If murdering a waitor by foreign agents was a reason to start a war, we would’ve been all dead by now.

Delaying (for over 20 years!) compensation to Bouchiki’s relatives was a very unfriendly state act by Israel, and Norway might well have treated it as an act of war, if she had perceived a sufficient national interest in deterring future Israeli incursions militarily. With most of the Mossad cell in custody and reasonable private assurances that this sad accident wasn’t about to recur, Norway elected to treat it as a mere crime instead.

If Lebanon had the power to offer comparable assurances against Hizb’allah recidivism, a tense but peaceful settlement between state actors might have been reached in the Wasserman/Regev matter, with or without extradition of the perpetrators. Lacking such power to participate in the give and take of national comity, they leave Israel only the military option to protect its existential sovereign interests.

In short, a crime across borders can be a warlike act, but (real, sovereign) states usually have a compelling common interest in downgrading it. A lot of sovereignty is state-actor trade unionism: it’s a good litmus test for serious statehood that states treat frank piracy and warlordism as a jus gentium offense.

Isn’t this a really odd thing to say, since the official Israeli story is that kidnapping and manslaughter (of Israeli soldiers) gives them a license to infringe upon Lebanese national sovereignty in an openly warlike manner. Of course, if all they’re doing is crimefighting, then the threshold of protection afforded the innocent is set way higher.

Anyway this issue, universal jurisdiction, and the issue of peremptory norms does not affect HRW’s argument, because many of Israel’s crimes are recognised as such by the original Geneva Conventions, which it has ratified, and by parts of Protocol 1 by which it is bound as customary international law.

Hezbollah Appologizes

BEIRUT (element)—Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah yesterday announced that he was “sorry” after admitting that his militia was “not fighting fair.”

“I feel really, really bad and embarassed,” Nasrallah said in a statement on Hezbollah television. “I mean, why can’t we just fight fair against the Israelis? How can we face the girls during recess if we refuse to fight the Israeli forces face-to-face, and instead continue to fight in this sneaky way.”

He called for a broad change in tactics in the war against Israel, after conceding that “the rules” clearly showed that bombing from an air force is “totally fair,” while firing Katyusha rockets is “not fair.”

“From now on, when the Israeli tanks and jets come at us, we’ll make sure we’re not anywhere near women or children, because it’s not fair. Give the jets their best shot, then we’ll take our best shot,” said Nasrallah. “If it means our complete destruction, well, then that’s fair.”

He also called on Iraqi insurgents to “fight fair.” “No more IEDs, no more suicide bombs,” he said. “From now on, fight the Americans in formation on an open battlefield. After all, it’s only fair.”

11 December 1917.

Lesser of usurpations, I said. Kidnapping and manslaughter are mere crimes, warlike only if committed under color of law, whereas the peremptory norm doctrine is a license for the ICC to infringe upon national sovereignty in an openly warlike manner. Uniformed British agents marching Gen. Almog off that El Al plane at Heathrow would have been a far graver matter between allies than British suicide bombers blowing up a bar in Tel Aviv, for example.

Yeah, it’s almost as though Israel has serious human rights issues and HRW is a human rights watchdog organization. What outrageous “bias”!

I notice they’re also “biased” against countries like Lebanon, because they kept on criticizing Lebanon’s actions as though that country was a persistent human rights violator. Oh, the humanity! Will the “bias” of these rights-obsessed folk never end?!

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3412

Mordechai Vanunu thanks you for your concern. And it isn’t just kidnapping either, is it? So the family of Ahmed Bouchiki no doubt shares your enthusiasm for the “occasional irregular” operation.

We managed to try Col. Noriega without mentioning jus cogens or calling in Avocats Sans Frontières. The Israelis tried Eichmann, ditto. It’s a convenient fact that Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is ponderously uninterested in how the accused arrived in the jurisdiction where he is charged.

Forced to choose between occasional irregular kidnapping subject to the normal checks of democratically enacted criminal law in the destination court, or occasional irregular incursions of undemocratically enacted international “law” into countries that have signed no treaty to grant it license, most Americans (and certainly I) see the former as by far the lesser of usurpations.