On May 20, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan KC (a British national), called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes alongside Hamas’ leaders. Equating democratically elected politicians with terrorists is morally wrong and will further weaken the legitimacy of the ICC.
Israel is defending itself against Hamas, which is an internationally and nationally proscribed terrorist organisation and an enemy whose explicit aim, as captured in the chant ‘from the river to the sea’, is the genocide of the Jewish people. The Israeli civilians who were butchered during the surprise October 7 attacks are a testament to the aims of Hamas.
The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants still needs to be reviewed by a panel of ICC judges and will only become binding once a confirmation has taken place.
Yet Israel’s war of self-defence against Hamas has been turned on its head by the cognitive warfare currently being waged by the terrorists. Cognitive warfare in this case refers to extreme propaganda designed to turn the West against Israel.
The US called out the announcement by the ICC prosecutor as wrong because it equated the leader of the Middle East’s only democracy alongside Hamas, an Iranian proxy for global terrorism.
US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, made this clear in his press statement of May 20:
‘We reject the Prosecutor’s equivalence of Israel with Hamas. It is shameful. Hamas is a brutal terrorist organisation that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and is still holding dozens of innocent people hostage, including Americans.’
Khan alleges in his arrest warrant that both Netanyahu and Gallant are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza since October 8. He alleges that they are responsible for the ‘wilful killing or murder as a war crime’, ‘intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime’, and ‘starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime’.
Allegations of excessive civilian deaths through actions of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) during the current war have been proven to be false and as repudiated by eminent military experts. The same applies to the fiction of Israel withholding food aid. Hamas on the other hand has threatened Palestinians who help Israel to distribute food aid with death, actively weaponising food in Gaza.
What makes the arrest warrants so repugnant is that the ICC is effectively rewarding Hamas by supporting their cognitive war aims. From the abuse of the international legal order by South Africa when bringing its genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice(ICJ) in December, the UN General Assembly vote calling on the Security Council to admit Palestine as a member of the UN on May 10, and now this arrest warrant, one thing is clear.
Terrorism pays.
And Australia has played right into Hamas’ hands. Or as an editorial in The Australian stated, Australia’s support for the UN vote on recognising Palestinians as qualified to join the UN as a full member in the future makes us a ‘useful idiot’ for ‘Hamas’s evil cause’.
Meanwhile, Israel is fighting on multiple fronts with Hamas and affiliated terrorist groups in Gaza in South Israel, Hezbollah in North Israel, and Iran’s missile and drone attacks in April of this year. In addition, Israel and Jews globally are being targeted in the cognitive warfighting domain, physically and verbally attacked and vilified on campuses across the globe, including Australia.
At the time of writing, the ANU, Australia’s national university, has been summoned to appear ‘before Senate estimates over its handling of anti-Semitism on campus’.
The international rules-based order relies on the application and enforcement of international rules and Israel is not exempt from these rules. But this case is different. Israel is not a party to the ICC but the Court’s jurisdiction was established in June 2014 over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem after Palestine (as a quasi-state) declared acceptance of the ICC as an attempt at ‘lawfare’ to scrutinise Israel’s actions there.
The inclusion of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh in the ICC arrest warrants, an unintended consequence of the Palestinian decision to join it, highlights the hypocrisy of the ICC’s decision.
It would be like prosecuting Churchill alongside Hitler and Himmler (the architect of the Holocaust).
Israel is lawfully engaged in self defence and while there is legitimate critique regarding the actual operational conduct and the war aims – both internationally and domestically in Israel – this attempt to go after Israel’s political and military leaders is de facto support of Hamas.
What has made the entire situation worse is the cheap TikTok-style delivery of the arrest warrants in an attempt to give it legitimacy.
This directly feeds into the modus operandi of information warfare targeting our Youth as the so-called Generation Z – a shallow, meme-driven form of left-wing populism that has real consequences for the West, its values and in essence survival.
With anti-Semitism rife and self-interested political leaders in the West effectively providing support for Hamas’ cognitive warfare strategy through their TikTok diplomacy, these are very dangerous times indeed for our society and the rules-based world order.
