Eroding U.S. Moral Legitimacy: A Comparative Case Study of Israel-Palestine Conflict

Abstract

This thesis will address the different ways in which the United States chooses to interact with the international legal bodies in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, through the International Criminal Court (ICC), United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept. As much as Washington is portrayed as a champion of a rules-based international order, it proposes a tendency of protecting those who are allies and pressuring those who are enemies. This contradiction casts crucial doubts regarding the competence and jurisdiction of international law bodies. This paper is based on the Neorealist approach, which accentuates the role of systemic pressures and politics of alliances in the determination of the behavior of states. In this light, the U.S. policy towards the state of Israel is not a paradox but a given: the observance of legal norms is justified by the interest of strategic partnerships and violation of the same laws by those of vital partnerships. To empirically verify this assertion, the study compares the Israel-Palestine conflict with two opposite scenarios- Libya and Ukraine, where the interests of the U.S. were more consistent with the application of the international law. The thesis uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Security Council debates, ICC decisions, the executive statements of the U.S. and human rights reports methodologically. Discourse is coded into either support, obstruction, or neutrality with sub-codes following the themes of alliance defense, humanitarian justification and sovereignty claims. This practice emphasizes the way in which language is reflective and constitutive of U.S. strategy with regard to international law. The expected findings suggest that U.S. conduct in Israel–Palestine will illustrate a consistent pattern of obstruction, while Libya and Ukraine demonstrate more active legal enforcement when aligned with American interests. This comparative analysis contributes by showing how great powers instrumentalize law, weakening institutional credibility and deepening Global south skepticism.