If Israel needed any more evidence that it is rapidly turning into an international pariah because of the Gaza war, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan provided it on Monday when he said that he was seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
The fact that Khan was also seeking warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif might offer some solace for Israel and its supporters in that Hamas won’t be able to escape from its alleged war crimes. But moral equivalency with a militant organisation is hardly flattering. And, much more importantly, the impact of an arrest warrant has far greater implications for Israel.
Apart from getting arms from Iran and cash from Qatar, Hamas doesn’t have much to do with the outside world. Sinwar and Deif are presumably holed up in a tunnel somewhere deep under Gaza and aren’t going anywhere; Haniyeh is a resident of Qatar and travels only to countries that do not belong to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and, therefore, won’t threaten him with arrest. Gaza, meanwhile, remains blockaded.
By contrast, Israel is deeply engaged with the world through trade, investment, and travel as well as via cultural, academic, and scientific ties. An ICC warrant would not only crimp Netanyahu’s travel plans and put him into the unsavoury company of previous ICC defendants—such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir—it would also cast a dark shadow over the entire country. Israel would be the first Western democracy with the moral stain of being led by a fugitive from the international law.
The ICC affair illustrates, in a nutshell, the challenges that Israel faces as its nearly eight-month-old war in Gaza comes under growing international criticism. That criticism has spurred a popular movement in much of the West to isolate Israel, if not economically, then psychologically and morally, via academic and artistic boycotts.
Will ICC arrest warrants enable the anti-Israel drive to significantly widen its base and gain unstoppable momentum? Will public opinion turn unremittingly hostile to Israel? Will multinational corporations and investors, for instance, decide that the warrants make Israel untouchable? Will governments impose economic sanctions?
Given how unprecedented the ICC threat is, it’s hard to answer any of these questions right now. What can be said with far more certainty is that Israel is more vulnerable to even the mildest forms of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment than any of the other countries that have come into the ICC’s crosshairs.
Israel is a wealthy country but a small one, whose domestic market cannot justify producing at home most of what it needs, whether it is automobiles or the oil to run them, construction steel, or smartphones. Foreign trade accounts for a significant 61% of gross domestic product.
The import substitutions that Russia and Iran, two much bigger sanctioned countries, have carried out with varying degrees of success would be a nonstarter for Israel. Over most of the past decade, foreign direct investment has exceeded 4% of GDP, well above the average rate for members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The high-tech sector, which has been the engine of Israeli economic growth for the better part of two decades and has become its national brand, can only exist as part of a globalised economy. Over the past three years, foreign capital has accounted for three-quarters of total investment in Israeli start-up companies. Israeli tech companies are entirely focused on overseas markets, and the biggest of them are publicly traded on Wall Street.
When US President Joe Biden threatened in mid-May to halt the supply of some weapons to Israel if it invaded Rafah, Netanyahu vowed that Israel would fight with its “fingernails. ... If we must stand alone, we will stand alone.” But it is an empty promise. As large and technologically sophisticated as Israel’s arms industry is, it could never fulfil the country’s needs for basics such as fighter jets, submarines, and bombs.
The war against Hamas in Gaza, which has eaten up prodigious amounts of ammunition supplied by the United States, has only heightened that reliance. If it ends up confronting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel will need even more US arms.
