It is not just Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant who should fear accountability for one of the gravest crimes of our age. If the international criminal court (ICC) had not issued today’s arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and his erstwhile defence minister – and indeed Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif – a global legal order already widely regarded with contempt by much of the world would not have survived.
Why? Because of the scale of the alleged crime. Because of the overwhelming body of evidence, not least that accumulated by Palestinian journalists, many of whom acted as the world’s eyes and ears on the killing fields of Gaza before being killed by Israel, often alongside their families. And because few crimes in modern history have been so confessed to – boasted about even – by the perpetrators, from leaders at the top to the soldiers unleashing murderous mayhem on the ground. That the evidence for war crimes and crimes against humanity has met the threshold to satisfy the ICC’s chief prosecutor, an independent panel of esteemed lawyers and now three pre-trial international judges demonstrates the strength of the case – and that nobody who facilitated this historic abomination can plead ignorance. It is not just Netanyahu and Gallant who should tremble before justice: as well as other Israeli leaders and soldiers, so should the guilty men and women of western governments.
Some may consider the threat of arrests to be far-fetched: those charged would need to travel to a state that is a signatory to the ICC, which excludes, for example, the US, and Netanyahu may enjoy a level of immunity in foreign states because he is a head of government. But as Victor Kattan, an assistant international law professor at Nottingham University, tells me, the now sacked minister Gallant has no such immunity. “Today’s move is unprecedented,” he tells me, “because we have never had Israelis held accountable for anything they’ve done to Palestinians for the last 70-plus years.” That the judges assessed the available evidence and decided there were reasonable grounds to issue an arrest warrant, he says, speaks to “very, very serious crimes we know are likely to be taking place.”
Indeed, the accused were open about their plans to commit these crimes from the start. The western politicians and media outlets that aided and abetted these atrocities know that, which is why their own protestations of innocence should be considered buried under the rubble, along with countless butchered Palestinian families. At the very start, Gallant declared Israel would impose a total siege on Gaza’s population, whom he termed “human animals”, echoed by one of his leading generals who threatened to unleash “hell” on the civilian population. As two US government agencies concluded seven months ago, Israel indeed deliberately blockaded the essentials of life.
In the days after 7 October 2023, Gallant promised “Gaza won’t return to what it was before.” If that left room for subtlety, he declared: “Hamas won’t be there. We will eliminate everything.” He told Israeli soldiers that he had “released all the restraints” and “removed every restriction” on them. And so it came to pass. The Israeli onslaught has killed what some public health experts estimated in July could amount to 180,000 Palestinians, and by last December had already destroyed so many buildings that Gaza was a different colour and texture when observed from space. These soldiers often posted their actions online, overwhelmed with glee and triumphalism as they did so. Too many western media outlets not only failed to frame their coverage around Israel’s explicit declarations of intent, they buried them, failed to explain their implications, and in many cases simply did not cover them at all.
Western politicians willingly armed this promised crime: the Biden administration has offered $12.5bn worth of aid since 7 October, and just this week was alone on the UN security council in vetoing a ceasefire. The White House has already come out to “fundamentally reject” the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants. Israel has said Netanyahu would “not give in to pressure” in the war against Hamas and the Iranian “axis of terror” and Gallant previously referred to the warrants as drawing a “despicable” parallel between Israel and Hamas. When the Labour government finally suspended some arms sales to Israel in September, it left 92% intact and bent over backwards to emphasise that Israel remained a staunch ally.
While western politicians and media outlets made themselves willing accomplices to an obvious heinous crime, those who took Israeli leaders and officials at their word were demonised, hounded, defamed and silenced. Well, let us be clear here. This crime is simply too depraved, too obscene, too colossal for the complicit not to face accountability.
But now is a time to give proper credit to the longsuffering people of Palestine. As the human rights scholar Dr Alonso Gurmendi tells me, “this is the denouement of a long process that the Palestinian leadership started in the early 2010s,” praising their success in “using international law to advance their liberation”. As he also notes, today’s decision could prove to be a sea change, where the west’s “double standards and conditional commitment to international law will be put to the highest test at the hands of an emerging global south”.
There is a separate case, of course, led by South Africa, at the international court of justice, seeking to prove Israel is committing genocide. But if anything emerges from the rubble of Gaza, let it be this. Israel’s genocidal onslaught is the most obscene example of how western supremacy is riddled with grotesque hypocrisies. Let accountability mean that these horrors will never be possible again.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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