There’s no Escape For Netanyahu After This Screw Up

Benjamin Netanyahu has had some self owns, but when it comes to shooting himself in the foot, this is a contender for the best yet. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu insists the International Criminal Court has no authority over him, which makes his behaviour over the past year faintly hilarious in a very dark way. Because people who genuinely believe a court is irrelevant don’t spend months trying to crush it. They don’t mobilise allies, threaten consequences, lean on funding, or attempting to sideline or intimidate judges. They shrug and move on. Netanyahu did the opposite, and in doing so told us everything we need to know. What we’re watching isn’t a miscarriage of justice. It’s a man discovering that impunity isn’t a personality trait, and that repeating “we don’t recognise you” doesn’t magically dissolve an arrest warrant once it exists. Worse for him, the effort to bury the court hasn’t just failed, it’s dragged others into the mess — governments that talk endlessly about a rules-based order right up until the moment the rules start pointing in their direction. This crisis wasn’t imposed on Netanyahu. He built it. And now he’s stuck inside it. Right, so Netanyahu built this crisis for himself. Not because an international court woke up hostile to Israel, not because activists finally shouted loudly enough, and not because the law suddenly changed, but because a series of political choices collided with a system that, for once, refused to step aside. The arrest warrant sought by the International Criminal Court has not emerged from nowhere. It has emerged from policy, from conduct, and from a sustained attempt to treat accountability as optional, followed by an even more revealing attempt to crush the institution that exists precisely to stop that kind of behaviour.