DFAT backing of ICC act on Israel is unconscionable
After the International Criminal Court’s abhorrent move to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has left clear-thinking Australians aghast at the government’s position in expressing respect for the body. In an odious statement, DFAT said: “Australia respects the ICC and the important role it has in upholding international law. The decision on whether to issue arrest warrants is a matter for the court in the independent exercise of its functions. It is not appropriate to comment on matters before the court.”
Joe Biden and many leaders rightly condemned the ICC. But Anthony Albanese shirked the issue, letting down the nation’s Jewish community and fair-minded Australians. “I don’t comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally in which Australia is not a party,” the Prime Minister said, falling far short of good leadership.
Former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who led Australia to join the ICC under the Howard government, was right when he said if he were still in office he would withdraw from the court if judges proceeded with prosecution. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan KC, a British barrister, had drawn a “moral equivalence” between Israel’s functioning democracy and Hamas, “a terrorist organisation which is determined to destroy and kill the Jewish people and eliminate their country”, Mr Downer said.
In a cynical attempt to establish that equivalence, Mr Khan requested arrest warrants for Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, its military wing commander-in-chief, Mohammed Deif, and its political bureau head, Ismail Haniyeh. In doing so, Mr Khan underlined the moral bankruptcy of his move. No conceivable moral equivalence exists between the genocidal pogrom Hamas launched on October 7 last year when it slaughtered 1200 Israelis and captured 250, precipitating the Gaza war, and the Jewish state’s right to defend itself against an existential terrorist threat. Hamas has pledged to repeat the events of October 7 “again and again”. Jews will not be safe until it is defeated.
The defects in the ICC’s charges against Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant are glaring. They include “starvation as a method of warfare”. Yet the Jewish state has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tonnes of aid for Gazans, carried on 28,255 trucks – an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians. Also ignored in the ICC’s charges is that Hamas steals much of the aid, from which it has made $US500m on the black market, according to the Washington Institute. Seven months into the war, the ICC’s flawed case is also weakened by the fact, amid horror and suffering, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed has been lower than in any comparable modern war, as West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer notes.
As the Israeli Knesset resolved in a bipartisan resolution, its heroic soldiers are fighting a just war against a criminal terror organisation. “The scandalous comparison by the Hague prosecutor between Israel’s leaders and the heads of terror organisations is an unerasable historic crime and a clear expression of anti-Semitism. We reject this with revulsion. Eighty years after the Holocaust, no one will block the Jewish state from defending itself.” Many world leaders did better than Mr Albanese’s fence-sitting. Czech Republic Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the ICC’s action was “appalling and completely unacceptable”. Hamas’s unprovoked terrorist attack, he said, “led to the current war in Gaza’’ and the suffering of civilians there, in Israel and Lebanon. Hamas’s goal, as The Wall Street Journal noted, is Israel’s destruction through a pincer movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human rights” lawfare: “The beneficiary will be Hamas; the victims will be Israel, the rule of law and civilisation itself.’’ Australia expressing “respect” for the ICC in aiding and abetting that process is unconscionable.