It is not surprising that US President Joe Biden got so ruffled by the efforts of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to seek a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli Prime Minister and his National Security Minister to face charges of committing war crimes against Palestine and its people.
“The war crimes include starving civilians, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury, willful killing, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population,” states the warrant. “We submit that the crimes against humanity charged were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to state policy,” wrote ICC prosecutor Karin Khan, contending that his office “has extensive evidence of the crimes, which continue to this day.”
As it has been widely reported, the Israel Defense Force has killed 35,000-plus Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, non-combatant males, causing serious injury to 80,000, with thousands more under the rubble of Gaza, flattened by US and European-made bombs projected by IDF. So too Israel has been reported to have blocked food trucks and denied Gazans of electricity, drinking water, and more.
For Biden, it’s a “false equivalent” for the ICC to seek to have the Israeli ministers arrested and charged with genocide in the same context as three Hamas officials who are reported to have killed 1,200 Israelis and nationals of other countries at the October 7, 2023, start of the war.
As could be expected, President Biden pulled out the old “terrorists” label with which the West has branded all groups and countries that seek to contest against the imperial-colonial conquests of their lands and the slaughter of their people in the “Mad Scramble for Africa,” India, China, the Caribbean, the Middle East, South and Central America, and indeed the genocidal diminishing of the indigenous peoples of the Hemisphere by the Europeans.
“It is not genocide” what has been done by the Israel Defense Force Biden insisted in a rage that revealed a deep inner feeling, perhaps of guilt (Freud’s unconscious-conscious theory will have to be invoked to fully understand his reaction), mixed with the colonial governor’s outrage that the subject peoples were daring to fight back against the inequity of the slave master.
Biden’s rage is not surprising for a number of reasons. Both Israel and the United States have put themselves beyond the scope of international law with their refusal to be members of the International Criminal Court, and so too have other nuclear powers, Russia and China, which are not now among the 124 members of the ICC. Effectively, the refusal to sign on to the court has placed these significant power brokers and their citizens beyond being answerable to international law in a structure established within the United Nations, the institution that was created in the wake of WW11 to prevent wars and bring peace to the international community.
Notwithstanding their refusal to be part of and bound by the system of international law, especially in the instance of the US and Israel, as they front up as upholders of law and order on the international stage, Israel makes the claim that its army is the “most moral in the world.” In the instance of the USA, it has been parading itself on stage as the “World’s Policeman” since the early 19th century, intervening to remove and replace governments with self-ascribed moral authority.
But the refusal of the US/Israel combine to acknowledge a world legal authority is also transferred to behaviours at the UN Security Council. In the instance of Israel, it has ignored 28 binding resolutions of the council.
The USA, as a permanent member of the Security Council, which means no declaration can be passed without its support, has vetoed 89 resolutions. Fifty per cent of such vetoes have been in support of Israel, and 33 of them related to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, including the treatment of Palestinian peoples. While so patently refusing to be accountable to international law, the US has made itself an avatar of principled behaviours and called others seeking freedom, “terrorists”.
Not too incidentally, the US recently supported a similar attempt by the ICC to have Russian President Vladimir Putin arrested to face war crimes charges for its attacks on Ukraine. Security Council declarations are applicable to others but not to the US and Israel, the logic of the two.
To illustrate the widespread nature of refusal to be in step with international law and practice, the Soviet Union/Russia has blocked UN Security Council bids to hold countries responsible 128 times and China 19 times, whatever the rightness or not of the declarations.
A country cannot be a moral proponent of international law if it so consistently violates the system. My contention is that the machinations of those with the power and their refusal to be bound by the law that they insist others must adhere to is eroding the power and respect for international law and the institutional system.
Sooner rather than later, the continuing violations will cause the law to lose all its potency and validity, and we shall return to the jungle.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser is a freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host and News Director at TTT, programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad, a correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press, a graduate of UWI, Mona and St Augustine – Institute of International Relations.
