The International Criminal Court still waits for Netanyahu

Shortly after Trump won the U.S. election, while Biden was still in office, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant to arrest Netanyahu.

"Today, on 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (‘Court’), in its composition for the Situation in the State of Palestine, unanimously issued two decisions rejecting challenges by the State of Israel (‘Israel’) brought under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute (the ‘Statute’). It also issued warrants of arrest for Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant."
Press Release: 21 November 2024
Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant

"Poland effectively wants to commemorate one genocide, and celebrate one ongoing - and the latter's architect - by inviting Netanyahu to Auschwitz memorial event and promising not to arrest him." Bluesky

"Among American Jews, 53% do not have confidence in Netanyahu... The only U.S. religious group to demonstrate confidence in Netanyahu is white evangelical Protestants." www.jta.org/2025/04/09/u...

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 3:11 PM

"...last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue [of starvation in Gaza]. ... Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population." The BBC's timeline "managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas. Verify's reporter asserted that in early March Israel "blocked humanitarian aid demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages". He then jumped to 18 March, stating: "Israel resumes military operations."" But, "in fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire" and it "broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza's civilians" which it is doing to prompt them to breach "the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt." ... Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” – in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades."
— Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong: The BBC's role is not to keep viewers informed. It's to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand, Jonathan Cook, Substack, May 7, 2025

On September 24, Jewish Currents sent this from Josh Nathan-Kazis:

"You couldn’t ask for a more fitting representation of Israel in the Netanyahu era than the scene that just played out on the floor of the United Nations: As the Israeli prime minister took the stage, most of the world silently fled the room while a few fanatics up in the rafters shouted “Am Yisrael Chai,” tunelessly, over and over again.

Netanyahu’s material was mostly rehash: He told the story of his martyred brother at great length, predicted the fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran, said Israel was fighting the “barbarians.” All the old hits.

What was new was a galling attempt to undercut world leaders’ growing discomfort with settler violence in the West Bank with astounding lies. Netanyahu said the violence was the work of “a handful of young juvenile delinquents who throw stones, who chop down olive trees, occasionally they light some fires,” and said that “the number of casualties per year, maybe two, three,” is nothing compared to the “thousands of attacks against the peaceful settlers.” These are immense falsehoods that, in their immensity, suggest that Netanyahu is not trying to convince anyone; he’s just playing to his tankies."

‘Baseless Lies Meant to Sanitize His Genocide’: Mamdani Hits Back After Netanyahu’s Attacks During UN Speech: “No lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” New York City’s mayor said of the Israeli prime minister. Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, Sep 24, 2026

Democracy requires underlying values and commitments

Thomas Zimmer yesterday:

"One prominent voice in the camp of those who opposed what they diagnosed as liberal or leftwing “alarmism” has been Shadi Hamid: After the 2022 midterm elections, he successfully leveraged his reflexive anti-“alarmism” into a position as a columnist and a member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post. Hamid declared that liberals should finally stop indulging the “great moral panic” of pretending that democracy was under assault from the MAGA Right. He offered what he called “democratic minimalism” as an alternative framework. “Democracy,” Hamid argued, “is a mechanism for regulating conflict through elections. It requires no commitment to specific substantive ends.” It should therefore be “de-coupled from the liberal and progressive outcomes that liberals and progressives think it should produce,” and instead conceptualized as “a system and means of governing and rotating power with no prejudice to substantive ideological outcomes.”

In essence, Hamid demanded we regard democracy as just a set of procedures, not as something that entails any substantive commitments. In practical terms, this would reduce democracy to, first and foremost, elections – and since there are, in this understanding, by definition no bad outcomes resulting from democratic procedures, any election result would therefore also have to be considered good from a democratic point of view. Put differently, if Americans make Trump president via an election or Germans put the AfD in charge of a state government, then that is not only something all (small-d) democrats need to accept, but they ought to consider it a normatively positive democratic outcome."

However, he says, democracy involves underlying values, not just a procedure that looks like you're taking a vote. (bolding mine)

"Democracy does not just mean elections. In today’s widely accepted parlance, this means a system of equality before the law, in which all citizens have a right to participate in the political process as equals; a system playing by majoritarian principles, in which all sides clearly renounce violence and agree to respecting the rules as laid out in the constitution; a pluralistic system seeking negotiation and compromise between differing interests in which the status of the individual is not determined by what they look like, what they identify as, who they pray to, who their parents were, or how much wealth they have accumulated. An election outcome that threatens that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to undermine it, that are at war with the very idea of a pluralistic society of equals and instead committed to a vision of a hierarchical ethnostate – is therefore very much not good for democracy. Can we please refuse to play willfully naïve?"

— Thomas Zimmer, Warnings and Lessons from the Struggle Against Trumpism, Democracy Americana, September 5, 2026