Dershowitz gathering ‘dream team’ to defend Netanyahu and Gallant at ICC

The arrest warrant for war crimes “disgraces the rule of international law,” the famed jurist wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz is gathering a “dream team” to defend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant from war crimes charges that will be brought against them at the International Criminal Court (ICC), he wrote Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

The case is extremely important, he noted, because “It will also be tried in the court of public opinion, both in the U.S. and throughout the world.”

He is therefore “assembling a team of world class lawyers from around the globe to help defend Israeli leaders against the false charges.”

He named over a dozen prominent attorneys who have already agreed to join him.

These included former U.S. attorneys-general Michael Mukasey and William Barr, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Canadian minister of justice and attorney general Irwin Cotler, and Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ICC on Thursday issued arrest warrants for the two Israeli leaders and a Hamas terrorist, Muhammed Deif, who was assassinated by the IDF months ago but the court is ostensibly not convinced of his death.

By doing so, Dershowitz argued, “the court is seeking to equate the terrorism of Hamas, which murdered, raped and kidnapped approximately 1,450 Israelis, mostly civilians, with the self-defense efforts of Israel to prevent a promised recurrence of Oct. 7.”

He accused the court of creating a “double standard” for Israel’s prosecution of its war of self-defense against the terrorists, when “the validity, integrity, legitimacy and acceptability of international law and the laws of war depend on the application of a single standard.”

By issuing “these illegal and unjustified warrants,” he wrote, the ICC has “disgraced and destroyed” the rule of international law and “lost its credibility.”

Dershowitz applauded the announcements by Congressional leaders that they would sanction ICC personnel if they continue with their anti-Israel efforts.

The arguments he said the team would use are familiar ones that Israel and its allies have already raised in attempts to head off legal action against the Jewish state by both the ICC and the International Court of Justice, whose mandate is to settle legal disputes on a state level and does not deal with individuals.

These include complementarity, which means that if a country has a judicial system as Israel does, that readily and robustly investigates even political leaders, the ICC cannot try the case itself.

They will also delve into hard statistics that have seemingly been ignored in the court’s zeal to prosecute.

Dershowitz wrote of the fact that the IDF’s kill ratio between combatants and noncombatants in Gaza is “lower than in any comparable war anywhere in the world.”

This makes a mockery of the charge that Israel is attempting to commit genocide “or any other war crime.”

The team will also present as an argument the enormous amount of humanitarian aid – 700,000 tons of food and medicine, according to government sources – that Israel has allowed into Gaza over the last year.

The professor emeritus at Harvard Law School ended by inviting other like-minded legal eagles to “join in this endeavor.”