Parshat Shoftim begins with a straightforward command:

“Judges and officers you shall appoint in all your gates … and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.” (Devarim 16:18)

Rashi explains that every town needed both judges to rule fairly and officers to enforce those rulings. Justice could not be a distant idea — it had to be rooted locally, available to every community. That is the Torah’s formula for a moral society: equal justice, applied where people live.

Justice Where You Live

The genius of Shoftim is its insistence that justice must be accessible and equal. Not some imperial tribunal deciding cases in faraway capitals, but local courts where every person could seek fairness and truth.

It is inside the gates where justice takes hold. That’s what builds trust, stability, and morality in a society.

The ICJ’s Distant Spectacle

Contrast this with the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It claims universal authority, yet its judgments fall unevenly. Brutal regimes that slaughter their own citizens often escape its scrutiny. But Israel, a country with one of the most independent and activist judiciaries in the world, is hauled before it repeatedly.

This is an inversion of the Bible’s call for justice: a court far removed from the people, applying rules unevenly, more performance than principle.

Israel’s Local Justice vs. International Bias

Inside Israel, anyone can petition the Supreme Court — Arabs, NGOs, critics of the army. Judges regularly check government policy and military decisions. That is exactly what the Torah envisioned: justice dispensed locally, equally, and consistently.

The ICJ, by contrast, applies law selectively and from a distance. It does not strengthen justice; it hollows it out.

Conclusion

The United Nations had the opportunity for courts in its gates — with its agency UNRWA on the ground in Gaza, running schools, hospital and providing loans. It could have confronted Hamas’ crimes. Instead, it chose silence. It abandoned justice, allowed Hamas to fester, and turned Gaza into a terrorist enclave for Israel to face.

Now the same UN condemns Israel in The Hague. A body that ignored justice locally dares to preach it globally.

But the Torah is clear: a land cannot be moral when evil is allowed to sit at its gates. Hamas must be expelled. And the UN — which empowered terror and continues to undermine justice — has no rightful place in the Holy Land either.