One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Waiting on a Western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the West means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative—as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other—demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the West is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine. And so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the International Court of Justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government—whose police forces, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire—come to Israel’s defense at the court.