And things got much worse in the latter part of 2024. Even if the court didn't take into account facts after 20 May 2024, ample evidence already existing by then was already enough to issue the warrants. When it takes more evidence into account I bet more warrants will be issued.
It is too bad Lebanon didn't ratify the ICC treaty. They really should have.
Here’s the full story if anyone is interested: https://palepedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court%27s_...
> A warrant was also issued for [Hamas military commander] Mohammed Deif, although the Israeli military has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.
Most news reports are treating this as a single story, but posting the original source seems a good idea in this case; it just happens to be split across two URLs.
ICC and the prosecutor are on very solid ground here.
The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law. The panel included people like Theodor Meron (former Legal adviser for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Helene Kennedy, Adrian Fulford.
Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant provided plenty of evidence of the intent. Did they really think that when they talk Hebrew to their audience, rest of the world does not hear them. Case like this would be harder to prosecute without evidence of intent.
When it comes to US public opinion, that's normally the way it works.
I am not American, but why oh why are you not rooting in the streets? That is just soooo effed up. This is just one of so many issues, and AIPAC is a just a part of the problem. It is just so obvious that U.S. politicians are up for purchase.
Fatigue and feelings of impotence, mostly. I don't think public protests are going to kick off campaign finance reform. And most people in the US feel that they have worse problems, and ignore the possibility that fixing campaign finance rules might cause us to end up with politicians who represent our interests better.
For instance if it is easy to mooch off public funds you will have people run for office just to get money to pay their friends who will owe them favors. If it is not easy to mooch off public funds than it won't be inclusive.
We saw a similar scenario scenario play out in 2016 when most of the Republican candidates were attending meetings with donors who were willing to shower them with money to promote conservative ideas so long as they kissed the ring and signed up to the same list of positions on an array of issues. Some of these positions were popular (with the base and the general electorate) and others were less so, it was a hodge-podge and not a package of issues designed to win a campaign. Notably the issue of immigration was left off the table because many elite Republicans are farmowners who have a choice between hiring local young people who think it's a dead end job and would rather earn a few $ an hour less working at Burger King because its an easier job or hiring a Mexican who wants to save money to buy a farm of his own and thinks the same way the owner does.
Trump didn't go that route and he picked a package of issues which were largely popular, adding the immigration issue which was highly salient in 2016 for the Republican base and that has become salient for the general electorate in 2024 since the lid blew off in Latinoamerica and Africa.
Had the Republicans had fewer candidates one of them might have been able to stand out against Trump but too much funding can mean too many candidates and no differentiation and you lose. The candidates are fine though because they got the cash and they got some visibility. (Would be worth doing just for the cash)
Democrats have the opposite problem that because billionaires don't fund left-wing candidates they don't have enough candidates entering in the primaries.
---
I'm skeptical of other kinds of reform such as tricky voting systems because the electoral college is bad enough and if people can't understand how the vote was counted it damages legitimacy. Also systems like that have all kinds of tricky situations where the outcome of your choices often isn't what you think. (If I had to thing about Arrow's Theorem all the time I would be depressed all the time)
US has a lot of issues. Some of those issues are obvious. Some of those issues are not obvious. Some have solutions. Some really do not have solutions that do not include changes that would make US fall apart as a result of those changes. Some of those issues have business interests ensuring those issues stay exactly as they are..
All this is also happening against conscious propaganda apparatus ensuring an individual stays separated from otherwise normal bonds. Entire communities are atomized to ensure they do not pose a threat of banding together. And this does not even begin to touch the social fabric.
Some of the stuff is fucked up, but one has to pick battles. Things are bad, but not bad enough in many people's view. Naturally, that can change. And since are we raised to believe in 'the economy', it only takes another 2008 to have Americans reconsider their current social agreement.
edit: bunch of syntax
Keep in mind the conviction rate at ICC is pretty low.
> The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law.
The court already disagreed with said panel on one of the charges (crime of extermination) and we aren't even at the stage yet where they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Netanyahu and Gallant should certainly be quite worried (if they somehow find themselves in icc custody which seems unlikely) but we are still very far away from a conviction. Its not a foregone conclusion.
May the persecution of all innocent Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Africans (e.g. Ugandans) end and a world of peace and justice be established, for one and all.
Considering here the old adage that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. They both lead to the same verdict from a court of public opinion point of view, and realistically the same consequences from a court of justice.
- Britain would never have ruled over Palestine
- Israel would have never been established in the middle of Palestine
- There would never have been a civil war in the area
- We wouldn't be using it as a vehicle for continuing to undermine democratic movements and unification in the Middle East
- We wouldn't be partnering with Mossad (and thus excusing their own activities) to entrap and spy on politicians and activists
- Women and babies wouldn't be dying
- Entire family trees wouldn't be wiped out
Additionally, anti-peace sentiment from Netanyahu would have been rooted out early on, and he would have been replaced with more stable leadership via fair anarchistic or democratic means.
Instead, our governments and their NGO partners tirelessly work to hoodwink and undereducate their populaces, precisely so that the upper class can continue unsustainably exploiting resources from artificially poor countries, while also benefiting from corpgov partnerships with artificially rich dictators to establish regulated access energy and natural resources.
This is all an extension of neoliberal policy, controlling energy and growth of both foreign and domestic demographics in order to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle of a relatively small amount of people in the upper class, and to a lesser extent (in order to incentivize obedience) the middle class.
Everyone else suffers. Either a slow death by a thousand cuts, or a swift death from above. We are witnessing increasingly horrific acts borne from poisoned authoritarian minds under the justification of juicing this shitshow for just a little bit longer, and typically, for millennia now, wrapped in religious justification, since religion has long been an effective medium of control for an undereducated populace.
It didn't have to be this way, and if these systems were actually working for us, it would be a cinch to expel this sort of perverted leadership before it has the chance to carry out unspeakable horrors.
Multiple active genocides aside, eventually these people die and we inherit a boiling planet with broken social systems, generational traumas preventing unification, fragile supply chains, depleted energy reserves, and severely impacted ecosystems and life-sustaining biogeochemical cycles.
It's ultimately up to us to organize and demand better for ourselves and of ourselves.
What problem would this solve? The Zionist movement began under the Ottoman Empire and was well underway by the time of the British Mandate, and the British were overall not entirely pleased with it. Indeed British restrictions on Zionism (by e.g., limiting Jewish migration to Palestine) was one of the major reasons the Israelis began a terror campaign against the British, culminating in the King David Hotel bombing. If not for the British Mandate's restrictions, the Zionist movement would have been in an even stronger position to seize control. Zionist political influence in Britain, and the Balfour Declaration, were obviously bad, but the outcome without them would have been the same; the Balfour Declaration only came about because of the already-existing movement.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the direct result of political Zionism and the resulting mass migration of Jewish peoples into Palestine in the late 1800s-early 1900s, it would not have mattered who was in charge of administering the area, unless they were prepared to have a zero-immigration policy in the face of enormous pressure otherwise.
In general, by this stage it is expected that the prosecutor should have enough evidence to go to trial.
My understanding is that's because it's usually difficult to show intent. However, in this case, not only do we have an incredible amount of video evidence of war crimes, but we also have a huge catalogue of Israeli politicians explicitly calling for the genocide of Gaza.
My biggest concern over this is what the US and/or Mossad will do...
To over simplify (also ianal) with genocide you basically have to prove that the only possible rationale for the action was to try and destroy the protected group and that there is no other plausible explanation. With normal war crimes its more just proving the act wasn't done accidentally. [This is a gross oversimplification]
> but we also have a huge catalogue of Israeli politicians explicitly calling for the genocide of Gaza.
I don't think that is relavent here, as genocide is not one of the charges. Additionally, that would probably be more relavent to state responsibility for genocide (what the icj decides) and not personal responsibility (what icc has juridsication over). Even for state responsibility, its a bit iffy how much those statements matter if they aren't said by people who have the power to issue orders to the military (they of course matter a lot if the charge is failing to suppress incitement of genocide). I'm not saying its totally irrelavent, it is probably a bit relavent to the prosecution charge, but largely it matters more what the individuals themselves have said as they are being charged in an individual capacity not as agents of the state.
Basically the ICC and ICJ are different and what you are saying is more applicable to the ICJ case not the ICC case.
"Double reasonableness" is used to delete tax advantages for certain things which you say were correctly exempt from taxation or attracted significant tax advantages but the government alleges you were in fact just generally avoiding paying tax and whatever you were doing doesn't count. It's not a crime to have mistakenly believed you didn't owe tax, but, if a court finds against you, you would now owe the back tax, plus potentially penalties.
The "double" comes from a requirement that not only can the reasonable person (say, a juror) not think of any way that what you're doing isn't just avoiding tax, but they can't even imagine any other reasonable person who thinks what you were doing made sense for another reason beside avoiding taxes either.
The idea is this only triggers for people who are very obviously dodging tax, so that their scheme sounds completely ludicrous unless it is explained that they hoped to avoid taxation, rather than just being a slightly eccentric thing to do which happened to have tax benefits when they did it.
"I buy and sell used cars" makes you a used car dealer. No reason you shouldn't take advantage of used car tax treatments which are a significant benefit.
"I let somebody else do all the buying and selling" OK, I guess you just own the business? Nothing wrong with that, small business, entrepreneurship, excellent.
"I don't own the business or anything, I just get the advantageous tax treatment". Huh, well it's very good of the people actually doing the transactions to let you benefit while they go without, very generous indeed, but at least you're ensuring a healthy market in used cars.
"Oh, there's just one car. That car is just bought and sold over and over again to make up the amount of money I requested". See, now that's ludicrous, why would anybody believe you had some reason to do this except to avoid paying taxes?
I think the evidence for the charges which were actually brought forward are pretty strong. I mean we have Gallant on video stating explicitly a policy of starvation, a policy which we have been seeing in action, also on video.
Persecution is the charge probably most similar to genocide minus a lot of the intent requirements (which was granted). The requirements for extermination (which was rejected) is basically they have to be resposible for > 50 illegal deaths (not sure on the exact number, but somewhere in the double digits). The icc granted the murder charge, which is the lesser version of exterminatin when it is only < 50 ish deaths.
Did the prosecutor simply fail to put forward good enough evidence to convince the judges?
Not that it matters the most, the charges they did bring are serious enough.
> I mean the flour massacre alone has 118+ confirmed deaths back in February.
These probably wouldn't count as it would be hard to argue that these were directly ordered by the defendents (unless there is evidence of that).
Additionally, they maybe also wanted to go with a clear cut case. Israel is claiming that there was a riot and their troops fired only to protect themselves. Even if you find that unconvincing, when this goes to trial the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that version of events is false. Maybe the prosecutor doesn't think there is enough evidence to get to "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is a requirement that "the perpetrator knew that the conduct was part of or intended the conduct to be part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population." So you do need to prove that there was intent to do the killings which might require having evidence it was premeditated (i'm not sure tbh).
[Ianal, and im just speculating]
There was even a database set to track this large number of genocide calls. See https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
Quite a few non-US citizens express a preference on who wins the Presidency, for example.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/uks-karim-khan-elected-next-ic...
> Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported that Israeli officials supported Khan’s candidacy behind the scenes, and consider him a pragmatist who shies away from politicization.
EO 14046
It's clear that the most powerful militaries in the world (US, Russia, essentially China too) have declared the "rules-based world order" dead. Does it do anyone any good to pretend this hasn't happened? It reminded me of the post Elizabeth Warren put out complaining that Trump was breaking the law because he didn't sign some ethics pledge: https://x.com/SenWarren/status/1856046118322188573. I couldn't help but roll my eyes. All Warren was doing was showing how pointless these laws are when there are no consequences for breaking them.
The rules-based world order was always a bit of convenient fiction, but I'm afraid it's a fiction that a large part of the world no longer believes in anymore.
Correct, and that's what happened only about a decade after WWI—the War to End All Wars and look what happened.
I'm fearful history might repeat itself. It has a bad habit of doing so and often with unexpected twists.
If the 1984 vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever is going to work out to be true, then so be it.
The ICJ is at least holding out against that future.
What will you (as a human) choose to do?
These days and years are going to be definitional I think.
ICJ? Are you implying that what I said, implied or inferred was against the ICC?
Let me be clear, I nether said, meant nor inferred any of those things. In fact I'm in favor of the ICC despite the fact it's a paper tiger in areas where it's most needed.
Edit: that said, like many, I've some criticisms all of which other comments have echoed. Like most things the ICC is a compromise in an imperfect world, it's better than nothing though.
The relevance of the ICC etc. is rooted in how much people actually do, not just say.
My take: it’s a luxury position that probably only makes sense if you’ve been a winner in the birth lottery of the global elite. They are the enablers of power-for-power’s sake populists and dead-eyed bureaucrats because they are certain, at least until too late, that bad things won’t happen to them of their loved ones.
I have hunker are confusing two things here - there is international law, which the US and other delinquents break regularly.
And there is Rules based world order, which is what US talks about and attempts to impose.
For example imposing sanctions on Russia does not have basis in international law, but is part of ‘rules based order’
Of course it does.
Every country is free to choose which countries it does business with.
But the whole bureaucratic issues are not to be underestimated. At some point, the US eased the sanctions on Iran a bit (under Obama I think), and my former colleague tells me that quite a few European companies were up for doing business with Iran (related to your regular old passenger cars in that case). At some point the sanctions got reinstated, and several German and French companies were threatened with sanctions if not outright sanctioned. My former employer (before my time there) had 2 projects worth ~$5M (of 2010s US dollars, not the monopoly money I earn now) total with some of these companies, and both were axed, even though the company itself had absolutely nothing to do with Iran. They got some compensation, but like not even 10%. Apparently, the whole sanctions thing is considered a "special case" in contracts.
There are treaties that countries either sign or do not sign. The US isn't breaking treaties it has signed, at least not in the general case.
If you mean to imply that Europe is somehow going to shoot down their planes if they fly over that’s obviously absurd.
Shoot down? No.
Force them down? There's precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
One can also fly from Israel to NY over international waters only adding some 400km to the route.
No, you can't. You'd go through either Spanish or Moroccan airspace; the strait is 7.7 nautical miles across.
I believe ICC members are obligated to enforce its warrants, which is why Putin couldn't attend BRICS in South Africa last year. And this applies to almost all the western world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
So no, it's not toothless.
President Orbán of Hungary also extended an open invitation to Netanyahu despite the ICC arrest warrant, but he isnt' exactly known for being a stickler for the rule of law.
Maybe it is more revealing that you jump to the obviously absurd interpretation rather than the even more obvious, and not absurd one?
Many of the emails of Assad and his government have been leaked and show in great detail how various governments interact with each other. And how Assad ran his country by forwarding NYT articles...
The aren't signatories to the ICC.
Instead of taking the most direct route which would fly over Europe they could stay over the Mediterranean until they reach the Atlantic and then head straight to the US.
That adds about 500 miles or so to the trip which probably isn't a big deal on a trip that long.
I'd assume so, but a quick skim-read didn't tell me either way.
If it does, then they'd pick between going through Spanish or Moroccan airspace, because the straights of Gibraltar are narrow enough you can see Africa from Gibraltar.
If you want to do something other than just a continuous and expeditious passage through the strait than you do need permission from the bordering countries and have to obey their rules. But if you are just going straight (no pun intended) through then it legally counts as being on the high seas all the way through.
Edit: I stand corrected. Narcotics are excluded, but other illicit cargo, or wanted passengers, is not reason enough to hinder passage.
Absolutely this matters.
This effectively limits where Netanyahu and Gallant can travel to. That's a big deal for a head of state. It sends a signal to all of Europe to be wary of doing business with Israel, which is a big deal.
We also don't know if there are any hidden warrants for other Israelis, and more importantly, if this is a precedent for future warrants. If the court starts issuing warrants for other IDF military personnel, that becomes a huge negative for Israelis.
The next person to win a fight for a most exclusive position may decide it should be of substantially less value.. But usually only as a tactic to get the position.
I wish and hope that's true.
But I think some of your analysis is really incorrect, unfortunately.
> He's been voted out of office before.
Yes, he was out of power for about a year of the last 15 or so years, and got back into power.
> He's in trouble politically.
True, and I hope it stays that way. However the elections are still two years away, there doesn't seem to be any pathway to forcing the elections to happen sooner, and he is gaining ground, not losing it. It is very much a possibility that he holds on to power.
> He promised a short, victorious war over Gaza, and got into a long major war against Iran and more countries instead.
I'm not sure he actually promised a short war. That said, the war against Lebanon is probably the most successful thing he's done in terms of restoring his power. It's entirely possible that acting more aggressively against more enemies is a winning strategy for him.
> The next government might decide to turn him over to the ICC simply to get him off the political stage.
This basically reads as completely wrong to me. Almost every politician on every side of the aisle in Israel has condenmed the ICC. The intrusion into Israeli sovereignity is a big blow to Israel, implying that Israel's democracy isn't trusted to hold people accountable by ourselves.
Even if privately opposition leaders would want Netanyahu gone, giving him up would be suicide politically.
But... Yes.
whenever this is happening there is a war
I thought it was the USA that makes these decisions
That seems very unlikely. If the next gov really hates him they might prosecute him domestically (the things he is accused of are all illegal under israeli law), but i can't imagine they would hand him to the icc.
Not just because that would look bad, but also because icc is supposed to be a court of last resort only to be used where domestic courts fail.
There was already a cold war with Iran before Oct 7, and many warned it could pop any moment. It could be said to the detriment of Netanyahu that he ignored that and didn't want this on his watch. Iran was priming and planning for a moment where a joint Hezbollah-Hamas ground invasion would have put the Israeli military to a stress beyond its means, and with many thousands casualties on the first day. It would have happened sooner or later if it wasn't for the Hamas independent action.
Also, on Oct 2023 he and other officials said it is going to be a long battle from the beginning. He never once promised this to be short. And also, a clear victory from a long war gets him more electorates, so he aligns his own victory with Israel's.
I have no idea how to resolve this. It is a mess. But one side needs to be PC and the other side was constrained to do this and that. When is icc warrant on putin and get him really arrested.
We hope for peace, rule based … but that is hope. One side disarming will not help.
It's one of those things -- if you make up rules and then can't enforce them, pretty soon no one cares what you say about anything.
Not yet. The UK and Italy both declared that they would be legally obligated to abide by the decision, which is unprecendented and historic in itself. Sure, Netanyahu could call their bluff and go to these places, and if they backpedal, then it would undermine the ICC's authority like you said. But Netanyahu would have to call their bluff for that to happen, or they would have to do an about-face before he arrives.
But until then, I would suggest that even the fact that just two well known western democracies quickly backed the ICC's authority (regardless of what they thought of the ruling) just gave the ICC more authority than it ever had before.
Honest question, are "hidden" warrants a thing at the ICC? Seems like it would be difficult, as the ICC doesn't have an enforcement arm of its own, so I would think warrant information would need to be circulated to all the treaty signers, at which case it would be pretty impossible to keep hidden. I tried searching but couldn't find anything - all the results were just about this Netanyahu situation.
They can resume business once Netanyahu is gone.
In fact Viktor Orban has already invited him to Hungary to the dismay of EU officials. His plane would need permission to fly in other countries' airspace anyway so it would be qiite a risky stunt.
It could possibly conquer many countries by largely destroying them as was done to Germany and Japan, but since the US is a democracy and a sizable portion of its people have morals and aren't sociopaths, it's politically impossible to fight a war this way in the modern era without some kind of extreme provocation. Even immediately after 9/11, I think most Americans would not have signed on to a campaign of total war in Afghanistan with multiple millions dead.
And even back when America did pretty well take the gloves off, doing nearly everything it could short of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, it still couldn't win. So I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that any decent-sized country could be conquered easily even if the 'will' was there.
This falls clearly under 'not wanting to'.
To wit, some ~60% of Americans currently oppose offensive arms sales to Israel[1], and yet it continues. Would you say America wants this to happen?
1 - https://theintercept.com/2024/09/10/polls-arms-embargo-israe...
Yes. However, Pax Americana did, at least initially, at least give semblance of established rules working. Now even that pretense is gone.
<< Afghanistan happened because America lost the will, not the ability. Had America gone the normal colonial route, Afghanistan would look a lot different today.
Eh. No. I am not sure where the concept this weird concept of 'bombing them to nothing did not help; we probably need to bomb them some more' comes from. I accept your premise that some of it is the question of will, but you have to admit that two decades with nothing to show for it is not.. great.
Sure... Such was in the interest of America
To be clear, bombing is not colonizing. Colonizing entails undoing the current culture and replacing it with your own. You don't replace culture with bombs, but rather by taking the young people, educating them in America, and then shipping them back a la Britain (among other things). You have to do this for several decades, or maybe even a century, maybe multiple centuries.
The whole thing could have been avoided had US decided not to back France’s colonial delusions a decade earlier.
This arrest warrant could be executed in a day if the US would stop supporting this genocide, but that won’t happen. They will sooner invite Netanyahu back to the UN to order more air strikes on refugees.
China likely has a much better army, but it’s hard to say without a large scale conflict. Hopefully we won’t find out.
The rules based order of the world was once something people believed in, and therefore expected others to conform to. Until they didn’t (for lots of reasons all of which cumulatively perturbed the system such that it’s flipped from a stable state and into a meta-stable state).
Now we're back to the state of the world as it has always been - multipolar - and it has once more become obvious that things only matter when backed up by force, leverage, and incentives. Look at things with teeth behind them - NATO borders, export controls and ASML, artificial islands in the South China Sea, control of Hong Kong, Russia in Syria or any of the other treaties with military bases. There are papers and laws and declarations on both sides of all of those things, but real-world control always follows force, leverage and incentives.
So were the Nuremberg Trials not an instance of the RBWO?
(And all the UN mediations in e.g. Palestine, Korea, etc. from its very founding)
Korea... it preserved South Korea's dictator in power, which allowed for a modern democratic and prosperous South Korea to happen. Back then it was little more than protecting the US-backed dictator against the Soviets-backed one. Both were pretty terrible and murderous.
Palestine - many failures, but there've also been many important resolutions that have kept the conflict (at least somewhat) framed in terms of the RBWO and the rights of the region's indigenous inhabitants.
We also have the Geneva Conventions, etc.
So in sum - yes, many failures, but on balance I see the glass as more half-full than half-empty, on this issue.
To the mediators, I’m unsure why that would be an example. We’ve had mediators for a very long time and UN mediation is only the latest flavor of that.
They were effectively arbitrary show trials.
I mean a tiny proportion of nazi war criminals were ever prosecuted and the (covertly pro-nazi) West German government pardoned pretty much everyone who weren’t executed in a handful of years.
Also the Soviets (and even the Allies) continued doing whatever they wanted with no consequences.
Of course at least establishing a clear precedent was a huge achievement.
Glass half-full, is what I'm saying.
The utter disrespect for the CFE treaty during that period is exactly what got us the Ukraine war right now.
None of his claimed grievances in regard to the CFE Treaty amount to casus belli, by any rational metric. And they certainly weren't the core of what ultimately moved him to make that decision. They were just another part of his giant smokescreen, basically.
As his Deputy Foreign Minister put the matter, quite succinctly:
Bondarev also recalled that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov screamed at US officials, including First Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, stating that ”[Russia] needs Ukraine” and that Russia will not ”go anywhere without Ukraine” during a dinner amidst the bilateral US-Russian strategic stability talks in Geneva on January 10, 2022.[67] Bondarev added that Rybakov vulgarly demanded that the US delegation ”get out with [their] belongings [to the 1997 borders]” as US officials called for negotiations.
Absolutely, I can not find the BBC or most other major news networks broadcasting and translating any of that.
I only see that on social media
What are you talking about here? Link?
Since there are not many Hebrew books written over the centuries (for obvious reasons), modern literature is heavily relying on religious texts for metaphors and analogues.
Calling someone Amalek is a call for genocide.
Maimonides elaborates that when the Jewish people wage war against Amalek, they must request the Amalekites to accept the Seven Laws of Noah and pay a tax to the Jewish kingdom. If they refuse, they are to be executed.
There are more moderate interpretations, but this discussion is about Ashkenazi fundamentalists.
Gaddafi was killed before he could be arrested.
It also acts as a deterrent as much of the world will now likely be out of bounds for travel for either the Israelis or Hamas leadership who were issued warrants.
Now, imposing "justice" obviously only works when you do it to small nations like Yugoslavia or Rwanda. Of course it will not apply to the Israel leader, let alone to somebody from even more powerful nation.
Nope, the US has bases in Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Djibouti and is friendly with the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
In Syria, the US has friendlies and bases setup to help them. In Iraq, the US maintains strategic presence.
Countries like Egypt are very shaky politically and the others are not even democracies.
I should add, none of these countries are treaty allies of the US, i.e. none of them have a mutual defense treaty with the US. The one country that is a treaty ally of the US in the region is Turkey, though that relationship has been strained in the last couple of decades
The current relevance is strictly dictated by internal political and demographic balances in the United States.
Israel is in the Middle East.
Israel for instance has a special relationship with Germany because of remorse for the 1940s. This incident in the 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
further gives Germany a reason to crack down on pro-Palestinian protestors. Although supporters of the Palestinians have not staged international attacks for a long time the history of this in the 1970s explains why my Uni suddenly instituted a clear bag policy at sports games a few weeks after the lid blew off in Gaza last year. (When I started doing sports photography at the beginning of the semester I could pack a big camera bag and even take extra lenses)
Also Israel has a high GDP and involvement in international trade, academia, etc. Israel has 50x the GDP per head of Rwanda so they have a large impact in terms of Intel's Haifa office, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Sodastream, etc. My thesis advisor traveled to Tel Aviv a lot to work with collaborators.
Big picture here is my take. Since 1948 there have been conservatives in Israel such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu who have had a policy of ethnic cleansing in that they cannot tolerate there being a non-Jewish part of the polity which is large enough to have political power. The plan has elements such as (a) dividing the population into different fragments such as the West Bank, Gaza and Arab Israelis that don't work together, (b) developing occasional crises that result in the killing or expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians, (c) most of all making sure that the Palestinians do not develop effective leadership, economic connections, soft power, etc. The destruction of academic organizations is critical to this plan because they don't want Palestinians to succeed the way that Jewish people have, instead they want ignorant stupid and desperate Palestinians to make bad moves such as the attacks last year, Munich, numerous 1970s airplane hijackings, the attempt to take over Jordan and such which justifies their persecution in the minds of Israelis and many others
I had a harrowing conversation with a Jewish mathematician about 15 years ago where he explained that it wasn't genocide because the Palestinians were not "a people" which at the time my answer was "boy you sure sound like the leader of Germany from 1933 to 1945" but I've chewed on and have an interpretation of:
Say the remnants of the Iroquois contacted aliens or got some machine like Drexler talked about and decided, now that they had the means, they wanted to take back New York. Are the people who live in the boundaries of New York really a "people" or "nation" or they are just people who live in a certain boundary? (Certainly you find every kind of white, black, Asian and indigenous person from absolutely everywhere here.)
The Ottoman empire despite claiming to be a Caliphate was actually very cosmopolitan and all sorts of people could live everywhere in much of the middle east (a Jewish friend had family that came from Iraq!) so they can make the case that the pre 1948 population of Palestine was just a bunch of randos like us New Yorkers.
Genocide is a crime on top of mass murder because of not just the harm to those killed or the trauma to the survivors and children of the survivors who recapitulate the crime 80 years later, but also the the whole world in the sense that the extinction of a species is a loss to the whole world. Germany is worse off today because of the holocaust because of all the things that aren't there and all of the richness that Jewish people brought to Germany that was lost. (20 years ago I could not find a good bagel shop wherever I went in Germany!)
It's a technicality whether it is genocide or just mass murder in my mind, but it's a good line to get into mind of people like Netanyahu who are thinking ahead hundreds or thousands of years with events like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
as clear in their minds as if they happened yesterday. On a bad day I think the polities of liberal democracies are like children in the hands of gods when it comes to facing those kind of people as our politicians often seem to be thinking two or three days ahead, at most to the next election and we are so self-centered and focused on stupid little things like the price of eggs that they can do what they want with us.
On the other hand there are so many positive things about Israel and Israelis but they cannot find it within themselves to constrain Netanyahu and they are paying a price for it now and will continue to pay a price for it. It is likely that if Netanyahu's program succeeds they'll face a crisis of meaning when they no longer have an enemy and they might lose their culture in just a few generations and at best continue start the cycle of losing their way and getting dispossessed which is repeated several times in the Old Testament and in history.
I have access to a lot of public opinion data at work and have a brief spiel about public opinion on transgender issues backed by citations that I've market tested in person with a few people who all hated it precisely because they interpreted my lack of moral judgement as a moral judgement. (pro and anti hated it and don't care hated it because they don't want to hear about it) From my point of view it is deliciously ambiguous and it drives morally oriented people crazy.
I haven't written it up though because I expect to just get trouble out of it and I hate the online discourse (pro and anti) about the subject and don't want to add to it.
Israel fought and won 3-5 wars (depending how you count them) without US military aid, and it seems that Egypt, Jordan and Syria no longer have any interest in prosecuting further wars against them.
They started getting military aid from the US after all those wars, and it seems that the only reason they still get it is for political reasons. I don’t think any military analyst believes they actually need that aid to survive.
Here are some of my favorite sources on that! These are all leftist and pro-Palestinian sources, but they are academic and studied. These are about why Israel is important to the "interests of the USA" (ie, what those with power to decide national interests think).
* “Framing Palestine: Israel, the Gulf states, and American power in the Middle East" by Adam Hanieh https://www.tni.org/en/article/framing-palestine
* The first chapter of "Palestine: A Socialist Introduction", “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East" by Shireen Akram-Boshar. The publisher Haymarket is giving away the ebook for free. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-social...
* "No, the US Doesn’t Back Israel Because of AIPAC" by Joseph Massad https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/no-the-us-doesnt-back-israe...
From the lobbies (e.g. AIPAC), to the actual members of the government and leading institutions, to the CEOs of the biggest companies and chiefs of financial institutions, to the media and newspapers, to Hollywood, etc...
Not saying they don't deserve it, but still, just to think how over-represented they are...
On the issue of foreign policy towards Israel specifically, rather than sociological mysteries in general, I posted articles (from Palestinian and Arab scholars and activists sympathetic toward Palestinians!) making solid arguments for why this is not the explanation of US foreign policy towards the mid-east, and thinking it does is a distraction from what's really going on and how to change it (which I want to as well).
Genuinely curious about this. It would basically mean that Jews are under-represented among white people, and this sounds... well, implausible. Jews are about 2% of the US population, can you name any high-profile position in which less than 2% of the total white representation is Jewish?
For example, in the current US cabinet there are 26 members, of which about 13/14 are arguably white, more or less in line with the percentage of whites in the general population (between 60 and 70%). Of these, half (7) are of Jewish descent. That's a ~15x over-representation.
Iran and basically the rest of the Middle East, US needs an ally to keep the region in check.
The US (and also UK/France/Germany) have been bending over backwards to prop up Israel since LONG before Iran switched to an anti-US theocratic government.
US President Joe Biden: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
Added emphasis to clarify the context of the quote.
I don't understand why.
Israel basically uses them to manipulate DC, whilst its allies in media ensure that Christians getting spat at in Jerusalem isn't widely reported.
The simple reason is that global politics (at the UN) led to the partition of the Mandate, against the will of entire regions, which, right now, represent 30% of world's population. Besides, anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism always rears its very ugly head during this conflict, especially in the US.
Subsequently, the lack of stability in the Middle East did Israel no favours in how it is perceived, even if it may not be solely its fault (it isn't).
Plus, the silencing of voices (particularly against patently unfounded claims such as, "the most moral army", "anti-Israelism is anti-Semitism", "the only democracy in the middle east") themselves come with their own Streisand Effect.
Also, socio-culturally, after Tibet & Cuba, it is one of the last/few remaining geo-political global movements with the added disadvantage of cutting through all 3 major Abrahamic religions.
That was a piece of paper which changed nothing.
The Arab and Jewish populations had been in an escalating conflict for years, culminating in an all-out civil war. The Israeli population would have declared independence as soon as the British left regardless of what the UN said. Similarly the Arab states had no intention of letting Israel exist, and attacked as soon as the British left.
It made the conflict the World's affair.
In a hundred years from now, the leaders of Isreal that people talk about will be the first, the last and the second to last. Similar to how when people talk about the Roman Empire (~500 year span) it's just Cesear.
I’ve never heard of a warrant being more than a footnote in history. Results are what ends up in the history books.
I've turned the flags off now, in keeping with HN's standard practices: some (but only some) stories with political overlap are allowed, and in the case of a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) we prefer the stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI).
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Here are a bunch of past explanations I've posted about how we approach this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744331 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40586961 (June 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
In the interest of full disclosure and the same transparency, I say this as someone who has had such a flag-bombed submission saved, an NPR report about one of the first systemic uses of gun-armed, AI-powered flying drones to mass-shoot people (not to mention that location targeting for the shootings is largely AI-driven as well). I struggle to think of a good reason to flag that as off-topic for Hacker News:
This approach has been stable for many years and there's no intention to allow HN to become a primarily-political site (quite the contrary) but it also doesn't work to try to exclude these things altogether.
I do think this news is major enough to justify being on HN. There is at least some useful discussions on the ICC that I found interesting, intermixed between the typical antisemitic messaging we're all-too used to seeing.
That's what happens here, and on any news involving the Gaza War, for quite some time. To someone who doesn't use [showdead] this creates an impression of partiality in this community which is not borne out by reality.
Which makes Hacker News appear complicit in supporting that point of view.
If you're going to keep overriding the flag mechanism and letting these posts hit the front page, you need to disable flagging of individual posts except by you or another moderator (if there is one?) after manual review. The status quo is unfair.
So much for the ICC: a banana court.
It felt so real when Milosovic was trialed: now we all know the true nature of these show trials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Tribuna...
Just for show. Just to provide some veil of legitimacy for the US actions to evil does without the US itself being held to the same standards.
But while the US (not an ICC member) simply insulted the court and the notion of holding an Israeli leader accountable, it was the UK that demanded hearings on the legality of pursuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Aside from Germany’s staunch and unconditional support for Israel, other Western countries that heavily criticized the decision included Hungary, Austria, Czechia, Canada, Australia, and Italy - important to note that some of which also mentioned that despite their long list of misgivings and outrages they nevertheless respected the independence of the court.
What happened in this case is that Israel beseeched its allies to lobby the court not to look into what was happening [0]. And the UK demanded hearings to impede the ICC warrants from being issued (purely politically, as this was done under Sunak and then Starmer/Lammy dropped the objection, but the delays were already underway).
[0]: https://www.axios.com/2021/02/07/israel-icc-political-pressu...
Would that be the same as saying that we shouldn't issue a warrant against a school shooter because it wouldn't stop the shooting? Would it distract from gun laws?
Maybe not the best analogy, but I know that I cannot say for certain whether it will negatively or positively affect the effort. It might positively affect if this makes (especially EU) countries put more pressure on Israel.
That would never happen. Israel is above any and all criticism, how do people not realize that by now?
Pressure, sanctions, whatever - nothing will actually happen. Likud can trot out the tired trope of antisemitism and any and all criticism, legitimate or not, is automatically waved away. Like it or not, that's objective reality.
Before the shills come in and accuse me of this or that, let me be clear: NO, I don't support Hamas, Likud, or any organization that supports the killing of innocent people. Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, Palestine has a right to exist and defend itself.
Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
Of course every death caused by intentional starvation is a severe crime and must be punished, but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
Some of those deaths are going to be legal targets killed during combat, which is not evidence of a war crime. You have to split things out for the numbers to mean anything.
The most extreme instances of this are the deliberate withholding of aid, both in the "total siege" in the beginning of the war, as well as operations like now in the north.
You might hit a lot of legitimate targets with this, but it's also guaranteed you will impact all the civilians in the area.
Generally, in this entire war (and also long before), Israel is far too quick with the "Human shields"/"collateral damage" argument to my liking, and using it as an excuse to basically disregard considerations for civilians at all.
(It's also instructive to see how different the hostages and palestinian civilians are treated in IDF considerations, despite both groups technically being "human shields")
Yep. The complication is, the Strip is close to being totally dependent on Israel, and yet chose war. I doubt any other country ruled by right-wingers, with that much power over their already (diplomatically, economically, socially) cornered enemy, would have acted any differently. I guess, the sequence of events reeks of desperation & despair from all sides and has ended up exposing one & all.
Also that stuff is exactly what international humanitarian law is supposed to prevent. Obligations of the occupying power and all.
I'm not sure that is true. Urban combat is notoriously bloody, and other conflicts of this nature have seen similar orders of magnitude deaths.
Additionally, civilian deaths are not neccesarily indicative of war crimes. Certain types of collateral damage are allowed where others are not (rules are complex and quite frankly oblivious), so you would also have to separate the legal collateral damage from the illegal collateral damage.
> The most extreme instances of this are the deliberate withholding of aid, both in the "total siege" in the beginning of the war, as well as operations like now in the north.
Well that allegation is the main basis for this warrant. However so far it seems like only a very small porportion of the deaths are attributable to that practise. To the point where so far the icc found that there wasnt enough evidence for a charge of extermination. I think about roughly 15 people have to die for it to be considered extermination. So it seems like so far there isn't evidence that a significant number of deaths in this conflict are related to that method of war. Of course new evidence can always come to light later. (Its important to note that siege warfare is still a warcrime even if nobody dies. The counter side is israel would probably try and argue (for the recent activity at least) that they gave civilians an opportunity to evacuate and thus it wasn't directed at civilians).
Too late to edit, but i meant to say ambigious not obvlivious.
ICC doesn't claim how many deaths are due to war crimes. GP is purposefully sowing misinformation
ICC never claimed only 41 deaths were confirmed
IANAL but this is probably incorrect i think - the starvation charge is related to allegations of intentionally restricting neccesities of life. Whether anyone dies as a result is irrelavent to that charge. The murder charge is for the people who actually allegedly died as a result (of the starvation that is. To be clear, the death has to illegal for it to be the war crime of murder. Normal combat death is not murder).
Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The Gaza heath ministry's figures remain the best (and basically only) source of casualties to date. While they're no longer able to record many deaths in hospitals or morgues, they've adapted by collecting casualty reports from other sources like a Google form (which makes the data a bit iffy, but better than nothing).
The numbers are absurdly small, if hospitals were still operational, their employees not subject to extrajudicial killing from the occupation authorities and the facilities themselves not subject to bombardment.
Data from these killing fields is probably going to be far, far worse than we believe, once the dust has settled.
Over that period, something like 30k deaths have been recorded in hospitals and morgues. The 63k starvations claim would suggest that roughly 2/3 of all deaths were due to starvation, but somehow they were only ~0.1% of the cases that hospitals and morgues saw.
So Gazans are something like ~500x more likely to enter a hospital or morgue for wounds (or other ailments) than for starvation? How do you explain that?
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66e083452b3cbf4bbd719...
Which context is this? If you mean the context of past ICC indictments that isn't true. There are multiple other examples of people indicted for specific acts that resulted in the deaths of a 2 digit numbers of people.
The bar for "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity" isn't the number of people you kill. Though in this case, plenty have been killed, this case is about what can be proved conclusively ebough given who it is against.
While many of them do require a certain gravity, viewing international crimes like a more serious version of a normal crime is probably the wrong way of doing it. Some war crimes do not require anyone to die. In other cases thousands could die and it wouldn't be a war crime or crime against humanity because the elements aren't met.
In particular, starvation doesn't require anyone to have died, and it covers more things than just food. Keep in mind its a relatively new crime in international law, it was only made illegal in 1977 (for example during ww2, the nuremburg trials explicitly ruled that sieges were legal). As far as i know nobody has ever been persecuted for it, so the case law doesn't exist, so its a bit unknown.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...
War crime of starvation was directed against 2.3 million people without distinction, incl. ~1 million children. I'd say that's bad enough.
You're citing an irrelevant Wikipedia page as a source that has a crazy edit history going back and forth between "41+" and "62,413 conservative estimated" deaths
The American Service-Members' Protection Act authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
Israel is listed in the act as covered. Any means explicitly includes lethal force, which is why the act is nicknamed the "Invade the Hague" act.
If I were a senior Israeli or Hamas leader I’d avoid the place for a couple of decades in case of sealed charges.
If the Netherlands granted diplomatic immunity to said leaders before their visit, and then decided to arrest them, that by itself would be an act of war.
And even worse, it would ruin basically the only treaty every country has agreed to - the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
What do you mean by this specifically?
Case in point: the “gedoogbeleid” for soft drugs. Contrary to many people’s belief, possession, sale etc of these are not legalised in the way that we see in many other jurisdictions. Yet, teenagers sit on the side of the canal near my old home getting happily stoned with their friends and say “hi” to passing police and “handhaving” city rule enforcement officers. They buy from the “coffeeshop” whose coffee making is more theoretical than practical, even though sales of the weed they buy are against the law. Sometimes inspectors will visit the shop to ensure that no tobacco is being smoked, but not being concerned about weed, with the threat of large fines or even loss of license to sell soft drugs (illegal, remember?) being withdrawn.
It’s all quite curious.
Also anti-BDS legislation in finance, regardless of ethical etc. concerns?
The US gives $4bn/year to Israel gratis, and so far $20bn in weapons over the course of this conflict, including advanced weapons like the F35 WITH source code access (which no other F35 partner has) - why?
There have been no investigations of US deaths WRT settler violence, aid workers killed etc. Normally with any US death it's a huge issue.
What does Israel do in return to make it such a favoured country? eg. 20bn in disaster relief aid to Florida would be probably more welcome by US citizens.
Lesson learned: arms sales can be used to ideologically justify butchering civilians if the government receiving that aid is not held accountable.
For Ethiopia it's flagged as humanitarian aid, and likely for Jordan as a result of the neighbouring Syria war.
None of that is arms though, and critically more than the aid, why the legislation?
What justifies making it illegal to stop investing in a country despite it's actions? Surely that's a commercial decision rather than a legislative one?
So in other words, these two at least are nothing but indirect aid to Israel.
I'd imagine that if they were detained the IDF would put out quite a bit of effort to get them sprung from prison ... at any cost.
(Imagine if a former US leader was put in prison anywhere but the US).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/nov/21/internati...
If Netanyahu and Gallant really think they are innocent, and the allegations are absurd and false, they should cooperate with the ICC. Have your day in court and show how absurd the accusations are. If you're not willing to do that, it seems reasonable for the public to draw a proverbial negative inference.
Of course the person charged and found guilty of a crime will argue against the court. Disagreement, even if valid, doesn't change the recognized authority of this court even if the "teeth" are extremely limited.
That said, if it ever gets to trial, the defendants will almost certainly try to challenge it on that basis.
Realistically though i think the chance of that type of challenge succeding is unlikely. International courts generally are above domestic law. They probably have a better chance of convincing the court that palestine isn't a state and thus cannot sign the rome statue (which is also a long shot imo)
They were replying to this part of the comment which was factually incorrect (Israel did not recognize ICC authority) not on what the challenge on jurisdiction was
For what it’s worth, Israel signed the Rome Statute establishing the court in 2000 but declared in 2002 it no longer intends to ratify it[1]. (Which, I guess, is marginally better than the US, which has threatened The Hague with military invasion in case any arrests are made[2]. But not by much.) TFA specifically points out that “States are not entitled to challenge the Court’s jurisdiction under article 19(2) prior to the issuance of a warrant of arrest.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
"military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand"
The act bars military aid to any country that is a signatory to the court, except those countries.
The prohibition you mention is in 22 USC 7426:
> (a) PROHIBITION OF MILITARY ASSISTANCE.—Subject to subsections (b) and (c), and effective 1 year after the date on which the Rome Statute enters into force pursuant to Article 126 of the Rome Statute, no United States military assistance may be provided to the government of a country that is a party to the International Criminal Court.
> [...]
> (d) EXEMPTION.—The prohibition of subsection (a) shall not apply to the government of—
> (1) a NATO member country;
> (2) a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand); or
> (3) Taiwan.
The threat I was talking about is in 22 USC 7427:
> (a) AUTHORITY.—The President is authorized to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any person described in subsection (b) who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.
> (b) PERSONS AUTHORIZED TO BE FREED.—The authority of sub-section (a) shall extend to the following persons:
> (1) Covered United States persons.
> (2) Covered allied persons.
> (3) Individuals detained or imprisoned for official actions taken while the individual was a covered United States person or a covered allied person, and in the case of a covered allied person, upon the request of such government.
> [...]
with “covered persons” defined in 22 USC 7432 by essentially the same list as above, as long as those countries do not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC:
> [...]
> (3) COVERED ALLIED PERSONS.—The term “covered allied persons” means military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), or Taiwan, for so long as that government is not a party to the International Criminal Court and wishes its officials and other persons working on its behalf to be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
> (4) COVERED UNITED STATES PERSONS.—The term “covered United States persons” means members of the Armed Forces of the United States, elected or appointed officials of the United States Government, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the United States Government, for so long as the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court.
> [...]
The military aid prohibition does not.
"Why Europe Is Unprepared to Defend Itself" - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-nato-armed-forces/
That's your straight-up speculation.
Meanwhile, the fact that he hasn't visited any of those countries -- suggests he knows better.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/south-africa-asks-icc-...
> South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has asked permission from the International Criminal Court not to arrest Russia's Vladimir Putin, because to do so would amount to a declaration of war, a local court submission published on Tuesday showed.
Brazil waffled, too.
https://www.reuters.com/world/up-brazils-judiciary-decide-pu...
> On Saturday, while in India for a Group of 20 nations meeting, Lula told a local interviewer that there was "no way" Putin would be arrested if he attended next year's summit, which is due to be held in Rio de Janeiro.
You've got 72 to go.
Small countries try not to piss off large nuclear powers with a history of polonium use.
And if we're going to use your dataset to extrapolate anything: probably half of them will enforce the warrant.
More substantially: I don't see where you're going with these objections. It's not like I think the warrant will be hugely successful. But it has to be issued and -- until Putin shows a significant readiness to bend -- it has to be kept in place. And it will have some effect. The exact percentage of countries that can be counted on to enforce it on continent X is obviously irrelvant.
I only jumped in because of the obviously vacuous, extremified formulation ("No country will ..."). Obviously they didn't mean it literally, but to underscore their point; but still -- it's a weird habit people unfortunately have on HN.
Even Chile's stated willingness is probably a bit like "if I were a billionaire I'd do <great things>" - easy to say when it's not an actual decision ready to be made.
I like being pedantic as much as the next person, but "small developing countries don't love pissing off big angry ones with nukes" isn't the outrageous conclusion you're portraying it as.
Also worth mentioning that without the United States the present continental European militaries would struggle even against the battered ground forces of Russia. Can't really fight back with GDP of your service economy alone.
It hasn't fought a war in decades, and it needs to figure out whether or not any of its shit/doctrines/etc works. It doesn't actually give a rat's ass about Crimea or Ukraine or Russian claims.
It fully relies on friendly logistics to participate in the conflict.
It should also be noted that Ukraine has been preparing for this exact scenario since 2014, building massive fortifications in the east (which is precisely why the Russian advance there has always been such a grind).
In the event of an open confrontation between Russia and European countries currently backing Ukraine, it's not at all a given that the latter can hold significantly better than Ukraine does today, without American help. European armed forces are generally in a pathetic shape, grossly undermanned and underfunded, and would simply run out of materiel before Russia runs out of bodies to throw at them.
Europe doesn't produce artillery shells because NATO (even NATO minus US) can drop bombs after air superiority instead.
Most importantly, Ukraine is doing this well with politically imposed limits on what they can do with those weapons. In a Russia vs. NATO minus US war, Russia will have to defend against deep strikes on critical infrastructure.
As far as "running out of bodies", the more accurate statement would be "running out of volunteers". While much has been made of Russia emptying its prisons, this ignores the fact that the majority of its fighting force are people who come to fight willingly, largely because of pay. Ukraine, on the other hand, has to rely on forced mobilization. At some point, Russia will do the same if needed - and yes, the regime doesn't want to do it because of political cost associated with it, but they absolutely can pull that off if and when they needed.
The notion that you can "just drop bombs after air superiority" hinges on the ability to establish said air superiority. US might be able to pull that off against Russia, but I very much doubt that Europe can. Not to mention that bombs also run out.
Russia has been importing soldiers from third-party countries. It does not speak well for the state of your armed forces if every growing percentages of your troops aren't even your own citizens.
Meanwhile, Russia's economy has been collapsing over the past two years. Their central bank has a 21% interest rate, there a million jobs they cannot fill because those people are off fighting a war (it may only be 500,000 jobs, accounts differ). It's backstopped by being a petrostate so they have oil money as a country, but that only papers over things for so long.
This is why Trump won again, by the way. Because Europe expected the US to fund their defense in this war, and people who do not live in cities with access to the global market see no benefit to aiding Europe and voted that Europe should pay for its own defense.
I guess now we'll get to see what happens when the US lets those European nations that are shaded green defend themselves without us.
Oh, this is simple. Ukraine would be able to defend itself if it kept nuclear weapons. However they signed a treaty with USA, UK and Russia and gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for some security guarantees. Russia did not honor that agreement. If USA and UK fail to provide adequate support, nobody will sign such treaties again. What’s even worse, nuclear arms are becoming the only real security guarantee, so the fate of Ukraine defines the fate of nuclear non-proliferation.
As far as i am aware, this is a false statement. Israel has been opposed to the ICC since its inception (originally because the first version had a judge selection mechanism they thought was biased against them, although i am sure there are other reasons they object, especially relating to their settlements).
Perhaps you are confusing the ICC with the ICJ, which are totally different things.
The ICC authority is being derived from the Palestinian Authority applying for membership and the Court deciding earlier in a 2-1 decision that Palestine is a state, the PA is the legitimate government of Palestine, and that Gaza is territory under its jurisdiction.
I think you are overstating it. They made a provisional decision, but just for the purpose of if the investigation can go forward. The decision does not decide whether or not palestine is a state in general, and if this ever goes to trial the defendants can still challenge this decision.
Israel never ratified the Rome statute. The US withdrew but Israel never ratified it in the first place.
> It has a history of being very transparent in its decisions and is widely recognized as being neutral and fair in their decision making process
There is a long section on criticism against the ICC, not just from Israel, that suggests otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
the rome statute itself contains provisions that limit its reach. article 98 precludes extradition, which has been abused by the US to prevent US nationals from being tried.
in short the ICC is allowed to go after western geopolitical rivals, however going after an ally whos committing genocide is a bridge too far; they will be shielded. for example: the US pressured its allies to refuse to refer any activities in Afghanistan to the ICC and largely succeeded as its allies form the dominant half of the UN Security council. whats interesting here is the US seems so isolated this time as to have lost the ability to block the referral. perhaps a first in history.
Out of all lawyers/attorneys/prosecutors/judges that I met in my life, that one was the one that I would judge to bet he most idealistic and justice motivated (admittedly based on my gut instinct); a very rare breed.
It's good that there are such institutions with a good purpose, staffed with good people. Bad faith actors - including war criminals - will of course claim agendas (other than bringing justice), deny jurisdiction etc. but it is a good starting point to have them. The next step is to strive to give these organizations enough "teeth" to execute.
The "individual bully" problem needs some addressing, a solution to that remains outstanding.
Either 40,000+ people dead or seemingly nearly all Palestinian's civilian infrastructure being destroyed, both warrant being witnessed and investigated by the international community with a fine tooth comb, no?
The ICC isn't some amateur city court in some backwaters country, it is the current epitome and evolutionary state from effort and passion of humanity towards holding the line for justice.
The ICC has not accused anyone of genocide. It does have juridsiction over personal criminal responsibility for gdnocide, but so far, nothing on that front has been mentioned.
South africa is suing israel at the icj alleging state responsibility for genocide, however that is different from personal responsibility, and different standards of evidence and procedures apply. Its also a totally separate court system.
ICC and ICJ are different, yes.
However if you didn't mean that, what did you mean by "person accused of genocide"? Who is accusing them? You personally?
Countless people are accusing him of genocide, including the ICC, and it certainly looks like a genocide by me; the problem with this discussion is no one defending the side accused of genocide will actually get into details of defining what could actually constitute genocide - so keeping it up in the air vague, which then allows them to not actually stand for it or against it - because there's nothing defined; most people have a wrong legal definition in their head for what constitutes genocide as well.
Personally yes, from what I have seen, the rhetoric from high up Israeli politicians and government officials, I would argue it's genocide.
The ICF has concluded officially as well that it is apartheid - and that those itnernational rules apply to Israel.
Well if you wrote clearly we wouldn't have this issue.
> Countless people are accusing him of genocide, including the ICC
The ICC explicitly have not. Perhaps they might in the future, but genocide was not one of the charges. If the icc prosecutor believes he has evidence of genocide occuring he has the authority to request a warrant for it (or request the existing warrant be amended)
As for others, well the icc is basically the only court with competent juridsiction (technically a domestic israel court would also, but it seems pretty unlikely at this point that the israeli gov would arrest their own PM for genocide). I dont find random people very meaningful compared to charges at court where evidence actually has to be presented.
> the problem with this discussion is no one defending the side accused of genocide will actually get into details of defining what could actually constitute genocide
The rome statue defines genocide which would be the definition used by the ICC. It is the same as how the genocide convention defines it which is essentially the official definition.
There is case law on how to specificly interpret the definition. Genocide is not a new concept at this point, and there exists people who have been tried for genocide in the past which has generated case law.
> most people have a wrong legal definition in their head for what constitutes genocide as well.
Yes, i agree that is an issue. However just because people have wrong beliefs does not mean the crime is undefined.
> The ICF has concluded officially as well that it is apartheid
I assume you mean ICJ here? They did not conclude that. They concluded that israel violated "Article 3 of CERD". Article 3 includes apartheid but it also includes other things. The ICJ did not specify which part of article 3 israel violated. (Obviously pretty bad either way)
What did you even hope to get across here?
Genocide is a major crime. Whether or not someone is facing charges for it is a big deal. The facts matter.
There never seems to be much critical thinking on the quick one-liners that on the surface appear to often be one-liner propaganda talking points used for deflection, to give an easy memorable line for an otherwise ideological mob to learn-train them with to then parrot.
(edited tran->train)
Like this is basically only the second time that a sitting head of state of a functioning country has had a warrant issued against them. Its fairly unprecedented. I don't agree with the claims the icc is biased against israel, but the fact they are acting at all certainly shows they aren't biased for them.
Now Netanyahu has done enough blatantly, what's argued by some to be the most video/photographed-recorded genocide in history, the hierarchy and people resource hierarchy of the ICC hasn't fallen to Israeli political pressure (or whatever other tactics Mossad is known to use to try to get their way).
Once again, your final point is more neutral - where you could only really honestly say that if in a vacuum, if you're not looking behind the scenes with how much pressure Israel has put publicly and privately on members of the ICC to not file nor then issue charges, etc.
They don't have veto powers of the ICC. Neither are even members.
However if your point is that both are powerful political actors, i think that speaks to a lack of pro-israel bias since they are going ahead with the charges despite the objections (and down right threats) from both countries which are super powerful actors.
> Now Netanyahu has done enough blatantly, what's argued by some to be the most video/photographed-recorded genocide in history,
It should be noted that genocide is not one of the charges. The ICC has juridsiction over genocide, but the ICC prosecuter has not accused israel of genocide thus far.
There's a reason why the US does not recognize the ICC.
"International Law" is a joke if China, Russia, France, UK, and US can unilaterally decide not to enforce it.
Your statement seems to imply that the Iraq War was unusually bad in terms of war crimes. If so, you should be able to give several examples of 21st century conflicts which you're confident had fewer war crimes committed per capita. Can you do so?
The way I see it, there are two rough hypotheses here:
Hypothesis 1: The US is an unusually evil country which has a harmful effect on world affairs. Its actions in Iraq exemplify this. The recent trend towards US isolationism is good, since isolationism will diminish its pernicious effects on world affairs.
Hypothesis 2: War crimes and violations of the laws of war are ubiquitous in conflict. The international treaties prohibiting them were well-intentioned but largely fruitless. The psychology of war drives soldiers to commit war crimes, and/or the incentives to commit war crimes are too strong. The US has a free press, and has systems in place to prosecute service members who commit war crimes, so you hear more about war crimes committed by the US than by other countries. But the per capita rate of the US committing war crimes may actually be lower than average.
What evidence is available that lets us differentiate between these hypotheses?
Never forget the CIA employee who killed a random guy in a car crash in the UK by driving on the wrong side of the road (who the fuck does this accidentally?), then got promptly evacuated back to the US, so that the family seeking justice could be told "get fucked, she's important, you are not". Anne Sacoolas. I really think this says a lot about how the US treats the idea of justice.
That's not some meaningful example of the US being especially bad in international relations, and certainly not evidence of the US being especially bad at committing war crimes.
Is this the golden standard you're aspiring for?
I agree it would've been better for the perpetrator to face justice in the UK.
Did they now? How many of the guilty went to prison for Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo? Bagram torture? The kidnapping of random civilians to get tortured is some heinous shit, yet very few people were convicted of it, let alone served any time even remotely worth of the crime. The worst I can find for Abu Ghraib in particular is 6 years, which is laughable; and all of the convicted were the service members perpetrating their crimes, none of their commanders were also convicted. Let alone the people who allowed torture as an "interrogation technique".
Can you provide a citation for the claim that these were literally random civilians (as opposed to people suspected of committing a crime or plotting to commit a crime)?
>very few people were convicted of it
The obvious possibility is that few were convicted because it wasn't widespread.
---
As an American, I think you are correct that these incidents may constitute evidence of institutional rot in our armed forces. I'm thinking maybe I should vote for politicians who will withdraw the US from NATO, so that the US will be involved in fewer wars in the future, and there will be fewer opportunities for American soldiers to commit war crimes. Do you support this?
Another one was kidnapped because of his watch type, a Casio: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-fil...
There was also another one who had the misfortune of sharing his name with a man accused of terrorism.
> The obvious possibility is that few were convicted because it wasn't widespread
Considering the well known and documented facts around Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, that's obvious not possible and not true.
NATO being a defensive alliance, your last point has no merit.
Looks much more like a case of a guilty Afghan framing an innocent Afghan for a crime, than a case of the US flipping coins in order to kidnap civilians 'at random'.
>Another one was kidnapped because of his watch type, a Casio: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-fil...
This article doesn't appear to substantiate the claim that anyone was kidnapped solely for owning a Casio. Can you quote the specific excerpt that you believe substantiates this claim?
What fraction of watches worldwide would you estimate are Casio F-91W wristwatches? Supposing we know that Al Qaeda trainees are issued this specific make and model of watch. (The Guardian: "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan...") Are you familiar with the concept of a likelihood ratio? Can you estimate the likelihood ratio for someone being an Al Qaeda trainee given that they possess this specific make and model of watch? Do you understand how a sequence of likelihood ratios (pieces of evidence) can be multiplied together to get a posterior likelihood ratio, from which you can derive a probability estimate that e.g. someone is a terrorist?
>There was also another one who had the misfortune of sharing his name with a man accused of terrorism.
Suppose you learn that your local police department has arrested a man who shares the name of a man on your country's "most wanted" list. What would be an appropriate response? Fire the person who arrested him and everyone in the chain of command? Or accept that mistakes are made, and arresting innocent people is an inevitable part of having a justice system?
Now (as in the Dilwar case) imagine that your local police department is operating in a warzone, does not speak the local language, experienced an attack on their police building this morning, and are trained to fight wars as opposed to administer justice. What result do you expect?
I asked whether the people involved were "literally random civilians" vs "people suspected of committing a crime or plotting to commit a crime". All of your examples appear to be people suspected of crime, in some cases for good reason. So -- thanks for answering my question, I guess?
(To clarify, I agree that the US made serious mistakes in Iraq/Afghanistan, and Dilawar's story is incredibly sad and tragic. However, I think my original point about the comparative per-capita rate basically stands. Israel recently got hit by a large terrorist attack, akin to Sept 11, and I would argue their response has been far more indiscriminate and vindictive than the US's: https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1859069963132432562#m No one has provided any comparative data re: 21st century conflicts where we can be confident fewer war crimes were committed per capita, as I requested.)
>Considering the well known and documented facts around Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, that's obvious not possible and not true.
Given your very creative interpretation of the sources you've shared so far, where arresting someone who shares the name of a suspect is basically the same as arresting someone 'at random', I reckon there's a decent chance that this claim of yours is also based on a creative interpretation of some kind.
>NATO being a defensive alliance, your last point has no merit.
Are you sure we can trust the US to keep it a defensive alliance? Perhaps they will provoke the alliance into a conflict.
Perhaps it's best for the US to withdraw from the alliance so it stays defensive. That's safer for other NATO members, because it will prevent them from becoming entangled in conflicts that are provoked by the US.
Even if fighting a defensive war, the US will likely commit war crimes. They committed war crimes in Iraq, and also in Europe as part of WW2. (Along with ~every nation that participated in WW2, I believe.)
---
I just want you to take a consistent position here!
One consistent position is that we should think of war crimes as being sort of like regular crimes. If you picked up a newspaper and saw that someone committed a murder in your country, would you view it as a reflection on the millions of people who live in your country? Or as a reflection on that individual? Or somewhere in between?
Alternatively, if you actually believe your own arguments, that the US is a uniquely evil country, then you should accept the straightforward implications of that. You should wish to diplomatically disentangle the US from your own country, which means you should praise US withdrawal from NATO. If the US is evil, you shouldn't wish to be allied with it, same way you wouldn't wish to be allied with Nazi Germany -- even as part of a "defensive alliance".
Again, I just what you to take a consistent position. I don't particularly care so much what it is. I just want you to accept the very straightforward implications of the claims that you yourself are making!
Why should my tax dollars pay to defend your country, if my country will inevitably end up committing war crimes in the process, and open us up to accusations that we are all monsters, like the accusations you're making in this thread? This just seems like a lose-lose proposition to me, as a US citizen. It seems better to just not have this arrangement, and withdraw from NATO.
How would you feel if you were in my position? Can you see how absurd this conversation feels to me?
You're being far too charitable to the occupying forces. Remember, they tortured the guy to death. Whether their own people picked the guy up off the street, or they outsourced the task to their local proxy forces (likely offering cash incentives, thus more or less guaranteeing that exactly this sort of thing would happpen), ultimately doesn't matter too much. If at all.
This article doesn't appear to substantiate the claim that anyone was kidnapped solely for owning a Casio. Can you quote the specific excerpt that you believe substantiates this claim?
This fellow, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salih_Uyar
According to Mother Jones:
More than a dozen detainees were cited for owning cheap digital watches, particularly "the infamous Casio watch of the type used by Al Qaeda members for bomb detonators."I was responding to the specific claim: "The kidnapping of random civilians to get tortured". This claim seems to be clear hyperbole.
>they outsourced the task to their local proxy forces (likely offering cash incentives, thus more or less guaranteeing that exactly this sort of thing would happpen)
It says right there in the Dilawar article that the Afghan who framed him is suspected of being responsible for the rocket attack. But yes, I suppose this was all secretly orchestrated by the US somehow...
It says right there in the Salih Uyar article that the watch was just one reason. You can see the other reasons here (Wikipedia citation): https://web.archive.org/web/20060711215342/http://www.ciponl...
A pattern I'm seeing in this thread: Someone makes a hyperbolic "America is evil" claim. I spend, like, 60 seconds investigating. The claim doesn't appear to hold up.
It seems clear to me that you, and others, love to exaggerate how evil the US is, regardless of the facts. And you haven't given a historical example of a country that did a good job of addressing counterinsurgency/counterterrorism with belligerents who hide in a civilian popuation. For example, perhaps you think that China's method in Xinjiang represents a superior approach? Please, provide a model that you think worked well!
I just want you to do one of two things: (a) admit you/others in this thread might be exaggerating a smidge, or (b) embrace the logical implication of your position, that the US should withdraw from NATO.
I don't care which of those you do -- I just want you to be consistent!
As an American, I personally have become more and more convinced that the US should withdraw from NATO, with every comment that's left in this thread. It just isn't worth the risk that something like this will happen again in the future, should the US become involved in another major war.
And, I don't think Americans should die for people who love to exaggerate how evil we are. That's absurd, frankly.
Frankly -- to every extent you think we're busily trying to "dial up" America's innate evilness, it seems you're definitely trying to divert/deflect blame for its actions, also. For example, spinning the torture/murder of Dilawar as a matter of his being framed by locals (as if that were the primary cause of what happened to him); without focusing on the infinitely bigger circumstances behind his death, which is the simple fact of the occupying soldiers choosing to beat the guy to a bloody pulp in the first place.
There's also the weird way you describe his death as "sad and tragic", as if it were a car accident, or something similar fateful. It was nothing of the sort of course - it was a war crime, straight up.
Someone makes a hyperbolic "America is evil" claim.
They said nothing of the sort. The initial commenter made some serious (and in my view perfectly justified) criticisms of the fact that the US never seems to have undergone a genuine moral reckoning for the moral disaster that was the 2003 Iraq invasion.
But this is very different from an essentializing, moralistic statement like "America is evil". So for all your concerns about hyperbolicizing over small details such as why exactly so-and-so got picked up before they were tortured, you're clearly doing some serious hyperbolicizing yourself in this case, and in a much intentional, top-down way.
Why do the errors of your "laziness" all point in the same direction? Motivated reasoning is the obvious explanation.
>spinning the torture/murder of Dilawar as a matter of his being framed by locals (as if that were the primary cause of what happened to him)
Yet again I will emphasize that I was responding to the claim "The kidnapping of random civilians to get tortured". Way up in this thread I stated:
>Can you provide a citation for the claim that these were literally random civilians (as opposed to people suspected of committing a crime or plotting to commit a crime)?
Perhaps you were too lazy to read that part?
The question here is not how gruesome the crime is. Repeating myself yet again: The question is the degree to which this crime reflects on the entire US nation, vs specific culpable individuals. Insofar as it reflects on the entire US nation, that's where the implication that we should withdraw from NATO is straightforward.
>There's also the weird way you describe his death as "sad and tragic", as if it were a car accident, or something similar fateful. It was nothing of the sort of course - it was a war crime, straight up.
I already stated in this thread: "I think you are correct that the US service members committed some fucked up war crimes in Iraq."
I won't respond to you further in this thread. It's increasingly clear based on your responses that you simply aren't reading what I'm writing, and aren't thinking very hard about this topic.
And, I don't think my nation should be defending yours. You're not an ally. An "alliance" means mutual benefit. But there's no benefit to me from partnering with you. Defending you is charity, and considered as charity, it is frankly terrible. I don't believe in charity for wealthy, self-righteous, entitled, smug, thankless people -- especially not when it entails significant personal risk.
You haven't remotely justified why my tax dollars should pay for your defense, given the risk of US service members committing more gruesome war crimes in the course of defending you, same way they did in WW2.
The extent to which you're going out of your way to launch an all-out, gratuitously personalized and caustic attack like this (based on fully imagined attributes, such as how "wealthy" you think I am, or what kind of passport you think I hold) -- is really quite bizarre.
You seem to be making a number of assumptions, all of which are wrong.
Your tax dollars are defending your country and its interests, and it just so happens that defending other countries is in your country's interests. The US doesn't keep NATO existing out of the goodness of its heart, it's a geopolitical tool. The US wants to combat Russian and Chinese influence and prevent them extending it, so it has various alliances and similar deals (like in Korea, Japan, the weirdness with Taiwan).
Second, that war crimes are an inevitable fact of life and nothing can be done. This is bullshit. War crimes can be committed in "the heat of the moment", but if properly dealt with (punished), will not be a frequent thing.
Third, that an army which has committed war crimes is automatically "all monsters". Only if it refuses to deal with its war criminals and they're in sufficient numbers, yes, but neither of those are facts of life. Had the US executed the people responsible for torturing civilians to death, nobody would be saying that the US ignores its war criminals; it did nothing, so everyone is right to say it.
As for the rest, you're trying to deflect based on technicalities. It doesn't matter if the US or allied militias did the kidnapping, US service members tortured those people to death with zero due diligence. They were tortured to death for the sadistic pleasure of groups of people in individual locations that could have been dealt with.... But not in Guantanamo. There the torture was the result of an official policy, implicating multiple high level officials, so the rot ran very high.
Fun fact: do you know what the Arbeit Macht Frei of Guantanamo is? "Honor bound to defend freedom". Can't make this shit up, perfect for an illegal in existence, no evidence required, torture to death/vegetable status unlimited detention camp.
So you will have no objection if we reassess our interests and decide that defending you no longer aligns with them? Because that's what many Americans, including me, are starting to think. I don't want conflict with Russia or China. As an American, that's not in my interest! And, I have no desire to partner with a country full of dishonest, self-righteous individuals such as yourself. That's not in my interest, either. Nor is it in my interest to risk a conflict on your behalf which could result in US soldiers committing more war crimes!
"Helping me is in your interest, buddy..." I know a con when I see one.
I'm hoping with Trump's election, the US will act as more of a neutral and peaceful arbitrator, instead of automatically taking the side of "allies" like you for some bizarre reason.
>will not be a frequent thing
You still haven't even attempted to address the key question of whether the per capita rate of war crimes in Iraq was notably high.
War crimes are wrong. I condemn them. I support more US-internal war crime investigations. But you've persistently failed to even address the question of whether US war crimes make it unusual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_war_in_the_Russia...
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/06/24/death-and-destru...
Where are the executions? I suppose the Ukrainian military is all monsters?
Can you even give a single historical incidence of a country dealing with war criminals on its own side in a way you consider acceptable?
How about for your own country?
>No investigation; No prosecutions. Major-general Christopher Vokes commander of the Canadian 4th Armoured Division freely admitted ordering the action, commenting in his autobiography that he had "No feeling of remorse over the elimination of Friesoythe."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_World_War_II#Cri...
>it did nothing
You are making more straightforward exaggerations, trivially falsified with 60 seconds on Wikipedia. "Nothing" is what Canada did in response to its WW2 crimes.
I'm done. There's no point in continuing with someone who delights in dishonesty.
What? So war crimes only matter if there were a lot of them? I've only skimmed the Geneva convention but don't recall seeing that part. In any case, you'd struggle to find a developed country in the past few decades with anything resembling the US war crime rate, and torture of civilians rate. So yes, obviously.
And there's a legitimate case to be made that ISIS and their crimes are the direct result of American incompetent handling of Iraq post the toppling of Saddam. So we can add some more to the pile.
> I'm hoping with Trump's election, the US will act as more of a neutral and peaceful arbitrator, instead of automatically taking the side of "allies" like you for some bizarre reason
You seem to have misconceptions about US foreign policy and what it means to be a US ally, and, hell, what Trump is and what he stands for (money). Check out what the US did to France with the Australian submarine deal, is that the an ally siding? With Trump in charge, his favourite dictators will do whatever they want.
In any case, good riddance. A few countries will be screwed through no fault of their own (Ukraine, Taiwan), being surrendered to a despotic regime. It's unfortunate, but it's clear that a lot of Americans cannot tell right from wrong, so it is what it is. The rest of the world can't force the US to continue in the role it took itself as the world police at least paying lip service to freedom and morality and what not. (More often than not this was propping up fascists and similar against anything left of Franco, but still, in some cases like Taiwan and Ukraine, something good came out of it)
But the EU will take the opportunity to stand up and become more autonomous, fully taking in on how unreliable the US is. The world will be better off, on average. It's just horrible how many people will have to suffer to get there.
Surely you don't expect people to give up these very fundamental rights so they could be tried in an international court?
with the 6th amendment, signing the rome statute into law would be both unconstitutional and effectively subjecting US soldiers to a kangaroo court (in the eyes of the US)
Constitutional restrictions on prosecution in the United States do not apply to foreign criminal justice systems.
Re response: your claim was participation not jurisdiction, shift goalposts however you like
> Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who incorrectly assert (in an etymological fallacy) that it refers to racist hatred directed at "Semitic people" in spite of the fact that this grouping is an obsolete historical race concept. Likewise, such usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a "scientific-sounding term" for Judenhass (lit. 'Jew-hatred'), and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone
So, many Palestinians are Semites as well. And one may conclude when Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, says:
“It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. The Lord shall return the Arab’s deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world.”*
That this is "Anti-Semitic" speech as well.
It's amazing how buying off 98% of US Representatives can change a cultural and media narrative.
*https://adc.org/racist-incitement-by-israeli-leaders-must-en...
It exists, and has semantic validity. But it does not in any way describe a group that has ever had any kind of common identity. Or as Wikipedia (itself a kind of a dictionary) puts it:
The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.Do the vast majority of people not understand correlation vs. causation? Because Netanyahu is Jewish does not mean an action against him is because he's Jewish.
That they are willing to use such "cry wolf" tactics, abusing it, dilutes their credibility at minimum - and then should bring their integrity into question, just for this misrepresentation of calling this action antisemitic.
Personally, I don't think that's fair, but it's understandable why they would use it as a defence.
I don't know if I agree with this.
If the ICC is an honest organization that stands for individual rights, liberty and justice then sure.
If, on the other hand, the ICC is a corrupt organization that invites the worst of the worst in terms of rights-violating countries and dictatorial regimes to the table, then no way. In any compromise between right and wrong, good and evil, the wrong has everything to gain and the good has everything to lose.
In other words, I don't have all of the facts when it comes to the ICC and its history. I know that it is separate from the UN, but I don't know very much about it. Therefore I don't know which alternative I ultimately land on.
But in general and in principle, when it comes to those that are objectively and morally wrong, there is every reason to not grant them legitimacy through recognition or participation.
you're also assuming that israel is a good faith actor in all of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#I...
"Criminals" in this context is meaningless. Please hear me out.
We're dealing with the concept of "International Law", which is largely understood as agreements / treaties amongst different countries.
This means that those agreements are no more valid or better or righteous than the countries that enter into them. If the nations involved share certain basic principles and make an agreement that aligns with those principles, the enforcement of these "laws" would come from those nations that are party to the treaty.
BUT - if one nation changes its mind, or changes its internal laws or decides "nah, no thanks" then how do you enforce these so-called "laws"? Do the other nations declare war on this nation?
It gets even worse than that. Because the very concept of "International Law" contains a logical contradiction.
The idea is that we are going make war (force, violence, death, destruction, conflict) subject to some kind of rules. The problem is, you can't. You can have two parties to a conflict agree to certain things: like not to murder civilians, or prisoners etc. if it can be helped. But at the end of the day it's an agreement that doesn't have any kind of binding power or significance because the idea of war means that two groups have decided that they can't reach any kind of rational agreement and so they have resorted to violent conflict.
War, by definition, is the absence of law. The absence of reason. The breakdown of civilization. It comes about when two groups cannot reason with one another; cannot agree with one another on what the rules ought to be.
Law is not a concept that comes out of nowhere. It is the idea that in order to protect individual rights and liberty, the element of force and violence is going to be taken out of civil existence and placed into the hands of a monopoly: the government, which sets the rules and enforcement mechanisms around when force is and is not justifiable within their respective operating jurisdictions.
When you have multiple nations that operate independently, each with their own laws and rules, all you can do is get them to agree to certain things, as long as they have some basis upon which to enter into an agreement.
My thesis is that a free, rights-protecting nation has no basis for an agreement with a dictatorship that routinely violates peoples' rights. That the dictatorship has everything to gain by getting the free nation to agree to what its evil desires want, while the free nation has only things to lose (through compromise, which is part and parcel of coming to terms).
That's what I mean by "invite to the table."
Well this is true of a lot of international law, it doesn't apply here. The ICC largely deals with things that are preemptory norms which apply regardless of if you sign the treaty.
That's irrelevant. Anyone can form an independent organization and proclaim that nations of the world are subject to the rules set forth by that independent organization.
The point is that they have no intrinsic authority.
Authority comes from either moral sanction (of the people, by the people / consent of the governed) or through force.
In other words, the enforcement mechanism has to come from those that opt-in to that organization. i.e: through mutual agreement.
Which means that any "violator" nation can then say "GTFO and I dare you to come at me and see the full force of my police (if you try to arrest my citizens) or my military (if the participating nations declare war on me in an attempt to enforce these 'laws')."
So it still can only come about through mutual agreements between nations. Otherwise it is nothing more than a rogue body that sends armed thugs to try and enforce its rules while nations get to say "We neither recognize nor agree to those rules, nor do we recognize your authority to enforce them. However, you are subject to our laws while you are trying to execute your 'warrants' on our soil. And we will arrest YOU and throw you in our jails if you interfere with the rights of any one of our citizens."
Tell that to the germans who were hanged at the nuremburg trials. They certainly didn't consent.
You are right to a certain extent, that enforcement requires agreement or force, but at the same time the general rules and procedures of international law do have some force to them. They have this force because they are widely agreed on. This includes Israel which broadly agree all these things are illegal, they just take issue with that specific court. However their donestic courts recognize all the things the icc prosecutes as crimes locally broadly speaking. (Well there is some dispute over what forced population transfer means, but that isn't one of the crimes in question for this warrant)
Wikipedia quote: "States and non-state actors may choose to not abide by international law, and even to breach a treaty but such violations, particularly of peremptory norms, can be met with disapproval by others and in some cases coercive action ranging from diplomatic and economic sanctions to war."
I think isolating bad actors can be a limited solution to the absence of physical power/not wanting to start a way, which ultimately as you rightly state corresponds to a situation of absence/breakdown of law that is best avoided.
If there is no such thing as international law, then what "rights" are these countries violating?
> When you have multiple nations that operate independently, each with their own laws and rules, all you can do is get them to agree to certain things, as long as they have some basis upon which to enter into an agreement.
It sounds like you do think all countries should be 'invited to the table' unless they fail to meet a standard which you yourself don't think exists. Confusing.
If you can put in the time & effort required to make an empirical assessment of the ICC, go ahead and do so; then come back here and enlighten us all. Otherwise, this is just more of the same kind of denialism & deflection we're all too familiar with post WW2 from the many (and vocal) mass crime apologists.
Im just saying, its important to be skeptical I guess, but all these comments being like "well who are these ICC people anyway?" can't help but be a little (darkly) funny to me. Like is this really the point where everyone just stops pretending to be good guys about this? Its like being a teenager and being angry at your mother for birthing you because she caught you doing something bad.
EDIT: Asking genuinely on Gallant all I know is he was minister of defence and had a felling out with Netanyahu.
It's called Command responsibility or sometimes the Yamashita principle/doctrine, after a Japanese general who was executed for horrific crimes committed by troops not even under his command, but in his area of responsibility (they were naval troops in the Philippines, he was commander of the Philippines, the navy and the army hated each other; he pulled out of Manilla in order to wage war in favourable terrain, the naval infantry commander refused to follow him and fought a brutal urban battle that destroyed the city, and on purpose killed more than a hundred thousand civilians).
>Hitoshi Imamura was a Japanese general who served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and was subsequently convicted of war crimes. Finding his punishment to be too light, Imamura built a replica of his prison in his garden and confined himself there until his death.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...
I thought he was much more of a moderate in Netanyahu cabinet.
He is certainly not a moderate, but he is far more trusted than Netanyahu and is considered a moderating and opposing influence on him by many people. Mostly representing the interested of the defence establishment, as opposed to purely political interests (or, if you ask me, as opposed to Netanyahu's only real interest, which is himself).
This clip is IIRC from about 3 days after Hamas invaded Israel and massacred civilians. He announced an utterly immoral siege policy, but abandoned it almost immediately.
And while you can certainly cherry-pick some awful statements from Gallant, he's also made many statements that make it clear that Israel is not targeting civilians.
Note that the only member of Hamas indicted, Mohammed Deif, will never see a day in court. As the ICC already knows, he was killed in an airstrike earlier this year.
Hamas sources have also confimed this.
I don't see this meaningfully constraining Netanyahu's foreign travel options.
Now, lets talk about Putin’s visit to South Africa. So Putin was scheduled to visit a BRICS summit in South Africa despite the ICC arrest warrant. South Africa claimed they wouldn’t enforce the arrest warrant. People got very mad. South Africa, in response, declared that Putin would only participate in the summit remotely, where the arrest warrant couldn’t be enforced.
Now this was obviously a way to bypass the ICC warrant, and the stunt did not go well in the general public. In the next election the ANC, the governing party at the time, lost their parliamentary majority for the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994. Now South Africans had several other reasons to ditch the ANC, but this stunt certainly didn’t help.
In a great many other countries, including nearly all Western countries, the warrant is still in effect.
And even in the South African case: the government's decision was considered quite tenuous, which is why Putin cancelled his visit, in was was considered to be a major diplomatic setback at the time. So at the end of the day -- the warrant still had significant effect, and fulfilled its purpose.
Putin has visited around 20 countries after this ICC warrant including UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, Armenia, Vietnam , India (planned), Uzbekistan ...
Start here and start counting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_presiden...
But I know you wont. Your response will be shifting some goal posts like "these are not real countries because they don't exist in my coloring book"
"The fact that he's only been able to visit a relative handful of countries -- nearly all of which were traditional Cold War allies (and several of these being current or former vassal states) -- indicates that, by and large, the warrant is working as intended."
BTW the number is 9, not 20.
I get 16 from the Wiki:
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Iran
Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan
Armenia
Kyrgyzstan
Belarus
China
United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia
North Korea
Vietnam
Azerbaijan
Mongolia
Turkmenistan
I don't understand why this would matter. Does it matter the rationale for increasing aid? I would think the only thing that should matter would be weather the aid was sufficient or not. (I appreciate in the end icc pretrial felt it wasn't enough , but i think that is the only thing that should matter)
Like if someone is accused of murder, but doesn't because a friend told them not to, we don't throw them in jail because they decided not to murder for the wrong reasons.
But when aid is not sufficient, I think rationale/intent makes more of a difference. If you're doing it for the right reasons and putting in a good effort, sufficiency may not be acheivable and it may not be right to charge you with not acheiving it. If you're only doing it to keep your friends happy, and it's insufficient, maybe there was more you could have done.
whether somebody accidentally stabbed a person 90 times or intentionally stabbed the person 90 times, for instance, is captured via the concept of intent.
>decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional.
I may be misinterpreting legal jargon, but "conditional" implies Israel often didn't want to allow humanitarian assistance unless Israel received something. This isn't allowed under international law. Relevant excerpt from the announcement:
>This finding is based on the role of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant in impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal.
Parties to conflict are expected to facilitate aid, not just allow it, and definitely not set conditions.
> Parties to conflict are expected to facilitate aid, not just allow it, and definitely not set conditions.
I think they are allowed to set some conditions, they just can't be arbitrary or prevent aid. Like they can set conditions around checkpoints, inspections, where aid can enter the country, as long as it isn't arbitrary or impedes the aid. (Obviously the ICC is implying something much different than those types of conditions)
If the starvation is a "simple" side-effect of the combat situation, but you're working actively to alleviate it on your own volition (by doing your best to let in aid organizations, etc) then it's obvious to see there is no intent to it.
If, on the other hand, you have to be pressured by the international community, including your closest allies for every tiny step in the direction of letting in aid, and you will immediately jump two steps back as soon as the pressure eases slightly, then it can be inferred that you really really want the starvation to happen and your only problem with the situation is getting away with it.
(Not even starting with all the government officials who spelled out the whole intent explicitly in public, documented quotes)
> Like if someone is accused of murder, but doesn't because a friend told them not to, we don't throw them in jail because they decided not to murder for the wrong reasons.
The problem is that the murder is happening here and the friend is trying - badly - to convince the person to pull out the knife.
If they did not carry out any action then this holds true. But there were actions carried out that amounts to assault and attempted murder.
Like if someone assualted someone but did not murder them because a friend asked them not to, we treat that exactly the same as if they assualted them but stopped before murdering because they thought murder was wrong.
This analogy has issues.
Topic is war. As far as international law is concerned, it’s “ok” to shoot people, blow them up and maim them.
I would propose analogy from a contact sport like mma (or the movie “purge”).
Bad things, that usually are forbidden, are allowed and even expected to be done in the event. Rules just add some restriction on how and why.
Wondering what happens to so many Western leaders who supported Netanyahu unconditionally.
They have knowingly supported and aided Israel, and I hope more warrants are forthcoming.
Come to think of it, plenty of journalists and media orgs are complicit too, such as the BBC.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/23/criminal-complaint-...
Notably this admission by David Cameron, to knowledge of starvation is rather damning
another question i have regards the future: it appears the US is working on even more aid for Israel, see Bernie's latest attempt to prevent that. now that leadership in Israel has warrants out for them, will the US aid continue? certainly would be a bad look to continue aiding Israel at this point i reckon.
what an absolute tragic mess all around. i'm ashamed of our complicity, and sadly will not be surprised one bit if we continue giving them aid despite it all.
Why kill one guy when you can kill all resistance and (future possible) resistance and tada you have a bunch of land and can expand your borders.
I think you are wrong, but you are wrong by equating Netanyahu and Israel. It is useful for the former. It would be hard to convince me it is useful for the latter. And then, even assuming tada part is uncontested ( not impossible in current configuration ), how exactly do you see this play out?
They want land expansion and the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Look up 'Greater Israel'. Tim Walz accidentally let it slip during a debate that this is the goal of the US empires support.
The full account is worth reading, it includes considerations by the various resistance factions that they’d also be subject to ICC jurisdiction and realized threats of punitive measures by the USA and Israel if they continued to push for ICC membership: https://palepedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court%27s_...
That sounds biased.
Why -shouldn't- Palestine be able to be a member of the ICC? Your verbiage makes it sounds like they basically bullied the ICC into membership.
And frankly, so what if the US is still mad at them for it? The US won't join organizations like this because it'd rather protect people like Kissinger who openly committed war crimes (and wants the freedom to be able to do whatever it wants, wherever, without consequence).
out of curiosity, where are you from?
sympathy for the Palestinian liberation struggle is very common where I live (despite what our government says and does)
good for them; is there some reason they shouldn't have?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/28/spying...
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...
How about the Hamas leaders living in Turkey? They were just kicked out of Qatar, and being in (semi-)European Turkey should be easier to arrest, no? Remember, these Hamas leaders in Turkey actually, really, call for explicit genocide - and carry out their actions.
Not saying that there are undoubtedly more “bad people” than just him. But that’s not how law works.
As a single example, Khaled Mashal is in Turkey.
> On 3 September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges
> against Mashal for allegedly orchestrating the 7 October attack on Israel,
> along with other senior Hamas officials.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_MashalI have my own strong opinions on it, but arguing it does not in my opinon belong on the front page here.
There are plenty of places you can go and have this discussion in as heated of a version as you prefer.
#2 Israel is a major tech partner and most large tech companies have offices in Tel Aviv. Many startups that we discuss here are headquartered in Tel Aviv. The head of state of the country having an ICC arrest warrant and the situation at large have major consequences to the tech world and thus HackerNews users have a unique lens through which to have discourse. Discourse with an angle that you won't find elsewhere this is discussed.
Well, that's obviously false. GP is right; this topic produces more heat than light.
That said, I think it's fair to assume that people from the US and other Israel-allied nations are disproportionately represented on Hacker News. So, we should not expect the global consensus to be reflected here.
But I think think this topic both (1) is on topic for HackerNews given Israel's outsized prevalence in the tech industry, (2) has geopolitical implications that I think are worth discussing.
Either way, HackerNews is an outlier in terms of the quality of the discussion, among social media or forums where people will argue both for and against Israel's actions. While I am very much on the "against Israel's actions" side, I do think there is value in this discussion, and so I am happy this topic is here on HackerNews.
I think you would find it useful, even for supporting your current arguments more substantially, to read any of the following (in order of recommendation):
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
- The Holocaust Industry
- Except for Palestine
I've been reading multiple outlets in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic (using machine translation), as well as history books and articles, for quite a while before October 7th and have formed opinions. I don't feel I need your help supporting them.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Any strange upvote/downvote activity going on in this thread?
Watching my own replies votes going up and down, makes me think of the "THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!" GIF: https://tenor.com/search/there-was-a-fire-fight-gifs
E.g. Going to 2 then down to 0, back up, back down and stabilizing again at 0; of course sophisticated coordinated activity will pace itself, even if across real users, as to not "waste their ammo" or be blatantly obvious; makes me wonder if there have been any studies analyzing this.. anywho. Back to life.
This is what Hamas and Hezbollah have done. They have built their combat infrastructure inside of and underneath schools, hospitals, houses, etc. To say that to attack them after they do that is to invite prosecution is risable.
<< To say that to attack them after they do that is to invite prosecution is risable.
Some of us do take issue with indiscriminately bombing a hospital to get one 'bad guy' or even ten 'bad guys'. Maybe it was more excusable when technology was less.. accurate, but it is very hard to argue that point when the country bombing said hospital is able to surgically explode pagers in Lebanon[2]. And Israel can't even take over a small enclave it almost completely cut off from the rest of the world?
That is risable. And all this after massive US support both in blood in treasury.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-human... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o
But maybe biased though. Anyone would have a link to some more nuanced statements with officials who do not sounds just like thugs?
And they know they'll be facing allegations themselves for helping to enable the situation.
> Mainly because i feel the rest of the world lives in a Disneyland like state of fake security that is guaranteed by the United States and never has to contend with the actual reality of the world.
> The actual realities of statehood say the ICC is a joke.
> As for your contention of thuggery.. again, referencing my Disneyland allegation... Thuggery is the basis of statehood and if that makes you uncomfortable, it's because you've been raised in Pax Americana.
> It's really time most countries started paying tribute to the United States, but I do understand the strategic benefit of magnanimity.
I get this viewpoint. Basically, the idea is that humans can only exist as a society of thugs, and everything else is just fairy tales. In that theory, the best possible outcome is achieved when one of the thugs is much more powerfull than all others, thus enforcing "some" order. Therefore, we should all pay tribute to it. I have issues with that theory though. Firstly, I do not believe it. Secondly, even if I did I would consider it a moral duty to still fight it for the small chance it's false. A finally, it does not say what to do in a situation like today when the former bigger thug is becoming weaker and is challenged by the competition. Are we supposed to wait patiently underground the next 20 years until the next contender takes the throne?
There is another theory, according to which human societies _evolve_ as any organism do. It can actually be shown that humans did tame themselves, and became less aggressive/more cooperative after tens of thousands of years of living cooperatively, first in small scale then in larger and larger scale. I take everyone's repulsion against the current state of affairs, or against any sociopathic bahavior for that matter, as another hint of this.
We _did_ evolve out of a primitive condition where there was no conceivable human made law or justice into a society where the rule of law was just a trick, into a condition where the rule of law was desirable, and possibly one day into a condition where the rule of law appears natural.
I believe the cynical viewpoint that you expressed, and that I share sometimes when my mood is low, is actually the fantasy.
If you think that trying some head of a small thuggish state, founded by its unilateral declaration of sovereignty over someone else's land, while already cleansing it of unruly natives, and terrorizing British officials for years both in Palestine and internationally (like with assassination campaigns and embassy bombings), that dug its own hole over decades into ethno-supremacy based and messianically driven conflict with Palestinians, will in any way degrade legitimacy of a court and treaty joined by 125 sovereign states (with almost all "western" ones included), then you're deluding yourself.
Especially when he's being explicitly tried for his role in ensuring that children have to suffer amputations and women get c-sections without anesthesia (among other things), which has nothing to do with defense of Israel.
If anything ICC standing rose a bit in many people's eyes today, slightly above the "court for african warmongers only", where it was previously.
If someone assaults me and I retaliate by injuring their family members then both the assilant and me are both guilty for criminal assault.
Maybe not a perfect analogy but that's what it seems has happened here...
Also mentioned in another comment I do believe Isreal has a right to defend itself but not to commit war crimes against civilians... that seems to be the issue here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaponization_of_antisemitis...
The issues seems to be retaliation against a civilian population.
Really attacking civilians seems to be the major war crimes on both sides of this conflict
Putin has had an arrest warrant for years and he just attended the BRICS summit remotely instead of in person.
Since in theory they would be obligated to arrest him in person. But seemed they had no problem letting him attend by video call.
I wouldn't object to all three of them being tried. I think Zelensky probably has the strongest defense, but I'm not fully informed on the conflict.
So if I invade the US tomorrow with a sharpened stick, they have to hand their country over because any kind of defence is immoral?
"A controversial Amnesty International report asserted that Ukrainian military tactics put civilians in danger. Video footage has since been published suggesting that Ukrainian troops may have executed surrendering Russian officers in the town of Makiivka. Back in 2019, the International Criminal Court (ICC) determined that Ukrainian forces committed possible war crimes against Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine.
To be clear: none of these allegations draws moral or legal equivalency between the acts of Ukrainian and Russian forces. Any alleged crimes committed by Ukrainian officers pale in comparison to the aggression and barbarity Russian forces have demonstrated in Ukraine. But all atrocities must be accounted for, not just those of one’s enemies."
Individual crimes are prosecuted as well, but Zelensky hasn't much to do with regular war crap, if it is not systemic and/or basically formalized and encouraged, as is the case in russia.
Russian playbook includes in every occupied town to set up torture/rape station where they put anyone suspicious. You can guess what happens next.
You're getting way too cerebral for this thread. The people who say "they're all equally guilty" don't care about such considerations. They're just trying to make a blanket moral relativism argument.
Which basically goes: "They're all bad to some degree, therefore they're all equally bad, or at least we can stop focusing on the one that's obviously much worse than the others."
It's not an argument at all really, but more like an emotional appeal.
War is hell. But this war could have been conducted better. Yes, aid was being diverted by Hamas. But that doesn't mean you stop providing it, it means you do what you must to take control on the ground. The deaths from bombings, et cetera have not been found to be war crimes. The starvation, which was and continues to be avoidable, is.
The leader of the PVV (biggest political party) is going to visit colonial settlers in Israël.
Many immigrants hate Israel.
Official state policy is a two state solution.
The relocation of the Dutch embassy to Jerusalem.
You could make a Netflix TV show about this. May we all live interesting times!