On December 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine… There is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”
Of course, this should be a no-brainer — and yet it took the ICC almost five years (a “preliminary examination” of the situation was opened in January 2015) to determine that “there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.” Then again, Palestinians have been waiting more than seventy years for justice, so five is perhaps a drop in the bucket.
Not that “justice” is a guaranteed outcome in international legal endeavors that often amount to torturously bureaucratic charades. Nor, it bears underscoring, has the Palestine investigation been officially given the green light — Bensouda is first seeking confirmation that the court’s jurisdiction applies to the territory in question. While Palestine is a signatory to the ICC, Israel — like its BFF, the United States — is not.
Furthermore, the proposed investigation would look into not only allegations of Israeli war crimes but also Palestinian ones — a fact that has been studiously ignored in Israel’s typically apoplectic reaction to the ICC announcement. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the good old antisemitism alarm, while branding the ICC’s move a “baseless and outrageous decision” and a “dark day for truth and justice.” Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz, former chief of the Israeli military, asserted that “the Israeli army is one of the most moral militaries in the world” and that “the Israeli army and State of Israel do not commit war crimes.” Case closed.
The ICC examination of the “situation in Palestine” looks back only as far as June 13, 2014 and includes various allegations of war crimes during Israel’s summer 2014 Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. That particular foray killed some 2,251 Palestinians in a matter of fifty days, the majority of them civilians; 551 were children. Six Israeli civilians perished.
Additionally slated for maybe-investigation is the Israeli military’s brutal repression of Palestinian protesters participating in the Great March of Return, which began in 2018 and “reportedly resulted in the killing of over 200 individuals, including over 40 children, and the wounding of thousands of others.” In the ICC’s view, there’s also a “reasonable basis to believe that in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, members of the Israeli authorities have committed war crimes… in relation, inter alia, to the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank.”
In other words, this is a relatively tame judicial undertaking, considering that for the past seven-plus decades, the Israeli state has — in terms of massacres and territorial usurpation — essentially constituted one continuous war crime. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.