This Is the System: What Gaza Taught the World

Mark Twain never actually said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated—but the line fits the international legal order almost too well. The order is not dead. What has died is something more precise: the plausibility of the claim that the system genuinely constrains power, rather than simply providing the vocabulary through which power legitimates itself.

That distinction matters enormously—especially for audiences across the Muslim world who have watched, with a particular kind of exhausted recognition, as the architecture of international law performed its rituals over Gaza while the killing continued. But it matters far beyond: the consequences of this reclassification are being felt and registered across the wider world.

Two Wars, One Standard—Applied Differently

Compare Ukraine and Gaza. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the international system responded with something resembling its own stated logic: asset freezes, arms transfers to the victim, ICC engagement, coordinated diplomatic isolation, Security Council mobilization. Russia violated international law and paid real, cumulative costs. Not enough to reverse the invasion—but the system performed according to its declared principles. A price was imposed.

Gaza was different. Beginning in late 2023, the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures requiring Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention. Israel did not modify its conduct. No sanction followed. UNRWA and the World Food Program documented conditions they described—in measurement terms, not rhetorical ones—as engineered famine. The Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution in March 2024, after the United States had vetoed multiple earlier ones; the fighting continued regardless. The ICC issued arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The institutional machinery of international accountability ran at full capacity. None of it held.

This is not a story about inconsistency. Every system is inconsistent—inconsistency can be dismissed as political expediency in individual cases. This is a story about pattern. When selective enforcement tracks alliance hierarchy with regularity, across repeated high-visibility cases, under full institutional scrutiny, it stops being a bug in the system. It is the system.

Understanding What Israel Is Doing—And Why It Matters

To understand why the system broke down so visibly over Gaza, one has to understand what kind of regional power Israel actually is—and what it is attempting to become.

The most useful frame is not simply “occupier” or “aggressor”, though both have legal and factual grounding in specific contexts. It is what might be called regional paramountcy: the project of maintaining decisive, unchallengeable military and strategic superiority across the surrounding environment—not through a stable and acknowledged set of rules that other states can navigate, but through the sustained assertion of unilateral freedom of action, with no codified framework and no institutional architecture that regional actors can consult or rely upon.

A demonstrator holds a placard showing a picture of Netanyahu during a pro-Palestine rally at Alexanderplatz in Berlin to protest against Israeli strikes on Gaza © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire / Rouzbeh Fouladi

This manifests in several specific and observable ways. Israel maintains a consistent pattern of preventive military action—targeting not imminent threats but assessed future ones, often with deliberately disproportionate force—across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Tunisia, and Qatar. It asserts an essentially unlimited unilateral freedom of military and intelligence action across sovereign borders. It pursues territorial revisionism in specific theatres through annexation, settlement expansion, buffer-zone creation, and demo-graphic restructuring in Palestinian and Syrian contexts— not always a coherent state-wide imperial doctrine, but a recurring strategic tendency tied to the consolidation of strategic depth and asymmetric advantage. Maximalist territorial imaginaries—including concepts associated with “Greater Israel”—remain influential within significant parts of the Israeli political and ideological spectrum, even if unevenly translated into official state policy. And Israel maintains a consistent posture of normative exceptionalism toward international law: not merely non-compliance, but the active denial that the bodies issuing findings—the ICJ, the ICC, the UN—have legitimate jurisdiction at all. This is not the behaviour of a state that finds certain rulings inconvenient. It is the behaviour of a state that rejects the premise of universal accountability altogether.

It is equally important to understand what Israeli paramountcy is not, and where its limits lie—because this is a project still in the making, not one already secured. Israeli reach beyond a defined operational perimeter degrades substantially. Its dominance has shown real difficulty sustaining itself under prolonged, distributed counter-pressure across multiple theatres simultaneously. And its control over political outcomes—as distinct from military outcomes—is considerably weaker than its kinetic capacity would suggest. One further and telling limit: this is a form of dominance that generates asymmetric escalation capacity—the ability to raise the costs of confrontation faster than adversaries can absorb them—but without producing the strategic stability that such dominance is supposed to deliver. Israel is attempting to bring this form of paramountcy into existence rather than having secured it. That distinction matters.

What makes this project particularly destabilizing—and this is the point that gets lost in debates focused only on specific military operations—is that it provides none of the compensating predictability that even coercive forms of regional dominance have historically offered. Classical forms of regional dominance, however brutal, imposed a legible hierarchy that other state actors could navigate, because the rules and interests of the dominant power were sufficiently codified to be consulted. Israeli paramountcy offers the inverse: it generates insecurity and escalation risk without providing any stable framework in return. There are no acknowledged rules. There is no institutional hierarchy of interests that regional actors can reliably consult. The dominant power does not stabilize; it unsettles. That absence dramatically increases escalation risk—for everyone in the region, including, ultimately, Israel itself.

One further and critical point: this project is structurally dependent on external support in a way that classical forms of regional dominance never were. Specifically, it depends on American weapons supply, intelligence sharing, and Security Council diplomatic cover. Without that support, the regional position Israel currently occupies could not be sustained in its present form. Accountability for its consequences, therefore, cannot be confined to Israeli decision-making alone.

America’s Role, And Its Costs

The United States transferred weapons to Israel throughout the Gaza campaign—including precision munitions and aircraft—while the ICJ’s provisional measures were in force. It vetoed ceasefire resolutions repeatedly before abstaining on a third; the cumulative message of that sequence was legible to anyone watching. It announced a pause on certain heavy bomb transfers in May 2024, then reversed it. It issued successive statements expressing concern about civilian casualties that carried no operational consequence.

No serious observer concluded that Washington lacked leverage over Israel. The conclusion drawn—inescapably—was that it lacked the will to apply that leverage at any mea-ningful cost to the relationship.

To be fair: the American carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean almost certainly deterred a wider regional war in the conflict’s early stages. That contribution should not be dismissed. But the full record demonstrates something spe-cific: Washington will manage the ceiling of a conflict—prevent its regional spread—but it will not constrain its ally’s conduct within it.

Al-Ghazali, in his Nasihat al-Muluk, warned that the most dangerous figure surrounding any ruler is not the enemy but the flatterer—the one who validates power rather than tests it against justice. The international system’s failure over Gaza was not, in the end, a failure of institutions alone. It was a failure of exactly that kind: the accommodation of power by those whose function was to constrain it.

Washington’s record over Gaza made that failure visible in ways that previous episodes of selective application—from Iraq to extraordinary rendition—did not. The scrutiny was too sustained, the institutional record too clear, and the gap between stated principle and operational conduct too wide to insulate rhetorically.

American influence in the Middle East has rested partly on military dominance, but also on the perception that Washing-ton operates according to principles—that there are some things it will insist upon regardless of who is asking. That perception has now been revised. Influence erodes not when power declines, but when its application becomes visibly conditional.

Europe: Unease Without Consequence

The European picture tells the same story from a different angle—and it matters precisely because the unease was not confined to the Muslim world alone. Several European governments spent much of the Gaza war in visible tension with aspects of American policy—supporting ICJ processes, moving toward recognition of Palestinian statehood, acknow-ledging the scale of civilian suffering more directly than Washington was prepared to do.

The most significant movement came from a cluster of states—Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Belgium among them—who recognized Palestinian statehood, suspended arms exports to Israel, or made public statements that went substantially further than the diplomatic mainstream. Their significance lies not only in what they did but in what they represent: the leading edge of a potential European bloc willing to move from expression to action, and doing so in direct tension with both Washington and the more cautious centre of European foreign policy. The fault lines, in other words, run through Europe itself—which makes further European movement more plausible, not less.

But the divergence remained hesitant and carefully bounded overall. NATO coherence held. Few European governments proved willing to impose meaningful material costs on Israel despite increasingly severe public rhetoric. The significance lay less in any policy rupture than in what it revealed: a growing tension between the universal language through which the Western system describes itself and the hierarchically differentiated manner in which it increasingly operates.

The Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR) holds an event outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid to mark the second anniversary of the latest escalation of genocide in Gaza
© IMAGO / Europa Press / Eduardo Parrax

This is partly why the debate on European strategic autonomy now has genuine political momentum. It is not that European governments want to break with the United States—most emphatically do not. It is that they have started to understand that strategic dependence and strategic predictability are no longer the same thing. Mark Carney, as Canadian Prime Minister, put it plainly earlier this year: the global order is not collapsing but fragmenting—reorganizing into competing blocs where transactional coordination substitutes for universal governance. That was an assessment from a Western leader with no interest in dramatizing the system’s failure.

Precisely because American credibility on the universal application of international law has been weakened, expectations are shifting toward Europe as the only remaining Western pole potentially capable of restoring some normative coherence to the system. Whether European governments have the unity or political will for such a role remains uncertain. But the expectation itself reflects a real perception: that whatever remains of rules-based legitimacy may now depend less on Washington and more on whether other actors are prepared to operationalize it independently.

The Generational Problem

There is a problem here that goes deeper than any particular crisis. Analysts, diplomats, and officials now moving into senior positions across the Muslim world and the wider world formed their professional judgement during a period bookended by Iraq in 2003 and Gaza in 2023—two high-visibility conflicts in which the rules-based order was tested under exceptional scrutiny and found to operate according to alliance hierarchy, not legal principle.

This is no longer inherited cynicism from practitioners who remember a more functional system. It is a settled, empirically grounded baseline. A practitioner who remembers a better system retains a counterfactual—things could be otherwise. A practitioner who formed their entire professional judgement within the post-Iraq, post-Gaza period has no such counterfactual. The dysfunction is not a deviation from something once known. It is all that has ever been known. Policy built on inherited cynicism still gestures toward the ideal while discounting it. Policy built on settled assumption dispenses with the gesture entirely.

Ibn Ata’illah al-Iskandari, in the Hikam, counselled against the particular despair that comes from mistaking the absence of immediate response for the futility of the effort itself. The slowness of the world’s response to injustice is not evidence that demanding a response was without purpose. It is, rather, the precise condition under which the demand must be sustained. That counsel applies with uncomfortable direct-ness to those who would conclude from Gaza that the work of building accountable international order is simply no longer worth undertaking.

What Middle Powers Must Do

None of this is an abstract lament. It is a call to action—particularly for middle powers that retain both credibility and the capacity to act where great powers will not.

Malaysia is an instructive example. As a Muslim-majority democracy with a significant multilateral presence, a history of principled engagement at the UN, and meaningful rela-tionships across the wider world, Malaysia is positioned to do something neither Washington nor Brussels can credibly do right now: insist on the universal application of inter-national law without the taint of selective enforcement. That means continuing to support ICJ processes, engaging actively in ICC mechanisms, and refusing the false choice between alignment with Western allies and commitment to inter-national norms.

The credibility of any future normative project depends on whether those governments are willing to call violations by their name, consistently, whoever commits them. That applies to Israeli conduct in Gaza and Lebanon. It applies equally to the illegal US-Israel strikes on Iran—as it applies to Iranian regime conduct in Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf

But Malaysia need not act alone, and should not. A coalition of middle powers—drawn from Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Gulf, Africa, Turkey, and Latin America—has both the interest and the legitimacy to rebuild the normative infrastructure that the major Western powers have damaged. This means coordinating positions at the UN General Assembly, where the permanent veto does not apply. It means supporting reform of multilateral institutions to reduce the structural dominance of any single patron. It means bilateral and regional arrangements that reduce the leverage asymmetries which make selective enforcement so easy to sustain.

It also means speaking plainly. One of the underappreciated costs of the Gaza period is the degree to which governments across the Muslim world—including those with real diplomatic weight—chose silence or studied ambiguity over clarity. The credibility of any future normative project depends on whether those governments are willing to call violations by their name, consistently, whoever commits them. That applies to Israeli conduct in Gaza and Lebanon. It applies equally to the illegal US-Israel strikes on Iran—as it applies to Iranian regime conduct in Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf. It applies to Russian conduct in Ukraine. The standard is the standard—or it is nothing.

The honest framework is not one of calculated return. It is one of obligation—the recognition that principled action must be taken not because it will be immediately rewarded, but because the alternative is complicity in a world ordered entirely by power. Middle powers that understand this, and act accordingly, are the difference between a failing order and one that can yet be rebuilt.

The Order Still Stands—Just

The institutions persist. The language of universal norms endures. The ICJ still sits in The Hague; the Geneva Conventions still exist; the UN Charter still says what it says. This is why the death-of-international-law framing is too simple.

What has been buried is the operational premise on which the system’s legitimacy rested—the belief that it functions as a genuine constraint on dominant power, rather than a resource through which dominant power legitimates itself. Structural assumptions do not reverse through declarations of recommitment. They reverse through observable, consistent behaviour by states whose conduct demonstrates that the rules apply regardless of alliance relationship.

That is something the United States cannot currently deliver, and that Europe can deliver only partially. It is, however, something that a coordinated group of middle powers—principled, persistent, and strategic—could begin to build.

The system failed not quietly but under full institutional scrutiny, with every accountability mechanism running and none of it holding, in plain sight. What comes next depends on whether those who still believe in the promise are willing to act on it—not because the great powers will reward them for doing so, but because the alternative is a world where the rules belong only to those with the power to ignore them.

That is not a world that serves the Muslim world, nor the world beyond. And it is worth fighting for something better—not with naivety, but with clarity, consistency, and resolve.

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This article is based on talks delivered at the Malaysian Festival of Ideas, where the author served as Royal Discussant, and at the Institute for Diplomatic and Foreign Relations (IDFR), Kuala Lumpur, in November 2025, and on an article published by the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed), Barcelona, Spain.