It has been a while since Israel had a new evil enemy threatening its very existence. The Dec. 20 announcement by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Fatou Bensouda, that she had found “reasonable basis” to suspect Israeli war crimes were and are being committed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and was seeking the court’s ruling on opening an investigation has turned both the Gambian-born jurist and the court itself into our sworn enemies.
This was not always the case. The idea of establishing an international framework to try those suspected of violating international law first arose after World War I. Article 14 of the 1919 Versailles Treaty stated that the League of Nations would approve plans “for the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice” that would try individuals — not states. But the plan fell by the wayside, and Article 14 was not implemented. Germany tried after World War I some of its soldiers for international crimes, but the German court acquitted almost all of them. These trials were conducted in Leipzig in 1921 (hence the name "the Leipzig Trials"). The allies mocked these trials because they were pathetic, and the Germans were angry over them, because they considered them a humiliation and as being forced upon their judicial system.