This essay discusses rape and acts of sexual violence, mutilation, violence against children, and other war crimes
On May 20, 2024, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan issued a public statement announcing his decision to file applications for warrants of arrest "in the situation in the State of Palestine." Since then, the ICC has affirmed countless times its intention to issue arrest warrants related to the genocide in Palestine, and on July 19, 2024, it issued an advisory ruling finding Israel's occupation of Palestine to be violative of international law.
Upon reading the initial ICC announcement of the arrest warrants in its entirety, many took notice of the disturbing and stark differences in the language used by the ICC to describe the war crimes and crimes against humanity alleged to have been committed by Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh—three individuals associated with Hamas—versus those alleged to have been committed by Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense of Israel Yoav Gallant.
For example, back in May, Khan claimed to have reasonable grounds to believe that Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh are criminally responsible for acts of rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity and as war crimes. Since this time, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh have been killed in Israeli attacks—with Deif being killed in an airstrike on Rafah and Haniyeh and his bodyguard being killed in the capital city of Iran. No charges have been filed against any of the Zionist regime's members for these or any other murders.
The intent to punish Hamas and the larger Palestinian resistance movement for alleged crimes—despite the fact that there is no credible evidence of the "crimes" in question and Israel has murdered two of the three Hamas officials—being singled out by the ICC is a tactic much in-line with the Zionist Entity and its Western allies' ongoing strategy to delegitimize the Palestinian liberation cause.
At the end of last year, The New York Times hammered the final nail in its credibility coffin by publishing the article "Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence On Oct. 7," which was purported to have been the byproduct of more than two months of investigative work by veteran foreign correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman along with two younger freelancers, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. On January 28, 2024, The Intercept extended the reporting of independent news site Electronic Intifada in an explosive counter-report that thoroughly debunked the claims made in the original Times article:
"The central issue is whether The New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details 'establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7'—a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war."
The New York Times is far from the only mainstream publication to abandon even the lowest standard of journalistic integrity in covering the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Several publications, including The Intercept, also exposed falsehood in the early, widely-circulated reports of systemic infanticide by Hamas as being part of strategic disinformation campaigns. The United Nations' investigation into allegations of mass rape on Oct. 7 similarly concluded that early viral accounts of sexual violence during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood had been fabricated.
At the same time, the general public has continuously witnessed images and video footage of mutilated Palestinian children, including one ultra-viral video of a child beheaded during the Zionist invasion of Rafah. We have seen video after video of the NYPD removing the hijab of Nerdeen Kiswani, one of the most visible organizers for Palestinian liberation in the US, in an attempt to intimidate her and others resisting from within the Belly of the Beast. In early August, news broke that Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), a Zionist organization, released an open letter, signed by several Hollywood elites, demanding that the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) rescind the Emmy nomination of Palestinian journalist Bisan Atef Owda with AJ+ due to her alleged affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Some believe that the central issue here is hypocrisy on the part of the ICC and that its recent advisory ruling is an actionable step towards addressing the United Nations' long-standing history of anti-African and anti-Arab biases, which could prompt a shift in the treatment of Palestinians and their solidarity movements in the United States in the months to come. However, the ICC's status as an international court does not mean that the ICC is a credible, unbiased arbiter of justice, or that the ICC is aligned with Palestinian liberation.
The belief in the ICC's integrity—which one must hold in order to be disappointed by the ICC—is rooted in the myth of Western superiority. This myth legitimizes the court's actions, just as it does all Western states and their international governing institutions when moments of instability require calls for intervention that impose and maintain "order." The ICC is therefore as much a tool of white supremacy and imperialism as the Supreme Court and any of the lower courts across the country.
As Zionists celebrate the ICC arrest warrants against Hamas, they also denounce ICC actions that are more critical of Netanyahu and his government officials. This attempt to repress and disintegrate the Palestinian struggle against occupation is a reminder that the rose-colored glasses many Americans grow up wearing in our settler state are tinted red with the blood of the world's Black, Indigenous, and other colonized people subjected to the unceasing violence and dispossession required to maintain order under American hegemony.
THE CO-OPTATION OF FREE PALESTINE
Before endeavoring to answer how these latest actions by the ICC benefit the Zionist regime, we must first clarify what is achieved by the Zionists' co-optation of the demand to "Free Palestine" and rearticulating it as a call to "Free Palestine from Hamas."
One of the primary objectives of Zionist propaganda is to eliminate any separation or difference between Jewish identity and Zionist political ideology. This objective by extension eliminates any distinction between the recognition of a Palestinian identity and sovereignty and assumed alignment with an inherently antisemitic political ideology.
Zionists seek to achieve this objective by collapsing any and all resistance by, and in solidarity with, the Palestinian people's justified liberation struggle into the insurgent figure of "Hamas," defined solely as an armed resistance terrorist faction, that as such is deemed a threat to the existence of the Zionist entity and a future Palestinian state. This is how anyone with anything remotely unfavorable to say about the Zionist regime is automatically identified as in support of the Hamas Insurgency, regardless of whether that individual is supportive of Palestinian freedom or is even familiar with resistance factions in Palestine.
These Zionist smears are readily amplified by mainstream Western media outlets and then circulated as a counter-insurgency strategy leveraged against Palestinians and their allies to suppress the genocidal truth in public discourse. As a result of this, an increasingly anxious general public is endlessly bombarded by the so-called news media's biased narrative telling them that Palestinian resistance fighters are the true foreign occupiers. And that they're, therefore, subject to the decisions of a complicit, tyrannical government that poses a real threat to order and stability in the so-called Middle East. This allows the Zionist regime to then be painted as a democratic hero that is legitimately defending itself and the people of Gaza against their "terrorist" adversaries. This also allows prominent Palestinian journalists and truth-tellers, such as Bisan Atef Owda and Nerdeen Kiswani, to be discredited based on their alleged ties to terrorism and terrorist organizations and accusations that their sole purpose is to cause chaos and division.
The "Good Arab"/"Bad Arab" binary is reinforced in this narrative, causing the general public to overlook, or willingly ignore, the fact that with settler-occupation comes the right of the occupied to engage in armed and unarmed resistance against the regime. This is something that, in other circumstances in non-Zionist imposed apartheid conditions, the international community enthusiastically supports.
LEGAL LEGITIMATE RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE
Long before Oct. 7 or the ICC's recent advisory ruling, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has repeatedly and explicitly affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist the Zionist occupation, including through armed struggle.
"The General Assembly…Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle; Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Namibian people, the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside interference…"
Due to the consent manufactured by Zionist-aligned media propaganda, the Palestinians' legitimate resistance struggle now forms the basis for criminal sanctions and suppression of the investigative efforts that seek to expose Zionist smears and other lies. The Zionist objective succeeds in allowing the ICC to make the case that Palestinian resistance and Zionist occupation are identical in morality and thus on equal grounds in terms of global condemnation and legal prosecution.
The theater surrounding the ICC's recent actions against the Zionist entity seeks to convince us that ICC prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan was faced with his very own trolley problem and made the most ethical decision given the circumstances. I caution the public to be careful not to fall for it.
When we chant "In our thousands, in our millions…we are all Palestinians" until our voices go hoarse and our chests ache, we should be reaffirming our commitment not to be deterred by smears against the movement or by the lies published by Zionist media and to fiercely resist occupation wherever it exists by any means necessary.
Zionists are relying on the people living in the US. and other Western allied nations to maintain their relatively positive perception of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, so that these institutions may continue to maintain their legitimacy as arbiters of justice, thus removing any barriers to the global acceptance of their rulings in this so-called "conflict." Israeli occupation did not begin with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the occupation of Palestine will not end if and when Netanyahu is arrested and tried. We cannot take the United States' condemnation of the ICC warrants or this UN investigation at face value; we must remain critical of all legal institutions—domestic and international—and exercise vigilance in the face of ongoing Zionist normalization efforts. Do not let the intervention of the ICC and the United Nations convince you that the work is done. It's barely started. The demand is for the end of the occupation and a liberated Palestine.