When Israel breaks international law, what does Trump’s US do? Sanction the judges | Owen Jones

The fate of one French judge is a case study in the west’s long unravelling. Nicolas Guillou cannot shop online. When he used Expedia to book a hotel in his own country, the reservation was cancelled within hours. He is “blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system”, unable to use most bank cards. Guillou, you see, has been sanctioned by the United States, putting him on a 15,000-strong list alongside al-Qaida terrorists, drug cartels and Vladimir Putin. Why? Because alongside two other judges of the international criminal court pre-trial chamber I, he approved arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and Mohammed Deif, the former commander of Hamas’s military wing. Guillou and his colleagues had “actively engaged in the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel”, the US claimed when imposing the sanctions in June. All are now barred from entering the US – but that is the least of the consequences. The rationale is brutally clear. The rule of law does not apply to the world’s hegemon or its closest allies. This was bluntly spelled out by Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who told the ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – himself sanctioned – that the ICC was “made for Africa and thugs like Putin, not democracies like Israel”. The US refused to sign up to the court, clearly fearing that its propensity to commit war crimes in foreign lands would lead to prosecutions. That put Washington in the same bracket as human rights abusers like China, Russia and indeed Israel. Only because Palestine acceded to the court a decade ago does the ICC now have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory or by its citizens. Guillou and his colleagues issued their warrants after a lengthy, cautious legal process. The case against the Israeli politicians focused on the use of starvation, which Israeli leaders routinely confessed to. Gallant had announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip” on the grounds Israel was fighting “human animals”, while Netanyahu declared: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.” In spring 2024, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid – an assessment that, according to US legislation, required halting all arms transfers. The US government disregarded its own law. The obliteration of Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of its people, the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure – we could go on – has led to a consensus among genocide scholars that Israel is committing genocide. But for the US and its allies, maintaining Israel’s impunity matters more than preserving any semblance of an international order. Nearly four decades ago, the then senator Joe Biden told Congress that Israel was “the best $3bn investment we make”, claiming that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”. The US regards Israel as an indispensable strategic asset, which is why it is the biggest ever recipient of US foreign aid, including military assistance. Washington will keep supplying the weapons that enable Israeli war crimes – and then threaten anyone who tries to hold the perpetrators to account. Other western countries have followed the US lead. Italy is an ICC member state, but decided to undermine the court by reassuring Netanyahu he would not face arrest if he visited. So did France, and it has since failed to stand up for one of its own citizens for fulfilling his legal responsibilities, while serving an international institution France helped to found. Are basic liberal precepts not supposed to include the international rule of law and the impartiality of justice? Related: Trump and his ilk imagine a world without international law – but they will not achieve it | Philippe Sands Western liberals are divided between justifying or whitewashing Israel’s livestreamed genocide, or issuing empty, hand-wringing platitudes. Whatever remained of that political tradition lies buried in Gaza’s pulverised landscape. Much of the world has witnessed Israel’s daily atrocities against the Palestinian people – including in the US itself, where half the population think genocide was committed, with only a little over a third denying it. Who will ever again accept western lectures on human rights or the “rules-based order”? Time and again, western disdain for international law has rebounded as a strategic disaster. After the Soviet Union collapsed, US elites persuaded themselves that American military power was unchallengeable. That belief helped unleash the illegal invasion of Iraq, which destroyed Washington’s aura of unbeatable strength and shredded the west’s supposed moral authority. The contempt for international law displayed in Iraq helped clear the path for Putin’s later aggression against Ukraine. In Afghanistan, the war crimes committed by US-led forces stoked resentment which resuscitated the Taliban, ending in shattering military and strategic humiliation. The international legal system was always tilted in the west’s favour. That South Africa dared to accuse a key western ally of genocide at the international court of justice tells its own story, as does the support it received from much of the global south and European states such as Spain. The same logic applies to the ICC, which many western states assumed would be used only against their enemies or powerless nations. That this assumption no longer holds is itself a measure of western decline. Waging a campaign against judges who apply the law consistently will not arrest that fall. It will accelerate it. The west’s own hubris sent its power into freefall in the 21st century. There is still a long way down. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist