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.”

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.