The World Wars are precisely why we have international institutions, including legal ones. The fact that international law is more honored in the breach isn’t an argument against its necessity.
For better or worse, the ICC is a joke and at best a decidedly mediocre institution that no one took seriously until it engaged in anti-Israel virtue signaling. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the idea behind the organization, this much is true.
I'm sure the Congolese, Ugandan, Sudanese, Malian, and Central African military and political figures who are or very recently were in custody due to the ICC would disagree. Dislike it all you want, but the ICC is one of the few organizations that has ever actually done something about enforcing justice for perpetrators crimes against humanity. I'd think its the only one that has done so across multiple conflicts. Its statements on this (and other conflicts, like its warrant against Putin) are newsworthy and widely reported because its record gives it a moral authority regarding war crimes that both Israel and Hamas lack. If it really was a "decidedly mediocre institution that no one took seriously" its statements would have been ignored like the vast majority of the statements made about this conflicts by no-name organizations have been.
I mean, they will be ignored in every truly meaningful sense as far as the conflict goes and rightly so. It has no jurisdiction and is simply embarrassing itself. And that’s assuming the warrants are even issued.
The Genocide Convention to which Israel
is a signatory was created because of the Holocaust, so the pro-Israel movement attempting to defend its conduct against such accusations under the Rome Statute by incorrectly claiming false jurisdiction may just be the peak of "embarrassing" hypocrisy. Palestine has been UN-recognized since 2012 & a state-level signatory to the Rome Statute since the P.A. signed it in 2015, & there's no "ICC jurisdiction applies only to UN members" provision of the Rome Statute, granted that unlike the ICJ, the ICC isn't even a UN organ! And either the ICC can investigate alleged crimes committed in the territory of member-states even when the act of directing those alleged crimes to be committed took place in the physical territory of a non-signatory to the Rome Statute, or else Putin's arrest warrant is just as deficient as the pending application for Bibi & Gallant. Just because terrorists like Yehya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif & Ismail Haniyeh routinely ignore international law & the rules of war doesn't entitle a democratic nation-state like Israel to also get to do so.
And if you don't believe me, then look no further than Bibi himself finally conceding that he has risked putting Israel on the path to becoming a pariah state after slowly but surely losing a lot of the support that the country righteously had on 10/7 because he allowed the operation to be too militarily incompetent & hell-bent on collectively punishing Gaza with genocide:
Whether or not the arrest warrants materialize, they have already had an effect. It is impossible to detach them from the postponement of any move to start the evacuation of Palestinian civilians as a prelude to the Rafah operation, and the sudden willingness of Netanyahu to accept an Egyptian proposal
for a hostage agreement that will include the restoration of freedom of movement in Gaza and, more than anything else, the increasingly open actions by Israel to restore supply lines into Gaza after long months of obstruction.
Israeli officials admit that these are now directly connected to the government's urgent efforts to fend off arrest warrants.
It's part of a wider trend of belated realization that the costs of this war on the international front could become intolerable, whether for Israel as a country or for certain Israeli individuals. And while many, perhaps even a majority, of Israelis don't particularly care if Netanyahu (and Mrs. Netanyahu) might have to give up his penchant for state-funded travel overseas, this isn't just about him.
That doesn't exactly sound like the Israeli political & security establishment is currently "ignor[ing the ICC] in every truly meaningful sense as far as the conflict goes and rightly so."
