The government must clearly reject the ICC ruling

It is possible to give a specific date on which the world turned on its head and the Jewish people stood accused of being not the victims of racism but its perpetrators. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 was adopted on November 10, 1975, holding that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.

There is clear thread from that resolution – a product of Soviet anti-Zionism – to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for the prime minister and former defence minister of Israel last week, not least in that the UN and its affiliated bodies are now among the leaders purveyors of antisemitic dogma.

The capture of international organisations by ideologies that see the Jews, through their homeland, as being the main cause of the world’s troubles has been so thorough that it would have been more of a shock if the ICC had not issued the warrants.

The court has behaved not as a legal but as a political institution, demanding that its view supersede the security decisions and policies of a democratically-elected government.

The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was admirably clear last week at Prime Minister’s Questions when he asserted that Israel had not committed genocide the day before the ICC issued its arrest warrants.

Since then, the government has been the very opposite of clear, relying on the formulation that “we respect the independence of the ICC” and that “we will comply with our international obligations.” That is not good enough.

Sir Keir is a distinguished human rights lawyer. He can surely see the manifest failings not just in how the ICC has behaved in its determination to punish Israel but also the spurious evidential basis behind the arrest warrants.

Sir Keir should make clear that the United Kingdom will have no truck with this sham of a legal process and will respect Israel’s duty to defend itself.