When international law is applied to Israel, Shany Mor recently wrote, it doesn’t function like law at all, in the sense of general rules applied consistently to particular cases. Another basic requirement for a legal system is that judges are impartial and free to evaluate cases on their merits. But this too is something the International Court of Justice lacks, as Peter Berkowitz observes:

The court’s bylaws call for its fifteen judges to “be elected from among persons of high moral character, who possess the qualifications required in their respective countries for appointment to the highest judicial offices, or are jurisconsults of recognized competence in international law.” But the qualifications for appointment to their highest judicial offices differ from country to country. In particular, the qualifications in free and democratic nation-states differ from those in authoritarian regimes as do the qualifications in nation-states that protect religious liberty differ from those in countries that don’t.

Currently, the court includes judges from the world’s two most powerful authoritarian regimes, Russia and China. Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China oblige judges to put the regime’s interest in the nation’s supremacy ahead of human rights and international law.

[Moreover], the neglect by the ICJ and member nations of war crimes and genocide elsewhere in the world erodes the court’s claim to administer impartial justice. Last November, the ICJ issued its first ruling against Syria, requiring it to prevent torture. Why, for example, has it taken the court and member nations twelve years after the commencement of the Syrian War – which has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced 12 million people (more than half of the country’s population), and produced 5 million refugees abroad—to address war crimes in Syria?

Israel’s attorney Tal Becker admirably used his opening statement not only to contest the charges, but also to turn the tables on the accusers. In Berkowitz’s summation, “it is the complainant South Africa that should be directed by the ICJ to take remedial action, because of its close relations over many years with [Hamas], an organization whose very reason for existence is, in defiance of the Genocide Convention, to destroy Israel.”

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.