For once Matthew Miller, a man as sinister as he is bland, had nothing to say. It was unusual. Nearly every day of the last 13 months has been witness to Miller’s banal podium performances as the mouthpiece of the State Department. Miller’s role: to run American complicity in the mass murder of Palestinians through the filter of colorless, exculpatory bureaucrat-speak. Yet on November 21, mere hours after the International Criminal Court issued its warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, State abruptly canceled a scheduled press briefing. There are, it appears, limits to Miller’s powers of obfuscation. Words failed him. Just as words so often fail us when we face the scale of Gaza’s destruction.
But silence too is an action, and the list of things the United States will not do to protect its accomplices is shrinking fast. The two highest courts in the world—the ICC and the International Court of Justice—now have open cases against the state of Israel and its current leadership. Rather than pull back a single inch, even to save its own face, the United States would prefer instead to trash these courts, the law they represent, and the moral principles they embody. Carry on like this, and the virtues America claims to defend will soon look exactly like what’s left of Gaza: ruined.
This time it’s personal. Netanyahu and Gallant stand accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of last Thursday, neither man can visit any of the 125 nations party to the Rome Statute (including United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany) without serious fear of incarceration and speedy shipping to The Hague. They are marked men, branded as killers for the rest of their lives, confined to countries just as dismissive and offensive to international law as theirs is. These warrants are a monumental event. They prove two things. To lead an alleged democracy does not make you immune from justice. And for the Palestinians, as a people, there is hope yet that their assassins might suffer some punishment.
The warrants also reveal a world tipped sharply on its axis. The Nuremberg precedent, which serves as the foundation of modern international law, has always been thin and precarious—especially after Vietnam, after Iraq. The U.S. acted in the postwar era as if the law was limp, placid, and pliable—a sidearm for the imperial hegemon rather than a gold standard applicable everywhere. But we scoff today to hear Secretary of State Antony Blinken trumpeting a “rules-based international order” precisely because that order has never been so openly insulted. With one side of its face, the U.S. smiles; with the other, it bites. The ICC was praised to high heaven when it indicted Vladimir Putin for his forced transfer of children from Ukraine. “I think,” Blinken said in March last year, “anyone who’s a party to the court and has obligations should fulfill their obligations.” Now, when the ICC applies the same standard toward an “ally,” Joe Biden calls the court “outrageous.”
In one sense, the government of the United States—and its propagandists, like Matthew Miller—doesn’t need to care. It is not a member of the ICC or a signatory to the Rome Treaty. Indeed, the U.S. refused to join the court when it was formed 22 years ago, at the dawn of the “war on terror,” to avoid moments like this. Senator Lindsey Graham admitted as much. The U.S. should, he said, “act forcefully against the ICC.… We cannot let the world believe for a moment that this is a legitimate exercise … because to do so means we could be next” (my emphasis). Meanwhile, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act is still in force, a law that allows the U.S. to use “all means necessary … to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the [ICC].” This law’s nickname is The Hague Invasion Act.
Intentional famine. Deliberate famine. Hunger as a weapon. These are Netanyahu and Gallant’s crimes. The pair, according to the ICC, “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival.” As such, they bear “criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation.” And these are crimes still ongoing. Blinken gave Israel 30 days to improve the grotesque humanitarian strife in Gaza or face “implications for US policy.” He gave no clue of what those “implications” might be. That was on October 13. The Israel Defense Forces allowed a few more aid trucks to enter. Not nearly enough to improve Palestinian life above the condition of bare, meager existence. But it was enough for the U.S. to admit, 30 days later, that those threatened “implications” no longer mattered. It was another “red line” to be passed over at the same speed as the “red line” drawn before the Rafah offensive in May—an offensive the ICJ insisted should cease immediately.
On October 9 last year, Gallant incriminated himself with the infamous “No electricity, no food, no fuel” order. Today’s dire circumstances are really no different. That instruction still stands. Indeed, to apply any caveats whatsoever on aid entering Gaza’s ruins is a violation of Israel’s legal duty. The ICC noticed the country’s duplicity here, stating that deliveries “were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations.… They were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States.” Regardless, that aid was “not sufficient.” Gaza remains held in a sick stasis. Every soul is suspended, kept alive long enough for the cold to kill them this Christmas. Or disease. Or dumb bombs made by American hands.
Netanyahu and Gallant face arrest for these strikes as well, these “widespread and systematic” attacks. The ICC indicts them with “criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.” This alone proves the Israeli army and its intelligence agencies are incapable of prosecuting the war in a manner that even begrudgingly allows for the right of Palestinians to live. Israel’s defenders, including the U.S., would protest that Netanyahu’s regime is engaged in a conflict against valid enemies. Regardless of the battle against Hamas or Hezbollah, they have, by their methods, forfeited the right to pursue the war on their own terms.
Like its client and customer, the U.S. finds itself at the opposite end to the goal of greater justice. Daily it sacrifices the postwar legal and moral order on the altar of Israeli arrogance and bloodlust. It is to Netanyahu and Gallant’s benefit that Joe Biden destroys whatever respect the rest of the world might still have for one of the proud authors of Nuremberg. And as Biden passes into political senescence, retiring shamed to his wintry Delaware home, we should hope that his mental agility is not as far decayed as it looks. Because only those sound of mind are able to reflect on a lonely legacy: The adamantine support Biden offered, as the representative of totemic American power, on the side of two men indicted for the acts humanity has collectively judged to be gravest of all. Short of joining the pair in the dock as a co-conspirator, we can wish too that late at night he weeps the tears of the guilty. The twilight of his life and presidency is the twilight of American prestige.
