The government should put its alliance with Israel above a foreign court

On October 7 2023, thousands of savage Hamas terrorists, determined to slaughter as many innocent civilians as possible, broke the beautiful tranquillity of a Shabbat festival morning and inflicted unimaginable horrors on thousands of men, women, and children across the south of Israel. Since then, Israel has fought a war of defence, determined to rescue the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas, and to ensure that these terrorists can never again perpetrate these atrocities.

As Israel attacked Hamas positions and sent in ground troops to rescue the hostages, many thousands of innocent Gazan civilians have died. Hamas hide within civilian centres and then exploit their deaths for their own objective of destroying Israel’s international legitimacy. It is the cruellest strategy imaginable.

If the International Criminal Court were to investigate this conflict, one would imagine that they would see a moral distinction between Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and this proscribed terrorist group Hamas, which is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel and the entire Jewish people. Yet in a trend common across the global institutions which dubiously compose the deceptively named ‘international community’, a profound moral inversion has taken place. Israel’s leaders have been cast as international fugitives, plausibly guilty of committing the very crimes that they are protecting their citizens from. The ICC judges have rubber-stamped the request by Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan that Netanyahu and Gallant be arrested by the ICC’s 125 member states if they step foot onto their territories.

The very result that Hamas intended.

Formed in the wake of the Cold War and horrifying violence in Yugoslavia, the ICC began with noble aims. Where member states have no credible legal system of their own in place, and so they are unwilling or unable to prosecute the world’s worst criminals, the ICC would step in and bring these figures to justice.

Israel is, of course, neither unwilling nor unable to prosecute their political leaders. The state has one of the world’s strongest judiciaries, and courts have previously imprisoned former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former President Moshe Katsav. National commissions of inquiry into wars have also led to the resignations of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Benjamin Netanyahu himself is even embroiled in an Israeli criminal investigation, with judges considering allegations of corruption against him. Israeli authorities are therefore more than able to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant if necessary. And for the ICC to pre-emptively decide that Israeli courts are unwilling to investigate these allegations, before the war has even concluded, is frankly ludicrous.

The core tenets of the ICC have been contravened by its prosecutors in their desire to try Israel’s leaders and in consequence reward Hamas’ terror tactics by enforcing a lofty legal principle designed for entirely other circumstances.

This is not even to mention the political harm that this decision will have. The ICC’s arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister will entirely undermine the fragile possibility of a peace process to end this intractable conflict. Even if peace is reached, Netanyahu will still face an international arrest warrant against him, however unhelpful this may be. The possibility of a neutral space, such as Oslo, Madrid or Geneva, where previous peace accords have been hammered out, has been diminished by the very fact that Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in any of these cities. The noble aims of Western leaders for Middle East peace have been made many degrees more challenging by the ICC’s misguided decision. The court’s brazenly political warrant entirely misaligns with the political goals of the UK and its Western allies.

The British government now therefore finds itself at a crossroads, unable to pretend any longer that they can square the circle. The ICC asks that our government sacrifices its relationship with its brave, resourceful, and important ally in the Middle East, in favour of pursuing a deeply perverse legal claim which will almost certainly never be heard. The government must show the moral clarity that it has so far been lacking and choose its precious alliance with Israel above the arcane and enigmatic proceedings of a foreign court. To do not do so would be a simple betrayal of the liberal democratic principles that our country holds dear.

Keith Black is Chair of the Jewish Leadership Council