Why are the good guys sanctioning ICC judges?
This used to be a huge complaint across African countries (because they had the same problem: African governments went pretty far in suppressing islamic insurgencies that threatened their existence. Of course the insurgencies committed 100x the human rights violations that those states did, but never got convicted)
That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority).
Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian).
The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law.
In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.
And it's not limited to this conflict. Other examples include that in order to "join the international order", ie. the WTO, China promised to not support any companies with state support and to charge all companies normal company taxes. And while I'm not aware of definitive proof, nobody seriously believes they are doing this. The agreement also outlaws what they're (very publicly) doing with loans in the belt and road initiative, by the way.
Or other examples: the US, France, the UK and other countries specifically signed that if Russia invaded Crimea that they would do some combination of:
1) declare war on Russia (this is in all agreements)
2) support Ukraine economically
3) support Ukraine militarily
4) commit to attack Russia physically and help free Crimea "kinetically"
In trade for Ukraine denuclearizing. Whilst there are different agreements, let's just simplify and say that any particular agreement contains 3 out of those 4 provisions.
And while all countries (except of course Russia) have indeed supported Ukraine, none of them have followed through on their commitment to declare war on Russia.
I took a year of law school, because, you know, bored. And I do remember one professor (who was a sitting supreme court judge at the time, btw), described international law as "fiction, a guideline at best". The problem being that nobody, except the US and Israel, have any real intention of following through on international agreements. Of course, this was before the current iteration of the conflict, even before 2014. On one hand, his opinion has not changed ... but it's because he has since left us.
The Palestinian Authority works extremely closely with the Israelis to hunt down anyone who engages in armed resistance against Israel. Just think of how incredible that is. The PA, which is run by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, supposedly dedicated to freeing the Palestinians from Israeli oppression, is working with the Israelis to prevent Palestinians from resisting an occupying military force. The PA has burned a huge amount of political capital doing this, and is now widely hated by the Palestinians. It's seen as a collaborationist organization. So when you demand that the PA work even more slavishly for Israel than it already does, I don't know what you're seriously expecting.
> China promised to not support any companies with state support
China did not make a blanket commitment to end all state support to its companies. Not even the United States or Western European countries have made such a commitment. China promised to carry out many different types of economic reforms, and it did indeed carry out very deep and painful reforms. The Chinese economy is drastically different than it was in the 1990s. Most of the big state monopolies have been broken up, private companies play a much larger role than before, and foreign investment is much easier.
> the US, France, the UK and other countries specifically signed that if Russia invaded Crimea that they would do some combination of
No, the US, France and UK never committed to defend Ukraine militarily. The Budapest Memorandum just said that each country agreed not to attack Ukraine, and that they would discuss with one another if there were any violations of the agreement.
> The problem being that nobody, except the US and Israel, have any real intention of following through on international agreements.
Huh? The US and Israel are not known for following through on international agreements. The US might have had some sort of reputation many decades ago, but that reputation is thoroughly shot through now. Israel never did. It has always been a loose cannon on the international stage.
Point me to the treaty that commits the US, France or the UK to what you're describing - what amounts to a full blown defense pact of Ukraine.
The only thing I'm aware of that is remotely close to that is the Budapest Memorandum and that contains none of what you describe. At most, it obligates countries go to the UN Security Council if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/05/06/united-states-unsigning-...
This paints a stark negative picture of the US. However, of course, as soon as you consider intent of signing ... and the fact that some signatories to the Rome statute, like Palestina or South Africa, have signed it without any intent to carry out their side of the agreement, and that the ICC has in fact accepted these members (kind of).
The idea of the ICC ... was supposedly the same idea that created Gaza in 2007. If you give them something in trade for cooperating with the treaty, they'll cooperate. Of course, reality was they greedily accepted what they got (e.g. Palestina immediately tried suing Israel), but never carried out their side of the agreement. Palestina, for example, in their "Martyr fund", paid out money to people the ICC said they should arrest, but never took any action and several times publicly declared they would never arrest any Palestinian, no matter what they did, for the ICC. (their "Martyr's fund" paid money to Palestinians according to how many Jews they had killed and/or wounded [1], which the PA committed a $330 million per year budget for). South Africa has now twice publicly protected people they should arrest (Omar Al Bashir and Putin) against the ICC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_...
The Palestinians are vastly outgunned by Israel, which militarily occupies the Palestinian territories. The Palestinians correctly believe that if everyone is forced to follow international law, it will be a huge net benefit the Palestinians. Of course, the Israelis have no incentive at all to submit to international law, because Israel can enforce whatever it wants through military force.
It's a David vs. Goliath fight. The Palestinians have very few cards to play. International public opinion and international law are two of those cards.
Israel does not occupy "the Palestinian territories". It does not occupy Gaza (not even now, or at least only about half).
The Israeli have a LONG history of submitting to international law, including retreating from Gaza in 2006 ...
I mean, we can keep going with getting the facts and prejudice out of your post, but ...
The reality is that Palestinians have a dream of eliminating Israel. As they showed before and during the war of 1948, and the wars after that, they want to massacre Jews to achieve that. A long time ago, probably before even 1970s, with help from the KGB, Arafat El-Masri (that's his full name btw, "the Egyptian mountain of knowledge") was an Egyptian KGB agent that scammed the Soviets and the UN out of literally billions of dollars, and that was his only goal). Palestine was created (it did not exist, except as a Jewish state before 1948, a colony of the British Empire, and as a colony of the last 3 caliphates, and a Roman province before that) as a scheme to collect money from international institutions, and that's what it still is. Both Hamas and the PA want conflict, because that gets them about 800$ per month per Palestinian monthly (and that's just the public part). That makes it VERY important for Palestinian leadership to neither lose nor win the conflict, but to keep the conflict, the deaths, the suffering going for eternity, ideally from the side of a Qatarese pool.
There is not a single population on the planet, no matter how badly off they are, that gets 10% of what Palestinians get, on a per-capita basis. Palestinians are absolute geniuses at this. Did you know there are Palestinian "refugees" living in New York, who have never once left the US, who receive an UNRWA pension (tax free, I might add)?
> Both Hamas and the PA want conflict
It sounds like you're still living in the 1970s, when the PLO was engaged in armed resistance against Israel. Those times are long gone. The Palestinian Authority (dominated by the PLO) has tried for 30 years to work with Israel. The last thing it wants is conflict. Israel has been bombing Gaza for 20 months now, and what has the PA done? Nothing. It's actually incredible how passive the PA is.
> There is not a single population on the planet, no matter how badly off they are, that gets 10% of what Palestinians get, on a per-capita basis. Palestinians are absolute geniuses at this.
Oh yes, how lucky the Palestinians are. I hear Israeli bombs are filled with butter tarts and pixie dust.
> Oh yes, how lucky the Palestinians are. I hear Israeli bombs are filled with butter tarts and pixie dust.
Let me just address this claim in your style: "Oh yeah, that's impossible, because NOBODY has ever heard of large groups of people doing war so they get amounts of money they have no other way of making".
Wait, that's so common just about every language has a word for such people? Oh my ...
In 2020, Israel killed 33 Palestinians. Compare that to Americans killing 19444 Afganis, drug lords killing 34512 Mexicans, Saudis killing 19056 Yemenis, Boko Haram killing 7300 Africans, etc. [2]
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/un-condemns-israel...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_in_202...
and paramilitary forces attacking civilians were illegal in British Palestine
taking private property also
and poisoning wells is also technically not super bueno under a little know statute, the laundry list of deeds for which Hammurabbi will fuck you up personally, but I'm not a legal scholars so maybe it was so legal a mockingbird granted them statehood.