OPINION
News, Yes. Judgment, No.
Every day the numbers arrive. Collapsed buildings, percentages, updated death tolls: newsrooms publish them, update them, and stop there. An independent analysis of over 1,100 articles from the three largest American newspapers measured exactly how much: every Israeli victim received eight mentions, every Palestinian victim barely one for every two deaths. An internal New York Times memo, made public by a journalistic investigation, instructed reporters to avoid the words “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory.” This is not carelessness. It is a documented editorial choice.
And yet, somewhere, judgment is taking shape. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories violates the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid — not a binding ruling, but an authoritative opinion from the UN's highest court. A separate case, filed by South Africa in December 2023, accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention: it is still ongoing, stuck at the written-pleadings stage, with no ruling on the merits. A fact to report precisely, neither inflated nor minimized. And the International Criminal Court, which judges individuals rather than states, issued arrest warrants against Israel's prime minister and his former defense minister in November 2024.
While these proceedings crawl forward at The Hague, money moves on a much faster track. And this is where the picture stops being abstract and becomes a matter of names, concrete choices, people who can be pointed to.
Money moves faster than law
Take Jared Kushner. In February 2024, still a private citizen, he said in a public interview at Harvard that Gaza's waterfront “could be very valuable” once Israel had “moved the people” out and “cleaned up” the area — his own words, not a hostile paraphrase. That private citizen no longer exists. Since 19 February 2026, Kushner has been the United States Special Envoy for Peace Missions, and is also one of the founding executive members of the “Board of Peace” Trump established to oversee the twenty-point plan for Gaza, alongside Tony Blair, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other heavyweight names such as the CEO of Apollo Global Management and the President of the World Bank. And while he negotiates the peace and oversees its reconstruction, he remains the president's son-in-law and head of an investment fund, Affinity Partners, which between 2021 and 2026 raised billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, investing it, among other things, in Israeli companies tied to defense. A U.S. House committee put it in writing in an April 2026 letter: the man deciding how the war ends has a direct financial stake in how it ends.
Then there is Miriam Adelson. She gave $25 million to the medical school of Ariel University, a settlement in the West Bank, explaining that the gift serves to “strengthen the settlers in Judea and Samaria” — biblical names that, as she herself has said, imply the land was given to the Jews by God. Another six million went to an organization that arms volunteers guarding settler farms. She owns Israel's highest-circulation newspaper, in whose pages she wrote that anyone who does not unconditionally condemn Israel's adversaries is “dead to us.” And she gave over one hundred million dollars to the committee that backed Trump's return to the White House.
Private money, however, is only half the mechanism. The other half is the inertia of those who have the power to intervene and choose not to, or do so too late. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, flew to Tel Aviv in October 2023 to offer “unconditional” support for the war against Hamas, without consulting the rest of the EU's institutions — so much so that the EU's then foreign-policy chief publicly accused her of speaking “in her own name only.” That same month, over eight hundred European officials and diplomats wrote her an open letter denouncing a “double standard”: Russia's blockade of Ukraine treated as an act of terrorism, Israel's blockade of Gaza ignored. In February 2024, Ireland and Spain formally asked her to review the EU-Israel trade agreement in light of the emergency measures just ordered by the Hague court. Von der Leyen will actually suspend, even if only partially, that agreement — but not until September 2025, nearly two years later, finally speaking of “man-made famine” in Gaza.
Germany tells the same story in its military version. It is Israel's second-largest arms supplier after the United States, and after October 7 its approved exports increased tenfold. Chancellor Friedrich Merz suspended exports usable in Gaza in August 2025, citing the military expansion into the city — but within a month and a half his own government had already approved new ones, and in November, after the ceasefire, the suspension was lifted entirely.
Lined up, these cases do not tell a conspiracy story. They tell something simpler, and for that reason more unsettling: private capital, media ownership, political office, and institutional inertia can, together, make negotiable what the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute were meant to make impossible — not only for Israel, but wherever the same ingredient appears in sufficient dose. It is the same mechanism this editorial space has already documented elsewhere, in selectively applied nuclear standards and in the chronic lack of enforcement of the International Criminal Court in general. Money buys narrative. Narrative buys time. Time, without coercive enforcement, becomes impunity.
This is what I mean when I say the West's presumed moral supremacy is being dismantled: not because a single government commits a crime, but because the system the West built specifically to prevent that crime from going unpunished proves, under sufficient pressure, negotiable.
What remains, whatever happens
Some of the states involved in the Nuremberg trials contested their legitimacy even as they were being held. Today those trials are the foundation of all subsequent international criminal law — including the very Rome Statute the International Criminal Court now invokes against an Israeli head of government. A state's present refusal to recognize a court does not erase the value its finding will carry over time. The work done remains. The judgment rendered remains.