The rise and fall of Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is a story for the ages. Not just because the most powerful international criminal lawyer in the world turned out to be a criminal himself. Not just because the charges of his repeated sexual assault of a vulnerable employee were grotesque. But because of what it tells us about the cancer of modern antisemitism.
Once his debauchery came to light, Khan thought he could save himself by blaming the Jewish state. And a global cadre of lawyers, UN “experts,” “human rights” types, and the Palestinian terrorist entourage supported that strategy to the end of the line.
Khan was elected prosecutor and assumed his post in June 2021. Use of the ICC against Israelis did not begin with Khan. The constituent treaty, called the Rome Statute, was permanently marred during the 1998 drafting process. The treaty included provisions intended to criminalize Jews living and breathing in parts of the land of Israel assigned by the drafters to a Judenrein Palestine. The supposed legal north star of universality was tossed out to target a party of one. The instant the treaty came into force in 2002, anti-Israel forces sought to use the ICC to criminalize Israel, Israelis and their supporters.
Those efforts gained steam when the UN General Assembly voted to admit the “non-member observer State of Palestine” in 2012, the non-existent State of Palestine purported to ratify the Rome Statute in 2015, and that “state” referred alleged Israeli crimes to the ICC in 2018.
By the time Khan mounted the stage, the Court had legitimized “Palestine’s” ratification and Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, had officially opened an investigation on “The Situation in Palestine.”
Nevertheless, jurisdictional hurdles abounded. The Oslo Accords prohibit Palestinian use of the ICC; Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute; Israel’s accusers are acting in bad faith; and the law prohibits international control in the context of robust national democratic institutions. The ICC apparatus reacted to those barriers by ignoring them, by claiming it was fine to launch a legal and political global pogrom against Israelis without even purporting to make a final determination of ICC jurisdiction over them.
But Khan didn’t just climb aboard the bandwagon that had been moseying along for years; he mounted the lead horse and screamed “charge!” Why?
October 7 was a physical attack on Israel that was matched by a political and legal attack. The genocidaires seeking to annihilate Israel had a two-part plan. The anti-Israel and antisemitic legal and political establishment, largely based at the United Nations, was more than willing to execute step two. The legal rationalizations of the mass rapes and atrocity crimes committed against Jews began as early as October 7 itself, along with the fictitious stream of Israeli doppelgangers allegedly committing identical crimes.
For his part, Khan understood that seeking arrest warrants against Israelis would immediately carry negative consequences for the ICC. Prioritizing the Israeli case over many more pressing global situations and uncomplicated cases on his docket – despite the serious jurisdictional challenges, despite the fact that Israel was not a party to the Rome Statute, and despite the existence of Israel’s demonstrable domestic capacities – would inevitably bring the integrity of the ICC into further question.
During the spring of 2024, the Biden administration persuaded Israel to take the difficult and perilous step of engaging with the prosecutor’s office. In April, Khan’s office and Israeli officials were involved in exchanging and discussing significant information. Moreover, Israel issued an extraordinary invitation for Khan to visit the country so that he could investigate and explore key facets of the arguments for and against moving forward. Khan accepted the invitation for the week of May 27, 2024, and his advance team was due to arrive on May 20.
But on May 2, 2024, everything changed. Khan learned that his year-long sexual abuse of an employee had been revealed to a few ICC insiders, and the situation would shortly be reported to the ICC’s internal oversight body.
His response? Blame Israel.
Just weeks later, as Israeli, American and British officials were expecting Khan’s advance team to land in Jerusalem, he made a blockbuster announcement on a highly unusual platform – CNN. There he proclaimed he was issuing a request for arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. And three Hamas leaders as their moral equivalents. Everybody running the Palestinian Authority was above reproach.
Khan expected that he could rally anti-Israel mobs to circle the wagons around him, that attacking Israel would immunize him from the personal trouble he was bound to face.
Khan and his legal team circulated the idea that his Malaysian accuser – a young mother who was also Muslim and known to strongly support the Israeli arrest warrants – was a Mossad agent. At each phase of the subsequent investigations and decision-making, Khan accused the players of being Israeli stooges or driven by Israeli puppeteers. Qatar launched a surreptitious investigation into the victim and her family scrounging around for evidence of an Israeli or Jewish connection. Finding nothing didn’t stop the claims that the sexual assault accusations were all about the Israeli arrest warrants and Israeli and American antipathy towards the ICC.
Eventually, more than two years later – and only because of media leaks and pushback from feminist groups supporting the victim – the piper came calling. Friday’s final vote by the Rome Statute’s Assembly of States Parties (ASP) to get rid of Khan was 82 in favor, 13 against, and 15 abstentions. The remaining 15 members of the ASP were in hiding.
The lessons here are profound. Khan has been constantly described as a brilliant lawyer, so assuming he isn’t stupid, the highest ranking international criminal lawyer in the world evidently believed that antisemitism was his last best hope. In 2024, for more than five months, he and his friends pressured the victim to recant her allegations on the grounds that it would hurt the Israeli arrest warrants.
The victim herself claimed to have allowed the abuse (including rape) to go on for so long for fear that it would disrupt those warrants. In her own words: “I held on for as long as I could because I didn’t want to f—up the Palestinian arrest warrants.” How sad and twisted that a mutual passion for screwing Israel should have taken priority.
Until the very end, Khan and his followers invoked the perennial scapegoat, the international Jew boy, Israel. As late as June 22, 2026, Khan’s lawyer ranted about his being “forced from office” on account of having “sought arrest warrants in relation to Palestine.”
In response, the victim’s supporters felt the need to make one final move that had nothing to do with the veracity of her narrative. They set out to prove that siding with her would not interfere with the ICC’s vigorous prosecution of Israelis.
And lo and behold, the deputy prosecutor of the ICC, who had been doing Khan’s job while he had been on leave pending Friday’s vote, delivered. While the ASP Executive Bureau was considering Khan’s fate this past spring, the Deputy issued a request for arrest warrants targeting more Israeli leaders, including Cabinet Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This time criminality is pre-determined because the alleged crimes are those written for Israelis into the Rome Statute itself.
The victim’s side celebrated. The main groups produced a Q & A, which posed the rhetorical question: “Does the Palestine investigation depend on the current prosecutor?” And answered with an emphatic “no.” Moreover, readers were told with a wink-wink, what is known publicly about the ICC’s new Israeli targets is the tip of the iceberg.
In other words, to support the sexual assault accusation, the victim’s side was driven to flaunt arrest warrants for Israelis. And yet these human rights charlatans remained totally silent on the obvious implications of this dynamic for the legitimacy of the ICC itself.
Now there is a massive campaign to save the ICC from Khan.
Khan’s detailed request for warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant was considered and approved by the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber in November 2024. So you had a corrupt lascivious scoundrel – who was pursuing Israelis to cover up his other criminal pursuits – busy filing briefs and making legal-sounding arguments as if nothing had happened. Nothing that came out of his mouth about Israelis should have been considered trustworthy. And yet that’s exactly what the Pre-Trial Chamber did.
We are now supposed to believe that Khan’s actions against women made him dispensable, but the actions of this rapist, liar, persecutor, and unprincipled fraud against Jews are indispensable. We are to condemn Khan’s function as chief prosecutor for some purposes and pretend that the exercise of his function is impeccable for other purposes – more precisely, for Israel-bashing purposes.
So the real story of the rise and fall of Karim Khan is not that antisemitism is a failed strategy, but that when it comes to the ICC, the sickness ensnares Israelis every which way.
Consequently, Khan’s undoing should signal the undoing of the ICC, not the replacement of one antisemitic regime with another.
