>In his first response to the ICC issuing a warrant for his arrest on allegations of war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has described the ruling as “absurd and false lies” and said the decision is “antisemitic.”
If Netanyahu and Gallant really think they are innocent, and the allegations are absurd and false, they should cooperate with the ICC. Have your day in court and show how absurd the accusations are. If you're not willing to do that, it seems reasonable for the public to draw a proverbial negative inference.
You are assuming the court isn't a political thing that is trying to get him regardless of evidence. The court is at least partially political, and Netanyahu will tell you this is entirely political and he wouldn't get a fair trail.
Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept and recognize the authority of. It has a history of being very transparent in its decisions and is widely recognized as being neutral and fair in their decision making process.
Of course the person charged and found guilty of a crime will argue against the court. Disagreement, even if valid, doesn't change the recognized authority of this court even if the "teeth" are extremely limited.
> Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept
For what it’s worth, Israel signed the Rome Statute establishing the court in 2000 but declared in 2002 it no longer intends to ratify it[1]. (Which, I guess, is marginally better than the US, which has threatened The Hague with military invasion in case any arrests are made[2]. But not by much.) TFA specifically points out that “States are not entitled to challenge the Court’s jurisdiction under article 19(2) prior to the issuance of a warrant of arrest.”
As a follow-up to [2], even more interesting is the text of covered persons:
"military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand"
Neither Israel nor the de-facto government of Gaza they are fighting ever accepted the authority of the ICC; neither has signed the Rome Treaty.
The ICC authority is being derived from the Palestinian Authority applying for membership and the Court deciding earlier in a 2-1 decision that Palestine is a state, the PA is the legitimate government of Palestine, and that Gaza is territory under its jurisdiction.
Israel don't recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court. Palestine, however, does, and therefore the ICC consider these allegations within their jurisdiction. A relevant point is that the UK (under the previous Conservative party government) requested the opportunity to dispute the allegations of war crimes based on this complication, but the new British government did not choose to continue with the objection. No other countries have made objections.
The challenge wasn't based on exactly that, they were trying to argue that a treaty palestine signed with israel precluded palestine from giving icc juridsiction that it didn't have itself.
That said, if it ever gets to trial, the defendants will almost certainly try to challenge it on that basis.
Realistically though i think the chance of that type of challenge succeding is unlikely. International courts generally are above domestic law. They probably have a better chance of convincing the court that palestine isn't a state and thus cannot sign the rome statue (which is also a long shot imo)
> Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept and recognize the authority of
As far as i am aware, this is a false statement. Israel has been opposed to the ICC since its inception (originally because the first version had a judge selection mechanism they thought was biased against them, although i am sure there are other reasons they object, especially relating to their settlements).
Perhaps you are confusing the ICC with the ICJ, which are totally different things.
Israel considers this court to be a joke because Hamas has been committing pretty obvious War Crimes for decades (firing missiles at civilians), but the court only acts when Israel does something, and then puts in a token, dead, Hamas member.
If this was a real court they would have asked for the arrest of lots of Hamas members a long time ago.
The court is certainly political - for one thing, it never issued a warrant against anyone in the Bush administration, or any of their international collaborators. (Tony Blair, etc, etc.)
Perhaps we should dispense with the notion that there is any international justice but victor's justice? That seems to be how it works in practice.
yeah, the accused has no right to a jury trial with the ICC
with the 6th amendment, signing the rome statute into law would be both unconstitutional and effectively subjecting US soldiers to a kangaroo court (in the eyes of the US)
(before you jump into discussion, remember that this only about these two individuals)
ICC and the prosecutor are on very solid ground here.
The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law. The panel included people like Theodor Meron (former Legal adviser for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Helene Kennedy, Adrian Fulford.
Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant provided plenty of evidence of the intent. Did they really think that when they talk Hebrew to their audience, rest of the world does not hear them. Case like this would be harder to prosecute without evidence of intent.
> Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported that Israeli officials supported Khan’s candidacy behind the scenes, and consider him a pragmatist who shies away from politicization.
I mean, nobody really knows until the trial (if one ever happens). Its easy to be convincing when you are just listening to the prosecution - it gets harder once the defense has the opportunity to poke holes.
Keep in mind the conviction rate at ICC is pretty low.
> The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law.
The court already disagreed with said panel on one of the charges (crime of extermination) and we aren't even at the stage yet where they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Netanyahu and Gallant should certainly be quite worried (if they somehow find themselves in icc custody which seems unlikely) but we are still very far away from a conviction. Its not a foregone conclusion.
Your dark humor made me chuckle. Thanks for that in this dire world.
May the persecution of all innocent Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Africans (e.g. Ugandans) end and a world of peace and justice be established, for one and all.
> Keep in mind the conviction rate at ICC is pretty low.
My understanding is that's because it's usually difficult to show intent. However, in this case, not only do we have an incredible amount of video evidence of war crimes, but we also have a huge catalogue of Israeli politicians explicitly calling for the genocide of Gaza.
My biggest concern over this is what the US and/or Mossad will do...
Also note that the US imposed heavy sanctions on Ethopia and Eritrea’s entire government party, head of state, spouses and businesses under the exact same observations of provoking famine and starvation
For context, this is only possible because the state of Palestine pushed hard and persisted for years to become an ICC member and thus give the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on Palestinian territory, whether by Israel or by Palestinian factions. The USA is still mad at them for doing it.
The full account is worth reading, it includes considerations by the various resistance factions that they’d also be subject to ICC jurisdiction and realized threats of punitive measures by the USA and Israel if they continued to push for ICC membership: https://palepedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court%27s_...
> For context, this is only possible because the state of Palestine pushed hard and persisted for years to become an ICC member and thus give the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on Palestinian territory, whether by Israel or by Palestinian factions. The USA is still mad at them for doing it.
That sounds biased.
Why -shouldn't- Palestine be able to be a member of the ICC? Your verbiage makes it sounds like they basically bullied the ICC into membership.
And frankly, so what if the US is still mad at them for it? The US won't join organizations like this because it'd rather protect people like Kissinger who openly committed war crimes (and wants the freedom to be able to do whatever it wants, wherever, without consequence).
I think the GP intended to congratulate the Palestinians for their digged resilience in pursuing this, despite the extraordinary opposition they faced. I think they were using this language specifically to suggest how hard the fight was, not to imply that it was a bad thing.
"The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare."
Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
Of course every death caused by intentional starvation is a severe crime and must be punished, but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
This is common and expected. Even when a serial killer suspected of 20 murder is apprehended, arrest is often made based on one or two confirmed cases, more charges are later added as investigation deepens.
Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.
How do they enter now? An American journalist was jailed in Israel as well for a video showing the Iranian missiles struck near military targets and Mossad headquarters, where the official line was they were targeting civilians.
The Gaza ministry that would have counted the deaths was also destroyed several months ago, which is why news media have been reporting the same death total of 40,000 for several months.
This is wrong. They are still reporting daily deaths counts, that counts have been going up. The Grauniad is good about collecting the reports (but bad about other unrelated things).
"confirmed" data from Gaza at the moment is unreliable. The people who were doing the counting have either been killed or cleansed from the area. The official death toll is still around 40k despite the reality being closer to 100-200k.
Regardless, total deaths don't matter, only deaths that were the result of crimes matter, in this context.
Some of those deaths are going to be legal targets killed during combat, which is not evidence of a war crime. You have to split things out for the numbers to mean anything.
This is a good example of the core problem with this academic and religious sophistry, i.e., unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way, it must not have happened or is not real, in spite of empirical evidence, observable reality right before our own eyes.
It leads to things like accepting the most heinous a horrible things by the worst types of people humanity can produce, who think themselves as some kind of demigod, stone age, chosen people psychopath supremacists who can slaughter you like bugs while you sleep in your home are are trying to get food for your starving children.
>unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way
Using strict process and critical methodology is the only want to approximate truth.
> observable reality right before our own eyes.
We don't observe reality correctly with our eyes. We (including you and me) are naked monkeys. Petty, vindictive, and biased. Palestinians and Israeli Jews are just like us but
live in a cesspool of religion, anger and violent history.
Given that the accused is currently in control of the crime scene, it's not surprising that the prosecution chose to prioritise the crimes that are easiest to prove.
> Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
IANAL but this is probably incorrect i think - the starvation charge is related to allegations of intentionally restricting neccesities of life. Whether anyone dies as a result is irrelavent to that charge. The murder charge is for the people who actually allegedly died as a result (of the starvation that is. To be clear, the death has to illegal for it to be the war crime of murder. Normal combat death is not murder).
> Researchers at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimated deaths from starvation to be 62,413 between October 2023 and September 2024.
We can compare the rate to countries in more.. stable situations[0]. They'll have a very difficult time getting anywhere with that rate. But we'll see. The world would be better off with all these individuals having no power at all.
The crimes have a definition with requisite elements in the rome statue.
While many of them do require a certain gravity, viewing international crimes like a more serious version of a normal crime is probably the wrong way of doing it. Some war crimes do not require anyone to die. In other cases thousands could die and it wouldn't be a war crime or crime against humanity because the elements aren't met.
In particular, starvation doesn't require anyone to have died, and it covers more things than just food. Keep in mind its a relatively new crime in international law, it was only made illegal in 1977 (for example during ww2, the nuremburg trials explicitly ruled that sieges were legal). As far as i know nobody has ever been persecuted for it, so the case law doesn't exist, so its a bit unknown.
> but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
Which context is this? If you mean the context of past ICC indictments that isn't true. There are multiple other examples of people indicted for specific acts that resulted in the deaths of a 2 digit numbers of people.
The bar for "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity" isn't the number of people you kill. Though in this case, plenty have been killed, this case is about what can be proved conclusively ebough given who it is against.
That’s an off claim but not surprising giving the amount of easily disprovable information that circulates about the Gaza war.
Gazans have more calories per capita than people in most countries. If you saw Bernie showing pictures of a thin boy he’s disabled which is why his siblings and mother are fine.
> The Chamber issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024
And things got much worse in the latter part of 2024. Even if the court didn't take into account facts after 20 May 2024, ample evidence already existing by then was already enough to issue the warrants. When it takes more evidence into account I bet more warrants will be issued.
It is indeed ridiculous that Lebanon didn’t join the ICC, one has to imagine that Hezbollah played a role in that decision. Which is funny because all the Palestinian resistance factions actually pushed for ICC jurisdiction to the extent that they called for it to apply to them and Israel equally! The hoops the Palestinians had to jump through to join the ICC were crazy, including (reified) threats of heavy punishments from the US if they did.
> The Chamber also noted that decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional. They were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law or to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza would be adequately supplied with goods in need. In fact, they were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States of America. In any event, the increases in humanitarian assistance were not sufficient to improve the population’s access to essential goods.
I don't understand why this would matter. Does it matter the rationale for increasing aid? I would think the only thing that should matter would be weather the aid was sufficient or not. (I appreciate in the end icc pretrial felt it wasn't enough , but i think that is the only thing that should matter)
Like if someone is accused of murder, but doesn't because a friend told them not to, we don't throw them in jail because they decided not to murder for the wrong reasons.
Israel was expected, under international law, to unconditionally allow aid for the civilians. Israel used it as a bargaining chip, effectively holding civilians hostage.
The rationale for supplying aid might not matter when the aid is sufficient. Although, coercive aid might still be a problem; I'm unfamiliar with international law on this.
But when aid is not sufficient, I think rationale/intent makes more of a difference. If you're doing it for the right reasons and putting in a good effort, sufficiency may not be acheivable and it may not be right to charge you with not acheiving it. If you're only doing it to keep your friends happy, and it's insufficient, maybe there was more you could have done.
The word intent is oftentimes used in The judicial system to measure culpability and punishment:
whether somebody accidentally stabbed a person 90 times or intentionally stabbed the person 90 times, for instance, is captured via the concept of intent.
According to Israel at least, all the ones that the warrants were requested for are now dead. Perhaps new warrants will be issued, but simply taking on the mantle of Hamas leadership will not make someone retroactively culpable for the crimes of October 7th. Culpability at this level is personal, not collective. So even though anyone who becomes the next leader of Hamas will be, by this act itself, a terrible human seeking to advance some horrible ideals, that will not make them culpable for everything Hamas has already done.
> A warrant was also issued for [Hamas military commander] Mohammed Deif, although the Israeli military has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.
Most news reports are treating this as a single story, but posting the original source seems a good idea in this case; it just happens to be split across two URLs.
I doubt there will be actual arrests, but there will be and there are already consequences. I just saw France and Netherlands announced they will obey the warrants, thus Netanyahu can no longer travel there. Presumably the whole of EU is off limits (I am unaware which countries recognize the court).
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was arrested and deported by the government of Yugoslavia after him. Of course, under immense pressure from the west. My preference would be that we tried him under our courts and sent him to jail in Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Now, imposing "justice" obviously only works when you do it to small nations like Yugoslavia or Rwanda. Of course it will not apply to the Israel leader, let alone to somebody from even more powerful nation.
further gives Germany a reason to crack down on pro-Palestinian protestors. Although supporters of the Palestinians have not staged international attacks for a long time the history of this in the 1970s explains why my Uni suddenly instituted a clear bag policy at sports games a few weeks after the lid blew off in Gaza last year. (When I started doing sports photography at the beginning of the semester I could pack a big camera bag and even take extra lenses)
Also Israel has a high GDP and involvement in international trade, academia, etc. Israel has 50x the GDP per head of Rwanda so they have a large impact in terms of Intel's Haifa office, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Sodastream, etc. My thesis advisor traveled to Tel Aviv a lot to work with collaborators.
Many scholars argue that the US uses Israel to destabilize the region so that all other countries besides Israel are unable to form a bloc and resist US hegemony, but perhaps that's what you meant by "keep the region in check".
> Iran and basically the rest of the Middle East, US needs an ally to keep the region in check.
The US (and also UK/France/Germany) have been bending over backwards to prop up Israel since LONG before Iran switched to an anti-US theocratic government.
According to Sachs, Israel has masterfully manipulated US influence to extend its global reach, primarily through AIPAC's incredibly efficient lobbying - spending just hundreds of millions to secure billions in aid and trillions in military spending. Netanyahu's strategy has been particularly clever, pushing the US to overthrow Middle Eastern governments that oppose Israeli policies, as seen with Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Through campaign financing, Israel has basically bought out Congress for surprisingly little money, ensuring the US consistently backs them internationally - like vetoing UN resolutions that favor Palestinians. This US shield is so strong that when the UN voted on Palestinian self-determination, only the US, Israel, and a couple other countries opposed it. Even when Biden sets boundaries for Israeli actions, they just ignore them without consequences. The whole system's genius lies in how Israel's managed to maintain its policies despite global opposition, though Sachs thinks this might backfire by making Israel too isolated and blocking any chance of a two-state solution.
They’re a western bastion in very close proximity to the Middle East, with a cultural and religious tie to a not insignificant number of Americans. It’s also a wealthy country.
From my weak understanding, it’s the only ally the west (USA) has in the Middle East, so they’re important strategically - for military bases and other reasons I don’t really understand, and so are propped up by financial aid and weapons and other help (intelligence etc?) beyond what would normally happen to a similar country.
The US has several allies in the middle east. Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all have major non-NATO ally status with the US, the same status as Israel. Jordan in particular is a very close US partner.
I should add, none of these countries are treaty allies of the US, i.e. none of them have a mutual defense treaty with the US. The one country that is a treaty ally of the US in the region is Turkey, though that relationship has been strained in the last couple of decades
> I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics.
Here are some of my favorite sources on that! These are all leftist and pro-Palestinian sources, but they are academic and studied. These are about why Israel is important to the "interests of the USA" (ie, what those with power to decide national interests think).
* The first chapter of "Palestine: A Socialist Introduction", “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East" by Shireen Akram-Boshar. The publisher Haymarket is giving away the ebook for free. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-social...
(Odd to me that I'm getting downvoted for suggesting the US support for Israel has to do with US interests, and providing sources going into detail on that, and people are getting upvoted for saying it's because Jews have a lot of influence! It's really not mostly because Jews have a lot of influence.)
Given Israel is the motherland for many Jewish people, plus almost 2.5% of the USA is Jewish, plus there are almost 16 million Jewish people globally, I would imagine that.
> When was the last time a head of state was arrested by the ICC?
It also acts as a deterrent as much of the world will now likely be out of bounds for travel for either the Israelis or Hamas leadership who were issued warrants.
There's a large attempt to pin all of this on Netanyahu and his closest cabinet but what he's saying is pretty much supported by nearly all of Israeli society down to individual citizens. I encourage everyone to find people who live in Israel on X and translate their tweets so they can see for themselves.
It's utterly appalling, and the main reason I tend to think the end of apartheid in Israel will look substantially different than the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Liberal Zionists like to pretend Gallant was the "moderate one" but in reality there is essentially no moderate in current Israeli society, there is only the secular far right and the messianic further right. The two differ only in small derails of their preferred strategy when using the military to ethnically cleanse Gaza. There is no significant coalition that recognizes basic human rights for Palestinians.
Being the minister of defense gives you culpability for the military actions the ICC has decided are war crimes, I'd think? But I am not an expert in international law, just don't find it surprising.
Yep, commanders are responsible for the actions undertaken by their troops.
It's called Command responsibility or sometimes the Yamashita principle/doctrine, after a Japanese general who was executed for horrific crimes committed by troops not even under his command, but in his area of responsibility (they were naval troops in the Philippines, he was commander of the Philippines, the navy and the army hated each other; he pulled out of Manilla in order to wage war in favourable terrain, the naval infantry commander refused to follow him and fought a brutal urban battle that destroyed the city, and on purpose killed more than a hundred thousand civilians).
He's the minister of defense (not anymore but was at the time). If the allegations are true, then as minister of defense he probably ordered the things in question (or failed to stop them)
As I understand it, he was the mastermind behind the policy of starvation and hindering of aid into Gaza. There is a famous video of him promising such in October 2023. He was also the defense minister in a time when several hospitals were targeted and damaged, so it is not hard to see the responsibility of this policy falling on him.
The response to the attacks on October 7th is just a thinly veiled excuse to do what Benjamin has wanted for a long time: forced occupation and displacement of Palestine. It's a convenient justification for genocide, similar to how the US used 9/11 to justify taking over Iraq when the majority of those terrorists were Saudi citizens.
Let's not pretend it's just Netanyahu when the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews support it in poll after poll. This is a country that made people who were on camera raping Palestinian prisoners into national heroes. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/65-of-israeli-jews-oppose-cri...
Many of us are going to have to reckon with the fact that the people committing these war crimes will be on our engineering teams in a few years. Isn't that a disturbing thought?
Wow, this took a long time to come after the application for the warrants. 185 days compared to 23 days for Putin's arrest warrant — but then again, one was against the wishes of the USA and the west while the other was at their behest.
I wouldn't say "and the west" without more qualifications. The USA and Germany are solidly behind whatever the Israeli government does. England a bit less so and the rest of "the west" (however you want to define it) is more ambivalent. My point is that if only two countries (the USA and Germany) would make their support more conditional (conditional on the israeli government not commiting war crimes for example), then things could change a lot
You’re right, there are notable exceptions in the form of western nations that have backed the enforcement of international law to put an end to the mass killings and starvation taking place in Gaza. Ireland, Spain, Norway, France, Switzerland, Slovenia, Denmark, and Belgium come to mind, ranging from “supporting the independence of the ICC and not commenting on proceedings” to “welcoming the investigation and the end of the killings.”
But while the US (not an ICC member) simply insulted the court and the notion of holding an Israeli leader accountable, it was the UK that demanded hearings on the legality of pursuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Aside from Germany’s staunch and unconditional support for Israel, other Western countries that heavily criticized the decision included Hungary, Austria, Czechia, Canada, Australia, and Italy - important to note that some of which also mentioned that despite their long list of misgivings and outrages they nevertheless respected the independence of the court.
> The Act gives the president power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".[2]
If you dig a little further, you'll notice that it also applies to "military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand."
I wanna emphasize: This pre-dates Trump, Biden and Obama. This has been a law for over two decades. It passed both the House and the Senate with very little opposition. Both parties voted in favour of it.
Man, Trump isn't going to shit about leaving NATO. He'll moan about some countries not spending enough, that's about it.
Leaving NATO would mean closing US-bases in Europe overnight, not getting valuable intel from partners in NATO, jeopardizing US defense deals, and a million other things.
As always, it's grandstanding from Trump to get some extra bucks from his allies.
US pulling out of NATO would likely embolden China to make a move on Taiwan. Seeing how much of the US economy revolves around technology, I really don't think there's any other option than to defend Taiwan, as it stands. Sure - Europe also depends on chips from Taiwan, but they'd also be swamped in the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
I should start a running list of all the people who say "Trump isn't going to...!" and then how they act like it was all part of the plan when he actually does it.
his first term, despite all the clownery and drama, ended up being run of the mill republican politics. Why do you think things will be different this time?
* People who say "Trump isn't going to...!" and then how they act like it was all part of the plan when he actually does it.
* People who say "Trump is going to...!" and the how they quietly stop mentioning it and move on to the next (bad) thing he's going to do when he doesn't do it.
Trump is heavily funded by Zionist extremists, but he isn't one himself. As soon as the ship really starts sinking (which could be induced by a Netanyahu arrest), he will attempt to jump ship and save himself.
Not super meaningful in reality - any country looking to arrest either man should tread carefully.
The American Service-Members' Protection Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
Israel is listed in the act as covered. Any means explicitly includes lethal force, which is why the act is nicknamed the "Invade the Hague" act.
The question here is why is only Israel covered in this act?
Also anti-BDS legislation in finance, regardless of ethical etc. concerns?
The US gives $4bn/year to Israel gratis, and so far $20bn in weapons over the course of this conflict, including advanced weapons like the F35 WITH source code access (which no other F35 partner has) - why?
There have been no investigations of US deaths WRT settler violence, aid workers killed etc. Normally with any US death it's a huge issue.
What does Israel do in return to make it such a favoured country?
eg. 20bn in disaster relief aid to Florida would be probably more welcome by US citizens.
It's not only Israel. It's all of NATO plus "major non-NATO allies" specifically Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand
We gave Pakistan and Iran a few billion dollars in military aid a while back. What we got in return was a Bangladesh genocide and an Islamic revolution.
Lesson learned: arms sales can be used to ideologically justify butchering civilians if the government receiving that aid is not held accountable.
You could ask the same questions about that yes, but whataboutism does not answer the questions here.
For Ethiopia it's flagged as humanitarian aid, and likely for Jordan as a result of the neighbouring Syria war.
None of that is arms though, and critically more than the aid, why the legislation?
What justifies making it illegal to stop investing in a country despite it's actions? Surely that's a commercial decision rather than a legislative one?
The answer is that giving aid to a region stabilizes it which makes trade more effective which american politicians for the past century have though is good.
The Netherlands said that they would arrest anybody accused. That would be peculiar to see, what would actually happen if anybody of the accused were to travel there.
The Dutch have a very lackadaisical attitude to law, and at the very same time a very principled cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face rule of law mentality.
If I were a senior Israeli or Hamas leader I’d avoid the place for a couple of decades in case of sealed charges.
On HN, having some stories with political overlap is both inevitable and ok—the question is which particular stories those should be. We try to go for the ones that contain significant new information. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42204689.
This approach has been stable for many years and there's no intention to allow HN to become a primarily-political site (quite the contrary) but it also doesn't work to try to exclude these things altogether.
I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli post in top since the beginning of the war. Definitely anything I submitted was flagged to death almost immediately, even if it was hacker-ish (say, the analysis of the Hamas statistics). You can say of course that users decide what they want, but for political stories at least I don't think it is straightforward
Rightfully so, their intentions and actions which have matched, have been clear for the last year. Hopefully the rest of the international community including governments will finally stand together and call them out for the crimes they have been committing. This is hopefully a step to removing arms sales to Israel as well from many countries.
Hacker News Guidelines: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
It's not a significant update. When the evergiven got stuck in the suez canel; if a court issued an arrest warrant for the captain that wouldn't have a historical impact.
In a hundred years from now, the leaders of Isreal that people talk about will be the first, the last and the second to last. Similar to how when people talk about the Roman Empire (~500 year span) it's just Cesear.
Users flagged it, as is common for the most divisive topics.
I've turned the flags off now, in keeping with HN's standard practices: some (but only some) stories with political overlap are allowed, and in the case of a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) we prefer the stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI).
I agree, so long as the people who flagged a given submission or post should also be displayed, for the same reason of transparency. Also the items a user flags should be included in their profile, for the same reason of transparency.
Stories about divisive topics are routinely flagged from all sides.
It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours.
I could never say there's no bias—unconscious bias is a thing, for example—but I can tell you that we work hard to be fair, have been doing that for years, and there hasn't been any change in our practices.
Sure, and yet if you take the examples you provided, unless you just happened to make a series of "unlucky" picks the probability is that the bias is pretty strong.
Now of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a bias (depending on the bias of course), but if you clearly have one while claiming to try and be unbiased that's wrong imo.
Dang, you stated multiple times in the past that users who will use site for political discussions will be banned. I saw you in the past banning pro-israeli users after a few comments.
How is this user https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=runarberg whose submissions and commentary pretty much totally political in nature still not banned, according to guidelines that you very fairly enforce ?
What is the point of the ICC? Russia doesn't recognize it, Israel doesn't recognize it and even the United States doesn't recognize it. I am confused at what these warrants even mean.
In this case, to make a political statement against Israel and their leadership.
Note that the only member of Hamas indicted, Mohammed Deif, will never see a day in court. As the ICC already knows, he was killed in an airstrike earlier this year.
Since there has been no proof of his death bar the announcements from Israel, it is sensible to consider him as a wanted man until there is concrete evidence he is dead.
In practice these warrants mean that they cannot travel to any country that does recognize the ICC without being arrested, which means they almost certainly won't.
Just like how Putin couldn't travel to, say, South Africa, after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Oh wait, South Africa declined to enforce the ICC arrest warrant in that case.
I don't see this meaningfully constraining Netanyahu's foreign travel options.
There have been several pundits with opinion on the matter, you’ll find quite a few in any news source (personally I recommend al-Jazeera). The gist of it is that this will have implication mostly around travels of Israeli officials to Europe. We might also see a slow and gradual policy shift in Europe as a result of this.
The whole Israel‘i cabinet scould have gotten arrest warrants for incitement to genocide, for supporting war crimes, for instance using starvation as a weapon, for supporting the bombing of shelters, bombing civil infrastructure, killing thousands of women and children. The whole Israeli society supports this. We are witnessing a live genocide and the Israel lobby pressures all western countries to suppress any protest against it. It’s a farce.
Edit: Wow, the Israel fans were quick to find this comment. You guys can downvote as much as you like, the Israeli intel can threaten ICC judges as much as they want, the world sees Israel‘s crimes. It’s a settler colonial apartheid regime that has killed and dispossessed Palestinians for decades. But the world is changing. Ain’t nothing you can do. Deal with it.
It's a bit reminiscent of the Bangladesh genocide by Pakistan, to whom the United States also sold weapons and also did nothing to stop hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
So you want to say that the reason for _not_ doing this is: it will distract from the effort to stop the cleansing.
Would that be the same as saying that we shouldn't issue a warrant against a school shooter because it wouldn't stop the shooting? Would it distract from gun laws?
Maybe not the best analogy, but I know that I cannot say for certain whether it will negatively or positively affect the effort. It might positively affect if this makes (especially EU) countries put more pressure on Israel.
>It might positively affect if this makes (especially EU) countries put more pressure on Israel.
That would never happen. Israel is above any and all criticism, how do people not realize that by now?
Pressure, sanctions, whatever - nothing will actually happen. Likud can trot out the tired trope of antisemitism and any and all criticism, legitimate or not, is automatically waved away. Like it or not, that's objective reality.
Before the shills come in and accuse me of this or that, let me be clear: NO, I don't support Hamas, Likud, or any organization that supports the killing of innocent people. Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, Palestine has a right to exist and defend itself.
How is this not a declaration of war against Israel and Gaza by the members of the UN? Regardless of their alleged friends, these people are the leaders of sovereign (-ish, for Gaza) nations.
Because nobody is invading Israel. Nobody's declaring war.
The whole point of international law is to hold citizens of sovereign nations accountable, without having to go to war to achieve it.
Nobody has legal authority to go into Israel to seize Netanyahu. But now he knows that if he tries to travel to Europe, he will be seized upon entry. That's not war, that's simply apprehending someone who there is an arrest warrant out for.
>In his first response to the ICC issuing a warrant for his arrest on allegations of war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has described the ruling as “absurd and false lies” and said the decision is “antisemitic.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/nov/21/internati...
If Netanyahu and Gallant really think they are innocent, and the allegations are absurd and false, they should cooperate with the ICC. Have your day in court and show how absurd the accusations are. If you're not willing to do that, it seems reasonable for the public to draw a proverbial negative inference.
You are assuming the court isn't a political thing that is trying to get him regardless of evidence. The court is at least partially political, and Netanyahu will tell you this is entirely political and he wouldn't get a fair trail.
Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept and recognize the authority of. It has a history of being very transparent in its decisions and is widely recognized as being neutral and fair in their decision making process.
Of course the person charged and found guilty of a crime will argue against the court. Disagreement, even if valid, doesn't change the recognized authority of this court even if the "teeth" are extremely limited.
> Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept
For what it’s worth, Israel signed the Rome Statute establishing the court in 2000 but declared in 2002 it no longer intends to ratify it[1]. (Which, I guess, is marginally better than the US, which has threatened The Hague with military invasion in case any arrests are made[2]. But not by much.) TFA specifically points out that “States are not entitled to challenge the Court’s jurisdiction under article 19(2) prior to the issuance of a warrant of arrest.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
As a follow-up to [2], even more interesting is the text of covered persons:
"military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand"
That's not the list of covered persons.
The act bars military aid to any country that is a signatory to the court, except those countries.
Neither Israel nor the de-facto government of Gaza they are fighting ever accepted the authority of the ICC; neither has signed the Rome Treaty.
The ICC authority is being derived from the Palestinian Authority applying for membership and the Court deciding earlier in a 2-1 decision that Palestine is a state, the PA is the legitimate government of Palestine, and that Gaza is territory under its jurisdiction.
Israel don't recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court. Palestine, however, does, and therefore the ICC consider these allegations within their jurisdiction. A relevant point is that the UK (under the previous Conservative party government) requested the opportunity to dispute the allegations of war crimes based on this complication, but the new British government did not choose to continue with the objection. No other countries have made objections.
The challenge wasn't based on exactly that, they were trying to argue that a treaty palestine signed with israel precluded palestine from giving icc juridsiction that it didn't have itself.
That said, if it ever gets to trial, the defendants will almost certainly try to challenge it on that basis.
Realistically though i think the chance of that type of challenge succeding is unlikely. International courts generally are above domestic law. They probably have a better chance of convincing the court that palestine isn't a state and thus cannot sign the rome statue (which is also a long shot imo)
> Courts are political entities but this is one that Israel chose to accept and recognize the authority of
As far as i am aware, this is a false statement. Israel has been opposed to the ICC since its inception (originally because the first version had a judge selection mechanism they thought was biased against them, although i am sure there are other reasons they object, especially relating to their settlements).
Perhaps you are confusing the ICC with the ICJ, which are totally different things.
Israel considers this court to be a joke because Hamas has been committing pretty obvious War Crimes for decades (firing missiles at civilians), but the court only acts when Israel does something, and then puts in a token, dead, Hamas member.
If this was a real court they would have asked for the arrest of lots of Hamas members a long time ago.
The court is certainly political - for one thing, it never issued a warrant against anyone in the Bush administration, or any of their international collaborators. (Tony Blair, etc, etc.)
Perhaps we should dispense with the notion that there is any international justice but victor's justice? That seems to be how it works in practice.
Whether it is political or not, that doesn't change the genocide taking place on the ground.
Whether Blair, Bush, etc are innocent or not, doesn't change the genocide taking place on the ground.
All of the above and much of this discussion is moot in the face of the genocide taking place on the ground.
Or shall we pour some champagne and eat hors d'oeuvres before our main course of Whataboutism?
> they should cooperate with the ICC. Have your day in court and show how absurd the accusations are
There's a reason why the US does not recognize the ICC.
Yes, because they want to operate outside the rule of international law.
It looks like ICC is not part of the fantastic rules based order.
ICC does not have the Freedom® and Democracy® that is in the Greatest FREE Democratic Nation on Earth that God has ever created.
( if you ignore the fact that it has the worlds highest incarceration rate and has invaded the most countries historically)
yeah, the accused has no right to a jury trial with the ICC
with the 6th amendment, signing the rome statute into law would be both unconstitutional and effectively subjecting US soldiers to a kangaroo court (in the eyes of the US)
(before you jump into discussion, remember that this only about these two individuals)
ICC and the prosecutor are on very solid ground here.
The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law. The panel included people like Theodor Meron (former Legal adviser for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Helene Kennedy, Adrian Fulford.
Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant provided plenty of evidence of the intent. Did they really think that when they talk Hebrew to their audience, rest of the world does not hear them. Case like this would be harder to prosecute without evidence of intent.
Also important to note that Khan, who filed the warrant requests, was one of Israel’s preferred appointees to the ICC as chief prosecutor.
Why would it be preferred or not? Israel is not an ICC member.
One can express a preference without having the right to participate in the selection.
Quite a few non-US citizens express a preference on who wins the Presidency, for example.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/uks-karim-khan-elected-next-ic...
> Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported that Israeli officials supported Khan’s candidacy behind the scenes, and consider him a pragmatist who shies away from politicization.
I mean, nobody really knows until the trial (if one ever happens). Its easy to be convincing when you are just listening to the prosecution - it gets harder once the defense has the opportunity to poke holes.
Keep in mind the conviction rate at ICC is pretty low.
> The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law.
The court already disagreed with said panel on one of the charges (crime of extermination) and we aren't even at the stage yet where they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Netanyahu and Gallant should certainly be quite worried (if they somehow find themselves in icc custody which seems unlikely) but we are still very far away from a conviction. Its not a foregone conclusion.
The outcome of this case will be hard to predict, but Netanyahu and Gallant did their best to get convicted.
Your dark humor made me chuckle. Thanks for that in this dire world.
May the persecution of all innocent Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Africans (e.g. Ugandans) end and a world of peace and justice be established, for one and all.
> Keep in mind the conviction rate at ICC is pretty low.
My understanding is that's because it's usually difficult to show intent. However, in this case, not only do we have an incredible amount of video evidence of war crimes, but we also have a huge catalogue of Israeli politicians explicitly calling for the genocide of Gaza.
My biggest concern over this is what the US and/or Mossad will do...
> Did they really think that when they talk Hebrew to their audience, rest of the world does not hear them.
When it comes to US public opinion, that's normally the way it works.
Thanks to our media and politicians.
And in turn, thanks to orgs like AIPAC.
People without media and politicians are not that much better.
... where the combination of their and the public's willful ignorance results in much needless suffering.
Also note that the US imposed heavy sanctions on Ethopia and Eritrea’s entire government party, head of state, spouses and businesses under the exact same observations of provoking famine and starvation
EO 14046
For context, this is only possible because the state of Palestine pushed hard and persisted for years to become an ICC member and thus give the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on Palestinian territory, whether by Israel or by Palestinian factions. The USA is still mad at them for doing it.
The full account is worth reading, it includes considerations by the various resistance factions that they’d also be subject to ICC jurisdiction and realized threats of punitive measures by the USA and Israel if they continued to push for ICC membership: https://palepedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court%27s_...
Do you think the state of Palestine would arrest Hamas officials on behalf of the ICC?
Moreover, would any Muslim country? I think this goes both ways.
Yes. The PA is controlled by a party that staged a coup when Hamas won an election in Gaza and has been able to prevent elections since 2006.
> Do you think the state of Palestine would arrest Hamas officials on behalf of the ICC?
They might if Netanyahu hadn't already illegally assassinated them all.
"Assassinated"? Hamas is a terrorist organization committing terror. They are active belligerents.
This pro-hamas non-sense has to stop.
> For context, this is only possible because the state of Palestine pushed hard and persisted for years to become an ICC member and thus give the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on Palestinian territory, whether by Israel or by Palestinian factions. The USA is still mad at them for doing it.
That sounds biased.
Why -shouldn't- Palestine be able to be a member of the ICC? Your verbiage makes it sounds like they basically bullied the ICC into membership.
And frankly, so what if the US is still mad at them for it? The US won't join organizations like this because it'd rather protect people like Kissinger who openly committed war crimes (and wants the freedom to be able to do whatever it wants, wherever, without consequence).
I think the GP intended to congratulate the Palestinians for their digged resilience in pursuing this, despite the extraordinary opposition they faced. I think they were using this language specifically to suggest how hard the fight was, not to imply that it was a bad thing.
"The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare."
Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
Of course every death caused by intentional starvation is a severe crime and must be punished, but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip_famine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
This is common and expected. Even when a serial killer suspected of 20 murder is apprehended, arrest is often made based on one or two confirmed cases, more charges are later added as investigation deepens.
Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.
Gaza absolutely does allow pro Hamas journalists.
How do they enter now? An American journalist was jailed in Israel as well for a video showing the Iranian missiles struck near military targets and Mossad headquarters, where the official line was they were targeting civilians.
The Gaza ministry that would have counted the deaths was also destroyed several months ago, which is why news media have been reporting the same death total of 40,000 for several months.
This is wrong. They are still reporting daily deaths counts, that counts have been going up. The Grauniad is good about collecting the reports (but bad about other unrelated things).
I was wondering about this. Thanks for the info. Got any links where I can read more?
This is a really good independent report on the death toll:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Also, Hasbara is a real thing.
"confirmed" data from Gaza at the moment is unreliable. The people who were doing the counting have either been killed or cleansed from the area. The official death toll is still around 40k despite the reality being closer to 100-200k.
Regardless, total deaths don't matter, only deaths that were the result of crimes matter, in this context.
Some of those deaths are going to be legal targets killed during combat, which is not evidence of a war crime. You have to split things out for the numbers to mean anything.
This is a good example of the core problem with this academic and religious sophistry, i.e., unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way, it must not have happened or is not real, in spite of empirical evidence, observable reality right before our own eyes.
It leads to things like accepting the most heinous a horrible things by the worst types of people humanity can produce, who think themselves as some kind of demigod, stone age, chosen people psychopath supremacists who can slaughter you like bugs while you sleep in your home are are trying to get food for your starving children.
>unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way
Using strict process and critical methodology is the only want to approximate truth.
> observable reality right before our own eyes.
We don't observe reality correctly with our eyes. We (including you and me) are naked monkeys. Petty, vindictive, and biased. Palestinians and Israeli Jews are just like us but live in a cesspool of religion, anger and violent history.
Given that the accused is currently in control of the crime scene, it's not surprising that the prosecution chose to prioritise the crimes that are easiest to prove.
Same reason an warrant on Putin was issued over the official children "adoption" program.
> Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
IANAL but this is probably incorrect i think - the starvation charge is related to allegations of intentionally restricting neccesities of life. Whether anyone dies as a result is irrelavent to that charge. The murder charge is for the people who actually allegedly died as a result (of the starvation that is. To be clear, the death has to illegal for it to be the war crime of murder. Normal combat death is not murder).
> Researchers at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimated deaths from starvation to be 62,413 between October 2023 and September 2024.
We can compare the rate to countries in more.. stable situations[0]. They'll have a very difficult time getting anywhere with that rate. But we'll see. The world would be better off with all these individuals having no power at all.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...
What’s the threshold for war crimes?
The crimes have a definition with requisite elements in the rome statue.
While many of them do require a certain gravity, viewing international crimes like a more serious version of a normal crime is probably the wrong way of doing it. Some war crimes do not require anyone to die. In other cases thousands could die and it wouldn't be a war crime or crime against humanity because the elements aren't met.
In particular, starvation doesn't require anyone to have died, and it covers more things than just food. Keep in mind its a relatively new crime in international law, it was only made illegal in 1977 (for example during ww2, the nuremburg trials explicitly ruled that sieges were legal). As far as i know nobody has ever been persecuted for it, so the case law doesn't exist, so its a bit unknown.
> but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
Which context is this? If you mean the context of past ICC indictments that isn't true. There are multiple other examples of people indicted for specific acts that resulted in the deaths of a 2 digit numbers of people.
The bar for "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity" isn't the number of people you kill. Though in this case, plenty have been killed, this case is about what can be proved conclusively ebough given who it is against.
That’s an off claim but not surprising giving the amount of easily disprovable information that circulates about the Gaza war.
Gazans have more calories per capita than people in most countries. If you saw Bernie showing pictures of a thin boy he’s disabled which is why his siblings and mother are fine.
> The Chamber issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024
And things got much worse in the latter part of 2024. Even if the court didn't take into account facts after 20 May 2024, ample evidence already existing by then was already enough to issue the warrants. When it takes more evidence into account I bet more warrants will be issued.
It is incredibly likely another series of warrants will be issued for the next level down of both Israeli and Hamas leadership.
It is too bad Lebanon didn't ratify the ICC treaty. They really should have.
It is indeed ridiculous that Lebanon didn’t join the ICC, one has to imagine that Hezbollah played a role in that decision. Which is funny because all the Palestinian resistance factions actually pushed for ICC jurisdiction to the extent that they called for it to apply to them and Israel equally! The hoops the Palestinians had to jump through to join the ICC were crazy, including (reified) threats of heavy punishments from the US if they did.
Here’s the full story if anyone is interested: https://palepedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court%27s_...
Have they issued any warrants for Hamas leaders for the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel?
they have, at the same time, issued a warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who is (or was) the commander of the armed part of Hamas.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...
Yes, for those that are still alive, that is indeed the case.
Yes. Read the posts
> The Chamber also noted that decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional. They were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law or to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza would be adequately supplied with goods in need. In fact, they were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States of America. In any event, the increases in humanitarian assistance were not sufficient to improve the population’s access to essential goods.
I don't understand why this would matter. Does it matter the rationale for increasing aid? I would think the only thing that should matter would be weather the aid was sufficient or not. (I appreciate in the end icc pretrial felt it wasn't enough , but i think that is the only thing that should matter)
Like if someone is accused of murder, but doesn't because a friend told them not to, we don't throw them in jail because they decided not to murder for the wrong reasons.
Israel was expected, under international law, to unconditionally allow aid for the civilians. Israel used it as a bargaining chip, effectively holding civilians hostage.
The rationale for supplying aid might not matter when the aid is sufficient. Although, coercive aid might still be a problem; I'm unfamiliar with international law on this.
But when aid is not sufficient, I think rationale/intent makes more of a difference. If you're doing it for the right reasons and putting in a good effort, sufficiency may not be acheivable and it may not be right to charge you with not acheiving it. If you're only doing it to keep your friends happy, and it's insufficient, maybe there was more you could have done.
The word intent is oftentimes used in The judicial system to measure culpability and punishment:
whether somebody accidentally stabbed a person 90 times or intentionally stabbed the person 90 times, for instance, is captured via the concept of intent.
Article is pretty light on the details of the Hamas officials. I wonder if they’ll show up to their day in court.
According to Israel at least, all the ones that the warrants were requested for are now dead. Perhaps new warrants will be issued, but simply taking on the mantle of Hamas leadership will not make someone retroactively culpable for the crimes of October 7th. Culpability at this level is personal, not collective. So even though anyone who becomes the next leader of Hamas will be, by this act itself, a terrible human seeking to advance some horrible ideals, that will not make them culpable for everything Hamas has already done.
According to the BBC:
> A warrant was also issued for [Hamas military commander] Mohammed Deif, although the Israeli military has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2exvx944o
This is the link: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...
Most news reports are treating this as a single story, but posting the original source seems a good idea in this case; it just happens to be split across two URLs.
I doubt there will be actual arrests, but there will be and there are already consequences. I just saw France and Netherlands announced they will obey the warrants, thus Netanyahu can no longer travel there. Presumably the whole of EU is off limits (I am unaware which countries recognize the court).
EU foreign policy chief said the court's decision should be implemented. Ireland also indicated they would comply with the warrant.
I expect Germany to declare the opposite. There is a small chance this incident fractures the European Union.
If Europe (ie Germany) as a whole fails to enforce the warrant, the court is pretty much dissolved.
I think Germany has already said it will respect the court's decision but disagrees with it.
Title doesn’t mention any hamas official
I adopted the title of one of the news articles that were also submitted about this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42204632 for why.
When was the last time a head of state was arrested by the ICC?
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was arrested and deported by the government of Yugoslavia after him. Of course, under immense pressure from the west. My preference would be that we tried him under our courts and sent him to jail in Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Now, imposing "justice" obviously only works when you do it to small nations like Yugoslavia or Rwanda. Of course it will not apply to the Israel leader, let alone to somebody from even more powerful nation.
I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics. By population Rwanda is ~30% larger than Israel.
They've worked really hard at it.
Israel for instance has a special relationship with Germany because of remorse for the 1940s. This incident in the 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
further gives Germany a reason to crack down on pro-Palestinian protestors. Although supporters of the Palestinians have not staged international attacks for a long time the history of this in the 1970s explains why my Uni suddenly instituted a clear bag policy at sports games a few weeks after the lid blew off in Gaza last year. (When I started doing sports photography at the beginning of the semester I could pack a big camera bag and even take extra lenses)
Also Israel has a high GDP and involvement in international trade, academia, etc. Israel has 50x the GDP per head of Rwanda so they have a large impact in terms of Intel's Haifa office, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Sodastream, etc. My thesis advisor traveled to Tel Aviv a lot to work with collaborators.
> I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics. By population Rwanda is ~30% larger than Israel.
Iran and basically the rest of the Middle East, US needs an ally to keep the region in check.
Many scholars argue that the US uses Israel to destabilize the region so that all other countries besides Israel are unable to form a bloc and resist US hegemony, but perhaps that's what you meant by "keep the region in check".
This video is relevant.
US President Joe Biden: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HZs-v0PR44
Even if Israel did not exist, the regional Middle East governments would not agree on much. And definitely not form a bloc.
> Iran and basically the rest of the Middle East, US needs an ally to keep the region in check.
The US (and also UK/France/Germany) have been bending over backwards to prop up Israel since LONG before Iran switched to an anti-US theocratic government.
Israel and Iran used to be BFFs.
According to Sachs, Israel has masterfully manipulated US influence to extend its global reach, primarily through AIPAC's incredibly efficient lobbying - spending just hundreds of millions to secure billions in aid and trillions in military spending. Netanyahu's strategy has been particularly clever, pushing the US to overthrow Middle Eastern governments that oppose Israeli policies, as seen with Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Through campaign financing, Israel has basically bought out Congress for surprisingly little money, ensuring the US consistently backs them internationally - like vetoing UN resolutions that favor Palestinians. This US shield is so strong that when the UN voted on Palestinian self-determination, only the US, Israel, and a couple other countries opposed it. Even when Biden sets boundaries for Israeli actions, they just ignore them without consequences. The whole system's genius lies in how Israel's managed to maintain its policies despite global opposition, though Sachs thinks this might backfire by making Israel too isolated and blocking any chance of a two-state solution.
They’re a western bastion in very close proximity to the Middle East, with a cultural and religious tie to a not insignificant number of Americans. It’s also a wealthy country.
From my weak understanding, it’s the only ally the west (USA) has in the Middle East, so they’re important strategically - for military bases and other reasons I don’t really understand, and so are propped up by financial aid and weapons and other help (intelligence etc?) beyond what would normally happen to a similar country.
The US has several allies in the middle east. Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all have major non-NATO ally status with the US, the same status as Israel. Jordan in particular is a very close US partner.
I should add, none of these countries are treaty allies of the US, i.e. none of them have a mutual defense treaty with the US. The one country that is a treaty ally of the US in the region is Turkey, though that relationship has been strained in the last couple of decades
> From my weak understanding, it’s the only ally the west (USA) has in the Middle East, so they’re important strategically
Nope, the US has bases in Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Djibouti and is friendly with the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
> I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics.
Here are some of my favorite sources on that! These are all leftist and pro-Palestinian sources, but they are academic and studied. These are about why Israel is important to the "interests of the USA" (ie, what those with power to decide national interests think).
* “Framing Palestine: Israel, the Gulf states, and American power in the Middle East" by Adam Hanieh https://www.tni.org/en/article/framing-palestine
* The first chapter of "Palestine: A Socialist Introduction", “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East" by Shireen Akram-Boshar. The publisher Haymarket is giving away the ebook for free. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-social...
* "No, the US Doesn’t Back Israel Because of AIPAC" by Joseph Massad https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/no-the-us-doesnt-back-israe...
(Odd to me that I'm getting downvoted for suggesting the US support for Israel has to do with US interests, and providing sources going into detail on that, and people are getting upvoted for saying it's because Jews have a lot of influence! It's really not mostly because Jews have a lot of influence.)
History.
Because members of the largest religious faith in the world identify with one party to the conflict and the global hegemon supports the other
Given Israel is the motherland for many Jewish people, plus almost 2.5% of the USA is Jewish, plus there are almost 16 million Jewish people globally, I would imagine that.
That was ICTY, not ICC as OP asked.
Omar al-Bashir is currently jailed in Sudan, but has not been transferred to ICC custody yet.
Gaddafi was killed before he could be arrested.
> When was the last time a head of state was arrested by the ICC?
It also acts as a deterrent as much of the world will now likely be out of bounds for travel for either the Israelis or Hamas leadership who were issued warrants.
Dead men don't travel.
Netanyahu I'm not surprised, but Gallant?
EDIT: Asking genuinely on Gallant all I know is he was minister of defence and had a felling out with Netanyahu.
Gallant's position is that there are no innocent people in Gaza and that they should be starved to death. He's said this many times:
https://x.com/KhalilJeries/status/1853905224320372923
I didn't know about this before, thanks :|
I thought he was much more of a moderate in Netanyahu cabinet.
He is a moderate; which tells you all you need to know about contemporary Israel politics and ethical standards.
There's a large attempt to pin all of this on Netanyahu and his closest cabinet but what he's saying is pretty much supported by nearly all of Israeli society down to individual citizens. I encourage everyone to find people who live in Israel on X and translate their tweets so they can see for themselves.
It's utterly appalling, and the main reason I tend to think the end of apartheid in Israel will look substantially different than the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Liberal Zionists like to pretend Gallant was the "moderate one" but in reality there is essentially no moderate in current Israeli society, there is only the secular far right and the messianic further right. The two differ only in small derails of their preferred strategy when using the military to ethnically cleanse Gaza. There is no significant coalition that recognizes basic human rights for Palestinians.
"Defense minister [Gallant] announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food or fuel". [1]
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...
Thanks for the link, I didn't know that it was he who announced that. Thank you!
Being the minister of defense gives you culpability for the military actions the ICC has decided are war crimes, I'd think? But I am not an expert in international law, just don't find it surprising.
Yep, commanders are responsible for the actions undertaken by their troops.
It's called Command responsibility or sometimes the Yamashita principle/doctrine, after a Japanese general who was executed for horrific crimes committed by troops not even under his command, but in his area of responsibility (they were naval troops in the Philippines, he was commander of the Philippines, the navy and the army hated each other; he pulled out of Manilla in order to wage war in favourable terrain, the naval infantry commander refused to follow him and fought a brutal urban battle that destroyed the city, and on purpose killed more than a hundred thousand civilians).
He's the minister of defense (not anymore but was at the time). If the allegations are true, then as minister of defense he probably ordered the things in question (or failed to stop them)
Okay, failing to stop them is a fair point I haven't considered - thanks.
As I understand it, he was the mastermind behind the policy of starvation and hindering of aid into Gaza. There is a famous video of him promising such in October 2023. He was also the defense minister in a time when several hospitals were targeted and damaged, so it is not hard to see the responsibility of this policy falling on him.
You're not surprised that the prime minister is accused of war crimes, but surprised the minister of defense is?
I don’t get why Israel waged war on Gaza instead of just going for the guy who ordered the attack. Any thoughts?
Because they want the land. Their actions over the past 50 years all make perfect sense under that lens. They're not subtle about it either.
Gaza is pretty much worthless. The israelis do not want it, they want the west bank which is not controlled by hamas.
He'd just be replaced and the next guy would order more attacks
Oct. 7 was incredibly useful for Israel give it the casus belli to destroy resistance and settle Gaza. Lebanon will be the cherry on top.
Why kill one guy when you can kill all resistance and (future possible) resistance and tada you have a bunch of land and can expand your borders.
The response to the attacks on October 7th is just a thinly veiled excuse to do what Benjamin has wanted for a long time: forced occupation and displacement of Palestine. It's a convenient justification for genocide, similar to how the US used 9/11 to justify taking over Iraq when the majority of those terrorists were Saudi citizens.
Let's not pretend it's just Netanyahu when the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews support it in poll after poll. This is a country that made people who were on camera raping Palestinian prisoners into national heroes. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/65-of-israeli-jews-oppose-cri...
Many of us are going to have to reckon with the fact that the people committing these war crimes will be on our engineering teams in a few years. Isn't that a disturbing thought?
> Many of us are going to have to reckon with the fact that the people committing these war crimes will be on our engineering teams in a few years.
Try to protest that and they will smear you as an antisemite and ruin your career.
Intent to commit genocide.
The Israeli government had extensive foreknowledge of the attack. This has always been a pretext to carry out ethnic cleansing.
Wow, this took a long time to come after the application for the warrants. 185 days compared to 23 days for Putin's arrest warrant — but then again, one was against the wishes of the USA and the west while the other was at their behest.
I wouldn't say "and the west" without more qualifications. The USA and Germany are solidly behind whatever the Israeli government does. England a bit less so and the rest of "the west" (however you want to define it) is more ambivalent. My point is that if only two countries (the USA and Germany) would make their support more conditional (conditional on the israeli government not commiting war crimes for example), then things could change a lot
You’re right, there are notable exceptions in the form of western nations that have backed the enforcement of international law to put an end to the mass killings and starvation taking place in Gaza. Ireland, Spain, Norway, France, Switzerland, Slovenia, Denmark, and Belgium come to mind, ranging from “supporting the independence of the ICC and not commenting on proceedings” to “welcoming the investigation and the end of the killings.”
But while the US (not an ICC member) simply insulted the court and the notion of holding an Israeli leader accountable, it was the UK that demanded hearings on the legality of pursuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Aside from Germany’s staunch and unconditional support for Israel, other Western countries that heavily criticized the decision included Hungary, Austria, Czechia, Canada, Australia, and Italy - important to note that some of which also mentioned that despite their long list of misgivings and outrages they nevertheless respected the independence of the court.
There is no sovereign state called "England"; you mean the UK.
And the US has threatened to invade NL if ICC warrants one of them.
So much for the ICC: a banana court.
It felt so real when Milosovic was trialed: now we all know the true nature of these show trials.
Milošević was not tried by the ICC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribuna...
It’s a banana court because the US doesn’t recognise it?
it's a ~~banana~~ kangaroo court because the US turning over soldiers to the ICC would violate their 6th amendment right to a jury trial
There is absolutely 0 chance that Trump would let any country arrest Netanyahu without severe consequences.
As an effect though it does isolate these people. Countries may not want to host them lest they get in the middle of something.
Keep in mind these warrants don't expire either. The world might look different 10 years from now.
So i think these types of actions do have consequences even if they are not the same as a domestic court issuing the warrant
Trump is only ever loyal to himself.
He's also inconsistent and prone to change his standpoint on a whim
There's definitely a larger than 0 chance.
Must be nice to have friends in high places.
Allow me to introduce you to the Hague Invasion Act, signed into law 22 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> The Act gives the president power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".[2]
If you dig a little further, you'll notice that it also applies to "military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand."
I wanna emphasize: This pre-dates Trump, Biden and Obama. This has been a law for over two decades. It passed both the House and the Senate with very little opposition. Both parties voted in favour of it.
What consequences? Even Trump isn't going to go to war for Netanyahu.
Using it as his justification for pulling out of NATO comes to mind.
He's already been saying he's going to do that.
Man, Trump isn't going to shit about leaving NATO. He'll moan about some countries not spending enough, that's about it.
Leaving NATO would mean closing US-bases in Europe overnight, not getting valuable intel from partners in NATO, jeopardizing US defense deals, and a million other things.
As always, it's grandstanding from Trump to get some extra bucks from his allies.
US pulling out of NATO would likely embolden China to make a move on Taiwan. Seeing how much of the US economy revolves around technology, I really don't think there's any other option than to defend Taiwan, as it stands. Sure - Europe also depends on chips from Taiwan, but they'd also be swamped in the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
I should start a running list of all the people who say "Trump isn't going to...!" and then how they act like it was all part of the plan when he actually does it.
his first term, despite all the clownery and drama, ended up being run of the mill republican politics. Why do you think things will be different this time?
Need two lists:
* People who say "Trump isn't going to...!" and then how they act like it was all part of the plan when he actually does it.
* People who say "Trump is going to...!" and the how they quietly stop mentioning it and move on to the next (bad) thing he's going to do when he doesn't do it.
I'll prepare my list.
Trump is heavily funded by Zionist extremists, but he isn't one himself. As soon as the ship really starts sinking (which could be induced by a Netanyahu arrest), he will attempt to jump ship and save himself.
If Netanyahu and Gallant declared as war criminals, does it also mean whoever helped them during the 2024 is complicit?
Wondering what happens to so many Western leaders who supported Netanyahu unconditionally.
Technically yes, and a number of UK politicians are being mooted for investigation
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/23/criminal-complaint-...
Notably this admission by David Cameron, to knowledge of starvation is rather damning
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-67926799
Not super meaningful in reality - any country looking to arrest either man should tread carefully.
The American Service-Members' Protection Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
Israel is listed in the act as covered. Any means explicitly includes lethal force, which is why the act is nicknamed the "Invade the Hague" act.
The question here is why is only Israel covered in this act?
Also anti-BDS legislation in finance, regardless of ethical etc. concerns?
The US gives $4bn/year to Israel gratis, and so far $20bn in weapons over the course of this conflict, including advanced weapons like the F35 WITH source code access (which no other F35 partner has) - why?
There have been no investigations of US deaths WRT settler violence, aid workers killed etc. Normally with any US death it's a huge issue.
What does Israel do in return to make it such a favoured country? eg. 20bn in disaster relief aid to Florida would be probably more welcome by US citizens.
It's not only Israel. It's all of NATO plus "major non-NATO allies" specifically Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand
We give Jordan $1.6B/year, what does it give in return? What about Ethiopia at $2B/yr?
We gave Pakistan and Iran a few billion dollars in military aid a while back. What we got in return was a Bangladesh genocide and an Islamic revolution.
Lesson learned: arms sales can be used to ideologically justify butchering civilians if the government receiving that aid is not held accountable.
You could ask the same questions about that yes, but whataboutism does not answer the questions here.
For Ethiopia it's flagged as humanitarian aid, and likely for Jordan as a result of the neighbouring Syria war.
None of that is arms though, and critically more than the aid, why the legislation?
What justifies making it illegal to stop investing in a country despite it's actions? Surely that's a commercial decision rather than a legislative one?
The answer is that giving aid to a region stabilizes it which makes trade more effective which american politicians for the past century have though is good.
The Netherlands said that they would arrest anybody accused. That would be peculiar to see, what would actually happen if anybody of the accused were to travel there.
The Dutch have a very lackadaisical attitude to law, and at the very same time a very principled cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face rule of law mentality.
If I were a senior Israeli or Hamas leader I’d avoid the place for a couple of decades in case of sealed charges.
Honestly, I would so like someone to test that!
This shouldn't be flagged.
Why not? How is it “hacker news” at all? It’s just news news.
On HN, having some stories with political overlap is both inevitable and ok—the question is which particular stories those should be. We try to go for the ones that contain significant new information. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42204689.
This approach has been stable for many years and there's no intention to allow HN to become a primarily-political site (quite the contrary) but it also doesn't work to try to exclude these things altogether.
I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli post in top since the beginning of the war. Definitely anything I submitted was flagged to death almost immediately, even if it was hacker-ish (say, the analysis of the Hamas statistics). You can say of course that users decide what they want, but for political stories at least I don't think it is straightforward
Rightfully so, their intentions and actions which have matched, have been clear for the last year. Hopefully the rest of the international community including governments will finally stand together and call them out for the crimes they have been committing. This is hopefully a step to removing arms sales to Israel as well from many countries.
How is this 'flagged'?
Hacker News Guidelines: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is a significant update on an event of historical impact.
If they get arrested it’d be of historical impact. These warrants mean little really.
Eh…
I’ve never heard of a warrant being more than a footnote in history. Results are what ends up in the history books.
It's not a significant update. When the evergiven got stuck in the suez canel; if a court issued an arrest warrant for the captain that wouldn't have a historical impact.
In a hundred years from now, the leaders of Isreal that people talk about will be the first, the last and the second to last. Similar to how when people talk about the Roman Empire (~500 year span) it's just Cesear.
Users flagged it, as is common for the most divisive topics.
I've turned the flags off now, in keeping with HN's standard practices: some (but only some) stories with political overlap are allowed, and in the case of a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) we prefer the stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI).
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Here are a bunch of past explanations I've posted about how we approach this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744331 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40586961 (June 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252765 (May 2021)
Stories with flags turned off should display a banner. These moderation decisions deserve transparency.
I agree, so long as the people who flagged a given submission or post should also be displayed, for the same reason of transparency. Also the items a user flags should be included in their profile, for the same reason of transparency.
Seems like there's a pretty common theme for flagged topics that get unflagged (hint: it's anti a specific country)
While you had something like the wagner coup attempt, or the Iran strike on israel, both which were much bigger news remain flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40025617
The moderation/policy should either be more transparent or more consist imo.
Stories about divisive topics are routinely flagged from all sides.
It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours.
I could never say there's no bias—unconscious bias is a thing, for example—but I can tell you that we work hard to be fair, have been doing that for years, and there hasn't been any change in our practices.
Out of curiosity, can you identify any pro-Israel stories that have been unflagged in the past year?
Sure, and yet if you take the examples you provided, unless you just happened to make a series of "unlucky" picks the probability is that the bias is pretty strong.
Now of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a bias (depending on the bias of course), but if you clearly have one while claiming to try and be unbiased that's wrong imo.
Dang, you stated multiple times in the past that users who will use site for political discussions will be banned. I saw you in the past banning pro-israeli users after a few comments. How is this user https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=runarberg whose submissions and commentary pretty much totally political in nature still not banned, according to guidelines that you very fairly enforce ?
or this one https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=zhengiszen ?
What is the point of the ICC? Russia doesn't recognize it, Israel doesn't recognize it and even the United States doesn't recognize it. I am confused at what these warrants even mean.
In this case, to make a political statement against Israel and their leadership.
Note that the only member of Hamas indicted, Mohammed Deif, will never see a day in court. As the ICC already knows, he was killed in an airstrike earlier this year.
Since there has been no proof of his death bar the announcements from Israel, it is sensible to consider him as a wanted man until there is concrete evidence he is dead.
https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5077358-new-evidence-s...
Hamas sources have also confimed this.
In practice these warrants mean that they cannot travel to any country that does recognize the ICC without being arrested, which means they almost certainly won't.
Just like how Putin couldn't travel to, say, South Africa, after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Oh wait, South Africa declined to enforce the ICC arrest warrant in that case.
I don't see this meaningfully constraining Netanyahu's foreign travel options.
There have been several pundits with opinion on the matter, you’ll find quite a few in any news source (personally I recommend al-Jazeera). The gist of it is that this will have implication mostly around travels of Israeli officials to Europe. We might also see a slow and gradual policy shift in Europe as a result of this.
Ah yes three countries accused of doing really heinous shit do not recognize the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. How convenient.
The whole Israel‘i cabinet scould have gotten arrest warrants for incitement to genocide, for supporting war crimes, for instance using starvation as a weapon, for supporting the bombing of shelters, bombing civil infrastructure, killing thousands of women and children. The whole Israeli society supports this. We are witnessing a live genocide and the Israel lobby pressures all western countries to suppress any protest against it. It’s a farce.
Edit: Wow, the Israel fans were quick to find this comment. You guys can downvote as much as you like, the Israeli intel can threaten ICC judges as much as they want, the world sees Israel‘s crimes. It’s a settler colonial apartheid regime that has killed and dispossessed Palestinians for decades. But the world is changing. Ain’t nothing you can do. Deal with it.
It's a bit reminiscent of the Bangladesh genocide by Pakistan, to whom the United States also sold weapons and also did nothing to stop hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
I m afraid this fruitless pursuit will distract from the effort to stop the cleansing, which has to be diplomatic and international
What effort?
I think gp, by "cleansing", means ethnic cleansing.
I think gp, by "What effort?", means "Not much effort has been made to stop the ethnic cleansing."
[delayed]
So you want to say that the reason for _not_ doing this is: it will distract from the effort to stop the cleansing.
Would that be the same as saying that we shouldn't issue a warrant against a school shooter because it wouldn't stop the shooting? Would it distract from gun laws?
Maybe not the best analogy, but I know that I cannot say for certain whether it will negatively or positively affect the effort. It might positively affect if this makes (especially EU) countries put more pressure on Israel.
>It might positively affect if this makes (especially EU) countries put more pressure on Israel.
That would never happen. Israel is above any and all criticism, how do people not realize that by now?
Pressure, sanctions, whatever - nothing will actually happen. Likud can trot out the tired trope of antisemitism and any and all criticism, legitimate or not, is automatically waved away. Like it or not, that's objective reality.
Before the shills come in and accuse me of this or that, let me be clear: NO, I don't support Hamas, Likud, or any organization that supports the killing of innocent people. Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, Palestine has a right to exist and defend itself.
What cleansing?
How is this not a declaration of war against Israel and Gaza by the members of the UN? Regardless of their alleged friends, these people are the leaders of sovereign (-ish, for Gaza) nations.
Because nobody is invading Israel. Nobody's declaring war.
The whole point of international law is to hold citizens of sovereign nations accountable, without having to go to war to achieve it.
Nobody has legal authority to go into Israel to seize Netanyahu. But now he knows that if he tries to travel to Europe, he will be seized upon entry. That's not war, that's simply apprehending someone who there is an arrest warrant out for.
> The whole point of international law is to hold citizens of sovereign nations accountable, without having to go to war to achieve it.
Only when it's Israel.
No one tried to hold Hamas accountable when they fire missiles into Israel.
This is selective enforcement.
Because a declaration of war is different to stating that a country committed war crimes.
ICC is not a UN organ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court