The decision of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister has a profound significance for Israel and for its position in global politics. It is the first time that the ICC has sought the arrest of a serving politician supported by the Western powers and it marks the dawn of radical changes in the politics of the Middle East, not least in Israel.
It is not that socialists should have faith in the value of the international ‘legal’ system, because the USA in any case, like China and Russia, is not a part of the ICC and the Israeli government will simply ignore any arrest warrants issued. But the significance of the ICC decision lies in the huge and unprecedented weight of world opinion that has built up against Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.
The statement of the ICC can be read here and it lists the charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the Defence Minister. Among a variety of war crimes it mentions are “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare…Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health…Wilful killing or Murder…Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population”.
Although they have been careful not to comment on the specific charges against the Israeli leaders, the German and French governments and, surprisingly, David Lammy for the Labour opposition, have expressed their support in principle for the work of the ICC in upholding ‘international law’.
The ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, is no swivel-eyed radical. He was elected to that position in 2021, having been nominated by the Tory government, and after decades of experience in international law and in prosecutions in many parts of the world.
‘International law’ is ignored by stronger states when it suits them
What the ICC actions signify is not the primacy of ‘international law’, which is a nebulous concept at the best of times, and which is studiously ignored by all of the most powerful states when it suits their interests. But it is an indication of a profound shift in world opinion, among tens of millions of workers and youth, over the murderous Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
The Western media has followed the war in Gaza in an utterly lop-sided manner, but thanks to social media and videos posted on ‘X’, Facebook and other platforms, and thanks also to broadcasters like Al Jazeera, the world, with the exception only of a narrow political class, can see the reality of Gaza, and have called it by its proper name, genocide.
It is largely to create a semblance of ‘balance’ that the ICC have included three leaders of Hamas in their request for arrest warrants, the three being a counterweight to two Israeli leaders. Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed the equivalence of Hamas and Israeli leaders as “absurd and false”, something echoed by all of those politicians like Biden who have backed Israel to the hilt.
The equivalence is indeed “absurd and false” because, although no socialist supports the policy and methods of Hamas, or its so-called ‘military’ operation on October 7, we also understand that the history of Gaza and Israel did not begin on that one day.
What is happening today in Gaza, is an extension of what has been going on there for the best part of two decades and what is going on, albeit on a more limited scale (for now) in the West Bank. It is the culmination of a history of oppression of the Palestinian people and the denial of their economic, national, and social rights.
For Palestinians, brutalised day-in and day-out for decades, deprived of any freedom of movement, of economic development or of any hope for the future, the events of October 7, or something like those events, were inevitable. Gaza was kept as an open prison for two decades and an explosive reaction of one kind or another was predictable and predicted. There is no ‘equivalence’ between a brutal miliary occupier and the victims of that occupation.
Significance of the ICC decision is hard to overestimate
The significance of the ICC decision is difficult to overestimate. It is a huge blow to the moral, political and diplomatic standing of Israel across the world. If they are issued, it means theoretically that those included in the warrants would risk arrest in any of the ICC’s 124 member countries, including the UK, most of Europe and Latin America, as well as countries in African and Asia.
“The implications for Israel could be really dramatic,” said Eran Shamir-Borer, head of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for National Security and Democracy and a former head of the international law department in the Israel Defense Forces, speaking to the Financial Times. “There are a number of countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, the US and Denmark, where there are pending cases . . . against local authorities not to sell arms to Israel. This might have an impact on their decisions.”
Also writing in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, hitherto a staunch supporter of Israel, described the ICC decisions as a “huge setback for Israel”. “The fact that the ICC is also applying for warrants against the leaders of Hamas” he wrote, “…will not cushion the blow.”
It is predictably in the USA that the outrage against the ICC has been loudest, other than in Israel itself. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has called for some kind of ‘punishment’ of the ICC if it proceeds with warrants, although not being a member of the ICC, the USA will have little leverage.
All throughout the bloody bombardment of Gaza, Joe Biden has carefully calibrated his responses. He would undoubtedly prefer a more pliant Israeli leader than Netanyahu, who is conducting an endless war only for his own political survival. But Biden nonetheless has given unstinting military support to Israel.
There are even reports that the temporary landing pier established by US Army engineers, supposedly to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, is being used to offload weapons for the IDF. If true, that would correspond precisely to Biden’s two-facedness.
The movement across the world in defence of Palestinian rights and in opposition to the merciless bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza is the biggest global political movement of its kind since the Second World War, perhaps the biggest ever. It has involved rallies, demonstrations, marches, and ‘camps’ of all kinds and has encompassed tens of millions of workers and youth. It has been fuelled by social media and modern technology in a way that no protest movement ever has before – even the movement against the US war in Vietnam.
No Western leaders want to see the Arab Middle East go up in flames
This tsunami of public opinion will inevitably feed through and have political effects in all of those states where it is manifest. If Western politicians are beginning to react to the carnage in Gaza, it is not because they have suddenly grown a conscience, but because they are feeling the hot breath of these protest movements on their necks.
None of the Western leaders, least of all Biden, want to see the Arab Middle East consumed in an upheaval of anger over Gaza, because it would threaten their strategic interests in the region, not least in relation to oil. Ironically, anti-war protests are far less common – almost absent in most cases – in the Arab states, precisely because they are banned. If there were genuine mass movements and demonstrations against Israeli policy in Gaza, they could quite quickly turn into anti-government protests, a new Arab Spring, and none of the corrupt, autocratic Arab leaders want that.
Even in Israel, the war and its fall-out will produce profound political changes, at least in the longer term. At the moment, predictably, the political class right across what passes for a ‘political spectrum’ has vehemently denounced the ICC.
The supposed ‘opposition’ leader, Benny Gantz, who has threatened to leave the temporary war coalition over Netanyahu’s lack of an ‘end plan’ condemned the idea of warrants, as did the leader of the largest opposition party, Yesh Atid. But the “complete moral failure” to which the latter referred, lies with Israeli politicians, the overwhelming majority of whom are infused with a racist view of the Arab population that it governs, and who have said and done nothing as an apartheid state has become consolidated.
Far right has dominated Israeli politics for years
It is only a small part of the Israeli population that understand at the moment that there can be no ‘peace’ and no ‘security’ on the basis of an apartheid state that denies rights to half of the population that the state ‘governs’. That minority view can be seen in human rights organisations, in ‘protest’ groups of former IDF soldiers, and even on the pages of newspapers like Haaretz, on the ‘liberal’ wing of the media but it has a voice that will grow.
The baying of the far right has dominated Israel’s political scene for two decades. It has an agenda that is based either on the consolidation of apartheid a state where only Jews have rights, or on the expulsion of Palestinians from the whole of Eretz Israel, ‘from the River to the Sea’ – or some combination of both. The noise of the far right has reached a crescendo in the current coalition government but it is now facing a reckoning.
Their policy, based on nothing more than blunt military power and the brutal oppression of Palestinians, has turned Israel into a pariah state across the world. It is all very well Netanyahu saying that Israel will fight on “with its fingernails”, but without American tax-dollars and international support he has nothing.
The new international status of Israel, as a cruel Spartan state, without moral compass or international standing, will impact particularly on secular and more liberal opinion in Israel. What we are witnessing is the dawn, the beginning, of new political processes in Israel. These processes will involve conflicts between Jews, sharper, more intense and potentially more violent than any others in the seventy-five years of that Israel’s history. That is the significance of the milestone decision of the ICC yesterday.
