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The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The hostile response to the warrants from Israel’s Western allies is a calculated assault on international law.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The Israeli leaders are accused of a litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the past year. For Palestinians, the arrest warrants were a rare moment of hope, but the Biden administration responded with outrage, while Republican senator Tom Cotton threatened to invade the Netherlands if necessary to help Netanyahu and Gallant escape justice.

Countries like Britain, France, and Germany that have signed up to the ICC, unlike the United States, have been looking for excuses to avoid carrying out the arrest warrants if Netanyahu and Gallant set foot on their territory. John Reynolds, professor of law at Maynooth University, spoke to us about the ICC warrants and explained why there is a binding obligation on all ICC member states to carry them out. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

Daniel Finn

Why was there a time lag of six months between the initial request from Karim Khan for these warrants and the point when they were actually issued? How does that compare with the time frame for some previous cases, notably the warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine?

John Reynolds

Part of it has to do with the slow pace at which international law generally moves; part of it has to do with the various political obstacles and procedural objections that invariably arise in the specific case of Palestine. When the office of the prosecutor in the ICC requests arrest warrants, that request goes to a pretrial chamber of three judges who look at the material submitted and make their determination.

On average, it would normally take a couple of months for them to do so before issuing a set of arrest warrants, though the institutions of international justice can also act quickly when there is a will to do so. In the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was a very swift and decisive response from international institutions, including the ICC. The court issued the arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova within three weeks of the prosecutor’s request. But it is not unprecedented that there would be a bit of time taken going through the various steps of the process.

There were a few things in the mix in the Palestine case. After the application for warrants was made in May 2024 — already inexcusably late in most people’s eyes — there was a request put in by the British government for the ICC to review whether it actually had jurisdiction to go ahead with this case. The court had already decided back in 2021 that it did, but the British challenge meant the court had to go through a process of reopening the question for submissions by other member states and interested groups and reviewing all that material.

Germany put in another objection as well where they tried to argue that the ICC should not prosecute Israeli leaders until Israel’s own legal system has had time to do so — which, when we are talking about brutal war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, it is evidently not going to do. There were these elements of state intervention that did slow it down, and that were probably designed precisely to slow it down.

On top of that, one of the three judges assigned to the case stepped down during the process and asked to be replaced on health grounds, so a new judge had to be appointed. There have also been allegations made internally within the ICC against the prosecutor Karim Khan for sexual misconduct in the workplace. He has now been placed under external investigation for that, but he has insisted on remaining in his position while it is ongoing.

In the meantime, the judges have now come back and confirmed the arrest warrants. All of the limitations of international law and the ICC notwithstanding, this is a major development, and not just in relation to Palestine but also in terms of the absolute impunity that Israel and other US imperial allies have traditionally enjoyed. That impunity is being chipped away at, even by institutions that would much rather not have had to confront the Israeli state in any way.

It’s important to stress that this isn’t something that has just come up in the last six months since the request for arrest warrants was made. The Palestinians have asked the ICC since 2009 to investigate Israeli crimes, so it has been fifteen years in the making. But for fourteen of those years, there was an assumption that the ICC would never ultimately be willing to proceed with an investigation of Israeli leaders because of the neocolonial dynamics that structure the court.

There was a very widely held racist and imperial view in Western sites of power, reflected in the first twenty years of the ICC’s practice, that this was a court only really designed to go after African suspects — and more recently Russian or Russian-allied forces. Despite all of the pressure on the court not to act in Palestine, the judges have obviously felt that the evidence is overwhelming after thirteen months and counting of this genocidal war that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza, with all of the chilling atrocities that it is still committing day after day in that context.

For the majority of the charges that have been leveled against Netanyahu and Gallant by the office of the prosecutor back in May, including several different categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the ICC has said very clearly that it has found strong evidence and reason to proceed. The judges said they have reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant are directly responsible for the war crime of imposing starvation as a method of warfare against the Palestinians in Gaza, and as “civilian superiors” who are responsible for the war crime of intentional attacks against the civilian population carried out by the Israeli military.

The court found both of them also responsible for three different categories of crimes against humanity: murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; persecution of the Palestinians as a group; and inhumane acts, including the denial of medical supplies and attacks on the health system.

The court used very decisive language in its statement confirming that it has issued the warrants for these crimes. The warrants themselves are classified as secret and aren’t publicly available so as to safeguard witnesses and the conduct of the investigations. But in this instance, the court did publish its justifications and said it was important to do so as these crimes are ongoing and also for the victims to understand the details and rationale.

The issuing of the warrants has of course triggered a huge backlash. We have seen yet another layer of the mask slipping in terms of liberal commitments to international institutions in the Western world, with many Western leaders falling over themselves to come up with convoluted statements to distance themselves from or question the ICC’s decision-making in this process.

Most overtly and explicitly, the likes of the US and some of Israel’s right-wing allies in Hungary and elsewhere have been saying that this is an outrageous, shameful, and absurd decision and that the ICC is a “kangaroo court” and they absolutely won’t support it. They present it as an attack on Israeli “democracy” and so on.

But we have on the other side strong support for the decision from states in the periphery and from Palestinian organizations who have been working on this issue and filing submissions and materials for many years now. They are now calling for the court to move on with this prosecution, and to go further and add more charges. They’re calling for the crimes of apartheid, genocide, and extermination to be included as well.

They are also agitating for a broader set of Israeli perpetrators to be indicted, which would be very much within the court’s remit. In the case of Ukraine, Putin and Lvova-Belova were the two initial Russian perpetrators named with ICC arrest warrants against them last year. But since then, four more Russian military officials have also had arrest warrants issued for them. The ICC has made clear that the Palestine file is an ongoing investigation, leaving the door open for warrants for other individuals and for more crimes to be added to the charges.

Daniel Finn

It would be unrealistic to imagine that the ICC judges have approached this as a question of pure law outside of political considerations, if for no other reason than the fact that they have been explicitly threatened with punitive consequences by a number of prominent US politicians. Was there a sense in which the judges felt that the entire legitimacy of the court would be compromised if they didn’t act?

John Reynolds

You’re right to point to the pressure that has been building around this for a number of years. We’ve seen all the reports of the attempts by Israeli intelligence to intimidate the previous prosecutor and officials in the court over the years. Under the previous Trump administration, there were sanctions already put on ICC officials in connection with the investigations (since “deprioritized”) that they were pursuing into US crimes in Afghanistan at that time.

Now you have Republican Party members of the US Congress who have put forward what they call the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which explicitly says “the ICC has no legitimacy or jurisdiction over the United States or Israel.” Under this proposed law, ICC staff, judges, witnesses, or anyone else aiding an ICC investigation into the US, Israel, or other NATO allies could be placed under US sanctions, along with their family members.

That pressure is very much there, and it will only ramp up now that things are proceeding with the arrest warrants. But as to the question of why the ICC decided to act now, I think there’s been an accumulation of evidence and pressure going back over the last fifteen years. The last year and more of the genocidal assault on Gaza has removed whatever pretense of plausible deniability that the ICC might have thought it had to say, “We’re not sure, we don’t have enough evidence,” or “There are other cases we have to prioritize because they are more serious and more urgent.”

Now those excuses just aren’t available. Of course, there will be pressure around the institution itself and from states that are members of it — in whether and how they cooperate and allow the proceedings to go forward. There will likely be threats to withdraw funding by certain states who contribute to the court’s budget. But the judges themselves will insist that they have to make their decisions on the basis of the evidence.

The prosecutor spent the first eight months of the war on Gaza since October 2023 saying he needed to look carefully, study the situation, and gather the evidence. There was a clear sense he was trying to avoid having to engage with it. But ultimately, once he did make the request for the arrest warrants, then the judges had to deal with it. If they had refused to issue the warrants, which many people felt was a possibility despite all the evidence, that would have been seen by the majority of the world as another nail in the coffin of the ICC.

Daniel Finn

What implications does this have in particular for Israel’s Western allies that have signed up to the ICC, such as Britain and Germany? Is it a political problem or is it a specifically legal problem for them, faced with these arrest warrants?

John Reynolds

At the moment, it’s a political problem. They’ve been trying to come up with statements and wordings that allow them to say that they’re committed to the independence of the court while at the same time challenging or undermining its decision in this situation.

The initial British government statement on the ICC warrants said very little about the ICC or the warrants themselves, but did say a lot about Israel’s right to defend itself, about Israel being a democracy, about [British prime minister] Keir Starmer’s support for Israel and plans to continue to engage with Netanyahu. It didn’t say that Britain wouldn’t comply with any legal process from the ICC, but they have obviously not given clear support to it.

Likewise, the German government has struggled to articulate any sort of coherent response. Germany boasts of being one of the strongest supporters of the ICC from the outset, but it has consistently opposed and actively challenged its investigations in Palestine. In response to the arrest warrants, German officials said they were examining the implications of the ICC decision, that of course they “abide by the law and international rules,” but conversely that it would be “hard to imagine that we would make arrests on this basis.”

This additionally could become a concrete legal problem for states like Britain or Germany if Netanyahu or Gallant were to travel. All of the member states of the ICC are obliged to execute those warrants and transfer the accused to The Hague if they come within their jurisdiction. You will have seen the question being put to many different leaders and foreign ministers after the warrants were issued: Would you arrest Netanyahu if he comes into your jurisdiction?

A number of European and Western leaders have said yes, we would. Others have tried to avoid the question or say, “That’s just a hypothetical” — but it’s obviously a plausible hypothetical and it could be a real question for them. The German statements, saying they find it hard to imagine Israeli leaders would be arrested in Germany, are antagonistic to the court, as well as to Germany’s own position as a member of the ICC and major contributor to its budget.

Other European countries have been similarly conflicted. The Netherlands, home to the ICC itself, had been quick to indicate initially that it would “abide 100 percent” by its obligations and “act on arrest warrants for people who are on Dutch territory.” But within a week, the prime minister was backtracking and suggesting that Netanyahu could visit the Netherlands in certain (undefined) scenarios without being arrested.

In Italy, Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said the state would have to fulfill its obligations and arrest Netanyahu if he came to Italy, whereas Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said the Israeli leader would be welcomed. Italy then hosted the G7 summit, where a common line emerged that there are “doubts” over the arrest warrants and the “feasibility” of arresting Netanyahu. The statement put out by the foreign ministers at the end of the G7 summit on November 26, however, studiously avoided any mention of the ICC or the warrants, despite containing a lengthy section on “the situation in the Middle East.”

Other right-wing European leaders, like Austrian foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg, have said that “the ICC decision to issue arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant is utterly incomprehensible.” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán put himself in the same camp as Joe Biden and the US administration in outright condemning the warrants as “shameful and absurd.” In Orbán’s case, he wrote officially to Netanyahu to invite him to visit Hungary and said that he would make sure his visit would be secure, and he wouldn’t be under any threat of arrest.

You have all of this maneuvering going on and people trying to couch their positions in various ways. Yet it would be a definitive obligation on all ICC member states to make the arrest if anyone who has a warrant out against them was to visit. The French government has now tried to suggest otherwise, producing an argument that Netanyahu may be entitled to immunity as sitting head of government. That would involve a departure from France’s own previous positions as well as the ICC’s decisions, including in the cases of Putin and former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, that there is no immunity for heads of state or government in a situation like this.

It has happened that leaders like al-Bashir and Putin have still traveled knowing they could go to certain friendly countries without being arrested. But even with advance reassurance, those trips did not always pass off without incident. If a government makes the invitation or hosts an official state visit, the courts in that country could still intervene to implement the arrest warrants.

It’s going to be a major shadow looming over Netanyahu and Gallant. Even if they feel they can go freely to the US without having to worry, you never know what might happen on the way there — a plane might need to reroute or make an unplanned stop-off somewhere. There is always a risk if they’re traveling that the warrants could be activated against them.

Daniel Finn

There have also been a number of cases brought by civil society organizations in countries like Britain and the Netherlands to pressure their own governments into ceasing the sale of arms to Israel. Does the fact that these warrants have now been issued have any implications for those efforts on the domestic legal front?

John Reynolds

It does in the sense that it’s another body of evidence from an international institution. It builds on what’s been going on at the International Court of Justice [ICJ] and in other decisions, reports, and materials that have been produced from the UN. It becomes much more difficult for the state in question to deny that the weapons it is selling to Israel are being used for the perpetration of war crimes or crimes against humanity.

In the most recent hearing in the High Court in London for the case against British arms export licenses, the government was forced to admit that British-made F-35 parts may be used by Israel to commit serious violations of international law in Gaza. It claimed that the risk of facilitating this was trumped by the strategic imperatives of the F-35 program and Britain’s relationship with US imperialism. Britain is already under increasing pressure in this case, and the ICC arrest warrants came a few days after that last hearing.

On the back of the warrants, Al-Haq and the Global Legal Action Network have upped the ante further again and are now seeking an emergency injunction over all arms exports to Israel in light of the ICC ruling. Scottish MP Brendan O’Hara also raised the issue again in parliament, asking Keir Starmer if he will “continue to choose to license F-35 components to a regime which is now led by a man wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity?” Starmer replied, without shame, that he is “very clear that we’ll continue to do so.” But this may be an increasingly untenable position as the legal and political pressure continues to mount.

There is now confirmation from an ICC chamber that there is significant evidence these crimes have been perpetrated, and there are arrest warrants out for two of the main leaders of the Israeli state over the past year. Again, it becomes much more difficult for the British state or the Dutch state or any other state to say, “We don’t know whether war crimes are being perpetrated. That hasn’t been determined yet.”

It’s another layer and another body of legal material that the organizations bringing those cases will be able to point to. It’s not definitive in the sense that a judge in a British court or a Dutch court would not be taking the arrest warrant decision from the ICC as the only standard that it would use to make the determination. A lot of those cases will ultimately rest on the specifics of the domestic legislation under which they are being pursued.

But it’s definitely another reference point that will potentially have a significant impact in those legal actions. It also feeds into the broader social movement campaigns around arms and energy embargos, interrupting supply chains and logistics for weapons, munitions, or any goods that could be going to Israel to be used in the commission of these crimes that are now subject to prosecution by the ICC.

Daniel Finn

I want to ask you how things would be likely to unfold if Netanyahu and Gallant actually were taken into custody to stand trial at the ICC, which is very uncertain at this point in time. If we compare it, for example, with the cases that arose from the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, how would that precedent operate in relation to this would-be trial?

Looking at what’s been happening in Gaza over the last year in comparison with Bosnia or other cases around the world, in many of those countries, you had paramilitary forces that were responsible for some of the worst atrocities, which in practice were operating under the auspices of the state, but there was a certain amount of plausible deniability in terms of operational control. In Gaza, on the other hand, it has only been the regular Israeli military forces that have been operating, so it would seem more straightforward to establish criminal responsibility up the chain of command, all the way up to Netanyahu, Gallant, and other figures.

John Reynolds

On that last point about criminal responsibility, there are different modes of liability, as they are called, in the prosecution of international crimes in a court like this. Under the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, they are being charged with the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and inhumane acts. For all of these crimes, the court is saying it has grounds to believe they bear direct responsibility for perpetrating the crimes.

On the other charge in the arrest warrant — the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population — the court has said that Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the commission of that particular war crime. They refer to specific incidents that they have investigated as attacks directly and intentionally directed against civilians. As the most senior political leaders overseeing the military structure, with a direct line of authority down via the army generals and commanders to those on the ground in Gaza, Netanyahu and Gallant are responsible for those crimes.

If other crimes were to be added, it would be a question of how the court frames it. They could be additional charges for Netanyahu and Gallant, or charges for another set of perpetrators. It will depend on what the prosecutor’s office decides is the best way to present the evidence. But as you said, that extra layer of distance is not there, if we compare it to paramilitary forces that have a looser or less certain relation to the state.

On the other point about the comparable precedents, you had Serb leaders, for example, who were prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [ICTY]. Netanyahu and Gallant are a long way from being in that position, and many people understandably doubt they will ever stand trial, but even eighteen months ago, many people would also have doubted that there would ever be arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. We are entering new territory.

If they were to be transferred to The Hague, you would be looking at a long haul of prosecutions and potential appeals. In relation to the example you mentioned, the ICTY decided to charge Serbian president Slobodan Milošević with a comprehensive set of charges for the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, including sixty-six different counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The trial went on for so long that he died before it was concluded. Although there was a massive amount of evidence presented against him, he was never formally convicted in his own trial because of his death in 2006.

At a later stage, the Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić were taken into custody, after many years as fugitives, and put on trial. Again, these trials were protracted, drawn-out affairs — ten years from arrest in 2011 to final appeal judgment in 2021 in Mladić’s case; eleven years from 2008 to 2019 in Karadžić’s.

Both were convicted of several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as one count of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre. Mladić was given a life sentence. Karadžić received an initial sentence of forty years, which was increased to life imprisonment on appeal.

There would be plenty of opportunities if Israeli leaders were put on trial for various objections to be made, with lots of technicalities, preliminary motions, and hearings along the way. You would be looking at a long period of time before any final sentences were handed down. That’s without even thinking about state interference.

It has obviously never been tested, but the US does have a law on the books that gives domestic legal authorization for the US president to use “all means necessary” to extract US or US-allied officials from The Hague if they were to be transferred there. That’s very much in the realm of speculation (though US Republicans like Tom Cotton have been actively threatening to invoke it). But there will certainly be various actors engaging in multiple forms of legal and political intervention to ensure Netanyahu and Gallant never end up in The Hague and to stop any trials from proceeding.

Daniel Finn

Right now, in terms of the international legal framework, everyone is talking about the ICC warrants, but earlier this year, the main focus was on the case being brought by South Africa at the ICJ, accusing Israel of genocide. Could you tell us if there have been any more significant developments at the ICJ, and if what is happening at the ICJ has relevance for the ICC case or vice versa?

John Reynolds

In the South African case against Israel, there were a series of provisional measures ordered by the ICJ in January, March, and May 2024 that have all been disregarded and violated by Israel. The last update was that the court set a deadline for South Africa to file its full memorial on Israel’s responsibility for perpetrating genocide. That will mark the start of the “merits” phase of the case, which involves a more comprehensive set of submissions and hearings than the provisional orders. South Africa filed its memorial at the end of October, just in time for the deadline that the court had set.

The election in South Africa during the summer and the dilution of the ANC’s [African National Congress] power into a coalition with liberals who are much more sympathetic to Zionism does throw up complications. But South Africa remains committed to the case and submitted a 750-page memorial with 4,000 additional pages of annexes and supporting information.

This will not be made public by the court until much later in the process. But it would comprise a massive body of work detailing the evidence and arguments that they are making about Israel’s perpetration of genocide, its intent to commit genocide, the elements and acts of genocide committed, the public incitement to genocide in Israel, and the various strands of the South African argument about the Israeli state’s responsibility for all of this.

Israel will now be given up until July 2025 to submit its counter-memorial. It will be provided with the South African memorial and given the chance to submit its response. There will also be time for other states in the meantime that want to make interventions in the case over the coming months — ten states, mostly from the Global South, had already filed interventions in the case before South Africa submitted its memorial, and others have indicated they are planning to do so. Assuming Israel does continue to engage with the case, once the Israeli counter-memorial is filed, there will be dates set for hearings and presentation of the arguments.

There will also be an option for Israel to file what are called preliminary objections about the jurisdiction or admissibility of the case, which states will often do, if for no other reason than to delay it. Before we get into the next full set of hearings on the merits of the case, realistically, it will be 2026 at the earliest, which is obviously a long way off in the context of the annihilatory colonial violence which has been ongoing for over 400 days now and continues to deepen every day, particularly in the “genocide within a genocide” in the north of Gaza most recently.

In the meantime, the Palestine solidarity movement has been trying to harness the provisional orders and use them on any front possible in its push for arms embargos, sanctions, and other measures that need to be taken urgently to stop the genocide. But it is that longer time frame that the ICJ will be working on.

One thing that was particularly relevant in the summary of the ICC’s arrest warrants decision: when it was talking about the crime against humanity of murder, the court specifically used language that comes from the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention. The ICC chamber said there were grounds to believe that the lack of food, water, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies being allowed into Gaza by Israel has created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population.

That’s the precise wording of Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention. The ICC says this has resulted in the death of civilians, including children, due to malnutrition and dehydration. For now, the ICC is not looking at the crime of genocide itself in the context of Gaza and the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, although that’s not to say it wouldn’t or couldn’t add those charges in the future.

But it was very pointed that it was using that language when talking about the crime against humanity of murder being committed in relation to Palestinians in Gaza. This is obviously murder on a mass scale. That will feed into South Africa’s argument at the ICJ. South Africa will have to make the additional arguments about how the specific genocidal intent can be attributed to the Israeli state. But the ICC’s language may certainly be useful to South Africa in its case.

Some of the other language in the ICC’s justification for the arrest warrants implies very clearly that the ICC judges believe Israel is acting in contempt of the ICJ’s provisional orders. Many of the orders that the ICJ issued were to do with allowing sufficient humanitarian access and aid into Gaza.

The ICC arrest warrants are talking about starvation as a weapon of war and other inhumane acts of refusing to allow medical supplies in. The upshot of that refusal has been that doctors were forced to operate on people in Gaza and carry out amputations, including on children, without anesthetics, safe sedation, or other means of managing extreme pain and suffering. All of those charges are in and of themselves breaches of what Israel was ordered to do back in January, March, and May of this year.

The ICC won’t explicitly reference the ICJ orders in a statement like this, but it’s very much there between the lines. These are two different institutions: the ICC is a criminal court holding individuals responsible, whereas the ICJ is a state responsibility court, and they are operating at different levels and with different burdens of proof. But there will always be an element of at least indirect conversation between them. For example, what the ICJ said about Serbian state responsibility for genocide in Bosnia was partly engaging with and drawing on what the ICTY had said by that point in terms of individual criminal responsibility for genocide by Serb perpetrators.

Daniel Finn

What are the implications of these legal proceedings for the idea of a “rules-based international order” that has been promoted for a number of years by the US and by its allies? You’ve really got two meanings of that term. One is the meaning that might seem to be implied in terms of everyday speech: there is an international order based on rules that are formally codified and that apply to everyone, so you can hold states and other actors against that benchmark. But when it comes to cases like this, perhaps more than anything else, it’s really brought home the idea that for the US, the “rules-based international order” actually means “we make the rules, and we give the orders.”

John Reynolds

The “rules-based international order” was essentially a fabrication of the Obama administration so they could move away from talking about international law or international justice. It was designed to manage the emerging economic conflict with China and was related to interimperial rivalry in the international economic and geopolitical order.

As things evolved in terms of US relations with China and the Russian war in Ukraine, the “rules-based international order” basically meant, as you said, the rules that the US or the Western powers had decided they were happy with and fine with enforcing. That concept is already a carve out from international law itself, which, although beset with its own colonial underpinnings and forms of geopolitical instrumentalization, was nonetheless viewed as an irritation in the imperial core.

The rules-based order was designed very specifically for that purpose in the context of Western capitalism and imperialism: to sideline certain rules or decisions with institutions like the World Trade Organization, for instance, that the US didn’t like or that were seen as too favorable to China, and to prioritize and amplify other rules that the US did prefer and could use coercively against its rivals.

You then had the question of where the ICC fits into this. When the ICC issued its arrest warrants for Putin and other Russian leaders, only a year and a half ago, it was being heralded as the guardian of the rules-based international order, the vehicle through which justice would be served on rogue regimes. All of the same broad spectrum of people who were celebrating the arrest warrants for Putin — from senior US political representatives through to figures in the public sphere like Garry Kasparov and many of the most nauseating proponents of “Western civilization” like Bernard Henri-Lévy — are now accusing the ICC of disfiguring the idea of international justice and suggesting that it should be abolished or done away with.

The same imperial and thinly veiled racist perspectives have also been ubiquitous in the editorial lines of outlets like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal when they write openly that the ICC “is not the venue to hold Israel to account” — it is meant for Russia, Sudan, or Myanmar, but not for civilized Israel. This type of coverage finds echo in the comments of US senator, “Trump ally,” and lawyer Lindsey Graham, who said the quiet part out loud in Jerusalem on November 27: “The [ICC] Statute doesn’t apply to Israel, or the United States, or France, or Germany, or Great Britain, because it wasn’t conceived to come after us.”

Graham condemned the threat posed by “international bodies who want to isolate the Jewish state or prevent it from defending itself.” He denounced the ICC’s arrest warrant decision as “beyond outrageous: it tramples on every concept that I hold near and dear as a lawyer.”

You have that line of argument, reaching all the way from liberal and social democratic forces over to the extreme right, claiming that the ICC is undermining the international rules-based order. Obviously that position is absurd when you drill down into it, but that is the mode of political discourse we are seeing around this.

On the flipside, many people, including in the Palestine solidarity movement, will be saying that this is the last chance for international law to salvage something from its own wreckage. Palestinians are rightly and deeply skeptical about the capacity of law and courts to support their liberation, though with these warrants, as Abdaljawad Omar puts it, “there is a crack in the veneer of impunity — a faint sense that accountability, however symbolic or precarious, might yet exist . . .  it is a moment to glimpse the possibility of reckoning, however distant or deferred.”

This is a belated decision by the ICC that should have come a long time ago, but it is a significant step, and it is up to the ICC and its members now to follow through. If the ICC is to be worth anything of tactical value to the broader goals of justice, anti-Zionism, and decolonization, these warrants will have to herald the beginning of the end of the blanket impunity granted to the Israeli state and its leaders over the apartheid regime and colonial atrocities they have been imposing on the Palestinians since 1948.