Juan Cole
Informed Comment / July 27, 2024
Ann Arbor – The Labour Party in Britain announced that it would not submit a brief to the International Criminal Court arguing that the court has no jurisdiction over Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The previous Conservative government of Rishi Sunak had pledged to make such a submission, but the new prime minister Keir Starmer has, after some waffling, decided against it.
Starmer is a strong supporter of Israel and, in alliance with a secretive British Israel lobby, has purged severe critics of Tel Aviv from Labour Party ranks, so in some ways the decision is surprising. Further, Starmer appears to have gotten heavy pressure from the Biden administration to challenge prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for the commission of war crimes in Gaza.
Starmer, however, also faced pressure from British Muslim constituents of the Labour Party, a significant bloc. In the July 4 election that Labour won so handily, it nevertheless did lose some seats it was expected to win, apparently over Gaza policy. Five independents ran and won, campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. Some 3,801,186 Muslims live in the UK, or 6.7% of the population of 67 million. They therefore have even more clout than Asian Americans in the US, who form about 5.6% of the American population.
The British youths, the left, and British Muslims as well as other minorities, e.g. left-liberal Hindus and activists from the Caribbean, have staged large and frequent demonstrations against Israel’s total war on Gaza. Further, trade unionists, another key Labour constituency, have urged an arms boycott on Israel over its atrocities against Palestinians.
Given Starmer’s stalwart support of Israel, he would not have backed down on the ICC submission unless the pressure from within his party was overwhelming.
The episode demonstrates the limits of Israel’s policy of ignoring Western public opinion in general and concentrating on influence-peddling in governmental decision-making bodies. Those bodies, as with Labour parliamentarians, are also susceptible to shifts in public opinion, as with the vehement denunciation of Israel for what many Britons see as a genocide in Gaza. Europeans also pay more attention to bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court than do Americans
The Labour Party said that it was leaving the decision up to the ICC, and the BBC concludes that if Netanyahu and Gallant are indicted, the United Kingdom would feel itself obliged to arrest them if they stepped foot on British soil. The same would also hold true for Spain, Ireland and Norway, all of which recognized the State of Palestine in late May as a way of protesting the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the brutalization of the Palestinians living there.
It should be understood that this move by Labour is a major symbolic loss for Israel and for the Biden administration, which has sought to ensure impunity for Netanyahu and his cronies and has even refused to allow the State Department to certify that Israel is using US weaponry in Gaza in a manner contrary to International Humanitarian Law, as required by the Leahy laws.
It is highly unlikely, however, that Starmer will take any practical action, such as an arms boycott or even a limitation on arms sales to Israel, as demanded by many trade unionists and other activists.
Palestine was recognized by the UN General Assembly as a non-member observer state of the UN in 2012. That status permitted Palestine to sign the Rome Statute and accede to the International Criminal Court as a member in early 2015. In 2018, the Palestine Authority brought a case against Israel at the court for its illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Although Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and would ordinarily not be under its jurisdiction, the argument the court accepted in 2021 is that Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza are within the court’s purview. Sunak had intended to challenge that argument. Note, however, that the US and most European countries welcomed the 2023 ICC finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is guilty of war crimes in Ukraine. Russia is also not a signatory to the Rome Statute, nor is Ukraine. But Ukraine granted the court jurisdiction over Russian war crimes in the Donbass. The case for the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza is tremendously stronger than that for its jurisdiction over Russian actions in Ukraine.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
