Are You Going to Sacrifice the Entire Multilateral System?

The Greatest Moral and Strategic Test for the West in Decades

1.

Trita Parsi:
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:

2.

The weak Western response to Israel’s assault on Gaza is “one of the darkest episodes of international relations in the 21st century,” says Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.
@KenRoth
-Pedro Sánchez: Europe’s response to war in Gaza has been a failure | Pedro Sánchez | The Guardian
”Spanish prime minister says double standards over Gaza and Ukraine threaten to undermine west’s global standing.”

3.

In his open letter to Netanyahu, Macron openly brags about equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism[fn1] and then tells Netanyahu that his actions at the UN (including recognizing an unarmed Palestinian Bantustan) are meant “to transform the military gains Israel has achieved on regional fronts into a lasting political victory, to the benefit of its security and prosperity…to [secure] Israel’s … full regional integration in the Middle East … its normalization… [and] the end of Hamas.” France is not defending Palestinian freedom. It’s defending Zionism.
@CraigMokhiber
Sep 2, 2025

4.

“I will be making sure that any breaches of international law by Israel will be documented, recorded and reported back to the European Parliament. It’s time to break the blockade. Saoirse don Phalaistín.”
—Irish MEP Lynn Boylan
@PetraSchur

- - responding to: - -

@LNBDublin
Sep 2, 2025
On Thursday I’ll travel as an independent observer of the latest Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, alongside human rights lawyers. Our role is to monitor and record any breaches of international law by Israel.
These flotillas act where the international community has failed.

[fn1]
□ comment:
Instead of the fateful IHRA, we recommend adopting the The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism | JDA, which states:
”Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.”