HUNGARY’S withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a warning. Both of the breakdown of respect for international law, and of the growing identification of far-right forces across Europe with the state of Israel.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban chose a visit by Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu to announce he was leaving the court, which has issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes committed during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. He did so emphasising the connection between support for Israel abroad and Islamophobic politics at home: “Israel can count on Hungary as an unassailable bastion of Judeo-Christian culture in Europe.”
Orban has long promoted what he terms Christian values. In 2021, he, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki declared a “European renaissance based on Christian values.”
Though the Hungarian, Italian and Polish right all stress their Catholic identity, this doesn’t involve heeding papal appeals to welcome refugees or oppose war. It is expressed through hostility to immigrants (especially Muslims), women’s rights and LGBT people.
In the past, Israel styled itself a modern, women- and gay-friendly and yes, European state to whitewash its brutal occupation of Palestine and define itself as a natural ally, contrasted to supposedly backward and undemocratic Arab neighbours.
That is increasingly difficult as Israeli politics has marched to the far right, with self-declared “fascist homophobes” given cabinet seats, religious extremists entering government and intensifying persecution of domestic dissidents. But no matter, since Europe is changing too.
Authoritarianism and racism are the mood music of the continent. As we see from the Israeli flags on Tommy Robinson demos, a different kind of mythologised Israel — one where a white race deploys unlimited violence to carve out a territory in which other races are excluded — appeals to a different European audience.
The liberal order was always hypocritical, both for an Israel which dispossessed Palestinians from the beginning and for a Western Europe aligned with a US-led imperialist system profiting from domination of the world’s resources.
Nor can we sharply demarcate the new right from the liberal Establishment in today’s politics. “Liberal” governments like Starmer’s and Macron’s are dismantling protest rights. Britain’s immigration policy takes its cue from far-right Italian leader Giorgia Meloni.
Orban withdrawing from the ICC is not worlds away from Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz saying he will invite Netanyahu for a state visit and ignore the warrant out for his arrest — why stay in the court, if you disregard it?
And support for Israel’s war, no matter how horrific the news from Palestine, unites them all.
Nonetheless, the retreat of institutions imposing theoretical restraint on states’ behaviour is a step backwards.
The ICC had the reputation of being a Western-established court set up to try people from “Third World” countries: but it is being ditched because for the first time it is trying to hold a Western ally to account.
Tolerance for Israel’s brazen slaughter of children, medics and journalists normalises war crimes in all conflicts: and forms part of the context in which Poland, Finland and others say they are withdrawing from the international ban on landmines, indiscriminate killers still claiming victims long after the end of conflicts from Angola to Vietnam.
War crimes have been committed in all wars: but the theoretical and occasionally real prospect of accountability mattered.
The UN, international courts and treaties banning particularly indiscriminate weaponry should be defended despite their flaws: steps in the direction of a rules-based order that never really existed, but which could emerge from the end of US hegemony, if the internationalist left rather than the racist right can take advantage of liberalism’s fall.
That means uniting the struggles which Orban makes clear are linked: the fight against war abroad and the fight against the far right at home. In Britain, the causes of Palestine and anti-racism must march side by side.
