Dur­ing the siege of Sara­je­vo, the Dan­ish army NCOs who con­trolled UN relief flights had a sign behind their check-in desk that  read: “Do not con­fuse your rank with our author­i­ty”. For politi­cians rant­i­ng against the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court (ICC)  arrest war­rants for the Gaza con­flict, I sug­gest one that says: “Do not con­fuse your self-image with the moral high ground.”

The 12,000 flight Sara­je­vo air­lift was the largest in history.

The Danes dubbed it “Maybe Air­lines”, as in: “Maybe there’ll be flights today. Maybe you can get on one. Maybe not.”
Maybe it would help to note the haunt­ing, grim par­al­lels between Sara­je­vo and Gaza.
Over the course of four years, an esti­mat­ed 11,540 peo­ple,  includ­ing at least 500 chil­dren, were killed in Sara­je­vo. Schools, hos­pi­tals and homes tar­get­ed, near­ly every build­ing in the city dam­aged, nowhere was tru­ly safe
In sev­en months, Oxfam esti­mates 70 per­cent of Gaza’s build­ings have been dam­aged or destroyed. An esti­mat­ed 34,000 Gazans have been killed, 70 per­cent of them women and children.
The tim­ing of the ICC action against Binyamin Netanyahu, his defence min­is­ter Yoav Gal­lant and Hamas lead­ers Yahya Sin­war,  Mohammed al-Mas­ri and Ismael Haniyeh can be argued. But the dual­i­ty of charg­ing both Hamas and Israeli lead­ers under­scores the prin­ci­ple that crimes by one side do not jus­ti­fy those com­mit­ted by the other.
Nei­ther Israel nor the U.S. are sig­na­to­ry to the Rome Statute that binds nations to recog­nise the ICC’s authority.
Among oth­ers who are  not are Chi­na, North Korea and Sau­di Ara­bia, which  goes some way to attest­ing the admo­ni­tion about being judged by the com­pa­ny you keep.

                  KNEE JERKS 

Pre­dictably, the imme­di­ate Israeli, U.S. and Hamas reac­tions over the arrest war­rants were the “round up the usu­al sus­pects” vari­ety.
Netanyahu called the ICC’s plan a “trav­es­ty of jus­tice”. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden  labelled it “out­ra­geous”.
The Israeli Knes­set was unit­ed in damn­ing the move as “scan­dalous … an indeli­ble his­toric crime and a clear expres­sion of antisemitism.”
In fair­ness, that’s under­stand­able. How­ev­er, when you call your army “the most moral in the world”, being held to account for wide­spread and delib­er­ate ham­per­ing of aid deliv­er­ies to civil­ians in dire need and attack­ing med­ical facil­i­ties isn’t anti-Semi­tism. It’s an insis­tence on adher­ence to the inter­na­tion­al­ly-accept­ed rules of war that self-image demands.
Hamas’ full-throat­ed denounce­ment of what it termed “the attempt to equate the vic­tim with the exe­cu­tion­er by issu­ing arrest war­rants against a num­ber of Pales­tin­ian resis­tance lead­ers” would be laugh­able were it not hypocrisy of apoc­a­lyp­tic proportion.
For a lead­er­ship that believes com­mit­ting atroc­i­ties in the name of elim­i­nat­ing Israel (which even they are ful­ly aware is not going to hap­pen), and  know from bit­ter expe­ri­ence they would pro­voke Bib­li­cal-scale ret­ri­bu­tion, the ICC war­rant isn’t an “equat­ing” , it’s the least that can be expect­ed, and arguably, deserved.
Twelve Repub­li­can sen­a­tors, who unques­tion­ing­ly sup­port a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who dis­putes the author­i­ty of the judi­cial sys­tem , an inte­gral ele­ment in the con­sti­tu­tion they are sworn to uphold, threat­ened to “tar­get” the ICC pros­e­cu­tor and his staff with “severe sanc­tions” and trav­el bans.

                         RAISON D’ETRE

The ICC is the only per­ma­nent inter­na­tion­al court with the pow­er to pros­e­cute indi­vid­u­als for geno­cide, crimes against human­i­ty and war crimes. It may not be to everyone’s taste, and is far from per­fect, but it sure­ly does a bet­ter job of serv­ing the over­all good than those who den­i­grate and dis­like it out of fear of falling under its gaze, only to shout is prais­es when it suits them.
Last year, Pres­i­dent Biden hailed an ICC arrest war­rant for Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vlad­mir Putin for war rimes in Ukraine as “jus­ti­fied”, adding that it made “a very strong point.” Appar­ent­ly the memo from that nev­er reached  Sec­re­tary of State Antony Blinken, whose reac­tion to the Hamas-Israel war­rants was that “the ICC has no juris­dic­tion.” He failed to elab­o­rate, or sug­gest who else might.
The roots of human­i­tar­i­an law applied to the rules of war extend back to  his­toric con­cepts of jus­tice that include Babylon’s Ham­mura­bic Code and  the Code of Jus­tin­ian from the Byzan­tine Empire.
Notably, they also incor­po­rate the “Lieber Code”, devised dur­ing the Amer­i­can civ­il war for the pros­e­cu­tion of war crimes and pris­on­er of war exchanges.
In his famous trea­tise “On War”, Pruss­ian gen­er­al and mil­i­tary the­o­rist Carl von Clause­witz, pos­tu­lat­ed: “War is a mere con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­cy by oth­er means. We see, there­fore, that War is not mere­ly a polit­i­cal act, but also a real polit­i­cal instrument…
It is also an unequiv­o­cal admis­sion that diplo­ma­cy has failed, and pol­i­tics have become venal.
The ancient Greek philoso­pher Aris­totele encap­su­lat­ed all that in one sen­tence: “At his best, man is the noblest of all ani­mals; sep­a­rat­ed from law and jus­tice he is the worst.”
And if you still think the ICC has nei­ther role nor moral author­i­ty in the Gaza war, watch the video in this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/opinion/gaza-hospital-collapse.html?te=1&nl=opinion-today&emc=edit_ty_20240521
There’s no “maybe” about the need for the ICC.

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