Ten years ago scenes of jubilation welcomed the “multilateral and humanitarian triumph” upon the creation of the International Criminal Court, ratified in Rome by 120 countries. For the first time a non-partisan body from the Dutch seat of The Hague would prosecute evil leaders and genocidaires.
Jewish leaders, horrified by the memories of the Holocaust, were among the most enthusiastic advocates of a similar Court to try perpetrators of war crimes. Benjamin Ferencz, who helped to prosecute the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, proclaimed that the Court was “a miracle”, no less.
George W. Bush was severely criticized because the United States boycotted the tribunal. Ten years later, the Court (to not be confused with the special UN Court on the former Yugoslavia) has issued just one sentence: against Israel. The Jewish State is the only “war criminal” being prosecuted by the Court.
In 2004, the Dutch judges condemned Jerusalem for the security barrier erected against Palestinian terrorists. The Court’s verdict on the “apartheid wall” has been one of the most repugnant propagandistic manipulations that Israel has ever suffered, because it is based on decontextualization and the ignoring of the cause-effect nexus.
The distortion of international law against Israel by the Court was also crystal clear in the inclusion, as a war crime, of: “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.
The inclusion of this offense, under the pressure of Arab states, and the addition of the phrase “directly or indirectly”, was intended to dismantle the Israeli settlements.
The Islamic regimes succeeded in changing the Court’s statute to eliminate terrorism as an offense and, at the same time, to define the Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria as “war criminals”.
If Israel has no right to defend itself from suicide genocidal attacks and the Jews have no right to live in their historical land, then Israel has no right to exist.
The Court did not rely on any legal precedents; it made up “the law” and its condemnations of Israel provided the basis for accusing the Jewish State of “illegal occupation” of all territory conquered in 1967. These humanitarian robber barons sanctified the current global battle that tries to liquidate the "conflated, illegitimate, illegal, zionist, settler regime".
All the legal proceedings against Israeli politicians and military personnel in the UK or Belgian courts, and the Goldstone report on Gaza, are based on the Court’s verdicts on Israel.
Howard Grief’s beautiful book “The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law” is the best and most important rebuke of the Court’s thesis about Israeli settlements.
In the Wall Street Journal, the former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, just wrote that “the Court is one of the most illegitimate institutions in the world” since the Court's prosecutor, Louis Moreno-Ocampo, has planned even investigations on the American military in Afghanistan. That’s why former U.S. President George W. Bush, in 2002, enacted the American Service Members Protection Act, also known as the “Hague Invasion”, meant to protect U.S. troops from the Court.
John Rosenthal in the Policy Review has also been harshly severe, writing: “It’s a rogue court”.
Ten years of “investigations” and naive warrants, a billion dollars spent for just one sentence (against the State of Israel) is the balance of this Permanently Useless International Court of Unjustice. But the tribunal’s supporters were right to proclaim that the Court is the natural continuation of Nuremberg. That of the anti-Semitic laws of 1935.