Everyone on the left seems to forget that Israel was the country that was attacked on October 7th. This is a war.
Kyle Orton writes at Substack:
The Dangerous Fantasy of “International Law”In the summer of 1998, shortly after the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) had been signed and four years before it went into effect, David Frum wrote: “power politics being what they are, the International Criminal Court may hesitate to strike directly at the United States. But Israel will provide a convenient proxy”. Points for prescience. Earlier today, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that his office was applying for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for a raft of war crimes and crimes against humanity alleged to have been committed in Gaza.Several oddities are immediately apparent, even within the ICC framework. First, Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute. Khan gets around this by claiming the ICC “can exercise its criminal jurisdiction in the … State of Palestine”, which, of course, does not exist. Second, though Israel is not a party to the ICC, it was cooperating with the Prosecutor in an investigative process that was abruptly and arbitrarily terminated, strongly suggesting the “investigation” was a sham and the decision to apply for indictments had been taken before the evidence was gathered. Third, no indictments were issued for officials in Iran, the State behind the 7 October pogrom in Israel that slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped nearly 1,500 mostly Jewish civilians.Still, it was a nice touch that Khan also announced the application for warrants against senior HAMAS officials, namely the head of the group in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar; the commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif; and the “political” leader, Ismail Haniyeh. HAMAS’ complaint that the ICC was attempting “to equate the victim with the executioner” was quite correct, albeit not in the way they intended. The ICC has given itself political cover institutionally to deflect the inevitable charge that it is unduly focused on Israel, while fostering a sense of equivalence between Israel and HAMAS, and as a bonus the ICC can further this political narrative without putting the HAMAS terrorists in any danger of arrest; all the trouble will be for Israel.And politics is what this is all about. There is little point delving into the ICC charges against Israel as legal or factual matters because they were arrived at using neither law nor fact. The shameless misuse of “international humanitarian law” (IHL) and concepts like “proportionality” on their own terms, essentially to try to criminalise war per se, is a subset of the larger problem: the system that brings these charges about.
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