Right on

The court is caught in an impossible bind.

To have refused to charge Netanyahu and Gallant would have given the court’s implicit blessing to Israel’s dismantlement, bit by bit, of the laws of war.

It would have confirmed the criticisms of those who say the ICC serves as simply another weapon – a legal one – to be used by the US and Nato against states they dislike.

And it would have licensed other states to cite the Israel exemption as an alibi to commit their own crimes against humanity. The ICC would have doomed itself to irrelevance.

On the other hand, acting against Israel – and thereby against Washington and its European satraps – puts the court directly on a collision course with the West.

It jeopardises the international legal order the court is there to uphold – one developed immediately after the Second World War to prevent the very crimes against humanity that culminated in the Holocaust and the US atomic bombing of Japanese cities.

This is precisely Netanyahu’s goal, as Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported last week: “Netanyahu intends to turn the ICC arrest warrant against him into a global motion of no confidence against international law and its institutions.”

The likelihood is that Washington will bring the whole edifice tumbling down rather than set a precedent in which it agrees to sacrifice its highly militarised client state, strategically located in the oil-rich Middle East.