The ICC and Hamas

With regard to “ICC warns Israel, Hamas: Gaza violence may constitute war crimes” (April 9), the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over Israel.

Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC. The fact remains that even signatories are under ICC jurisdiction only so much as these states actually grant the court jurisdiction. What’s more, jurisdiction in the end requires sovereignty, and even the most myopic investigator can clearly see that the ICC possesses none.

The ICC, recognizing the inherent contradiction of its existence and its utter lack of sovereignty, has, by warning Israel, displayed the political reality of its foundations, which is to say that the court is all about politics and nothing about either laws or justice.

But really, the ICC is besides the point. The fact is that Hamas has gone from happily killing the civilians of its enemy to developing a modern take on the strategy of waging war from behind its own citizens, to now embracing the large-scale use of its citizens in waging war on its behalf. So now it no longer merely hides behind its people in hospitals and schools – it plays on the idiocy of its population to try and harness mobs to accomplish military operations (e.g., penetrating a border to commit further operations on enemy soil).

Either the military operation fails or it does not, but either way, Hamas perceives it as a win.

That Hamas is too cowardly to deal straight – for instance, by putting in uniform the people it uses as soldiers – does not make the activities of these people any different. It’s idiotic in the extreme to assume that just because it disguises its military operations in civilian clothing, these undertakings are any less of a military nature, and a true stretch of stupidity to say that since an aggressor doesn’t look the “right” way to some far-off, illegitimate court, an opposing military cannot perform its basic operations of defending a country. JAMES ESTRIN Jerusalem