The United States has been acting with impunity for years through interference in third countries, illegal invasions, sending weapons to local groups, bombings and military operations that it justifies with the excuse of protecting and guaranteeing security, although the real objectives and interests that drive them are others.
With its active and continued support for Israel in its massive destruction against Gaza it has gone even further, sustaining an ongoing genocide. In more than fifteen months of massacres, Washington has vetoed a ceasefire in the United Nations Security Council on several occasions, has sent billions of dollars in military aid to the Israeli Army and has put political and diplomatic pressure to sustain the actions. of the Netanyahu Government. To this end, it has promoted a Campaign of discredit against some of the most essential organizations of the scaffolding built on the basis of universal international law, such as the courts of The Hague.
The US war against the International Criminal Court
This past Thursday, a couple of hours before the tribute to former President Jimmy Carter – who, paradoxically, was one of the promoters of the International Criminal Court (ICC) – the US House of Representatives voted in favor of sanctioning any attempt at the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute “protected persons” of the United States and its allies, including Israel. Among the votes there were 45 yeses of Democratic congressmen.
With this resolution, which will now have to be addressed in the Senate, the aim is to penalize and hinder the arrest warrant issued by the Court of The Hague (ICC) against the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, an order described as “scandalous” by President Biden himself. The spokesperson of Secretary of State American has come to say on more than one occasion that, in the eyes of the United States, the International Criminal Court is valid for the cases of Ukraine, Sudan and Darfur, but not for the Israeli issue.
In this way, the double standard has become more clearly visible, which is implying an unprecedented weakening of international law, in pursuit of a scenario that favors the strongest, the most armed, those with the most military industry, with more weapons capacity and more warlike disposition. The striking thing about this process that pushes us to a new stage – the era of the imposition of brute force – is that Europe has not opposed or tried to avoid many of the steps taken in this regard by Washington, but has instead adhered to most of his intentions and objectives, without even public words of objection.
European nations have not fulfilled the opinion of the International Court of Justice last July, which requests the UN States to suspend trade and investments that could facilitate the illegal Israeli occupation, and they have not even issued a statement against the active support of the US to the operations military actions of mass destruction carried out by Israel. They continue to award contracts to Israeli arms companies and do not establish official embargoes.
The law has given Western governments tools to act, but they look the other way. The lack of European forcefulness in the attempt to dismantle the scaffolding of international law live and direct is changing the world and will take its toll.
Poland’s contempt for the order of the Court of The Hague is another push towards impunity
European submission
After fifteen months of unconditional support for Israeli crimes and the genocide in Gaza – with setbacks for freedom of protest included – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has commented Donald Trump’s statements this week, in which the incoming American president expressed his willingness to appropriate Greenland (territory under Danish, that is, European, sovereignty). “The principle of the inviolability of borders is in force for all countries, it does not matter if they are east or west. “Everyone must comply with it, whether they are a small country or a very large power,” Scholz said on Wednesday.
At what point did the German leader think that the contempt of Israel, the US and Germany (among others) for the Palestinian borders did not set a precedent? Why are you now defending the same rules for everyone if you have supported removable rules for the Israeli case?
This Thursday another European country, Poland, joined Washington in his disdain to the International Criminal Court, stating that it will not comply the arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “It cannot be conceived that Israeli political leaders cannot safely participate in the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
It is not the first time that a European Union nation has objected to the arrest warrant against Netanyahu. Recently the Government of France appealed to an alleged immunity – which is not such – of Prime Minister Netanyahu, claiming that he could evade arrest.
By abandoning the defense of international law in Gaza, Europe accepts the principle of force, harming itself
If the Hague Court is denied action today on the Palestinian question, tomorrow international law will be weaker when we need it to be applied in defense of our own interests. Today it is the Palestinians, tomorrow it could be us. With his statements about the possibility of seizing Greenland, the Panama Canal or Canada by force, Trump has staged a provocation and wanted to warn that tomorrow is already here, showing that he has Europe’s submission.
In their lack of criticism of the United States in the face of the genocide in Gaza, many European nations have chosen to accept Washington’s plans and its support for Israel. With this, they have consented to the principle of force and the primacy of the framework of military power without being the maximum powers in that scenario, which means signing that their own continent can be intervened in the future.
All of this occurs while the war in Ukraine continues, which began with the Russian invasion, in which the Ukrainian and Russian people put the dead. The perpetuation of this armed conflict increases the risk of an extension of violence in the region, while the US watches it from thousands of kilometers away, benefiting from it, since it has allowed it to position itself as the main seller of liquefied gas in Europe.
For more than a year, European citizens and the entire world have seen how Western leaders and media avoided naming Washington’s support and active complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In an admirable juggling effort we have come to read or hear political and journalistic statements that attributed to the Biden Government fed up or anger with Netanyahu, while it continued to provide him with weapons and forceful political support. The facts have gone one way and the story, too often, the other. As in George Orwell’s supposedly free England in his Farm Animal“inconvenient facts can be hidden without the need for any official prohibition.”
Now that Donald Trump is going to assume the presidency, it would be appropriate to recognize that the United States was not one country yesterday and a totally different one today, but that if it has come this far it is because there have been policies – not only from the Republican Party – that have been paving the way for years. path of imperialism, warmongering and impunity, that is, of the law of the strongest, a scenario in which the European peoples lose. There can be no surprise in the impunity of the Trump Government if the facilitation and coverage of a genocide by the Biden Government has previously been accepted.
#era #brute #force #global #stage
