Amid the smell of gunpowder hanging over the region and warnings that war may return across the entire Middle East, my mind returned to the final scene of the Egyptian film Al-Ghoul. Adel Imam stands before the court after killing the powerful businessman played by Farid Shawqi and delivers the famous line written by Wahid Hamed: “I killed him so that the Law of Saxony would not prevail, and killing would not become the law of the jungle.”
The line was not merely a defence of an individual act. It was a warning about the collapse of the very idea of the state. When the law loses its ability to protect people and hold the powerful accountable, violence becomes the only language left, and power itself becomes the source of legitimacy. Are we now living through the age of Trump’s American ghoul?
Decades after the film was produced, its warning appears to have moved beyond the cinema screen and into the reality of the Middle East. The issue is no longer confined to one state or a local conflict. An entire international system is facing an unprecedented test.
As Israel’s war continues across multiple fronts, military operations expand and strikes repeatedly cross sovereign borders, the questions become increasingly urgent: What remains of international law when its application becomes selective? What value do international institutions have when they cannot enforce their own decisions or even protect the principles for which they were established? What is happening around the framework agreement, alongside the statements of Israel Katz and Benjamin Netanyahu, provides a stark example, despite the injustice embedded in the framework itself.
When Law Becomes Subordinate to Power
Since the end of the Second World War, the international system has rested on a simple principle: law should prevail over force. The United Nations, the Security Council and the International Court of Justice were intended to form a system capable of preventing the world from returning to the logic of unrestricted war.
Yet recent years have exposed a widening gap between legal texts and the political will of major powers, particularly when Israel is involved. Many see American political, military and diplomatic support as a protective shield that has restricted the ability of international institutions to enforce their decisions or hold violations to account. The result has been a deep erosion of public confidence in the effectiveness of those institutions.
This is where the central idea behind Wahid Hamed’s warning becomes relevant. The problem does not begin when the law is violated once. It begins when violating the law becomes routine and carries no political or legal cost. At that point, exceptions become the rule, and power becomes the true measure governing international relations.
This transformation does not threaten Palestinians alone, nor does it affect only the Lebanese, Syrians or Iranians. It threatens the structure of the international system itself.
If borders can be violated without accountability, national sovereignty becomes subordinate to the balance of power, and United Nations resolutions are reduced to recommendations that can simply be ignored, then the world is effectively entering a new era. Legal deterrence is collapsing while military deterrence is taking its place.
The danger lies not only in the wars taking place today, but in the model being established through them.
When other states see that military force can deliver political gains without accountability, they will begin to imitate that model. International law will cease to function as a common reference point, and relations between states will become an open competition for military strength, alliances and technological superiority. The result would closely resemble the law of the jungle against which the film warned.
The Middle East Will Pay the Highest Price
The Middle East is the region most likely to bear the immediate cost of this transformation.
The region already exists along complex political, sectarian, ethnic and territorial fault lines. Any further decline in the authority of international law will expand the possibilities for confrontation. Border disputes will become easier to ignite, assassinations and pre-emptive strikes will increase, and opportunities for political settlements will decline as the logic of imposing realities by force takes precedence.
Trump’s repeated pressure on President Ahmed al-Sharaa to enter Lebanon is a striking example. The question is whether repetition itself is now being used to manufacture a new reality.
If this equation continues through years of hardship, the region could face a series of dangerous transformations.
The first would be the consolidation of a belief that security cannot be achieved through international institutions, but only through the possession of military deterrence capabilities.
The second would be an unprecedented arms race, draining already fragile economies and delaying development for decades.
The third would be a widening divide between populations and international institutions as the conviction takes root that justice is selective rather than universal.
The fourth would be declining investment and economic stability. Capital does not thrive in an environment governed by open-ended wars and permanent uncertainty.
Israel Will Not Remain Immune
Israel itself will not be insulated from the consequences of this trajectory.
Weakening international law may provide it with broad freedom of action today, but it may eventually contribute to the emergence of a far less stable world in which every state is forced to rely primarily on its own power against others.
Such a reality carries long-term risks for every party, regardless of the scale of its military capabilities.
The same contradiction applies to the United States. Washington’s continued protection of this approach raises questions that extend far beyond the Middle East.
For decades, the United States presented itself as the guardian of a rules-based international order. If the perception becomes firmly established that Washington applies those rules selectively, its credibility will continue to weaken. At the same time, competing powers such as China and Russia will gain greater room to call for a restructuring of the global order around new balances of power.
The Normalisation of Lawlessness
The greatest danger of the present moment is not war alone. It is the world’s growing familiarity with war, the normalisation of institutional paralysis and the acceptance of exceptions to the law.
History teaches that legitimacy does not collapse in a single moment. The process begins with the justification of smaller violations. Those violations are repeated, the exceptions expand, and eventually the logic of force is permanently accepted.
This is why Wahid Hamed’s famous line remains more than a piece of cinematic dialogue. It is a continuing political and moral warning.
When law collapses, one side does not simply triumph over another. Everyone ultimately loses. When force becomes the source of legitimacy, states and societies enter an era governed neither by justice nor institutions, but solely by the balance of power.
The question confronting the Middle East and the wider world is therefore unavoidable: Can the principle of international law still be rescued and legitimate institutions restored to meaningful authority? Or are we quietly moving towards a Middle East governed entirely by force, where the Law of Saxony becomes a distant memory and the law of the jungle becomes the only system that remains?
