Ian Bremmer | ICC War Crimes Charge Boosts Netanyahu’s Position

Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week.

Plenty of breaking news right now. And what I want to focus on is the International Criminal Court, the ICC, which is now seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leadership and Israel’s leadership, putting both on a level with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been friends with both Hamas leadership and Netanyahu over the years. So it’s kind of an interesting club. But this is certainly a challenging headline.

And if you’re watching this around the world and you’re seeing that the International Criminal Court is making these cases against Sinwar who runs Hamas and other senior deputies, and the Israeli prime minister and the minister of defense.

What you are seeing, what you feel, the takeaway you would have is moral equivalence, culpability. Well, both of these must be, you know, sort of engaged in crimes against humanity, acting against international law. These are bad people. These are criminals. And I mean, I want to just take a step back for a second. Seven months after the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust, you are seeing that democratically elected leaders of Israel, the only strong, albeit far from perfect democracy in the Middle East, is being put on the same plane as the terrorists that raped and tortured and killed Israeli citizens, still, seven months later, holding them hostage and want to destroy Israel as a country.

That is an extraordinary headline for people to see and people around the world who are on very different sides of this conflict will respond to that very differently, radically differently.