Shurat HaDin Continues to Defend Israel and the IDF in the Hague

FOR YEARS SHURAT HADIN has been active in the International Criminal Court (ICC) employing strategic proceedings in anticipation of the day when the ICC would target Israel and the IDF on war crime allegations. This past December 2019, unfortunately, that day arrived with the Chief Prosecutor announcing she was launching an investigation. Shurat HaDin along with several other NGOs, the Israeli government and a number of sovereign nations, have filed briefs with the ICC, insisting that the Palestinians are not a state and that the Court does not have the jurisdiction to investigate nor prosecute the Jewish State. Lining up against Israel on the Palestinian side were a host of antidemocratic regimes, the Arab League and the so-called “human rights organizations.” At stake is whether the Palestinian Authority can charge Israel with war crimes over the IDF’s operations against the terror groups in Gaza and the legitimate right of Jews to settle in the West Bank. In an earlier ruling, the ICC declared that “Palestine” is a state and that there was sufficient evidence that Israeli officials and IDF officers have committed crimes against humanity. Israel has repeatedly made it clear that it will not accept ICC jurisdiction since it is not a signatory of the Rome Statute. Regardless, several member nations—including the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Australia, Hungary, Brazil, along with others, filed briefs supporting Israel. The Czech Republic’s argument was the most voracious, quoting a 2004 International Court of Justice decision to prove that there is no state of Palestine. The Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represent dozens of countries, as well as former diplomats from the United Nations support the Palestinian position. Under international law an entity can only be defined as a sovereign state if it has a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Clearly, the Palestinians satisfy none of these criteria.