Craig Mokhiber examines how the US-Israel assault on international law threatens global rights as Israel’s legal impunity begins to crumble.
The Israel exception to international law is not new. It predates even the establishment of the Israeli regime itself, constructed as it was in the halls of imperial power more than a century ago, and buttressed by Western powers (and the vassal regimes they control) ever since.
The implanting and sustaining of a deeply racist, fundamentally violent, relentlessly expansionist, and essentially lawless colony on the ashes of indigenous Palestinian society could not occur without external guarantees of impunity. The United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and other Western powers have dutifully ensured that impunity for decades, even at the expense of their own interests and resources.
But two things have changed dramatically in the period of expedited genocide that has marked the past three years in Palestine, changes brought on one side by the ruthlessness or the US-Israel Axis, and on the other by the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and the unrelenting solidarity of their allies across the globe. Today, as a direct result of the genocide in Palestine, the international legal system is in tatters and, nevertheless, Israeli impunity is beginning to crumble.
Assaulting the Law to Prevent Justice
First, in defense of its genocidal and expansionist project in Western Asia, the US-Israel Axis has launched a systematic campaign to dismantle the international institutions built up since the Second World War to protect human rights, prevent aggression, and advance international law.
The US began the assault by repeatedly using its veto to hogtie the Security Council so that it could not intervene in the genocide in Palestine. It then aggressively pressured the Secretary-General and UN agencies into relative silence (and sometimes complicit parroting of Israeli propaganda), maliciously smeared others, defunded many, and withdrew from several more.
And in yet another unprecedented (and unlawful) assault on the international system, the US imposed draconian sanctions on international actors and institutions that dared to try to hold the Israeli regime accountable for its crimes. Sanctions were imposed on the United Nations human rights rapporteur on Palestine, leading Palestinian human rights organizations, and on the ICC, its judges and prosecutors.
For its part, the Israeli regime literally turned its guns on the UN itself, hijacking and obstructing UN aid, destroying UN facilities, confiscating UN property, attacking UN convoys, murdering UN staff in their hundreds, and abducting, imprisoning, and torturing many more.
Israeli “diplomats” trolled the aisles of the UN General Assembly to harass delegates of other countries, delivered outrageous speeches from the podium, and mocked the organization with a series of clownish stunts in official UN meetings. Elsewhere, Israeli spy agencies were deployed to spy on and intimidate international judges and prosecutors.
At the same time, to challenge the framework of international law itself, the Axis adopted a strategy of repeated, audacious, broad daylight violations of the highest (jus cogens and erga omnes) rules of international law, including the two supreme crimes of the modern era – aggression and genocide. As the two rogue states dared the world to stop them, they perpetrated the first live-streamed genocide in history and carried out blatant acts of aggression across Western Asia, with attacks on Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and beyond.
And the US would extend the assault on international law beyond the region, with attacks on Venezuela and the abduction of its President and First Lady, the summary execution of hundreds of boaters in the Caribbean, bombing raids on Somalia and Nigeria, and brazen human rights violations against migrants, dissidents, and human rights defenders inside the United States (especially those speaking out against the genocide in Palestine).
The message has been clear: the Axis is not subject to international law and would crush any international institution that dared to enforce or even assert its principles vis-à-vis the Israeli regime or its US sponsor.
And that there are no more redlines – not against aggression, not against genocide, and not against assaults on international institutions themselves. Israeli regime impunity would not be challenged, and its project of genocide, aggression, unlawful occupation, and seizure of neighboring territories would be defended at all costs, up to and including the destruction of the international legal order itself.
The final nail in the coffin of that order was to be revealed soon enough. Confident that most governments would not dare to challenge the Axis in the midst of its global rampage, the US would complete its assault with an open declaration of 21st-Century imperialism.
US President Donald Trump, in his personal capacity, would create an imperial council (dubbed, in Orwellian terms, “The Board of Peace”), headed by Trump himself, with the direct participation of the Israeli regime, and staffed by a rogues’ gallery of corrupt former officials, international grifters, compromised apparatchiks, Israel regime loyalists, authoritarian leaders of vassal states, and Trump cronies, to consolidate the genocide in Gaza and the erasure of its people, to seize its resources, to reward the perpetrators of the genocide, and to subjugate the survivors.
Importantly, the UN would be disempowered, sidelined, and ultimately replaced, and, in an ultimate act of humiliation of the organization, would itself be forced to bend the knee to the Trump board.
That surrender would come in the form of Security Council resolution 2803, adopted in November of 2025, a resolution that was both unlawful and ultra vires under the UN Charter and under binding norms of international law, and which purported to hand over control of Gaza, its people, its resources, and its future to the co-perpetrators of the genocide itself.
15 state members representing all regions voted on the resolution. Not a single veto. Not a single no-vote. Not a single member of the Security Council was courageous or principled enough to defend international law, the UN Charter, or the human rights of the Palestinian people. A self-inflicted wound that may well prove fatal to the UN and to the very idea of international law on which it is built.
Today, it is simply undeniable that international law, international institutions, and the international system itself have been dramatically transformed, indeed, severely weakened, perhaps forever, in just three agonizing years.
Cracks in the Wall of Israeli Impunity
But the world has witnessed a second fundamental change since the acceleration of genocide in Palestine in October of 2023. The US-Israel assault on the international system has simply come too late to save the Israeli regime.
Significant cracks have appeared in Israel’s wall of legal impunity for the first time in the history of the regime. Those cracks have been brought by principled Palestinian resistance and sumud, by a massive popular movement of solidarity across the globe, and by unprecedented action in official intergovernmental institutions, for which they are now under attack.
Those institutions include the three most important norm-based organizations at the international level, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.
Explicit findings of genocide have been made by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, by its dedicated Commission of Inquiry, and by a host of other specifically mandated UN experts.
The country itself is on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and that court has issued a series of binding orders against the regime and has issued a separate opinion declaring the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory entirely unlawful, finding racial segregation and apartheid, condemning the cooperation of other states with the regime, and demanding that the occupation be ended fully and quickly.
In a separate case, Germany is on trial at the ICJ for complicity for its open support for Israel regime crimes. The Israeli regime’s leaders have been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). And cases are being brought in national courts around the world to challenge Israeli impunity.
What’s more, the findings of these bodies mirror an unprecedented global consensus of international experts, jurists, and leading non-governmental organizations – as well as of the global public – that the Israeli regime is guilty of apartheid, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
In other words, despite continuing support for the Israeli regime from the US empire, from corrupt governments, and from complicit corporations, and despite dedicated US efforts to dismantle the international legal system on Israel’s behalf, the Israeli regime and the Zionist ideology upon which it is based have definitively lost the battle for legitimacy for the first time in decades. Israel has been judged both by international institutions and by the court of public opinion to be a criminal state. And calls for freedom for Palestine have been globalized.
The Frontline in the Battle for Human Rights
Nelson Mandela’s admonition that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” and the cry of demonstrators around the world that the freedom of all of us depends on freedom for Palestine, are more than just expressions of solidarity. Rather, they are statements of fact.
The US-Israel Axis is determined to dismantle human rights protections everywhere, at both the national and international levels, in order to ensure Israeli impunity.
In that sense, the struggle for the rights and freedom of the Palestinian people is literally a struggle for the rights and freedom of all of us. If Palestine falls, the Post-Second World War system of international law falls with it. And that portends a truly dark era, a world without moral or legal redlines, not only for the people of Palestine, not only for the peoples of Western Asia, but for all of us.
– Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer, writer and former senior UN official, and a member of the Gaza People’s Tribunal. He spent over thirty years at the United Nations before leaving in October 2023 with a widely read letter warning of genocide in Palestine and calling for equality, human rights and international law.