“You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

According to new reporting this week from The Guardian, Yossi Cohen, in his capacity at the time as director of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, spoke those intimidating words to Fatou Bensouda when she was the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor.

Additional reporting from +972 Magazine indicates that “for nearly a decade, Israel has been surveilling senior International Criminal Court officials and Palestinian human rights workers as part of a secret operation to thwart the ICC’s probe into alleged war crimes.”

Israel gathered intelligence to “retroactively open investigations into incidents that were of interest to the ICC, to try to prove that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding its own to account.”

This was seen as a necessity because Israel’s military court system and self-investigations are widely recognized as a “sham” for Palestinians seeking an approximation of justice for Israeli human rights abuses meted out in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel is also getting help from American politicians in its long-running campaign against the ICC.

And Israel censored the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz’s planned coverage of the surveillance approximately two years ago.

American intimidation

“You have been warned.”

So concluded a 24 April letter from 12 Republican senators to Karim Khan, the current prosecutor for the ICC.

“The United States,” they declared, “will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.”

These scofflaws seek to intimidate a duly functioning court primarily to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant, but also to secure American impunity.

Last year, Senator Tom Cotton issued a genocidal call to “bounce the rubble” in Gaza and Senator Lindsey Graham, gripped by his own genocidal fervor, inveighed, “We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.”

On Wednesday, while with Netanyahu, Graham commented that the International Court of Justice – not to be confused with the ICC which the senator wants to sanction – is “a joke.” Graham added that “the head judge of the ICJ is a raving anti-Semite.”

This viewpoint may have been based on an op-ed devoid of evidence of anti-Semitism run by Fox News just days earlier.

A tweet from 5 June 2015 is absurdly cited as evidence of anti-Semitism by ICJ presiding judge Nawaf Salam. If anything, he’s highlighting decades of anti-Palestinian racism by Israel.

Khan’s pushback irrelevant

On 3 May, Khan responded to the attacks directed at the ICC, tweeting that the “independence and impartiality” of the court “are undermined, however, when individuals threaten to retaliate against the court or against court personnel should the [prosecutor’s] office, in fulfillment of its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction. Such threats, even when not acted upon, may also constitute an offense against the administration of justice under Art. 70 of the Rome Statute.”

He added, “That provision explicitly prohibits both ‘retaliating against an official of the court on account of duties performed by that or another official’ and ‘impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties.’”

Such “attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence” court officials should “cease immediately.”

Early last week on 20 May, Khan moved against Netanyahu, Gallant and three Hamas leaders.

“On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for … war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the state of Palestine (in the Gaza Strip) from at least 8 October 2023.”

Khan cited the crime against humanity of extermination as well as the war crimes of starvation and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.”

He did, however, reiterate his warning against efforts to intimidate his office.

“It is critical in this moment that my office and all parts of the court, including its independent judges, are permitted to conduct their work with full independence and impartiality. I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately. My office will not hesitate to act pursuant to Article 70 of the Rome Statute if such conduct continues.”

Despite Khan’s announcement to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, elected Republicans – now actively joined by Democrats – rallied in support of the Israeli prime minister.

Blinken appeared agreeable, calling the decision by Khan to seek arrest warrants “wrongheaded.”

“Let’s look at it. We want to work with you,” Blinken responded to Risch.

“As you say, the devil’s in the details, so let’s see what you got.”

How Khan views these bipartisan efforts to undercut his work and sanction court employees for doing their jobs remains to be seen.

Blinken slammed what he termed the ICC’s “shameful equivalence implied between Hamas and the leadership of Israel.”

In a separate discussion in the US Senate, Blinken stated that he would “welcome” working with Lindsey Graham to develop “bipartisan” sanctions against the ICC. That would have meant direct Biden administration collaboration against the ICC with the man who called to “level” Gaza in a “religious war.”

But days later the Biden administration decided not to pursue sanctions, though White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration would “work with Congress on other options.”

“We fundamentally reject the ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders,” she noted on Tuesday. “Sanctions on the ICC, however, we do not believe is an effective or an appropriate path forward.”

Nineteen Democrats in Congress – along with six Republicans – who disagree with the Biden administration on sanctions wrote a letter to Blinken and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on 30 May maintaining that “the charges against Israeli leaders are baseless. They reflect the ICC’s well-documented historical bias against Israel.”

They added, “We urge the administration to consult with Congress to immediately impose sanctions against the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and any other officials who have demonstrated undue bias in their actions.”

If anything, however, the ICC has handled Israel’s lawbreaking with kid gloves in past years, moving cautiously in the face of the Israeli government intimidation and surveillance recently exposed.

Notwithstanding the second thoughts over sanctions, the American president is not reversing himself on blasting Khan. In Donald Trump-like fashion he excoriated a legitimate court, declaring, “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.”

President Joe Biden and Blinken did not inveigh against decades of Israel carrying out policies of dispossession, occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people. Instead, they sided with the Israeli leaders enacting those policies and currently carrying out serial war crimes.

Nor did they stop to consider that when nonviolent, diplomatic and legal approaches were closed off to Palestinians that a violent response became more likely.

“They say I’m using the law as a weapon of war,” Shawan Jabarin, the director general of Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, said of Israeli surveillance against his organization intended to undercut its case to the ICC. “If you don’t want me to use the law, what do you want me to use, bombs?”

It’s a fair question. Israel wants a pacified Palestinian population stripped of rights and unengaged diplomatically, politically, legally and militarily as it completes its takeover of the West Bank.

Both the president and the US secretary of state bear responsibility for the horrors being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli military. This is especially the case in the aftermath of the ICC arrest warrants brought forward by Khan and the move by the International Court of Justice on Friday last week ordering a cessation of Israel’s military offensive and any other related action in Rafah “which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israel’s brutal response in Rafah in the days that followed was predictable as was the unwillingness of the White House and US Congress to cut off American weapons in response. They are complicit and don’t think they will face any legal or political consequences for providing the weapons for genocide and the destruction of the Gaza Strip.

When the US supports the ICC’s prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin then it sees the court and the laws it upholds as legitimate. But when the American president deems the ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant to be “outrageous” that is an obvious indication of an American double standard.

Israel, by Biden’s lights, is a fellow great nation ally that by definition cannot run afoul of the law.

Sanction ICC, invite Netanyahu

Senator Tom Cotton, a “strong” Republican candidate for vice president according to CNN, who has called to hurl pro-Palestinian protesters from bridges and tear the skin off of them to boot, is pushing legislation to sanction ICC officials – and their family members – for doing their jobs.

Once you back using the American military against demonstrators inside the US, it’s apparently an easy step to voicing support for collective punishment not just for Palestinians but for family members of those associated with the ICC.

Congressman Michael McCaul is heading the legislative effort to sanction the ICC in the House of Representatives.

In a statement issued last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that “Congress is reviewing all options, including sanctions, to punish the ICC and ensure its leadership faces consequences if they proceed. If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”

His counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, called Khan’s decision “reprehensible.”

Johnson, Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries extended an invitation to Netanyahu on Friday to address a joint meeting of Congress. Schumer, though he criticized Netanyahu in a 14 March speech, came around to the idea.

War crimes are no problem in the US Congress so long as they are carried out against the right people. And Palestinians, widely vilified in Washington for rejecting apartheid conditions, are undoubtedly the right people.

Welcome, then, Mr. Prime Minister to “the land of the free,” where the ICC does not pertain and a genocidal leader is not only cheered but armed and invited to address a joint meeting of Congress.

The world and historians will take note. So, too, will grassroots Democratic voters who will be disgusted at seeing their party provide a platform to Netanyahu after months of watching Biden fail to take action.

Democratic Party leaders seem determined to alienate the base of their party. Biden, Schumer and Jeffries are not an aberration. They are the heart of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

Palestinians, for their part, will continue to be killed by Israel’s apartheid army because the US would rather cozy up with a war criminal than reverse course and champion Palestinian freedom and an end to Israeli apartheid.

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