International Criminal Court announces decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is a response to the “crimes against humanity” committed by both men. An arrest warrant has also been issued for a man who is probably dead Hamas commander.

American senators like Lindsey Graham rejected the ICC decision as “a dangerous joke”. Unfortunately, the international community’s farcical response to Israel has been going on for months and months, and the only ones laughing today are the terrorists and authoritarian regimes.

This is not the first time that the Middle East’s only democracy has been the butt of a dangerous joke.

Last year, South Africa approached the ICC’s sister court, the International Court of Justice, to accuse Israel of the crime of genocide. It’s the same South Africa which once hosted a Sudanese dictator after the ICC issued arrest warrants against him for crimes against humanity and genocide, then, last year, also hosted a Sudanese warlord accused of crimes against humanity.

However, few in the international community understood the irony: coddling war criminals from failed states with one hand while accusing democracies of war crimes with the other. South Africa’s accusation was not only false and ironic; this demonstrates a worrying tendency within the international community to equate the defense of democracy with the defense of terror and authoritarianism.

For example, the The United Nations has repeatedly failed to condemn or reign in Iran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies for their relentless, daily efforts to literally annihilate Israel. This, coupled with the ICC’s decision to indict a Hamas commander – along with Netanyahu and Gallant – reveals the macabre moral equivocation that so often lies behind the legal gibberish of the two international organizations.

It is therefore even more horrible that European Unionthe country’s top diplomat said the ICC decision “must be respected and implemented.”

The war in Gaza is brutal, tragic and has no end in sight. But many seem to have forgotten how we got here. It was Hamas that carried out the brutal massacre of Israelis on October 7. It is Hamas which continues to hold Israeli hostages. It is Hamas that uses Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, it was Hezbollah that launched more than 12,000 rockets into Israel over the last year, displacing tens of thousands of families. Finally, it is Iran which finances and directs these operations, even if it is praised and even honored by the United Nations.

And yet, it is Israel that is accused of war crimes. The reality on the ground is this: Israel is doing what any democracy would do in the face of similar attacks: fighting back to eradicate the groups responsible. But from a global perspective, Israel is only the tip of the spear in a broader conflict with an increasingly nihilistic and technologically sophisticated network of radical Islamists.

This reality should This was made clear twenty years ago during the Second Intifada: suicide bombings in Israel were soon followed by the September 11 attacks in the United States and the London Underground bombings in 2005. Iranian ayatollahs regularly call Israel the “Little Satan” and deploy a vast and well-equipped terrorist infrastructure against it. These same ayatollahs see the United States as the “Great Satan.”

What do you think will happen next?

The first quarter of this century has made it clear: democracies attacked by terrorists have every right to retaliate vehemently. The court’s decision, if taken seriously, risks squandering these hard-earned lessons in the service of a “dangerous joke.”

This can only lead to one outcome: the normalization of terrorism and the criminalization of democratic responses to it. In the meantime, Israel will rightly refuse to fall on its sword on behalf of a broken set of international legal authorities more interested in power and posturing than in facts and values.

Aviva Klompas is the former director of speech writing at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations and co-founder of Israel without limitsa nonprofit organization that partners with community leaders in the United States to support education in Israel and combat hate. Jews. She is the co-host of the show Unlimited Perspectives Podcast.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.