After much hesitation, deliberation and circumspection, the charges were written. On November 21, International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant for ‘war crimes’ that ‘intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, including food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity, between October 8, 2023, and May 20, 2024. ICC also found that each bore ‘criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population’ resulting in torture, violence, murder and rape by Israel’s occupation forces.
Israel’s immediate response was to decry the anti-semite bogey that constantly bears false witness of wrongdoing despite the nation’s professions of innocence. Netanyahu’s office then preposterously compared his fate to that of Alfred Dreyfus, the Alsatian-Jewish artillery officer wrongfully accused of espionage by France in 1894. America’s response was a study in unwavering support. Joe Biden called ICC’s warrant ‘outrageous’, stating there was ‘no equivalence between Hamas and Israel’. In this, he is right.
Hamas is a Palestinian nationalist organisation that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. It has a militant wing, but does not command an army that can enter into formal combat. Israel, however, is a nation with a well- appointed military force, which can both go to war, and operate as an army of occupation.
Any unprovoked violence that Hamas undertakes, therefore, can only be counted as an act of insurgency, the perpetrators of which should be dealt with appropriately. But punitive action can’t take the form of waging total and indiscriminate war against a people whose right to exist as an independent nation is denied and obstructed by Israel.
And, yet, after Hamas killed 1,189 people, and took 251 others hostage, on Oct 7, 2023 – an unconscionable act of terror born of decades of suppression – Israel, instead of initiating a targeted assault against the culprits, unleashed an orgy of violence against Gaza, an enclave under blockade. Citing the right to defend itself, Israel’s belligerence has resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians, displacement of lakhs more, Dresden-style destruction of urban infrastructure, and uninterrupted misery to the hapless survivors who continue to suffer every form of tribulation and privation, including forced starvation.
In Exterminate All the Brutes: Gaza 2009, Noam Chomsky correctly opined that while ‘a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks… it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force’. Such a doctrine would have allowed Germany ‘to justify Kristallnacht on the basis of [Herschel] Grynszpan’s assassination of a German embassy official in Paris’, or excused British incursions into Ireland in response to IRA hostility in Belfast. German atrocities were condemned. Britain, fearing world censure, despite engaging in ruthless conflict, managed uneasily to maintain some sense of proportionality.
By contrast, Netanyahu and Gallant have outdone many earlier political psychopaths. Slobodan MiloSevic, former Yugoslav president, and his co-defendants, indicted in 1999 for displacing 7.4 lakh Kosovo Albanians and murdering 340 others, can’t hold a candle to them. Protected from adverse global criticism by American veto and sanction power, the pair advertised their intention early on to undertake ‘a complete siege of Gaza’ where they were ‘fighting human animals’, whose grisly fate was sealed. In the last 8 decades, men have been sent to the gallows or to lifetime imprisonment for less.
As things stand, Netanyahu can be arrested upon arrival in any of the 124 countries that are part of the ICC-founding Rome Statute. But scepticism prevails because some powerful countries like the US, Russia, China and India have not signed and ratified the court’s authority. And even as France cops out by stating that Netanyahu can’t be arrested on French soil since Israel is not an ICC signatory.
But this should not deter the rest. By continuing to deny Netanyahu entry, on penalty of being apprehended and tried for war crimes, these countries can firm up his position as a pariah.
Feeling the heat of international pressure, Netanyahu has made a great show of striking a compromise by accepting a ceasefire – which, according to France, he has violated 52 times already – with Hezbollah. This does not diminish his culpability. Hopefully, when expediency and decency are cynically aligned in UNSC at some point, the Israeli PM will be brought to justice.
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