Patrick Lawrence: The ICC Warrants and the World They Announce
LONDON—There is an old, often-told story about a front-page article one of the big dailies here once ran as severe weather hit in these parts. “Storm in Channel, Continent Cut Off,” the headline read. Nobody is certain any newspaper ever published any such story with any such headline. The majority view is that it is an apocryphal tale meant to suggest the Anglocentric sensibility you sometimes find among the English.
People cite some specifics from time to time: It appeared in The Times in the 1930s. No, it was in the Daily Mirror in the 1940s. “A common date and name I’ve seen,” a reader remarked some years ago in AskHistorians, a portal carried on Reddit, “is The Daily Telegraph somewhere in 1929.”
I have always been inclined to the view that there’s a home truth in this chestnut but no literal truth to it. With the reporting coming out since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister on Nov. 21, however, I have to wonder about The Telegraph. “ICC puts its reputation on trial by chasing Netanyahu,” is the headline that appeared in its Thursday evening editions. The subhead is just as hourglass upside-down: “Pursuit of democratically elected individuals who have been supported by the West will test court’s legitimacy.”
There will always be an England, as the old song goes.
The court has not released the documents pertinent to its warrants. On Thursday it simply cited “reasonable grounds” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival.” This is legal language alleging that the Israelis systematically used starvation as a weapon of war, an open-and-shut war crime of which the terrorist regime is open-and-shut guilty. But given the slaughter and atrocities the world has witnessed in real time, my guess is there are probably a lot more in the charges to come out of Khan’s investigations.
The ICC issued a third arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s top military commander, for “crimes against humanity and war crimes.” In my read this was pro forma, a pre-emptive response to charges that Khan’s findings are one-sided. However culpable Deif was for the events of Oct. 7 a year ago, he will never face trial: The Israelis announced over the summer that they killed him in an air strike last July. The court said simply that it cannot verify his death. And so the warrant.
The Western powers and the Zionist state have been bracing for these warrants since Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, requested them last May. The Netanyahu regime instantly termed Kahn’s recommendations an antisemitic disgrace. “Outrageous,” proclaimed President Biden, a professed Zionist who has accepted many millions of dollars from the Israel lobby. Tell me something new under the sun, please. The interesting thing here is that this kind of carrying on no longer goes anywhere.
The main argument as the world awaited the warrants—and why did the court take so long, we have to wonder—has been jurisdictional: Israel is not among the ICC’s 124 members, and the Zionist regime asserts its leadership is therefore not subject to the court’s rulings. The Biden regime, also not a member, has supported this contention—all by its lonesome, per usual. This, too, has not held up, to state the obvious.
There has also been quite a lot of funny business obscured from public view. Last month the Daily Mail, the London tabloid, reported that a woman on the ICC staff had accused Khan of sexual harassment. Khan immediately termed the accusation disinformation, welcomed an impartial investigation, and called for a separate investigation into the origin of the charges. Anyone with a well-maintained bullshit detector and a familiarity with the disgusting tricks American and Israeli intelligence have in their bags could detect what this was all about.
For the doubtful, here is a passage from The New York Times account of this affair, published Nov. 11. It is worth quoting at some length. Warning: You are about to undergo severe exposure to The Times’s obfuscatory language:
The Daily Mail reported in October that a female colleague had accused Mr. Khan of harassment, an allegation he denied. The Guardian later reported that Mr. Khan had tried to suppress the accuser’s claims, which he also denied.
After being made aware of the allegations, Ms. [Paivi] Kaukoranta, president of the assembly representing 125[sic] nations that recognize the court’s authority, said in late October that the court “seeks the consent of any alleged victim of misconduct before proceeding with an investigation,” but after a conversation with Mr. Khan’s accuser, the court “was not in a position to proceed.”
Days later, Mr. Khan said on social media that the matter had been “closed” by the court’s oversight body without an investigation because no complaint had been made, and that the “alleged aggrieved person” had declined the option of an investigation. Mr. Khan also said he sought an investigation into how the information, which he called “disinformation,” had been made public. The court, based in The Hague, did not say on Monday what had changed in recent weeks to prompt an investigation.
Translation: The ruse fell apart but this cannot be reported plainly enough to be easily understood. Do you have to love The Times or what?
Later last month the ICC announced that Iulia Motoc, the Romanian judge presiding in the Netanyahu–Gallant case, had been abruptly removed on medical grounds. No further details: “The personal medical situation of Judge Motoc is entitled to medical confidentiality,” the court statement said.
We know nothing more of Iulia Motoc or Iulia Motoc’s health. There are no conclusions to be drawn in this case. We know only these two things. One, as soon as Judge Motoc’s removal was announced there were widespread expectations that the ICC’s judgment on Khan’s case would be deferred, as the Netanyahu regime had hoped, and possibly by up to six months. Motoc was quickly replaced by Beti Hohler, a Slovenian elected as a judge last year, but the swiftness of the new appointment appears not to have been foreseen. So the question remains in the Iulia Motoc case. Cui bono?
Two, there is an extensive, thoroughly criminal matter of Israel’s long efforts to subvert the ICC and those of its staff pertinent to the Zionist state’s interests. Karim Khan, as soon as he announced last May that he was seeking arrest warrants, asserted forthrightly, “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this court cease immediately.” It has long been known that the U.S. has been unshy in its underhanded efforts to disrupt the ICC, but we now know far more about Israel’s operations in this line.
Credit where due. I will let +972, the Israeli investigative journal, explain what it found via a joint project conducted with Local Call, another Israeli publication, and The Guardian:
For nearly a decade, Israel has been surveilling senior International Criminal Court officials and Palestinian human rights workers as part of a secret operation to thwart the ICC’s probe into alleged war crimes, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian can reveal.
The multi-agency operation, which dates back to 2015, has seen Israel’s intelligence community routinely surveil the court’s current chief prosecutor Karim Khan, his predecessor Fatou Bensouda, and dozens of other ICC and UN officials.
It goes on from here in great and useful detail, giving us the full depravity of the Zionist regime’s inventory of corrupt practices and unnatural acts. From The Guardian’s report:
The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries….
The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States,” according to a source familiar with its contents….
Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200….
The +972 report is available here, The Guardian report here, and Local Call’s, in Hebrew and English, here. Each has its own way into the joint investigation and they are all worth reading.
As I argued elsewhere last February, after South Africa first presented the ICC with evidence of Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza, the Zionist regime simply cannot survive in international public space. It must accordingly spare no effort, however infra-dig, to… well, to defecate in it whenever it finds itself hauled into it. So it has been since the court announced the warrants last week.
The official statement from Netanyahu’s office read:
Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions and charges against it by the international criminal court, which is a biased and discriminatory political body.
Note the lower-casing of the ICC’s name — a subtle touch. How will the court ever survive this?
And further:
There is nothing more just than the war that Israel has been waging in Gaza since the seventh of October 2023, after the terrorist organization Hamas launched a murderous attack against it, and carried out the greatest massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The decision was made by a corrupt chief prosecutor trying to save his own skin from the serious charges against him for sexual harassment, and by biased judges motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel.
I’m surprised the first “antisemitic hatred” trope is so far down in Bibi’s diatribe. But again, a nice touch that he references the harassment charges against Karim Khan well after they have been discredited. Say it often enough and you are bound to fool a few of the least alert among us.
Benny Gantz, a sometime rival of Netanyahu but now part of his “war cabinet,” on “X:”
… moral blindness and a shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten.
Isaac Herzog, the Zionist regime’s president:
This is a dark day for justice. A dark day for humanity. Taken in bad faith, the outrageous decision at the ICC has turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock. It ignores the plight of the 101 Israeli hostages held in brutal captivity by Hamas in Gaza.
And from Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in the Knesset, a prime minister for six months before Netanyahu formed his extreme-right coalition in 2022 and “a centrist” — yes, a centrist in Israel’s political constellation:
Israel is defending itself against terrorist organizations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens. These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism.
Shameful stains, dark days, bad faith, rewards for terrorists, and so on, slathered on with trowels. I quote this unserious stuff to give an idea of just how far the Israeli leadership has wandered from reality.
My fav in this line for its all-around oddity is from Netanyahu’s office. The PM described the warrants as: “an antisemitic decision equivalent to the modern Dreyfus trial.” I will take this opportunity to remind readers that Dr. Lawrence has previously diagnosed Netanyahu as suffering a form of clinical psychosis. This remark, reeking of self-dramatization, suggests the paranoiac delusions may be worsening and will go into Dr. Lawrence’s Netanyahu file.
Alfred Dreyfus was an Alsatian-born military officer of Jewish background who served as an artillery officer in the French army during the later decades of the 19th century. When, in 1894, he was accused, found guilty, and sent to Devil’s Island as a spy for the Germans, the case became a cause célèbre for its exposure of the antisemitism then rife among the Third Republic’s military and political elites. By the time Dreyfus was found an innocent scapegoat and brought back to France, all kinds of prominent writers, actors, artists, and political figures had rallied to his side—Émile Zola most faithfully, but also Anatole France, Sarah Bernhardt, Clemenceau, and others. Dreyfus died, in 1935, something of a hero, at least in some quarters.
A lot of people, even murderous racists, are heroes in their own minds. But what could possibly be Bibi’s point here? It seems to me he has given us a glimpse — fleeting, indirect — into a part of his psyche we never see, the part still capable of suffering injury when so much of the world, more or less all of it, is repulsed by his barbarism. It turns out Bibi Netanyahu, I’ll be damned, craves acceptance. He wants to be seen as good and innocent and unjustly framed, awaiting redemption, like Dreyfus. He wants others to buy into his heroism.
Reactions on the American side were predictable even when extreme. In a curiously curt statement President Biden, loyal as ever to the Israel lobby if not the interests of the United States, called the warrants “outrageous.” And, with that rhetorical flourish the Democrats lately seem to think persuasive, added:
Let me be clear once again: Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.
Here I defer to John Whitbeck, the international attorney based in Paris, who remarked via his privately circulated blog after the White House issued Biden’s statement:
One thing I can agree with in the outraged and outrageous Israeli and American reactions to the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court… is that there can be no moral equivalence between the Israeli government and Hamas. Indeed, there can be no moral equivalence between those enforcing an illegal occupation, as Israel’s 57–year occupation of the State of Palestine has been definitively declared to be by the International Court of Justice, and those resisting that occupation, as is their legal right, including by armed action, under international law.
There is simply no beating Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican and the stupidest senator now serving on Capitol Hill, on these kinds of occasions. Here is Cotton with his batteries fully charged:
The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: The American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.
Has America ever had a Scheisskopf of this … this foolishness weighing in on matters of state? Can you believe that just a short while ago Tom Cotton’s name came up when Trump was thinking about his nominee for secretary of state?
For the record, the Bush II regime passed “the Hague Invasion Act” in August 2002 — note the date, as the conduct of the U.S. military in Afghanistan was already attracting critics — as an early artillery round fired at the ICC, which had been founded via a treaty signed in Rome a month earlier. Its formal name is the American Servicemembers Protection Act, and it authorizes the use of military force — yes, military force — to rescue any American or citizen of a U.S. ally the court has put under arrest. Hence the diabolic nickname.
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, is not quite as stupid as Tom Cotton, although this is a close call. Here is Graham waving the Israeli flag after the warrants were announced:
I will be introducing legislation that puts other countries on notice—If you aid and abet the ICC after their action against the State of Israel, you can expect consequences from the United States. Any nation that joins with the ICC after this outrage is a partner in a reckless act that tramples the rule of law.
Let us think about all this, as Tom Cotton urges.
Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham would make good headline writers at The Telegraph, it seems to me. They have the same lack of proportion as whoever it was who suggested that the ICC, having issued its warrants, had come to its day of reckoning, whereupon its legitimacy hangs in the balance. Cotton and Graham get it precisely as upside down as that down-table copy editor.
These warrants have a profound significance you will never read about in The Telegraph or any other mainstream newspaper and never hear about from any corporate or state-funded broadcaster. Straight off the top, Bibi Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant will be able to travel to the U.S. whenever they please; they can even address joint sessions of Congress and receive standing ovations, as Bibi has done four times now. But travel elsewhere in the world will be complicated at the very least.
I saw over the weekend that Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s wild-card premier, has pointedly invited Netanyahu for a state visit to Budapest. O.K., that’s Orbán singing to the world he’ll do it his way. But there are 123 other members of the ICC, as earlier noted, and it will be one or another degree of risk for Netanyahu or Gallant to travel to any one of them.
Already these warrants reveal—or cause in their own right—cracks in the Western alliance’s façade. Apart from the U.S., the whole of the Atlantic world and all of its appendages are signatories to the Rome Statute. Now what? It is the obvious question.
A little to my surprise, the Starmer government here was very quick to declare very publicly that it “respects the authority of the ICC” and will abide by its ruling. On paper this means the U.K. will arrest either of the two accused were they to set foot on British soil. Whether that would come to be in practice is another matter; it is hard to imagine the Brits crossing Washington on a question of this magnitude. But in my view Britain has just told Bibi and his defense minister, “Please don’t come. Please don’t make a mess for us.”
At bottom I read the warrants as a formal, legal announcement in behalf of the vast majority of nations that the new world order many of us now anticipate—the post–American world order, the order that is to follow the Americans’ awful, disorderly “rules-based order”—is to be accepted as an historical inevitability. International law, to put this point another way, is to be restored after its decades of abuse at the hands of the Americans and their most loyal clients. In this way the warrants declare a kind of confrontation—between the old and the new, between law and lawlessness, between hegemony and global parity as a 21st century imperative.
The issue raised concerns isolation. And, per usual, the policy cliques in Washington are overplaying their hands. Israel, having made a pariah of itself to the extent it wasn’t one already, is a lost cause in this regard. The Americans have long marched resolutely toward a state of isolation by way of their continuing pretense to global hegemony. Standing with Israel at this time, while they were bound to do no other, shoves the Americans good and hard further into their corner.
It will be interesting to see how the Europeans navigate the-world-after-the-
warrants in months and years to come. I take the Starmer government’s swift declaration of its intent as an interesting portent. The major European powers may decide they simply cannot stand with the Zionist regime and the Americans against the ICC. If this turns out to be so, the warrants issued last week could mark a decisive turn in trans–Atlantic relations. It is plausible.
Think of the ICC’s warrants as a great storm in a channel flowing between the U.S. and Israel and the rest of the world, and then ask yourself, Who is cut off?
