The World Order Is on Trial at the International Criminal Court

by Jeremy R. Hammond | Dec 5, 2024

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-world-order-is-on-trial-at-the-international-criminal-court/

On November 21, the International Criminal Court (ICC), after months of delay, finally issued arrest warrants as requested by the ICC Prosecutor for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Both men are charged with being directly responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip since October 8, 2023.

The ICC Prosecutor on May 20, 2024, had also sought arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders for crimes committed on October 7, 2023, but at least two of the three are now dead. The head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated by Israel in Tehran, Iran, on July 31. Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas official in Gaza who masterminded the October 7 attacks in Israel and was appointed to succeed Haniyeh, was killed by Israeli forces on October 16.

The third Hamas official is Mohammad Deif, who joined Sinwar in planning what they called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” and whom Israel claims to have killed in Gaza on August 1. The ICC proceeded to issue the arrest warrant for Deif on the grounds that it was not in a position to verify his death.

The two Israeli leaders are accused of using starvation as a method of warfare and directing attacks against civilians.

Since October 8, 2023, Israel has maintained a policy of collectively punishing the entire civilian population of Gaza by blocking delivery into Gaza of goods essential for survival while systematically destroying the civilian infrastructure, killing over 43,000 Palestinians, about 70% of whom have been women and children—which is exactly what one would expect from indiscriminate bombing since that is roughly the proportion of Gaza’s population who are women and children.

Israel’s policy of using starvation as a method of warfare has recently extended to protecting criminal gangs in Gaza that are systematically looting aid convoys entering through the Kerem Shalom crossing. That armistice line between the Gaza Strip and Israel has been the main crossing being used for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza since the Rafah crossing with Egypt was closed in May.

When Hamas’ civilian police force has tried to intervene to stop looting of aid trucks, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has attacked them. Whereas, criminal gangs operating under clans rivalled with Hamas are allowed to loot convoys under the watchful eye of Israeli forces in what the IDF has come to call “the looting zone.”

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the IDF is protecting the criminal gangs “even though some of the clans’ members are involved in terrorism, and some are even affiliated with extremist organizations like the Islamic State.”

The head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Georgios Petropoulos, described the area near the Kerem Shalom crossing as “the only place in Gaza where an armed Palestinian can come within 150 meters of a tank and not get shot.”

Israel has allowed only a minimal amount of aid to enter Gaza under pressure from the Joe Biden administration, which has made great efforts to sustain the illusion that the U.S. government is concerned about the lives of Palestinian civilians.

In truth, Israel’s indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians and efforts to render Gaza uninhabitable could not occur without American support.

The day before the ICC issued its arrest warrants, the Biden administration vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an unconditional ceasefire. It was the fourth ceasefire resolution since October 7, 2023, that the United States has vetoed.

The Biden administration has nevertheless tried to maintain the pretense that it favors a ceasefire with one cynical public relations ploy after another.

In May, President Joe Biden gave a speech outlining a three-phase ceasefire proposal that he claimed Israel had accepted while portraying Hamas as the only obstacle to a cessation of hostilities.

In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly rejected the proposal on the grounds that the IDF would not stop until Hamas was completely destroyed.

Hamas, by contrast, announced its acceptance of the proposal, which was similar to ceasefire proposals Hamas had agreed to in February and again in May, shortly before Biden’s propaganda campaign to obfuscate the fact that the obstacle to a ceasefire was not Hamas but Israel.

One of the main reasons why Netanyahu fired Yoav Gallant from his position as Defense Minister, which occurred on November 5, is because Gallant was the sole member of the prime minister’s security cabinet objecting to Netanyahu’s position that eliminating Hamas was a higher priority than securing the release of Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023, and still being held captive in Gaza.

Indeed, Netanyahu has been so firm in rejecting a ceasefire to secure the release of Israeli hostages that he has perpetrated a public relations hoax of his own with the aim of portraying the families of hostages who have been demanding a ceasefire as gullible dupes who are serving Hamas’s agenda.

On September 4, Netanyahu claimed at a press conference that Israel’s intelligence community had learned that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning to escape Gaza, taking hostages with him through the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along the border between Gaza and Egypt.

During ceasefire negotiations, Hamas has insisted on a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces, while Netanyahu has insisted on maintaining a military presence in this area of southern Gaza.

The day after Netanyahu gave that press conference, the Jewish Chronicle published an article purporting to have verified his claim with intelligence sources.

The day after that, the German tabloid Bild published an article claiming that a policy document obtained from Sinwar’s computer showed that Hamas’s aim in ceasefire negotiations was not to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians but to rebuild its military capabilities. To that end, the article claimed, Hamas was using psychological warfare against the families of hostages to build support for a ceasefire among Israelis.

Both articles played directly into Netanyahu’s political agenda. He cited the Bild article at a cabinet meeting two days after it was published to bolster his position that Israel could not agree to a ceasefire.

However, the claims made in both articles were subsequently disavowed by the Israeli military and intelligence communities.

The Jewish Chronicle article, it turned out, was a hoax. The article was removed from the website, and the publication ended its association with the article’s author, Elon Perry, who also turned out not to be who he claimed. The IDF clarified that there was no such document indicating a plan by Sinwar to flee Gaza with hostages.

As for the document cited in the Bild article, while one did exist, the tabloid had grossly mischaracterized it, according to the IDF. Contrary to the report, it had been found not recently but five months prior; it was written not by Sinwar but by a mid-level Hamas officer; it was not a policy document; and, in the words of the IDF, “it did not constitute new information.”

The IDF also launched an investigation to determine who had leaked that document to Bild, resulting in the arrest of one of Netanyahu’s aides on charges of having leaked classified information and harming national security.

A little more than a month after Netanyahu had launched his public relations hoax designed to discredit Israelis protesting his refusal to secure the release of hostages with a ceasefire agreement, Yahya Sinwar was killed.

He was found not hiding in a bunker surrounded by hostages but engaged in combat with Israeli forces in Rafah.

Netanyahu’s hoax claim parallels the Biden administration’s own public relations ploys aimed at manufacturing consent for the policy of facilitating Israel’s genocide, including the construction of a floating pier earlier this year that cost American taxpayers $230 million to install. Pentagon officials said the pier would enable the equivalent of 150 trucks per day of humanitarian aid into Gaza by ship, in lieu of Israel fully opening all border crossings as demanded by the entire international humanitarian community.

Instead, the pier was operational for only two of its first six weeks, no more than thirty truckloads of aid per day got through, and the aid could not be effectively distributed once in Gaza due to Israel’s continued policy of using starvation as a method of warfare.

To put that into perspective, aid agencies have been saying that a minimum of 500 to 600 truckloads per day are required to meaningfully address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

For another example, after lying that Israel had already accepted the ceasefire proposal outlined by Biden in his May 31 speech, the U.S. government introduced a draft resolution that was passed by the UN Security Council on June 10 as Resolution 2735, which lent an air of legitimacy to the public relations hoax by reiterating Biden’s false claim and calling on Hamas to accept the proposal.

Yet the justification offered by the Biden administration for vetoing the draft resolution on November 20 was that the United States could not support a ceasefire that failed to secure the release of Israeli hostages.

That excuse illuminates just how cynical the U.S. government has been in pretending to care about Palestinian civilians because the vetoed resolution did in fact call for the immediate and full implementation of Resolution 2735—the very resolution that the United States had introduced to the Security Council on the grounds that its proposed ceasefire would secure the release of Israeli hostages.

Yet another public relations hoax was perpetrated by the Biden administration more recently with the reporting of a leaked letter dated October 13 to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, which warned that if Israel did not meet certain criteria within thirty days to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including the delivery of at least 350 truckloads of humanitarian aid per day into Gaza, then the United States could cut off arms shipments.

As correctly observed by former State Department official Hala Rharrit, who had resigned in April to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war crimes, the “conveniently leaked” letter was just another “public relations ploy.”

The thirty-day period, she noted, placed the deadline after the U.S. presidential election, with the Democratic Party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, having already suffered a major loss of support from within their own party because of the administration’s complicity in Israel’s brazen war crimes.

At a press briefing on November 4, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller admitted that Israel had failed to implement the steps required by the letter to avoid a halt to arms shipments.

In fact, the humanitarian situation had worsened during the thirty-day period, according to numerous humanitarian aid organizations, which assessment was verified by The New York Times by using Israel’s own data. As noted by The Washington Post, the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Palestinians during October had fallen to the lowest point since Israel’s assault on Gaza had begun the prior year.

Proving just what a cynical hoax the supposed threat to halt arms shipments was, after Israel acted to worsen the humanitarian situation, the Biden administration announced after the expiration of the 30-day deadline that it would continue to provide Israel with the weapons necessary to get the job done—the job being the completion of its genocidal military assault against the civilian population of Gaza.

The ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for two Israeli officials occurred also within the context of a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which the government of South Africa has accused Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.

On January 26, 2024, the ICJ ordered Israel to take preliminary measures to demonstrate its compliance with the Genocide Conventions, having determined that Israel was committing a plausible genocide in Gaza. Despite being a party to the UN Charter, which established the ICJ and obligates all member states to comply with its orders, Israel ignored the ruling and proceeded with its genocidal assault.

On May 24, the ICJ issued additional provisional measures ordering Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza due to that operation’s incompatibility with Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention. Israel again ignored the order and persisted in the world’s first genocide live-streamed on social media.

The ICC has a reputation for only prosecuting third-world dictators while leaders of Western countries guilty of gross violations of international law remain uncountable for their crimes.

The ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a last-ditch effort by the court to preserve its own credibility.

The question faced by both the ICJ and ICC is whether they will choose to fulfill their ostensible mandates or to demonstrate their own irrelevancy by failing to hold accountable the leaders of a country perpetrating genocide openly with the whole world looking on—a situation exists because of the complicity of the world’s superpower, the United States government.

The ICC essentially had no choice but to issue the arrest warrants, the only alternative being to expose incontrovertibly to the whole world what a sham it is—nothing more than a weapon hypocritically used by western powers against two-bit thugs while the U.S. government goes on violating international law with impunity.

The ICJ will similarly have no choice but to rule, probably some years from now, that Israel has been guilty of perpetrating the crime of genocide in Gaza.

The credibility of the existing world order is at stake. We are supposed to believe that institutions like the United Nations, its legal organ the ICJ, and the separately established ICC exist to uphold international law, to maintain world peace, and to hold aggressors accountable for their crimes.

The whole world is watching now as that ostensible raison d’être of the existing world order is being put to the test. Will these governmental institutions live up to their promise or prove their own obsolescence? That is the dilemma that the ICC was faced with in making its decision to issue the arrest warrants.

The significance of both the ICJ’s deliberations in the genocide case and the ICC’s warrants for Israeli leaders is that the existing world order characterized by American predominance is itself now on trial.