“There is absolutely no reason for Biden to be involved in this,” said one analyst. “But once again, Biden steps in to protect Netanyahu from the consequences of the war crimes he commits.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly growing increasingly concerned that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for him and other top government officials for committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
The Times of Israel reported Sunday that the Israeli government, in partnership with the U.S., is “making a concerted effort to head off” possible arrest warrants from the ICC, which first launched its war crimes investigation in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2021.
Israel does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction and has refused to cooperate with the probe. The ICC says it has jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Citing an unnamed Israeli government source, The Times of Israel reported that “a major focus of the ICC allegations will be that Israel ‘deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza.'” Other officials who could face arrest warrants are Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.
The Times of Israel‘s reporting came shortly after Israeli journalist Ben Caspit wrote that Netanyahu is “under unusual stress” over the possibility of arrest warrants and is leading a “nonstop push over the telephone” to forestall ICC action.
Like Israel, the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002. The legal body is tasked with investigating individuals, not governments.
The U.S., Israel’s leading arms supplier, has opposed the ICC’s Palestine investigation from the start, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying in a 2021 statement that the court “has no jurisdiction over this matter” because “Israel is not a party to the ICC.”
Seeing commentary that ICC arrest warrants against Israeli officials would create a dangerous precedent because Israel isn’t a party to the Rome Statute.
Guess who else isn’t a party to the Rome Statute?
Russia.
ICC already crossed that bridge with warrant for Putin.
The Israeli government has been accused of committing numerous war crimes in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas-led attack, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and using starvation as a weapon of war. Late last year, the human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now submitted to the ICC the names of dozens of Israeli military commanders who are believed to have been directly involved in violations of international law.
Reports of potentially imminent ICC action have sparked alarm among conservatives in the United States.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wrote on social media Friday that the court should “should stand down on this immediately.”
In an editorial published that same day, The Wall Street Journal suggested the U.S. and United Kingdom could “risk finding Americans and Britons under the gun” next if they don’t warn ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan against issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials. Human rights organizations and legal experts have said Biden and other U.S. officials could be held liable under international law if they continue supporting Israel’s war on Gaza.
“Mr. Khan’s candidacy was championed by his native Britain and supported by the U.S.,” continues the Journal editorial, “so both countries may have influence if they warn Mr. Khan of what will happen if he proceeds.”
The Times of Israel noted Sunday that according to reports in several Israeli media outlets, the U.S. is “part of a last-ditch diplomatic effort to prevent the International Criminal Court from issuing arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued Sunday that “there is absolutely no reason for Biden to be involved in this.”
“But once again,” Parsi added, “Biden steps in to protect Netanyahu from the consequences of the war crimes he commits, which Biden claims he privately is frustrated about.”
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Germany has become the latest country to resume its funding to Unrwa, the United Nations agency that provides essential relief services to nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees. The decision came after an independent review found no evidence to support Israel’s claim that the agency has been infiltrated by Hamas.
All eyes are now on the US, the agency’s largest supporter, to see if it will reinstate the US$350 million (£280 million) it typically provides each year. Meanwhile in the UK, MPs have written to foreign minister David Cameron, demanding that funding is restored “without delay”.
Reaction from the Israeli government has been hostile. In a statement, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman said that “this is not what a true and comprehensive investigation looks like”, adding “it is impossible to say where Unrwa ends and Hamas begins”. The Israeli government did not provide any further detail or evidence for this claim.
Israel alleged in January that 12 of Unrwa’s 13,000 employees in Gaza had participated in the October 7 attacks. Shortly afterwards, the government went on to claim that hundreds of Unrwa employees are members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, in breach of the UN’s neutrality principles.
In response, Unrwa commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini immediately fired nine of the accused 12 (of the other three, two are dead and one is missing). Meanwhile, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, ordered an independent review into Unrwa’s neutrality practices.
That review was chaired by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna and carried out by staff of Nordic research bodies – the Swedish-based Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr. Michelsen Institute and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The report makes good reading for Unrwa. Colonna and her team described its work as an “indispensable lifeline” for Palestinians and noted the agency’s robust neutrality framework.
Crucially, they also found that Israel has provided no evidence for its allegations that a significant number of Unrwa employees belong to militant groups.
Donor response
In response to the original Israeli allegations, 16 governments paused or suspended funding to the agency. This threw Unrwa’s work into an escalating crisis. With the agency having already suffered from a serious financial deficit for many years, management warned that it could run out of money entirely in a matter of weeks.
The withdrawal of core funds heightened the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, where Unrwa provides essential services to 87% of the population, including food assistance to 1 million Palestinians. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food advised that the defunding made famine in Gaza inevitable.
With the Colonna report finding no evidence to support the allegations, serious questions are now raised about the speed with which so many states withdrew their funding. Many governments had already reinstated funding for Unrwa after Colonna’s interim report was released last month. These included Australia, Japan, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Canada.
Since the final report’s publication, EU humanitarian chief Janez Lenarcic has called on others to follow suit. But there are so far no signs that the US – Unrwa’s biggest donor for decades – will.
Congress recently passed a budget banning any financing of Unrwa for the next 12 months. This means there is little possibility of a policy reversal, even if the Biden administration was amenable to it. By the time that budget expires in March 2025, the next US presidential election may have returned the White House to Trump – who completely defunded the agency during his previous presidency.
The UK government has also so far resisted calls to reinstate funding to Unrwa, meaning there may be a limit to the Colonna report’s impact on this front.
Israel’s stance
The accusations levelled against Unrwa in January follow years of Israeli attacks on the agency. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, first called for Unrwa to be disbanded back in 2017 and has repeated his demand regularly since then.
Observing this, several observers, including Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, have concluded that the Israeli discourse on Unrwa is really driven by the political objective of undermining Palestinian refugee rights.
They may now point to further evidence of this in the Colonna report, which notes that although Unrwa has provided Israel with its staff lists annually since 2011, the government had never previously raised any concerns.
The report also throws further doubt on Netanyahu’s post-war plan for Gaza, which proposes that Unrwa be shut down and replaced by other international aid groups. It is unclear how this would work in practice, as Israel has provided no specifics.
What’s more, Colonna and her team found that Unrwa actually has “a more developed approach to neutrality than other similar UN or NGO entities” – raising questions about whether neutrality is really the issue here.
Amid the political discussions, it is crucial not to lose sight of what is at stake. A man-made famine is threatening lives across the Gaza Strip. More than 2 million Palestinians are struggling to survive after Israeli attacks have killed more than 34,000 people over the past six months.
With Unrwa providing a critical lifeline, any decision about its funding has serious repercussions – with the most vulnerable people in Gaza paying the ultimate price.
Anne Irfan, Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, UCL
Climate strikers march in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 19, 2024. (Photo: Albin Haglund via Greta Thunberg/X)
“We are many people and youths who want to express our frustration over what decision-makers are doing right now: They don’t care about our future and aren’t doing anything to stop the climate crisis,” one young activist said.
Ahead of Earth Day, young people around the world are participating in a global strike on Friday to demand “climate justice now.”
In Sweden, Greta Thunberg joined hundreds of other demonstrators for a march in Stockholm; in Kenya, participants demanded that their government join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; and in the U.S., youth activists are kicking off more than 200 Earth Day protests directed at pressing President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
“We’re gathered here to fight, once again, for climate justice,” Thunberg told Agence France-Presse at the Stockholm protest, which drew around 500 people. “It’s now been more than five and a half years that we’ve been doing the same thing, organizing big global strikes for the climate and gathering people, youths from the entire world.”
“I lost my home to climate change. Now I’m fighting so that others don’t lose their homes.”
The first global youth climate strike, which grew out of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strikes, took place on March 15, 2019. Since then, both emissions and temperatures have continued to rise, with 2023 blowing past the record for hottest year. Yet, according to Climate Action Tracker, no country has policies in place that are compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
“We are many people and youths who want to express our frustration over what decision-makers are doing right now: They don’t care about our future and aren’t doing anything to stop the climate crisis,” Karla Alfaro Gripe, an 18-year-old participant at the Stockholm march, told AFP.
The global strikes are taking place under the umbrella of Friday’s for Future, which has three main demands: 1. limit temperature rise to 1.5°C, 2. ensure climate justice and equity, and 3. listen to the most accurate, up-to-date science.
“Fight with us for a world worth living in,” the group wrote on their website, next to a link inviting visitors to find actions in their countries.
Participants shared videos and images of their actions on social media.
In Asia, Save Future Bangladesh founder Nayon Sorkar posted a video from the Meghna River on Bangladesh’s Bola Island, where erosion destroyed his family’s home when he was three years old.
“I lost my home to climate change,” Sorkar wrote. “Now I’m fighting so that others don’t lose their homes.”
“Young climate activists in Bandarban demand a shift to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels,” said Sajjad Hossain, the divisional coordinator for Youthnet for Climate Justice Bangladesh. “We voiced urgency for sustainable energy strategies and climate justice. Let’s hold governments accountable for a just transition!”
In Kenya, young people struck specifically to demand that the government sign on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“As a member of the Lake Victoria community, the importance of the treaty in our climate strikes cannot be overstated,” Rahmina Paullette, founder of Kisumu Environmental Champions and a coordinator for Fridays for Future Africa, said in a statement. “By advocating for its implementation, we address the triple threat of climate change, plastic pollution, and environmental injustice facing our nation.”
“Halting fossil fuel expansion not only safeguards crucial ecosystems but also combats the unjust impacts of environmental degradation, ensuring a more equitable and sustainable future for our community and the wider Kenyan society,” Paullette said.
— Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (@fossiltreaty) April 19, 2024
In the U.S., Fridays for Future NYC planned for what they expected to be the largest New York City climate protest since September 2023’s March to End Fossil Fuels. The action will begin at Foley Square at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, at which point more than 1,000 students and organizers are expected to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to rally in front of Borough Hall.
The strike “is part of a national escalation of youth-led actions in more than 200 cities and college campuses around the country, all calling on President Biden to listen to our generation and young voters, stop expanding fossil fuels, and declare a climate emergency that meaningfully addresses fossil fuels, creating millions of good paying union jobs, and preparing us for climate disasters in the process,” Fridays for Future NYC said in a statement.
The coalition behind the climate emergency drive, which also includes the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future USA, and Campus Climate Network, got encouraging news on Wednesday when Bloomberg reported that the White House had reopened internal discussions into potentially declaring a climate emergency.
“We’re staring down another summer of floods, fires, hurricanes, and extreme heat,” Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay said in a statement. “Biden must do what right Republicans in Congress are unwilling to do: Stand up to oil and gas CEOs, create green union jobs, and prepare us for climate disasters. Biden must declare a climate emergency and use every tool at his disposal to tackle the climate crisis and prepare our communities to weather the storm. If Biden wants to be taken seriously by young people, he needs to deliver on climate change.”
The coalition is planning events leading up to Monday including dozens of Earth Day teach-ins beginning Friday to encourage members of Congress to pressure Biden on a climate emergency and Reclaim Earth Day mobilizations on more than 100 college and university campuses to demand that schools divest from and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.
Emboldened by the overturning of Roe vs Wade, US anti-abortion groups have the UK in their sights | Future Publishing/GettyImages / Pexels / Composition by James Battershill
A right-wing political and media ecosystem pushing a US-style anti-abortion agenda is gaining traction in the UK
Conservative MPs, hard-right media personalities, and US-backed Christian anti-abortion charities are working to spread their anti-abortion agenda ahead of a parliamentary debate on legislation that would stop women being imprisoned for terminating a pregnancy after 24 weeks.
Emboldened by their success in the United States with the Dobbs decision – the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned the right to safe and legal abortion in the US – groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Edmund Burke Foundation are now seeking to rollback progress on reproductive rights around the world.
Their campaigns in the UK are based on strategies honed and perfected in the US. They use language shaped over decades to seed anti-abortion falsehoods that begin on social media before becoming talking points on conservative-friendly TV stations modelled on right-wing US news channels and far-right podcasts. Crucially, those behind the campaigns also invest millions of dollars to push their agenda in the UK.
“As if the US anti-abortion movement didn’t already have sufficient momentum, the Dobbs’ decision turbo-charged their motivation and reach,” Gillian Kane, the director of policy and advocacy research at pro-abortion non-governmental organisation Ipas, told openDemocracy.
“There are veteran organisations continuing their line of work, but also traditionally domestic-focused groups… see an opportunity to dip their toes in these crowded international waters.”
In the UK, Labour MP Stella Creasy being viciously attacked on social media for backing an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill that would end criminal sanctions for late-term abortions. These attacks were not started by a far-right activist or even an anti-abortion campaigner – but by her fellow MP Neil O’Brien, a former junior health minister in the Conservative Party-led government.
O’Brien claimed Creasy was “arguing for people to be able to kill a baby before the day it is due to be born”, branding the amendment “an incredibly extreme and bad proposal”. Contrary to his allegation, the legislation would not increase the 24-week limit in which abortions must be carried out. Rather, it would mean women who self-administer late-term abortions will not be imprisoned, after Carla Foster, a mother-of-three from Staffordshire, was jailed last year for illegally procuring her own abortion at around 33 weeks pregnant.
We shouldn’t send women to prison for decisions they make about their own bodiesLouise McCudden, MSI Reproductive Choices
“On principle, we shouldn’t send women to prison for decisions they make about their own bodies,” said Louise McCudden, the UK head of external affairs at MSI Reproductive Choices, an NGO providing contraception and safe abortion services. “However, the solution has to be about more than prison and sentencing. We need to remove women who end their own pregnancies from criminal law altogether. That can be done without making any changes to the way abortion care is regulated or provided.”
O’Brien’s message was provably wrong – but it was still shared by five of his Conservative colleagues. Soon, hard-right broadcasters began making similarly incendiary posts about the amendment, with GB News’ Darren Grimes and TalkTV’s Isabel Oakeshott branding Creasy’s proposal “infanticide” and “butchery” respectively.
On social media, posts targeting Creasy started to quote far-right conspiracy theories and descended into misogyny and transphobia. It is no coincidence that such rhetoric directly echoes the far-right propaganda that led the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade – openDemocracy has found that many of those making false claims about the amendment have links to the US anti-abortion movement, which sees an opportunity to make reproductive rights a new frontline of the UK’s culture wars.
“Abortion isn’t divisive in this country like it is in the US,” said McCudden “Ninety percent of people [in Britain] are pro-choice, and many people are frankly shocked to discover that abortion sits within criminal law at all. That said, there’s a small but very vocal minority which does seem to be getting more aggressive.
“There has been a worrying trend towards greater policing of women’s reproductive choices, with women’s bodies implicitly treated as national resource, especially in policy debates about the ageing population.”
Funded by US cash
The campaign against the UK amendment is reminiscent of the ‘partial-birth abortion’ propaganda successfully deployed by the US-anti-abortion movement since the mid-1990s.
The term, which refers to late-stage abortions, is designed to make people think not of a fetus but “of a young child”, as conservative Robert Arnakis explained in 2017 at an event hosted by the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ think tank, Family Research Council.
Such is its effectiveness, according to the Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win can be traced back to the moment he referred to “partial birth abortions” during a candidate debate in Las Vegas.
So-called ‘partial birth abortions’ had been banned nationwide in the US by 2003. When that ban was challenged by Planned Parenthood in 2007, a Christian legal charity successfully argued it was constitutional all the way up to the Supreme Court. That charity was Alliance Defending Freedom, which would go on to fund the lawyer who won a fight to implement an abortion ban in Texas in 2021 and was influential in the Dobbs ruling that revoked Roe vs Wade.
But the ADF, which was founded in 1993, never intended to limit its influence over sexual and reproductive rights to the US. It has spent more than $31m on foreign activities since 2015, of which $27m has gone to Europe.
The charity is now splashing more cash in the region than ever before; in 2015, its European spend was $1.4m – by 2022 that had risen to $5.2m. While US organisations must declare who they fund at home, for foreign spending they only need to name the region their money is going to. This means it is impossible to parse the details of where exactly ADF’s dollars flow overseas – though tax returns reveal much of it goes to its own international branches.
The UK’s ADF branch, for example, has received more than £2m from its parent company since its first tax return in 2017. This has been spent on legal support for anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ protesters and societies, as well as on growing its political influence in the UK – more than doubling its expenditure from £370,000 in 2018 to £770,000 today.
ADF UK’s communications lead, Lois McLatchie-Miller, was among those amplifying opposition to Creasy’s amendment. The day after she tweeted Creasy’s plans were “barbaric”, she appeared on the far-right podcast Hearts of Oak, which claims to “bridge the transatlantic and cultural gap between the UK and the USA” and has platformed conspiracist voices.
British anti-abortion groups have also increased their spending and activity in recent years. Right to Life UK, an anti-abortion charity with close ties to numerous UK MPs, spent £705,000 last year, up from £200,000 five years earlier. And the extremist anti-abortion group Centre for Bio-Ethical Research UK – which in 2019 erected a billboard featuring graphic abortion imagery outside Creasy’s office – is now targeting her constituency with leaflets and “education displays”. Although the group’s small size means it does not have to report full accounts, its staff numbers have risen from four in 2017 to 12 today, suggesting an uptick in its spending.
US campaigns, UK MPs
Money alone won’t help global anti-abortion actors to push their agenda in the UK. As the posts on X reveal, they are being aided and legitimised by Conservative Party politicians, media channels such as GB News, and events such as the annual National Conservatism Conference.
In 2019, ADF International paid for flights and other travel expenses for anti-abortion MP Fiona Bruce to attend its youth conference – Areté Academy – in Vienna. The same year, she attempted to ban late-term abortions for specific fetal anomalies. Academy alumni have gone on to work at Bruce’s legal firm, and in September 2023, she took another donation to cover expenses from ADF International, this time worth £1,737.92.
In Westminster, ADF UK also “engages with the members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief”. It featured alongside a host of anti-abortion and pro-Brexit MPs – including then-home secretary Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates – on the line-up of last year’s National Conservatism Conference, which was held in London.
NatCon, as the conference is more commonly known, is run by the Washington DC-based Edmund Burke Foundation. The 2024 conference – which took place in Brussels this week – was marred by controversies after police shut down the event during a speech by British hard-right politician Nigel Farage, following an order from a local mayor who feared a threat to public order. A court later ruled the event could resume and the ADF – which was again present at the conference – is backing a legal challenge against the mayor’s order.
On the bill for this year’s event were Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and French presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour, as well as British politicians including Braverman and Cates. The latter made a name for herself at the 2023 event, when she echoed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, saying: “There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism had failed to deliver and that is babies.” The white nationalist theory accuses Black and Brown migrants of ‘colonising’ white Europeans and blames white women’s “selfish individualism” for low birth rates.
Cates is now part of a number of MPs pushing anti-gender narratives, including attacks on trans rights, LGBTQ+ inclusive education, and abortion. Alongside Kruger, she is a co-chair of the New Conservatives, a group of Tory MPs that says it is fighting “a dangerous new culture that despises national sentiment…, welcomes mass migration, denigrates our nation’s history, and pursues a radical agenda on sex and gender which is directly harmful to children”.
The Legatum Institute – a British think tank that openDemocracy previously revealed receives funding from the foundation of US billionaire Charles Koch, who donates to an array of anti-abortion causes – gave £50,000 to the New Conservatives in December 2023.
Legatum is also behind the recently launched ARC Forum, where Cates and Kruger sit on the advisory board, and is a co-owner of GB News, a right-wing news channel that offers a platform to commentators promoting anti-gender disinformation and anti-trans and anti-drag conspiracies.
While GB News and its presenters and guests maintain a veneer of respectability, the anti-abortion disinformation they amplify is picked up by far-right social media accounts that espouse conspiracies such as the Great Replacement.
One such post attacked Creasy’s amendment and suggested that white women should be banned from having abortions, while black women should be encouraged to have them. Another, which came in reply to a post by Grimes warned the plan would mean “the native birth rate will further decline”.
Despite the growing volume of attacks, and the increased spending on attempts to reverse abortion rights, the UK has seen progress in liberalising reproductive healthcare in recent years. Parliament voted to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland in 2019, and women have been able to access telemedicine for abortion since the pandemic. MPs also voted to introduce buffer zones around clinics, although the law has yet to be implemented.
But such success is often met with increased backlash. While the attacks on Creasy’s amendments seem disparate, our analysis shows they are connected by a global anti-abortion movement funded by hard-right interests determined to shout louder and spend more to roll back women’s rights in the UK. Such forces have already succeeded in making trans rights part of their culture war. They want abortion to be next.
openDemocracy approached ADF UK, O’Brien, Cates, Bruce, Clarke-Smith, Grimes and the Legatum Institute for comment, including clarification on what they believe the sanction should be for women who terminate their pregnancy after 24 weeks. We received no reply.
