The International Criminal Court has lumped Yahya Sinwar and Benjamin Netanyahu into the same category of “war criminal” and is coming for both of them. To say that this is an act of moral inversion doesn’t even come close to describing what’s happening here, except to say that we’re seeing the left’s desire to outlaw Israel.

The International Criminal Court (“ICC”) was established in 2002 via a UN General Assembly vote called the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Its ostensible purpose was to address crimes of genocide, war crimes, “crimes against humanity,” etc. Early on, it was clearly intended to make Israel a war criminal because the founding UN Treaty made it an actionable crime to transfer a “population into occupied territory.” This openly targeted Israel’s housing developments in Judea and Samaria (aka Gaza).

However, despite being a UN-created organ, the ICC does not bind all UN nations. Instead, it binds only states that signed on to it. The member states are a rogue’s gallery of crackpot and openly socialist and antisemitic countries.  This map perfectly sums up many of the leftist, anti-Christian, antisemitic countries of the world: Western Europe, the Anglosphere other than America, all of Latin America, and most of Africa:

Public domain image.

Bill Clinton refused to submit the treaty to the Senate. Further, he recommended against America’s ever becoming a part of the organization because it’s inherently anti-American and challenges America’s sovereignty. While Obama didn’t try to ratify the treaty, his administration, unsurprisingly, periodically supported the ICC. Trump went the other way, sanctioning the organization. Naturally, Biden lifted those sanctions.

Now, this anti-American, antisemitic group has issued an arrest warrant for both Netanyahu and Sinwar:

The International Criminal Court announced Monday that it is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on war crime charges.

The charges are tied to the deadly Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said in a statement on Monday.

Warrants are also being sought for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and two top Hamas leaders.

The charges against the Hamas terror chiefs include extermination, murder, torture, rape and taking hostages, all as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israel is accused of “wilful killing,” “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and “wilfully causing great suffering.”

Henceforth, Netanyahu and Gallant are at risk of arrest if they leave Israel, and it’s likely that all Israelis will soon be at the same risk.

The indictment, of course, is ludicrous. Let’s look at the facts:

Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005. It’s not occupied territory.

In the years since then, Hamas has received billions of dollars in foreign aid. Hamas has used that money to (a) enrich its leaders and (b) build hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza, which are used to store weapons and transport troops. This is in addition to its using schools, hospitals, and apartments as barracks and weapons storage. Gaza is a giant military encampment with civilians as an integral part of its defense system.

Israel has also built for war: It created the Iron Dome to protect its citizens, along with an infrastructure of early warning systems and shelters.

On October 7, over 4,000 Hamas troops invaded Israel. They did not attack military targets. Instead, they attacked civilians at a music festival and in their homes. In a few hours, they slaughtered over 1,200 Israeli-based civilians, making a particular effort to torture women and children to death. In addition, they seized over 200 hostages, some of whom were Americans and most of whom have since been murdered. (Biden never mentions the Americans.)

Since October 7, Hamas has aimed tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian centers. Israel’s defensive systems are the only reason there haven’t been mass civilian casualties.

In the face of a massive, murderous attack on sovereign territory, Israel did exactly what the United States did after 9/11: It formally went to war against its enemy. The enemy is Hamas, a political and military organization.

Israel has since been waging urban warfare against Hamas and has done so with exquisite care for civilians in Gaza. It has abandoned the element of surprise by giving advance warning to enable civilians to escape, put its own troops at risk in battle situations to protect civilians, provided medical treatment for civilians, and shipped tons of food and medical supplies to civilians (the vast majority of whom support Hamas, giving it aid and comfort).

Image: Israeli flyer warning civilians to evacuate from a future battle zone. X screen grab.

Considering that this is urban warfare and that Hamas has deliberately made its civilians part of its military defense system, few civilians have died as a result of Israel’s actions. Hamas, of course, generated grossly exaggerated civilian mortality numbers—and even with those numbers, there was no doubt that Israel had done an extraordinary job of protecting enemy civilians:

Speaking as a military historian, less than 2:1 is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.

And it’s a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the IDF,”

says Lord @aroberts_andrew. pic.twitter.com/D8mgy2YF3V

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 10, 2024

Moreover, Hamas’s numbers were quickly proven fake, so much so that even the UN eventually conceded that they were double the “real” civilian casualty rate. It’s likely that the real civilian death toll is even lower:

And that’s not all. The Palestinian statistical agencies are famous for using “under 20” as their marker for separating children and adults. That means among the “children” are likely a number of 18- and 19-year-olds (i.e. not children). Additionally, we know the IDF encounters 16- and 17-year-old militants in the field, meaning a chunk of the “children” are actually combatants. And of course Hamas makes no distinction between combatants and civilians when counting the casualties.

It’s possible, then—perhaps even likely—that the IDF has achieved a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of around 1.5-1, an unheard-of level of precision and civilian protection in urban warfare.

What the ICC did is an obscenity. Israel has complied with all modern rules of warfare, going above and beyond the call of duty regarding enemy civilians, yet her leaders are being lumped in with a man whose admitted goal is Jewish genocide. The only virtue of this moral inversion is that we’re getting clarity: Evil nations, including Europe (which clearly regrets not finishing what it started in Auschwitz), want to make Israel illegal as the first step in destroying the world’s only Jewish state.

As of this writing, the White House has been silent. However, to its credit, the British government has done the right thing:

The British Foreign Ministry:

"The Hague Tribunal has no jurisdiction in this case, since Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Convention, and the Palestinians are not a state. We oppose the prosecutor's decision." https://t.co/MCb9wxIqZy

— ((🆆3⃣🅱🆂🜃🅶3⃣)) 🇮🇱 I Stand with Israel! 🇮🇱 (@w3bsag3) May 20, 2024