Irony is heaped upon irony in the wake of the warrant for Tzipi Livni's arrest for war crimes issued by a British judge last week. Livni was due to address the ultra-Zionist Jewish National Fund (JNF) conference in North London on December 13 but, on hearing of the British judiciary's alterative plans for her weekend, suddenly discovered a ‘diary clash' and stayed at home instead.
Livni is the latest in a string of Israeli parliamentarians to find themselves on the wrong side of international law. In October, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon pulled out of an JNF dinner on the advice of Israeli legal experts who have also warned Cabinet ministers with a security portfolio and senior Israel Defence Forces (IDF) officers not to visit Britain, Spain, Belgium or Norway, where lawyers are seeking to apply ‘universal jurisdiction' to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice.
Universal jurisdiction, of course, is the principle applied by Israel when it brought Adolf Eichmann to trial in Occupied Jerusalem in 1961. It is the principle under which ‘Ivan the Terrible' aka John Demjanjuk is currently being tried in Germany for the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
Shockingly, the question does not appear to be whether or not the Israelis committed war crimes during the 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza (which left more than 1,400, mostly civilian, dead) but whether or not they should be held to account for them.
The Arab, Muslim and human-rights activists who instigated the legal application for Livni's arrest warrant were obliged to take justice into their own hands when the British government failed to abide by the fourth Geneva convention, which requires the 189 participating countries (Britain included) to bring persons who have committed grave breaches of its principles to trial.
War crimes
Justice Richard Goldstone's report on the Gaza conflict found the Israelis guilty of war crimes. Goldstone (who is Jewish and a firm supporter of Israel) is a veteran of such investigations, having brought the perpetrators of serious violations of international law in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (among others) to justice. His report was adopted by the UN Human Rights Council and further endorsed at the General Assembly.
Livni was foreign minister in the Cabinet that ordered white phosphorous to be used against the children of Gaza and urged IDF soldiers to the slaughter. This is why the British judge charged with issuing a warrant for her arrest assessed that there was a prima facie case for Livni to answer.
Yet Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband immediately put in personal phone calls to Livni and the ultra-right-wing Avigdor Lieberman (who has openly advocated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and dropping a bomb on the Aswan dam to ensure catastrophic losses among the Egyptians) to apologise for the action of the court and to assert their opposition to it.
This is not the first time that a British leader has been at odds with the judiciary. In 1998, Margaret Thatcher famously argued for the release of the genocidal Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, who had been detained in the UK on a Spanish warrant for his arrest. But it is highly unlikely that any of Brown's predecessors would have considered changing the mechanism of the legal system (a completely separate and independent organ of state) as a result.
Labour, it seems, is intent on just such a course of action in order to prevent Israeli officials implicated in the Gaza massacre being arrested if they visit the UK. During Wednesday's Questions to the Prime Minister Harriet Harman, standing in for Brown, told the house that the ‘situation' would be ‘resolved' during the Christmas recess — in other words, without the involvement of parliament.
This highly undemocratic and unconstitutional suggestion was wholeheartedly endorsed by opposition leader William Hague, and moves are already afoot to allow the attorney general (effectively part of the government) to veto arrest warrants for visiting foreign leaders.
The rationale behind this alarming deficit of democracy and justice is that Britain will not be able to participate in the ‘peace process' if Israeli delegations are to be handcuffed on arrival at Heathrow. Apart from the fact that there is no peace process at the moment due to Israel's intransigence on the colonies issue, British law already provides immunity against arrest for foreign officials attending government-level talks.
The only conclusion one can draw is that the Zionist lobby in Britain is so strong that it can persuade Brown and a large proportion of British politicians that Israel's war crimes are not the sort that should be punished. That Israeli violations of human rights and the genocidal propensities of Israeli leaders are somehow different to those of the Nazis or Slobodan Milosevic.
By effecting radical change in the 600 year-old British judicial system, upstart Israel, at just 60, demonstrates that it is not only able to evade the long arm of the law, but twist it too.
Abdel Bari Atwan is editor of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi.
