Whatever the jurists of the Hague, and world opinion, might think, Israel has stated that it will defy any order to stop fighting.

“No power on Earth will stop Israel from protecting its citizens and going after Hamas in Gaza,” said a spokesman on the eve of the decision.

The top UN legal body has no way to enforce its decisions and its lacklustre support for Ukraine’s attempts to place international law at the forefront of its campaign against Russia emboldened Moscow to shrug off the order to suspend the military operations that it commenced 27 months ago.

In South Africa v Israel, the court held that there was “a plausible case” that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is violating the Genocide Convention and were asked to go further. That issue is possibly years away from being fully considered.

The International Criminal Court, which also sits in The Hague, has identified the judges who will hear the requests to issue arrest warrants for Hamas leaders, for Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant, and for Netanyahu.

Friday’s decision, in the same week as the largely symbolic recognition of Palestine by Ireland, Spain, and Norway, completes a number of diplomatic setbacks for Jerusalem.

But diplomacy can be a very long game, as we witnessed during decades of opposition to apartheid after its introduction in South Africa in 1948. The rising international opposition to Israel may have reverberations in arms-supplying democracies but it will cement determination inside the increasingly isolated state.

Where there is protest in Israel, it consists of anguish for the hostages and anger at their prime minister for failing to save them. Calls for a ceasefire are based on attaining freedom for the captured, not sympathy for the Palestinians or desire to reinvigorate peace talks.

The decisions of independent courts; an increasing rejection by 140 nations and the Holy See of Israel’s current position; internal legal challenges to the providers of weaponry. All of these are straws in the wind which indicate the current direction of travel.

But that wind may blow harder yet. In a confidently-argued article last weekend, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle asserted that revised civilian death figures exposed a lie behind claims of genocide. He wrote about the concept of “a just war”. 

It is quite possible that casualty numbers are wrong. That does happen in wars, for a variety of reasons. But Israel has lost most of the arguments in the court of public opinion and did so again this week. That is no foundation for a successful strategy.

Cărtărescu’s winning numbers

The judges at the Dublin International Literary Festival are to be commended, not only for their perspicacity, but their boldness in choosing a book with mathematics as one of its core themes.

They have awarded the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English — €100,000 — to Mircea Cărtărescu for his story of a teacher mired in the soul-sapping regime that was Nicolae Ceauescu’s Romania in the 70s and 80s.

Solenoid recounts the mundane nature of daily life in a country dominated by the Securitate secret police, long queues for basic provisions, the inherent and Kafka-esque contradictions of the education system, and family life.

Any book which uses mathematics as a plot device is taking a risk. Some surveys indicate as many as one in four people struggle with simple calculations. 

Yet, they appear to be an increasingly popular component of modern dramatic works. The hugely popular award-winning Chinese trilogy The Three-Body Problem embraces quantum physics, nanotechnology, string theory, astronomy, and pure mechanics.

Fermat’s Last Theorem was the first book about mathematics to become a bestseller. The story of the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan became an award-winning play, A Disappearing Number.

Solenoid gives a hat-tip in the direction of Cork’s George Boole and reinforces that mathematics, with its prime, negative, irrational, imaginary, and friendly numbers, can often seem like a kind of magic. And magic is, also, a component of the very best literature.

Challenges of making everything add up

Nowhere are the contemporary difficulties of comprehending very large numbers more amply demonstrated than in the differing academic views of the cost of unifying Ireland.

Last month, a report from the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA), compiled by John FitzGerald, adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin, and DCU economics professor Edgar Morgenroth, concluded that the bill would be €20bn per year for two decades, an eye-watering sum of €400bn.

Sinn Féin was swift to pounce on that conclusion and denounced the methodology behind the figures.

Now another leading academic has rebutted the findings — and by association the work of a colleague — by suggesting that the headline figure is “widely inaccurate.”

John Doyle told the Oireachtas committee on the Good Friday Agreement that the IIEA study “contains significant errors and is based on entirely unreasonable assumptions”.

Prof Doyle added: “Consequently, the figures in the report are not even a worst-case scenario — they are just wrong.”

The true total, as said by DCU’s vice president of research, would be €25bn spread over 10 years. And, he said, the North would run a surplus after approximately a decade.

This may not be of pressing importance, although we can expect all parties to be promulgating policies for their election manifestos. Shortly before becoming Taoiseach, Simon Harris insisted that a united Ireland was not where his priorities currently lie.

He remained committed to the objective and hoped he would see it achieved “in his lifetime”.

Given that Mr Harris is the youngest person to become the Republic’s principal minister and is only 38, this provides him with some considerable latitude.

Nevertheless, there is a mighty difference between a cost of €400bn and €25bn. You don’t have to be a statistical genius to understand that one figure is 16 times larger than the other.

As the debate inches forward, voters will not want to be confounded by multiple sets of calculations which bear little resemblance to each other. 

But if citizens are distracted by theoretical mathematics, they will be able to contemplate another abundance of sums which were presented to them yesterday, this time in the projections for metropolitan Cork’s transformative high-frequency commuter rail project.

The bill will be €1.6bn, although we must observe all the usual caveats about the country’s poor track record in establishing infrastructure on time and at cost.

Among the deliverables are eight new commuter rail stations. There will be upgrades to nine existing stations, the development of a major multi-modal integrated transport hub next to Cork’s Kent station and a depot to store a new 150-strong fleet of carriages.

Subject to planning being granted, and funding, which is in place, it is hoped that all of the work will be completed by 2030.

This looks like a lot of bang for the buck for a hugely important project.