Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed.
The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’. The grounds are these: Israel’s failure to facilitate relief ‘by all means at its disposal’ and to ‘ensure that the civilian population… would be adequately supplied with goods in need’ amounts to a violation of the ‘fundamental rights… to life and health’.
Had the ICC sat in judgement on the war against the Nazis, it would have issued arrest warrants for Churchill and Eisenhower
There are two major ethical problems with this. The first concerns the concept of intention.
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