Fatou Bensouda, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, issued a statement last Friday reading: “In brief, I am satisfied that, one, war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip; two, potential cases arising from the situation would be admissible; and three, there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.”
Bensouda also used the term “Palestinian state,” which itself exposes the ICC’s antisemitic bias.
It is instructive to consider who is Bensouda, otherwise one misses the bigger picture. Bensouda is a black Muslim immigrant, an unelected legal bureaucrat, and as such she is the face of a “politically-correct” European culture that has reduced logic, as well as every other human virtue, to nonsense. And it is this culture, helped by millions of European Muslims, that is rapidly reverting Europe back to its familiar, morally-justified, millennia-old antisemitism. Fatou Bensouda, to say it again, is the embodiment of this moronic culture-in-the-making.
This ongoing process can be seen in Bensouda’s use of the term “Palestinian state.” To be clear, it is one thing for a politician to use the term “Palestinian state,” and quite another for a senior jurist to do so. A politician uses this term to further a political agenda. A jurist, on the other hand, is restricted to operating within the confines of the law. Since a Palestinian state exists only in one’s mind, Bensouda’s reference to a nonentity in a legal framework exposes a political agenda behind the ICC statement. And to make the point clearer, the ICC, or any other court for that matter, becomes illegitimate once it begins to meddle in politics and assume authority it does not have.
Bensouda in representing the ICC doesn’t seem to care about all of this legal gibberish, but others do.
A similar ICC statement calling to investigate alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan, issued last April, prompted the Trump Administration to issue a warning that if the ICC proceeds with opening an agenda-driven investigation, Washington “will fight back.” The implication was that the Trump Administration would consider banning ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, put sanctions on any funds they have in the US financial system, and prosecute them in the American court system.
With that, why still label as antisemitic the ICC’s decision to investigate (alleged) Israeli war crimes? Why would Prime Minister Netanyahu say that “the ICC has been turned into a political weapon in the fight against Israel”? That such is the case, said Netanyahu, is because “the prosecutor has completely ignored serious legal explanations presented to her. She also ignores truth and history by [implying] that Jews living in their land amounts to a war crime.”
Among other things, Netanyahu noted the “marches of return” taking place nearly every week at the Gaza border. Some call these mere “demonstrations,” but their declared aim is a mass infiltration of Palestinians back to their pre-1948 villages and towns, which means that their aim is to destroy the Jewish state. Therefore, when the ICC sees Israel’s fight against these marches as war crimes, it effectively denies Israel’s right to exist. And that, as France and Germany have already legislated, amounts to antisemitism.
And since the above was written on the first day of Hanukkah, it is proper to recall that some 2,160 years ago, Simon Maccabee responded to Antiochus Epiphanes’ threats to destroy the Hasmonaean kingdom (Israel) with these immortal words: “We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time had been unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity, we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers” (1 Maccabees 15:33-34).
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