[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 87 (Monday, May 20, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S3764]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 Israel

  Madam President, on a related matter, since the immediate aftermath 
of October 7, Israel, her allies, and Jewish people around the world 
have faced pernicious efforts to equate a sovereign nation's self-
defense with barbaric acts of terrorism.
  We have seen it in the specious media tropes about ``cycles of 
violence,'' in university statements bemoaning Israel's self-defense 
actions, and in our own elected leaders' attempts to browbeat Israel's 
coalition government for seeking to restore its people's security.
  But today--today--the most noxious attempt at moral equivalence comes 
from unelected international bureaucrats brandishing a contrived and 
perverted authority. In the same breath, the self-aggrandizing 
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for arrest 
warrants--arrest warrants--for both Hamas's chief terrorist and 
Israel's duly elected Prime Minister.
  It is a damning development but not for the supposed subjects of the 
application. The ICC has succeeded only in discrediting itself even 
further as a rogue kangaroo court, utterly untethered to morality or 
justice.
  For those who have long rejected this international farce of a Court 
and its efforts to gobble up jurisdiction, this fact was hardly news. I 
have refused to acknowledge any ICC authority to conduct politicized 
investigations of American servicemembers, as it has tried 
illegitimately to do--literally for years.
  And weeks ago, several of our colleagues and I warned the institution 
specifically against lighting any last shred of credibility on fire in 
an attempt to equate--equate--Hamas's calculated cruelty with Israel's 
right to self-defense.
  Putting its ignorance on full display, the judicial junta in The 
Hague responded by claiming that holding it accountable for this power 
grab would somehow violate international law.

  Unfortunately, there are still plenty here in the Senate and in the 
administration who need reality to be spelled out more clearly. This 
isn't about Prime Minister Netanyahu. It isn't about so-called 
international law. In fact, the leader of Israel's opposition condemned 
the ICC decision as ``a complete moral failure.''
  But too many Senate Democrats require frequent reminders of how 
Israel's National Unity Government works and what the Israeli people 
expect of it.
  Even as glaring evidence exposed the moral rot and terrorist 
complicity of another international organization, UNRWA, the Biden 
administration was reluctant to ignore its loud base of campus radicals 
and end U.S. funding.
  Well, today's news lays down another gauntlet. It is time for the 
President and other Western leaders to finally pick it up. Support 
Israel's right to defend itself against terrorist savages like Sinwar, 
reject the fiction that unaccountable bureaucrats in The Hague have any 
power over a sovereign nation that isn't a signatory to its authority, 
commit to imposing significant costs on the Court and its agents if it 
pursues shameful and baseless charges against Israel, and choose--
choose--once and for all between actual justice and the rule of the 
loud campus mob.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The senior Senator from Illinois.