On Monday, Karim Khan, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for three senior Hamas leaders. Kyle Orton examines some procedural flaws in Khan’s case, and argues that the ICC’s investigation, with which Israeli officials cooperated, was in fact a “sham.” He then turns to the bigger picture:

The prosecutor, the judges, and the rest of the ICC bureaucracy are drawn from an international layer of highly ideological academics and lawyers committed to the “progressive development of international law.” . . . By definition, this cadre sees national sovereignty as the biggest impediment to its objectives, and is by disposition virulently hostile to claims based on traditional rather than rational-legal authority, to claims of national interest generally, to the use of force in pursuit of same, to nationalism or patriotism in any form, and really to democracy, seeing it as a destabilizing factor that produces undesirable elements in the international system—look at Donald Trump—which compete with their own magisterial impartiality.

This obviously makes the Jews a special problem, holding to their ancient creed of peoplehood centered on the Land of Israel. . . . During the Enlightenment, Jews were attacked for stubbornly holding on to their insular, backward particularism. . . . The language has changed, but the theme of Jews as not only holdouts against the tide of universalist progress, but as a cosmic danger to the entire enterprise, has remained within Western elites, whose members now come from the four corners of the earth and staff the ICC.

The next step, of course, is to use the ICC against the United States and other democracies. Orton concludes:

As with so many things that start as problems for Jews, “international law” of the modern kind, embodied in the ICC and United Nations institutions like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is a problem for us all.

Observing Hizballah’s increasingly effective use of rockets, drones, and anti-tank missiles against not only the Israeli civilian population but also strategically sensitive targets, Yaakov Lappin argues that the IDF’s campaign of limited strikes and the killing of key commanders is insufficient:

Hizballah’s widespread attack on the north on Wednesday demonstrates that the core threat lies not in any individual commanders but in the substantial firepower array that is entrenched deeply throughout 200 southern Lebanese Shiite villages, as well as in Beirut and in the Bekaa Valley.

Hizballah’s military-terrorist infrastructure and expansive manpower pose the largest conventional threat to Israel. The limitations of targeted strikes as an approach are becoming increasingly evident, as [are those of] IAF’s ongoing campaign to strike at Hizballah weapons-storage centers and command posts in a limited fashion, in line with the Israeli war cabinet’s directive.

Yet, short of invading southern Lebanon, Jerusalem has few other options. Lazar Berman argues that the time is far from ripe for an all-out war:

The challenges the IDF would face in Lebanon would be orders of magnitude greater [than in Gaza]. Hizballah has far more advanced anti-tank weapons and attack drones. Fighting in prepared defenses in open territory, they would be able to target IDF forces from kilometers away.

The IDF could take every square inch of territory ten—even twenty—kilometers from the border, and Hizballah would still be able to rain rockets down across Israel. . . . And it would end in a ceasefire agreement, one that residents of the north are unlikely to put much stock in.