Or How We Turned Our Back on International Law, Justice, and Human Rights

Or How Israel Made All Arabs and Muslims "Terrorists"

"Never Again" read the placards hoisted by the emaciated and anguished prisoners at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in April of 2025, the same month that Adolph Hitler shot himself in his bunker. There is scholarly debate about whether those prisoners meant for Never Again to apply universally or to the Jewish people, but the phrase had been used earlier in "Never again shall Masada fall!"a 1927 epic poem, Masada, by Yitzhak Lamdan. However it is most closely associated with Buchenwald and a protest against fascism. I ask now, should "Never Again" not apply to all people universally, as suggested in the post World War II rules based order that the United States created, including the United Nations Charter? Did the whole world not unite in horror in response to the Nazis (eventually) so that it rallied nations to join the United Nations in order to prevent territorial aggression and human rights abuses? So why, then, has the United States turned its back on that same rules-based order when it comes to Israel? Only five countries hold a permanent seat at the Security Council of the U.N. Those five members have veto power. The Security Council is the arm of the United Nations that deals with security and maintaining order. It might have been a pipe dream to expect the United States, Soviet Union, China, France and Great Britain to use the Security Council unanimously, but American exercise of the veto power on behalf of Israel when the world sought to check its aggression and denial of Palestinian rights has confounded American voters, just as the bizarre coverage of Palestine in our mainstream media has. We have been taught to condemn the Nazis for the Holocaust because it was a genocide. However, it remains beyond the comprehension for many Zionists, especially in the U.S. and U.K., that anyone would seek to limit what Israel does in the name of its own security. For some, Never Again applies only to Jews, and Jews hold a special place as victims, which would excuse any excesses carried out by Israel in the name of security. However, if public discourse were allowed to flourish on the topic of Israel and Palestine, we wouldn't be so blinded by the horrors of the Holocaust and the zeal of the Zionist lobby and the narrative selected by the mainstream media to the perpetration of human rights abuses by Israel.

The law is important, so why should we ignore it? The U.N. Charter prohibits territorial aggression, and holding on to territories acquired in war. It is also unlawful to use force against another country unless in imminent self-defense without the authorization of the Security Council. Nevertheless, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 in violation of that law. Even though Resolution 242 has sought to get Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, it was watered down at the insistence of the U.S. to fall short of a demand for immediate withdrawal. The result? 59 years since 1967 of jack-booted thuggery carried out in the name of national security for Israel, keeping Gaza and the West Bank separated, military checkpoints for commuters walking into work, illegal Israeli settlements, and a slow, insidious refusal to allow Palestine statehood.

The law is important because we need international order as much as we need order and security at home. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers and white collar criminals should be prosecuted. They should also be given due process. That is how we try to administer criminal justice fairly and equitably. The goal is to have a fair system in order to discourage vigilantism and protests for unfairness. Why shouldn't the same principles apply internationally? Why should the United States fund and arm and enable a fascistic state that steps all over the rights of those who are not Jewish? In our horror at the Nazis, why does that horror not apply whenever Palestinians are kicked out of their homes, bombed indiscriminately, starved, and deprived of the basic right of statehood? Why do we care so much when a child is kidnapped but turn a blind eye when tens of thousands of children are bombed?

"We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law." These are the words spoken by Justice Robert Jackson in his opening remarks as chief prosecutor of the International Military Tribunal on November 21, 1945, the Nuremberg Trials.  The trials, including the one of Hermann Göring, the highest ranking Nazi that was tried for German war crimes and the genocide of European Jews. These words were monumental because they signified the beginning of a trial that would try to hold a high-ranking official of a sovereign state accountable for war crimes. 

In our support of Israel, by exercising our veto power, we have stifled the ability of countries to take legal recourse in the Security Council when illegality is alleged.  We erode the international rules as we forget the most important lesson of World War II and the holocaust, which is that we must never allow ourselves to “other” people, to make them less than human, to render them disposable.  When we continue to fund the country that is committing a series of land grabs, ethnic cleansing, and  genocide, we are just as responsible. We are a democracy, so it is the responsibility of our citizenry to try to stop atrocities that our leaders allow to happen with our tax dollars.  If we do not try, then we are culpable every bit as much as our political leaders.

The situation in the United States is Orwellian. Censorship over Israel has been a fixture for decades, but with the new media we are beginning to have public conversations about our Israel policy.  For the first time there questions asked about why we give more to Israel than any other country, despite its relative wealth and tiny population.   We are beginning to ask why we continued to fund Israel while it flaunted international law by building Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank without so much as a news article discussing the legality of it. Yet in Congress and in the mainstream media, censorship prevails. It permitted the liberal party in power to allow a genocide to happen with American money and weapons without doing anything in Congress to try to stop it.  It was actively used by the so-called free-speech party, the GOP, as we saw Secretary Rubio rescind student visas of those who spoke out against Israel’s genocide. We saw Canary Mission, a pro-Zioinist student organization, graduate from doxxing pro-Palestine activists to collaborating with Homeland Security by making lists of pro-Palestine students and waiting for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to snatch those students up, detain and deport them.  We have seen President Trump force the sale of Tik Tok to Larry Ellison’s Oracle and other investors after neocons complained that Tik Tok is too full of woke Palestine supporters. Ellison is a staunch Zionist who bought Paramount (which already owns CBS) for his son, and CBS News is now run by Bari Weiss, who had little reporting experience but a did have a demonstrated willingness to advocate for Israel.

Consequences for Americans are many.  But the trick of the media is to convince us that there’s nothing to see here.  Yet there are questions that we should be asking:  Why did the media take pains to “de-link” the motivations of Al Qaeda, which was anger at US support for Israel, with the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon?  Why did the US media downplay Israeli efforts to get us to invade Iraq in 2003, as documented in John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s book, The Israel Lobby, in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion?  Why has there been no public reconciliation over the Iraq war as the biggest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam, leading to the death of a million Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers, the creation of ISIS, the conditions leading to the Syrian Civil War, and the continued suffering of the Iraqi people?   It didn’t matter how many Iraqis wanted Saddam Hussein gone. What mattered is that we destroyed Iraq far more than Saddam ever did, and we lost thousands of American soldiers and incurred a debt of trillions of dollars along the way. With Iran, it doesn’t matter that people dislike the mullahs in charge. What matters is the outsized influence of Israel and the juggernaut of Israeli desire to weaken any strong power in the region no matter what, no matter which laws are ignored, and whose human rights are violated, as long as it’s not Jewish rights.  

The extent of Israel’s relationship to Jeffey Epstein is also avoided in the mainstream press. Epstein did not keep a Manhattan apartment that had Israeli cameras and microphones wired throughout it just because he liked his influential friends to have sex without interruption. Those microphones and cameras were there as part of a long-term Israeli operation to garner leverage over people of influence - in order to advance Israeli policy.  Why isn’t CNN covering that aspect of the Epstein revelations? 

That brings us to Iran.  This is Israel’s war, and among some circles in the U.S., that’s enough for it to be America’s war. Trump was supposed to have turned his back on the hawkish neocons, which is why he targeted in his 2016 presidential run anyone who voted to invade Iraq and neocons in general.  But in 2026, Trump is as hawkish and as neoconservative as anyone in government. Secretary Rubio said that the U.S. got involved because Israel was going to strike anyway and because the U.S. wanted to have some control over the bombing of Iran. It’s what Israel has wanted ever since we did regime change in Iraq. This time, the landscape has changed.  In 2002, the Bush administration followed domestic law and asked for a Congressional vote to authorize the use of force. We followed international law. Colin Powell went to the United Nations to get Security Council approval for the use of force in Iraq.  We used false intelligence supplied by Israel and the United States when we convinced the world to go along with invasion and regime change in Iraq, but at least the need to follow the legal frameworks was on the minds of America’s leaders. 

Today, the guardrails are gone.  Just when we should be forcing a reckoning in domestic politics over the disaster that was the Iraq war, when we should be refusing to vote for anyone who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, we refuse to have that reckoning and actively engage in collaboration with Israel to commit apartheid and genocide. We have ignored the ICC warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Our Middle East policy is being conducted by a president who, in the wake of genocide, posted an AI video depicting Gaza as a resort community for billionaires and who portrayed the Obamas as chimpanzees.  It is conducted by an unelected Jared Kushner who is an avowed Zionist with deep financial ties to Israeli banks and personal ties to Israeli leaders.  It is conducted by an ambassador who is an end-times evangelical Christian Zionist in Mike Huckabee, who believes that the chosen people should acquire all the land from Egypt to the Euphrates River. It is run by an administration that adopts Mark Levin’s definition that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, which is a chilling and powerful tool meant to end debate, not engage in one.

Iranians, as a result, will suffer. Trump asked Iranians to rise up against the regime, like Bush did of the Shia in 1990 and 1991.  In Iraq, we failed to follow up, and Saddam massacred 30-60,000 Shia who thought that we were going to back them up.  In Iran, the regime killed 7-36,000 protesters as President Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting, that help was on its way. it doesn’t matter whether some dissident who has been living in the United States or England for decades talks about how much regime change is wanted by Iranians. What matters is the erosion of law in this act of aggression against another country without a declaration of war and without Security Council support. 

What matters is that once again we find ourselves bombing Muslims because somehow we believe it’s acceptable to do so. What matters is that we are perpetrating yet another act of imperialism on Iran while the news media allows us to forget that we staged a coup in Iran in 1953 to depose the first democratically elected president just because he wanted to nationalize the oil industry. What matters is that our hubris in 1953 laid the foundation that allowed Muslim fundamentalists to take over the Iranian Revolution of 1978.  What matters is that because our foreign policy is shaped in part through a pro-Israel lens that we are arrogant enough to believe that we do good by dropping bombs on Muslims.  We allow ourselves to forget that without Israeli actions, there would be no Hamas and no Al Qaeda and ISIS.  We delude ourselves into believing the neocon lie that we can shape things in the Middle East for the better by buttressing Israel when the evidence shows that our support for Israel no matter what atrocities they commit is precisely why there was a 9/11. What future terrorists are we creating now as we pummel Iran alongside the IDF?  

We cannot wield our might and power in the world without empathy and without fairness just because we have a friend who wants it so.  Our politicians cannot be prevented from voting their conscience because they fear being targeted by AIPAC and the PACS they they and other Israel lobbying groups fund. We cannot deport students just because they speak out against Israel. We cannot call people antisemitic just because they criticize Israel.  We cannot shove the rules aside and bomb Iran without a declaration of war or international support just because Israel wants us to.  The result is that we have allowed the interests of a few to jeopardize the well-being and safety of the many.  The irony is that “never again” has been betrayed because we have given cover to the abuses of human rights by the very country  that was founded on “never again.”

Copyright 2026 Raymond Jacoub