The foolish hope–whether real or pretended–that the UN plan for peace in Syria would work is gone. At least since the Assad regime’s bloody attack on Aleppo University last week, this has been clear even to previously blind diplomats. Read more »

Is Palestine a state? The International Criminal Court (ICC) answered this question this week, and said no.

The Palestinian Authority, apparently calling itself the “Government of Palestine,” tried to lodge a complaint against Israel at the ICC. As American courts would do, the ICC first had to decide if it had jurisdiction. As its statement notes, the ICC has jurisdiction over a matter only when the UN Security Council or a “state” provide it. So is “Palestine” a state? Read more »

It was during Kofi Annan’s tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations (1997-2006) that the “Responsibility to Protect” became a major item on the international scene.  That is no feather in his cap, because the urgency of “R2P,” as it came to be called, reflected the various mass murders that had taken place during his watch ( Darfur, 400,000 dead; Kosovo, 800,000 displaced and 12,000 killed) or just before it (Rwanda, 800,000 killed) when he was an Under Secretary General and latterly the Special Representative for the Former Yugoslavia. Read more »

Iceland recently recognized Palestine as a state. As I noted in The Weekly Standard,

according to Iceland, Palestinian sovereignty includes 100 percent of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Palestine, as Icelanders see it, includes the Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s holiest site. The judenrein policy enforced by Jordan during the years it ruled Jerusalem would thus be reinstated. And Israel in any recognizable form would anyway disappear, for the Allthingi resolution calls for all Palestinian refugees–of whom according to the U.N. there are five million–to “return” to Israel. Read more »