When Karim Kahn, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, applied for arrest warrants in May to be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, I commented on X that the warrant application was “proof positive that the powers that be in the world cannot stand the Jewish people defending themselves against terrorists hellbent on destroying them.” Now that the court has issued the arrest warrants, there can no longer be any doubt that this is the case.
The moral emptiness of the court’s actions is matched only by its legal frivolity and the danger of its potential impact.
Israel is not a member of the ICC. Israel has an independent and robust legal system. There is no evidence that Israel is committing war crimes by intentionally targeting civilians or using starvation as a tool of war – quite the contrary. All reliable evidence points to Israel’s extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties and to provide as much food as needed to the people of Gaza. Moreover, it is known, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Hamas is operating from within civilian infrastructures, using civilians as human shields in contravention of international law. Hamas continues to steal most of the aid that goes into Gaza and is using it as a tool of repression against its own people. Yet, based primarily on Hamas’s own propagandized news reports, Kahn and his cohorts at the ICC have brought these baseless charges and arrest warrants. The reason is clear: The world’s institutions will do anything to stop Israel from defending itself from the terrorist regimes that surround the Jewish state.
It is worth noting that the Palestinian Authority managed to be admitted to the ICC as a member “state” in 2015. This comes despite the fact that there is no “state of Palestine” and that the P.A., Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are dictatorial terrorist entities that should be given no shelter in international institutions, such as the ICC. In fact, to become a member state of the ICC, the country must ratify the Rome Statute, the court’s founding treaty. This is laughable for the Palestinian leadership for various reasons, including that the Rome Statute reaffirms in its preamble that “all States shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any [other] State.” But no one ever accused the ICC of being intellectually honest. Mahmoud Abbas, the dictatorial leader of the P.A. joined the ICC with impunity as a platform from which to openly launch lawfare attacks against Israel. Abbas has achieved his goal. The ICC has become the useful idiot of the P.A. and Hamas and has created immense pressure on Israel and the West through these dangerous actions.
Of course, no trial will ever occur. No country is going to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant despite grandiose statements by woke leaders such as Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. There will never be an adjudication of these nonsensical claims. The entire process is simply a charade of the left, although the danger posed by the position taken by the court cannot be understated. The ICC, which was only established in 2002, is done. It has revealed itself as a puppet of the far-left and of Islamist regimes, much like the United Nations. The court has only brought 32 cases since 2002 and has convicted just 11 people. The court was meant to be a court “of last resort” for crimes against humanity and genocide, where local courts are corrupted and are not prosecuting these most grave crimes. Kahn’s move may be the end of the ICC.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13928 authorizing asset freezes and family-entry bans against International Criminal Court officials for their threats to assert jurisdiction over the United States, which is also not a member of the ICC. The sanctions worked, and the ICC dropped its investigation into the United States. President Joe Biden inexplicably revoked the sanctions on April 2, 2021. But Trump is back and so will the sanctions. All indications are that this time, the sanctions will be taken to the next level. The United States should, and likely will, pressure its allies to do the same.
Even if the case goes nowhere, there will certainly be a lasting negative impact of the ICC’s actions. Remember, the war launched by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Islamic Republic of Iran against Israel will not be the last. In the next war launched by a terrorist regime against a sovereign Democratic Western nation, be it in the United States or Europe, the supposed guardrails the global community had built through the walls of the United Nations, and later the International Criminal Court will be nowhere to be found. Terrorists will continue to use the Palestinian’s playbook, which has proven to be effective in Western pseudo-intellectual institutions: Attack civilians, kidnap civilians, hide behind civilians and cry foul when those you attack launch a responsive war in response. In the end, we all lose.
I hope that this bell can be unrung, not just for Netanyahu and Gallant, but for all leaders in the Western world.
(JNS)
