This piece was first published on the Good Law Project on 9 March 2026.
As a Lebanese in the diaspora, there was only one reason my phone suddenly started to light up with dozens of notifications: war. On Saturday 28 February I woke up to a blizzard of alerts from friends and family telling me that the US and Israel had started to bomb Iran.
The obvious illegality of this unprovoked assault makes it all the more terrifying. It’s yet another example of how the lack of accountability for the genocide in Gaza has emboldened the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu.
My research into authoritarianism told me this war would only get worse. Donald Trump sidelined Congress – making this war of aggression unconstitutional under US law as well as illegal under international law. And we soon learned that he jumped on to Netanyahu’s bandwagon only after Israel had already decided to attack Iran.
Senior figures have given different contradictory explanations for the operation – from a war launched in “self-defence”, through a series of strikes designed to knock out Iranian missiles or to counter a nuclear threat, all the way to a war of liberation for the Iranian people. And it became increasingly clear that neither Trump nor anyone in his circle ever had a plan for what comes next.
As the realisation that this could very quickly become worse than the 2003 invasion of Iraq kicks in, I can’t stop thinking about a friend in my home town, Beirut, who has been living with crisis after crisis for several years now, from the Lebanese economic crisis to the Israeli bombings. Whatever she does, she tells me, it feels like it is never enough. There is an overwhelming sense that unaccountable powers are playing with our lives, and that no government is willing to save what’s left of international law.
I may be thousands of miles away, but my despair is the same. All day long, the news is full of bombs dropped by a UK ally on Beirut and I’m struck by the absurdity of it all. The bombastic names chosen by the US and Israel for this shameful adventure: Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion. The cartoonishly macho language used by American and Israeli officials who boast of “death and destruction from the sky all day long”. The hubris and recklessness of those in the UK who insist on defending the indefensible. It all adds to the overwhelming sense of helplessness. You would think that Keir Starmer would be pushing back harder against this dangerous war, especially as it comes hard on the heels of American threats against Europe which promise to “cultivate resistance” to our way of life. But, as the conflict spills ever wider across the region, all we see is complacency.
International law has never been perfect, and the UN is far from ideal, but moments like these give us a taste of what the world would look like without them. If we don’t push back against the mad emperor playing a game of Risk with our planet, it is our rights and our future that are at stake. If Trump can do whatever he wants, the dangers are greater than at any time since the second world war. The stakes couldn’t be higher.