International law died in Gaza. Why is the world mourning it in Greenland? Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Mon, 01/12/2026 - 15:33 We have entered the age of open thuggery, as the brutality Israel tested on Palestinians is now being normalised elsewhere People protest against US pressure on Greenland, outside the American embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 29 March 2025 (Nils Meilvang/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP) Off For months, many warned that Israel ’s unrestrained assault on Gaza was not merely a crime against Palestinians , but a fatal blow to the very idea of international law . What was being tested was not only the scale of Israeli violence, but whether rules still applied at all; whether power would remain constrained by law, or whether law would give way to brute force. Those warnings were dismissed as exaggeration. They were not. Few articulated the stakes more clearly than Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro , who cautioned that the choice before the world was “stark and unforgiving”: either defend the legal principles designed to prevent war, or watch the international system collapse under the weight of unchecked power politics. For billions of people in the Global South, Petro warned, international law is not an abstraction, but a shield. Remove it, and only predators remain. He was right. Gaza was the opening act - not an aberration or a lapse, but the moment a long-gestating doctrine finally shed all restraint. What has unfolded there is not only the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, but the killing of law itself - and with it, the value of human life. Over more than two years, international law has been rendered meaningless, trampled alongside the bodies of children, doctors, journalists and patients bombed in their homes and hospitals. Human life has been reduced to an inconvenience, legality to an obstacle, morality to a nuisance. Enabling atrocities This was not done in secret, but in full view of the world. Germany armed it. Britain justified it. France equivocated. Others offered silence dressed up as “complexity”. The institutions meant to prevent such crimes stood aside or actively enabled them. The world persuaded itself that the collapse of law and the devaluation of human life could be contained; that Gaza could be treated as an exception without consequence. It could not. The rules were expendable when Palestinians were crushed beneath them; they became sacred again when Greenland, or Europe itself, appeared exposed There is something grotesque in watching Germany and Europe suddenly rediscover international law when US President Donald Trump speaks of of annexing Greenland . The same governments that spent months shredding legal norms, supplying weapons, and neutralising accountability while Gaza was pulverised, now speak gravely of sovereignty, order and the dangers of unrestrained power. Having armed a genocide , having watched hospitals bombed and children buried without consequence, they now clutch their pearls at the prospect of borders being ignored - so long as those borders are European. This is not a defence of international law. It is nostalgia for a version of it that protected them. The rules were expendable when Palestinians were crushed beneath them; they became sacred again when Greenland, or Europe itself, appeared exposed. Gaza marked the point at which American-backed power ceased even to feign adherence to international norms, and began operating openly as domination imposed by force. Once law is enforced selectively, it ceases to function as law at all. It becomes permission. It was only a matter of time before that permission was exercised elsewhere. What is unfolding in Venezuela today is not an escalation, but its execution. The kidnapping of a head of state and the bombardment of a sovereign capital are declarations. They announce a new phase in global politics, stripped of restraint, shame, and even the pretence of legality. Unapologetic intervention The US has intervened violently across Latin America and the Global South for more than a century, through coups, invasions, sanctions, proxy wars and assassinations. What distinguishes the Trump era is not the frequency of intervention, but its form. Intervention is no longer cloaked in euphemism or filtered through institutions. It is declared, personalised, theatrical and unapologetic. Where earlier administrations wrapped destruction in the language of democracy or humanitarianism, Trump dispenses with the mask entirely. Control is not justified; it is asserted. This is the practical expression of Trump’s revived and distorted invocation of the Monroe Doctrine . What was once presented, however dishonestly, as resistance to European colonialism has been inverted into a licence for American domination. Under what critics have aptly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”, the principle now signifies something far cruder: the asserted right to intervene violently, seize resources, dominate strategic chokepoints, and exclude rivals by force. A man stands in front of police as part of a demonstration in support of Gaza at Venice Lido, Italy, on 30 August 2025 (Stefano Rellandini/AFP) Venezuela is not the destination of this doctrine, but its demonstration - one Trump has made clear will not end there, with Cuba and Mexico already signalled as the next potential targets. Nowhere is this clearer than in the plan being imposed on Caracas. Under it, the US will control Venezuelan oil sales “indefinitely” , manage the revenue through US-controlled accounts, and use it as leverage to dictate the country’s political and economic future. Venezuela will not even be free to trade as it chooses, forced instead to purchase American goods exclusively, regardless of cost or availability elsewhere. This is not aid. It is expropriation. And this did not emerge in a vacuum. Venezuela has been subjected to US sanctions since 2005 , and they intensified dramatically in 2017 during Trump’s first term, ultimately escalating into what now resembles a blockade. The result has been economic devastation and the displacement of nearly eight million people from a country that holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world. This collapse was not accidental; it was engineered. The current plan is not a departure from that strategy, but its culmination. Graveyard of international law The parallels with Iraq are impossible to ignore. There, too, sanctions were weaponised and humanitarian catastrophe rebranded as policy. The UN-administered oil-for-food programme was itself a response to sanctions that had already killed more than half a million children through malnutrition and disease. By comparison, the plan now imposed on Venezuela is even more extreme: no UN oversight, no multilateral framework, no freedom of trade. The US alone will control the oil, the revenue, and the conditions of survival. ICE's killing in Minneapolis shows American empire has come home Read More » The historical lineage runs deeper still. What is being imposed on Venezuela mirrors older colonial practices, such as Britain’s systematic destruction of India’s textile industry , or the Opium Wars that reduced China to a captive market at gunpoint. Even 19th-century empires cloaked conquest in the language of civilisation and progress. Trump seeks no such legitimacy. Domination is justified by power alone. History also teaches that imperial violence abroad inevitably returns home. The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, followed by the denial of medical aid, shatters any illusion that this system targets only distant populations. The parallels with Israeli military practices in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are unmistakable: extrajudicial force, total impunity, and the use of terror to impose obedience. US and Israeli security forces share surveillance technologies, training programmes , and repression strategies that increasingly blur the line between occupation and domestic enforcement. What was tested on Palestinians is now being normalised elsewhere. Gaza became the graveyard of international law - not because the law was fragile, but because it was buried: methodically, publicly and without consequence. International law was dismantled plank by plank, body by body. Those who now lament its demise are the same actors who engineered its destruction, like Frankenstein recoiling from the monster he assembled piece by piece. This is the age of open thuggery. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0