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Israel to Fight War-Crimes Probe by International Criminal Court
(JNS) Israel Kasnett - The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, announced last week that at the request of the Palestinian Authority, she is opening a probe into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the 2014 Gaza war, as well as crimes in the disputed territories of the West Bank. Alan Baker, director of the international law program at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS: "There is no legal basis to such requests since only sovereign states may appeal to the court, and there exists no sovereign Palestinian state with sovereign territory over which the court could extend its jurisdiction. If the court accepts the Palestinian requests and opens a formal investigation, it will damage its own juridical credibility and become politicized like other UN bodies." Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at the George Mason University Law School, told JNS that the ICC "ignores international law by inventing a Palestinian state that does not exist and creates a crime that no one in international law has ever been charged with before: the crime of people living in places. To say it is a war crime for a Jew to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City [of Jerusalem] is absurd. It is quite clear that the crime of people living somewhere is a crime for which one must be Jewish to be eligible." Kontorovich noted that Bensouda "pretended, in the interest of evenhandedness, to investigate 150,000 Russians being moved into Crimea and concluded without any fanfare that is not a war crime." He noted her refusal to investigate Turkish settlers in Cyprus.