The ICC Opens a New Front in the War Against Israel. Why We Must Fight.

(The Media Line) — You don’t have to be a lawyer to know the drill:

Heads Israel loses. Tails Palestinians win.

When it comes to the Palestinian Authority’s abject failure to deal seriously with the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel is an occupying power with the responsibility to inoculate all Palestinians. The fact that the Palestinian Authority has the legal responsibility and a health ministry is irrelevant. Israel is cast as an immoral Goliath monster, this time its main weapon isn’t an F-35 but its biomedical prowess and high-tech connections.

However, when it comes to putting Israel in the docket of a kangaroo court, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announces it is treating ‘Palestine’ as a sovereign nation. The Jewish state, its political leadership, generals and soldiers could be placed on Interpol watchlists, be detained at airports, barred from entering other countries and even be schlepped into courts and put on (show) trial – paraded as war criminals – for the chutzpah of protecting their fellow Israeli citizens from criminal terrorists like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah. Speaking of these organizations, the leaders and their deadly operatives have little to fear from the ICC. That court will never hold them responsible for their targeted serial attacks against Israeli civilians living within their internationally recognized borders!

There are observers and legal experts whom I respect, who would counsel the State of Israel to pay no heed to the ICC’s shenanigans. Jerusalem, like the United States, they would rightly point out, never signed on to give the court any jurisdiction, so the ICC threats have no stature or legal standing.

I’m not a lawyer but doing nothing is a luxury Israel and her Zionist supporters don’t really have.

I’m not a lawyer but doing nothing is a luxury Israel and her Zionist supporters don’t really have.

The ICC gambit and its timing when the United States is re-embracing international addresses including the anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council and the Iran nuclear agreement, cannot go unchallenged, especially in the court of international opinion.

ICC’s lurid indictment of a people defending itself from terrorists rather than going after the terrorists themselves, targets one nation and one nation only – Israel.

It fulfills, on steroids, Natan Sharansky’s and Irwin Cotler’s classic 3 Ds of contemporary anti-Semitism masquerading as criticism of the Jewish state:

The ICC is guilty of a whopping Double standard; its goal is to Demonize Israelis by hanging the sign “war criminals” around their necks (read Nazis) for defending themselves from mass murderers; and to De-legitimize Israel’s political leadership by isolating the Jewish state in the international community and de facto keeping key leaders from traveling around the world.

Exaggerating, you say? I think not. I feel like we have been to this rodeo before.

In 2021, academics and well-funded ‘student’ groups around the world serially pummel Israel and her supporters with BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) lies, spawning bullying of Jewish students who stand up for Zionism out of leadership positions in student government. It is no wonder that such an environment also spawns blatant anti-Semitism.

Now the ICC’s  illegal decision to recognize the non-existent state of Palestine and to investigate Israel for possible “war crimes” means the opening of a new front in the war against the world’s largest Jewish community. It also guarantees a tsunami of colloquia at law schools and articles in legal journals attacking Israel.

One key question going forward is what will the new Biden Administration do in this case. America is no mere bystander. If Israelis can be prosecuted for imaginary crimes in Gaza, so can Americans be targeted for their actions in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. If Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or members of his cabinet can be indicted for military actions, so could former US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, or potentially President Joe Biden.

When I asked Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal why he chose to dedicate his life to bringing Nazi war criminals before the bar of justice, he said that one reason was that he wanted to help rehabilitate the fundamentals of justice, which the Nazis had almost succeeded in obliterating.

Were he alive today, he would denounce the ICC’s reckless and shameless politicization of justice to punish Jews for defending themselves from those committed to finish Hitler’s genocidal goals.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean and global director of its Ed Snider Social Action Institute.