Drawing in part on her own experiences, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains the circumstances that led to the creation of institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose prosecutor last week requested arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister along with the senior leaders of Hamas. This move, she argues, stems from the simple fact that the court “is not fit for purpose,” and not intended to judge the activities of democratic countries like Israel with functioning judiciaries. What is happening now, she explains, is “a concerted effort to weaponize the court to target the Jewish state,” which originated with the Palestinian Authority itself and enjoyed the eager collaboration of the previous prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.

What are the likely results of this perversion of international law? Stephen Daisley explains:

Granting these warrants would require ICC signatory countries such as the UK to arrest the men if they set foot in their territory and hand them over. The likely effect of their arrest would be to cripple Israel’s war effort and throw the country into political chaos. . . . The applications relating to Hamas leaders are little more than fig leaves. Terrorist organizations can function pretty well despite arrest warrants. . . . Lawfare is a mere inconvenience to terrorists but to democrats it is a grave threat to their ability to lead their country.

Daisley calls for a counterattack:

Israel and its supporters should begin in earnest a campaign arguing for mass withdrawal from the Rome Statute, which would effectively abolish the ICC. The very notion would be scandalous to law professors, the human-rights industry, and progressives but the ICC has existed for just 22 years. . . . The ICC has contributed little to the upholding of the Fourth Geneva Convention in its two decades of existence and has evolved into a thoroughly political organization.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].