The ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu is really an indictment of the West

The move is too little too late, but it still exposes the glaring hypocrisy of the ‘rules-based order’

What is a ‘rogue regime’? According to one of the first US propagandists of the term, Anthony Lake, former President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser from 1993-97, it is an “outlaw” government that chooses to stay outside polite international society and also to “assault its basic values.”

The term, of course, was never even meant to be applied honestly. From the get-go, it was designed to be weaponized as a tool of Western hybrid warfare against countries such as Cuba, Iraq, and Libya that in reality had only one thing in common: They would not bend to the will of the US and its clients, together making up the Collective West: When Western politicos and their careerist stenographers in the mainstream media start calling you a ‘rogue regime’, get ready to fend off invasions, coups, economic warfare up to starvation-siege level, and, when it all comes together, bloody regime change, including vile public torture and assassination. 

And yet, let’s take this primitive propaganda term at face-value for a moment. The underlying theory (if that’s the word) is as simple-minded as can be: There are goody-two-shoe states – almost all of them in the Global North, as it happens – that follow the rules, and then there are the bad kids that spit on them. And we won’t even ask what rules, or who makes and applies them. That question would lead us into the fetid moral-intellectual morass of the ‘rules-based international order’ drivel. That, in reality, is a euphemistic Western shorthand for: ‘We are above international law (here, the actual opposite of those obscure and adjustable ‘rules’), we spit on the UN, and in addition, we have the unique privilege to order others around and kill them, individually and collectively, if they don’t comply’.

No, let’s just roll with the ideological nonsense for a moment and – step one – pretend (just pretend) that the truly Orwellian term ‘rogue regime’ actually has a meaning an intelligent, unbiased observer could take seriously. Step two: Let’s ask what, by that logic, would be even worse than a rogue regime. Easy: What’s worse than a regime that openly disregards legal and ethical rules is a regime that pretends to represent – even own – those rules, only to pervert them. Because such a regime does not merely disobey, but fundamentally undermines them. A simple criminal will break the law and morality, but they will easily survive that. But a true villain, a real force of evil, will usurp and defile the law and moral norms, depriving them of general respect and thereby threatening their effectiveness and, ultimately, even existence.

And that is why it is the West as a whole that will be challenged the most by the fallout of the International Criminal Court (ICC) finally issuing arrest warrants for two of Israel’s genocidaire leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Because it is the Collective West – and only the West – with its genocidal de facto colony Israel that has been that villain. 

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Don’t get me wrong: There are very disappointing limits to what the ICC – the only international court that can go after individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity – has done. For now at least, it is targeting only Israeli officials (and far too few of them) – and a Hamas leader who Israel claims is dead already – but not their Western accomplices. In that narrow sense, obviously, Israel, a state constantly breaking new records in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, will be most directly affected. If, again, by far not enough, because the ICC is doing far too little far too late. Indeed, it has not even charged Netanyahu and Gallant with genocide, as it could have under Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute and obviously should have. Instead, the ICC has indicted them ‘only’ for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Finally, the ICC by design lacks any capability to execute its own arrest warrants. For that, it has to rely on those states that have signed up to the Rome Statute, and on their willingness to uphold their obligations under it.

Yet, while the ICC is a judicial institution, the true significance of the arrest warrants is of course political. It is, as The Economist admits, a “diplomatic disaster” – and not just for Netanyahu, as The Economist tries to hedge – but for Israel. This is no ordinary disaster though, but an especially disruptive one because for Israel, it is yet another signal that its impunity is cracking, because that impunity rests on the death grip of its international bullying, corruption, lobbies, spy-and-blackmail networks, and all-purpose subversion. We know that Israel and its accomplices have exerted massive pressure on the ICC to prevent precisely this outcome. And yet they have failed. Israel’s power and reach are far too great, but they are not unlimited, and they are declining.

But Israel is a very special kind of state. While virtually all states bend and break laws and subordinate at least some moral norms some of the time to their interest as their elites see them, Israel is different because it is criminal to its core. This is not a rhetorical point, but an analytical one. Most states can survive if their infringements of laws and ordinary morality lead to negative consequences. Put differently, for most states, impunity is nice but not essential. But for Israel, impunity is a vital resource because it is built to such an extent on crimes that not getting away with them any longer would inevitably – and deservedly – endanger not merely its interests, but its existence. That is why Israeli politicians and media are closing ranks – once more demonstrating that the problem is with Israel as a whole, not merely with a small group of psychopathic leaders – and going into hysterical overdrive, once again, by throwing about ludicrous accusations of anti-Semitism as if there were no tomorrow.

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And in a way, there probably isn’t, at least not for that charge being taken seriously anymore by anyone with a moral spine and half a brain. Ironically, for that, too, we only have Israel to thank. To be precise, Israel’s sickening habit of weaponizing the dark history of European and Christian anti-Semitism – including its worst single outcome, the Holocaust – against Palestinians, Arabs in general, Persians, and Muslims in order to deflect from Israel’s own crimes of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide (to name only the peak performances). 

In the interest of humanity, both anti-Semitism and the Holocaust should be taken seriously, but it is Israel that has done its worst to deprive any talk of them of weight and credibility. The shamelessly absurd fake Amsterdam ‘pogrom’ story – systematically misrepresenting racist, violent Israeli hooligans, shouting genocidal chants and viciously attacking Dutch citizens, as Anne Frank-like ‘victims’ – was a recent illustration of this foul phenomenon.

It is simply a fact that Israel is a state that is dependent for its very existence on ceaseless crimes and lying. Therefore, even a fragment of truth breaking through to an institution like the ICC makes a difference. In the end, it will take much more than that to end this horrific regime and its revolting crimes. But every little bit helps.

Yet apart from the effects on Israel and its very dubious future – and, again, Israelis only have themselves to blame – the West as a whole will now take an even worse hit from the ICC arrest warrants against two leading Israeli butchers. There are three main reasons for this.

First, with few exceptions, the political and media elites of the West have largely been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and its neighbors, in particular Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Countries such as the US, UK, and Germany, for instance, have supported Israeli genocide and war crimes unrelentingly with money, arms, direct military participation, diplomatic cover, and last but not least, the brutal suppression of solidarity with Israel’s victims. Their judicial systems, police, and mainstream media have become tools of this complicity. And all of this in the face of a general public that is by no means as fanatically committed to Israel, and often even against its crimes. 

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To cover for their abject collaboration in genocide, Western elites have gone on and on about Israel’s supposed ‘right to exist’ (a right that does not actually exist under international law), its purported ‘right to self-defense’ (a right occupiers do not actually have against the occupied and that can never justify genocide anyway), and last but not least, about crimes that the Palestinian Resistance never actually committed (mass-murdering babies and mass rape), while omitting the fact that Israel itself massacred an unknown but certainly substantial number of its own citizens under its Hannibal Directive.

In other words, Western elites, falling over themselves to slavishly serve genocidal Israel, have not merely damaged whatever credibility they had left, they have pulverized it the way a US-Israeli bunker-buster bomb erases a residential building or a camp of refugee tents in Gaza or Beirut.

Secondly, apart from the issue of credibility, there is the question of precedence. Panicked, US war monger extraordinaire Senator Lindsey Graham has already posted his deep anxiety on X: If the ICC can go after Netanyahu and Gallant, then, he fears, “the United States is next.” What an idea indeed! A world in which even American government criminals might actually have to answer to the same law as others. Graham has long been a joke, and a very tasteless one. His unintentional admission, however, that among the US elites, many are criminals and should be prosecuted as well, is intuitively entirely correct. 

And it holds far beyond America. What about, for instance, German still-barely-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has repeatedly denied Israeli criminality against all available evidence and only recently boasted about his government’s continuing arms deliveries to the genocidal apartheid state? And he is not alone: In Germany, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Economy Minister Robert Habeck come to mind immediately; in Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy should definitely be worried; Canada has Justin Trudeau, Melanie Joly, and Chrystia Freeland.

The list goes on and on. With few exceptions, the current rulers of the West have sided with Israel and against its victims with a vengeance. What no one seems to have explained to them – or the many bureaucrats who have served them obediently – is that under the foundational 1948 UN Genocide Convention, ‘complicity in genocide’ is explicitly listed as a crime, too (Article III, e). Whether they now deign to acknowledge (in word if not in deed) their legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant makes no difference to everything they have said, done, and failed to do until now. 

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The third, and perhaps most fundamental reason why the ICC arrest warrants against the two Israeli government criminals are even more damaging for the West than for Israel is that Western elites have chosen to live in a symbiotic relationship with the monster state that has taken over what should be Palestine. Due to its principally criminal political model, Israel has always damaged international law and basic moral norms as much as its leaders could get away with – that is, immensely.

But it is the Collective West that has let them get away with, literally, mass murder and every other crime and perversion you can think of and quite a few that sane people do not even think of: Deliberately, systematically murdering journalists to suppress the news of the crimes, and first responders to make sure initially surviving victims won’t find help? Israel can do it. First starving your victims, then letting in trickles of aid just to trap and massacre those trying to get to it? Consider it done. Raping a doctor to death? Leave it to Israeli ingenuity. 

And all of this has been backed to the hilt by the same Collective West that claims to stand for a “garden” of “values” in a world it arrogantly, racistically disparages as a “jungle.” It is the West and Israel that have assaulted, to paraphrase Anthony Lake, the most basic values of not merely the international community (whatever that may be) but of humanity as such and everywhere. All the while trying to pass off their inhuman, abject savagery as the gold standard of ‘rules’ and ‘order’. The West is declining for many reasons of elite incompetence, corruption, and dishonesty. But its elites’ perverse suicide pact with Israel would be sufficient to bring it down all on its own.