NEW YORK — Today, T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that represents over 2,000 rabbis and cantors and their communities, issued the following statement in response to the International Criminal Court (ICC) decision late last week that since Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute, the court has jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah, released the following statement:
“We support the existence of an international enforcement mechanism to ensure that human rights laws and norms are upheld equally around the world. In this position, we follow the lead of generations of Jewish communal institutions and leaders, who supported the idea of an international court to uphold human rights from the earliest days of this proposal in the 1940s. As recently as 2000, advocates were calling the creation of the ICC the ‘unfinished business’ of the Nuremberg Trials where Nazi leaders were prosecuted after World War II.
“Those who carry out gross violations of human rights must be held accountable for their actions. The establishment of international human rights law, as well as the ICC, acknowledges that human rights are an international concern, not only the domestic business of individual countries, and that there must be international mechanisms for accountability and enforcement.
“The Torah teaches us that even the king is subject to higher laws:
When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Eternal his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18-20)
“The Talmud specifies that it is the mark of a righteous king to be subject to judgment, “The kings of the House of David can judge and be judged, as it says in Jeremiah (21:12), ‘O House of David, so says the ETERNAL: Execute justice in the morning.’ If [others] may not judge him, how can he judge?” (Sanhedrin 19a)
“The ICC in its current form is a flawed institution. Some of the worst actors — including leaders of China, Syria, and Russia — cannot be held accountable, as they are not party to the Rome statute. Nor is the United States a member; thus, high level Bush administration officials cannot be charged with war crimes despite the documented use of torture during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as part of the War on Terror. Virtually all of the investigations conducted by the ICC have focused on African countries. The ICC will not fulfill its intended purpose until it has the power to investigate officials in every country, including the United States and Israel.
“We reject the characterization by Prime Minister Netanyahu and some American Jewish leaders of the ICC decision as antisemitic. As a state bound by international human rights law, Israel, like other countries, can be criticized when it fails to live up to these commitments. Furthermore, the ICC’s decision opens the possibility not only for bringing war crimes cases against Israeli leaders for practices including displacement and the disproportionate use of force but also against leaders of Hamas and other groups for firing rockets against civilians, and against the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for the use of torture. Falsely painting any attempt to hold Israel to the same human rights obligations that any country should welcome as antisemitic only makes it harder to counter actual acts of antisemitism when they happen. Furthermore, unlike the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which targets Israelis indiscriminately, the ICC focuses on high-level actors accused of making specific decisions that violate human rights law.
“The true tragedy is that Israel has reached the point that the ICC would consider investigating possible war crimes. For more than half a century, Israel has carried out a policy of displacing Palestinians from their homes in the occupied territories, expanding settlements, and too easily resorting to deadly and disproportionate force in both the West Bank and Gaza. Rather than focus on the ICC, which should be the last resort for accountability on human rights, Israeli leaders and Jewish leaders around the world should put our energy toward ending these human rights abuses and pursuing a long-term solution that protects the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.”
About T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights mobilizes a network of more than 2,000 rabbis and cantors from all streams of Judaism that, together with the Jewish community, act on the Jewish imperative to respect and advance the human rights of all people. Grounded in Torah and our Jewish historical experience and guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we call upon Jews to assert Jewish values by raising our voices and taking concrete steps to protect and expand human rights in North America, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.
