There Are No More Excuses for Failing to Halt US Military Aid to Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) arrives for a party meeting at the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in Jerusalem on May 20, 2024. (Oren Ben Hakoon / AFP via Getty Images)
The ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israeli leaders puts it beyond doubt: It’s time to cut off the weapons.
by JOHN NICHOLS
When US Senator Bernie Sanders argued two months ago that it was time for the United States to halt new military aid to Israel, the Biden administration and most members of Congress refused to take him seriously. They didn’t listen when the Vermont independent urged them to “block unfettered offensive military aid to the extremist Israeli government—a government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is continuing his unprecedented assault against the Palestinian people.” They dismissed Sanders’s warning that “Netanyahu and his extremist government are clearly in violation of US and international law and, because of that, should no longer receive US military aid.”
They cannot ignore the compelling case for a suspension of aid—based on both international standards and US law—any longer.
With the decision of the International Criminal Court’s prosecution team to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—along with Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza; Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, who is better known as Mohammed Deif, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades; and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader—it is time, once and for all, to stop making excuses. The five named individuals face charges that they have engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity: the Hamas leaders for the role in plotting and implementing the October 7 attack that left at least 1,200 dead, and the Israeli leaders for launching an assault on Gaza that has left more than 35,500 Palestinians dead, a substantial portion of them women and children, and wounded almost 80,000.
The prosecutor’s decision to apply for the warrants should tip the balance, even for those who have been cautious about pressuring Israel, against the allocation and distribution of any additional US military aid.
It is true that the legal process is just beginning. ICC judges must decide which warrants, if any, will be issued. But the seriousness of the charges against the Israelis ought to cause the president and Congress to press the pause button—for practical, political, and moral reasons.
According to Karim Khan, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.” The charges against the Hamas leaders are equally grave. But as Khan explains, the Israeli response to the October 7 attack has had a disproportionately deadly impact on civilians in Gaza. “The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza,” said the prosecutor.
Kahn—who, far from being some pro-Palestinian partisan, has been accused of treating Israel too leniently in the past—asked a group of international lawyers with expertise regarding human rights violations to advise him regarding prosecutions. Four of them—Amal Clooney, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and cofounder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice; Danny Friedman, an expert in criminal law, international law, and human rights; Baroness Helena Kennedy, a member of the British House of Lords and director of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute; and Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the former deputy legal adviser at the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office and distinguished fellow of international law at Chatham House—wrote in the Financial Times:
