Diplomats and international lawyers meeting in Kampala last month have agreed to empower the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to prosecute the authors of aggression. This news is very important per se, but it does not mean that I expect it to be implemented or that the big aggressors will one day be prosecuted. However, the Arab press seems to have ignored this development, as though it passed under the cover of darkness and escaped unseen. I know the Charter of the United Nations did not prevent any major aggression from taking place in reality, although it clearly mentions that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”. Thus, the member states of the Rome Agreement decided in Kampala to give the UN Security Council until 2017 to exercise its power to refer leaders of aggression from any country to the ICC for trial. The United States participated in the deliberations and supported the plan although it is not a member of the ICC, while Britain and France, who are both ICC members, insisted on rendering the Security Council the final arbiter in assigning aggression and its perpetrators, which means that there will be a veto to protect aggressors. This issue is not novel. In the past, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried Nazi leaders for the crime of aggression, and decided that the latter is not “only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." The Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. He stressed several times that aggression is a state crime, and is not only limited to the nations vanquished in the Second World War. The world then waited 65 years before Judge Jackson's words were put into a provision that gives the ICC the power to prosecute the perpetrators of aggression. The delay is understandable, given the fact that the biggest aggressors after WWII were: the Soviet Union, the United States and Israel, and today, Russia, along with the United States and its illegitimate child Israel are among the non-member states of The Hague Tribunal. We know what the USSR committed against the countries of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and all its neighbors, and we know that Russia is better now, even when it has not stopped its aggression. We also know what the United States has committed from the Far East to Central and South America, and recently, Iraq. Then there is Israel. The creation of Israel itself was an act of aggression against Palestine and its people. The aggression continued today and continues every day; Israel remains an illegal outpost in its entirety until the Palestinian state is established, and the Palestinians give Israel a certificate of legitimacy. Of course, I state this as an Arab. However, the whole world has become inclined to delegitimize Israel. The BDS campaign, or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, is led by human rights groups and Christian churches, some in the United States itself. Aggression was thus committed by Israel as soon as it was founded in 1948, and committed since then, until the Lebanon 2006 Summer War and the War on Gaza between 2008 and 2009, and then the massacre of peace activists at sea several weeks ago. Every crime of these is sufficient to refer Israel and the criminals leading it, who have committed the aggression, to trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal. However, I do not expect that the Israeli criminals will ever be tried, nor the criminals in the Bush administration who invaded Iraq on falsified premises while the real motive was oil and the interests of Israel. As long as the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog, Israel will remain a pariah state. I have a simple example from this month alone when 542 Israeli academicians signed a petition denouncing the Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar (whose name seems to be derived from rabidity [Ar. Saar=Rabidity]) for his intention to take action against Israeli professors who support the academic boycott of Israel. I hope that the Arab reader will notice that Israeli academicians are condemning their government. The Ben Gurion University itself is accused of becoming a hotbed for anti-Israeli activities. I also hope that the reader will follow with me the issue of 11 Arab and Muslim students who boycotted a lecture by Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador in the U.S, in their university (the University of California in Irvine), and who are now being threatened of academic disciplinary action and even expulsion. This is while noting, as Professor Jess Ghannam wrote, that George Bush gave a speech on U.S citizenship in Virginia on 4/7/2008 which anti-war activists boycotted, heckled him and called for his impeachment, and yet, no one tried to stop them or punish them. Only Israel cannot be criticized. As a result, it commits crimes and enjoys impunity. For this reason, I expect that a petty officer that we have never heard of, and who seized power in some country/tribe in Africa, will be tried, while the perpetrators of major crimes will continue basking in impunity. [email protected]
