In 1945, after the ruins of fascism had been surveyed and the last concentration camps emptied, the victors wrote their moral triumph into law. From the ashes of Auschwitz and Nuremberg came the promise: never again. Never again mass deportations. Never again wars of conquest. Never again the targeting of civilians. Yet from the moment the ink dried, the principle was already being undermined. Not by those outside the liberal order, but by its self-appointed stewards. When it is politically useful, a war crime is a war crime. When it is not, it is regrettable. Tragic. Complicated. Or simply not a crime at all.
We are told there is a rules-based international order. That human rights are universal. That the laws of war apply to everyone equally. Yet this is not how the system works in practice. The Geneva Conventions have become a language of denunciation and diplomacy, not accountability. The International Criminal Court is a stage where Western outrage is performed, but rarely against Western allies. The standard is not what is done, but who does it. There are nations for whom every death is a violation. Then there are the nations for whom every accusation is a slander.
Take Israel. Since October 2023, it has waged the deadliest assault on Palestinians since the Nakba. Many tens of thousands killed, many of them children. Hospitals bombed. Refugee camps levelled. Whole families erased. Aid convoys targeted. The destruction of Gaza’s civic infrastructure (the water, electricity, schools, archives) has been systematic, deliberate, and broadcast in real time. The Israeli leadership has not merely acknowledged this destruction; it has boasted of it. “We are hitting Gaza like it’s never been hit before,” said Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who also described Palestinians as “human animals.” In June 2024, Foreign Minister Israel Katz confirmed that plans were underway to construct so-called “humanitarian cities” in the south of Gaza, fenced enclosures to relocate displaced Palestinians. Meanwhile, Blair’s thinktank was on Zoom calls about a “Trump Riviera” and post-war reconstruction.
In international law, forced population transfer is a war crime. Collective punishment is a war crime. Attacks on civilian infrastructure, when not justified by urgent military necessity, are war crimes. The killing of journalists, medics, and aid workers is a war crime. The use of starvation as a weapon is a war crime. The ICC has opened an investigation, and arrest warrants have been requested. But the response from Israel and its allies has not been one of legal cooperation, it has been one of coordinated sabotage.
The United States immediately denounced the ICC’s decision. Former US President Joe Biden, who once promised to restore faith in international institutions, called the court’s move “outrageous.” Republican senators threatened the ICC with sanctions and prosecution. Britain issued a tepid statement, then quietly allowed military exports to continue. Rishi Sunak reaffirmed Israel’s right to “defend itself.” Keir Starmer, then Leader of the Opposition, said that Israel must operate within international law, a statement that at once implies that it currently does and that legal boundaries are a matter of internal discretion. In power now, Labour’s Home Secretary has proscribed Palestine Action under terrorism legislation.
The contrast with the Western response to Russia could not be starker. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the liberal democratic world responded with a unified moral outrage. Vladimir Putin was swiftly declared a war criminal. ICC proceedings followed. The Bucha massacre was documented and condemned in detail. Western officials queued up to affirm the inviolability of civilian life, territorial sovereignty, and the rules of war. None of this was wrong. What Russia did (and continues to do) in Ukraine is a series of war crimes. But that only raises the question: why are similar acts by Israel not treated with the same legal clarity and political urgency?
The answer lies in the structure of global power. The international legal system is not neutral. It was constructed by states, is enforced by states, and serves the interests of those states with the power to enforce or ignore it. The ICC, despite its rhetoric of impartiality, cannot investigate any nation unless that nation has ratified its jurisdiction, or unless the UN Security Council authorises an inquiry—something the United States will always veto where its allies are concerned. Israel, like the US and Russia, is not a party to the Rome Statute. Yet, Palestine is. This should, legally speaking, grant the ICC jurisdiction. But in practice, every step toward accountability is blocked by those who cry politicisation, while engaging in it.
The record is damning. Since its founding in 2002, the ICC has indicted more than forty individuals. The overwhelming majority have been from Africa. Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo. With many still classed as fugitives. The pattern is clear: leaders from weaker states (those without the backing of major powers) are fair game. Serbia, too, became a key target in the post-Yugoslav tribunal system, with high-profile prosecutions of Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, and others. These trials were often framed as great advances for international justice. In some respects, they were. But they were also geopolitically convenient. No NATO officials were prosecuted for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which included strikes on civilian targets and the use of cluster munitions. No American generals have stood trial for Fallujah, for Mosul, for Bagram or Guantánamo. Tony Blair (never charged) walks free. George W. Bush (never charged) paints watercolours.
This is not justice. It is hierarchy, masquerading as law. The ICC, for all its institutional independence, has become a mirror of global imbalance. It punishes those without protection, and hesitates when confronted with powerful violators. Only recently, under immense pressure, has it begun to move against Putin. Even that step (while symbolically significant) carries little immediate weight. Russia ignores the warrant. Western nations celebrate it. But when the same court turns its attention to Israel, the celebration turns to threat. Can you honestly imagine an Operation Amber Star against those accused of war crimes in Israel? The message is unmistakable: the law applies until it touches the wrong state.
It is not only Israel and Russia who exploit this double standard. Britain, too, has refused to reckon with its own war crimes. From Basra to Helmand, British forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, black-site transfers, and collective punishment. Yet no high-ranking official has ever faced trial. The Overseas Operations Act, passed in 2021, effectively grants British troops immunity from prosecution after five years. Investigations into SAS killings in Afghanistan and Syria are slow-walked, underfunded, and denounced as “witch hunts” by retired generals and tabloid editorials. The Daily Mail recently ran a front-page headline demanding that Labour end the “legal persecution” of British soldiers. The implication is clear: legality only applies when it flatters the state’s sense of honour.
The logic here is not legal but imperial. War crimes, we are told, are something “they” do. The enemy, the insurgent, the terrorist. “We” are better. More civilised. More restrained. If civilians die, it is an accident. If homes are levelled, it is unfortunate. If children are killed, it is because their parents used them as shields. These are not arguments. They are the myths of empire. And they have survived into the present through repetition and impunity.
Nowhere is this logic more visible than in the criminalisation of protest. In June 2025, the UK government moved to proscribe Palestine Action, a direct action group targeting arms manufacturers, under counterterrorism legislation. The accusation was not that the group had committed acts of mass violence (it hadn’t) but that it had caused property damage and disruption to supply chains. In the same parliamentary vote, Palestine Action was grouped with far-right militias and sectarian death squads. MPs were told to vote on the whole package. If you wanted to oppose the fascists, you had to endorse the criminalisation of protest. The message was clear: any meaningful disruption to the war machine would now be treated as terrorism.
This is not new. Across the liberal democracies, protest has been increasingly reframed as extremism. The act of resistance is made suspect. Meanwhile, state violence (deportations, arms sales, military occupations) is made normal, technocratic, and above all, lawful. For the most powerful states, legality itself becomes optional: the law is something to invoke against others, not something to obey. It’s a kind of legal laundering: clean uniforms, parliamentary oversight, strategic ambiguity. What’s being erased is not just legality, it’s legibility. The state retains the monopoly not only on violence, but on the definition of violence.
Yet, cracks are appearing. The image of the rules-based order is no longer convincing to many. In the global South, Israel’s assault on Gaza is not seen as a tragic necessity but as naked colonial aggression. In international forums, the double standards are openly denounced. Young people across Europe and North America are mobilising. Not only to oppose war, but to expose the hypocrisy of a system that punishes the powerless and protects the powerful. The law, they are beginning to understand, is not enough.
What would real justice look like? At minimum, it would mean equal application of the law. Arrest warrants served without regard to geopolitics. Arms embargoes that don’t discriminate between friends and enemies. Reparations for victims of imperial violence, whether in Rafah, Fallujah, or Kunduz. But more fundamentally, it would require abandoning the fantasy that the current order can police itself. There is no impartial referee in a world governed by power. The ICC cannot stand alone as the conscience of the world while its funding is threatened and its rulings ignored.
The struggle, then, is not only legal but political. Accountability will not come from international courts alone. It must be forced into being by movements from below. By whistleblowers. By lawyers. By journalists. By the courage of survivors and the solidarity of the many. The history of justice is the history of people making the law mean something. Because the law, by itself, does not save.
When Israel bombs a refugee camp and the world calls it self-defence, when Russia abducts children and is called a war criminal, when Britain’s special forces execute civilians and newspapers demand loyalty, we are not watching justice. We are watching the performance of power. The term “war crime” becomes a stage direction: used when needed, omitted when inconvenient.
So when is a war crime not a war crime? When legality is just another arm of empire, and justice another casualty of power.
