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What’s Good for the Goose
Why the ICC is Right to Indict Netanyahu
On Monday, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, as well as others, for war crimes and other crimes against humanity. In a blistering (though entirely predictable) response, President Joe Biden objected, saying, “Let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” Netanyahu, echoing the tired, yet familiar refrain of former President Donald Trump (who is currently facing his own onslaught of federal and state indictments here at home), was even stronger in his denunciation, calling Mr. Khan a “rogue prosecutor who’s out to demonize the one and only Jewish state.” Thankfully, in the days since, leaders of Belgium, France, and Germany (all NATO allies of the United States) broke with the U.S. and Israel and stated publicly that they respect the independence of the ICC. It’s time we did the same.
After all, when this same organization issued an arrest warrant in March of last year for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war crimes his government continues to commit in Ukraine, Biden called the move “justified” before subsequently conceding that the pronouncement was largely symbolic, as neither Russia nor the United States formally acknowledge the jurisdiction of the ICC. This might initially appear strange, considering that the U.S. participated in the negotiations that led to the creation of the court in 1998, with President Bill Clinton even going so far as to sign the so-called “Rome Statute” that formally instituted the ICC. He did not, however, then proceed to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification as is constitutionally mandated. What’s more, following the September 11th attacks of 2001, newly-elected President George W. Bush “effectively ‘unsigned’ the treaty, sending a note to the United Nations secretary-general that the US no longer intended to ratify the treaty and that it did not have any obligations toward it.”
The timing of this decision is significant when one considers that, by this point in the now infamous and ill-fated “War on Terror,” the United States itself was already committing numerous criminal offenses against…
