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Scales of justice and Israeli and Hamas leaders in front of the ICC
The ICC and its unintended consequences for Israel and beyond
The International Criminal Court, widely known as the ICC, announced on Monday that prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for the leadership of both Hamas and Israel, a move that leaves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant with the same legal status as Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, and terrorist military commander Mohammed Deif – as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is wanted for ordering the invasion of independent Ukraine.
Whatever your personal opinion of Netanyahu, this order appears to create a moral parallel between the democratically elected leadership of Israel pursuing a war with massive civilian casualties and Hamas’ rape and torture of civilians, the taking of some 250 Israeli and other hostages, and the worst wholesale killing of Jews since the Holocaust. That’s an extraordinary decision from the ICC.
Outside Israel, of course, this move will be hardest to swallow in the United States. The Biden administration has roundly criticized the Israeli Defense Forces’ failure to do more to protect innocent Palestinian men, women, and children who are trapped in Gaza with nowhere to run. And the United States has itself put out a report that the IDF has likely committed war crimes in Gaza, but that it can’t make the claim with high confidence because the Israelis have failed to provide information requested by Washington.
Senior Biden administration officials, including the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and the CIA director, have all visited Israel over the past few months to warn Netanyahu that the US opposes using starvation of civilians as a tool of war, that Israel must allow much more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and that more measures must be taken to avoid civilian casualties. There’s another complication for Biden. Like Israel (and Russia), the United States does not recognize the authority of the ICC, while the strong majority of the world’s governments do. That highlights the perception that US action against the court puts Washington further out of step with most of the rest of the world. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested he’ll work with Congress on a plan to pursue sanctions against the ICC in response to its decision to pursue Israeli officials.
However Biden feels about Netanyahu and his most hawkish deputies on a personal level, with little real leverage to influence their near-term choices, Washington remains Israel’s most important ally and security partner. His administration continues to send weapons, share intelligence, and broadly support the war against Hamas. Some of that is Biden’s determination to protect a democracy that’s responding to a horrific terrorist attack. But it’s also an acknowledgment of a US election-year reality. While the president must care about the many young people whose votes he needs in November, most of whom are outraged by both Israeli actions in Gaza and the refusal of the United States to act firmly to stop them, he must also answer to the millions of American voters who support Israel’s response to the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7.
The ICC charges have also had an unintended consequence inside Israel. Voters in that country, many of whom wanted Netanyahu out of power for years before this war began, are outraged by the court’s seeming moral equivalence of elected Israeli officials with the terrorists of Hamas. In that sense, the ICC has done Netanyahu, Gallant, and others a big political favor. And that, in turn, strengthens the position of Israel’s most aggressive war strategists, who may now decide they have a more solid public mandate to do exactly what they want. Biden, who would much prefer to be dealing with a new Israeli leader, can’t be happy about that either. Particularly since it weakens his own leverage with Netanyahu’s government even further.
In sum, the ICC announcement is likely to produce the opposite of its intended effect. It will empower those within Israel whose positions sound nearly as extreme as those of Hamas. Many members of the right-wing parties that keep Netanyahu in power, including both the finance and national security ministers and their backers, regularly argue for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They have called for the full, permanent Israeli occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank. They want Israel to control all the land “from the river to the sea.” It’s not hard to hear the parallels in that rhetoric with the words of Hamas leaders and their broader axis of resistance.
Neither Israel nor Hamas can seize control of all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea without much more war and the killing of many, many more people. Without genocide. In a horribly twisted way, Hamas and the Israeli extreme right need one another to continue a fight that benefits them both.
The greatest tragedy of all of these past seven months is that war has allowed Hamas and the most extreme Israeli views to ignore calls for peace from the rest of the world. We are now farther from peace than when the ICC made its announcement and much farther than we were before Hamas broke into Israel on Oct. 7.
ICC war crimes charge strengthens Netanyahu's position in Israel
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week.
Plenty of breaking news right now. And what I want to focus on is the International Criminal Court, the ICC, which is now seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leadership and Israel's leadership, putting both on a level with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been friends with both Hamas leadership and Netanyahu over the years.
So it's kind of an interesting club. But this is certainly a challenging headline. And if you're watching this around the world and you're seeing that the International Criminal Court is making these cases against Sinwar who runs Hamas and other senior deputies, and the Israeli prime minister and the minister of defense.
What you are seeing, what you feel, the takeaway you would have is moral equivalence, culpability. Well, both of these must be, you know, sort of engaged in crimes against humanity, acting against international law. These are bad people. These are criminals. And I mean, I want to just take a step back for a second. Seven months after the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust, you are seeing that democratically elected leaders of Israel, the only strong, albeit far from perfect democracy in the Middle East, is being put on the same plane as the terrorists that raped and tortured and killed Israeli citizens, still, seven months later, holding them hostage and want to destroy Israel as a country. That is an extraordinary headline for people to see and people around the world who are on very different sides of this conflict will respond to that very differently, radically differently.
But it's important to recognize what exactly we're seeing and just how far, if you will, the world has moved in what it thinks about this conflict, over the course of the seven months since October 7th. It's clearly bad for the United States and the Biden administration, in particular that President Biden is supporting the Israeli government, is the strongest ally of Israel of any country in the world. It continues, to send weapons, to share intelligence, and to broadly support the war against Hamas. Its continuation though certainly with significant disagreements in the way that the war has been conducted. It's also important to recognize that the United States has itself put out a report that said that war crimes, it believed, were likely to have been committed by the Israeli Defense Forces on the ground in Gaza, says it doesn't have sufficient evidence, to make those claims definitively because the Israelis have not provided the evidence requested by the United States.
But it is worth mentioning that a lot of what the Biden administration, including the secretary of state, the national security adviser, the director of the CIA, all of those have been making trips to Israel over the past months. A lot of what they've been saying privately to Israel, the opposition to using starvation as a tool of war, the demands that humanitarian aid in much greater amount be allowed in, the targeting of civilians with far less restraint than the Americans would want to see.
A lot of that is indeed reflected, though with much sharper language and publicly, in the ICC report. But of course, the United States and Israel, like Russia, do not recognize the ICC as a legitimate body. Most countries around the world do, the vast majority. But the Americans and the Israelis, do not. The response here is going to be stronger support for the Israeli government inside Israel, stronger support for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister inside Israel. The idea for any Israeli civilian, any Israeli civilian that their country, that their leadership could be somehow put in equivalence to the terrorist organization that attacked them on October 7th is utterly unthinkable. And so they're going to support their leadership in response to that claim makes it harder to remove the Israeli prime minister and government, something that certainly the United States and many around the world would like to see. It also puts the hard right in Israel in a stronger position, because that's what the PM needs to maintain his leadership.
And of course, this is a group that is much more equivalent to Hamas. Yes they were also democratically elected. There are many, many parties in Israel, and some of them are very extreme. And they managed to be the critical support to allow for a coalition to be established. But they have leaders who regularly, including members of cabinet in Israel, the minister of finance, the minister of national security, though not critically, any members of the War Cabinet, but they have been arguing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They have been arguing for the full and permanent Israeli occupation of that territory, essentially ideologically very similar to Hamas and the axis of resistance. I mean, what you hear them say is from the river to the sea. And if you're Hamas, that means for you, territory should only be for the Palestinians. If you're Israeli on the far right, that means the territory, should belong to the Jews. But neither of which are going to lead to any possible resolution other than greater fighting and war. But it is, of course, one of the true tragedies of the last seven months that these are the two organizations that have become, in a sense, stronger and with veto power over what the rest of the entire world is trying to bring to an end, is trying to create stability and eventually opportunity for these two people to live side by side without fighting each other.
We are farther from that, I'm afraid, today than we were yesterday, and certainly much farther from that today than we were on October 6th. That is it for me. And we'll be watching this, I'm sure, very closely. Thanks.
- ICC arrests and Rafah invasion threats loom ›
- Netanyahu escalates feud with the White House ›
- How Netanyahu used Hamas to avoid talks of a two-state solution ›
- Yuval Noah Harari: Netanyahu's 'Deep State' fears enabled Oct 7 attack ›
- Netanyahu and Hamas both won, Israelis and Palestinians lost ›
- Israel-Hamas war: Who is responsible for Gaza's enormous civilian death toll? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel-Hamas war: Who is responsible for Gaza's enormous civilian death toll? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel-Hamas war: Who is responsible for Gaza's enormous civilian death toll? - GZERO Media ›
What We're Watching: Africa desperate for vaccines, US-EU truce on airplanes, ICC probes Duterte
Africa is running out of vaccines: Africa has received fewer vaccines than any other continent, and the results are now showing. Faced with a third wave of infection, many African countries say that cases are soaring and that vaccine deliveries from the WHO-managed COVAX facility remain sluggish, in large part because of shortages from Indian drug manufacturers. South Africa, Namibia, and Uganda say that their healthcare systems are inundated with COVID cases; ICU beds are scarce, and COVID patients are dying while waiting for hospital beds. To date, just 0.6 percent of Africa's 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated, and new variants are spreading, making containment across the continent even harder. (Cases in the South African province of Gauteng, home to the hubs of Johannesburg and Pretoria, where South Africa's more transmissible COVID strain has run rampant, have doubled over the past week, and doctors are bracing for a surge in deaths.) Meanwhile, the G7 countries agreed this week to send 1 billion COVID doses to poor countries, but experts warn that these may not arrive in Africa before most states' supplies run dry.
US and EU agree to truce on Boeing-Airbus row: After 17 years of quarreling, the US and the EU have agreed to put their differences aside in the ongoing saga over subsidies for Boeing and Airbus, their respective aerospace champions. In 2019, the World Trade Organization found that Brussels had illegally been providing subsidies to Airbus, essentially clearing the way for Washington to slap billions of dollars' worth of tariffs on EU products. Shortly after, the WTO found that Washington was doing the same thing for Boeing, violating international trade regulations and leading Brussels to threaten tariffs on US exports. In reaching this truce on the sidelines of the recent G7 summit, US President Joe Biden and EU representatives have agreed to suspend punishing tariffs — championed by former US President Donald Trump — worth a collective $11.5 billion a year on a range of products like whiskey, cheese, spirits, and tractors. But why now? President Biden has made it abundantly clear that he wants to get the Europeans on side in an increasingly bitter fight with China over a range of economic, human rights and tech abuses. The Biden administration also says that this move will help stabilize manufacturing jobs in aerospace and other sectors, reflecting its "foreign policy for the American middle class."
ICC to probe Duterte's drug war: The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has asked permission to launch a full investigation of alleged crimes against humanity committed during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs from 2016 to 2019. Duterte's crackdown on drug traffickers has killed about 6,000 people, according to official police data, though local human-rights groups say the real figure is much higher. As expected, the Philippine government blasted the Hague's decision and vowed not to cooperate with the probe. In fact, Manila withdrew from the ICC in March 2019 in response to its preliminary investigation into the drug war. Duterte himself has kept quiet so far, but the threat of a full ICC probe won't draw any sign of remorse for his war on drugs, the signature campaign promise that helped elect him five years ago. Indeed, these days the Philippine president is more focused on choosing whom he'll endorse to run for the top job in next year's elections, and whether he'll be on the ballot as a vice-presidential candidate.