https://www.frontpagemag.com/parchment-barriers-wont-keep-israel-safe/
Last week during a pause in hostilities Israel started exchanging Palestinian Arab prisoners for Hamas’s Israeli hostages. Obviously, the “international community” has been pressuring Israel to make this concession, one that most Israelis know is dangerous, given the moral hazard of rewarding Hamas’ war-crimes, the certainty that any stop in the fighting will allow Hamas to regroup and rearm, and the Palestinian Arabs’ sorry track-record of serially violating every “agreement” it’s made with Israel, as well as transnational covenants like the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, Hamas is already violating the provision of the agreement that forbids evacuated Gazans from returning to the north.
The broader issue, however, is the continuing fealty that Western nations have to the “rules-based international order,” one predicated on dubious, if not empirically falsified assumptions about state behavior and human motivation; and on a questionable faith in “diplomatic engagement” and treaties to deter aggression and keep the peace. No global conflict illustrates this truth more than the war between Palestinian Arabs and Israel, one that has been going on for at least 75 years.
The failure of the postwar “new world order” and its most consequential institution, the UN, was obvious a few years after its creation, and Israel bore the brunt of that failure. After the Arabs rejected UN Resolution 181 in November 1947, and Israel declared itself a state six months later, five Arab states, four of whom were signatories to the United Nations Charter, invaded Israel.
This resort to violence was a blatant repudiation of the “rules-based international order” and its fundamental principle that no nation should use force to seize territory from another nation. Yet the challenge of this bedrock principle by four UN members was shrugged off, and offenders were not sanctioned or punished.
Several weaknesses of the “new world order” also were exposed, the most serious being the absence of any reliable or consistent provisions for enforcing the UN’s resolutions. Member states’ national interests and passions, no matter how illiberal or totalitarian or destructive, took priority over principle. The UN had begun its transformation into what Churchill feared in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech: “a cockpit in the Tower of Babel.”