On May 21, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he would seek arrest warrants against five individuals for “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Three of them are Hamas leaders accused of committing terrorist acts both against Israelis directly as well as Gazans indirectly. Two of them, however, are Israeli leaders: Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
While some countries (NATO allies France, Belgium and Germany among them) stood in support of Khan’s actions, Israeli and American leaders began to denounce this move. President Biden, Netanyahu and others rejected this claim by using the argument that this implies some sort of false equivalency between Hamas and Israeli leadership.
This is not a very good legal defense. “But he did something worse” is an argument that does not work for 5-year-olds avoiding a time-out, much less war criminals. To be fair, Hamas leaders used the same dumb argument to defend their own, but I doubt many of us disagree on the validity of seeking warrants for terrorists.
Although the odds of Netanyahu or Gallant ever getting arrested are slim, the restrictions on their movement (to countries that do not recognize ICC jurisdiction) serve as a deterrent to all leaders – including Western ones.
It demonstrates we are no longer a world stuck in the Middle Ages, where any number of civilian casualties can be excusable in the name of a “just cause” that was perhaps just in its original intent but has long since exceeded the scope of a rational response.
Some may point to the civilian casualties during the Allied bombing campaigns of World War II as a counterpoint. However, Hamas hardly poses the same kind of threat to global peace and human rights as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did. It would have posed no threat in the first place had IDF leadership placed more forces near Gaza instead of backing settler criminality in the West Bank.
Furthermore, military technology has evolved since then, making intelligence gathering far more effective and bombing/shelling far more accurate. What has progressed the most, however, is international mechanisms for diplomacy, making the use of such indiscriminate weapons, especially with the way they are being used in Gaza, atrocious.
A more reasonable challenge to Karim’s plan is posed by Ron Swanson of the Atlantic Council, who argues a warrant may induce a rally-around-the-flag effect in Israel, whose citizens have at times questioned the independence and fairness of the ICC. With increasing international opposition to Israeli actions, Israeli citizens might reflexively support Netanyahu’s Gaza war plans when they might not have otherwise.
This returns us to the original problem: a lack of a competent plan or strategy in the first place. If Israel continues with its current invasion strategy, the IDF will start to learn the lessons the United States learned after 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq – that the actual invasion is the easy part. This is why Netanyahu and his cabinet feel the need to conduct an all-out bombing campaign that is killing scores of innocent civilians – because they need to kill every last Hamas fighter to succeed with their current plan.
So long as there is a power vacuum, Hamas will grow to fill the gap unless another competent organization steps in. However, Netanyahu is unwilling to let a competent non-extremist Palestinian government exist, because such an organization would implicitly provide a strong case for a two-state solution. This is what Netanyahu really fears: the lack of a buffer between Israel and its Muslim neighbors.
Such a fear is unfounded given the strength of the Israeli military and the increasing normalization of relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors. Even with this conflict, these normalization efforts have merely paused, rather than backtracked. The creation of a Palestinian state would set Arab-Israeli relations on a positive trajectory like never before – this is what Netanyahu’s coalition fails to realize.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
