Melanie Phillips: Courting infamy
So why did such a man trash what was left of the court’s reputation by turning a court that is a supposed bulwark against tyranny into a weapon to punish a democracy for defending itself against genocide?Arsen Ostrovsky: The ICC has perverted the very meaning of justice
The answer is surely that Khan, a former member of a “human rights” barristers’ chambers in London, subscribes to “human rights” culture. And in recent years international “human rights” law — which, when it was developed in the middle of the last century to protect powerless minorities, some presciently warned would turn into a politicised weapon against the Jewish people — has indeed developed into a weapon to demonise, delegitimise and destroy the State of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. “Human rights” culture today is suffused with hatred of Israel and has thus played a major role in poisoning the progressive west against it.
Defensively, Khan says he has consulted a panel of “impartial” lawyers. Yet this panel contains a number of radical “human rights” lawyers who are no friends of Israel.
One of them, Danny Friedman KC, is a barrister at the radical Matrix Chambers. On November 18 last year he wrote:
Israel’s response to the attack on its territory has involved catastrophic mass fatality and untold human suffering of Palestinians — not only as a result of aerial and ground bombardment, but through, among other features, cessation of basic sustenance and amenities, destruction of medical facilities, and forced movement of populations within the blockaded geography of the Gaza strip. These are also grave war crimes… it is difficult to see from a legal point of view how the continuation of military action in Gaza at this time would be concordant with international law.
In a speech he gave to a fundraising dinner for Medical Aid for Palestine, he said a ceasefire was now “a matter of legal imperative”. These were hardly the views of someone who brought an open mind to the ICC’s deliberations.
Another panel member was the veteran barrister Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws KC. Her website says she is president of Medical Aid for Palestinians. Last October, she warned against “collective punishment” by Israel and referred to Gaza “being reduced to rubble”. She said only token amounts of aid were being allowed in and accused Israel of cutting off Gaza’s water supplies.
In a speech on genocide in the House of Lords in March, she said:
The current conflict between Hamas and Israel follows decades of terrible conduct, by both the IDF and Hamas, before, during and after 7 October.
Rub your eyes. In the view of this doyenne of “human rights,” Israeli soldiers who died in great number as they desperately tried to fight off the Hamas stormtroopers even while they were continuing to perpetrate that depraved and barbaric pogrom against Israeli women, children and men, were guilty of “terrible conduct”.
This “impartial” panel is actually a hanging jury from the Salem school of law: verdict first, evidence nowhere.
Khan’s attack against Israel — with the panel of lawyers he assembled serving as his human shield against criticism — represents yet another onslaught of defamation, demonisation and delegitimisation mounted by the apparatus of international law against the Jewish state, a unique and malicious double standard applied to no other country on earth.
Far from restoring the ICC’s reputation, Khan’s move will now bury it in the eyes of all fair-minded and decent people.
It will also hammer a nail into the coffin of human rights law, the legal instrument of the international “humanitarian” establishment of the UN and anti-Israel non-governmental organisations for which this kind of “lawfare” has become a principal weapon aimed at Israel’s destruction.
Doubtless under enormous pressure from both the UN and his former chums in Britain’s radical barrister sets, Khan’s preposterous move is part of the agenda for Israel’s destruction through a pincer movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human rights” lawfare.
The beneficiary will be Hamas; the victims will be Israel, the rule of law and civilisation itself.
Yesterday was a dark day for justice.Brendan O'Neill: A judicial pogrom
The announcement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan that he is pursuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant alongside the leaders of Hamas is an egregious and unconscionable perversion of the law, and a gift to the murderers and rapists of October 7 - one which Yahya Sinwar could never have imagined in his wildest dreams.
That Khan would even utter Israel and Hamas in the same breath is simply unfathomable.
There is absolutely no comparison between a genocidal terrorist organisation like Hamas and a democratic state like Israel, seeking to defend its citizens and rescue its hostages, following the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
To draw such equivalence, which is no different to equating Churchill and Hitler, is abominable and morally repugnant.
The ICC was established in 2002 as a “court of last resort” to end impunity for the perpetrators of the most heinous of crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide - not the Orwellian circumstances of arresting Israeli leaders for responding to the pogrom of October 7.
Notwithstanding the heinous crimes inflicted upon the Jewish state, which continue to this day with the holding of 128 hostages in Gaza and ongoing rocket attacks, the IDF has gone to unprecedented lengths - not seen until now in the history of modern warfare - to abide by the laws of war and avoid harm to Palestinian civilians.
As a court of last resort, the ICC is governed by the principle of “complementarity”, meaning it may only assert jurisdiction in circumstances where a national legal system fails to act, or to do so in a bona fide manner.
Khan himself stated during a visit to Israel after the October massacre that “Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders and a robust system intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law.” How quickly has Khan forgotten his own words.
The Clooney vision of the ICC and its brainy advisers as gallant defenders of decency is a grotesque lie. Clooney, in her statement, says ‘I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s’. Big words from a barrister who’s advising prosecutors for a court that is notoriously selective in which wars it investigates and which wars it leaves alone. So Israel is threatened with being dragged to The Hague, but Bashar al-Assad was not, despite overseeing a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Neither were Saudi leaders over their killings in Yemen. And this isn’t to mention Western leaders – in the US, Britain, France – whose warmongering has caused far greater death and destruction in the Middle East than Israel ever has. I would really like to ask all those legal eagles why killings by the Jewish State seem to cause them greater angst than killings by ‘white’ states.Eli Lake: Israel Is Not Equivalent to Hamas
The ICC is infamous for its disproportionate targeting of the leaders of black Africa. To see a map of ICC investigations is to behold neo-imperialism in all its shameless pomposity. Most of its investigations have been in Africa, with a smattering in Latin America and Asia. No wonder the African Union has advised African states to cut ties with the ICC on the basis that it is a ‘neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political… interests in Africa’. That ‘anti-racist’ leftists are now cheering a court, riddled with racist double standards, because it has lumped the Jews in with the blacks is a testament to how fried their brains have become as a result of Israelophobia. Even the neo-colonial powers of the postwar globalist order are treated as allies by the woke left, as ‘good guys’, if they make moves against Evil Israel.
There’s a special cruelty to the seeking of arrest warrants against the Jewish State. The ICC has its origins in the postwar discussion about the need for ‘international law’ to deal with criminals like the Nazis. So grave were the crimes of fascism against the Jews that new legal systems are needed to punish such crimes, the argument went. Eventually, the ICC emerged. Fast forward to 2024 and this court that was founded on the principle that fascistic murder must never again go unpunished now threatens to punish a state whose only crime was to fight back against fascistic murderers. The postwar ideal of protecting the likes of the Jews is now weaponised against the Jews. The seeking of arrest warrants against Israel is a grotesque betrayal of the promises and principles of the entire postwar era. It is the self-negation of everything the modern, liberal West claims to represent.
I see it as a judicial pogrom, to go alongside the militant pogrom launched by Hamas and the intellectual pogrom pursued by Hamas’s apologists in the West. Militarily, politically and now legally, the Jewish State is under attack. We are fast reaching a situation where it isn’t only Israel’s military actions that are viewed as crimes against humanity but Israel itself. The Jewish homeland itself is this close to being redefined as a crime. This should be intolerable to anyone who believes in nationhood, self-determination and the equal right of Jews to go after the armies that butcher their people. Screw the ICC. It should enjoy no jurisdiction over Israel or any other independent nation.
In the coming weeks there is a very good chance that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be pursued by the International Criminal Court as a wanted man. On Monday, the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, applied for an arrest warrant for Israel’s leader and its defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
That Netanyahu and Gallant’s warrant applications were announced alongside warrants for three Hamas leaders responsible for the October 7 massacre is the first of many flaws in this disgraceful case. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was right when he called the equivalence of Israel with Hamas “shameful.”
Then there’s the fact that Israel is not a party to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, or ICC. Blinken said that “the United States has been clear since well before the current conflict that ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter.” Finally, Blinken noted “deeply troubling process questions.” Israel has said it was willing to cooperate with the court and that Khan had been due to visit Israel next week. Instead he abruptly announced his application for a warrant, which “call[s] into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation,” Blinken said.
But even assuming Khan is waging a credible, legitimate prosecution, there is another problem with the case. Khan’s central accusation against Israel is that the Jewish state has “intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.” That is a crime under international law. And Khan argues in a press statement that Israel has used “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” to collectively punish Gaza’s 2.3 million people and to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it captured on October 7.
We have heard many accusations of starvation over the course of this war, but there has been scant evidence. (According to The Wall Street Journal, over the past seven months Hamas claims that 31 Gazans have died because of malnutrition and dehydration.) More, the ICC ignores abundant evidence that Hamas is hoarding the food and medical aid meant for the population it purports to govern. As the U.S. military was building a pier in Gaza to deliver aid last month, Hamas fired mortar rounds at the construction area. The Israel Defense Forces have posted many videos and photographs of Hamas gunmen commandeering aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). On May 2, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller acknowledged that Hamas was diverting aid.