behalf of war derangement, once again.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
