It is the 76th year and the 253rd day of the genocide in Palestine. The killing continues. Every day, the butchers demonstrate some new depravity. It’s impossible to number the dead. The zionist aggressors are not content to slaughter alone, but have killed those who tally and record the losses. The zionists are true genocidaires: they seek not only to annihilate Palestine, but its memory, too. And the killers of hope, those diplomats and policymakers who oil this killing machine? They have squirmed through every lie conceivable to keep the slaughter going. A full spectrum: from the most crassly racist lies of decapitated babies and mass rapes by the resistance, to the mealy-mouthed obfuscations and mystifications of “endless conflict” and “religious differences,” to the seemingly concerned but nonetheless enabling rhetoric of “law-breaking” by the zionists.
It makes a certain sense to see people place their hope in international institutions. After all, we’re told they’re above the settler butchers (the zionists and their handler, the U.S.). We’re told it’s their job to hold everyone accountable. Most recently, the International Criminal Court (ICC) sparked a wave of this sort of hope on May 20 when its prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, applied for the arrest warrants of the zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for seven violations of international law.
On Tuesday, June 4, the U.S. House passed a bill to sanction the ICC for investigating “protected persons” and allies of the U.S.. The bill implicates anyone on the court’s staff, anyone who “assisted” investigations, even witnesses. All would be subject to economic and political repression. And though the White House and the Democrats mostly opposed the Republican-drafted bill (aside from the 42 blue fascists who crossed imaginary party lines to support it), they’ve stressed their own desires to retaliate against the ICC for “overstepping.” The partisan bill is merely too aggressive for their liking. To the Democrats, sanctioning an international criminal court is much like the U.S. resolution to invade the Hague: good to have up your sleeve, but best not to wave around.
Despite the indignation of both factions of the ruling party, and likely because of it, people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause may find themselves invested in the ICC case. It is validating after months of being gaslit about the most blatant, irrefutable atrocities to feel that such a prestigious organization is on the side of justice. The zionist colonizers will finally be held accountable. Finally, someone could seize the blood soaked hands.
But this is a mistake.
In the official application for the warrants of arrest, the condemnations of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant which list their seven charges for violations against international law, are buried. They are buried beneath the warrants of arrest of three Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas; Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades; and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau — charged with eight violations of international law. The application for arrest is aimed at the “situation in the State of Palestine,” in which, according to the ICC, the Palestinians are the worst criminals. This is how the statement by the ICC Prosecutor opens. Condemning Hamas. The only thing worse than committing a genocide is resisting one. It is the position of this prestigious order of international justice that the Palestinians have committed greater crimes in attempting to break their chains than the fascist settlers have in butchering them for it.
We’ve quoted the Palestinian writer, Mourid Barghoutti, elsewhere, but it bears repeating: “A killer can strangle you with a silk scarf or can smash your head in with an axe; in both cases you are dead.” The genocide has been going on for 76 years, beginning with the smashing of an axe into the head of the Palestinian people with the Nakba, and continued for intermittent periods of the silk scarf. Always broken by the axe. Always followed by the scarf, with the expectation that the nation bleeding from its head must be grateful for such gentler suffocation. What the ICC really opposes, what the international order of capitalist countries really condemn, is that this period of axe massacre has gone on too long. It has made the simplistic, undeniable reality of genocidal apartheid naked to the world. And the ICC and other similarly useless organizations resent that their impotence is made equally undeniable by such uncontested crimes.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan revealed that, in response to his meek arrest warrants for the zionists, a U.S. senior advisor threatened him, bluntly stating: “This Court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,” not Western leaders. Khan was offended to hear this, which is by all accounts the ugly truth — international institutions like the ICC do not resist the atrocities of imperialism, they serve imperialism. They are built, staffed, and funded by imperialist countries. The ICC provides another layer of legitimacy for global oppression. It has never been the case that the extremes of colonial violence have been stopped or brought to justice by its beneficiaries. The zionist settler colony is U.S. imperialism’s most vital outpost in West Asia. These warrants are part of a larger effort to pin the blame of zionism’s intrinsic reality on a couple of “rogue actors,” who can be shuffled out and replaced with identical butchers. Wipe off the blood. Sheath the axe. Bring that scarf out with a kind smile.
The ICC doesn’t exist to abolish zionism. It exists to save it.
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