Middle East Eye revealed details of a “heated phone call” between former British Prime Minister David Cameron and International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. According to the report, Cameron threatened to defund the ICC and withdraw from the Rome Statute if Khan proceeded with issuing arrest warrants for senior members of the Israeli government. Cameron insisted that “the world is not ready for this.”
Of course, what Cameron meant by “the world” in that phone call was neither ordinary folk nor the mythical “international community.” Cameron’s world was more likely a useful abstraction, referring to the broad coalition of those who would never be ready to see war criminals held accountable, especially when those criminals enjoy the unwavering support of the ruling class of the American empire. How could “the world” be ready for the arrest of a man who had received countless standing ovations in the U.S. Congress amid a genocide for which he bears direct responsibility?
What must happen for “the world” to be ready? Mass killing and starvation will not do. Considering the increasingly belligerent statements made by senior U.S. government officials, the desired level of readiness would not be attained even if, say, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally held a gun to activist Greta Thunberg’s head and pulled the trigger live on air. A British broadcaster, like LBC, would probably announce the news as “the unfortunate but deserved death of a very foolish and extremely anti-Semitic member of the ‘selfie-yacht’ crew.”
That the accusation would involve a procedural reference to anti-Semitism is also instructive. After all, in Cameron’s world, that is the cardinal sin, though reasonable people have come to consider it rather as a hideous slur by this point. Yet, recently, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of all people, claimed that Germany had “imported anti-Semitism” over the past decade by allowing a large number of foreigners to migrate to the country. He was clearly reminiscing about the golden age of Germany before mass migration took off in the 1950s, when the pure Aryan nation tolerated not even a trace of anti-Semitism. Would Germany have been ready for the arrest of a war criminal back then? Evidently not.
And perhaps it is naïve to imagine that Cameron’s world, much like Germany’s before 1945, is ever meant to be ready. For readiness, here is apparently not a matter of legal thresholds or moral imperatives. It is a condition as elusive as peace in the Israeli ethos, and as selective as Western “outrage.” In this context, readiness means the alignment of global sentiment with the “strategic incentives” of the empire. When war criminals are designated allies, the world must remain unprepared.
Despite the moral depravity involved, it is admittedly a clever trick. By invoking the world’s unreadiness, Cameron and his ilk construct a vague, unquantifiable delay. Ostensibly, justice is not rejected; it is “postponed.” Not now, but maybe later. And always later, like waiting for Godot, or a train that is always “expected soon” but never actually arrives.
Yet, Cameron’s world is never short on readiness when it comes to other things. It is always ready for peace summits, for example, or solemn statements of concern, and for carefully curated photo ops in front of humanitarian disasters. Cameron’s world is impressively ready to prosecute the official enemies of the American empire, too, and it is ready to sanction “uncooperative” nations. Crucially, “the world” is all too ready to denounce, censor and smear those who dare to point out the obvious – namely, that the insanity has reached unprecedented levels. In this world, the real crisis is not the sight of charred bodies of little children, but the “wrong” language to describe them.
So perhaps the question is not whether “the world” is ready for justice. Perhaps the world, as Cameron and other respectable people see it, is the very thing that we, the people, must be ready to confront.
