"He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!" (Isaiah 5:7)
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Sooner or later, international organizations wind up selling out the values of an open, democratic society, even if they were originally founded by people seeking to do good. They become morally perverted because of the moral defect of most of their member nations, who are not democratic, not pluralistic, and do not know the meaning of human rights. At best, they are authoritarian regimes like Turkey, Russia, most Arab states, and Africa, even when they have "elections," "parliaments," and "courts." At worst, they are totalitarian in the sense of China, or barbaric like North Korea, Iran, and Syria. And even when the regime is less of a threat to those who live under it, in most of these cases society oppresses the individual, especially women, LGBTQ+, and members of religious or ethnic minorities. This non-pluralistic majority is reflected in the character of international organizations. The pluralistic minority, by its very participation, gives the organization legitimacy, without conditioning that participation on holding perversions of values in check, even in their most loathsome form. The "evil" prosper because the "good" have no moral courage.
This misconstruction is called "the international community" and it is mainly seen in the United Nations and its various branches. With a few interesting exceptions, the anti-pluralistic majority goes around the "unidentified" states, comprising more than two-thirds of the organization. Other organizations are supposedly more "professional," but most of them draw legitimacy and political inspiration from the UN. The biggest and most important group of democratic, pluralistic nations, the European group, is caught in a paralyzing trap. On one hand, its members are aware of the absurd, despicable nature of many of its decisions. But on the other, the Europeans have created and internalized the folk tale that the world can and should behave according to the dictates of a fiction known as the "international community," which is supposed to express the will of most of its residents, as expressed in the UN more than in any other framework.
The Europeans, who have grown addicted to the ethos of military and political weakness, have a need to believe in their ability to lead this (fictitious) camp, because of its (true) moral qualities. To lead it and build up their status within it, they need to deny that the UN and its organizations are perverting their values, or accept it. In the end, they lose on both ends: they sold their moral high ground for a mess of pottage, and they now carry painfully little weight in shaping the world.
The moral perversion of the UN and the bodies that follow its lead focuses on a false symmetry between fundamentally unacceptable practices of non-pluralistic societies and mistakes, aberrations, or twisted pictures of acts by open and democratic societies. The role of these organizations, according to most of their participants, is to obscure the moral difference between the absolute evil that characterizes their own behavior and the inherently imperfect good in the democratic societies. By obscuring that distinction, they successfully lock down forgiveness for their own atrocities in much of European public opinion and a smaller part of US public opinion, and instill in western societies feelings of guilt for their sins, both real and imagined. When it comes to Israel they, with help from a considerable chunk of the European elite, have managed to turn things around entirely and paint barbaric acts as heroism by oppressed victims and Israel's efforts to defend itself as war crimes. Without European support, both active and passive, they would not have been able to.
The processes in The Hague that are intended to accuse Israel of war crimes are more damaging that condemnations from the UN, but there are signs of positive change in the Europeans' conduct at The Hague. The threat is that Israeli politicians and officers could be harassed by arrest warrants abroad as part of legal warfare. But it should be noted that recently, the authority of ICC judges to discuss the territory of "Palestine" has been rejected, not only by Israel and the Biden administration, but also European nations that recognize the authority of the ICC – primarily Germany.
The explanations are legal, but the issue itself is blatantly political: should violent societies that hold human rights in contempt be allowed to use the international court as a way of defending themselves against democracy, in the framework of a twisted kind of symmetry that compares the imperfectly good to the thoroughly evil?
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