Yesterday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Mohammad Deif for “alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed in Gaza. Deif, Hamas’s former military chief, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in July. The Netherlands, Canada, and a few other countries have already stated that they will arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot on their territory.

The case against Israel is so absurd, the court’s assertion of jurisdiction over this conflict so feeble, and the behavior of the ICC so un-lawlike, that the warrants say more about the institution’s flaws than the war in Gaza. In 2003, shortly after the ratification of the Rome Statute—which created the ICC, and which neither the U.S., nor Israel, nor Hamas signed—the legal scholar Jack Goldsmith diagnosed those flaws:

The ICC can exercise its independent jurisdiction over perpetrators of international crimes if the crimes are committed (a) by a national of a signatory party, or (b) on the territory of a signatory party! Two important consequences follow. The first is territorial liability over non-signatories. The ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed by a non-signatory nation in the territory of a signatory nation. The second is the traveling-dictator exception. Leaders of non-signatory nations can commit crimes in their [own] territories without fear of prosecution. Even if human-rights abusers from non-signatory nations vacation in The Hague, they cannot be arrested and tried by the ICC.

The most salient class of human-rights violators during the past century has been oppressive leaders who abuse their own people within national borders.

Goldsmith, thinking of Israel’s use of targeted killings of terrorist leaders to combat the campaign of suicide bombings and massacres launched by Hamas and Fatah, had a prescient sense of how the court would be used:

I am not arguing that the ICC will have no effect whatsoever. Surely it will. As the Palestinian response to Israeli military attacks in July 2002 indicates, it will be a focal point for rhetorical assertions about criminality even in cases in which the ICC clearly lacks jurisdiction.

Moreover, since American military might had proved the only reliable tool for bringing war criminals to justice, Goldsmith concluded that the ICC was not just “self-defeating,” but ultimately “perverse,” since it “exposes the United States, a non-signatory nation, to liability for crimes committed in signatory nations or in non-signatory nations that temporarily invoke” the court’s jurisdiction. It thus punishes good behavior (like American humanitarian interventions that risk collateral civilian deaths), while doing nothing about actual evils (like Bashar al-Assad slaughtering hundreds of thousands of his own subjects).

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.