ICC arrest warrants must bring an end to Israel’s atrocities – and true accountability for all the guilty | Owen Jones

IIt is not only Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant who should fear accountability for one of the most serious crimes of our time. If the International Criminal Court (ICC) had not issued today’s arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and his former defense minister – and indeed Hamas’ military leader Mohammed Deif – a global legal order already widely held in contempt by much of the world would not have survived .

Why? Because of the magnitude of the alleged crime. Because of the overwhelming amount of evidence, not least that accumulated by Palestinian journalists, many of whom served as the world’s eyes and ears on the killing fields of Gaza before being killed by Israel, often along with their families. And because few crimes in modern history have been so confessed – even bragged about – by the perpetrators, from leaders at the top to the soldiers wreaking murderous mayhem on the ground. That the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity has reached the threshold to satisfy the ICC’s chief prosecutor, an independent panel of distinguished lawyers and now three international judges before the trial shows the strength of the case – and that no one who facilitated this historic abomination can claim ignorance. It is not only Netanyahu and Gallant who should tremble for justice: as well as other Israeli leaders and soldiers, so should the guilty men and women of Western governments.

Some might consider the threat of arrests far-fetched: those charged would have to travel to a state that has signed the ICC, which excludes, for example, the United States, and Netanyahu can enjoy a level of immunity in foreign states because he is head of government. But as Victor Kattan, assistant professor of international law at Nottingham University, tells me, the now-sacked minister Gallant has no such immunity. “Today’s move is unprecedented,” he tells me, “because we have never held Israelis accountable for anything they have done to Palestinians in the last 70 years or more.” That the judges evaluated the available evidence and decided there was reasonable cause to issue an arrest warrant, he says, speaks to “very, very serious crimes that we know are likely to occur.”

Indeed, the accused were open about their plans to commit these crimes from the start. The Western politicians and media who aided and abetted these atrocities know why their own protestations of innocence should be considered buried under the rubble, along with countless slaughtered Palestinian families. At the very outset, Gallant declared that Israel would impose a total siege on the people of Gaza, whom he called “human animals”, echoed by one of his senior generals, who threatened with release “hell” on the civilian population. As two US government agencies concluded seven months ago, Israel indeed deliberately blocked the essentials in life.

In the days after October 7, 2023, Gallant promised “Gaza will not return to what it was before.” If that left room for subtlety, he declared: “Hamas will not be there. We will remove everything.” He told Israeli soldiers that he had “released all the restraints” and “removed any restriction” at them. And then it happened. The Israeli attack has killed what some public health experts estimated in July could amount to 180,000 Palestiniansand already last December had destroyed so many buildings that Gaza had a different color and texture when observed from space. These soldiers often posted their actions onlineovercome with joy and triumph as they did so. Too many Western media not only failed to frame their coverage around Israel’s explicit statements of intent, they buried them, failed to explain their implications, and in many cases simply did not cover at all.

Western politicians willingly weaponized this promised crime: the Biden administration has offered $12.5 billion in aid since October 7, and just this week was alone in the UN Security Council to veto a ceasefire. The White House has already come out to “fundamentally reject” the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants. Israel has said Netanyahu “will not yield to pressure” in the war against Hamas and the Iranian “axis of terror”, and Gallant previously referred to the rulings as drawing a “despicable” parallel between Israel and Hamas. When the Labor government finally suspended some arms sales to Israel in September, it left 92% intact and bent over backwards to emphasize that Israel remained a staunch ally.

While Western politicians and media made themselves willing accomplices in an obviously heinous crime, those who took Israeli leaders and officials at their word were demonized, persecuted, vilified and silenced. Well, let’s be clear here. This crime is simply too depraved, too obscene, too colossal for the accomplice to be held accountable.

But now is the time to give proper credit to the long-suffering people of Palestine. As the human rights researcher Dr. Alonso Gurmendi tells me, “this is the end of a long process that the Palestinian leadership started in the early 2010s,” and praises their success in “using international law to advance their liberation.” As he also notes, today’s decision could prove to be a sea change, where the West’s “double standards and conditional commitment to international law will be put to the ultimate test at the hands of a growing global South”.

There is, of course, a separate case, led by South Africa, at the International Court of Justice that seeks to prove that Israel is committing genocide. But if anything emerges from the rubble of Gaza, let it be this. Israel’s genocidal attacks are the most obscene example of how Western supremacy is filled with grotesque hypocrisies. Let accountability mean these horrors will never be possible again.

• Owen Jones is a columnist for the Guardian

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