Preemptive Absolution for Alleged War Crimes
The New Arab reports that Israel has opted to close dozens of war crimes investigations into its soldiers, acting on the recommendation of its military prosecutor general, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. This decision, affecting inquiries into alleged detainee deaths and various operational incidents, is explicitly motivated by fears of an impending probe by the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) and other international legal bodies. The rationale is to maintain what Israel views as its unilateral right to investigate its forces, thereby attempting to pre-empt external jurisdiction. This pattern of internal exoneration is not new. Following Israel's attack on Gaza in 2014, human rights organizations documented 60 cases of alleged war crimes, yet the military justice system pursued
only 22 criminal investigations, resulting in merely one conviction for minor offenses, and not a single senior commander faced charges. Compare this to the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, where over 40,000 people were killed or disappeared, and accountability only began to emerge decades later through international pressure, precisely because domestic systems failed. The official narrative
consistently frames these internal reviews as rigorous, despite their near-total lack of substantive convictions for serious abuses. By dismissing these cases domestically, the Israeli government signals a clear double standard: a reluctance to comply with international legal norms while simultaneously asserting its legal system's sufficiency against global demands for justice. This tactic mirrors