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Javier E

Giving Ukraine heavy weapons does not mean NATO is at war with Russia | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21808835

ukraine heavy weapons nato war russia casus belli neutrality collective self-defence

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The charter recognises that states have a right to self-defence, and that other countries can join in “collective self-defence” to help them. States are allowed to give military support to victims of aggression, or to impose sanctions on the aggressor, without affecting their own neutral status.
  • this law of neutrality was designed for a world where war was an accepted tool of statecraft. That changed with the adoption of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, which made it illegal to attack another country unprovoked—a principle later enshrined in the UN’s charter.
  • International law, as it developed in Europe beginning in the 17th century, required countries that wanted to stay out of others’ wars to observe strict neutrality. That meant they had to trade equally with both sides of a conflict, as Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, professors at Yale Law School, explained in a recent article. Supplying arms to one side only, or favouring its trade, could make their ships fair game for attack by the other.
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  • In Ukraine no such Security Council resolution has been adopted—but only because Russia, a permanent member, vetoed it. The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the invasion
  • when the UN Security Council condemns an act of aggression, that resolution is legally binding on all member states.
  • As for states becoming co-belligerents, the bar is even higher, argues Michael Schmitt of the United States Military Academy at West Point. German supplies of arms to Ukraine do not make Germany a party to the conflict with Russia because “there are no hostilities between the States concerned”—their soldiers are not killing each other.
  • “If Russia wants to feel provoked and attack NATO it will do it, independently of whether we have delivered tanks,”
  • thers think that if supplying heavy weapons increases the risk of a direct conflict, it is mainly because they make more inviting targets
  • it is wrong to dismiss the legal aspects of co-belligerency entirely: they help prevent a conflict escalating to nuclear war. When America and other NATO countries rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, they emphasise such a step would make them parties to the conflict. This, Mr Haque thinks, is a useful way to draw red lines between nuclear powers. “America is using these rules of international law to signal to Russia that we will come up to a clear red line but not cross it. I think Russia understands that signalling,”
  • “But they will try to contest the American interpretation of those rules and invent their own red lines—not based on law—to serve their aims.”
  • America never accused the Soviets or Chinese of being co-belligerents, and the nuclear powers never came close to direct conflict. American bombers avoided Soviet freighters: when US Air Force pilots accidentally strafed one in 1967, they were court-martialled. America was restrained not by international law but by the fact that bringing the Soviets or Chinese into the war would not have been in its interests.
  • That will be the decisive factor for Russia in Ukraine, too. “If Russia wanted the conflict to spill over and drag us in, it would have already succeeded in doing that,”
Javier E

The lonely people of history | Yossi Klein Halevi | The Blogs - 0 views

blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-lonely-people-of-history

Israel mentality epistemic bubble culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • now we are at one of those defining moments in Jewish history when we find ourselves at a moral disconnect with much of the international community. As we struggle to absorb the enormity of the October 7 massacre and to confront a global wave of antisemitism, the trauma of aloneness has returned.
  • One typical tweet in my feed reads: “First they came for LGBTQ, and I stood up, because love is love … Then they came for the Black community, and I stood up, because Black lives matter. Then they came for me, but I stood alone, because I am a Jew.”
  • Surely those who had played down Israel’s security fears would now understand the nature of the threat we face on our borders. After all, this was no “ordinary” terror attack but a pre-enactment of Hamas’s genocidal vision. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – free, that is, of Jews. 
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  • “The attacks by Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, citing the 56-year Israeli occupation. Both sides are responsible, added former president Barack Obama, urging us to “take in the whole truth” of the conflict.
  • This is not a political conflict, we remind the world, but an outbreak of evil. Just like ISIS, we note, recalling the terrible devastation caused by the necessary American assault in Mosul and Raqqa. 
  • No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is
  • yes, the suffering of innocent Gazans deserves the world’s urgent humanitarian attention, but not at the expense of moral clarity about the justness of this war.
  • Yes, many Jews readily acknowledge, Israel bears its share of the blame for this hundred-year conflict. So do Palestinian leaders, who rejected every peace offer ever put on the table. 
  • What may well be the most horrific massacre of our time, outdoing even the atrocities of ISIS, has resulted in the unprecedented popularity of the Palestinian cause.
  • increasingly, we sense that we are talking to ourselves. The post-religious West, which substitutes the ideological rhetoric of academia for a genuine language for evil, doesn’t understand the old Jewish language we are speaking.
  • No, Israel is not a paragon of virtue. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spent this last year protesting every week against the anti-democratic Netanyahu government
  • To leave a genocidal regime on our border would be a betrayal of the founding ethos of Israel as a safe refuge for the Jewish people. It would be the beginning of our unraveling.
  • Over and over we repeat what we’d assumed was self-evident: One side seeks to maximize civilian casualties, the other side to minimize them.
  • Harnevo mocked Cosgrave for tweeting, on the day of the massacre, a chart comparing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last 15 years. “You see Paddy, what happened on October 7 was not another data point on your f*king charts. It was something else, unbearable.” 
  • there are moments when we must risk going alone. We know that the longer the fighting in Gaza lasts, even our friends will begin to pressure us to relent. We must resist that pressure and not fear the consequences. 
  • During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.
  • Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”
  • Israelis across the political spectrum agree that the regime of Oct. 7 must be destroyed. Like Ben-Gurion, we are willing to pay the bitter price of being alone.
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