Abdaljawad Omar
Mondoweiss / November 25, 2024
Palestinians hold deep scepticism of courts based on generations of Israeli abuse. But the ICC warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are a moment to expose the contradictions of the American Empire and put a crack in the veneer of impunity.
The interrogation room carries the weight of a long and fraught history in the Palestinian encounter with their interrogator. It is never merely a space for the extraction of intelligence, never solely a sterile apparatus of information-gathering. Instead, it becomes a staging ground for the fraught performance of master and slave—a theater in which domination demands submission, and where the Palestinian captive fights the demons summoned by the dungeon’s isolating embrace. Here, the deprivation is not just of freedom but of recognition, of the validating gaze of another that affirms existence. When a prisoner is thrown into the dark, extracted from his everyday existence, and isolated from images, sounds, and familiar others, the prisoner yearns for that moment, when anyone, even the enemy would look at him or her and recognize their existence.
In this claustrophobic choreography, the only human acknowledgment comes from two figures: the one who delivers food, a ghost of functional survival, and the other—the interrogator—whose questions probe the intimate architecture of being. These questions are not neutral; they are laden with suspicion, accusations shaped like knives cutting into memory and motive. “Who are your friends?” “Where do your loyalties lie?” “What compelled you to resist, to fracture the smooth surface of submission?” The interrogator’s gaze becomes a mirror, distorted but inescapable, reflecting back the terror of being seen and unseen, of being reduced to a puzzle for them to solve, a story for them to decode.
Year after year, these encounters with interrogators—those who have learned our language, who wield our words as weapons against us—have, for many, become a grim rite of passage. For some, it is an affirmation of strength, a harrowing initiation into a fragile manhood, where the refusal to confess serves as the last bastion of self-preservation, the one act that secures a tenuous grasp on dignity. But for many, it is also an encounter with the limit—the moment where solitude morphs into an unbearable loneliness, where fear grows wild, fed by the jailer’s deliberate mechanisms of isolation. The fear, the desperate need for salvation, and the search for reprieve in the here and now propel the confession—a moment that fractures the self and leaves behind a shattering experience.
With the confession, the bonds of trust that once anchored friendships begin to erode, and the fragile world you knew before collapses under the weight of the occupier’s violence. It is not merely an act of capitulation but a profound rupture, where the very fabric of relationships and identity is torn apart, leaving only the echoes of betrayal and the deep scars of survival.
I cannot pinpoint who first devised or refined Israel’s interrogation techniques—those intricate mechanisms that weaponize sexuality, isolation, disappearance, and physical pain in one seamless operation—but I am certain they have read Kafka. The methods speak his language, echoing his nightmare of systems that entangle, dehumanize, and render the subject an object of relentless scrutiny, caught in a web of power that insists on submission while withholding meaning. Imagine not living in the metaphor of Kafke’s masterpiece the Trial but its appearance as an everyday reality, not as an allegory of modern life, but as an actuality.
This is perhaps one of the most emblematic sites in the experience of over a million Palestinians who have been arrested and incarcerated since 1967—a staggering number that includes more than a third of all Palestinian men. Captured, isolated, tortured, and subjected to stress positions and a range of so-called “interrogative techniques,” they are drawn into the carceral machinery of occupation. Yes, Palestinians have transformed the interrogation room into a site of sumud—the steadfast refusal to recognize, confess, or even utter a word. But this resistance also serves as a threshold into what Walid Daqqa, the martyr-prisoner, describes as a parallel time. It is an entryway to a life confined yet reshaped, where minutes are counted differently, where the rhythms of existence distort, and where events assume another form altogether, refracted through the isolating lens of captivity.
Within these spaces, the prisoner may occasionally be brought before a military judge—an Israeli settler living in one of the colonies, whose role seamlessly aligns with that of the intelligence officer. This judge, the intelligence apparatus, and the jailers operate in unison, colluding to enforce Israel’s policy of mass confinement, where punishment is not merely individualized but systemic, a mechanism of control that disciplines and dehumanizes on a national scale. Here, imprisonment is not the exception but the norm, an integral strategy in the project of domination, designed to break bodies, fragment communities, and suppress the very possibility of resistance. Laleh Khalili framed it as a policy of mass confinement, and Palestinian scholar Lena Meari wrote about the practices of sumud within the prison, where this silence becomes an act of defiance, a reclamation of agency in the face of overwhelming oppression.
In a nutshell, Palestinians despise the courts. We hate the sight of a judge, knowing all too well that they are no different from the interrogator. We loathe the law and all it stands for in our context—a tool for oppression cloaked in legality. Even the lawyers, perhaps universally disliked, evoke our mistrust. But for us, the courts represent more than frustration; they are the place where our oppressive conditions are translated into legal language, where the weight of colonial domination is formalized with a veneer of legitimacy. Here, the judge smiles—a smile devoid of justice—before condemning some of the best among us to years behind bars. It is a theater of power, an extension of the occupier’s machinery, where resistance is criminalized, and the law is wielded not to protect but to punish, the judge enunciates a sentence, but we feel no remorse, perhaps ‘regret’ of being caught, or fear of the confining brace of Iron bars, panopticons, but seldom do we feel remorse.
The ICC warrants
The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant land like a whisper in the void, met with a muted scepticism that cuts through the air in Palestine. At a coffee shop in Ramallah, a man sipping tea voices what many are already thinking: “Will we ever see a day in a real court? Or is this just another performance?” The question hovers, more accusation than inquiry, speaking to a deep-seated mistrust of international legal mechanisms—a system that seems more adept at staging its own redemption than delivering justice. The gesture of the warrants, no matter how symbolic, struggles to hold weight against the decades of legal rhetoric and human rights discourse that have failed to materialize into anything tangible for Palestine. For many, this is not an opening, but a familiar loop, a simulacrum of accountability that keeps justice forever deferred.
For those of us who have studied international law, fully cognizant of its limitations, the ICC warrants still carry a certain symbolic weight. They remind us of the law’s capacity—however tenuous—to prod local courts around the world into holding sadistically obscene soldiers to account. They cement and back Palestinian claims, providing a tangible marker of legitimacy in a landscape riddled with denial. And yes, they offer a moment to stick the ICC warrant in the eyes of the New York Times editorial board, to the CNN newsroom, and declare: “You hid the truth.” Now, judges in an international court—your court—have issued a decision to arrest the leaders of your cherished colony.
Some of those who pity us can, with equal ease and a gleeful tone, declare: Now, you Palestinians—a different colour, a different language, the subspecies Gallant so brazenly labelled “human animals”—can wield the arrest warrant as a medium for your message. But this fact, this recourse to courts as a vehicle for our testimony, is itself a symptom of a malaise—a testament to the persistent refusal to hear Palestinian voices. Year after year, we have spoken, declared, and documented. We said, long before the archival records were unsealed, that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948. We bore witness to what the world demanded Israeli historians confirm decades later.
Now, once again, we say: Israel has long operated with impunity. It has gotten away with apartheid, with systematic killing, with mass confinement, with the maiming of bodies and spirits, with the foreclosing of freedom. And today, it is committing genocide—an annihilation of a people. Yet the world waits, as it always has, for confirmation from the colonizer’s archives, for the “credible” voices of Israeli academics, or for the slow deliberations of international courts that only seem to stir when the crime has already reached its crescendo.
Here you now have yet another confession, delivered not from us but from another court—a court you claim to respect. This court, with all its pomp and veneer of impartiality, has enunciated what you have long refused to hear: that your cherished colony stands accused of war crimes. Its prime minister and defense minister now bear the stain of arrest warrants issued in their names. The verdict is not ours, but it echoes what we have lived and known—etched in our bodies, our ruins, and our histories. It is your own edifice, now trembling under the weight of its proclaimed justice. The court waited for so long, tried to not issue arrest warrants, and attempted to find anything that would help clear the way, to give Israel the exemption it so desires to do as it wishes without repercussions. It still signals to Israel: if only you would conduct an internal investigation, we would not need to take this further, just please, Israel investigate yourself and find yourself innocent. But humour us.
Ultimately, the court decided to cast Israel’s demand for exceptionalism onto the world. Now, the burden falls on the court’s member states—those self-proclaimed champions of legalism—to decide whether to act on the arrest warrants, to uphold the rule of law, or to reaffirm the principle of unwavering support for Israel, no matter the cost.
It is a stark game of legal principles versus Israel’s principles, where the lofty rhetoric of justice collides with the entrenched realities of power and allegiance, of empire build-up, leaving the world as a passive spectator to this fragile theater of contradictions.
The rage of the empire
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) has expressed strong opposition to the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He has labelled the ICC a “kangaroo court” and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, a “deranged fanatic.” Cotton has warned that any attempt to enforce these warrants should be met with severe consequences, referencing the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act—often dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act“—which authorizes the use of force to free U.S. personnel detained by the ICC.
Although the United States prides itself on being a nation founded on the rule of law, where constitutions, legislation, and courts form the bedrock of its identity, Senator Cotton is already brandishing threats of violence and sanctions against an international court. But perhaps these contradictions do not matter after all. Cotton himself seems to have little issue with rejecting the claims of immigrants knocking on the gates of his cherished country—conveniently forgetting that he and his ancestors once knocked on Turtle Island’s gates and erased most of its Indigenous peoples. Perhaps his disdain for courts that dare to symbolically hold the empire and its extensions accountable stems from this same logic of selective justice, where only some voices, some histories, and some laws are allowed to matter. After all, he has a problem with immigrants, who in most cases come to live and attempt to build a life in the United States, but he views Palestinians as profane for having a distaste for those who arrived on our land to live here instead of us.
The importance of the court’s decision lies precisely here: in its ability to expose, reveal, and force these antagonisms to surface. It compels the actors who have long relied on the facade of universal principles to confront the contradictions inherent in their stance. It forces everyone to speak their truths, and as things roll, as they fracture, many people will be able to see how Palestine emerges once and once again as a constellation of various contradictions, and how it blows up from both without and within the American Empire and its rule-based international order.
The judges in the court will now witness firsthand how their efforts—to shield or defer Israel from prosecution, or simply carry out their duties—are met with vile attacks and outright threats of violence. Those who work within the United Nations, or who hold faith in the principles of international justice, will find themselves confronting a stark truth: that the very framework they serve is weaponized and discarded at will, depending on the interests it touches.
Netanyahu and Dreyfus
It has long become clear that Israel strategically wields accusations of antisemitism as a tool to silence dissent, to forestall a reckoning, and to discredit those who dare to point out inconvenient truths as driven by hatred. This tactic offers a lifeline to those hesitant to stand with Palestine, allowing them to cling to the last fault line, the final stick, before they are swept away by the flood of truths that the Palestinian struggle unearths. It provides an avenue for deflection, enabling these individuals to mask their own anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices beneath the guise of moral indignation.
In this, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s invocation of the Dreyfus Affair is no coincidence—it serves a calculated purpose, mirroring its historical function to mobilize outrage while maintaining the status quo. The narrative holds certain supporters of Israel, or even the merely silent, firmly in line by offering a pretext to avoid confronting the structural violence and colonial realities laid bare by Palestine’s enduring resistance.
But more than anything, this construction of a world that hates Jews is the lifeblood of Israeli society—a fiction that, while feeding on the reality of antisemitism, redefines it to serve a larger narrative. This fiction becomes the framework through which reality is interpreted, shaping the coordinates of thought and action. On the one hand, it fosters a sense of existential siege, convincing Israelis that they have no other option but to commit genocide. It reinforces their attachment to the land, their drive to dominate other people, and it cultivates something far more insidious: a will to power, a will to kill, and a will to sacrifice. This narrative does not merely justify violence; it enshrines it as a condition of survival, weaving it into the very fabric of what it means to belong to the state. It defers the implosion of the colony, since it has no “mother country,” but many countries, and all these mother countries in fact really ‘hate it.’
The colony thus becomes trapped in a vicious cycle: it must continually invent enemies to justify its actions, even as these actions alienate the world further. The more the fiction is invoked, the more hollow it becomes, as the weight of its contradictions accumulates and begins to unravel the narrative’s credibility. Over time, this mechanism of deflection—of wielding antisemitism to foreclose critique—will likely encounter its own limit, as the realities of colonial violence become too visible to obscure, too undeniable to suppress.
A glimpse of justice
But beyond the ploys and fictions spewed by Israel around the ICC warrants lies a long and calculated history of restriction, a story Israel has been perfecting for decades. For years, it has imposed suffocating limitations on Palestinian movement. It has made leaving Gaza an ordeal, turned the sea—less than an hour’s drive from any city in the West Bank—into a forbidden horizon, and steadfastly refused the establishment of a Palestinian airport. Borders are not merely lines of control but instruments of domination, where Israel enacts sweeping travel bans on tens of thousands of Palestinians with impunity, often arbitrarily.
Now, Netanyahu must think twice before boarding a plane, calculating his steps in a world that no longer feels entirely without consequence. For a fleeting moment, there is a crack in the veneer of impunity—a faint sense that accountability, however symbolic or precarious, might yet exist. It is not justice, not by any stretch, but it is a moment to glimpse the possibility of reckoning, however distant or deferred.
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian scholar and theorist whose work focuses on the politics of resistance, decolonization, and the Palestinian struggle
