Given the vacuum of moral responsibility across the Middle East, who can trivialise the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu?

We pick and choose who we want to stand trial among the leaders across the region – but the law is something that binds us all, writes Robert Fisk

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) inside the district court of Jerusalem on 24 May (AFP)

I’m not greatly moved by the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s not the charges – bribery, fraud and breach of trust – nor the length of time it’s taken to see him appear Netanyahu in court. Nor the Israeli prime minister’s attempt to drag the court case on even longer.

Nor is it the obvious fact that any sane observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must ask why the Israelis themselves must endure this possibly two-year trial when far more ghastly offences should have been levelled against previous Israeli leaders and military commanders over their behaviour in past decades.

The Israelis – like the Arabs, by the way – have committed plenty of war crimes: the wholesale shooting dead of unarmed Palestinians, the bombing of apartment blocks containing innocent men, women and children, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982, the mass destruction of homes and businesses, the imprisonment without trial of thousands of Palestinians.

That’s not even to mention Netanyahu’s latest promise to steal even more territory from its legal owners by annexing the Jewish colonies constructed illegally on Arab land. Ariel Sharon himself was held “personally” responsible for the 1982 Beirut massacres by the Israeli Kahan commission report and even lost his job as defence minister at the time. But he survived to hold the same prime minister’s job that Netanyahu now holds (temporarily), to expand the colonies further, and die an (incredibly) honoured man in the eyes of the US and its allies.

Set against these outrageous acts, the present charges against Netanyahu – true or false – are piffling, pitiful, almost absurd in their insignificance. Netanyahu’s own reflections on the court – that these are “ludicrous… ridiculous, fabricated cases”, a plot by police, prosecutors and left-wing journalists – are Trumpian in their insolence. But they bear no relevance to the grave crimes which the state Netanyahu represents has committed over dozens of years, some of whose war criminals are still alive.

Now you may say that without a trial, there can be no Israeli war “criminals”. But then since there will never be such a trial – and the only one which just might have been held (under Belgian law against Sharon for crimes against humanity) was abandoned after the US threatened to close the Nato base in Brussels – we may justly say that those we believe are guilty should have a fair chance to clear their names.

They will never get such a chance since no charges of war crimes will ever be levelled against an Israeli politician or general. Yes, a few individual Israeli soldiers have been taken to court – but their sentences, when convicted, have been modest to the point of ridicule. As long as Israeli generals and politicians claim that they are fighting “terrorism”, they will get away with it.

BUT. I use capital letters here because I find that word ‘but’ now hovers ever more persistently over every paragraph we write about the Middle East. But if there is any honour left in Israel’s judicial system (and I know plenty of reasons why the Palestinians would rightly claim there is not), it remains a fact of history that no Arab state has ever held its leaders or its generals to account. Yes, of course, dictators are overthrown for their mistakes – often involving corruption, a cancer that exists in both the Arab and the Israeli Middle East – and if an underling, a prole, a mere uneducated Arab villager or foolish and treasonous officer should dare to threaten, let alone commit murder, then the hangman’s noose invariably awaits them.

I have always been transfixed by the Arab despots’ love of mimicry. Because western democracy holds elections, so the autocracy must hold polls, even if the dictator inevitably wins 98.88 per cent of the vote. Similarly, grotesque military and security trials are held by the hundred week after week in the Middle East – take a look at the charges and grovelling admissions under torture that sent thousands of Saddam’s enemies to the gallows. Yet study the court papers when the Butcher of Baghdad was eventually put on trial – a series of grotesque hearings, by the way, which even Amnesty was forced to condemn – and they contained evidence of wall-to-wall “trial” verdicts of Iraq’s ‘state enemies’ and sentences signed by Saddam himself and by his apparatchiks.

But name the Arab leader who has been taken to court, even for the most diminutive of offences. “Bribery”, “fraud”, “breach of trust” – what Arab tyrant does not regard these as his private practice, an essential part of the system of rule which followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. War crimes charges? Perish the thought. Or perish anyone, very quickly indeed, who utters such a thought. Who was tried for the 1982 slaughter at Hama or the mass killings across Syria after the civil war began in 2011?

Who was tried in Egypt after the massacre of Muslim Brothers in Rabaa square in Cairo in 2013? What about the 12,000 civilians listed as killed in the Yemen war since Saudi Arabia’s assault in 2015, and another 80,000 believed to have died there of hunger? Or – dare we mention so small a crime amid this bloodbath – the liquidation of Jamal Khashoggi?

Of course, we are as keen to avoid delving too deeply into Saddam’s use of gas against his enemies – he was never tried for this – because the west took the frightful man’s side in his eight-year war against Iran and because some of the chemical components for that gas came from the United States. We pick and choose and demand trials for our favourite criminals. Charges against Bashar al-Assad – absolutely. Charges against Sisi, Trump’s “favourite dictator” – no way. Charges against Mohammed bin Salman​ – for what? And so it goes on. For we are as complicit in the Arab system of justice and “injustice” as are the Arab people themselves.

But it remains a fact that in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, at least 400,000 Israelis – perhaps half a million – demonstrated in the streets of Tel Aviv against the atrocity which had been committed by their country’s Lebanese allies, watched by their country’s own soldiers and excused by their political leaders. What other nation in the Middle East would have – or could have – suppressed such a protest? Israel held a commission of enquiry into this massacre of around 1,700 Palestinian men, women and children. It was far from perfect. It avoided the use of the word “Palestinian” in its title, it spoke of “terrorists” in the camps who did not exist, it preferred the word “events” rather than the word “massacre”, and called the Phalangist murderers “soldiers”.

But what did the Lebanese government do? It produced, months later, a pitiful official report to the effect that the mass dead (number unknown) were killed by “persons unknown”, a lie as gross as any uttered at the time by an Arab government. Where were the Arab enquiries into the 1982 Hama killings, the atrocities of the Syrian civil war or the Egyptian revolution or the civil conflict of Algeria between 1990 and 1998?

They did not exist. And would not exist. And will not exist. And amid such a vacuum of moral responsibility across the Middle East, who is to trivialise the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu? Non-violent though its charges are, bearing no relation to the mass human injustice visited upon the Palestinians and upon Israeli Arabs, its long-drawn out proceedings show that – even in a nation whose citizens and friends increasingly believe (with very good reason) that it is turning into a right-wing apartheid regime – there still remains some residual idea of that which should lie at the heart of all our lives. And those of Arabs. The law.