Beware Benjamin Netanyahu’s ICC Indictment

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Many were understandably exhilarated when on May 20th, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a statement outlining why he was seeking international arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for “crimes against humanity” committed in Gaza since “at least” October 8th 2023. 

To anyone who has been spectating the Gaza genocide in the wake of that fateful day, the roll-call of heinous charges levelled at Netanyahu and Gallant will hardly have been surprising. For the details to be so forcefully spelled out by an international legal body was nonetheless remarkable. “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; wilfully causing great suffering; wilful killing; murder; intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population; extermination; persecution; inhumane acts.” The list went on, and on.

Khan charged that these “crimes against humanity” were “committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population, pursuant to State policy.” What’s more, these horrors, in the “assessment” of ICC prosecutors, “continue to this day.” The statement went on to note Khan’s Office had collected extensive evidence, attesting that the Zionist entity “has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.”

For the countless millions the world over who have marched, occupied, boycotted or vandalised in service of the Palestinian cause, or simply implored their elected representatives that decisive action be taken to halt the systematic, industrial scale slaughter of the Palestinian people while Gaza has been crucified, the ICC announcement surely provided some degree of relief. Yet, it must be remembered that “international justice” is at best a comforting fable, at worst an outright fraud.

In a televised interview following Netanyahu’s indictment, Khan made a number of startling admissions. He revealed that while the ICC built cases against Israeli officials, he was threatened by numerous Western sources - including “elected leaders” - to back off. One “senior official” openly warned him the Court was “built for Africa and thugs like Putin,” not the West and its allies. The veteran prosecutor stridently countered that the ICC had universal jurisdiction:

“We don’t view it like that. This Court is the legacy of Nuremberg. This Court should be the triumph of law over power and brute force!”

A cynic might suggest Khan was simply playing for cameras. Given his professional history, he is uniquely well-placed to know the fundamentally hegemonic and discriminatory nature of “international justice”. Khan cut his teeth in the field during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as a senior legal advisor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It was set up to prosecute political and military officials in the region for war crimes and atrocities committed during Yugoslavia’s catastrophic breakup.

In theory, Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs were all in the ICTY firing line. In practice, Serbs were targeted to a far greater degree, and punished considerably more severely, than any other ethnicity in the former Yugoslavia. Some have argued this is reflective of and proportionate to the crimes committed during the brutal wars of the 1990s. Yet, anti-Serb bias - and a need to diminish the crimes of Washington’s Bosniak and Croat proxies - was hardwired into the Tribunal even before its inception.

A February 1993 CIA memo outlining “Yugoslavia policy options” proposed “establishing a war crimes tribunal”, for the express purpose of “publicizing Serbian atrocities.” It markedly warned against “even treatment of Bosniak transgressions,” which could be perceived regionally, and among US allies, as “tilting in Belgrade’s favor.” The ICTY was created three months later, then spent the next 24 years convicting Serbs for grave crimes, up to and including genocide. Frequently, they were jailed for extremely lengthy periods amounting to life imprisonment.

Several of these convictions were secured via the highly controversial doctrine of “Joint Criminal Enterprise”, also derisively known as “Just Convict Everyone”. Under JCE’s terms, defendants can be guilty of crimes they did not personally commit, approve of, or even know about at the time. By contrast, many Bosniak and Croat military and political figures weren’t indicted, or were acquitted, or received meagre sentences, despite overwhelming evidence directly implicating them in the planning and commission of horrendous crimes against humanity.

Take for example Naser Oric, a Bosniak military commander. He had a fearsome reputation for taking no prisoners, torturing, mutilating, and murdering civilians and enemy combatants in the most repulsive ways imaginable. He moreover made no secret of this, to the extent of proudly showing Western journalists footage of his butchery. In July 1995, a Toronto Star reporter was treated to a private view of “a shocking video version of what might have been called Naser Oric’s Greatest Hits”:

“There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. ‘We ambushed them,’ he said. The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: ‘We launched those guys to the moon,’ he boasted. When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce, ‘We killed 114 Serbs there.’ Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.”

General Philippe Morillon, who commanded UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1992/93, testified at the ICTY trial of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic that Oric was responsible for “terrible massacres”, and openly “confessed killing Bosnian Serbs every night.” Morillon had personally seen a mass grave filled with villagers slain by the Bosniak commander and his soldiers. However, the Tribunal only convicted Oric for failing to prevent inhumane treatment of prisoners. He received a two year sentence, but was released immediately due to time served.

The sense the ICTY deliberately fudged Oric’s trial to insulate him from justice is ineluctable, and this was widely suspected at the time. A leaked 2006 diplomatic cable, authored immediately after the Commander was released, records how the head of Belgrade’s Tribunal liaison office, “normally a stalwart defender” of the ICTY, privately complained to US officials it was “becoming increasingly obvious” Tribunal judgments were “politically driven.” Even locals who supported the prosecution of their former leaders were disturbed by the “vastly different treatment of Serb and non-Serb indictees.”

To this day, hardline Bosniak nationalists cite Oric’s ICTY exoneration as proof of his innocence, despite his self-avowed bloodlust. In this context, it must be remembered the ICC is formally a successor to the Tribunal, and all that implies. Were the Court to ultimately acquit Netanyahu and Gallant of war crimes, the ruling would inevitably be cited ever after as a validation and justification of the Gaza genocide. And no doubt embolden and encourage Zionist entity military and political chiefs to - somehow - even greater savagery.

The unrelenting, perverse profusion of photo and video evidence of Israeli Occupation Forces perpetrating a 21st century Holocaust, combined with so many self-incriminating statements of Zionist entity officials, and intense public attention focused on the ICC as a result of South Africa’s pioneering case against Tel Aviv, no doubt gave the Court little choice to indict Netanyahu and Gallant. The question of whether the pair will ever land in the ICC’s dock, let alone be convicted for their monstrous deeds, remains an open one.

Until or unless Netanyahu and Gallant are convicted, we cannot place faith in the Court to ensure justice is done on the Gaza genocide. Even if the pair are rendered to the Hague for trial, there is no guarantee the ICC will be allowed to convict either, no matter the evidence against them. This is the bleak reality of an “international justice” system created explicitly and exclusively to prosecute “[Africans] and thugs like Putin”, not Western imperialist warlords, and their proxies, puppets, and pets.