WITH only a couple of days to go, 2024 is certain to be remembered as a year that buried a rules-based world order. It is customary to label such a year as annus horribilis.
Certainly, there have been many more horrible years before, but if only a strip of land with a few million people is considered, 2024 must be on top of a horrid pile.
Do not go thinking that this is due to some misfortune visited by nature. No, not at all. Every dreadful day of 2024 bears the mark of human evil.
One evil empire in the Middle East — Israel — and its no less wicked allies in the West, led by the United States, have made sure that 2024 would go down as a year that lost all humanity.
Let's begin with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored several calls for a ceasefire — even a few for permanent peace — only to publicly boast that he was on a mission to change the balance of power in the Middle East forever.
Neither a ceasefire nor a permanent peace must stand in the desperate despot's way. If Israel's security is really the goal of Netanyahu or his servile allies, the Gaza massacre would have been brought to an end long ago.
Instead, Netanyahu, who has been on the hunt for Palestinian blood since he first became prime minister in 1996, had early this year urged his soldiers to go on a genocidal mission against the Palestinians, whom he described as "Amalek" in a pre-ground Gaza invasion briefing, quoting a fabricated Jewish religious text. Desperate despots often quote unholy texts.
He faces corruption charges at home while his country is coming under growing global accusations of genocide. The United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — whose ruling this year was that Israel was committing "plausible genocide" — and rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were unequivocal about Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians being genocide.
Not so to the US. The reason for Washington's hypocrisy is clear: if it admits to Israel committing genocide, then it will be admitting to complicity in the worst of all crimes.
This is why President Joe Biden's administration was the first to describe, even the "plausible genocide" of the ICJ ruling, as non-binding.
When the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes, the US was issued repeated threats against ICC and its officers.
Its Western allies, as signatories to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, stated they were obligated to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they entered their territory but were also threatened with sanctions for doing so. Its Western allies, which expressly said that as parties to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, they were obligated to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they set foot in their territory but were also threatened with sanctions for doing so.
Which rule of law nation does this? The US most certainly — having done so under Donald Trump's administration — and one or two European nations.
A nation cannot claim to uphold the rule of law while violating the international laws it helped establish. No rule of law nation can call itself so while breaking all the international law that it helped create.
The rule of law principle says no one is above the law. A few powerful nations are behaving as if they are. It is they who have made 2024 a horrible year of bullets.