There now seems little doubt the Albanese government believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau is probably a war criminal.
How else does one interpret the studied silence by Foreign Minister Penny Wong over the International Criminal Court’s issuing of arrest warrants for the Israeli leader and his former defence minister for alleged crimes against humanity?
Why did Wong choose not to utter words similar to those of the leader of our closest ally, with Joe Biden describing the ICC’s decision as “outrageous”, adding that “whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”. And why did we not, at the very least, get clarification from Wong that if Netanyahu were to visit Australia, we would not follow the ICC’s call to arrest the leader of a democracy and an ally fighting a war against terrorists who attacked it?
Instead, Wong issued only an opaque motherhood statement saying “Australia respects the independence of the ICC’ and calling on “all parties” to comply with international humanitarian law. Let’s be frank here, this is a government pretending to sit on the fence when it has already fallen off and landed with a thud on the opposite side to Israel.
The ICC ruling is the government’s worst nightmare because it pits support for Israel’s right to defend itself against the support for the findings of an institution which Australia, along with 124 counties, has signed up to. From Wong’s initial non-comment, it seems as if the ICC has won that fight, although the government will not say so in as many words. Instead the government is “respectful” of the fact a court with a clear political bias against Israel is lumping its democratically elected leader in with other ICC targets like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine without provocation, and Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who carried out relentless ethnic cleansing.
The fundamental problem with the ICC’s ruling is that it chooses to label as “war crimes” the Israeli government’s actions on the battlefield in a hot war against a terrorist organisation that slaughtered its own people.
That is not to say that Israel has not made mistakes in its conduct of this war. It has. After 1200 of its own people were killed, Israel adopted more hardline battlefield rules in the targeting of Hamas fighters, choosing bombing targets in Gaza that had a higher civilian-to-Hamas ratio than it had accepted in previous operations. This meant Israel’s justifiable targeting of Hamas fighters led to more civilian deaths than it should have. It is fair to criticise Israel for this.
Israel’s second wartime mistake has been its continued reluctance to let in more aid to Gaza when it was clear that a humanitarian crisis was unfolding. For too long Israel used the excuse Hamas might steal some of the aid to justify restricting the more urgent needs of ordinary Gazans. Once again, it is fair to criticise Israel for this.
But to suggest, as the ICC does, that these mistakes and excesses, made during a hot conflict which was not of Israel’s choosing, amount to war crimes is, as Biden put it, “outrageous”.
Even the ICC admits that Israel was not seeking to eradicate Gazans in some sort of planned genocide, as Israel critics often claim. The court gives no weight to the fact Israel’s conflict against Hamas was provoked by Hamas’ acts of October 7 last year. It makes no mention of the fact that Israel’s pursuit of Hamas is being made in self-defence and with the laudable aim of preventing another such attack.
It takes no account of the fact that, as unpalatable as it may be, there were always going to be heavy civilian casualties when fighting an enemy like Hamas which willingly sacrifices the lives of its own people by operating under hospitals, schools and apartment buildings. Given these oversights, it’s hard not to conclude that the ICC has a fundamental anti-Israeli bias.
The government should condemn this decision and make it clear that it will not arrest Netanyahu or his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, when they next visit Australia.
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