Yesterday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, “for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024”, as per the ICC press release.
An arrest warrant was also issued for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, although this particular detail will continue to be entirely ignored by the Israeli establishment, which prefers to remain up in arms over its allegedly singular victimisation. In the eyes of Israel, the ICC decision constitutes a horrifying display of anti-Semitism and even support for “terror”.
Among the war crimes charges against Netanyahu and Gallant are that “both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024”. The latter date refers to the day that the ICC prosecutor filed the applications for the arrest warrants and is not, obviously, an indication that Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip have abated over the past six months.
Officially, the Israeli military has killed nearly 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher. And while a United Nations committee recently found Israel’s methods of warfare in the Gaza Strip to be “consistent with genocide”, the ICC has stopped short of calling Israel out on this front, instead specifying that the court “could not determine that all elements of the crime against humanity of extermination were met”.
Of course, any and all international recognition of Israel’s criminal behaviour is morally significant given the country’s modus operandi, according to which international law is made to be broken – but only by Israel itself. It’s no accident that neither Israel nor the United States, Israel’s primary backer and current accomplice to genocide, are not parties to the ICC.
Were international “justice” not completely selective and governed by an egregious double standard, the US would have its own plethora of war crimes to answer for – like the wanton slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq under the guise of the so-called “war on terror”.
Meanwhile, it’s not quite clear why the ICC has stopped short of detecting “all elements of the crime of against humanity of extermination” on the part of Netanyahu and Gallant. After all, knowingly depriving a civilian population of everything “indispensable to their survival” would seem to be a pretty surefire way of ensuring, well, extermination.
It’s also kind of “indispensable to survival” to not be bombed to death while having your entire territory pulverised. And to that end, perhaps, the ICC has “found reasonable grounds to believe” that both Netanyahu and Gallant “each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.
But assigning such individual guilt is a mere drop in the bucket of “justice”. At the end of the day, the state of Israel as a whole bears “criminal responsibility” for usurping Palestinian land and engaging in 76.5 years (and counting) of ethnic cleansing, displacement and massacres. All of this while driving a sector of the Palestinian population to armed resistance and thereby converting them into targets for continued Israeli criminality.
Given Israel’s lengthy history of flouting United Nations resolutions, the country’s presumption that it should also be immune from ICC rulings comes as no surprise. While Israel does not recognise ICC jurisdiction domestically, Netanyahu and Gallant could in theory be arrested if they travel to any of the court’s 124 member states. Needless to say, this is not an eventuality that will be encouraged by the world’s reigning superpower.
And yet this is not Israel’s first run-in with the ICC. Back in 2019, after nearly five years of “preliminary investigation”, the court announced that then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was “satisfied” that there was a “reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine”.
This did not mean, of course, that said investigation was set to commence – eternal bureaucracy and foot-dragging being the hallmark of international criminal law. Rather, it had simply been established that there was a “reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”.
Well, yeah. And that “reasonable basis” had already been around for, oh, seven decades or so.
Anyway, Bensouda’s ruminations were still more than the Israelis could handle. The Jerusalem Post, for example, ran a dispatch by Israeli attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner – titled “Refusing to Play the Palestinians’ ICC game” – in which the author accused the court of serving as a “concealed weapon” against Israel.
Contending that there was “nothing sexier for Bensouda than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, Darshan-Leitner concluded: “We knew that Bensouda was tired of pursuing African dictators and brutal tribal leaders, and wanted to show that the ICC was a court with a truly international reach”.
Speaking of sexy, Al Jazeera has noted that, as a result of Bensouda’s ongoing perceived insolence, Israeli spy chief Yossi Cohen “intensified the covert war on the court that Israel has been waging since Palestine joined the ICC in 2015”. The Mossad went about intercepting Bensouda’s communications, and she reported being “personally threatened”. She stepped down as prosecutor in 2021, the same year the “investigation into the situation in Palestine” finally got under way.
Now, it remains to be seen just what the Israelis have up their sleeves in this latest international legal showdown. But as the “situation in Palestine” proceeds apace and genocide rages, there’s a reasonable basis to believe justice is not ultimately an option.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.