Jonathan Cook
Middle East Eye / December 4, 2024
When everything is exposed as a lie, the biggest liars triumph. The forces of darkness rush in to fill the void. That is the future awaiting us.
For more than a year, those calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza have been relentlessly vilified: as apologists for Hamas, as antisemites, even as supporters of a genocide against Israel and the wider Jewish people.
These smears have been buttressed by western politicians and the media insisting that Israel is conducting a legitimate, “defensive” war with limited aims: supposedly to eradicate Hamas and free a few dozen remaining Israeli hostages.
The bigger picture has had to be swept from view. That Israel has levelled the infrastructure in Gaza needed to sustain life; bombarded Palestinians wherever they have sought refuge; butchered many tens of thousands of civilians – or more likely hundreds of thousands; and actively starved most of the population by withholding aid.
And, overlooked in all of this, Israel has failed to make any significant impact on Hamas’ fighting ability and has almost certainly endangered the lives of the hostages with its indiscriminate bombing campaigns.
Finally, 14 months on, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has struck a major blow against Israel’s tissue of lies and deceptions – as well as the complicity of western elites.
Judges at the war crimes court approved last month the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
After six months of delays, the ICC has agreed, against a background of unprecedented intimidation, to put the pair on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity, including the targeting of civilians and the use of starvation as a method of war.
Should either step on the soil of any of the 124 member states – including Britain and all of Europe – that state will be obligated to arrest them and transfer them to The Hague.
The charges laid against Netanyahu and Gallant are likely also to bolster the case being made at the ICC’s sister court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.
What is clear is that the walls are closing in on Israel, as they are for those who have aided and abetted its crimes. Which includes western political and media establishments.
Collision course
This is a historic – and therefore dangerous – moment for the court and for the international legal order.
The judges have finally plucked up the courage to take on an ally of Washington – in fact, its most favoured client state – rather than continuing to single out the crimes of African dictators or official enemies of the West.
It is a sign of how grave and indisputable Israel’s crimes are, and quite how much the court’s own credibility is at stake should it continue to ignore those crimes, that it has decided to act.
The court is caught in an impossible bind.
To have refused to charge Netanyahu and Gallant would have given the court’s implicit blessing to Israel’s dismantlement, bit by bit, of the laws of war.
It would have confirmed the criticisms of those who say the ICC serves as simply another weapon – a legal one – to be used by the US and Nato against states they dislike.
And it would have licensed other states to cite the Israel exemption as an alibi to commit their own crimes against humanity. The ICC would have doomed itself to irrelevance.
On the other hand, acting against Israel – and thereby against Washington and its European satraps – puts the court directly on a collision course with the West.
It jeopardises the international legal order the court is there to uphold – one developed immediately after the Second World War to prevent the very crimes against humanity that culminated in the Holocaust and the US atomic bombing of Japanese cities.
This is precisely Netanyahu’s goal, as Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported last week: “Netanyahu intends to turn the ICC arrest warrant against him into a global motion of no confidence against international law and its institutions.”
The likelihood is that Washington will bring the whole edifice tumbling down rather than set a precedent in which it agrees to sacrifice its highly militarised client state, strategically located in the oil-rich Middle East.
Don’t expect much pushback from Europe, even from the capitals where the centrists – rather than the nationalists – reign.
The hypocrisy of the European Union, rhetorically committed to the rule of law and the principle of humanitarianism but in practice entirely beholden militarily, economically and ideologically to the imperial hub in Washington, will soon enough be exposed.
They have only ever been interested in pursuing “humanitarianism” when it has served Washington’s or their own geostrategic agenda – most recently in using Ukraine as the battlefield in which to fight a proxy war against Russia.
Smeared as antisemites
Given the evidence of what Israel has done over the past 13 months – killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, according to the most reliable estimates, and imposing a severe aid blockade – as well as the declarations from Israeli leaders of their intention to make Gaza uninhabitable, it is hard to conceive of how the court could not find Netanyahu or Gallant guilty, were they put on trial.
Or at least, it is inconceivable if legal considerations – rather than political ones – are at the forefront of the judges’ minds. After all, even a former head of the Israeli military, Moshe Ya’alon, admitted at the weekend that it is clear Israel is not defending itself in Gaza but “ethnically cleansing” – to use his words – the enclave.
Which is why the campaign to pollute the case with other concerns began immediately. Netanyahu accused the court of being “antisemitic” – as he does to everybody that tries to hold him or the Israeli army to account for their flagrant violations of the rules of war.
Netanyahu claimed that Israel was not starving the people of Gaza, even as figures released by the United Nations showed that virtually no food had been delivered over the preceding 40 days to large parts of the enclave. The UN warned that the people there faced “diminishing conditions for survival”.
But according to Netanyahu, the evidence before our eyes is nothing more than a plot to blacken his – and therefore Israel’s – name.
Once again Netanyahu, echoed by his apologists, has imposed a false, binary choice that can only fuel antisemitism. His demand: either back Israel’s genocide in Gaza or expose yourself as a Jew hater.
Palestinians, solidarity activists and human rights organisations are used to this. But now even the judges of the International Criminal Court are being tarred as antisemites. Could there be a quicker path to making antisemitism respectable?
Worst offenders
In their own way, western leaders have subtly reiterated Netanyahu’s trivialisation of antisemitism – and by extension, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Rather than staunchly defend the court and the rule of law, they have desperately tried to shore up the existing narrative: that Israel is the wronged party, not the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed and maimed by its bombs, and the two million-plus civilians being starved to death by its aid blockade.
The US and Israel have refused to ratify the Rome Statute, which founded the ICC, for one reason only: they regard themselves as exempt from the provisions of international law
As ever, Britain and the US are the worst offenders.
President Joe Biden impugned the court’s motives, calling the decision to enforce international law against Washington’s client state “outrageous”. A White House spokesperson referred to “process errors” in the court’s ruling but could not specify what these supposed errors were.
The US and Israel have refused to ratify the Rome Statute, which founded the ICC, for one reason only: they regard themselves as exempt from the provisions of international law.
In other words, international law is viewed solely as a vehicle for advancing their interests, not as a limitation on their military behaviour. The ICC’s indictments against Netanyahu and Gallant have upended the premise of a “rules-based international order” in which Washington alone sets the rules.
Last week, the Washington Post said exactly that quiet part out loud, stating that the court had no business holding the “elected leaders of a democratic country” to account for the crimes against humanity they are accused of committing.
But even if we accept that false premise – is it only dictators who can commit war crimes? – Israel is not a democratic country by any measure. It is an apartheid, settler-colonial state, as human rights groups – including Israeli ones – have been warning for years.
And its genocide is simply the culmination of a decades-long, zero-sum process in which Israel has sought to eradicate the rival national claims of the native Palestinian people to their homeland.
It is in the DNA of settler-colonial states to expel, segregate or exterminate indigenous populations – as the US should know well from its own history.
On the US right, there are calls to invoke the so-called “Hague Invasion Act” of 2002, should Netanyahu or Gallant be put on trial. That law permits Washington to use military force against the court if it charges US personnel with war crimes.
More immediately, bipartisan support appears to be growing in Washington to revive sanctions against senior ICC officials – a form of intimidation designed to subvert due process and which itself is likely to constitute an international crime.
In 2020, Donald Trump imposed draconian sanctions on the ICC after it announced it was investigating the US and Israel for war crimes, committed respectively in Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories.
Biden dropped the sanctions a few months later, shortly after entering office, but only in return for the ICC “deprioritising” its investigation of US crimes in Afghanistan.
Trump will be in the Oval Office within weeks. The ICC knows it is likely to face his full wrath once more.
Double mendacity
Already European states are jostling to stay on the right side of Washington and ignore their obligations under the Rome Statute.
France, after initially indicating it would enforce the arrest warrant against Netanyahu, recapitulated last week, claiming the Israeli prime minister was “immune” from arrest.
Paris echoed the White House in justifying its decision on the entirely discredited grounds that Israel is not a party to the ICC. As has been repeatedly pointed out, the court has ruled it has jurisdiction in the Palestinian territories, where Israel’s crimes are being committed.
Britain has not gone so far yet as to openly defy the court in its response to the arrest warrants. Instead, it offered the most minimal, mealy mouthed backing.
Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, both lawyers, maintained a studious silence as Netanyahu and Biden besmirched the reputation of the court and the standing of international law.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary who would have to approve an arrest warrant were Netanyahu or Gallant to arrive in the UK, shrugged off responsibility, pretending she suddenly did not understand the most elementary aspects of British law – or her role.
“That’s not a matter for me,” she told broadcasters in a clearly rehearsed response.
Meanwhile, a government spokesperson commented only that Britain would “comply with its legal obligations” – leaving it unclear how it might interpret those obligations were they ever put to the test.
Notably, Herzi Halevi, the head of Israel’s military and high on the list of Israeli officials who face a future indictment by the ICC, visited the UK last week for a meeting with several counterparts from other nations.
Almost certainly, Starmer’s government issued him with “special mission” immunity beforehand, given the risk that an arrest warrant could have been issued at short notice during his visit.
There is a pattern here hard to miss.
Shortly before the ICC announced its arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Lammy condemned Russia at the UN in clear, unequivocal terms for vetoing a Security Council resolution proposed by the UK to protect civilians in Sudan.
Lammy’s concern is that a civil war there has led to ordinary people being subjected, in his words, to war crimes such as “killing, rape and starvation”.
The question then is why is Lammy not equally exercised by Israel’s “killing, rape and starvation” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. All of these crimes have been documented in horrifying detail over the past year and are central to the ICC’s case against Netanyahu and Gallant.
Why, similarly, did Lammy have no words of opprobrium – as he did for Russia – when the Biden administration two weeks ago vetoed a Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza to halt the killing of Palestinian civilians and secure the release of the Israeli hostages
Jaw-dropping claim
It is not just the British government’s hypocrisy on show. Lammy and Starmer have had to feign complete ignorance of the most fundamental aspects of international law in denying that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
In a jaw-dropping moment last month, Lammy claimed that Israel had not killed enough Palestinians in Gaza for its actions to qualify as genocide.
That was doubly mendacious.
Lammy knows that Gaza’s death toll is necessarily a massive undercount. The enclave’s health and governance systems, in utter disarray after more than a year of bombardment, are in no position to record most deaths, even assuming bodies can be unearthed from the rubble and then identified.
But more significantly, no serious lawyer or judge thinks that genocide is determined according to a headcount or a mathematical formula. The Genocide Convention specifically lists forms of genocide – such as the forcible transfer of children from one group to another – that may not entail loss of life.
As Francesca Albanese has repeatedly observed, the aim of the Genocide Convention is to recognise genocide at the earliest stage possible so that mass slaughter can be averted
And as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has repeatedly observed, the aim of the Genocide Convention is to recognise genocide at the earliest stage possible so that mass slaughter can be averted. And, in this case, so that Israel is deterred from spreading the genocide from Gaza to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
As she notes: “Genocide is a process, not an act … No Palestinian is safe under Israeli rule.”
The convention is not there, as Lammy implies, simply to serve as a guidance note in assessing retroactively whether a genocide has taken place after the failure to stop it.
It was this stunning misunderstanding of the law by Lammy that led Albanese to characterise him as a “genocide denier”.
The term could be used just as fairly to describe Starmer.
He told the House of Commons this month that, from his previous work as a human rights lawyer, he could be certain that Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza.
Except, if the evidence from his earlier professional life proves anything at all, it is just how economical he is being with the truth when addressing the destruction of Gaza.
No courage, no conviction
For months, the establishment media have been careful to avoid referencing videos doing the rounds on social media of Starmer readily defining what constitutes genocide in the period before Israel’s slaughter in Gaza began.
One video, from 2014, shows him addressing the International Court of Justice, the ICC’s sister court, to set out what he characterised as the genocidal policies of Serbia in its 1991 siege on the Croatian city of Vukovar, following the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Starmer explained: “Serbian forces carried out a sustained campaign of shelling, systematic expulsion, denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation and medical treatment – bombing, burning, brutal killings and torture, which reduced the city [of Vukovar] to rubble and destroyed its Croat population.”
He clarified why he was calling these acts a genocide rather than an armed conflict. Because, he said, Serbian actions were a “radically disproportionate attack deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population”.
As Starmer well knows, Israel’s crimes in Gaza have been immeasurably worse – and on a far larger scale – than anything suffered by Vukovar. Also unlike Vukovar, in Israel’s case its leaders have not shied away from making clear their genocidal intent towards Gaza.
So how, using Starmer’s own definition, does Israel’s slaughter in Gaza not count as genocide?
Similarly, in July 2020, shortly after he became leader of the Labour Party, Starmer issued a video to mark Srebrenica Memorial Day – the anniversary of events in 1995 in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed and buried in mass graves by Serbian forces.
Strikingly, Starmer called those deaths a genocide, one that “must never be forgotten”.
If he was so certain the massacre in Srebrenica amounted to a genocide – one small front in a much larger war – how can Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, on an incomparably greater scale, not also qualify as a genocide?
Starmer added that it was incumbent on the West to “use the agony and the anger that crimes like Srebrenica bring to help us find the courage and conviction to stand up and say, ‘Never again’.”
It hardly needs pointing out that, only three years later, Starmer was unable to find the courage or conviction to stand up to either Israel or the US and say “never again” as the Gaza genocide unfolded.
Complicity exposed
Starmer and Lammy’s comments should be seen for what they are: an attempt to subvert the rules of war, in line with Israel and Washington’s wishes.
In their repeated genocide denial, the pair have sought to undermine the standing of the International Court of Justice and its large panel of judges, all esteemed jurists of international law.
The court ruled 10 months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The situation in the enclave is incalculably worse now.
Starmer and Lammy have treated the ICJ with contempt. And through their evasions and double standards, they are now weakening the standing of the ICC, too.
Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, has suggested that the British government dare not identify the slaughter in Gaza as a genocide because that “would be admitting their own complicity in one of the greatest crimes of our time”.
Corbyn is right, in part. Doubtless, the ICC’s delay in issuing the arrest warrants reflects its nervousness with where this process it has initiated could ultimately lead.
It will be hard to restrict the charges to Netanyahu and Gallant when western leaders, including Biden, Starmer and Lammy, show they deserve to be in the dock alongside them
It will be hard to restrict the charges to Netanyahu and Gallant, or even other Israelis, especially when western leaders, including Biden, Starmer and Lammy, show they deserve to be in the dock alongside them.
Britain has been intimately colluding in Israel’s genocide from the very outset.
It is selling weapons and components vital to the operation of F-35 fighter jets that have been bombing Gaza and killing huge numbers of civilians.
It has been gun-running for Israel too from its Cyprus airbase: the largest number of deliveries of weapons to Israel have been via the RAF.
And from the same airbase, British surveillance planes secretly fly over Gaza numerous times a day to provide Israel with intelligence – intelligence that most likely has been used to target and destroy infrastructure, making the enclave uninhabitable.
And on top of all that, Starmer and his government have been justifying Israel’s war crimes as “self-defence” and pre-empting the judgment of the ICJ on whether Israel is guilty of genocide.
That goes far beyond genocide denial into the realms of active collusion and participation.
Biggest liars triumph
But it is not just about self-preservation. The number of experts calling out the genocide in Gaza grows by the day. Even Israeli Holocaust scholars have added their voices.
One, Omer Bartov, believes not only that there is a genocide unfolding in Gaza but that it is reaching its “final stage”.
Starmer could easily reverse course, using the ICC decision as the moment to declare that Israel has crossed a threshold and that the UK must desist from colluding in the eradication of Gaza.
He has decided not to take that course. He has decided to assist Israel in seeing out its genocide to the bitter end.
In equivocating about whether the UK backs international law, at a moment when Israel and the US are determined to tear it down brick by brick, Starmer is doing something even graver. He is colluding in the dismantlement of the rule of law and its supporting institutions like the ICC.
There is one of only two possible lessons to be drawn here.
Either that Britain never truly supported international law. Its signing up to the Rome Statute and the ICC was always on the assumption that the court was there to punish others. That it would never actually dare try to restrain countries that belonged to a self-declared club of “western democracies”.
Or that Britain, like the rest of Europe, is not really an independent, sovereign state, but an outpost, a protectorate, of an imperial hub in Washington that dictates our foreign policy. Defiance cannot be contemplated because it would not be tolerated.
Or that both are the case.
Either way, the truth is that the idea of a British liberal democracy is unravelling before our eyes. When the guardians of the liberal order, of the rule of law and humanitarianism, are unmasked as charlatans – as is the case with both Starmer and Biden – the forces of darkness rush in to fill the void.
When everything is exposed as a lie, the biggest liars triumph. That is the future that awaits us.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
