There have been many opportunities to foreground Israel’s cruelty in the past year, but the issuing of arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a milestone both serious and seismic. It means the political leaders of an alleged democracy cannot step foot in any of the 124 states – including Britain – that are party to the Rome Statute without risking arrest. It means they join Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (who is reportedly dead) on the list of individuals formally indicted for the kinds of offences humanity has collectively agreed are gravest of all. Yet today (22 November) the British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper refused to say if she would arrest Netanyahu if he landed on British soil. Complicity with Israel’s actions is no longer viable. Above all in the West, this warrant should mean that those nations which have up until now been happy to take Israeli money in exchange for weapons used for slaughter – the US, the UK, Germany – no longer have any legal justification to continue their deadly trade.
These countries could have acted earlier. They could have stopped in May, when the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan (now under fire for alleged sexual impropriety) first recommended charges. That same month the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered an immediate stop to Israel’s offensive in Rafah and a cessation of any act that might be genocidal. Who knows how many lives might have been saved in Gaza or Lebanon had they acted in July, when the ICJ also ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands was illegal. The release of any of the damning, horrifying reports compiled by international bodies, civil society groups and human rights monitors should have been enough. The sight of 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou being burned alive with an IV drip in his arm alone should have been enough. Children crushed under ruins, children without heads, children in plastic bags: these, too, should have been enough.
The ICC’s warrant also reveals the scale of Israeli methods. In Gaza, there is risk of famine. Medical supplies necessary to treat the wounds inflicted by incessant air strikes, artillery barrages and sniper shots are precious and limited. Potable water ran dry long ago. When Yoav Gallant ordered on 9 October 2023 a siege so total “no electricity, no food, [and] no fuel” would be allowed to pass, he kept to his word. This statement, as in the ICJ rulings, forms the backbone of the ICC’s argument proving intent.
Gallant and Netanyahu, the ICC alleges, “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival”. Such deprivation has “no clear military need or other justification… Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation.” Moreover, the ICC has enough conclusive evidence to allege more than just the criminality of a siege “calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population”. As the ultimate heads of the Israeli armed forces, Netanyahu and Gallant are (or were) responsible for military actions and as such, the ICC states, bear “criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population”.
In the year after 7 October, the Royal Air Force flew 645 reconnaissance flights over Gaza from their base in Akrotiri, Cyprus – more than the US and even Israel itself. Al Jazeera has alleged that these surveillance flights were also the source of targeting data provided to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). If this is the case, then the British government will have already passed from complicity to active involvement. The UK Ministry of Defence claims the RAF pilot orders are “narrowly defined” to “secure the release of the hostages only”.
When he was still in opposition, David Lammy said “all parties must uphold international law”. Any breaches, he insisted, “should always be treated with utmost seriousness”. He did not act with utmost seriousness when he cancelled only 30 of the 350 active British-Israeli arms export licences in September. That, too, was another missed opportunity, another choice made to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians. It is a moral choice as much as much as it is a legal one, and there is only one answer. “We will not falter in our pursuit of peace,” Keir Starmer proclaimed last month. He has never failed to remind us that he was once a human rights lawyer. On his shoulders rests the responsibility to ensure that the cause to which he has allegedly committed his entire life – the cause of justice – will not be scoffed at by butchers. In doing so he must not become a butcher himself.
After the ICC’s arrest warrants, anything less than an immediate and total British arms embargo on the state of Israel should be considered a plain endorsement of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Anything weaker than a blanket ban on the involvement of British military personnel and equipment in support of the IDF will transform abetment into active encouragement. If Keir Starmer and David Lammy – or any other Labour MP – wish to avoid imperilling their own souls or being tainted for the rest of their lives with the stink of the mass grave, they must sanction any sworn member of the Israeli government and the bloodthirsty settler movement it represents. The Home Office and the Attorney General ought to publicly commit themselves to a policy: if Benjamin Netanyahu or Yoav Gallant ever enter British territory they will face immediate arrest and the speedy transfer to a holding cell in The Hague.
If in the future there is to be any reckoning with the complicity of the British government in the annihilation of Palestinian life in Gaza, it is moments like these that will matter most, when political leaders can sense the evidence piling up and when they have both the political capacity and the moral will to act. The choice could not be starker: between direct collusion in a world-historic crime and the principled refusal to participate in an extermination.
[See also: The ICC’s milestone decision]
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