ICC Issues Historic Arrest Warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu

Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor, told CNN earlier this year that “I’ve had some elected leaders speak to me and they were very blunt. ‘This Court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin’ was what one senior leader told me.” Khan said he replied “we don’t do it like that” in the midst of seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defense Minister who was recently sacked by Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, as well as now deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and his other lieutenants Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif.

Today, Khan made good on his word to try to make the ICC into something more than just another method for the United States to impose its imperialism on the rest of the world, issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant, asserting that the court had found reasonable grounds to believe they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Keeping with its brand of being a country who wholeheartedly supports the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a White House National Security Council spokesperson said “The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.” The fact that there is no mention of the indicted Hamas leaders in this statement is further proof of the fact that the United States does not believe international law applies to itself and its allies. Fundamentally, we are no different than autocrats like Putin and Xi Jinping in how we view the world as ours to exploit, no matter how much bloodshed it takes.

Pro-Israel dead-enders who only see the world as a way to express their personal grievances and completely miss the Western imperial nature of Israel’s creation will no-doubt frame this as supposedly yet another unfair move against their beloved genocidal apartheid state, but that typical kind of whining falls flat when in this same move, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, was also issued an arrest warrant for his crimes against humanity (Israel claims he was killed earlier this year in an airstrike but that assertion is still unverified). Speaking as a Jew, I am very familiar with the inevitable kinds of retorts to this stuff by now, so my preemptive question to the pro-Israel brigade is: do you think the ICC is right in issuing arrest warrants for Hamas but not for Netanyahu? If so, you may be a raging hypocrite, but a lot of folks in your life already knew that.

The United States has destroyed what little was left of the 20th century post-WWII order. Donald Trump did untold damage to America’s international standing, and while he has a hand in this genocide by inflaming the issue in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, he could not do what Joe Biden did to truly kill the international order. Foreign countries talked themselves into Trump being an anomaly, and when Biden entered office, the United States was widely-assumed to get back to the business of at least pretending to care about the international system people like Biden romanticize so much.

Here is how one senior G7 diplomat described part of Biden’s foreign policy legacy to the Financial Times.

“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

The ICC now is following in this same logic, understanding full-well that if it continues to just be a tool for Western imperialism, that it is inevitable the ICC will be sidelined by some kind of Chinese or Russian replacement in the future. With the United States sanctioning practically every country under the sun along with the A/B test of Gaza and Ukraine that has ensured the Global South “won’t ever listen to us again,” it’s on these international institutions to justify their own existence before a new system replaces them. The only way they will gain any kind of legitimacy is if they apply international law to Western leaders and institutions going forward.

Further driving home the point that the United States and Israel are incredibly isolated is this statement from their chief ally, the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer raised some eyebrows when he said he “respects the independence” of the ICC and when asked about if he would arrest Netanyahu if he traveled to the U.K., Starmer said “we’re not going to get into hypotheticals.” Contrast that to the U.S.’s condemnation above, and the mask is fully off America now as we are very clearly on our own along with our apartheid state made in our segregated image.

The ICC issuing arrest warrants for a Western-allied leader for the first time ever is a watershed moment. With Trump incoming and the Republicans set to sanction ICC prosecutors (again), this move is likely to get undercut at some point by the imperial levers buried within these international institutions, but the message sent here is clear: the world knows the United States is no longer a moral actor, if it ever was. We are no different from China or Russia in many countries’ eyes now, and our relationships will suffer as a result, all while the international institutions we built in our image know that they must adapt or they will perish now that the U.S. has lost most of its credibility in the eyes of the world. While this entire situation feels increasingly hopeless, at least we can take a measure of solace in the fact that for the rest of his miserable life, Benjamin Netanyahu must fear leaving Israel, lest he be arrested by a country who actually believes in holding war criminals responsible outside of “Africa and thugs like Putin.”