Waiting on a Sunny Day: Prospects for Palestinian Futures

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26 September 2022

Impasse

1993 signing ceremony at the White House of the Declaration of Principles revealed its pitfalls. The symbol of Palestine Liberation Movement seeking recognition from Israel, Rabin’s reluctance to even shake hands short time after his systematic grave breaches of international law while crushing the Intifada, and Americans’ quest to gain domestic political leverage in the form of “peace making in the troubled Middle East”. In the background ‘moderate’ and incompetent Mahmoud Abbas on the verge of boasting the absence of Palestine.

 

The next set of interim agreements drafted by the legal adviser of the Israeli negotiation delegation further defined the framework of relations between the parties. Limited self-rule, substantively and geographically in Gaza and West Bank for the Palestinians under the overall control of Israel’s military. The most important issues that defined Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians were left to the final status negotiations to be concluded by May 1999: 1948 and 1967 refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem. Throughout this period and after Israel’s policies continued as if there is no anticipated faze of final status negotiations and regarded the formation of pockets of Palestinian self-rule akin to Bantustans as a nuisance to be ignored and suppressed.

 

International law was largely on the side of Palestinians, even though the diplomatic imbalance of power against them in the form of American foreign policy, covert and transparent, has been overwhelming. The rudimentary understanding of the Question of Palestine in the American political, diplomatic, and academic spheres contributed significantly to tilting the potent country against them. Zionism’s claim for sovereignty in Palestine was and continues to be not sound legally, politically, historically, and ethically. Two thirds of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by Zionist/Israeli forces in 1948 in a blatant expression of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Palestinians’ right of return as well as compensation have been unjustifiably denied by Israel.

 

Despite Israel’s propaganda, it is difficult to dispute its insistence to negate and sabotage Palestinians’ right for self-determination. East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza remain occupied by Israel to this day notwithstanding its various redeployments and illegally annexing and applying a fragile and hostile civilian rule in East Jerusalem which is militarily disconnected from the West Bank. Israel’s longstanding apartheid epistemology has been belatedly discovered at least by international human rights organizations.

 

Exceptional odds against them and Israel’s overall domination, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza managed to form a bureaucratic and administrative self-rule on the small geographic area they inhabit and an energetic diplomacy, particularly under the late Saeb Erekat. The split between the two variously enclaved Ramallah and Gaza is not optimal nor a necessary obstacle to advocate for Palestinian rights against Israel.

 

Mahmoud Abbas had risen to the helm of the Palestinian Authority as a security project against Arafat’s alleged mismanagement of the Palestinian security sector. American funding and equipment have kept Abbas in power beyond his tenure’s timespan making him not only a genuine anti-democratic force, but also one that sharply contrasts his people’s quest for liberation. His repetitive ineffectual appeal to Israeli public opinion reveals his ill-informed understanding of Israel’s society. The only forces that may contemplate his unconvincing outbursts are the shortly discussed Palestinians in Israel and their peculiar opportunist allies in the Israeli Jewish population, traditionally known as the ‘Zionist left’.

 

Both sides of the Palestinian divide have become engaged with the work permit issue governed by Israel offering no future vision for Palestinians under their jurisdictions, let alone regarding the Question of Palestine. It seems that these conditions will not change in the foreseeable future, fueling constant resentment among Palestinians in their different habitats globally: administrative and other regular political prisoners in Israeli jails, activists, ordinary individuals, and engaged intellectuals.

 

Embezzled by Israel from much of their resources before of its establishment and internally displaced during and after its formation, the Palestinians in Israel have endured direct suppression, fear, economic co-optation, and a-political marginality. They may be reproducing it today by some of their elected figures in the Knesset thus reinforcing their community’s underclass status. Possible reasons for the odd performance are the MKs opportunism, lack of ingenuity, mimicking the Israeli economic and political discourse, and awkward priorities and agendas formed by political parties in Tel-Aviv who seek uninformed and depoliticized support from Palestinians in Israel. They live in an apartheid state but bizarrely reluctant to acknowledge it. Elie Rekhess’s ultimate wish or the perfect ‘Israeli Arabs’.[1]

 

In addition to Israel’s policies, it is possible to identify three models of political incubators that have produced the problematic political stagnation by significant segments among the Palestinians in Israel. They share common features of stripping Palestinians from their historical consciousness and proclaim purported solidarity with their underclass predicament as ‘Arabs in Israel’. The optimal thought colonizers. We will indicate them according to their affinity to the Palestinian population, notwithstanding certain and insufficient developments they have endured in the recent past. The first is the tradition practiced for decades by the Israeli Communist party whereby Palestinian and popular Arab awareness had been suppressed whereas the party’s complete Israelness has been reproduced and commemorated manifested in: a. being part of the collective celebrating Israel’s independence since the signing of the declaration of independence while the Nakba was taking place; b. the fetish memorialization of the Soviet Union’s participation in the Second World War; c. raising the Israeli flag in major Palestinian towns such as Nazareth during May 1st marches.

 

The second is the cooperative Arab-Jewish village of Neve Shalom that persistently fail to address Israel’s historical and contemporary realities or generate a model worthy of studying and possibly reproducing. It is an esoteric phenomenon cherished and appreciated by Arabs in Israel more than anyone else without presenting a genuine challenge to Israel’s official, academic, and popular ideologies.

 

The last and clearest colonizing model are the Arab-Jewish youth meetings hosted at Givat Haviva, the national education center of the Kibbutz Federation in Israel. From there the pitiful slogan of the Arabs in Israel forming a bridge to peace with neighboring countries came to being, contrasting a decent understanding of Israeli Jewish society as well as regional politics and global international relations.[2]

 

Mansour Abbas’s political behavior and rhetoric during the last Israeli government has satisfied Israel’s proponents but defied any reasonableness claimed by the Islamist politician who has internalized Israel’s deep animosity towards this religion and its believers. Contrary to his disturbingly ignorant claims, there is nothing new of his hollow political agenda. It is the exact a-political marginality prevalent during the military regime days (1948-1966) that Israel failed to reproduce in the 1967 Palestinian Occupied Territories in the form of the Village Leagues.[3]

 

Nature of Israel’s Rejectionism

Israel’s shift to the right in political and economic terms is more severe than any self-comparable place: Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, and the United States. Yet, it is not pondered by foreign observers, particularly in the United States, as worthy of noting or even analyzing. On the contrary, influential commentators such as New York Times’s Thomas Friedman in the United States unashamedly constantly voice Israel’s interests and concerns. His newspaper, attuned to its New York subscribers, includes an Israeli journalist commenting on diplomatic and security affairs regarding Israel and regionally. Israel’s coverage is often relegated to reporters with deep and undisputed commitment to Israel personally and ideologically.

 

At least since oil tycoon Jacob Blaustein, American Jewish Committee’s President, lobbied for the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine with the American administration, American Jewry has been shaped not only by Zionism, but from the presence of Israel as well.[4] Blaustein has also been credited with convincing Ben-Gurion to accept the international partition of Palestine,[5] indicating the local Zionist leader’s true ambitions towards this geography and its original inhabitants. Abolishing Palestine and its people by Ben-Gurion and his forces has been the most denied subject among Israeli and American Jews.[6] American Jewish political, financial, academic, and moral support for Israel embolden its apartheid.

 

But Israel’s rejectionism of becoming a decent place of living, and consequently reaching a genuine peace with itself and regionally, is not recent rather decades long phenomenon.

 

Israeli state and society are premised on the repudiation of Palestine and Palestinians. How could it be otherwise?[7] It is the most obvious yet excessively concealed issue in Israeli consciousness. State policies and rituals, academic research, and social norms are derived from and directed at the abrogation of Palestine as a geography and political cognizance. Official and quasi state research organizations and policy makers acknowledge demography to be Israel’s most compelling strategic threat, exceeding the imagined and manufactured one centered around Iran’s nuclear program. Even without the existentially troubling Palestinian issue, and disregarding East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees, to adhere to minimal principles of decent governance, Israel is supposed to be constitutionally and epistemologically a bi-national state. Alas, it is nothing but a one group identity location with no intention to even muse transforming in the near future. Adding the omitted Palestinian components further reveals Israel’s implausible ambience.

 

To substitute for the severe lack of legitimacy for its sovereignty in Palestine, Israel has resorted to the victimhood argument. It has replaced or laundered its repression of original Palestine and its people with the notion of forming a haven for Jews. The resources invested in organs of the state to bring Jews ‘home’ are not intended to combat the demographic challenge posed by the mere existence of Palestinians rather it is an act of pure altruism. The inspiration here is of course the lessons of World War Two, invoked as a matter of official foreign policy whenever the opportunity is available or as a matter of banal dreariness.[8]

 

Without comparing the Holocaust to any other event in human history, intriguing topics come to mind from the symbiotic relations between this occurrence and its infusion into Israel’s consciousness.

 

Israel – Western Germany relations developed in parallel to absorbing the Holocaust into the Israeli mindset. The catastrophic Second World War event was introduced into the Israeli education system only in 1979 and the subsequent year it became a legal obligation to teach it. Systematic visits to Poland by high school students began in 1983, when Israel’s international stature was impaired by its intervention in Lebanon arousing marginal local resentment among the Jewish population as well,[9] ending in June 2022 following a dispute between the governments of Israel and Poland over the appropriate educational content for the visiting youth. Some legal and other historians unconvincingly identify the Gruenwald (1954-55) and Eichmann (1961)[10] trials as instilling the tragedy of the Holocaust into the public domain and collective memory. Insignificant number of others tried to advance a hesitant claim that the Holocaust has been utilized by the Israeli government in its diplomatic jargon directed against the region who replaced the perpetrators from the horrific scenes of the great powers’ war.

 

Yet what has not been grasped, or argued coherently,[11] is that there is reasonable evidence to demonstrate that the Holocaust has been utilized diplomatically and domestically to counter mainly Israel’s original sin of ethnically cleansing more than two thirds of the Palestinian population during its formative war supplemented by its excessive efforts afterwards to conceal its crimes crowned with willful embezzlement. Inserting the Holocaust into Israel’s 14 May 1948 Declaration of Independence was certainly convenient shortly after the forceful collective removal of Palestinians from Haifa (April 1948), Jaffa (April 1948), Jerusalem (April 1948), Tiberias (April 1948), Safad (10 May 1948), Baysan (11 May 1948), and Acre (13-15 May 1948), as part of Haganah’s Plan Dalet.[12]

 

Drafting Israel’s declaration of independence commenced on 23 April 1948. One of the first and probably most authoritative Israeli legal historians, Yoram Shahar, described the daunting albeit short process of formulating this declaration. His discussion of inserting the Holocaust element in it is short and incidental reflected in a passing indication that none of the drafters experienced the historical event. Like most historians in Israel, Shahar’s research excogitate the mass displacement of Palestinians during this period as constituting a non-issue.[13]

 

Contrary to contemporary expectations, there has not been legal research in Hebrew about the Nuremberg trials. A historical one from 2018 designates a chapter to this issue as part of a general inquiry concerning Germany’s transformation from pre to post World War state. Shlomo Aronson’s historical research attempts to synthesize between World War Two events and Ben Gurion’s character, unsuspecting of the 1952 agreement between Israel and West Germany, partied by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany as well that provided significant monetary arrangement for the state of Israel and individuals affected by the war. A decade later, in 1965, the two countries would establish official diplomatic relations.

 

In 1996 Moshe Zimmerman identified Israel’s ‘new historiography’, which failed to reach the critical revisionism carried out by German historians, as a result of regional political developments and the emergence of a less militarized Israeli society. Ilan Pappe, however, traced this unfamiliar examination to the historians’ subjective experiences as Israeli soldiers either in 1980s Lebanon or in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories. Both failed to accurately predict the nature and scope of this phenomenon, which projects its insignificance through the shy research beginnings of ‘Israel’s Palestine historian’ and ideologically objective Benny Morris bolstered by his miserable frustratingly blaming conclusion. The ‘new Israeli historians’ camp was divided from the outset and lost the intellectual battle to academic bureaucracy which supported competing and traditional story telling about Israel’s 1948 atrocities.[14]

 

For a while Israeli Jewish society seemed to absorb a mild and not entirely disclosed tension between persons of Polish origin on the one hand, and others of German ancestry. Anecdotally, it was crystalized by formerly Belarusian Pole Shimon Peres’s gesture to a gathering of originally German Jews asking them to “try to be Polish”. One research in ethnic studies suggested that a factor for differences between the two groups lies in the Poles’ collectiveness as opposed to the Germans’ universality and cosmopolitan character. Research of enlightenment (Haskala) of German Jews, which followed the prevailing one in Germany, is cherished mostly by academics with German roots, and embarrassingly mimicked by few learned Palestinians in Israel, while researchers with Eastern European background who study this field tend to focus on its mostly Polish manifestations. In the public sphere the differences were mostly apparent in the more developed commercial skills of the formerly Central Europeans compared with the Eastern ones.

 

Until the inception of the short lived 1993 Oslo process, the Israeli encounter with Palestinians has been as subjugated cheap labor from the 1967 occupied territories (East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza) and a strictly contained impoverished community within the green line. Palestine was part of Israeli political awareness as a concept for denial, abuse, and exploitation. It remains as such with features of Palestinian Authority’s quislingism. Before and after the Oslo process, Palestine and Palestinians have never constituted a subject of genuine reflection for Israeli Jews which would require this community no less than forgoing their privileged status bestowed on them illegitimately and undeservedly.

 

International Criminal Court

On 5 February 2021 the International Criminal Court (ICC) acknowledged its jurisdiction over the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories: East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. The specific events that gave rise to Prosecution’s preliminary investigation and Pre-Trial Chamber I’s ruling, uncontested and unrecognized by Israel, were: (1) alleged crimes committed by Israeli officials and Palestinians during hostilities in Gaza in 2014; construction of settlements in East Jerusalem and West Bank; and the use of indiscriminate lethal force by Israel’s IDF against unarmed demonstrators in Gaza who launched a series of marches commemorating Palestinians’ right of return starting in March 2018.

 

Having excelled in the humanities, protest, business, and political naivety Palestinians may not give this legal development a significant weight. While aware of the severe disparity in the balance of international power against the rights of Palestinians, this path for seeking accountability against Israel should not be neglected, ought to be carefully explored, and shrewdly utilized not as a double-edged sword.

 

The start date of the inquiry was the year 2014, because the Palestinian submission to the ICC included this year as the earliest one for the reported crimes to the Office of the Prosecutor. However, it need not be limited to this timespan given the ICC’s launching date on 1 July 2002. The rational for accepting Palestine’s request to join the ICC is its people’s well recognized right for self-determination, not necessarily the bureaucratic efforts initiated at the United Nations for this purpose after 2010.

 

There is a reason at least to suspect that Israel is taking the application of ICC’s jurisdiction in occupied Palestinian territories seriously, even if not explicitly and regardless of avoiding discussing the issue publicly. We do not know if the blatant attack against Palestinian civil society organizations,[15] unconvincing to many European countries [16] and United Nations human rights experts,[17] is linked to the fact that Israel has been subjected to the ICC’s jurisdiction, including the prospect of issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials who have allegedly violated the ICC’s Statute.

 

Various policies adopted by the Israeli authorities qualify as crimes under the ICC Statute that could attach individual criminal responsibility to the individual officials who carried them out. Non exhaustive list contains the following:

- Establishment of settlements in the 1967 occupied territories, including East Jerusalem. Here, distinctions in the Israeli political and legal cultures are irrelevant: outpost as opposed to settlement and expansion of a settlement compared with establishing a new one. All are illegal and captured by the ICC’s Statute and the Court’s jurisdiction as of 1 July 2002.

- The Dahiya Doctrine, which is the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force during armed conflict. Although not new to Israeli military performance,[18] the doctrine with this title can be traced to Israeli General Gadi Eisenkot’s public statements from October 2008. There are clear indications that this military theory has been applied in Gaza at least since operation Cast Lead, December 2008-January 2009.

- Israel’s extremely broad interpretation of international humanitarian law’s notion of civilians taking direct part in hostilities, applied as the pretext for carrying out illegal assassinations. Former legal adviser of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), a major patron of its execution together with the military confirmed the illegal nature of Israel’s excessive and malicious assassinations policy. He was in office at the time of the policy’s major implementation.

 

Special attention should be given to Israel’s perpetration of the crime of apartheid, enumerated in ICC’s Statute, which has been well documented in recent years by international law experts, academics, and international human rights organizations.[19]

 

All big organizations, certainly international process centred institutions such as the ICC, lead themselves according to a rational mechanism that is mostly governed by the total budget and the senior management’s priorities. In the case of Palestine grave political and illegal intervention had taken place when until recently British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, expressed his position in a letter to MPs members of his party supportive of Israel, against the investigation and prosecution of Israeli individuals at the ICC. Member States to the ICC acting to affect cases before the Court undermine its credibility and due process, particularly when the Prosecutor Karim Khan is from intruding England.[20]

 

Refreshing element of the ICC is its location out of the direct sphere of American foreign policy’s influence. The wealthiest and most powerful international actor on earth militarily has consistently refused to be part of this international institution, possibly understandably, and does not fund its functioning. Nevertheless, American financial diplomacy towards ICC member states or the Court itself, either by exercising soft power or blunt reactions, need to be monitored.[21]

 

As in various settings internationally, American covert involvement in international crimes, particularly by instigating conflicts and more, has rarely been processed by American, foreign, and international courts although it forms part of America’s popular culture and dominates domestic as well as international American mode of governance (the ‘trap’, ‘problem’, and ‘hell’). Not avoiding the Palestine context, such American actions ought to be investigated if the ICC’s Prosecution selects the easy rout politically and diplomatically of blaming Palestinians or equating between their acts and those of Israelis.

 

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[1] Poorly failing to formulate any reasonable uncontained rights-based agenda, the official Palestinian left in Israel continues to demonstrate its detachment from progressive and solidarity discourse and values, following a typical conservative paradigm that underscores responsibility, caution, and adaptation as guiding principles.

[2] An exemplary caricature of the “bridge for peace” figure is MK Ahmad Tibi and his politics. Ever since his origins as a political product of Ezer Weizman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, he has developed a keen interest to play the meaningless and insignificant role of “peace bridging”. The 1988 trip as Ezer Weiaman’s envoy has been augmented by his close ties to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and its security apparatus. His political thinking and tactics are relentless embarrassment to any intelligent individual. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews dislike his politics, says more about this community than the ‘effort’ endured by the MK.

[3] See Salim Tamari, “In League with Zion: Israel’s Search for a Native Pillar”, 12(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.41-56 (1983).

[4] See Mark Bauman, “The Blaustein-Ben-Gurion Agreement: A Milestone in Israel-Diaspora Relations”, Generations: Jewish Museum of Maryland Magazine (2007-2008). See also Kermit Roosevelt, “The Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics”, 2(1) Middle East Journal, pp. 1-16 (1948); Bruce Evensen, “The Limits of Presidential Leadership: Truman at War with Zionists, the Press, Public Opinion, and His Own State Department Over Palestine”, 23(2) Presidential Studies Quarterly, pp.269-287 (1993); Theodore Sasson, The New American Zionism (NYU Press, 2015).

[5] “Jacob Blaustein Is Dead at 78; Founder of the American Oil Co.”, New York Times, 16 November 1970.

[6] Consciously disregarding blame of generalization, it should be asserted that American Jews have utilized their power abusively and contributed the most in their state of citizenship to the distortion of Palestine and Israel’s actuality. Key figures in American academia demonstrate this notion: Michael Walzer, Martha Minow, Noah Feldman, and Lawrence Summers. Judith Butler’s modest critique of Zionism should be understood, therefore, as an exception demonstrating the rule, a work emanating from and directed at the American Jewish community. See Judith Butler, Parting Wings: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2013).

[7] See Benjamin Beit Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (Interlink Publishing, 1993).

[8] Bearing in mind the extremely harmful indiscriminate strategy of Israel’s security agencies against civilians as such regardless of nationality, and the overwhelming negation of Palestine as a social norm among Israeli Jews, engaging in historical excavation about the atrocities of World War Two to appease vulgar second or third generations of Holocaust survivors is an exercise in futility.

[9] The news from Israel’s engagement in Lebanon in the 1980s contributed to further influence the consciousness of Palestinians in Israel (coastal areas, Galilee, and the Naqab-Negev) who while enduring almost absolute control of the Israel’s educational system and its security apparatus, formed a significant group of cheap labor in Israel’s market, similar to Palestinians from the 1967 occupied territories.

[10] For the trial’s foreign effects, particularly in New York, the United States, see David Ben Gurion, “The Eichmann Case as Seen by Ben-Gurion”, New York Times, 18 December 1960.

[11] See, for example, Yechiam Weitz, “Even Ben-Gurion Exploited the Holocaust When It Suited Him”, Haaretz, 31 October 2013.

[12] See Palestine Land Society, available at: Palestine Land Society (plands.org); Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine”, 18(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.4-33 (1988).

[13] Key figure in this respect is the legal historian Pnina Lahav, who wrote two books about two Eastern European/American personalities who ended up in Palestine and following its obliteration in Israel: Shimon Agranat and Golda Meir. The first in Hebrew translated into English and the second originally in English. She may have joined Martha Minow’s metaphoric enlightenment effort to better educate Americans about Israel.

[14] A symbolic symptom of traditional Israel’s triumph is Haifa University’s 2014 decision to grant an honorary PhD to Uri Lubrani former coordinator of Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon in the 1980s, among his various roles. The University’s Chairperson of the Board at the time was former head of Israel’s Security Agency (Israel’s FBI) Ami Ayalon who resides in a Moshav/settlement constructed upon a 1948 depopulated Palestinian estate. The current Chairperson of the University’s Board is Attorney Dov Weissglas, Ariel Sharon’s decades long attorney and confidant. Another example of the quest to disregard Palestine and Israel’s history intellectually is the academic ascendance of Professor Daniel Friedman’s protege Professor Nili Cohen.

[15] See “Outcry as Israel labels Palestinian rights groups ‘terrorists’”, Al-Jazeera, 22 October 2021; Raja Abdulrahim, “Palestinian Rights Groups Raided by Israeli Soldiers”, New York Times, 18 August 2022; Shawan Jabareen, “We Document Human Rights Violations. Israel Wants to Silence Us”, New York Times, 23 September 2022.

[16] “Nine EU states reject Israel ‘terrorist’ designation for Palestinian NGOs”, Reuters, 12 July 2022.

[17] OHCHR, U.N. Experts Condemn Israel’s Designation of Palestinian Human Rights Defenders as Terrorist Organizations, 25 October 2021.

[18] See, for example, Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”, 6(3) London Review of Books (1984).

[19] John Dugard & John Reynolds, “Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, 24(3) EJIL, pp.867-913 (2013); John Dugard, “Why aren’t Europeans calling Israel an apartheid state”, Al-Jazeera, 17 April 2019; Richard Falk, “Is Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid?”, Al-Jazeera, 5 December 2011; Richard Falk & Virginia Tilley, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Palestine, ESCWA, 2017; Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, 27 April 2021; Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, February 2022.

[20] Moreover, the political climate in Britain is far from being knowledgeable or understanding to the rights of Palestinians. See Keir Starmer, “Why my Labour party will always stand up for Israel”, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 November 2021; Jacob Stolworthy, “Ken Loach says he’s been thrown out of Labour Party and accuses Keir Starmer of ‘witch-hunt’”, The Independent, 14 August 2021. In addition to this political dynamic, there are Britain’s influential tabloids who may assail a genuine attempt to internationally prosecute Israelis by a British prosecutor. Lastly, the close cooperation between Britain’s intelligence services and Israel’s is another reason to scrutinize the leadership of the ICC’s Office of Prosecutor. See JNR, “UK and Israel sign agreement on military cooperation”, Jewish News, 7 December 2020.

[21] See Barak Ravid, “Trump administration coordinated ICC sanctions with Israel”, AXIOS, 11 June 2020; Julian Borger, “US imposes sanctions on top international criminal court officials”, The Guardian, 2 September 2020. See also “The U.S. does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court”, NPR, 16 April 2022 (former U.S. State Department legal adviser defends the claim of hypocrisy levelled at America’s inconsistent approach towards the ICC. He notes that his tenure was during Bush administration’s second term).