Caroline Glick on the International Criminal Court, Egypt, and the Jewish Vote

(Photo courtesy of Caroline Glick)

Commentary

For those who don’t know Caroline Glick, the Israeli American is arguably the most articulate contemporary spokesperson for the Israeli right.

Born in 1969, she obtained her political science degree from Columbia in 1991 and moved to Israel that same year, joining the Israel Defense Forces. Since then, she has had an illustrious military and diplomatic career and an even more illustrious career as a writer for Israel Hayom, Breitbart News, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish News Service, and Maariv, among many others.

She has produced a satirical television show and now also has her own podcast—one she did recently with the estimable British author Douglas Murray is well worth watching.

In 2014, Ms. Glick published a controversial book (maybe not so much now), “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” that took on the vaunted “two-state solution” so enamored of our State Department for so many years.

I have known Caroline for some time but rarely get to see her because she lives in Israel and I live in the United States. So I was pleased to hear that she would be coming to Nashville, Tennessee, for an Israel Summit sponsored by a Christian group on May 21. Due to what are now almost too-predictable threats from the “river to the sea” crowd, the venue had to be switched to nearby Williamson County, where I went to interview Ms. Glick at the conclusion of the conference.

Among other things, we discussed the recent ruling of the International Criminal Court (ICC) equating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, some troubling developments from Egypt, and the eternal conundrum of the Jewish vote.

Since my iPhone, at that point, had ceased to cooperate, I will briefly paraphrase what Caroline had to say about the latter subject. Having toured many parts of the country and followed the issue for some time through the advent of Oct. 7, 2023, she said the Jewish vote is finally poised to desert its traditionally liberal past and that many, even a majority, of people will be voting for former President Donald Trump this November, although quite a few will do so in a clandestine manner as “shy Trump voters,” as they’ve been called.

What follows is Ms. Glick, verbatim, with some parts slightly edited for brevity and clarity, starting with my initial question about why she was here.

Caroline Glick: I was invited by The Israel Guys, which is a terrific Christian Zionist group that is led by people who actually moved to Israel 20 years ago and who live in Samaria. And they are doing their first of what they hope will be an annual conference and summit for Christian Zionists in the area. And there were people who came all the way from Chicago and Florida who introduced themselves to me, a huge group of 700 people, to learn about what’s happening in Israel and why Judea and Samaria are an integral part of Israel and also why it’s so important to stand with Israel today for Christians. What does it mean to support Israel at this time? And what my speech was about today was why. Why Israel is being singled out and what it tells us about the status of the West that Hamas’s slaughter of Oct. 7 was arguably more positively responded to in the West than it was in the Middle East, which is pretty amazing. And so we talked about that.

Also, it has been a really interesting conference. And so I was really glad to be invited to speak at it, and aside from being in Nashville tonight, I’m flying to Washington, and I’m going to meet with a lot of our friends on the Hill to talk about some of the really bad things that are happening today toward Israel and how Congress can help, considering the International Criminal Court and its decision.

Roger Simon: I was about to ask about that.

Ms. Glick: Except another problem is Egypt, which has really been acting strangely. We considered Egypt to be a strategic partner of Israel under [President Abdel Fattah el-]Sisi, and yet since Oct. 7, and increasingly over the past couple of weeks, but really since Oct. 7, Egypt has been acting as a state sponsor of Hamas. And then we learned this past week from our forces in Rafah that they exposed 50 tunnels in Rafah that traverse the border with Egypt, which means that Egypt is an integral part of the Hamas war machine, which is something that Israel mistakenly believed was not happening.

Mr. Simon: What is going on in the Egyptian mind that makes them now allies of Hamas?

Ms. Glick: Like they say in Hollywood, it’s complicated—complicated and convoluted the closer you get to the ground. But the reason we were surprised ... I speak for myself, although I think that probably what my misapprehension was, the cause was common to many Israelis, which is that when Sisi, the president of Egypt, led the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood regime in 2013, when he was defense minister, we were very happy in Israel about it because the Muslim Brotherhood is an enemy of Israel. But they were taking other actions on the ground to transform Egypt into an Islamic Republic along the lines of Iran, and it was very frightening. They were getting closer to Iran. They were letting Iranian warships traverse the Red Sea and the Suez Canal for the first time. So there were a lot of actions that were being taken by the new [Mohamed] Morsi regime that led Israel to be very upset.

The Obama administration supported the overthrow of [Hosni] Mubarak in 2011–12. And then Morsi proved that we were right to be freaked out by what would happen with Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood. So we were very relieved when Sisi ousted Morsi, and the Obama administration responded with rage, and they started cutting off weapons shipments to Egypt and civilian aid to the economy. Egypt had almost no money in reserve, and it was about to go into a famine with 90 million people. Most of them live at subsistence level or lower. So they were about to go into default on their loans. Israel under Netanyahu lobbied hard in Washington for the Obama administration to renew U.S. support for Egypt. We were very relieved when that happened.

And then it was around the same time that you started having the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And then ISIS in Sinai started carrying out a terror war against Egypt against the military and against tourists in the Sinai Peninsula. And Israel allowed Egypt to breach the peace treaty that stipulates that the Egyptian military is not allowed to deploy into Sinai, but we allowed them to deploy in significant numbers in order to defeat ISIS. And they did, but then they didn’t remove their forces from the Sinai, and now they have a lot of military there.

So we were very helpful to the Egyptians, and they were helpful to us back in 2014, when we had a war against Hamas. The Obama administration was pushing us to accept Qatari mediation of a cease-fire with Hamas, and the Egyptians, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain said no. Egypt is supposed to mediate. And then Sisi mediated a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas on Israel’s terms, and the Obama administration created the flip here. So the flip I think happened over time.

Mr. Simon: So now we have all those suddenly discovered tunnels running between Gaza and Egypt.

Ms. Glick: Things just relaxed. There’s a lot of money to be made in smuggling. There’s one Egyptian firm that handles all of the trade with Gaza, and it’s [allegedly] run in partnership between Bedouin smugglers and the Egyptian military. So it’s millions and millions of dollars going into the coffers of Egyptian companies that are aligned with, owned by, subsidiaries of the Egyptian military, which is the largest economic actor in Egypt. So it’s like money. It may be kickbacks.

Mr. Simon: Is Israel now basically alone?

Ms. Glick: Well, there don’t seem to be any states aside from Argentina that are standing forthrightly with Israel right now. There doesn’t seem to be anybody doing that. It’s almost like a redo of World War II, when there was not one state that stood with the Jews. And it’s kind of happening now, too. So it’s a very unsettling feeling. Which, by the way, is why it’s nice to be at this conference with these Christian Zionists because their support for Israel is profound.

Mr. Simon: So let’s finally turn back to the ICC. What are they doing by making an equivalency of Sinwar and Netanyahu? Is this another version of that old dark joke, “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”?

Ms. Glick: Well, I think part of it with the ICC is about institution-building. But in so doing, the court is committing a war crime because Hamas is for genocide. And so anybody who provides aid and comfort to Hamas is giving material support for genocide, including the blood libel that Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor, issued against Israel [on May 20]. Hamas was deliberately murdering people and deliberately starving people, which are both of the claims that he made against Israel that were total lies. I mean, there’s literally no truth behind any of those lies that do two things. One is they provide material support for Hamas, which is a war crime. And the other thing that they do is they propagate bigotry and anti-Semitism, which is another war crime. And so he himself has to be indicted for what he said.

And he also obviously ... it’s illegal for him to go after it because he has no jurisdiction—because Israel isn’t a member of the court; we didn’t sign the Rome treaty—and so to get around that, the ICC accepted “Palestine” as a member and as a signatory, but there is no state of Palestine, and they know that, so that was also illegal. So they carried out three crimes. Two of them are war crimes in order to get to the point where they can do this.

Why this is institution-building is if you read the Rome Statute and you know about the background of the formation of this court, then you understand that this court was actually inherently conceived as an anti-American court. It was conceived as a post-nationalist court that was going to target the United States and Israel and undermine their sovereignty, and that was the reason why [President Bill] Clinton didn’t sign it, even though he was such an advocate of international organizations after the Cold War. And that’s, of course, the reason why Israel didn’t sign it, even though the prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, was the most radical leftist prime minister we’ve had, arguably, ever.

Mr. Simon: How do we fight back against the anti-Semitism that’s kind of unheard of since the Nazi period?

Ms. Glick: So, first of all, for the ICC, a couple of things. One is that there’s legislation moving very quickly through both houses. It’s Sen. Tom Cotton’s legislation, and it’s moving through the House co-sponsored by [Reps.] Chip Roy and Elise Stefanik and I think [Rep.] Brian Mast and another couple dozen lawmakers. Those laws would respectively reinstate Trump’s executive order against the ICC. And we‘ll have to see where [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken ultimately stands. He testified before the House [on May 21] and indicated that they would support such a law. I hope they don’t put in a presidential waiver that gives President [Joe] Biden the power not to invoke or implement these sanctions, but we’ll have to see how they move forward, and so that’s important.

It’s also important for the United States to start prosecuting Hamas because part of the reason that they’re getting away with this atrocity of moral equivalence between Netanyahu and Sinwar is that nobody has indicted these people. Israel is carrying out the largest criminal investigation in our history. I’m not even sure why, but whatever it is, to document precisely what they did to us and to build war crimes charges against the people who we’ve incarcerated who carried out Oct. 7. But the United States doesn’t. I mean, more than 30 Americans were raped, tortured, and slaughtered, and you have five Americans still being held hostage in Gaza, and there’s literally no reason that a real justice system, the U.S. justice system, shouldn’t be indicting.

Mr. Simon: Many worry we don’t have a real justice system, so that’s ...

Ms. Glick: ... a different question for a different conversation. But I mean, I think that that would be a good idea. And also, on May 3, Karim Khan posted a tweet and a press release from the ICC on his Twitter page that threatened with extortion U.S. lawmakers like Sen. Cotton who were advancing legislation to sanction them. And he claimed that it was undermining the writ of the court, of which the United States, of course, is not a member. So he’s actually directly threatening to take action, including threatening Israel’s leader, which is to illegally kidnap and incarcerate people who committed no crime and over whom you have no jurisdiction under any law. And so he was threatening a congressman, and if I were an enterprising U.S. attorney, say from Texas or something like that, I would consider indicting with a grand jury Karim Khan for extortion and threats against elected officials in the United States, officers of the federal government.

But in terms of the anti-Semitism tsunami that you’re getting in America, I mean, I think the first thing that you have to do is start really prosecuting the organizations behind all of the riots on campus. ... I would go after them. I would go after all of the universities that are receiving billions of dollars in undeclared income from Qatar and other hostile states. And I would deny them federal funding, because they’re not protecting the civil rights of their Jewish students. And so, I think what’s happening with Congresswoman [Virginia] Foxx’s subcommittee is very important, but I think that you have to see a significant move to defund these universities, all of them. There’s no reason taxpayers should be paying money to these institutions.

If you’re interested in more about Ms. Glick, Wikipedia, in this instance, is surprisingly relatively evenhanded.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.