Law was not born as a limit on power; from the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) onward, law emanated from rulers, served their interests, and organized society accordingly. For most of history, law functioned as a technology of domination—a mechanism through which kings, empires, churches, and later states imposed order, secured obedience, and enforced their version of “peace” upon the people.

Modernity and the Partial Domestication of Power

Modernity complicated the relationship between power and law without overturning it. Within Western societies, when industrialization concentrated large populations in cities, literacy expanded political awareness, and public opinion began to emerge as a political factor, something changed. Democracy—established unevenly between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries—introduced constitutions, parliaments, and judicial review, and aspired to bind power to law through checks and balances. Authority was no longer absolute but, at least in principle, constrained.

Yet this constraint was never complete. Beneath the surface of formal equality, latent forms of power—economic, colonial, racial—continued to shape how law was interpreted, enforced, or suspended. Legal universality coexisted with selective application. Nevertheless, within Western states, national law could at times be mobilized against power rather than functioning solely as its instrument. This was a historically significant shift.

From this experience, many drew a hasty conclusion: that the transformation of law into a real constraint on power within certain states would inevitably extend to relations between states themselves. International law, it was assumed, would mature into a genuine check on power by virtue of its declaration alone.

This assumption was profoundly ahistorical. It rested on the belief that states willing to submit to law internally would also accept being governed by law externally in their mutual relations. While national legal systems do interact with treaties and international norms, the structural conditions that make law effective at the domestic level are absent internationally. At the moment of its emergence, there was no international state to enforce international law, no international police force to uphold it, no global free press to systematically expose violations, and no unified international public capable of exerting sustained political pressure or sanctioning leaders through electoral accountability.

At best, international law operates through national courts, when and where it is incorporated into domestic legal systems. International courts themselves can only be created, and their rulings enforced, when sufficient geopolitical power stands behind them. The Nuremberg Trials illustrate this reality clearly: they were not the triumph of abstract legal principles over power, but the result of overwhelming military and political alignment among the victors that made accountability possible.

The Nakba: Law’s Foundational Betrayal

After 1945, international law was reconfigured and presented as a universal response to the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century—genocide, mass displacement, and aggressive war. It claimed a moral and legal universality that vastly exceeded the material conditions necessary for its enforcement.

Yet at the very moment international law proclaimed an era beyond colonial dispossession and crimes against humanity, a state was brought into being through genocide, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. The Nakba was not an anomaly but a reincarnation of the very horrors international law had been designed to prevent.

Israel’s admission into the United Nations did not resolve this contradiction; it legitimized and institutionalized it. Through that act, the foundational crimes of dispossession and mass expulsion were neither reversed nor remedied, but absorbed into the international system as faits accomplis. Settler colonialism—among its most violent historical expressions—was normalized as a political reality rather than treated as an ongoing crime requiring redress.

From its inception, Israel thus constituted an explicit negation of international law. The assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte on 17 September 1948 marked the culmination of this negation. Bernadotte, acting as the United Nations mediator, embodied the attempt to reassert legality after the crime of the Nakba. He insisted on the right of Palestinian refugees to return, rejected territorial expansion beyond the UN framework, and sought to bind the emerging Israeli state to legal obligations rather than military faits accomplis.

For this, he was executed in Jerusalem while travelling in a clearly marked UN convoy, shot at point-blank range by members of the Zionist Lehi militia. The message was unmistakable: law would not be tolerated when it threatened outcomes produced by force. No meaningful accountability followed. On the contrary, one of the organizers of the assassination, Yitzhak Shamir, would later become Prime Minister of Israel.

Unipolarity and the Imperialization of Law

Throughout the Cold War, international law entered a form of hibernation, constrained by bipolar confrontation. Its selective application was at least partially limited by geopolitical balance. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed that constraint. In the 1990s, the United States emerged as the central organizing force of the international system, combining military supremacy, financial dominance, normative authority, and media power. It was precisely at this moment that international law reached its lowest point, revealing itself most clearly as an instrument of empire.

Legal doctrines were mobilized to legitimize what were cynically termed “humanitarian interventions.” They were used to sanction non-compliant regimes, to justify regime change, and to impose permanent states of siege against so-called “rogue states.” Law no longer even pretended to universality; it functioned openly as a mechanism of coercion aligned with imperial interests.

The blockade of Iraq was paradigmatic. Imposed by the United Nations on false pretences—non-existent weapons of mass destruction—it resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands through sanctions, deprivation, and siege. This was followed by invasion, occupation, and massive bombardment, this time without a UN mandate and based on the same fabricated justifications. Political leaders such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair presided over these crimes with complete impunity. Madeleine Albright’s declaration that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were “worth it” laid bare the genocidal calculus underpinning this order.

When rivals of Western power engaged in imperial or genocidal wars of their own, international law suddenly acquired sharp teeth. Arrest warrants were issued, tribunals convened, and perpetrators imprisoned in The Hague—Milosevic, Mladic, Taylor. Once again, law served its master: selectively unleashed against adversaries, while remaining conspicuously absent when comparable crimes were committed under Western banners or by Western allies.

Israel was the prototype of such an ally. Since 1948, Israel has systematically ignored United Nations resolutions. Hundreds of resolutions—of the General Assembly, the Security Council, and UN bodies—have affirmed the illegality of territorial acquisition by force, condemned settlement expansion, demanded withdrawal from occupied territories, upheld the right of return, and called for the protection of civilians under occupation. Israel ignored them all.

Enforcement mechanisms were neutralized through diplomatic shielding, veto power, and political indulgence by powerful allies. Over time, non-compliance itself became normalized, transforming international law from a system of obligation into a language of ritual condemnation without consequence. Israel learned early that resolutions could be violated indefinitely while retaining full diplomatic standing, military cooperation, and economic integration.

The Return of the People to History

Law is fake when it is just symbolic, docile, and a tool for the powerful. It becomes real only when it becomes dangerous to power. The emergence of public opinion and its agency in liberal democracies moved national law from myth to reality. Of course, that reality is not linear, and law is still mitigated by power, but power is also now mitigated by law. Law became a balancing factor that cannot be ignored. This process took almost two centuries to be of significance at the national level and is still ongoing. At the international level, the United Nations was supposed to play a similar role but failed, because it itself was nothing but a theater for power and its influence.

With globalization, the structural conditions of global power began to shift. The state’s near-monopoly over information—long a prerequisite for governing consent and obscuring violence—was progressively eroded by the internet, smartphones, and social media. Information ceased to flow vertically from institutions to populations; it began to circulate horizontally across networks. Agency was redistributed. Publics were no longer merely passive recipients of official narratives but increasingly active interpreters, challengers, and producers of meaning.

Out of this transformation, something historically new started to take shape: a global civic subject. It remains fragmented, polarized, and deeply unequal, yet it is increasingly capable of observing, documenting, debating, and coordinating across borders within a shared informational space. Events that once would have remained local or hidden are now instantaneously visible; testimonies travel faster than diplomatic communiqués; images puncture propaganda before it can fully stabilize. Power is no longer uncontested in the domain of narration, and this alone alters the conditions under which legitimacy is produced.

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this transformation dramatically. For the first time, humanity experienced a single crisis simultaneously—governed through comparable emergency regimes, justified by similar security logics, and mediated through identical digital infrastructures. Lockdowns, health mandates, and states of exception were debated in real time across continents. Scientific authority, political decision-making, and media framing were scrutinized, contested, and compared globally. Polarization did not merely spread; it synchronized.

This moment further eroded trust in official narratives and institutional authority. Governments were no longer evaluated in isolation but measured against one another by connected publics. Contradictions became visible; double standards were documented; failures could not be contained within national borders. What emerged was not a unified global public, but a shared field of perception—a planetary arena in which power, law, and legitimacy could be collectively interrogated.

It is within this altered landscape that international law encounters, for the first time, the material conditions that could make it more than symbolic. Not because states have become more ethical, but because the global civic subject increasingly observes, remembers, and pressures power in ways that escape traditional containment. International law, once dependent almost entirely on state will, now begins—tentatively and unevenly—to encounter a counterweight from below.

Alongside these transformations, fractures within the imperial order itself deepened. Western power no longer operated as a seamless or coherent bloc. The alignment between military dominance, economic leadership, moral authority, and cultural hegemony began to fray. Competing national interests reasserted themselves, internal political polarization weakened strategic coherence, and declining legitimacy eroded the capacity of Western states to present their power as universal or benevolent.

At the same time, the rise of alternative elites—both within Western societies and beyond them—further destabilized the old architecture. These actors did not necessarily oppose domination as such; rather, they sought different modalities of power, new alignments, and alternative routes to hegemony. Financial capital, technology platforms, sovereign wealth funds, and regional powers increasingly operated outside the traditional Western-centric order, diluting its monopoly over global agenda-setting.

This fragmentation produced a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it weakened the imperial system’s ability to impose unified discipline and narrative control. On the other, it intensified instability, as competing centers of power pursued overlapping, sometimes contradictory strategies. The result was not the disappearance of empire, but its internal pluralization—a shift from a single organizing center to a contested field of influence.

In this context, international law began to escape, partially and unevenly, from exclusive imperial command. No longer anchored to a single hegemonic will, legal institutions and norms became sites of contestation rather than mere instruments of enforcement. Cracks appeared where law could be invoked not only by the powerful against the weak, but—occasionally—by fragmented publics, weaker states, and transnational actors against power itself.

What emerged was not a just order, but a volatile one. Yet volatility matters. It creates openings. And it is within these openings—produced by global connectivity from below and imperial fragmentation from above—that the possibility of international law becoming materially consequential begins to re-enter history.

Gaza and the Trial of the World

Gaza did not create the conditions for this shift through genocide; it galvanized an already emerging global civic actor. The scale, persistence, and clarity of the response exceeded elite expectations. Ruling classes fractured. Long-standing certainties wavered. What had functioned for decades as unconditional political, diplomatic, and legal support for Israel began to show visible strain.

Within that opening, law began to move—not autonomously, but through pressure. A global public opinion pushed judges, lawyers, investigators, civil servants, and organized civil society to apply existing legal frameworks to facts that could no longer be plausibly denied. In this moment, law ceased to function solely as a language of moral appeal and began to operate as a material force. It became, in effect, a form of disobedience.

What we are witnessing is the fragile and contested emergence of a new historical alignment. A transnational civil society—digitally connected, legally literate, and politically mobilized—has begun to engage law not as an abstract ideal but as a terrain of struggle. For this emerging subject, law becomes productive of counter-hegemony: it translates outrage into procedure, memory into evidence, and political demand into claims that power must either confront or suppress.

This constituted a severe blow to American imperial hegemony—and empire struck back.

Judges, prosecutors, investigators, and legal officials who sought to apply established legal standards to the crime of genocide committed by a proxy of empire in Gaza were sanctioned, intimidated, defunded, or publicly discredited. Legal institutions were not merely bypassed; they were actively punished. The pretense that law stood above power was openly discarded. What remained was power defending itself through coercion.

This moment will be remembered in one of two ways: either as the definitive abortion of the promise of an international legal order, or as its true moment of birth—when law ceased to be symbolic and became, for the first time, dangerous.

Before international law can become real, it must first become disobedient. It must break with the de facto sovereignty of vested interests and refuse its traditional role as ornament to power. This is why even the most modest legal gestures now provoke disproportionate reactions. They do not merely threaten individual perpetrators; they announce a shift in authority itself—over who is entitled to speak, to accuse, to name crimes, and to demand consequence.

Power fears this mutation of law. An order secure in its dominance does not sanction its own judges. A system confident in its legitimacy does not criminalize the application of its own rules. Power attacks law not because law is weak, but because it has begun to draw strength from a different source—one rooted in society rather than hierarchy, in collective agency rather than command.

We are living through a twilight moment. To paraphrase Gramsci, the old order is dying, but it is not yet dead. It still possesses weapons, institutions, alliances, and the ingrained reflexes of authority. The new order is being born, but it remains fragile and incomplete. It does not yet rule; it interrupts. It speaks through law, through networks, through archives of testimony and evidence, through fragmented yet relentless demands for justice. Between these two worlds lies instability: repression, backlash, and open confrontation, as the old order fights ferociously against its own historical supersession.

In this sense, Gaza is not only a site of genocide. It is the point at which this historical transition became impossible to ignore. It has forced law to reveal both its impotence and its latent force—its exposure to power, and its capacity to disrupt it. Gaza has stripped international law of its comforting illusions while revealing, beneath them, a dangerous potential.

The question before us is therefore not whether international law will survive in its present form. It is whether it will become real: whether it will crystallize into a genuine constraint on power and a vehicle for a new popular hegemony, or whether it will once again be dragged back into subservience—reabsorbed by old empires or refashioned to serve new ones.

Much depends on this outcome. And this outcome depends, unavoidably, on us.

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