To add to the genocide charges
Kenneth Roth: Biden’s response harms U.S. interests
The Biden administration’s reasons for condemning the International Criminal Court’s move against Israel and Hamas are confounding. It appears to be grasping for a way to defend senior Israeli officials for their
starvation strategy in Gaza — a strategy that senior U.S. officials themselves have
repeatedly decried.
President Biden called chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials “outrageous,” noting that “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” But Khan did not say there was equivalence; he simply charged both sides for their separate crimes. The dual charges help underscore that war crimes by one side
never justify war crimes by the other.
Biden also said the United States “will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” But the issue is
how Israel defends itself. No defense justifies war crimes.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
claimed without elaborating that “the ICC has no jurisdiction.” He could be referring to the old U.S. argument that the court cannot charge nationals of governments that have not joined it, even if they commit crimes on the territory of a government that has. Israel has not joined the ICC, though the Palestinian territories have. But Biden abandoned that argument when he called the ICC’s use of territorial jurisdiction to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin “
justified.”
Or, Blinken might be alluding to the view that Palestine should not have been allowed to join the court. But the ICC judges have already rejected that argument, based on the U.N. General Assembly’s
recognition of Palestine as a “non-member observer state.” Palestine has used that status
to ratify a host of human rights treaties, which should be welcomed.
Blinken notes that the ICC, under the principle of complementarity, is supposed to defer to good-faith national prosecutorial efforts. But the Israeli government has never pursued war crimes charges against senior officials.
Khan said he would reconsider his charges should that change.
Finally, Blinken says the ICC’s request “could jeopardize” efforts to reach a cease-fire. But, historically, war-crime charges have often facilitated peace by marginalizing hard-liners. They led, for example, to the
Dayton peace accord for the Bosnia conflict. Khan is right to discount this contention.
Biden should reconsider this reflexive, if flimsy, defense of the Israeli government. It does enormous damage to his administration’s efforts to portray itself as a principled supporter of the rule of law.
Kenneth Roth was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022.
