THE HAGUE AWAITS: Arrest warrant for Netanyahu?

Right, so is the net closing in around Netanyahu? Talk of arrest warrants being issued? Well apparently it is being reported that the conspicuously quiet up until this point International Criminal Court, the equivalent to the International Court of Justice that brings prosecutions against individuals as opposed to nation states, is in the process of drawing up an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and fellow ministers in his far right government and this has been sufficient to cause enough panic that an emergency meeting has been called over it, but really is there any chance of the warrant being executed and should Netanyahu be worried he will get dragged to The Hague? Or is it more about the optics of the situation and the reputational damage to Israel should this move be made?
Right, so sphincters are twitching around Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet table it seems as reports are coming out implying that an arrest warrant may well be issued shortly for Netanyahu and others in his mad far right government, but why now? Why has it taken this long for the International Criminal Court to do anything, especially in light of the International Court of Justice having handed down orders to Israel back in January, which got beefed up slightly last month?
Well, if I were to put myself in the shoes of the ICC I would look at this situation and thought OK, right well the ICJ have handed down provisional orders to Israel because there’s a prima facie case for genocide here, it’ll take years to assess the merits of that and of course the genocide is still ongoing, Israel are attacking Rafah in skirmishes, the big push into the city where the majority of the Gazan population are holed up, suffering disease and famine, that the world fears could happen so far hasn’t, but the rest of Gaza has been pretty much razed to the ground. From the ICC’s perspective, Israel is clearly a country of interest, but their remit is those in charge. Now it seemed to me, that all the evidence presented at the ICJ by South Africa, incriminating the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog and Itamar Ben Gvir etc certainly presented itself also as evidence for individual prosecutions by the ICC in turn, but perhaps they needed more? Perhaps seeing Israel pay not the blindest bit of notice it seemed of those ICJ rulings, the ICC might have thought, well if they aren’t going to stop, we may as well bolster up any potential individual prosecutions by giving them more rope so to speak, allow the alleged criminals to commit more criminal activity strengthening a case against them further down the line. Now that might sound really hard headed, hard hearted, but I’m thinking within the remit of the ICC here. The ICJ I do feel should have stepped in harder and faster than they have, its not like South Africa haven’t been trying to get that, though enforcement of all of these rulings be they ICJ or ICC is out of both their hands it is for the UN to enforce. Across the board it can be argued and I wouldn’t dispute it, more could and should have been done before now. But at last it seems like the ICC might be prepared to issue arrest warrants, the cases against some in the Israeli government, namely Netanyahu himself, evidently may be strong enough now to give them confidence in this course of action and Netanyahu by all accounts is bricking it now, he’s in a flap, there’s panic.
Now from my point of view I’m thinking, OK, great, an arrest warrant gets issued, who’s going to carry out the arrest then? I’m reminded that Putin has such a warrant out for him and he’s still very much in charge of Russia, so does Netanyahu have much to fear from this? Well his actions imply that he does, as this Times of Israel excerpt explains:
‘Israel is increasingly worried by the prospect of the International Criminal Court in The Hague issuing arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli political and military leaders for alleged breaches of international law in Gaza, Channel 12 reports.
It says three ministers and several government legal experts held an ’emergency discussion” at the Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday regarding how to fend off the feared imminent issuing of such arrest warrants.
The meeting was convened after information reached Jerusalem indicating that such warrants could be issued in the near future, the report says.
Netanyahu also raised the concern in his meetings this week with Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.
At Tuesday’s discussion, with the participation of Foreign Minister Israel Katz, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, it was decided that Israel would also seek assistance in other influential international diplomatic circles to try to thwart the effort, the report says.
Jerusalem reportedly fears the arrest warrants would be sought on the basis of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with countries that claim Israel is breaching international law and the 4th Geneva Convention said to be leading the effort.’
So that meeting was now last week at time of writing and the response to come out of that meeting was to use their diplomatic connections to seek to thwart the ICC issuing these warrants. Such is the pervasiveness of the Israeli state as many people talk about, certainly in terms of our UK politics with both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both being avowedly pro Israel, the thinking here is that by speaking to their allies, pressure might be brought to bear on the ICC to leave things be, to subvert justice actually and any evidence and clue that this is happening will be damning for anyone caught doing it.
It was notable that there were two politicians mentioned there, the UK and German foreign secretaries, David Cameron and Annalena Baerbock.
Germany is a nation that seems, certainly from a governmental level, to be a nation still desperate to be seen to be making amends for the crimes of Nazism, the Holocaust and they do not wish to be seen to be opposing the self proclaimed Jewish state of Israel, to the point they are seemingly hell bent on standing by them come what may and all it really is doing is putting them on the wrong side of the argument once more. Three generations on from those atrocities, modern Germany has nothing to apologise or make up for in my view, yet here they are siding with genocidalists in Israel and the optics are appalling.
Cameron is considered the most pro Israel Prime Minister ever, yet where leverage upon the ICC comes in, this bears looking at more closely, because the Chief Prosecutor at the ICC Karim Khan, was the Conservative Party pick for that post of Chief Prosecutor. He’s also the brother of a former Tory MP, though I daresay both he and the Tories might not like that point to be drawn on since his brother, Imran Ahmad Khan, was the former MP for Wakefield, convicted of sexually assaulting a minor back in 2022.
All of that raises the possibility that Khan is subject to being potentially leaned on by the Tories, if we take a cynical and suspicious position, however Khan has previously said, even though he hadn’t moved on it, that both people in the Israeli government and Hamas could both be tried by the ICC. Israel itself can only be put on trial at the ICJ, it is for them to prosecute states as I said before, but individuals within that government and also when it comes to organisational bodies, such as Hamas would be, the ICC takes charge. It is notable therefore, that a warrant is only being spoken of right now in terms of Netanyahu and other close aides and government ministers and not for Hamas. It’s not like Khan is a sympathiser with alleged terrorist organisations and I use that word alleged deliberately because not every nation sees Hamas as such, just because the UK does. But Khan had as one of his first cases at the ICC as Chief Prosecutor, picked up a 2020 case against the Taliban for their actions in Afghanistan. The risk as ever with the ICC as this case proved, is one of means, because this case got dropped because the ICC couldn’t justify the expense of funding it. Funding, is one thing we can see threatened as a means to convince the ICC to forget about these arrest warrants. Equally issuing an arrest warrant for a global leader like Netanyahu though, is not above Khan’s willingness to act either, he was the one that issued that arrest warrant for Putin too, so if he can do that, he can certainly issue one for Netanyahu and it would really raise suspicions now this story has come to light about Israeli panic if Khan doesn’t now see this through.
If they do get issued it really would say something about who is in the right and who isn’t if as seems to be the case, they are issued for Israeli figures only and not Hamas. It needs underlining that Israel are the occupying state and resisting occupation is protected by law, so even as investigations are attempted to find out exactly what happened on the night of October 7th, and what Hamas actually did versus what Israel did, the truth of which would help future prosecutions potentially on both sides, but as this video recommendation will tell you all about, Israel are actually blocking an independent investigation from taking place. Now why would that be if it was all Hamas? Find out all about that in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.