Analysis from Israel

Note: This article was published on October 10 but posted to my site only on December 3







Moreover, in democracies, courts ultimately derive their power from the consent of the governed since they were established pursuant to democratically elected laws or constitutions. The ICC, in contrast, asserts jurisdiction even over countries that never consented to it. See, for instance, the cases it’s pursuing against Israel and America, neither of which ever joined the court.

What all this means is that a few unelected individuals have been given the power—or even worse, in the case of countries that didn’t join the court, have seized it—to criminalize decisions made by democratically elected national governments. They can do so based on a legal system different from those of many democracies, and whose provisions they can interpret however they please, unburdened by the doctrine of precedent (stare decisis) that democratic legal systems generally employ. They can ignore considerations that citizens of most countries consider important, like national self-defense. They are even free to pursue personal vendettas, as evidenced by their biased treatment of Israel. In short, they have no constraints on their power at all.

All these problems are compounded, as legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin noted last month, when people from countries blessed with peaceful neighbors sit in judgment on the decisions made by countries not so blessed. At the ICC, people with no clue about, say, the difficulty of avoiding civilian casualties when combating attacks launched from crowded urban areas, or the devastating impact of living under constant rocket fire even when the death toll is low, presume to judge countries for whom such problems are daily realities.

In short, the ICC has none of the safeguards that national courts in democracies have. And no international tribunal ever could.

Nevertheless, letting atrocities like genocide go unpunished clearly isn’t an acceptable option. So how do we strike a proper balance between the need to prosecute atrocities and the need to maintain the safeguards that the ICC signally lacks?

The answer lies in the feature that distinguished not only the Nuremberg Trials, but also subsequent ad hoc international criminal tribunals like those on the Rwandan genocide and the Balkan wars of the 1990s—massive international consensus. Cases will be pursued only against acts so outrageous that many different governments and many different legal systems can all concur that they far exceed the realm of reasonable governmental or military action.

Granted, that means many crimes will go unpunished. But it turns out that’s equally true for the ICC. For instance, the court indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for the Darfur genocide almost a decade ago, but hasn’t been able to pursue the case because none of the many countries he has since visited has been willing to arrest him. Similarly, the ICC’s case against Kenya’s president collapsed because the Kenyan government refused to cooperate. In other words, successful prosecution is unlikely in any event absent either massive international consensus or the target country’s consent.

Thus replacing the ICC with ad hoc tribunals, which could be created only when the requisite international consensus exists, wouldn’t significantly reduce the amount of justice dispensed. But it would significantly alleviate the ICC’s main flaws: political bias, the undermining of national self-defense and interference with democratic national decision-making. That would be a win for both justice and democracy.

This article was originally syndicated by ( on October 10, 2018. © 2018

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In Europe, Israel needs a bottom-up approach to diplomacy

For years, I considered Europe a lost cause from Israel’s perspective and decried the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Euro-centric focus, arguing that it should instead devote more effort to places like Africa, Asia and South America, which seemed to offer better prospects for flipping countries into the pro-Israel camp. But the past few years have proven that Europe isn’t hopeless—if Israel changes its traditional modus operandi.

This has been evident, first of all, in the alliances that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed with several countries in eastern and southern Europe, resulting in these countries repeatedly blocking anti-Israel decisions at the European Union level. Previously, Israeli diplomacy had focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe. Netanyahu’s key insight was that conservative, nationalist governments seeking to preserve their own nation-states would have more instinctive sympathy for a Jewish state than the liberal universalists who dominate in Western Europe, and whose goal is to replace nation-states with an ever-closer European union.

But as several recent events show, even Western Europe isn’t a lost cause. The difference is that there, conventional high-level diplomacy won’t work. Rather, the key to change is the fact that most Europeans, like most people everywhere, don’t really care that much about Israel, the Palestinians or their unending conflict. Consequently, small groups of committed activists can exert a disproportionate influence on policy.

For years, this has worked against Israel because the anti-Israel crowd woke up to this fact very early and took full advantage of it. Take, for instance, the 2015 decision to boycott Israel adopted by Britain’s national student union. The union represents some 7 million students, but its executive council passed the decision by a vote of 19-12. Or consider the academic boycott of Israel approved in 2006 by Britain’s National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (which no longer exists, having merged into a larger union). The association had some 67,000 members at the time, but only 198 bothered to vote, of whom 109 voted in favor.

Yet it turns out pro-Israel activists can use the same tactics, as in last week’s approval of a resolution saying anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism by the lower house of France’s parliament. The resolution passed 154-72, meaning that fewer than 40 percent of the National Assembly’s 577 deputies bothered to vote, even though 550 deputies were present earlier in the day to vote on the social security budget. In other words, most deputies simply didn’t care about this issue, which meant that passing the resolution required convincing only about a quarter of the house.

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