The ICC, Khan Al-Ahmar, and Netanyahu's failure

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced that it will be opening an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories. (It will also be investigating possible war crimes by Hamas.) The result of such an investigation, if guilt is found, would likely find Israelis (government official both past and present along with past or present IDF personnel) arrested and charged when traveling internationally.

Obviously this has upset the Israeli government and the Israeli government is denying war crimes and also denying the ICC's jurisdiction to even deal with the matter.

Interestingly, Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz is now saying that the reason the government has not dismantled and evacuated the village of Khan Al-Ahmar despite the go-ahead given by the Israeli courts is because they were afraid that doing so would be the last straw for the ICC and would lead to trouble.

Looks like they got it anyway.

This used to be called the Sam Malone Method of Problem Solving, being that if you ignore a problem long enough it will go away.

They thought that just ignoring the issue and not doing anything newly provocative would cause the ICC to leave them alone. It turns out that the ICC wants to pick on Israel regardless of Khan Al-Ahmar, and Israel just avoiding the issue did not accomplish anything.

So, will this push Israel to now dismantle the village, since not dismantling it did not help anyway? Or perhaps now it is already too late and it will just make matters worse? Did Netanyahu get this completely wrong, adding this as another misstep and miscalculation of his to a growing list in the past year or two...or was there no way to avoid it anyway?





 

------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel

------------------------------------------------------