Nearly five months of human slaughter have gone by since the International Criminal Court was asked to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister as well as three Hamas leaders. Since the request was made in May, at least 13,000 more people have been killed in Gaza and a further 18,000 have been wounded. Each one was a person, a fact often lost in the routinely reported casualty statistics. Each had a private life, thoughts and imaginings. Each was connected to other people through love or birth or community. Each of those old enough to have known about the court’s warrant application may have hoped its decision could signal an end to the horror enveloping them, until they too became statistics of the dead and injured or joined the 11,000 missing beneath the rubble of Gaza.
At the same time as the bodies of the innocents were piling up in Gaza and over 2,000 more in the West Bank and Lebanon, one of the world’s most famous journalists was preparing to publish his latest book, called War. Ever since Watergate, Bob Woodward’s career has been devoted to snooping behind Washington’s closed doors with the help of phenomenally well-placed sources. Judging by published excerpts from War, those sources have brought Woodward’s snooping right into the Oval Office.
He writes that, after Joe Biden had threatened America would stop sending bombs and artillery to Israel if its army invaded Rafah but Israel went right ahead and did so anyway, Biden privately pronounced Binyamin Netanyahu “a f***ing liar”. Still, America keeps sending him its killing machinery.
Perhaps the court in The Hague should also be considering arrest warrants for political leaders in the US and Iran as accessories to war crimes by supplying arms that are exterminating masses of civilians. Whatever it is considering, it needs to act promptly. Why is it taking nearly five months – so far – to respond to the request for Netanyahu’s warrant when it took just three weeks to grant a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and one of his deputies last year?
One purported reason is the extra work entailed when the warrants concern five individuals, but this is unpersuasive, as two of the Hamas leaders named in the application are now dead. Military leader Mohammed Deif was killed in an Israeli bomb explosion along with 91 others in Gaza in July and Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh died in a suspected Israeli bombing in Tehran the same month.
Israel has submitted an official challenge to The Hague court to the request for Netanyahu’s arrest. While delaying due process must be observed in the interests of justice, some urgency needs to be generated too. Humans are dying, losing their homes, their kin, their limbs and their minds amid the ceaseless carnage. International war crimes tribunals and courts do vital work but, too often, the fruits of their work come too late; after the annihilation is complete. While The Hague fiddles, Gaza burns. Now Lebanon burns too.
A contemporaneous report on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, published by an international commission chaired by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Seán MacBride, portrayed the same sort of devastation and human suffering that is currently being unleashed. This time, more than 1.2 million people have fled their homes in Lebanon. More than 40 ambulances have been hit by air strikes and escape roads have been cratered. Forty years ago, the MacBride commission said Israel did not recognise innocence and that the objective of that invasion was to terrorise the inhabitants and make their place uninhabitable “thereby breaking the will of the Palestinian movement”. Precisely the opposite happened. It gave birth to Hizbullah and its paramilitary wing, the Jihad Council.
Both Biden and US secretary of state Antony Blinken have scorned the warrants application by the court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan as “outrageous” and “shameful”, but what is actually outrageous and shameful is Washington’s feeble two-facedness. Publicly, it has egged Israel on by invoking its right to self-defence – as if slaughtering more than 50,000 people in Gaza and Lebanon matches any definition of self-defence – while, according to Woodward’s book, Biden is privately warning Netanyahu his country is perceived as “a rogue state”. Water off a duck’s back for the Israeli leader who has shut down Al Jazeera’s broadcasting in the country and has been discussing a grotesque plan for the Israel Defense Forces to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza.
On Monday’s first anniversary of Hamas’s killing, kidnapping and raping rampage in Israel, billboard signs featuring a gigantic image of Netanyahu appeared along Tel Aviv’s Ayalon highway, declaring “You were in charge and you are to blame”, alluding to the October 7th incursion. “We won’t forget. You won’t escape.” That night, a spokesman for the hostages’ families told a television reporter they want their loved ones returned to them, the 80,000 internally displaced Israelis to go back to their homes and peace to reign for everyone, “including those on the other side of this border”, he said, gesturing towards Gaza.
With politics failing and diplomacy failing, how can any of that be achieved? By enforcing the laws of war. Cynics may dismiss the issuance of warrants as an impotent gesture because the culprits will ensure not to set foot in any jurisdiction that might arrest them, but it would make them global pariahs who could no longer visit their friends in the White House. Not least, it would be a tangible recognition of the horrors suffered by tens of thousands of innocent victims on all sides.
History is repeating itself in the Middle East. It may already be too late for the present generations but, to protect future ones from reliving it in another 40 years, the course of unfolding history has to be changed. The International Criminal Court, to which 124 countries give allegiance, has the power to do that by acting swiftly. As Prince Andrei reflected in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the only way to proceed is to make war so hellish that people and their leaders lose all taste for it.