The ICC indictment against Netanyahu is getting a lot of attention in the media as being out of line. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham has said that if an ally arrests him, the United States will tank their economy. Joe Biden has said the charge is “outrageous.” But what other method or manner should be used to investigate whether a head of state with a powerful military has violated the rights that all humans should enjoy by default?

It’s clear that powerful world leaders are not a good source for evaluating this on face. They have a narrow goal of self-preservation, often couched in the rhetoric of the nation-state. The state must defend itself not only territorially, which is obvious, but also symbolically – the permanence and obviousness of borders is best conveyed through material violence. The state has no other tools other than slaughter to convince others that their borders are real.

There are times when border defense via weapons is necessary but these times should be rare. The further you live from a border the more real it seems. The closer you get, the more it seems to be somewhere else. You are never quite there. Sometimes we have to put big signs and facilities on borders to make sure people don’t mistake where they are.

The symbolic necessity of a hard border in the logic of the nation-state means that leaders of nation-states will defer to going hard on defending them – including violating other borders and territorial integrity, invasion, and other such actions that one would see at a pre-school such as breaking your stuff because you broke mine; knocking over your brick tower because you didn’t like mine, etc.

The suffering people on and around the border and the state or organization that has been determined to be at fault pay the price. The ICC makes sure that the state’s actions do not violate the rights of those who happen to be close to these borders, or in a geographically inconvenient spot. The ICC is the agreement that the governments of the world should step back and check one another to determine if state reaction to the flimsiness of borders goes too hard or too devastating on the physical lives and practiced rights of the people who happen to be in the area chosen for this demonstration of force.

The ICC seems like the perfect place to this rhetorician to stand and defend one’s actions. It seems like the best forum we have of this writing to make the argument that the nation-state has no alternative but material destruction and casualty when there is an existential threat to the state. The ICC prosecutor has the burden to argue when and where that line exists: That the defense of the nation-state has limits that should be respected and enforced in order to secure the fundamental rights of the people of the world. This discourse would be incredible to have access to in order to help people have conversations with one another about military reaction to violation of state sovereignty, and why violating peoples’ right to life or right to safe passage, might not be a valid way of re-establishing the symbolic certainty that “borders make the state” (to the tune of the clothes make the man).

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think stepping back and having the arguments articulated as to why such destruction is not only appropriate, but necessary, or perhaps the only option available versus the arguments that this kind of state action is illegitimate because of the cost on human rights, life, etc as well as the interesting argument that perhaps it further de-legitimizes the state in ways that it can’t recover (a very cynical reason to sign on to the Rome Statute, but I would think some governments had this conversation in their parliament or perhaps behind closed doors) is essential for us to figure out not just who to vote for or what policy to protest against, but the very nature and role of things like voting and protest in our world that we increasingly feel as more real and simultaneously deeply, deeply symbolic.