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.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.