'Built for Africa, and for thugs like Putin'
American ideology is built around avoiding the atrocities of WWII, but the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian case against The Hague creates painful contradictions.
The motion for arrest warrants against Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the International Criminal Court has caused Washington to suffer a bipartisan meltdown. American leaders, some of whom supported the ICC when it went after the Russian government, are now outraged that The Hague’s court would put the State of Israel and Hamas on the same level. The Biden administration and Congress are considering sanctions against ICC staff.
The ruckus has once again raised questions about why the United States seems to carve out an “Israel exception.” The nature of the ICC affair helps highlight how — beyond just lobbying or self-interested support for allies — this exemption came to be. Support for international law and support for Israel come from the same post-World War II ideological roots, and American politicians consider it a heresy to pit one against the other.
It’s not even a hidden subtext; both sides of the ICC controversy have invoked the Holocaust and its aftermath to bolster their case. The U.S. State Department called the ICC “shameful” for equating Israel with the “brutal terrorist organization that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, meanwhile, told CNN that “this court is the legacy of Nuremberg,” the trials of Nazi leaders that began in 1945, representing “the triumph of law over power and brute force.” He argued against an unnamed politician who claimed that the ICC “was built for Africa, and for thugs like [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin.”
The U.S.-led world order justifies itself in terms of stopping the Nazi horrorshow from repeating. The creation of a Jewish state was supposed to ensure that the victims were never again at the mercy of a Nazi-like regime, while international law was supposed to prevent such a regime from targeting any other group. Although these ideas took a few decades to solidify — and weren’t always taken for granted — they are now fundamental to the Western worldview.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a fly in the ointment. The Israeli independence war in 1948 created a huge stateless refugee population and a permanently undefined set of borders. The Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, instead of resolving these questions of international law, made them messier yet. In a supreme historic irony, Palestinians were reduced to the same pre-World War II stateless condition that Zionism had promised to take Jews out of.
Biden, a true believer in liberal Zionism, wants Israel to do the “right thing” and solve the Palestinian question humanely. But he wants this decision to come out of the goodness of Israelis’ hearts, abhors any kind of hostile outside pressure on the Jewish state, and believes that Americans have a duty to shield Israel from that pressure. For awhile, the endless negotiations towards a two-state solution allowed liberal Zionists to square the circle.
Those to the right of Biden are more straightforward: they think Palestinians do not have legitimate grievances. The Jewish state was the answer to the ultimate evil, so who could oppose it but supporters of that evil? Christian Zionism, a common boogeyman of liberals, actually comes from the same post-1945 impulses that liberals are driven by. It turns a quasi-religious belief — that Israel’s wars exist above normal ethnic conflict, in the realm of absolute good and evil — into a literal religious dogma.
The war in Gaza is bringing the contradictions to light in a way that can’t be ignored. The Israeli government has publicly declared its intent to violate some of the most important post-World War II taboos, such as the prohibitions on forced starvation and mass expulsion. (Not to mention a host of behaviors that the U.S. military would not tolerate from its own troops.) That’s true whether or not the Israeli campaign meets the definition of a genocide; the whole point of post-1945 norms is to restrain war before it gets to that point.
Of course, international law has never been well enforced, and Washington has gotten away with turning a blind eye to its friends’ atrocities. The difference is that Washington is not turning a blind eye to Gaza’s plight. American leaders don’t even give themselves the space to be hypocrites, to tut-tut about human rights while enabling violations in private. They enthusiastically support the Israeli campaign, framing it as a continuation of World War II.
“The West was given a choice today between the international criminal law project it kicked off at Nuremberg and impunity for Israel,” international law expert Alonso Gurmendi stated on social media. “It is choosing the latter and thus will destroy the former.”
But the current cohort of U.S. leaders is not “the West,” or even America, as a whole. The younger generation of American elites, including many Jewish Americans, is aggressively opposed to the idea that Israel should be exempt from the post-1945 principles. European countries have also always taken international law more seriously than their American superpower counterparts; even Germany, normally deferential to Israel, came out early and hard in support of the ICC’s legitimacy.
Further afield, other countries want an international law that binds the strong as well as the weak. While it may not make sense to speak of “the Global South” as a unified bloc, regional powers like South Africa and Brazil have invested political capital in the notion of liberal international principles, consistently applied. Israel is an important test case for these governments, precisely because the West insists on carving out such a conspicuous exception.
The stage was set for an ideological showdown. The only surprising thing is the venue. The ICC is much younger than its sibling in The Hague, the International Court of Justice, and its legitimacy is less established. Perhaps that is why Khan went forward with the case: to prove that the ICC is not just a kangaroo court “for Africa, and for thugs like Putin.”