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25 November 2024. Nigel for The Spectator. Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of…
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11 August 2024. Nigel for Quillette. The flawed moral reasoning of the ICC’s panel of legal experts would have approved the arrests of Churchill and Eisenhower. When, in June, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their conduct in Gaza, the Conservative government objected that the…
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01 July 2024. By Nigel for The Centre for Independent Studies. The pacifist answer to the problem of war is straightforward. Any use of violent force by anybody in any circumstances is immoral and should cease. War is always worse than its alternatives; peace is always preferable. This is not a view to which I…
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7 May 2024. Students and staff are united through their foolish misunderstanding of Israel’s founding It’s no surprise that the widely broadcast pro-Palestinian protests in the US should have inspired some Oxford students to pitch their tents outside the Pitt Rivers Museum, decrying Oxford University’s historic complicity in the British Empire’s “disastrous colonial legacies” in Palestine. …
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3 March 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. Opponents of the Jewish state smear it as a colonial project. This is a false narrative and fake history. The “decolonisation” story is a moral melodrama, performed in stark divisions: black versus white, oppressed versus oppressor, good versus evil. That’s the comic- book source of its…
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18 January 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Spectator. Israel’s fight against Hamas is not genocide. Last week Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his concern that Israel ‘may have breached international law’ in its three-month bombardment of Gaza. Two days later, at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s lawyers presented their case accusing…
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31 Oct 2023. Nigel Biggar for The Times. Sir, to be fully proportionate, Israel’s response to Hamas’s deliberately indiscriminate slaughter of October 7 needs more than the prospect of military success and a reconstructed Gaza (“Is this a just war? Let’s apply some tests”, Philip Collins, Oct 30). It needs to belong to a political…
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15 October 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. An ‘Iron Wall’ will never make the Jewish state safe. The last 100 years shows it will only make some Palestinians nihilistically violent. Hamas’s attack on Israel has given fresh voice to the view that a just political end legitimates the use of any military means…
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27 March 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Times. World leaders, even Putin, take the nuclear threat seriously. Why if Kyiv had kept its stockpile? When Russian forces crossed the border and advanced on Kyiv just over a year ago, only two responses were possible: acquiesce or fight. The Ukrainians chose to fight and the…
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Paul Cornish, Nigel Biggar, Robert Johnson and Gareth Stansfield prepared a report commissioned by the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) of the UK Ministry of Defence. The authors considered intervention policy and practice for those circumstances in which the UK national interest might demand action. The authors argue that UK intervention operations are permissible to maintain the rules-based…