Why is the west defending Israel after the ICC's request for Netanyahu’s arrest warrant? | Kenneth Roth

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded with predictable vitriol to international criminal court (ICC) accusations against him and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Yet his arguments are all spin, designed to divert attention from their devastating conduct in Gaza. The American, British and German governments were little better.

On Monday, the court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced that he would seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as well as three senior Hamas officials. He proposed charges against the Hamas leadership for atrocities on 7 October as well as the mistreatment of the hostages since then. He proposed charges against the Israeli officials primarily for their efforts to starve the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. These important proposed charges offer the possibility of breaking through the "wall of impunity" that victims of Israeli and Palestinian abuses have long suffered, as Human Rights Watch put it.

Khan is the ICC's most experienced chief prosecutor of the three to date. My conversations with him from early in his tenure suggest his approach to his job is conservative. He is unlikely to have pursued charges without solid evidence behind them, as found by a panel of independent experts whom he assembled. The court's pre-trial chamber is likely to affirm the charges and issue the requested arrest warrants, meaning that the accused could not travel to any of the ICC's 124 member states, including all of Europe, without facing probable arrest.

The demand for solid evidence is probably why Khan began with Israel's starvation strategy, because the evidence was more readily available. Israel has barred his investigators from Gaza, where he would ordinarily want to investigate Israel's indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing. Khan made clear that his investigation "continues". More charges could come.

In the common last resort for defenders of Israel, Netanyahu accused Khan of "callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world", claiming that "Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times." This is rich from an Israeli leader who has had no trouble embracing an antisemite - the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán - when it serves him. It also endangers Jews around the world, because if people see the charge of antisemitism as a thin cover for Israeli war crimes, it will cheapen the concept at a time when a strong defense is needed.

Recognizing the independence and the importance of the international criminal court, some governments - notably, France and Belgium - issued statements supporting it. But others followed in Netanyahu's footsteps.

In a terse statement, Joe Biden called the charges "outrageous", stating that "there is no equivalence - none - between Israel and Hamas." The German government, while saying it "respects the independence" of the court, echoed this "false equivalence" charge. But Khan made no claim of equivalence. He simply charged both Israeli and Hamas officials for their own separate war crimes. Indeed, given the severity of the offenses, it would have been outrageous had Khan ignored one side's crimes. The dual charges underscore a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law: war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by another.