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[Excerpt:]

"International law is a strange animal. It is a legal system with no consistent enforcement mechanism, no clear and acknowledged legislator, no bedrock procedural rules for a fair gathering of evidence and no system for appeal. While its principles may be noble, it is not a trial by judge or jury, but by an international version of a parliamentary committee. Thus, Libya or China have little to fear from the likes of the Human Rights Council or international courts, because they are supported by a political mob – either in the form of the Arab and Muslim blocs, or sheer financial and demographic clout. Only when it comes to a country such as Israel, lacking the benefit of hundreds of millions of Jews at its back, international law – in the form of commissions established by, among others, Egypt and Pakistan – suddenly finds its voice. Courts of law must not only be objective, but must be perceived as such. Judges do not wield real weapons, but rather the power of the perception of fairness, of transcending the conflict they are arbitrating. Law is the diametric opposite of the rule of the mob. In a reality in which the gaps in international law have made it at times the legitimizer of the lynch mob, can Goldstone be sure his committee will be anything but the start of another front in a war of delegitimization? Is he so ignorant of the methods and history of this conflict that he fails to see this possibility unfolding before him? And, more deeply, Israelis have the right to wonder: is it moral to have a legal system whose laws aren’t legislated by the elected, whose procedures aren’t known ahead of time and which denies all right of appeal – a legal system where only minorities, small states and small peoples ever find themselves on trial?"