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HOWARD EPSTEIN: NOT A BAD DAY AT THE HAGUE

This is the second (and last, for now) of my reports from Eretz Yisrael, where every day is suffused with grief, and some days with suffocating grief as when we lost 21 soldiers in one moment. Yet, within an hour’s drive of the center, the country functions as if there were no war. We even find some amusement in matters of concern to us.

 

The eruption into our world of self-appointed experts is a black comedy that was catalyzed by Jewish suffering on Black Shabbat, then swiftly forgotten by all bar the victims’ families and co-religionists. Within the following week, those who, bizarrely, identified with the butchers and rapists proclaimed themselves experts on genocide and were convinced that the IDF was inflicting it upon the population of Gaza, one hundred percent of them presumed to be one hundred percent innocent.

 

(As an interesting aside, the Metropolitan Police, currently being vilified for its failings in policing London, have been collecting evidence about war crimes they suspect may have been committed in the Levant. Possibly to lend gravitas to their arrogating to themselves such grave responsibilities, yet careless as to any image of impartiality, the Met – apparently now experts on the Koran and its interpretation – explained why it had failed to arrest those calling for Jihad against Jews. It claimed that there are many interpretations of the term, “holy war” apparently not commending itself to the boys in blue quite as readily as to the thousands on the streets. The mobs, who demand also that the land between “the river and the sea” – no, not the Thames and the Irish – be rendered Judenrein, understand Jihad all right. (Hitler did too, but in his dreams, it was a matter of Judenrein from the Rhine to the Pacific.)

 

To return to the bagatelle du jour, genocide, the South Africans, unarguably experts on apartheid, presumed that status conferred on them unique insight into mass slaughter. Possibly seeing no difference between the two, they applied to the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) for a ruling that Israel’s response to the horrors of 7 October amounts to genocide. (Through the looking glass, one perceives Hamas trumpeting the horrors of that day as merely the first of many until its raison d’être – the erasure of all Jews from the planet – has been fulfilled.)

 

There was considerable apprehension in Israel as to the ICJ’s response, not because we thought the IDF had acted unlawfully, as we know we have the most moral army ever, with lawyers embedded in every battalion, but because the ICJ is part of the United Nations, which is famously anti-Israeli. (Every year, more UN resolutions are passed condemning the Jewish State than as regards all the other nations of the world.) So even a minor miracle from the UN is momentous for Israel.

 

There is no expectation for some years of a verdict either way on genocide in Gaza, despite some 25,000 Gazan deaths and other casualties (assuming, irrationally, that Hamas figures can be trusted). The immediate apprehension was that the court might make an interim order disruptive of IDF strategy. Yet no call for a ceasefire was heard from the court. As the Jerusalem Post headlined it: “ICJ badmouths Israel for 35 minutes, then Israel wins”.

 

The result was even better than that. In perhaps the most beneficent outcome for Israel at the UN since the Jewish State was voted into existence by its General Assembly in November 1947, Israeli allegations were taken at face value: that a dozen United Nations Relief and Works Agency (“UNWRA”) staff took part in the pogroms of Black Shabbat.

 

Astonishingly, countries that have been funding UNWRA since the early 1950s announced that, pending the outcome of an investigation, they were suspending aid to the UN agency. So far, the chequebooks have been closed in Finland, Italy, Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK. Lord Cameron’s Foreign Office (and I hope you are sitting at this point) stated, “the UK is appalled by allegations that UNRWA staff were involved in the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, a heinous act of terrorism that the UK government has repeatedly condemned”. More countries are expected to follow.

 

Israel has complained for years that UNWRA, which exists only for the benefit of Palestinians, has been in cahoots with Hamas. (Quelle surprise! Most of the agency’s 30,000 or so staff are Palestinians.)

 

Far from giving fishing rods to UNWRA and telling them to teach the Palestinians to develop their economy, the donors have provided vast supplies of fish, thereby increasing dependence on aid and their sense of victimhood. How much fish? In 2021, the USA gave over US$338m; Germany US$176m. These gifts to UNRWA aggregated about half of the total: over one billion US dollars for one year. Taking into account inflation, and assuming 2021 to have been an average year, one might reasonably assume that, over its life, UNWRA has frittered away some US$75 billion. Out of an abundance of caution, let’s discount that by one-third the West still appears to have treated the Palestinians via UNWRA to over US$50 billion, freeing up other inward aid to be spent mostly in a replica of the London Underground.

 

A significant defector from the movement to defund UNWRA is, with no surprise, Ireland. The Irish are nothing if not consistent in their distaste for Israel. Could it be that old cause of antisemitism, jealousy? After all, Eire achieved its independence a generation before Israel and had little to show for it, before it became a supplicant member of the EU and one of its major beneficiaries. Whilst Israel has built a diversified economy, Ireland now excels at customer support for Amazon, Microsoft, and the like. Nul points.

 

Israel has to report back to the ICJ next month on the Court’s warning that Israel should facilitate humanitarian aid, preserve evidence for probes of alleged war crimes and prosecute Israelis who engage in illegal incitement against Palestinians, whilst … ahem … not committing genocide. The ICJ judges seem blissfully unaware that all that has always been Israeli policy.

 

© January 2024, Howard Epstein (www.howard-epstein.com)