Some opponents of the judicial reforms proposed by the current Israeli government have asserted that their passage will expose current and former members of the IDF to prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC). If Israel allows its elected legislators to select judges and forbids its Supreme Court from revoking laws on a whim—the anti-reformists claim—the ICC will determine that Israel is incapable of prosecuting crimes on its own, and will therefore assert its jurisdiction. Eugene Kontorovich and Avraham Shalev are unconvinced:

The ICC has no authority over Israeli soldiers, regardless of the details of Israel’s legal system, for one simple reason: the court only has jurisdiction over countries that accept its jurisdiction by ratifying its constitutive treaty, known as the Rome Convention. . . . Israel, like its allies, the United States and India, has never joined the ICC, out of longstanding concerns about [its] systemic bias. The only way the court could exercise jurisdiction over Israeli nationals is in the case of war crimes committed in the territory of a state party, a situation that simply does not arise.

Assuming the ICC had jurisdiction, it only prosecutes where the home state is “unable or unwilling” to investigate or prosecute a crime. [This principle, known as the] complementarity doctrine, in no way relates to the method of judicial selection. Indeed, it does not refer to courts at all, but to the “unwillingness” of the “state” to prosecute, which focuses primarily on the executive branch. The proposed reforms do not involve Israel’s criminal justice system, its independence, or the ability of prosecutors to prosecute offences committed by its soldiers.

Even Israel’s present judicial system would not satisfy the ICC’s views of what complementarity requires, however. Foremost among the supposed crimes the ICC is investigating [is] the supposed crime of allowing Jews to live in Judea and Samaria. Israel’s Supreme Court, however, has never treated this as a criminal issue.

The rhetoric about the ICC in the judicial-reform debate gives the body far more respect and formidability than it deserves.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.