Professor tells the JC that their demands to empower the Knesset to overturn human rights rulings would make Israel vulnerable to prosecution at the International Criminal Court
December 15, 2022 12:00
Demands by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to empower the Knesset to overturn human rights rulings would make Israel vulnerable to prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Professor Alan Dershowitz has told the JC.
The plan would make it harder to resist calls for the ICC to investigate Israelis for alleged war crimes, Prof Dershowitz warned. “The risk would be quite high,” he said.
Prof Dershowitz said this week he had warned top Israeli officials including incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the danger posed by such a move.
“The ICC can’t investigate a country that has a fairly operating legal system,” he said.
“At the head of the legal system in Israel is the Supreme Court. It ain’t broke, and it doesn’t need to be fixed, so why break it?”
Mr Netanyahu’s incoming coalition partners Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and Itamar Ben Gvir, of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, want to strip the court of its power and to change the constitution so its judgments can be reversed by politicians.
“They think the Supreme Court is too leftist, too elitist,” said Prof Dershowitz. “Well, supreme courts with judicial review powers are supposed to be elitist, and they’re supposed to focus on human rights.
Benjamin Netanyahu
“But so long as it applies the law fairly — and Israel’s Supreme Court has applied the law fairly — it shouldn’t be tampered with, and that is the advice I have given everybody in Israel.”
Harvard law professor Mr Dershowitz, whose high-profile legal clients have included boxer Mike Tyson, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former American football star and actor OJ Simpson, told the JC he was dismayed by the demands of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing partners.
He singled out Mr Ben Gvir’s claim that “an Arab throwing a rock” should be treated more harshly than a Jew. Prof Dershowitz said: “That’s not acceptable… I am a zealous Israeli advocate, but I cannot defend Ben Gvir’s suggestion that the rules … should depend on the ethnicity of the person throwing the rocks.”
Such proposals, he said, were “making it much harder to defend Israel” .
Prof Dershowitz was also scathing about coalition politicians’ calls for the Law of Return to only apply to “Orthodox” Jews. He added: “Israel has responsibility to the Jewish people around the world. I just don’t think Israel should be trying to reduce the number of Jews by adopting [an] interpretation as to ‘who is a Jew’ for immigration purposes.
Right winger Itamar Ben-Gvir (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
