International “law” isn’t law

It is a fable that those insulated from harsh realities tell themselves.

As a follow-up to my No War Is Illegal post, this exchange between musician and break-out podcaster and YouTuber Winston Marshall and Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur says what needs to be said about international law not being law, eloquently and with demonstrative examples.

The transcript has been lightly edited to remove pause noises and words.

Winston Marshall

54:20 I’d love to take your impression on this. I’ll start by saying mine is international law is a mirage, in my opinion, and it’s only ever been might that keeps people acting moderately well behaved. It’s only been American hegemony that has kept the peace. And I don’t quite see the point in international law. If anything, international law seems to be an excuse for people like my prime minister, Keir Starmer, to do nothing and to be a coward, as he’s keeps landing on international law. What do you think about international law?

Haviv Rettig Gur

55:00 I share your skepticism and I share it deeply and viscerally.

I remember as a young man in the army, I was a soldier on the northern border for a short time and standing on that Israeli border looking into Lebanon and seeing villages of South Lebanon, Shia villages, ordinary places, populated by wonderful, decent, ordinary people. and knowing that a 100,000 missiles and rockets are buried under those villages, and knowing that Iran put them there, and knowing that Hezbollah manned them, and knowing that the purpose was to make sure that any Israeli attempt to clean out those missile arsenals—meant to set our cities on fire—would have to result either in many civilians fleeing or many civilians dying, and standing there and then seeing alongside places that we knew were Hezbollah outposts or maybe even, we knew, Hezbollah tunnels, were built alongside UNIFIL bases, alongside UN forces that were meant to challenge Hezbollah, prevent Hezbollah—disarm Hezbollah after 2006—but in fact just served as themselves human shields who refused to ever challenge Hezbollah and allowed the arming of this militia buried under this massive civilian population—everything that we’ve seen in Gaza Hezbollah planned in Lebanon—and asking myself, what the hell is the UN? What is it?

UN forces in the Israeli experience, they divided us from the Egyptians. And in the run-up to ‘73 and in the run-up to ‘67, the Egyptians just said leave and the UN forces all left and then they proceeded to have a war with us. The UN forces on the Golan Heights separating the Israelis and the Syrians: well, in the Syrian civil war, I think around 2013 roughly or 14, when Jabhat Al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, was coming down the Golan plateau, all those UN forces fled behind the Israeli military line. In other words, instead of separating Israel and Syria, they ended up being people that the Israeli army now has the headache of having to protect.

There is no such thing as international community and international law when the rubber hits the road.

International law did not stop the massacres in Bosnia. International law did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. International law never stops anything.

When Bill Clinton makes the decision personally, literally, to bomb Belgrade, the Bosnia war ends within two weeks—after four years of nobody doing anything because “international law”. International law is not a thing.

It won’t protect you if you’re a small people in this world and if you rely on it to protect you, it will fail you, guaranteed. There’s zero chance it will actually save you, protect you, or do anything useful for you.

So what actually is it? Why do people constantly talk about it? Well, then you go and look at who’s constantly talking about it.

The progressives teach us a very important lesson. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it claims it is, not what it pretends to be, but what it actually does in the world.

International law does one actual thing in the world. It allows very safe, very powerful people to feel very morally righteous about their safety and power. That’s it. It doesn’t actually do anything more than that.

Europe constantly talks about international law because it has zero challenges. If it actually had a security challenge, if Putin invaded Poland, defeated the Poles—which is I think unlikely because Poland has quite a significant military—but if it did that, and now Germany had to face directly the Russian army, you know what the Germans wouldn’t care about? They wouldn’t care about having a lawyers’ committee figure out every air strike before they dropped the bombs because they would be desperate and they would actually have to survive this thing and win this thing. And so international law only survives because Germany doesn’t think that’s ever going to happen and so it can just talk about the the great and enormous and self-congratulatory morality.

I want international law. I wish we had international law. I desperately wish we had international law.

You know what international law would mean? It would mean that Iran was constrained by the world from being able to ever try to exterminate my people from putting 200,000 rockets onto the villages of South Lebanon. That would have terrible costs for Iran. Costs Iran cannot afford.

Because that’s what law is. Law is enforceable. If you can’t enforce it, it’s not law. It’s a conversation. It’s a suggestion. It’s a best practice at best.

You know what law is? Law flows from the population that it imposes itself on. Right? I have a social contract with law. Community law enforcement infrastructure protects me. Every day they go out there and they catch the bank robbers and they catch the people speeding who threaten my teenage son so that he can drive on a safer road. And therefore, because they protect me, they can also demand of me things.

Well, international law can’t protect me. So, what right does it have to demand of me? What right does it have to tie my hands behind my back in a fight Hezbollah if it can’t do a damn thing to protect me from Hezbollah? And I happen to be powerful, self-made powerful. So, you know, I’m relatively safe from an international law that can’t protect me. But, you know what? You want to take this case to the other side of the aisle and not have an Israeli declare he doesn’t care about international law? Palestinians. What the hell has international law ever done for them? Has it protected them against Israel?

Has it protected them from Lebanon, which for decades had laws on the books that were basically the Tsarist oppression laws against the Jews in Eastern Europe for a century under the Russian Empire? They couldn’t own land. They couldn’t work in professions. Lebanon treated the Palestinian refugees for four generations in Lebanon the way the Tsarist regime treated the Jews that sent millions of Jews fleeing.

Where was international law to protect Palestinians? Either from us or from anybody. Where was that? What happened to that?

You come to the Arab world and you ask about international law. Nowhere do people scream and shout and yell about international law more than in the Arab world and in Iran. The Iranian foreign minister talked about international law this very week. Well, that’s an interesting point. Israel has been taken to the International Criminal Court to face charges of genocide and various other charges. And then you actually look around the Middle East and you notice, there are no Arab countries that are even members of the ICC, that signed the Rome Statute, except, I think, Tunisia.

The Arab world demands that Europe take in millions of refugees from Syria. The Arab world took in almost no refugees from Syria with a couple exceptions of Jordan and Lebanon. I think that’s it.

Well, why didn’t the Arab world take in any refugees from Syria? Why does Germany and and Britain and France have to take in more than all the Arab world combined, each one of them on any given month, more than the Arab world ever has? And then you realize that all these Western countries in the name of morality and international law are all signatory to the Refugee Convention. You know who’s not signatory to the Refugee Convention? Just about every Arab country.

International law is the law in which the people who would behave that way anyway—the good, the decent, the democratic—constrain their ability to face down those who just don’t care and don’t plan to ever follow these laws. It’s a bad idea, if only the good people can’t defend themselves, and that’s what international law has become.

It’s not even built. It inherently can’t be enforced and actually be the one thing that I need a law to be. The one thing that gives it the right to make demands on me, which is that it protects me. It doesn’t protect me. What right does it have to make any demands?

Exactly.