You Have Been Served

Anthony McIntyre ☠ The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has at last been served with an International arrest warrant issued by the UN backed International Criminal Court.

Also indicted were Netanyahu's former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and the Hamas official Mohammed Deif. In the case of the latter, Israel claims to have killed him in July.

In his statement the ICC prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, outlined the case against both Israeli war crime suspects:

With respect to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, the judges of the International Criminal Court have found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, as a direct perpetrator, acting jointly with others. The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that they are each responsible for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilians as a superior.

For Netanyahu, the arrest warrant is not before time, given the speed with which a similar warrant had been issued against the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. While enthusing about the potential Putin arrest, the US had been feverishly trying to prevent the Netanyahu warrant being issued in a bid to protect its beachhead ally in the Middle East. Genocide Joe stumbled out of the traps to lambast the actions of the court as outrageous. To his dismay, Whitehouse word salads are not an effective dressing when it comes to masking the stench of Israeli crimes against humanity. International law sucks Joe when it is not a mere instrument in your bloodstained hands to be used exclusively for the dual purpose of jailing African despots while simultaneously legitimising your own hegemony in international relations.

Netanyahu has taken to throwing out the old antisemitic slur against the ICC, much as he threw it out when the Nazi fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv rioted in Amsterdam. The court, he screams, is a modern-day Dreyfus trial "driven by anti-Semitic hatred of Israel." There will be few takers, the Jewish victim card no longer acceptable at tills across the globe. There have been many Jewish victims throughout history, but the Kapo, Netanyahu, is not one of them.

Despite threats by the right wing Orban government in Hungary to defy the arrest warrant, the move is a diplomatic disaster for Netanyahu and his regime. It is even more damning than the Goldstein Report, the author of which was forced to disingenuously and unconvincingly recant after serious pressure.

The predictable Western wailing about Israel being a democracy with a right to defend itself hopes to drown out the crucial historicity of the ICC move that:

What makes this moment historic isn’t just the ICC warrants, but the unprecedented international acknowledgment that even democratic states can commit crimes against humanity. The fiction of Israeli military “precision” has been definitively shattered. Each bomb, each airstrike, each calculated act of starvation represents a deliberate choice to prioritise political objectives over human life.

In the unlikely event that the Israeli war criminals ever do make court, a most fitting venue would be the German city of Nuremberg, a place etched in the mind forever as one where Nazis are made accountable to international law.

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