U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman shake hands during a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing ceremony at the Royal Court in Riyadh on May 13, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

When it comes to global institutions, why is the world so polarised? In particular, what explains the policy of the U.S. on enforcing rules on Israel?

Trita Parsi: Put simply, this is a genocide and we can see it happening live, on our phones. The Lancet estimates the toll to be over 1,86,000 because 43,000 is only the number of bodies that have been counted in hospitals. So, I’m not surprised by the world’s outrage in comparison to what was felt over [Russia’s invasion] of Ukraine. Roughly, 700 children were killed in Ukraine through Russian bombardment over two-and-a-half years. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza in about a year already. The intensity of this exceeds anything we have seen in any modern war.

What is surprising is America’s reaction. The Biden administration, in particular, has violated its own regulations to allow the Israeli government to do exactly what it wants. This has never happened before. The U.S. is shifting away from supporting the same international institutions, regulations, and laws that it played a crucial role in establishing. The first shift was away from international law to what it calls the ‘rules-based international order’. The rules-based order is not centred on law; it is centred on rules, and it is unclear who makes those rules. In reality, it ends up being a coalition or a willing partnership of countries, mostly allies, which is not universally accepted or applicable. This is what we are seeing when it comes to the ICC warrants as well.

Navtej Sarna: The U.S. has a sort of umbilical relationship with Israel. The U.S. has treated Israel as if it is a part of the U.S. which needs to be protected at all costs. Now the protection is for strategic reasons, but also because Israel represents a sort of a moral burden. It is the Jewish homeland, and after the Holocaust, there is a need to protect all Israelis and not let them lose the homeland. In the view of the U.S., Israel is also a democracy, a vulnerable democracy in a very hard neighbourhood, the only democracy in West Asia. While it is unstated so far, Israel is also believed to be a nuclear power, and one that can be a deterrent against another potential nuclear power that could be Iran. Now there are some contradictions: Israel’s democracy comes up against the fact that it has also been an occupying power and it is no longer vulnerable. But that has been overlooked because of the U.S.’s need to protect Israel for the other reasons I mentioned, particularly after the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas.

Israel has said the ICC warrant makes no sense because it is not a member state of the ICC, much like how India isn’t, and doesn’t submit to its jurisdiction. Can a warrant still be issued against Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Trita Parsi: Of course it can, because Israel is conducting war crimes in another country’s territory [Palestine]. This was an issue that the ICC had to address before taking up this issue.

Navtej Sarna: More than the ICC warrant, it is necessary to look at what has been done to international humanitarian law on the ground. Countries may react to the warrants one way or the other, but the sad part is that international humanitarian law has been flouted for months in [full] visibility of the world. Therefore, everybody has a responsibility to bear for allowing the [bombardment of Gaza to continue]. The U.S. has simply been putting up a diplomatic performance. If it really wanted to stop this, it could have.

Why didn’t India join the ICC and what is its position on this warrant now?

Navtej Sarna: The ICC has only 124 member states. India participated in the negotiations in the preparatory stages that led up to the setting up of the ICC in 2002. India participated in the negotiations of the Rome Statute. But it did not sign it or ratify it. India negotiates in good faith and when it finds that it can’t agree to some of the terms, it doesn’t sign. It is better than signing and flouting the terms. The reasons for not signing at the time were many. The Indian government felt that the ICC did not give sufficient place for national administrative and judicial institutions to deal with such crimes and it did not recognise the use of nuclear weapons and the use of other weapons of mass destruction as a crime which could be punished. It also did not recognise terrorism as a punishable crime against humanity, which, I think, was probably the breaking point for India, which had been a victim of terrorism for decades. Regarding the present ICC warrants [in the cases of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Mr. Netanyahu], India has made it clear that it does not have much faith in the ICC.

At the UN Security Council (UNSC), there has been a logjam over votes involving Israel and Russia. Even in cases where the UNSC has passed resolutions, such as Afghanistan and Myanmar, the regimes in power are flouting directions with impunity. Are we reaching a point where the international world order, as is defined by these institutions, is unable to function? What would it take to make states including Israel compliant?

Navtej Sarna: It is clear that UNSC resolutions don’t mean a thing any more. In the case of Israel, the U.S. veto is used almost automatically. Naturally, Russia is going to use its veto for its own purposes, to protect itself, as it has in the past few years. The fact remains that the situation in which the UN was formed has changed from 1945. So even if the UNSC believes it can still deliver, the truth is it cannot. Every country has decided to live on a transactional, immediate short-term policy paradigm. There are no ‘value-based international relations’ today. It is not as if countries did not work in national interest earlier, but the brazenness with which we see ‘realpolitik’ used is at a different level. Until this situation changes — and I don’t see any signs of that — this kind of breakdown of international systems will probably increase.

Trita Parsi: I agree that we are in a very bad situation. However, I don’t think there is a collective desire not to have any rules and laws that will guide state to state conduct at this point. We can point to all of these examples in which clearly the system has not worked, but those are perhaps 5% of the situations. Of the interactions that are taking place in the world, there are many in which laws are being followed.

The UNSC absolutely needs reform. It has become a joke and at some point, it will become irrelevant. Things are going to get worse, but there is going to be a tipping point in which a critical mass of countries will recognise that it is actually in their interest to have a functioning global order and effective institutions that help uphold international conventions and laws.

Do you see Israel being brought to account internationally, or a ceasefire in Gaza any time soon, especially given the upcoming change in U.S. administration?

Trita Parsi: There is a likelihood of a ceasefire because incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will take a tough position on ending the war. While he has shown little regard for global institutions, and sees transactional value in backing Israel, I think he does not want to see the U.S. get dragged into another war in West Asia.

Navtej Sarna: I think Mr. Trump’s main motivation would be to show himself as the ultimate winner who can say he delivered on his campaign promise to stop the wars. But a ceasefire will not mean peace. Mr. Trump’s next step will be to want to go back to the Abraham Accords, which will be more difficult than it was in Trump 1.0 (2017-2021). The landscape has changed considerably for the countries that signed the accords (the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco) and those that the U.S. was trying to bring on board (Saudi Arabia). There won’t be a return to peace or negotiations until the heart of the problem is addressed, which is the need for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast

In an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine in October 2023, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote, “…Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades… The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.” A few days after the piece was sent to press, on October 7, Hamas launched its deadliest attack in Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking some 250 people hostage, triggering the latest spell of war in the Israel-Palestine conflict. A year later, West Asia (or the Middle East, as Mr. Sullivan calls it) is deadlier today than it has been in decades.

Mr. Sullivan’s October 2023 prognosis was not entirely unfounded if the region is seen from an American perspective. The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 by Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, announced a new age of Arab-Israel partnership. Saudi Arabia was in an advanced stage of normalising ties with Israel, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself put it. At the G20 Summit in Delhi in September 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden announced an ambitious economic corridor that sought to connect India’s western coast to Europe through the Persian Gulf, Jordan, and Israel. But what Mr. Sullivan, the Arabs, and the Israelis overlooked was the Palestine question.

Two narratives

Israel believed that it had established a new status quo — occupation without consequences. The Arabs believed that the Palestine issue had lost its geopolitical currency and that they could go ahead with formalising their decades-long back-room relationship with Israel. The U.S. wanted to bring the Sunni Arabs and the Israelis, two pillars of its West Asia strategy, closer in its bid to reshape West Asia and isolate Iran. But by carrying out a murderous attack in Israel, Hamas not only torpedoed this status quo, but also triggered a chain of events that led to a wider regional conflict, reinforcing the old argument that there will not be peace and stability in West Asia unless the Palestine question is addressed.

But Israel has a different narrative. It has always sought to delink Palestinian militarism from its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Before October 7, Israel had been treating Palestinian violence as a security nuisance. But after the Hamas attack, the first large-scale one in Israel proper since 1948, the narrative shifted. Now, Israel is fighting an “existential war” against terror. Israel marched to Gaza with fire and fury. Over the past 12 months, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians (more than 110 every day) and injured nearly 1,00,000 Palestinians. Nearly the whole population of Gaza (2.3 million) has been displaced.

Three-tier war

As the onslaught on Gaza began, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia group, opened a “support front” in Israel’s north. Israel expanded the war, defying pressure from the U.S., by doubling down on its assault on Hezbollah and taking the war to Iran by attacking its embassy complex in Damascus. In retaliation, Iran launched direct attacks against Israel. Now, Israel is fighting a three-tier regional war in West Asia.

Israel has different objectives at each tier, which collectively make for its strategy to alter the balance of power in West Asia to further its advantage. At the bottom tier, Israel went to Gaza with two declared objectives — to destroy Hamas and secure the release of hostages. In the middle, it wants to push Hezbollah from the border region of Lebanon and stop the Shia militia from launching rockets into Israel so that the displaced residents of the Upper Galilee region can return to their homes. At the top, it wants to weaken Iran, its main regional rival. Israel sees the conflict, as the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett put it, as a war against a rival octopus. Iran is the head of the octopus and the militias (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hashad al-Shabi, etc.) are the tentacles. In the three-tier war, Israel wants to destroy or degrade the tentacles and weaken the octopus and thereby reshape West Asia. Is this an achievable goal?

After 12 months of fighting in Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 and has been besieged by Israel since October 7, 2023, Israel is yet to meet its objectives in the 365 sq. km enclave, sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea and Israel proper. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to obliterate Hamas, but now even the IDF says this is not an achievable objective. More than 100 hostages, many of them believed to be dead, are still in Hamas’s captivity. Hezbollah says it will not stop firing rockets into Israel unless Israel ceases fire in Gaza. Israel cannot do this unless it meets its goals in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu chose to expand the war to Lebanon not because he is achieveing his objectives, but because he is far from doing so. Granted that Israel’s back-to-back attacks on Hezbollah, including its killing of Hassan Nasrallah, perhaps the second most influential figure in Iran’s axis after Ayatollah Khamenei, was a huge setback for both Hezbollah and Iran. When Hezbollah was in shock after the killing of its leader, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Here, Israel faces two questions. First, will the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership help Israel finish the war in Gaza? Second, will the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership help Israel defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon? The answer to the first question is an outright no. The second question will be answered in the coming weeks, months, or years.

History suggests decapitation hardly works in destroying or deterring militias. Nasrallah took over Hezbollah after Israel killed the group’s co-founder, Abbas al-Musawi. That did not stop Hezbollah from becoming what it is today: the most powerful non-state militia in the region. Israel killed two of Hamas’s founding leaders in 2004. But that did not stop Hamas from driving the Israelis out of the enclave in 2005, capturing the territory in 2007, and carrying out the cross-border attack on October 7 last year. If Israel has not destroyed Hamas in the besieged Gaza in 12 months, how is it going to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets from Lebanon? After Nasrallah was killed, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets into Israel.

The Iran question

This takes us to the third problem: Iran. The IDF has great firepower. Israel has proved in the past that it can carry out pinpointed attacks inside Iran, which shows the deep penetration of its intelligence in the Islamic Republic. Israel is set to carry out a decisive attack in Iran, in retaliation for the October 1 ballistic missile attacks by the Iranians. But will that deter Iran from launching another attack or supporting the axis? If it doesn’t, what Israel, Iran, and the region as a whole will get is a shooting match between the two most powerful actors of West Asia. If Iran’s already porous deterrence is weakened further in the shooting match, there is a high possibility that Iran will change its nuclear doctrine. Israel does not have a clear endgame vis-à-vis Iran, unless there is a regime change in Tehran.

This is a conflict loop where no side is deterring its rival. With no way to break out of the loop, Israel chose to climb up the escalation ladder. To dial down the heat in the region, there has to first be a ceasefire in Gaza. For long-term stability, the Palestine question needs to be addressed. Israel is ready for neither at this point. Instead, it is seeking to reshape West Asia in its favour. The last time a country tried to do so was the U.S. And the world’s most powerful nation failed.

stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in