Are You Going to Sacrifice the Entire Multilateral System?

The Greatest Moral and Strategic Test for the West in Decades

At this point, as you pointed out[fn1], there is no doubt this is a genocide. You have several different UN agencies coming to that conclusion. We have the largest association of genocide scholars voting 86% that this is a genocide, and I am increasingly convinced that

it is not about whether the ICJ will find Israel guilty of genocide,

but rather how will the rest of the world react to that?

And will that tear apart many of these different institutions?

The ICC is already now essentially under tremendous challenge, and perhaps the ICJ will as well, and if that happens, what is left of the current multilateral system?

And I want to point to you that it’s not an argument that ICJ shouldn’t find them guilty of genocide, if that is what the evidence shows. It absolutely has to.

But the question is then for—the ball is then in the Western court.

Are you going to sacrifice the entire multilateral system, all of these institutions in which Western states actually had a pivotal role in creating, for the sake of enabling Israel to continue to commit a genocide?

Is that the interest of Western states?

Is that what’s more important to Western states than to have some degree of a functioning multilateral system that ensures that conflicts by and large are minimized, prevented when possible, which enables collective collaboration against collective threats such as pandemics, climate, are you going to sacrifice all of that in order to protect Israel while it is committing a genocide?

That is going to be probably the greatest moral and strategic test that the West will have faced in decades, and I’m unfortunately not convinced that it will make the right choice!

[fn1] Source: Trita Parsi: Why Europe’s Sanctions Make an Israeli-Western War on Iran Unstoppable YouTube, India & Global Left