Why the International Criminal Court on Israel irritates Biden
The demand for arrest warrants against Israel's leaders is a form of hybrid warfare. The speech by Francesco D'Arrigo , director of the Niccolò Machiavelli Institute of Strategic Studies
For the West, the priority is not to bring down Netanyahu's government, but to defeat the jihadist movements that threaten the free world. The release of four hostages by the IDF has momentarily rekindled the media's attention on the over 120 civilians, including children and infants, captured on 7 October and still in the hands of Hamas. Israel is at war and in addition to fighting in an urban guerrilla scenario that is almost unsustainable for any armed force, it must also counteract an equally hostile flow of disinformation coming from Hamas and its numerous supporters, which the Western media assume as the impartial truth about what is happening in Gaza.
But if we are horrified by the civilian casualties in Gaza, we should also ask why the hostages recently freed by the IDF were kept hidden in the home of a Palestinian family, others in a refugee camp? Why aren't we scandalized by the fact that Hamas continues to use the population of Gaza and the hostages as human shields? For Israel and for Western public opinion, every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, every dead civilian represents a martyr useful for the success of its strategy.
If the objective is the defeat of transnational jihadist organizations, capable of using all available technologies, military and cyber, visible and hidden, the West is very far from achieving it.
If their strategy and actions are allowed to be justified and go unpunished, if their leaders are allowed to be equated with the leaders of Western democracies, Hamas and all terrorist groups that want to destroy Israel will gain power and legitimacy on the world stage. An existential threat to the free world.
The US counterterrorism director resigns
“Hamas attacks in Israel and the Gaza conflict have energized terrorist threats around the world.” This is what the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Christine Abizaid , declared when announcing her resignation from the position, only 3 years after her appointment by the Biden Administration.
Recently, the first female director of the US National Counterterrorism Center repeatedly warned about Hamas' military capabilities and the growing threat of terrorist attacks in the West. The attack on October 7 was a true paramilitary plan capable of occupying the territory, killing thousands of civilians, kidnapping hundreds more and calling into question the survival of a state, and not just any state, but a military power like Israel. .
In the West, the strong repercussions of this new war in the Middle East have materialized in the form of support for Hamas and in a worrying resurgence of anti-Semitism shown by sectors of society and by some international organizations which, by exploiting the Palestinian cause, justify terrorist acts and the dozens of missiles launched daily against Jewish civilians by the Islamic Resistance Movement in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah and other jihadist groups in the region.
The strategic error of the International Criminal Court
The decision of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is a strategic mistake.
The measure by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan, who also makes use of a pool of experts, among which Amal Clooney (wife of the famous actor) stands out, provoked very harsh reactions from all US institutions. The lower house of Congress with a Republican majority immediately approved a measure calling for heavy sanctions, including a ban on entry into the United States, against all members and experts of the Office of the Prosecutor of the Criminal Court international who called for the issuance of international arrest warrants against Israeli government members Netanyahu and Gallant.
The demand for arrest warrants against Israel's leaders is a form of hybrid warfare
The provision with which the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) advanced the " requests for an arrest warrant against the leaders of the government of Israel before the Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court for the situation in the State of Palestine" is part in the typologies of hybrid warfare: international law warfare and disinformation.
Equate Yahya SINWAR (head of the Islamic Resistance Movement – “Hamas” in the Gaza Strip), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim AL-MASRI, (known as DEIF, commander in chief of the military wing of Hamas, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades) and Ismail HANIYEH (head of the Hamas Political Bureau) to members of the Israeli government, has the political objective of politically recognizing Hamas and putting it on the same level as the State of Israel.
An act of international law warfare that has definitively removed any doubt about the legal authority of the International Criminal Court, equating Israel, an imperfect democracy, with Hamas, a terrorist group whose sole objective is to destroy the State of Israel and kill all Jews. An implicit but false symmetry immediately adopted by the Western media, legitimizing yet another disinformation operation against Israel.
Disinformation about Israel that is fueled by statements by political leaders, by some diplomats and representatives of international institutions, and by social media. Lies about Israel that are continually repeated become truths in the common sense of a small part of the university world, anti-Semitic and manipulated by the funding it receives from states that support jihadist movements.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's response to the ICC's request to issue international arrest warrants against Israeli leaders was brief: “ International arrest warrants will not deter me. This is a political and partisan decision. It is a disgrace and a shame. We will continue until we win ."
Prosecutor Khan's accusation that Israel, on the orders of Netanyahu and Minister Yoav Gallant, is deliberately starving and intentionally targeting Gaza civilians for death is slanderous. During the war that Hamas unleashed, Israel behaved towards the civilian population of Gaza in an unconventional way for an army during a war: warning in advance of the bombings, creating escape routes and interrupting the fighting to allow their use, guaranteeing the delivery of humanitarian aid, not only water, food and medicine but even petrol. Aid that Hamas seizes, worsening the humanitarian situation. The IDF, acting with all possible caution in an urban and underground battle scenario, pays a price in speed of advance, in losses of soldiers who fight aware of the presence of hostages on the ground, including children, old men, suffering girls and boys and abused. Far from starving or deliberately killing civilians, Israel is doing more to protect the lives of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip than any other army has done to protect the lives of civilians in war zones.
The ICC's goal in spreading this very severe attack on the Jewish state appears to be to transform Hamas from a state-funded terrorist organization into a state-sponsored terrorist organization; and at the same time criminalize Israel, denying it the right to self-defense.
The ICC's request for arrest provoked a harsh response from the White House, with a statement from President Joe Biden , the protagonist of all-out pressure on the Israeli government to put an end to the conflict in Gaza: "The request for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is scandalous. And let me be clear: Whatever the prosecutor may imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand by Israel against threats to its security.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken also accused the ICC of overstepping, abusing and distorting its authority. “ The United States has been clear since before the current conflict that the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over the matter. The International Criminal Court was established by its States Parties as a court with limited jurisdiction. Such limits are rooted in principles of complementarity, which do not appear to have been applied in this case, given the prosecutor's haste to request these arrest warrants rather than allow the Israeli legal system a full and timely opportunity to proceed .”
International law warfare
Law warfare refers to the use of legal systems and processes as a weapon in conflicts or to achieve strategic objectives. It involves manipulating laws, regulations, and legal procedures to gain an advantage over an adversary or to influence public opinion. This may include filing lawsuits, exploiting legal loopholes, and using international law to support a particular political agenda. Legal warfare can be used in different contexts, including international conflicts, internal disputes, ideological struggles. It can be employed by governments, non-state actors, multinational companies and individuals to achieve their goals and weaken adversaries. It can be used to subvert the rule of law and manipulate legal systems for political gain. Legal warfare is one of the hybrid tactics that raises important questions about the role of law in resolving interstate disputes, conflicts and the ethical use of legal systems in pursuing political and strategic objectives.
Prosecutor Khan's move is an obvious form of international law warfare , because the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over Israel. Israel is not a signatory to the Treaty of Rome , which over time has been joined by 124 states that founded the International Criminal Court and defined its powers and jurisdiction. A Treaty that to date has only been ratified by a small number of member states. To circumvent these constraints, the International Criminal Court accepted, by manipulating international agreements, “ Palestine ” among its members as a signatory to the treaty.
The political entity that presents itself as the “government of Palestine” is the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA was established in 1994 under the bilateral agreements that the "Palestine Liberation Organization" signed with Israel in the 1990s. Such agreements – known as the “ Oslo Accords ” – prevent the Palestinian Authority from seeking membership as a sovereign state in international bodies, including the International Criminal Court.
The ICC's lack of jurisdiction is only part of the legal manipulation in its law warfare against Israel. In his arrest request, Prosecutor Khan also drew a false moral equivalence between the crimes against humanity and the acts of genocide committed by Hamas on October 7 – that is, the invasion of the territory of the State of Israel by of the terrorist group and the massacre of children, rape, torture and kidnapping of thousands of civilians and soldiers – on the one hand; and the legitimate acts of war that Israel waged against the terrorist regime of Hamas and its terror militants, in response to that invasion and commission of atrocities. Hamas is bound by its Charter to commit genocide against the Jewish people worldwide and to annihilate the Jewish state. Prosecutor Khan's accusations against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister Gallant – and more generally against the State of Israel – are based on disinformation, false data and absolutely unreliable sources coming from the Hamas regime in Gaza. In this way, the International Criminal Court legitimizes and provides political and legal support to Hamas, a terrorist group engaged in a genocidal war against the Jewish people.
The accusations that Prosecutor Khan leveled at Israel's leaders are also a tool to influence public opinion and elections, which the Biden administration has well understood and is countering. Both houses of the US Congress have advanced bills to sanction the International Criminal Court and its staff for illegally prosecuting US ally Israel.
After learning that American lawmakers have introduced legislation sanctioning their officials, the ICC released a statement on May 3 that Prosecutor Khan posted on his X account, threatening action against anyone who acts against them. The statement states that “ threats of action against the ICC and its staff may… constitute an offense against the administration of justice under Article. 70 of the Rome Statute".
Meanwhile, the European Union, committed to the renewal of its institutions, is divided on this issue too. It would be desirable for the EU to take measures against Hamas. First, it should indict its leaders for the murder, rape, kidnapping and torture of European citizens during and after 7 October. Not only should these terrorists not be given a pass for their actions, they should be held criminally liable by European courts. The EU must support Israel, because although it is a small and only Jewish state, surrounded by enemies who want it to disappear from the map, and now also isolated from a large part of the international community, the prejudicial actions taken against it they pose a threat to the free world as a whole.
The acts of hybrid warfare against Israel carried out by international bodies represent nefarious and dangerous precedents, which could be used in the future against Western democracies that could find themselves forced to fight genocidal terrorist groups, armies and regimes that attack sovereign states. If a Court without the necessary legal legitimacy is allowed to carry out actions of international law warfare against representatives of democratic states that defend their security, these forms of hybrid conflict will gain ever greater strength in the eyes of those fighting the free West and, just as today the ICC is abusing its jurisdictional power against the Jewish State, tomorrow it could even use it against NATO representatives.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/corte-penale-internazionale-israele-errore-strategico/ on Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:08:20 +0000.