The International Criminal Court (ICC) deliberately demonizes and delegitimizes Israel in order to abet those who seek Israel’s destruction. Israel’s response to the ICC must match the severity of the court’s gangland behavior.
The ICC’s deliberate and systematic attack on Israel has the delegitimization of the country as its central, and essentially only purpose. This can be unambiguously determined by looking at the actions and statements of the court and its prosecutor.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant
(Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw/File Photo, Haim Goldbreg/Flash90)
A kangaroo court
From the very beginning, when the court decided, in February 2021, to extend its jurisdiction to what it called “the territories occupied by Israel since 1967," it used as the basis for this decision an anti-Israeli act by the United Nations. Specifically, this was General Assembly Resolution 67/19 of November 2012, by which the Assembly decided to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member observer state of the UN. The automatic anti-Israel majority at the UN adopted that resolution, which Israel, the United States and seven other countries voted against.
Like all General Assembly resolutions, including Resolution 3379 of November 1975, which declared that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” while deliberately mis-spelling Zionism without a capital letter, Resolution 67/19 possessed all the legal and moral force of a piece of waste paper. Yet, the court derived the basis for its actions from the words written on this waste paper.
The court had waited more than eight years after the Resolution’s passage, and then used it a moment it deemed convenient to give a veneer of legitimacy to its own activities directed against Israel. When the court’s prosecutor, at that time Fatou Bensouda from Gambia, initiated an investigation a month after the court’s decision, in March 2021, its subject was the "Situation in Palestine." So it remains to this day. In itself, this title obliterates Israel and its rights, and runs roughshod over the fact that Israel has never accepted the court’s jurisdiction.
A prosecutor as gangster
Three months after Bensouda’s announcement, she was replaced by a new prosecutor, Karim Khan. Khan’s father is of Pakistani origin, which is significant because the Pakistani government is sufficiently antisemitic that it includes the phrase “This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” in all the passports that it issues.
Khan is an Ahmadi, a member of a Muslim sect discriminated against in Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries, apart from Israel, but this does not exclude the possibility that Khan shares the hatred of Israel promoted by Pakistani officialdom. Of course, the court has never addressed this issue, never attempted to determine whether Khan holds anti-Israeli and antisemitic views.
During the initial period of Khan’s service as prosecutor, the matter of the court’s hostility to Israel quietly rotted, until on October 7 last year Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the largest massacre of Israelis in the country’s history.
Within six weeks of the massacre, on 17 November, Khan acknowledged "a referral of the Situation in the State of Palestine" made to him by five different countries, for the purpose of investigation of specific persons. Of these five countries, Bangladesh, Comoros and Djibouti do not now and have not ever in the past had diplomatic relations with Israel. A fourth, Bolivia, had severed these ties two and a half weeks earlier. The fifth, South Africa, commenced proceedings against Israel in another court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a month and a half later. It accused Israel of acts “genocidal in character.”
Khan had accepted a referral made exclusively by some of the most anti-Israel countries in the world, and made no mention of this fact. His statement on the subject mentioned Israel just once, while studiously avoiding the words Hamas, Hezbollah and terrorism.
Just six months later, on May 20 this year, Khan issued his application for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant. In it, he called the murderers in Gaza “the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas),” and again omitted all mention of the word terrorism.
With practiced cynicism, he then included mention of his visit to the site of Hamas attacks and his team’s interviews with survivors, and even issued a pro forma call “for the immediate release of all hostages." In the paragraph immediately following this, he declared that he has “reasonable grounds” not even to accuse, but to hold Netanyahu and Gallant criminally responsible for starvation, murder and extermination.
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The South African legal team during a hearing on its genocide claims against Israel
(Photo: REUTERS /Yves Herman)
Having made use of a referral by countries that despise Israel, and having failed to use the term terrorism on even a single occasion in his statements, Khan accused the two people exercising ultimate authority over Israeli military operations of crimes fully equivalent to those committed by the Nazis against the Jews and other victims during the Second World War. His, and the ICC’s, object is unambiguous. It is to delegitimize Israel by libeling it as a Nazi-like criminal state, and to further the cause of those who seek to boycott Israel in order to weaken and ultimately destroy it.
In its decision to issue the warrants, the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I rubber-stamped Khan’s behavior, and his libel. Using the same language it “found reasonable grounds” to state that Netanyahu and Gallant are responsible for starvation and murder. Vaulting over ever-greater heights of cynicism and hypocrisy, Khan followed up the court’s decision with a statement again referring to his meetings with Israeli victims and ending with the assertion that “the lives of all human beings have equal value.” Of course, the word terrorism was again prominent only by its absence.
Khan, and the members of the Pre-Trial Chamber who service his activities, act like gangsters, engorged with a sense of impunity and driven by the joy of a hunt against those who they believe have no effective defense against them. They are encouraged in this by the position adopted by multiple governments. These include Britain’s current repugnant government of non-entities, which first refused to comment on the court’s warrant, and then had a spokesman say that the country “will always comply with its legal obligations.” Germany’s even more feeble government has muttered that it “will abide by justice and law.”
A few journalists are rather less restrained. Alistair Bunkall of Sky News, whose pretense of objectivity does not go much further than Karim Khan’s, states that Netanyahu and Gallant “are now wanted suspects, wanted to be put on trial for war crimes. And it is a label that will never leave them.” The BBC’s Frank Gardner declares that it is “a major blow to Israel’s international standing.” Jonathan Freedland, with glee disguised as analysis, announces in the Guardian that “it will accelerate Israel’s path to international pariahdom.”
It is time for punitive action
Israel, which has stretched out its war against Hamas and Hezbollah into a fourteenth month, cannot afford and must not tolerate the continuation of this international display of hypocrisy and dishonor, seeded with the rancid hatred of the Jews which defiles many long centuries of human history. Prosecutor Karim Khan, the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber, and all those who aid and abet their gangsterism, must face the full force of Israeli punitive action.
It is wrong to counsel, as Ron Ben-Yishai does, that Israel should adapt and Israeli military men should keep a low profile abroad. Israel was not created in order to cower in front of antisemites, but rather to give the Jewish people a safe national home, by making the cost of attacking them unbearable. Therefore, Netanyahu’s declaration that the court’s decision “is a modern Dreyfus trial,” while correct and proper, does not meet the challenge of the moment.
Israel should declare that the ICC is an antisemitic organization, permanently proscribe all its activities within Israeli and Israeli-controlled territory, and issue comprehensive sanctions and travel bans against those who work at the court. This will have limited practical significance, but it will set the right tone. The tone having been set, Israel should proceed to directly and publicly warn both prosecutor Khan and the judges. Either they will rapidly withdraw the warrants and cease all activity directed against Israel, or they shall face catastrophic consequences. The consequences need not be specified further, the mere mention of these will clear the minds of all those who possess a mind capable of being cleared.
There will be those, not just in Israel, who think that the path of public and unambiguous confrontation is the wrong one, and that it is best to wait, perhaps to let the Trump administration deal with the court in whatever manner it might deem appropriate and effective. This approach is certain to fail, for the simple reason that transferring one’s right of self-defense to another, however well-intentioned that other may be, is never the answer.
Trump has many priorities much more urgent to him and his administration than the ICC. Israel must take responsibility for its own defense. The weed must be torn out at the root, the campaign of libel and boycott must be trampled into the dust. The court must know that it has no choice but to withdraw the warrants, or else.
- Dan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian and author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today.