The arrest warrants that the International Criminal Court issued against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant position Israel at an unprecedented moral nadir, as a country whose leaders are accused of grave crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip.
The ICC's prosecutor, Karim Khan, accuses Netanyahu and Gallant of responsibility for starving the millions of Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza as refugees after being expelled from their destroyed homes, and denying them humanitarian aid, electricity, gasoline, food, water and, especially, medicine and anesthetics. Both are also accused of responsibility for deliberate attacks on civilians, the murder of children who died of hunger and dehydration, and other inhumane acts.
Israel's diplomatic and legal battle to prevent the arrest warrants, which began as soon as the prosecutor requested that they be issued, has failed. Khan wasn't even deterred by the sexual harassment allegations against him. The Israeli legal system, military and civilian alike, didn't do anything to investigate these grave suspicions, while the government refrained from setting up a state commission of inquiry that could have probed the prosecutor's allegations. Any such investigation is politically unfeasible in Israel. But even had one been conducted, it would at most have provided a procedural defense. After all, Israel continues to operate in Gaza using the very same methods described in the arrest warrants, and it has only deepened its hold on the territory and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza's Palestinian residents.
Netanyahu predictably responded by accusing the court of antisemitism and presenting himself as a modern-day Dreyfus, just as he has during his criminal trial in Israel. And as usual, senior opposition leaders fell in line with the government, as did both the outgoing and incoming U.S. administrations. Netanyahu hopes U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will rescue him from this trouble with the help of sanctions on the ICC, its judges and its prosecutors. In the meantime, Netanyahu, like Gallant, will have to stay out of countries that would honor the arrest warrants, like France and Ireland.
But Israel's problem, and that of every Israeli, isn't whether the prime minister and his ousted rival have the ability to travel freely. Rather, it's the horrific actions of its government and its army, as described by this international legal institution. These are actions to which most of the Israeli public is indifferent and hardhearted. At most, Israelis blame them on Hamas, which perpetrated the massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and has refused to surrender, even in the face of the mass killing, expulsion and destruction Israel has wreaked in Gaza. The fact that Hamas itself has committed horrific war crimes against Israelis and refuses to surrender and release the hostages, does not justify the mass killing, deportation and destruction that Israel has inflicted on the Gaza Strip.
One might have hoped the ICC's announcement would raise pointed questions in Israel about the morality of the ongoing war in Gaza. Unfortunately, both the government and public opinion, with the support of most of the media, are refusing to listen. Instead, they are all hoping that Trump will enable Israel to continue, if not intensify, the actions that the International Criminal Court defines as crimes against humanity.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.