Will the issuing of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu force European countries into a reluctant parting of the ways with the US?

In retrospect there can't be much doubt that when Jeremy Corbyn was at the height of his powers as Labour leader, when he had recently achieved a miracle result at the 2017 general election and looked impossible to dislodge, a number of right-wing figures within Labour got together privately and tried to work out how on earth they could turn the tide and get the party back under their control, and what they settled on was the construction of a largely fake 'anti-semitism crisis'.  As Machiavellian strategies go, that one would have seemed particularly unpromising if it had been set out in advance, and it really is quite astonishing how comprehensively it worked.  Doubtless there was the occasional example of genuine anti-semitism on the Corbynite left, as there is in all walks of life, but generally speaking what the supposed "crisis" was about was legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state being repackaged as "anti-semitism".  Too many people who might reasonably have been expected to be sensible enough to see through the stunt proved all too credulous, probably due to their own underlying disdain for the Corbyn project.  The momentum behind Corbyn, which briefly made him look like a Prime Minister in waiting, was put sharply into reverse, and once again he was back to being dismissed as an abnormal figure outside the bounds of political acceptability.   The tactic undoubtedly contributed to the scale of his defeat in 2019, paving the way for his replacement by Starmer, who was emboldened enough to remove his predecessor from the party on bogus grounds of anti-semitism - an act of unprecedented cynicism and arrogance.  And yet the political and commentator class continued acting as if nothing was amiss.

Having seemed for ages to get away with all of this Scot-free, it's hard to escape the supreme historical irony of the fact that Starmer and co were - unbeknown to them - concocting their "anti-semitism crisis" at a moment in time just before the State of Israel was about to commit the worst genocide of the 21st Century so far, thus unexpectedly putting Jeremy Corbyn very publicly on the right side of history as one of the minority of politicians who had consistently refused to accept Israel using accusations of anti-semitism as a shield to allow them to get on with oppressing a neighbouring people.  By contrast, Corbyn's tormentors like Margaret Hodge and David Lammy were left as the ones being seen to have cosy selfies taken with genocidal war criminals like Isaac Herzog and Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Labour leadership's initial reaction to this problem seemed to be to double down and join with Israel in accusing anyone trying to impede the genocide, or even to identify its existence, of anti-semitism.  But can you really do that with the International Criminal Court, now that they have issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu?  

Israel itself is of course already trying to discredit the ICC as an anti-semitic institution, motivated by a wish to distract from sexual harassment accusations against their chief prosecutor.  The incoming Trump administration will doubtless join in with this smokescreen, and will probably take far more sinister actions against the ICC and its staff too.  But given that the UK is a party to the ICC and fully accepts its jurisdiction, how can Starmer go down that road himself?  Indeed, how can he do anything other than denounce those who try to undermine the rule of international law?  In spite of the way the Labour party has mutated in recent years, there are still enough internationalists within the PLP that it's hard to imagine them indefinitely tolerating a leader who favours Trump and a wanted war criminal over the international courts.  

I said a couple of weeks ago that one of the silver linings of Trump's victory is that it might force European countries, however reluctantly, to move away from slavish loyalty to US leadership.  The ICC ruling may mark a parting of the ways whereby European countries will be forced to make a straight choice between loyalty to the US and adherence to an international rules-based system, because the two concepts will henceforth be opposites and fundamentally inconsistent with each other.

Bit of a problem for Keir Starmer that a big part of the ICC's rationale for issuing the arrest warrant against Netanyahu is "knowingly depriving the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival", ie. exactly what Starmer said Israel had the right to do.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) November 21, 2024