Justice at Last? Panic in Israel as the ICC Takes Momentous Step in the
Right Direction
The high level of these ICC investigations places the legal push against
Israel at a whole new level. This is uncharted territory for Israel, the
United States, Palestine, the ICC and the international community as a
whole.
by Ramzy Baroud
January 08th, 2020
By Ramzy Baroud @RamzyBaroud
At long last, Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court (ICC) has uttered the long-anticipated conclusion that "all
the statutory criteria under the Rome statute for the opening of an
investigation (into alleged war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories) have been met".
Bensouda's verdict has been in the making for a long time and should,
frankly, have arrived much earlier. The ICC preliminary investigations into
Israeli war crimes began back in 2015. Since then, many more such war crimes
have been committed, while the international community persisted in its
moral inertia.
The ICC statement, issued on December 20, asserted that the court saw "no
substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the
interests of justice".
But can the "interest of justice" be served while the United States
government continues to wield a massive stick, using its diplomatic,
political and financial clout to ensure Israel emerges unscathed from its
latest legal scuffle?
There is little doubt that Michael Lynk, the United Nations Special
Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory,
is absolutely right: A formal ICC criminal investigation into war crimes in
Palestine is a "momentous step forward in the quest for accountability".
He is also correct in his assessment, published in the United Nations Human
Rights Officer of the High Commissioner website, that "accountability has,
until now, been largely missing in action throughout the 52-year-old
occupation."
I would go even further and expand the timeline of the missing
accountability to include the two decades prior to the Israeli occupation of
East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, how is one to
account for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48, the numerous
massacres and other wanton killings that accompanied and followed those
defining years, or the fact that Israel was never held accountable for its
violations of international and humanitarian laws between 1948 and 1967?
That issue notwithstanding, the Palestinian Authority and all political
parties in Palestine should exploit this unprecedented opportunity of
holding Israel accountable.
As soon as the ICC issued its statement, news reports surfaced conveying a
sense of "panic" in Israel. The Times of Israel reported that an Israeli
government meeting to discuss the ICC decision was held shortly after, with
the aim of considering a proper response, including the possibility of
preventing ICC investigators from reaching Israel.
This is eerily familiar. Israel has denied entry to - or refused to
cooperate with - international investigators and observers on many occasions
in the past.
Following a UN planned investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in the
Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002, the Israeli government quickly
moved, and, sadly, succeeded in blocking the investigation altogether.
It has done so time and again, often demonizing the very individuals
entrusted with the mission of examining the illegality of Israel's behavior
in the context of international law. Well-respected judges and international
law experts, such as Richard Goldstone, Richard Falk, and John Dugard, were
vehemently attacked by Israeli officials and media and, by extension, by the
US government and media as well.
Israel ICC Invesitgation
UN investigator Richard Goldstone visits a family home destroyed by Israeli
artillery in Gaza, June 3, 2009. Ashraf Amra | AP
Israel has managed to survive dozens of United Nations Resolutions and
countless legal reports and indictments by the UN and all UN-affiliated
organizations, largely because of blind and unequivocal American support,
which has shielded Israeli war criminals from ever answering to their
horrific actions in Palestine.
"Remember, it was (then-Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton who took pride
in the fact that she personally killed the Goldstone Report," said US
author, Norman Finkelstein, in a recent interview with the news website
'Mondoweiss'.
The Goldstone report was issued in the wake of the Israeli war on Gaza in
2009, dubbed 'Operation Cast Lead'. The campaign of intimidation and
pressure on Goldstone, personally, forced the once-respected judge to
retract his accusations of Israeli war crimes and the deliberate targeting
of civilians.
While Clinton did her part in torpedoing the Goldstone Report, former US
President, Barack Obama, according to Finkelstein, went to great lengths to
"neutralize international law against settlements and other Israeli crimes
in the occupied territories".
Worse still, on September 14, 2016, Obama handed Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, himself accused of carrying out numerous war crimes
against Palestinians, the largest US aid package to a foreign country in
modern history, a whopping $38 billion over the course of ten years.
This is not a new phenomenon, where the US enables Israeli crimes and
simultaneously shields Tel Aviv from any accountability for these crimes
before the international community. All US administrations, whether
Republican or Democrat, have honored the same sinister maxim, thus ensuring
Israel, literally, gets away with murder.
A particular case in point was in 2001, when 28 Palestinian and Lebanese
survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre attempted to try, in a
Belgian court, late Israeli leader and accused war criminal, Ariel Sharon.
Intense American pressures and a brazen intimidation campaign, targeting the
Belgian government and the judicial system, resulted in the dismissal of the
case in 2003. To deny Israel's victims the opportunity to seek justice
everywhere in the country, Belgium revised its very law, to the satisfaction
of Israel and the United States.
The high level of the ICC investigations places the legal push against
Israel at a whole new level. This is uncharted territory for Israel, the
United States, Palestine, the ICC and the international community as a
whole. There is little doubt that some joint Israeli-American effort is
already underway to develop strategies aimed at countering, if not
altogether dismissing, the ICC investigation.
It is clear that justice for Palestinians in the face of Israeli aggression,
itself fueled by unconditional American support, is not at all possible if
it is not accompanied by regional and international unity, and a clear and
decisive decision by all parties concerned that Israel, once and for all,
must pay for its military occupation, racist apartheid laws, protracted
siege on Gaza, and the many massacres in between.
Without this kind of international will, the ICC investigation could become
another sad case of justice denied, a non-acceptable option for any
justice-seeking individual, organization, and government anywhere in the
world.
Feature photo | Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in the courtroom of the
International Criminal Court (ICC) during a trial in The Hague, Netherlands,
August 28, 2018. Bas Czerwinski | Pool via AP
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He
is the author of five books. His latest is "These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons" (Clarity
Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the
Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).
His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
