International Criminal Court Gearing Up For Most Shameless Anti-Israel Legal Decision Evuh

I hate doing these ICC “jurisdictional creep” posts because – above and beyond being mind-numbingly boring – the upshot is always the same. But since bait-and-switch “safeguards” are one of two main ways that politicized international agreements get turned against Israel and its Western allies, off we go:

State Prosecutor Moshe Lador was to Monday summon the seven senior Israeli defense officials who were named as defendants in a war crimes trial that will be heard by a Spanish court… The International Criminal Court is exploring ways to charge Israel Defense Forces officers over alleged war crimes committed in Gaza… The alleged crimes included the use of white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas, the British daily said. According to The Times, when Palestinian groups initially petitioned the ICC, its prosecutor said that it was unable to take the case because it had no jurisdiction over Israel, a nonsignatory to the court. Now, however, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC prosecutor, reportedly told The Times that he is examining the case for Palestinian jurisdiction over the alleged crimes. The Times reported that part of the Palestinian argument rests on Israel’s insistence that it has no responsibility for Gaza under international law since it withdrew from the coastal territory in 2005.

Wow. Really? Even by the standards of anti-Israel nudge-wink international law, this is pretty shameless.

Quick background: when internationalists were selling the ICC, they had to promise all kinds of jurisdictional safeguards to assuage sovereignty concerns. One of the main ones was that the ICC is basically an opt-in treaty: if you don’t sign it you don’t get to influence it, but you also aren’t under its jurisdiction. There are a bunch of caveats that extend ICC jurisdiction even to non-signatories, the goal being to incentivize states to opt in since they’re already somewhat subject to it. But as long as Israel doesn’t attack other ICC states most of those caveats don’t really apply. And since Israel didn’t opt in, the ICC stays out.

In a separate context: the UN, the Palestinian Authority, and international human rights groups have spent the last three years insisting – as a matter of black-letter international law – that Israel is still in occupation of the Gaza Strip. They’ve done it again and again and again and again and again. Israel has some arguments going the other way – trivial things like “but… but… we’re not actually occupying the Gaza Strip” – but naturally those have fallen on deaf ears. Because if Israel isn’t the occupying power then they can’t get blamed for Hamas’s deliberately manufactured humanitarian crisis. And then where would we be?

And yet now – since the ICC needs to extend its jurisdiction over the IDF soldiers who fought in Operation Cast Lead – Israel really did leave Gaza behind in 2005! And Gaza is subject to the ICC! How convenient.

There’s nothing particularly clever about this. The ICC judges are drawn from the same pool of “objective international legal experts” currently working themselves into a Holocaust-denying froth over Durban II. They ritualistically mouth the legal niceties of Western jurisprudence – rule of law, objectivity, human rights – while studiously conducting legal pogroms. They unblinkingly invoke whatever arguments are close enough to being neutral-sounding enough to put on a sheet of paper.

If they do get to stage their kangaroo court, they’ll use the same litmus test for evaluating arguments that they used for determining jurisdiction. It won’t really matter that even the Red Cross admits that Israel didn’t use white phosphorus against Palestinian civilians (no matter how many times the AFP and the AP say otherwise). And it won’t really matter that Palestinian soldiers undeniably did fire phosphorus shells at Israeli civilians, since no one would try untenably applying the ICC to Hamas. That’s not how show trials work.

“Israel is no longer the occupying power in the Gaza Strip”? Now they tell us!

References and previously after the jump…

References:
* Safeguards in International Law – Yeah, We Were Just Kidding About That [MR]
* Annapolis As A Rosetta Stone For How Anti-Israel Bait And Switch Diplomacy Works [MR]
* Israel state prosecutor to meet officials at center of Spanish war crimes probe [Ha'aretz]
* THE ISRAELI "DISENGAGEMENT" PLAN: GAZA STILL OCCUPIED [UN]
* Legal Acrobatics: The Palestinian Claim that Gaza is Still "Occupied" Even After Israel Withdraws [JCPA]
* BBC Slips, Proves Liberal Gaza Occupation Fetish [MR]
* HRW’s Letter to President Bush on Gaza: The “Collective Punishment” Hoax [NGO Monitor]
* Israel’s obligations under international law [BTselem]
* Palestinian Authority: Of Course Gaza Humanitarian Crisis Is Manufactured By Hamas (Plus: United Nations Still Trying To Blame Israel) [MR]
* Red Cross: Of Course Israel’s White Phosphorus Shells Don’t Violate Int’l Law [MR]
* AFP Falsely Ties Victim to White Phosphorous [CAMERA]
* AP: Passing along Palestinian white phosphorus lies [Yourish]
* For the first time, Gaza militants fire phosphorus shell at Israel [Ha'aretz]