Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The ICC vs Netanyahu & Gallant - with Natasha Hausdorff

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

This past Thursday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The warrants were issued on charges of attempting to orchestrate starvation as a method of warfare, and crimes against humanity, of “murder and persecution”, in the ICC's terms. A warrant was also issued for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an airstrike in Gaza in July.To help us understand the ICC; its role, jurisdiction and credibility; and the wide range of implications of these arrest warrants, our guest is Natasha Hausdorff.Natasha is a British barrister and expert on international law, foreign affairs, and national security policy. She is the Charitable Trust Legal Director of UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI). Natasha regularly briefs government leaders and international organizations, and has spoken at parliaments across Europe and at the United Nations. She is a regular commentator on issues of international law, both generally and specifically as they apply to Israel.UK Lawyers For Israel on X: https://x.com/uklfi 

I remember there was an article in 2012 in the New York Times, which was written by Mahmoud Abbas, and it was Abbas's declaration of lawfare. He called for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal, not just a political matter. Now, lawfare is an abuse of legal systems, legal processes, international legal institutions in particular when it comes to Israel and it is a misuse of those processes to advance a particular political agenda. So it's not just the ICC but I have seen the developments across other international legal bodies, across the international legal Academy, essentially accusing the victims of the very crimes that have been perpetrated against them. I mean, all of this is utterly

extraordinary but outside of these exchanges that we're having, it is becoming the received wisdom. It's 5.30 p.m. on Saturday, November 23rd here in New York City. It's 10.30 p.m. on November 23rd in London where our guest joins us today. It is 12.30 a.m. in Israel on Sunday, November 24th as Israelis prepare for the week ahead. Two days ago judges at the International Criminal Court, the ICC, issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's former Defense Minister Yoav Galant on the grounds of attempting to orchestrate starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder

and persecution in the ICC's terms. A warrant was also issued for Hamas leader Mohammed Def, who was killed in an airstrike in Gaza in July. President Biden swiftly called the war crimes arrest warrant quote outrageous and said that the United States government rejected the ICC decision and Republican leaders of Congress who will be taking over the majority in a matter of weeks came out with very harsh statements directed at the ICC implying that there will be repercussions for the ICC as an institution. On the other hand several European countries have said that they respect the decisions of the court and also countries like Canada, countries elsewhere in the world, and suggesting that they would comply with ICC requests that these Israeli leaders be arrested if they

land in any of these countries. And now onto today's conversation. This is Call Me Back. With us today for the first time to discuss the wide ranging implications of these arrest warrants is Natasha Hausdorff. Natasha is a British barrister and expert on international law, foreign affairs, national security policy. She regularly briefs political leaders and international organizations and has spoken

at parliaments across Europe and at the United Nations. She is a regular commentator on these issues of international law generally, but specifically as they apply to Israel. Natasha, welcome to the Call Me Back podcast. Thank you, Dan. It's very good to be with you. I want to start Natasha with the claims themselves. Can you just generally tell us about these charges raised against Netanyahu and Galant?

Well what we know about what has been put forward to pre-child chamber one which made this decision to issue arrest warrants is what was contained in the public summary that the prosecutor Karim Khan put out on the 20th of May this year. Now I have to say the very public nature of the application and it's being accepted by the court is very unusual. Usually these sorts of warrant requests are made in secret so that the subjects of them are not aware that they're subject to a warrant for their arrest. But here on the 20th of May, Kareem Khan put out this public summary. He gave a press conference, an interview on Christian Amampour. And what was contained within his summary was principally

an allegation of intentional starvation, which included a host of false allegations that Israel had closed the crossings into Gaza and had deliberately restricted aid into the Gaza Strip in order to deprive the civilian community there. There have also been likewise allegations of it targeting civilians in the Gaza Strip throughout its war against Hamas. The factual basis that was presented to the court is very significant because my organization UK Lawyers for Israel went through that public summary line by line and in a further submission to the court and a letter to the prosecutor proved, I should say line by line, that every phrase of every sentence was in fact false. One example is that in furtherance of this

allegation of starvation, the prosecutor relied on a report that suggested that famine might come to parts of the Gaza Strip. That report was subsequently debunked by a famine review committee report that indicated it had been based on insufficient or incomplete information and it drew implausible conclusions. And the real unfortunate aspect of this entire process is that after being put on notice of all of the falsehoods contained in that public summary of the factual allegations, rather than seeking to review the position, the prosecutor instead told the court to ignore any and all submissions that have been made to it that didn't come

from him on the question of accuracy. So the overriding impression from that process and then also from the press release that the court put out on Thursday is that they have made this determination to issue arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yov Galant on the basis of this slew of false information. Okay, I want to rewind the tape and just understand how we got here. And when I say how we got here, I sort of want to start with the book of Genesis, if you will, of this particular story of the ICC. The ICC is not something that's been around for hundreds of years or even for decades, right?

It was something that was just created 20 plus years ago. Indeed, with the Rome Statute at the end of the 90s and the court was initially born in 2002. And has no formal relationship with the United Nations, correct? No formal relationship, save that there is provision for the UN Security Council to make referrals to the court. So why does this institution exist? How did it come to exist?

Before we get to Israel and the implications for Israel, why does it exist? What was the impulse for it? Well, interestingly enough, Israel and the United States were both quite heavily involved in establishing the notion, the project of an international criminal court and encouraging the formation of it. And ever since the Second World War, the creation of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and the notion of having international bodies subsequent to the Nuremberg Trials that might exist on a permanent footing to bring to justice the worst perpetrators of crimes against humanity

and war crimes is something that all right-thinking states, those supporting the rule of law and wishing to counter war crimes, supported. It was in the process of the drafting of the Rome Statute, unfortunately, that a particular political agenda started to creep in. And that ultimately was the reason that, albeit both the United States and Israel initially signed the Rome Statute, neither of them joined the court, neither ratified that international treaty to become members of the ICC. And one of the key reasons for that was the inclusion in the crimes in Article 8 of some innovative drafting. The lobbying at the time was for a provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49-6, which is often used to claim that the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria is against international law that Israeli settlements were illegal. That provision

was transposed into the Rome Statute which founded the court, but it is a provision against state transfer of individuals into an occupied territory. While it was being brought across to the Rome Statute, the drafters introduced keywords directly or indirectly. And with this manipulation of the drafting of this particular crime, both America and Israel saw that they were trying to shoehorn the situation in the disputed territories in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank into this definition of a crime, an alleged crime, and that the clear indication from that was that Israel was going to be a political target of this court. So since then, unfortunately, the court has failed ultimately to live up to its lofty aspirations and the hopes that its founders had. And it has come

under severe criticism. Back in 2012, at the 10th anniversary of the court. The entire workings of the court had managed to secure one successful conviction at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Since then, most of the focus has still been on African defendants. So there were lots of allegations of racism against the court. And then in 2020, there was an independent expert review of the court and that revealed a culture of bullying and of fear within the staff at the court, as well as a gross incompetence and malpractice that had caused a number of prosecutions to fail. So all in all, it's had a pretty lousy run for 20 years. And there are certainly those that have been saying, well, that's a perfect explanation

for this political agenda that seems to be seizing on the world's punching bag and the current frenzied criticism of Israel and so much of the misreporting that we've seen over the last 13 months. But this court is ultimately seeking to rehabilitate itself by going after the Jewish state. And it's funded by the member nations, by the signatories?

Yes, it is. Okay. So the US government obviously does not fund it, but it has funding from other countries. I want our listeners to understand the distinctions in the nomenclature. So there's the ICC, which we're focused on today. Yes. How is it distinctive from the ICJ, the International Court of Justice? So they both sit in The Hague in the Netherlands, but the ICC's focus is on criminal responsibility of individuals. So it will only ever be individual persons who find themselves defendants at

the International Criminal Court. The International Court of Justice, the ICJ, deals with states. Okay, so now I want to get to this case now. So if you were the defense attorney for Prime Minister Netanyahu or former defense minister Galant, what would your defense strategy be in this case? Assuming you're not going to discredit the court and you had to represent these two defendants, what would your case be?

What would the defense be? So it's a really good question because I do think that both of the targets of these warrants are ultimately stuck between a rock and a hard place. And we've seen that actually in the response of the court to the submissions that have been already made to it, challenging these arrest warrants after the prosecutor made his application. Essentially, at every juncture the court has kicked the can down the road and refused

to properly engage with the absence of jurisdiction. That's ultimately at the core of the functioning of the court. It's what separates a judicial body from a political body. And here it's important to stress that the court simply does not have jurisdiction because Israel is not a party to it. And because the only other way that the court gets what's called territorial jurisdiction, so the ability to try individuals for crimes committed on a particular territory, is if the entity, the state with jurisdiction over that territory, delegates it to the court or accepts the court's ad hoc jurisdiction over it. Now, in this case, what the court has ultimately

decided is that the so-called state of Palestine is sufficiently a state to be able to join the court and delegate that jurisdiction. And there are some pretty enormous problems with that, starting with the fact some pretty enormous problems with that, starting with the fact that Palestine isn't a state. It is the Palestinian Authority that have purported to join the Rome Statute. The criteria for statehood are very clear in international law. They are quite settled. They are also reflected in the Montevideo Convention criteria. They include a permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into international relations. And the Palestinian Authority simply does not

fulfill those, not least the territory itself. Areas A and B of the West Bank are subject to the Palestinian Authority's jurisdiction. Just explain real quick what the terminology area A and B. Of course. So the West Bank under the Oslo Accords, an international agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was split up into these three areas, A, B and C. Area A was designated by Israel for the Palestinian Authority to have both civil and security control over.

Area B was shared in that the Palestinian Authority had civil control, Israel maintains security control and it has retained entirely control over Area C of the West Bank. Now that is important in several respects because firstly there was never the creation of Palestinian territory through those Oslo Accords. There is nothing there that allows the Palestinian Authority to advance through to statehood. It simply doesn't meet those criteria. But the Oslo Accords themselves also provide a barrier to the Palestinian Authority seeking to delegate any criminal jurisdiction over Israelis because of the very simple fact that the accords themselves, the international agreement that created the Palestinian Authority,

precludes the PA from having or exercising any criminal jurisdiction over Israelis. And very simply, the Palestinian Authority cannot delegate to the court something that it does not have. So at every level here on the question of jurisdiction the court is way out of line and has thrown this fundamental aspect of the way that it operates out of the window. That's a key issue that any subjects of arrest warrants that issued any Israelis would necessarily be having to advance. But another key aspect of this is that the court has flouted its own rules. Very importantly, the rule of complementarity.

Now this is part of the Rome Statute, the founding statute of the court, and it requires that the court act in a complementary fashion to state's jurisdiction, not to substitute it, not to replace it. So where a state is willing or able, willing and able I should say, to investigate and try any credible allegations itself, each should be afforded the opportunity to be permitted to do so. Ultimately, the jurisdiction rests with the local state that has jurisdiction over the territory. Now here we're in the middle of a war. The prosecutor has not allowed any opportunity for the judicial authorities in Israel to pick up and run with any of these allegations and test their credibility. The reporting tells us that in fact the day that Kareem Khan announced his

arrest warrant application on the 20th of May, he was in fact scheduled to meet Israeli officials, or there was a meeting in place in order to facilitate a dialogue about his concerns. Well, that was thrown out of the window and the application itself was advanced with. So at every point, this principle of complementarity has again not been complied with and it's a breach of the court's own rules. We all know the nature of Israel's judicial legal system, the robustness of it, the importance with which the rule of law is upheld. We also know that there are some hundreds potentially of ongoing investigations into allegations that have been raised against individual soldiers. So this is a system that is up and running and robustly working, utterly inexplicable that the

court would proceed in these sorts of circumstances and not at all what was envisaged in its founding. Another really important aspect that I think anyone subject to these arrest warrants should be raising with the court and then the total lack of accuracy in the context of the information that has been put to the court is also something that needs to be raised, that the court itself needs to be held to account in respect of. Unfortunately, however, any subject of these arrest warrants at this stage is only really permitted to make representations on jurisdiction as and when the opportunity arises. So it doesn't seem, other than the mechanisms which have already been utilised, both by UK lawyers for Israel and also the high-level military group, made a substantial submission on the total lack of accuracy of any of the allegations the prosecutor was putting forward.

But neither of those seemed to have made any difference to the court's determination. And the only real implication of that is ultimately that the court hasn't considered them and hasn't decided to act on the information that was put before it. So some critics have argued on this last point you're raising that a I don't want to get into the whole debate for reforms in Israel's judicial system, but some have argued that the 2023 pre-October 7th heated debate about judicial reform illustrated that Israel's judicial system may be a little more fragile or vulnerable to politics. And then more recently, after the ICC came out with these warrants, there's a question about because there has not been a state commission of investigation,

that these self-policing or self-governing investigative mechanisms built into Israel's system, in the one case they could be fragile at some point, or in the latter that there hasn't been a commission of inquiry yet, that maybe, these are not my views, I just wanna elevate them to you to respond to, that maybe Israel's institutions

are not as strong as many of us think and therefore makes it vulnerable to these kinds of attacks from the ICC. Well, you and I and many people who followed the judicial reform process will know that reforms have not been implemented. So that argument as a matter of logic simply doesn't follow. Right, that even if you believe that the judicial reforms would have the effect of weakening Israel's judicial system, if the ICC is actually trying to use that argument, they're using an argument that's predicated on something that hasn't happened yet.

Well indeed, but there is a consensus in Israel there does need to be some amendment, some form of address to it. I think there's also a recognition that the manner in which it was carried out before the 7th of October occurred perhaps left a great deal to be desired, to put it mildly. But in any event, whatever anyone's personal opinion on the need for those reforms or the validity of them might be, the fact of the matter is that nothing has happened to change the judicial system in Israel and nothing in that reform package would have, in my opinion, impacted the independence of the judiciary. I have a degree of experience having followed the calls for reforms for perhaps a decade. I also worked at the Supreme Court. I clerked for the former or the late Chief Justice Miriam Naor. And for anyone who has any familiarity with the manner in which Israel's legal system operates, the notion that it is not sufficiently

robust to deal with credible allegations is simply laughable. If I compare it to the UK, I'll tell you that the Israeli judicial processes are far more interventionist, far more robust. And I don't just mean the manner of advocacy in the courtroom when I say that. But so far as the commission of inquiry aspect of this, and I think as you rightly say, I mean, the calls for that have been into how the 7th of October could have taken place in the first place. Meaning the lapses in intelligence, the lapses in preparedness, basically how Israel got itself in this geopolitical and military mess that enabled October 7th to happen, at both

at a strategic and tactical level. Absolutely, what the failings were and who was ultimately responsible for them. And I think, you know, in so many respects, this will be multifaceted. The fact of the matter is that Israel is still at war. Some are certainly referring to it still as an existential war. Of course, it's not just Gaza. It's Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria. Let us not forget the incredible challenges that Israel is still facing day to day. And so the notion of an inquiry before anything resembling normality might be restored in Israel is perhaps difficult to imagine. But that would have no bearing on what it

is that the court has now indicated its concerns are. Its concern is how Israel responded to October 7th, not what led to October 7th. Absolutely, spot on. But we know that to the extent that there are allegations raised against individual soldiers, these are subject to investigation and where appropriate prosecution. That is how the legal department of the IDF operates. And that is subject to, I should stress, the chain of command that sits outside the military chain of command. The lawyers in the IDF are answerable to the Attorney General. That is in part so that they are able to approve strikes, disapprove of strikes, tell officers more senior in rank to them yes

or no as far as military activity goes. That's quite an important aspect of how the IDF operates in conjunction with the legal advisors. But it's also important to recognize the robustness of the approach that Israel has always taken to investigating allegations and ensuring that soldiers are properly disciplined. None of this seems to be of any interest, I have to say, to the International Criminal Court, which is another reason that I say this is a political agenda that it is following, as opposed to the proper and necessary legal analysis that it was set up to conduct. Okay, now there's 124 member states signatories to the ICC. There's been a range of responses, but many governments, as I said in the introduction,

have indicated that they would comply with it. In fact, let's play Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responding to a question on Friday about how the Canadian government would respond to Gallant or Netanyahu arriving in Canada. First of all, as Canada has always said, it's really important that everyone abide by international law. We are one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. We stand up for international law and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts.

This is just who we are as Canadians. So Natasha, how common is that response? The spirit of it, the tone of it among a number of the member states? Well, looking at the list, Canada, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands and Slovenia have all essentially issued statements of some similarity and indicated that they would enforce arrest warrants in their jurisdiction. Contrary to that, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Argentina have made it very clear that they would not comply with arrest warrants that have just been issued. I have to say that the UK has been somewhat equivocal about it. The spokesperson for number 10 indicated

that the UK would comply with international law. And I find that particularly interesting because ultimately, at least as far as Benjamin Netanyahu is concerned, the question of immunity is one that would have to be balanced against this application for arrest warrants. There are two competing articles in the Rome Statute that apply here. Under Article 27, the Rome Statute purports to essentially supersede immunity, but under Article 98, there's a provision essentially for the diplomatic community applying to non-member states existing unless it is waived by that third party, that non-member state of the Rome Statute. And there's a big academic debate about how those two articles

interact, about how one possibly balances them. But the reason I say the UK is potentially stuck between a rock and a hard place is that ultimately the validity of these arrest warrants will dictate whether or not the UK if it ever sought to enforce an arrest warrant to actually arrest Netanyahu or Gallant in this instance, whether in doing so it would in fact be breaching its international law obligations about state immunity. And so that balance is a very difficult one to strike, especially where there are so many arguments that these warrants cannot possibly be valid because of the lack of jurisdiction and the other failings that I've outlined.

What are the implications for lower ranking IDF soldiers and officers? So if you are a Miloimnik, a reservist in Israel, let's just say you're a 30-year-old engineer at the Google facility in Israel, which is one of the largest employers in Israel, and you have three kids and you haven't been in the army in years and you get called up for reserve duty after October 7th, and were deployed to Gaza and you are somehow in some way tied to this, what is described as this orchestrated attempt at famine. Parenthetically, I should add that I was just pulling this stat up. There have been 1,138,847 tons of food distributed to Gaza from Israel since October 7th, which is something

like over a billion pounds of food. But if you are a lower ranking Israeli reserve duty civilian, you get called up, you're in Gaza and you are somehow quote unquote complicit in whatever the ICC is charging Israel with here. Is the precedent of going after Netanyahu and Gallant mean that ultimately all these others could be vulnerable? So the ICC itself has focused on more senior officials, the leaders of states, generals of that nature. But there is also an aspect of how international criminal law operates, which is called universal jurisdiction, which in principle enables war crimes to be prosecuted in the context of

in the domestic environment of any member state. And you may remember in fact that I think it was around 2008, 2009, there were already a number of arrest warrant requests in the UK at the time for Tzipi Livni, for Ehud Barak, and ultimately they weren't successful. And what happened was that the government tweaked the law ever so slightly here so that for an application for an arrest warrant for crimes of that nature, one needed to obtain the consent, the approval of the attorney general. You couldn't just rock up at a court and make an application like that. That has clearly allowed Israeli officials to travel here to the UK unimpeded because successive attorney generals would have certainly refused their permission for

a vest warrants of that nature. Some people have said that the jury would be out with respect to the current Attorney General Richard Herrma. He has been appointed by Keir Starmer. He's an old personal friend of Keir Starmer's. In fact, I think they both know each other from the bar. He was a significant campaigner against the anti-BDS legislation and has also some anti-Israel activities to his credit. So the question as to whether or not in this context after the issuance of these warrants he may take a different approach to the application for warrants for any other soldiers that are made here domestically in the United Kingdom is a big question. Certainly, if I'm speaking here in the UK, there will be families that come up to me and say, our son is a lone soldier and we're very concerned. What happens if he comes back to the UK? Is he going to be

subject targeted in that fashion? I hear that echoed across other places, Australia, South Africa in particular, where in fact service in the IDF is, according to the letter of the law, not something that the South Africans consider to be legal. That hasn't been something that has been enforced until now, but the situation is very, very rapidly changing. And certainly in the UK, we know that there are organisations, groups of Palestinian lawyers, fundraising to bring these sorts of arrest warrant applications, prosecutions for war crimes, and compiling the names of dual nationals to enable them to do so. Whether we'll get to that point is, I'm afraid, still

a question mark, but it is something that I think we need to be very aware of and alive to. I want to talk about the implications for other countries, so not just lower ranking soldiers and officials in Israel, but the implications for leaders in other countries. So let's take Syria. So Bashar Assad under his regime over the last, call it, you know, 10 to 15 years, there has been something in the order of over 600,000 Syrians slaughtered. Talk about a genocide, an orchestrated genocide with the use of chemical weapons and the complete shelling and destruction of whole Syrian towns, largely Sunni Muslim towns and villages, and some 2 million million Syrians who have been displaced some internally, but most of them externally displaced

You have talked about forced starvations. We can talk about what famines are Like in places like North Korea we can talk about the wave of human rights abuses in Countries like Iran, so just take Kim Jong-un, Bashar Assad, and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei, as the three examples I just cited. The ICC has never, not once, I don't think, targeted any of those leaders. Am I correct? They are not member states of the ICC. Right, but neither is Israel.

Right. No, you're completely right. The way that the ICC has sought to overcome that is by purporting to accept the palatine authorities delegation of jurisdiction to it. So ultimately it comes back down to this very problematic issue that the court does not have jurisdiction to have started the investigation in 2021 or indeed to have issued these arrest warrants. But I entirely take your point. If this is a court with any degree of moral standing, then it ought to be going after real situations of the abuse of human rights or specifically war crimes, crimes

against humanity, as opposed to the invented ones here. So to be clear, if we take serious examples, example, so the ICC, to defend itself from this, the exposing this hypocrisy, they could say, well look, it's tragic that, you know, 600 plus thousand Sunni Muslims have been slaughtered in Syria and there's all these internally displaced and externally displaced Syrian Sunni Muslims, but they don't represent an independent state that has standing. They are citizens of a country. That country, by the way, is not a member of the ICC. So there's no way to deal with this. Whereas what you're

saying is the Palestinians, as far as they can say, they've unilaterally decided they represent a state and a member state. Well, it's a little bit worse than that because it's the court that has essentially decided that this can be the case contrary to settled international law on the subject. So the court can only operate on the basis of territorial jurisdiction, which means that a state, it's always going to be a state, with jurisdiction over a particular territory can delegate that to the court and can say, we're essentially passing you our state-like powers. All international law is ultimately based on the issue that states are the building blocks and this is the way that the International Criminal Court was

formed. It's states coming together saying essentially they were going to give over some of their powers to the court. But in the context of Syria, Iran, because they have not joined the court, they have not given that power, that jurisdiction over to the court. Here, ultimately, this all comes down to the question of the status of the territory. The Palestinian Authority have, it seems, purported to say that they have jurisdiction to delegate to the court both over the areas that they control in the West Bank, but also over the Gaza Strip. This is another aspect in which the jurisdictional questions here and the way that they've been answered by the court simply make no sense.

We talked about the difficulty which the Oslo Accords present the Palestinian authority. They cannot delegate criminal jurisdiction they do not have. But essentially what the court was asked to decide by the prosecutor, the previous prosecutor, Fassu Ben Suda in 2021 when she reported to open, wanted to open this investigation, was to find that the territory of the so-called state of Palestine included the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Now settled international law does tell us what the borders of states are when they come into existence and the application of this rule of customary international law which is called Utiposidetes Euris, essentially makes it very clear that since 1948, those areas that I've just referred to were in fact Israeli sovereign territory. And the

reason for that is that this rule dictates that the new state inherits whatever pre-existing administrative lines were there before. And the pre-existing administrative lines before the creation of the State of Israel on the 14th of May 1948, were the administrative lines of the British Mandate. That included East Jerusalem and the West Bank and also Gaza. In 1948, Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Egypt occupied Gaza, and that was the situation until 1967 when Israel recovered that territory. Thereafter, you've got a temporary administration that is implemented in the West Bank in particular. Israel applies its law, administration and jurisdiction in full to East Jerusalem, it reunites the city. But in the West

Bank that temporary administration exists until the Oslo Accords. At no point is there any change to the underlying status of the territory from 1948 onwards. And every single international agreement has been clear that a change of status to that territory will be a matter for final status agreements that determines the borders of those states. And so when the court in 2021 gave its decision approving the prosecutor to begin this investigation, it essentially rode roughshod over that universally applicable international law. It ignored the applicable international law to the status of the territory. So in every respect, I'm afraid, international law is, as I say, being thrown out of the window. And the contribution to the overall

narrative here that Israel violates international law, that Israel is committing war crimes is problematic. It's ultimately entirely false. But it is carrying a lot of favour. It has a fair wind behind it. It's entirely in keeping with an awful lot of the misreporting that we've seen in the media. And actually, it's clear from what has been said by many judges and legal commentators that much of this has in fact been based on what has been seen on television. Frequently even former justices of the Supreme Court here that have been arguing various points coming out of these decisions by international courts have said we see on our television screens that Israel is targeting children. You mean in the UK? You're saying judges in the UK? Yeah.

Former Supreme Court judges that were essentially making an argument that Israel was guilty of genocide, if you can believe that, have referenced what they have seen on television in order to justify their remarks. And so we are seeing a vicious cycle of the misreporting in the media and the false narratives, the blood li labels ultimately. This is the modern blood label. To accuse Israelis of killing Palestinian children or Jews were accused of killing Christian children in the Middle Ages in pursuit of their blood. This is no different except that it now has the modern acceptable face of the hatred of the Jewish

state and I think that's why it's become so pervasive and it's so effective at fueling this weaponization of international law against the Jewish state. I want to talk about the long-term perhaps irreparable harm this entire effort will have ricocheting back against the ICC itself. So I've heard many Israelis argue that as horrendous as October 7th was, and as much as it has shattered Israel and Israeli society and it was just, you know, there's no words to describe the depth of the massacre,

that it has backfired against Hamas and Hezbollah and Tehran, the Islamic regime in Iran, in ways that none of these actors could have ever imagined. If Yehysinwar on October 6th had been told that your attack against Israel is going to result in Hamas being completely decimated, your life ending, Mohammed Deff's life ending, the leadership of Hamas being completely wiped out, and oh, by the way, Hezbollah, that quote-unquote ally you had up on Israel's northern border, that too will be wiped out, and its leadership,

including Hassan Nasrallah, who's been in power for decades, will be dead, and oh, by the way, Iran's defenses will be completely exposed because it is gonna result in Israeli military action, aerial military action against Iran and in fact some operations that penetrate Iran right on the ground, right in its government area in the capital, in its capital in Tehran. If you would ask Sinwar on October 6th that all this was going to happen to Hamas and its co-conspirators in the following year, I don't think he would have believed it.

And what we are about to witness, some Israelis have argued, what we're about to witness is the legal version of that backlash against, instead of Hamas, against the ICC, that the ICC has overshot here and they have triggered a response that I think you can already see, we're all focusing, and by the way, I am too. Like I'm guilty of this too in this conversation,

focusing on the countries that are saying they're gonna comply with these arrest warrants. But there are plenty of members of the ICC that have also said they won't. So the fact that members of the ICC, the corollary is the members of the ICC has said we're not gonna participate, and we're not gonna comply, I think also chips away

at the credibility of the institution and I know the u.s With the new administration coming in and the new Congress coming in are talking about taking some very strong action Against the ICC so we could wind up a year from now The ICC being a shell of itself. Oh My goodness, I hope that you're right But I have to say that I have witnessed decades that have led to this point. I remember there was an article in 2012 in the New York Times, which was written by Mahmoud Abbas, and it was Abbas's declaration of lawfare. He called for the internationalization

of the conflict as a legal, not just a political matter. Now, lawfare is an abuse of legal systems, legal processes, international legal institutions in particular when it comes to Israel, and it is a misuse of those processes to advance a particular political agenda. So it's not just the ICC. I hear what you say about this overreach and a potential backlash. I hope that that might follow through and there'll be some steadying of the ship and maybe a return by the ICC to its proper mandate. But I have seen the developments across other international legal bodies, across the International Legal Academy which have been again decades in the making, and across armies of so-called NGOs.

So Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, their reports that seek to call Israel an apartheid state. All of this has ultimately been contributing to the weaponization of international law against Israel and none of it is actually based on real international law. All of it is either inverting international law, essentially accusing the victims of the very crimes that have been perpetrated against them. And I don't just mean South Africa's allegation of genocide, where Israel was the victim of genocide, Israelis were on the 7th of October. But also the allegation of apartheid that I just mentioned.

Where is the real apartheid, Dan? Because it does exist in the area that we're looking at. Right. Areas A and B of the West Bank are Jew-free. Gaza is Jew-free. When Israel withdrew in 2005, it ethnically cleansed that land of Jews. And also colonialism, another pseudo legal accusation that is being deployed against Israel. All of these legal terms, genocide, apartheid, all of the Arab world is Jew free. And yet this allegation

is directed at Israel where there is a 20% minority of Arabs that live as equal citizens. I mean, all of this is utterly extraordinary, but outside of these exchanges that we're having, it is becoming the received wisdom. The ICC isn't launching this initiative in a vacuum. And so far as the public debate, let alone the public intellectual debate, which has really run away with itself in this respect, so far as all of that is concerned and we've seen what's happening at universities around the world, that backlash needs to be against far more than just the International Criminal Court if it is going to have any impact on bringing all of these legal discussions, debates and processes

back onto the straight and narrow and if it is going to have any effect on preventing them from continuing to victimise the only Jewish state with this inversion of international law. Well, Natasha, I do try to end these conversations on a hopeful note. And I know you're saying that you hope I'm right. You remain a skeptic, but you hope I'm right that this will be the beginning of the end for the ICC. And I will just quote from Mike Walz here, Representative Congressman Mike Walz,

who is a congressman from Florida, very influential, has been very influential on national security matters in the US Congress, and is the incoming national security advisor for the new Trump administration for President Trump. So he has the top national security role inside the White House heading up the National Security Council.

And he tweeted yesterday, and I quote here, the ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the US government. Israel has lawfully defended its people and borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the anti-Semitic bias of the ICC and UN come January. Perhaps I might also join you in that slightly more positive outlook. And I also hear from the US that the reinforcements are on the way, which is always very good to know. I was recently actually on the ground

in Gaza. In September, I went in with the 160th second division and was witness to some of the challenges that they have been grappling with on the ground, but also importantly, the incredible progress. And it's not something that we usually hear very much about. You've referenced, of course, the achievements against Hezbollah as well as those against the leadership of Hamas. But what has been achieved in the war on the tunnels, the terrorist infrastructure that Hamas had spent 16 years building, embedding itself within civilian infrastructure and the ability of the IDF to take precautions to prevent civilian

casualties in a fashion which has been unprecedented in the history of warfare. All of this is an incredible achievement. I think it should make everyone extremely proud and it bodes so well indeed for the future, not just of the IDF, but also of all Israelis who have stepped up, who have unified and who have met these challenges in a way that I don't think we could possibly have imagined just over a year ago. I second that. I appreciate. There we go.

Now there's too much hopefulness. Too much hopefulness. We're bouncing back in a game of ping pong of hope. Natasha Hausdorff, thank you for joining this conversation, especially timely, and we hope to have you back on soon. Thank you so much, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Natasha Hausdorff's work,

you can do it through her organization, which is called UK Law show for today. To keep up with Natasha Hausdorff's work, you can do it through her organization which is called UK Lawyers for Israel. You can follow them on X at UKLFI. That's at UKLFI, UK Lawyers for Israel. Their work is very important. I highly recommend you take a look. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar, our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huérgaux. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Sinor.