Israel wins the battlefield. It is losing the bench and the ballot box

Israel can still win the war in Gaza. It cannot win the argument that follows it. That is the gap accountability advocates keep pointing to, and it is the gap Israel’s own allies in Europe are now widening. The war has split into three fronts. The military one, in Gaza, Israel controls. The legal one, in The Hague, and the diplomatic one, across European capitals, are slipping away. Military power buys territory. It does not buy legitimacy. And legitimacy, not tanks, is what determines whether a state can trade, arm itself, and sit at a table after the guns fall silent. South Africa’s genocide case was the catalyst. It turned a bilateral war into a multilateral legal question, and once […]