EVASIVENESS on whether Britain will comply with the International Criminal Court (ICC’s) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposes government hypocrisy.
It underlines the crisis engulfing the Western-defined and policed “rules-based international order” and the dilemmas this poses for liberal imperialists like Keir Starmer.
Neither he nor Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can risk slamming the arrest warrant as “outrageous,” as US President Joe Biden does.
Washington has never signed up to the ICC. Its political leaders are open about being rule-makers not rule-takers, insisting other countries comply with the court’s rulings — as when Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded that every ICC member honour the arrest warrant for Russia’s Vladimir Putin — while rejecting its jurisdiction over anything the United States or its citizens do.
Britain’s role is subordinate. It belongs to the ICC and claims respect for the court’s neutrality.
Hence Cooper’s mealy-mouthed talk of “proper processes that need to be followed.” In fact, as the chair of the foreign affairs select committee Emily Thornberry acknowledges, the proper process is straightforward: “If Netanyahu comes to Britain, our obligation under the Rome Convention would be to arrest him under the warrant from the ICC… we are required to, because we are members.”
But to admit that would raise questions the Starmer government is determined to ignore. If the prime minister of Israel is a wanted war criminal, systematically starving the civilian population of northern Gaza among other crimes, how can Britain justify continued support for his war — which it continues to provide, for all the empty talk about immediate ceasefires, through arms sales, shared surveillance flight data and allowing the use of RAF bases on Cyprus to supply its military?
On the other hand, to state publicly that Britain will disregard the warrant has drawbacks too. It would be another nail in the coffin of the “rules-based international order” whose defence is the official rationale for resurgent militarism — ever-larger “defence” budgets, more colossally expensive nuclear warheads and despatching gunboats to the other side of the world to menace China.
Hence the hedging, with Downing Street insisting it will comply with its legal obligations (which does mean arresting Netanyahu should he visit Britain), without going so far as to spell them out.
We should force the issue. Not because such an arrest is remotely likely to take place. Netanyahu is unlikely to visit ICC member states with this warrant hanging over him. But because it increases pressure on the government to end its diplomatic and military support for the Gaza genocide.
The more we expose the British state’s complicity in war crimes, the more we explode the myth that the world order it helps to enforce is, or ever has been, “rules-based.”
No country breaches international law more frequently than the United States, through wars of aggression like Iraq (with Britain invariably riding shotgun), routine use of drones to kill arbitrarily defined enemies (and anyone in the vicinity) across multiple continents, and through the extensive and illegal sanctions it deploys to wreck other countries’ economies.
Biden is outraged because once a formerly tame instrument of Western foreign policy like the ICC starts applying the law to US allies, there is nothing to stop it pointing the finger at Washington itself.
And if international law is applied without fear or favour, we might start to question whether adversaries like China — which has not dropped a bomb on anyone in more than 40 years — are really more of a threat to global peace and security than the United States, which, its own Airpower Summary statistics show, has launched an average 46 air strikes every day for the last 20.
The US and its allies — Israel and Britain among them — are the biggest obstacle to a “rules-based international order” emerging, and exposing that is the first step to overcoming it.
