Professor Shabtai Rosenne was the Foreign Ministry's first attorney general, and he served in that role for 19 years. Over the course of his lifetime, he was both a law professor and a diplomat, and in every role, he dreamed of establishing an international court that would have the authority to try officials who committed serious offenses in various countries around the world.
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When, as Foreign Ministry director-general, I met Rosenne for the first time in 1986, he explained that the International Court of Justice deliberated conflicts between states, and that although each country was supposed to try individual criminals, this was not enough. That is why when the Allied powers sought to immediately try German and Japanese criminals after World War II, they had to invent international tribunals, one in Nuremberg and the other in Tokyo, and set up temporary systems of prosecution, defense, and jurisdiction. Rosenne told me the Jewish people had to work toward the establishment of a permanent framework that would have the authority to deliberate crimes by individuals and punish the perpetrators. It's no coincidence, he said, that Jews from around the world and Israel were the main proponents of establishing such a tribunal in the early 1950s.
The tribunal's charter has undergone countless changes, and each official involved in its preparation has naturally attempted to protect their own country's Achilles' heel.
In the 1990s, it appeared agreements had been reached until the Egyptians and the Syrians demanded the charter treat the transfer of populations to occupied territories as a war crime. Although Israel was clearly the target of the move, in international law, population transfer relates to the forced transfer of a population to occupied territories. Although I oppose the very existence of settlements in the Palestinian territories, I cannot claim the settlers were sent there by force. As a result, Israel, but also the United States, voted against the final wording of the charter.
Up until Dec. 31, 2000, the charter could be ratified without us having to accept its provisions until we decided to ratify them. At the time, I was serving as Israel's justice minister in a government led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. I told him it would be a slap in our own faces if the Jewish state failed to adopt the establishment of the tribunal it had pushed so hard to establish. I made this argument with the understanding that we had the necessary tools to stand up to various charges. Moreover, any state that ratified the treaty could choose a particular clause for which it could not be sued for seven years, and this was something we could take advantage of, I said.
In a government meeting on Dec. 31, it was decided that Israel would not ratify the charter. I asked then-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami to join me in adding to the decision that, were the Americans to announce they would ratify the charter later that day, Israel would join them. A few hours later, Washington announced it was joining the body. I called Barak, who convened the government, and the decision to have Israel join the International Criminal Court was made. I called Rosenne and told him: Your lifelong dream has been realized.
No, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the court is not an expression of "pure anti-Semitism," but rather a war on anti-Semitism. The judges' ruling that they have jurisdiction to open a war crimes investigation against Israel does not determine we are war criminals, but that the chief prosecutor has the authority to open an investigation. Democratic Israel is strong enough to stand up to the accusations.
Instead of seeing every judicial decision as an existential threat, Israel must present a united front with the US. If an investigation is opened, cooperate with the court, host those who seek to investigate, and explain everything there is to explain.
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