By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice
If anyone still harbored any illusions that the International Criminal Court at The Hague was a serious institution with a shred of legitimacy and a moral mandate, those illusions have surely been put to rest.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan issued arrest warrants in late May for Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in what may be the finest demonstration of absurdity in international affairs so far this century. And given the continued omnipresence of the UN, that’s saying a lot.
Granted, Khan and his team of charlatans also issued warrants for a handful of Hamas bosses, but the ludicrous equivalence only seems to lend an even greater sense of incredulity to the episode; it is on the order of issuing arrest warrants for both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, had the ICC been around to make fools of themselves in 1940.
Khan seems to have received a reasonable legal education in the UK, so it’s difficult to explain the reasoning behind the allegations he has leveled against Netanyahu and Israel, which are laughable on their face. He claims, for instance, that Israel uses “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” and has “intentionally and systematically” deprived Gazan civilians of the basic necessities of life. He apparently missed the over half a million tons of aid that Israel has brought into Gaza during the war.
He goes on, accusing Israel of “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” Never in the history of warfare, and that’s a long history, has there been a military so cautious in the avoidance of civilian casualties among its enemy’s population as the IDF in this conflict.
The lack of validity of their fanciful claims aside, the ICC’s jurisdiction in this matter is non-existent. Israel never signed onto the accord establishing the court (neither did the U.S., by the way) and is therefore not bound to any of its precepts in any case. The ICC knows this, and so had to conjure up a “State of Palestine”, which does not exist, on whose behalf to act. Any way one chooses to look at it, the warrants issued by the ICC are based on Khan and company’s anti-Israel fantasies.
As though the ICC had not discredited The Hague sufficiently with their remarkably stupid warrants, last Friday the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, which in the court’s opinion – get this – “may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction.”
If the “Palestinian group” in Gaza to which the ICJ is referring is Hamas, then yes, absolutely, 100 percent the Israeli operation there could bring about its physical destruction. That is the point, and all civilized peoples should be hoping for that outcome, for that – and that alone – will end the war justly. If they are somehow referring to the Palestinian civilians – the ones who the Israelis have been painstakingly endeavoring to evacuate – then see above.
And if those two incidents were not enough of a stain on the international community in one week, Spain, Ireland and Norway took it step further by formerly recognizing something called the “Palestinian State.” It’s bad enough that these presumably civilized nations would extend recognition to a fiction; what adds to the absurdity is the fact that none of these nations have been bothered to formally recognize Taiwan – an actual country, with a functioning government, thriving free market economy, and impressive dedication to democracy, rule of law, and individual freedom.
This is especially poignant, given that it happened in the same week that Communist China launched military drills encircling Taiwan, in what the Chinese called “strong punishment for the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces,” that act being the democratic election of a new president, whose inauguration took place three days earlier. Where is the international outrage over that act of aggression? Why are left-leaning European countries tripping over each other to recognize a state that, like it or not, does not even exist, and whose de facto ruling authority countenanced, if not materially supported, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, while denying official recognition of a well-established country with a commendable human rights record whose only international “crime” is that Communist China wants it to be a part of their prison-nation, even though it never has been?
The Biden administration, as it sometimes does, said the right things in regard to the ICC, calling its ruling, appropriately, “outrageous”; but will it back it up? Doubtful. What should happen is that the U.S. should immediately impose sanctions on the ICC, and put in place the pieces necessary for the U.S. to completely disassociate itself from the organization. That would, to be sure, be a shame, as a legitimate international criminal court could be useful. But false equivalence of the kind demonstrated by the ICC is fatal, or should be, and such actions are necessary not only for the advancement of international justice, but for our own self-esteem.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.