Netanyahu’s ICC Drama and the Global Reckoning

Netanyahu’s Hague tantrum wasn’t a defence, it was a pyrotechnic display of justifications, drenched in self-pity and Holocaust rhetoric, while ignoring charred ruins and starving children.

If you’ve ever been stuck in a Netflix binge wondering what a 21st-century political thriller would look like in real life, look no further than Benjamin Netanyahu’s cinematic rebuttal to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Israeli Prime Minister delivered his monologue with the fire of a Shakespearean king and the self-awareness of a guy who brought popcorn to his own trial. But behind the theatrics lies a much grimmer narrative about international justice, war, and the tangled web of morality in the modern geopolitical landscape.

Netanyahu, in full-throttle defiance mode, labeled the ICC’s arrest warrant for alleged war crimes a “modern Dreyfus trial,” invoking Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French officer wrongly accused of treason in the late 19th century. Sure, there’s a certain poetic heft to the comparison—until you realise this isn’t exactly about false accusations. As his critics would point out, Netanyahu’s rebuttal sounded less like a denial and more like a litany of jus…