Israel and Universal Jurisdiction

By Prof. Tony Hall
Source

In the Oct. 26edition of False Flag Weekly News it was reported that law makers in Israel were considering a new statute that would criminalize BDS supporters including by subjecting them to heavy jail time.

In our brief exchange on the story, Dr. Kevin Barrett and I considered the possibility that there would be efforts to project the same law to people outside Israel in the name of universal jurisdiction. Colleen McGuire took the discussion further by pointing to the fine of $18,000 imposed by an Israeli court in a civil action involving two BDS activists, women of both Palestinian and Jewish ancestry. Their letter persuaded New Zealand performer Lorde not to perform in Tel Aviv. The civil case was brought by a group with tickets to the concert who claim to have been traumatized by Lorde’s decision.

Although there is not now any means for the Israeli court ruling to be enforced in Aotearoa (New Zealand) the ruling nevertheless moves the markers and sends a signal of where juridical trajectories are being pointed by powerful interests.

The concept of universal jurisdiction is a two-edged sword for the Israeli government. On the one hand the advancement of the concept through the development of enforcement techniques poses threats that IDF and related Deep State operatives might be apprehended and tried outside Israel for international crimes committed inside Israel and the territories it controls. On the other hand, the application of the principles of universal jurisdiction might offer a means of exercising and expanding the imperial powers inherited from the old Anglo-American empire.

These ideas jumped out at me when I recently read a Mondoweiss story beginning with an account of the Israeli government’s reply to an Israeli Supreme Court ruling concerning the new Regulation Law. It is aimed at trying to regularize the nature of land title beneath illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. The Mondoweiss story began as follows:

The Israeli government has recently claimed that it can “legislate anywhere in the world”, that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”, and that “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”. This was written in an official response letter to the Supreme Court last month.

Questions concerning the reach of Israeli jurisdiction in the international community were front and centre in the trial of Adolf Eichmann initiated in 1961. In a brief essay looking at the locating of the Eichmann trial in Israel, Andrew J. Batog noted

In the Eichmann trial, the court in Israel set another important modern precedent in the advancement of universal jurisdiction. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann had been apprehended in Argentina by Israeli intelligence agents and brought to trial in Israel. In a detailed opinion the court appealed to the idea of the natural law to find universal jurisdiction applied.[1] It found the crime of “genocide against the Jewish people” to be unequivocally a crime against accepted international law[2].

I paid particular attention to the footnote describing the court’s dependence on the 17th century Dutch jurist Grotius. Grotius was cited as follows to justify what some saw as a kidnapping of Eichmann away from from Argentina

Eichmann 36 I.L.R. 1 (Dist. Ct. Jerusalem, 1961), at 15. Citing to Grotius, the court in Eichmann reflected:

“According to natural justice, the victim may take the law into his hand and himself punish the criminal, and it is also permissible for any person of integrity to inflict punishment upon the criminal; but all such natural rights have been limited by organized society and have been delegated to the courts of law.”

In Grotius’ vision of natural justice, it seems, some room was left for the principle that might makes right.

International and transnational trade law is another important site of experimentation in the evolving concept of universal jurisdiction. As I see it, the primary role of the WTO created after the demise of the Soviet Union was to establish a single platform from which to charter global corporations not constrained by national borders and the sovereign jurisdiction of national governments. As it is now, corporations continue, in theory at least, to be subject to the authority of the sovereign national governments that created their charters thereby investing in them their legal capacities and personality.

There are unmistakable anticipations of some edified form of Israeliocentric universal jurisdiction associated with the will to build in Jerusalem a Third Jewish Temple along with reconstituting a governing Sanhedrin. The universalist claims made by proponents of this religious agenda including Christian Zionists have profound geopolitical implications that figure into all sorts of issues including the future of the BDS movement.

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