Criminal arrest warrants are looming for the current leaders of what Christians like to call the ‘Holy Land’. Ironically, the warrants are being issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), an international judicial institution set up largely on the initiative and firm endorsement by the world’s strongest ‘Christian’ states or civilisations.
Even as the world waits for the issue of arrest orders by the ICC, these ‘Persons of Interest’ who lead the Likud party-led coalition Government in Israel, are already declaring that they have no interest in foreign travel. Having declared that, these ‘suspects’, namely, the Premier (Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu) and Defence Minister (Yoav Gallant) of the State of Israel, continued their daily business of further obliterating a whole community as well as the physical living conditions of that community in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank (OWB). Arrest warrants are also being issued for the leaders of Hamas, Israel’s adversary in the Gaza War, who orchestrated the taking of Israeli hostages on October 7.
In fact, the Likud leaders are openly, officially, publicly, continuing to perpetrate the very crimes for which the ICC seemingly intends to prosecute them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s sudden disinterest in foreign travel is his spontaneous rejoinder to the speculation that arrest warrants would mean that those so served are immediately liable to be detained by any Member State of the ICC they visit. At the time of writing of this column (early in the week due to holiday schedules), the ICC, in The Hague, Netherlands, was yet to formally issue the arrest warrants.
After many months of public appeals and complaints, by concerned countries and numerous civic action groups seeking justice for the current calamity afflicting Palestine, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan last Monday announced that he was requesting the Court to issue warrants of arrest as the first step toward prosecution.
According to Monday’s announcement, the warrants are against two Israeli State leaders and three leaders of the Hamas movement that currently is the elected Government in the Gaza Strip in Israeli-occupied Palestine (the Palestinian Authority has nominal authority in the OWB). The warrants are for: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, his Defence Minister Gallant, and Hamas’ Head of Government in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the commander of Hamas’ Gaza Defence Force, Mohamed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and, the foreign-based Hamas political head and internationally well known Ismail Haniyeh.
Ironically, the arrest warrants are being talked about at a time when Netanyahu and Gallant have publicly clashed over the post-War power structure or rather the lack of it, in Gaza. Gallant has implied that Netanyahu’s indecision was harming the country’s security and leading to a de-facto military control of Gaza. Gallant insists on some type of civilian administration in Gaza, not necessarily led by Hamas, but not full Israel military control either. This is because of fears that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) could get bogged down for several years with no solution to the Gaza impasse.
Readers should note that the (Israeli-occupied) State of Palestine, which includes the Gaza Strip, is a State party that has signed up to the ICC. Israel, the State that has been militarily occupying Palestine since its creation in 1948, has not signed up to the ICC.
Neither has the Occupier State’s principal financial, political and military sponsor (since 1948), the United States, signed up to the ‘Statute of Rome’ that established the ICC in 1998. Like some other big powers, including China and Russia, the USA, which claims leadership of “the Free World” (readers will be forgiven if they are ignorant of this now-defunct “world”) has carefully stayed away from the ICC. Originally, Washington actively supported its setting up.
In fact, despite being a non-Member, the US actively welcomed the very quick decision by the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin within a year of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Indeed, at the time, Washington was known to have appreciated the efficacy of the ICC Chief Prosecutor Khan, who is British. The Joe Biden administration has also reversed the sanctions placed on ICC officials by former President Donald Trump but reinforced the position that the US continued to “disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations.”
The internationally respected and experienced Khan (a distinguished London barrister) began an investigation into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine soon after it began. He obtained an ICC arrest warrant for President Putin and another Russian official in March 2023.
Putin could not attend the BRICS summit hosted by South Africa because of the ICC arrest warrant which South Africa, an ICC Member State, would have had to comply with. Signatory States are required by international law under the Statute of Rome to fulfil the ICC requirement to detain anyone served with an arrest warrant and then present that arrestee to the ICC for prosecution.
Sri Lanka and India too are not Member States of the ICC. If anyone, in any ICC member country, files action at the ICC against any individual and the ICC finds enough evidence to begin prosecution, that individual faces the possibility of arrest if he or she visits any ICC Member Country. But if one’s own country is not an ICC member, then one is able to live freely at home (of course, defying legal proceedings) as long as one does not travel to any ICC Member State.
Fugitives
There are only some dozen countries in the world to which both the Israeli and Palestinian ICC would-be fugitives can travel. Already, many of the US’ closest allies have rushed to support the ICC’s move. The vast bulk of the rest of the world community, which comprises the 123 ICC member countries, are expected to cooperate with the ICC if the Court does issue arrest warrants. While the ICC Chief Prosecutor has asked for warrants for these five named ‘Persons of Interest’, the Court itself could decide whether only some or all are to be arrested. That depends on their evaluation of the charges and evidence presented before them.
Now that Prosecutor Khan has submitted requests for warrants, a panel of three Judges at the ICC will now make a decision on whether to issue the warrants. Judges apparently take about two months to make such decisions. However, experts say it is likely that the arrest warrants will be granted given the volume of evidence provided to them. As of July 2022, 31 cases have appeared before the ICC, which resulted in 10 convictions and four acquittals. The court has issued 37 arrest warrants, with 21 people ultimately detained while 12 people remain at large.
Even though there was initial resistance by Israel to allow ICC investigators to enter their country, subsequently they were given permission. Khan himself is known to have visited. Of course no one could visit the embattled Gaza Strip. Those Western powers, now lining up behind the ICC, include US allies who are equally complicit, as fellow ‘champions of democracy’, with the USA in arming and financing Israel’s ongoing military offensive which has resulted in crimes that the ICC seeks to prosecute.
Thus, international legal circles are speculating as to how much individual officials in those complicit Governments, who are the decision-makers on military and other material aid to Israel, will also become liable for arrest. This will also apply to individuals involved in decision-making in those ICC member countries that support Hamas.
Both the Israeli and Hamas officials are being charged with nearly a dozen crimes defined by the Statute of Rome. The charges include genocide, massacres of civilians, deliberate starvation of civilians, sexual assault, and hostage-taking.
The number of Western power bloc countries that have lined up on the side of the ICC has led to much speculation as to whether these powers that claim ‘democracy’ and ‘civilisation’ are now beginning to reduce support for Israel.
Jewish hardline opinion leaders inside Israel and also in the West have begun to talk of ‘betrayal’ by the same Western power bloc that had helped establish the Jewish State in Palestine and sustained it all these decades. At the time of writing, speculation was also rife that at least three Western European Governments were planning to unilaterally recognise a State of Palestine, dealing another blow to Israel. The UN General Assembly recently voted in favour of recognising a State of Palestine.
On their part, as the global context has changed over these same decades, the Western powers themselves, are surely re-assessing the viability of militarily enforcing a kind of colony in a hostile region at the very time when the world has moved beyond that hugely discredited era of colonialism. These former colonial powers are keenly aware that they are now a small minority of nations – rich and powerful as they may be – among a diverse world community of nations all now moving away from such past traumas and seeking the stability needed for their own prosperity.
And Christians, too, all over the world – not just in the West – may be in deep reflection as to the very theology of ‘place’ and ‘land’ that the faithful must consider as ‘Holy’. After all, as the Gospels teach, the Inspirer of the Faithful, calls to make that holiness reside in the hearts and minds of His Followers and not in any humanly prescribed geographical territory.
The gory massacres in the Old Testament that some receive as ‘history’ in a process of ancient colonisation are better seen as simple, powerful, metaphor of intense spiritual search for salvation rather than a worldly-political hunt for real estate.
