11 Fall 2026 in singling out Israel for selective opprobrium and indictment. A case study of this institutionalized groupthink in the post October 7 arena is that of the International Criminal Court (ICC). I am a longtime supporter of the ICC and was “present at the creation.” I co-sponsored the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act in the Canadian Parliament as an MP in 2000, providing for domestic implementation of the ICC Statute, and convened the first ever Parliamentary Assembly for the ICC in 2002. I continued to support it thereafter, both as Minister of Justice and Attorney General and as a parliamentarian. Accordingly, I work closely with ICC Special Prosecutor Karim Khan to support efforts to hold Hamas responsible for its war crimes and crimes against humanity. I filed a brief with the ICC to that effect, while serving also as counsel for families of the hostages taken by Hamas in 2023. Surprisingly, Karim Khan called for indictments against both the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister of Israel, the first ICC indictments against the leaders of any democratic state. These acts were not antisemitic, as some have contended. Karim Khan, whom I know well, is not an antisemite in any way, but the institutionalized groupthink of which he partook ended up breaching the very foundational principles of the ICC and international law — complementarity, cooperation and equality before the law. It may also end up being antisemitic in effect, though not in intent, in the way the ICC indictment is weaponized for singling out Israel for selective opprobrium and indictment. This leads to the second dynamic, that of the intensified post-October 7 laundering of antisemitism under universal public values — the protective cover of the UN, the authority of international law, the culture of human rights, and the very struggle against racism and apartheid itself, which has found expression in the indictment of Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), yet another UN legal body with which I have had an ongoing involvement. In December 2023, South Africa launched its case at the ICJ, accusing Israel of genocide and calling for provisional measures to end Israel's “genocidal actions.” Israel replied to the filing “with disgust,” describing South Africa’s case a “blood libel” and urging the Court to reject it. I was asked by the Israeli leadership to be their nominee for the ICJ in January 2024, and this would have included presiding in this case. I would have been honored to do so – given my respect for the Court let alone this proceeding – but I declined for health reasons and recommended the appointment of the former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, a jurist respected internationally, and the Government of Israel followed suit. I also had been looking forward to serving along with the South African nominee to the ICJ at that time, Justice Dikgang Ernest Moseneke, with whom I had a long and mutually respectful relationship and who had been imprisoned with Mandela, and was himself a former Deputy President of the South African Constitutional Court. While I did not join the Court, I did publish a twelve-point critique of South Africa's weaponization of international law and abuse of process in undertaking this proceeding, as summarized below: 1. South Africa purports to be representing and affirming our common humanity, which would presuppose Israel’s legitimacy as a state with an inherent right to self-defense under the UN Charter. Yet South Africa’s Application impugns Israel’s legitimacy — characterizes its founding as an “apartheid state” — while engaging in delegitimizing and demonizing tropes. South Africa’s Application appears more as a proxy for Hamas than an Applicant on behalf of our common humanity. 2. The jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice presupposes the existence of a dispute under the Genocide Convention between the Applicant South Africa and Respondent Israel. For there to be a “dispute,” the Convention requires that the Respondent, Israel, be engaged in the matter of the “dispute” — that it be given a right of reply — before proceedings are instituted. Yet as the record shows, Israel was not engaged as a party to the dispute, not given a right to reply, and was effectively denied “due process” and the “right to a hearing” as mandated by the Genocide Convention itself. Indeed, South Africa falsely presented the dispute to the Court as existing. Since this was not true, the International Court of Justice lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate. This alone warrants the case to be dismissed. 3. The exercise of jurisdiction in the matter of the Genocide Convention presupposes not only a finding of Israeli “acts of Genocide” but the requisite “intent to commit Genocide.” In the absence of such intent, there is no case to proceed with, and no case to answer. In South Africa’s Application before the Court, it not only ignores the overriding evidence of Hamas’s genocidal intent, let alone Hamas’s genocidal acts, but it imputes
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