1.
Justice seeks truth and that is man's highest purpose – to seek justice. Moses explained that when the people came to him to judge even on petty matters, they came, in fact, "to inquire of God!" But the International Criminal Court in the Hague does not seek truth but rather Israel's head. It illustrates the words of the prophet: "And he hoped for justice, but behold, injustice; For equity, but behold, iniquity!" (Isiah 5:7) The Jews are disrupting the world order that we have been accustomed to; they refuse to accept the role of victims assigned to them. Worse yet, they fight their enemies and teach the world a lesson in eradicating evil. This is inexcusable.
The verdict of the justices was determined at the start of the war. When the founding prosecutor of the ICC, Louis Moreno Ocampo, tweeted that Israel is planning to kill thousands and bring an end to Hamas' rule, stated that IDF operations in Gaza were a "pogrom" and determined that killing and starvation of civilians was a "criminal response" to Hamas with all the inherent legal implications.
2.
Nevertheless, we are an eternal people, our enemies come and go, while we remain and advance. We have a moral duty in the world. Western civilization, the free world and all of humanity, are threatened by great forces seeking to subjugate them in the name of a cult of death. The blindness is so great that democratic countries sent condolences to Iran this week over the death of the hangman from Tehran, who caused the deaths of tens of thousands of his people. The United Nations lowered its flag to half-mast, a sign of mourning for the death of the man who dedicated his life to war not only against Israel but against the West.
Immediately after Isaiah talks of justice that becomes injustice, he defines precisely what he saw when he speaks of those "who vindicate the one who is in the wrong in return for a bribe, and withhold vindication from those who are in the right." (Isaiah 5:23). The bribe in our case is a very large one, there is a lot of business to be done with the Axis of Evil, even in funding elite universities in the West. But bribery is not only about money but also about prejudgment (It is said of a person with a predisposition that "he is biased"). Antisemitism nurtures ideological bribery until it blinds many in the West, preventing them from seeing that it is not only Israel that faces evil, but that they themselves are in even greater danger.
3.
Ever since October 7, public discourse in Israel has revolved around the issue of the responsibility of our leaders, political and military. We have heard almost nothing about the responsibility of the judiciary. For years, the courts, in the name of human rights, held back the IDF in the war against terror. Justice Aharon Barack justified this on the grounds that democracies sometimes have to fight with one hand tied behind their back. The idea is an interesting one, and, indeed, we should not do everything that is permissible for our enemies. The question is where the boundary lies. Here things depended not on the law – that is, on citizen consent to the way the country operates – but on the worldview of the judges. It is in light of their worldview that they toughened open-fire regulations, prevented the IDF from employing proven methods of operation, and blocked effective attempts to defend the Gaza border fence. The demonstrations held along the border fence some years before the attack, were intended to gather intelligence and accustom the IDF to the terrorists' "non-violent" approach. We have fulfilled the words of our sages about those who become compassionate to the cruel eventually becoming cruel to the compassionate (Midrash Tanhuma).
The pretension of legal scholars to rule exclusively on philosophical and moral issues, and to skip the public debate and its conclusions, is also related to this great failure of October 7. Because now, as we face a legal test from the nations of the world, the righteousness of our court and the restrictions it imposed did not stand in our favor. The world was not convinced by Israel's justice system or by the unprecedented humanitarian aid we provided to our enemies during war. True, there are things we do by moral choice and without a doubt there can be no comparison between the monsters of Hamas and the soldiers of the IDF. However, we have now found out that some of these restrictions were exaggerated, and they led to the extension of the war and exacted an unnecessarily high cost in human lives.
4.
In Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958), the British-Jewish philosopher warned of the danger of totalitarian ideas being neglected precisely by those trained to think critically about ideas. He never saw the occupation of elite universities by supporters of the contemporary version of Nazism, with the public or tacit support of some professors. It is as if Berlin predicted our times: when the critique of fanatical social and political doctrines in the name of political correctness is neglected – and worse yet, the West, led by Israel, becomes the source of global evil – these ideas "sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism."
Berlin noted the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine's warning in the mid-19th century to the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: "philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization." Heine was referring to Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," which served as "the sword with which European deism was beheaded." Heine also spoke of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social moral work as "the bloodstained weapon" which, in the hands of Robespierre, had destroyed the old regime in the French Revolution. Chillingly, Heine prophesied that the romantic beliefs of the German philosophers Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling "would one day be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of the West."
5.
Berlin asked the question whether, in view of these historical facts, professors (or jurists, for that matter) can wield such fatal power "may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?"
And indeed, where are the voices of the truth-seekers of our generation, intellectuals who understand the existential danger facing the West, who see clearly that is Israel fighting not only for its survival, but for the survival of the entire free world? Where are the intellectuals, academics, and jurists who will hold up a mirror in the face of the hypocrisy of the world and the international legal system?
