Amal Clooney Loses the Plot on Women’s Rights

T ime’s 2022 woman of the year, Amal Clooney, is a human-rights lawyer who has earned a reputation for defending women’s rights. Not just a glamorous jetsetter with a celebrity husband (actor George Clooney), she has made her mark, Time wrote, by ensuring “that women who are victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence, are not forgotten, that they get justice, that their lives and communities are better as a result.”

Clooney was most recently an adviser to the International Criminal Court in its decision to issue arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant. Anti-Israel activists applauded her for joining the panel of experts who aided and affirmed ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s effort. Although Clooney has been relatively quiet about the war since Hamas attacked Israel in October, this move redeemed her in pro-Palestinian circles; her fans forgave her silence in light of her role with the ICC. One person wrote on X: “Amal Clooney quietly working on the ICC proceedings to bring Israel to The Hague for war crimes while she was being dragged online for not posting about Gaza. Queen, sorry we doubted you.”

Clooney said that she felt “compelled to assist” the ICC because Israel has “tested the system of international law to its limits.” In doing so, she helped Khan draw an equivalence between the leaders of a terrorist organization and the leaders of a democratic nation. By condemning Israel’s counterattacks against Hamas as strongly as Hamas’s war crimes, the ICC has drawn an odious parallel. National Review’s editors have explained the court’s ruling in detail. But the way in which Clooney used her voice is another facet of the case worth exploring.

Clooney has come under sharp criticism from pro-Israel groups over her relative silence on the hundreds of female Israeli victims of the 10/7 attack. When Clooney finally did speak up, she did not call for justice for these women, as she has done for other women throughout her career, but rather equated a terrorist regime that raped, murdered, disfigured, and abducted women and children with a democratic society that seeks to remove from power the monsters who raped, murdered, disfigured, and abducted women and children. Clooney’s career has taught her how much a woman’s perspective matters. She said at the 2023 Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, “Justice is not inevitable: it doesn’t just happen on its own. We have to fight for it; to gather our forces, forge alliances, prepare a strategy and be determined to do whatever it takes.” On the website of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she and her husband established, she posted a statement on the ICC decision, saying that she will “never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s. I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law.”

Clooney’s statement does refer to Hamas’s “hostage-taking, murder and crimes of sexual violence.” The problem is that she has had little else to say, over the past seven months, about the Israeli women who were the victims of those crimes. Or about baby Kfir Bibas, who turned one in captivity, and his brother Ariel, aged four, taken captive with their mother — a mother whose grief and fear are seen in her face on Hamas terrorists’ video; or about any of the other hostages, not even the women enslaved to terrorists who hide among civilians.

Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza has pit some women’s-rights activists like Clooney against each other. On one side are women focused on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the thousands of mothers and children who have, and will, unfairly lose their lives in Hamas’s war. On the other side are women who stand firmly with Israel, at a time when international feminist organizations, and progressives who once made it their mission to stand up for victims of sexual and gender-based violence, will not. These positions need not be mutually exclusive. There is a case for a pro-woman approach to the war, and it is, I think, best labeled “anti-Hamas.” Hamas uses women and children as props, tools, and objects of terrorism. To assume that a cease-fire, or greater humanitarian aid, would benefit the women and children in Gaza presumes that the terrorists who rule Gaza care about fair and equal aid distribution or women’s rights. The aid provided to Gaza over the last decade has gone to build up a sophisticated tunnel system, in which Israeli women are now being held and subjected to torture. Fuel that could power hospitals and neonatal-intensive-care units in Gaza has been diverted and stockpiled by Hamas to help Hamas’s war aims. Hamas steals humanitarian aid intended for Palestinian families. Hamas’s rage, brutality, indifference toward life, and relentless pursuit of martyrdom at the expense of Israeli and Palestinian lives will continue until the terror group is eradicated.

When I was in Israel in March, an IDF soldier recalled a horrifying story. His unit was in Gaza, facing fire from two terrorists, who hid in buildings opposite each another. One man ran out of ammo. The other, whom the IDF would have shot upon sight, dispatched a little boy to run to the opposite building, retrieve ammo, and bring it back to him. The IDF couldn’t do anything but watch the child. Another story from Gaza: A group of burka-clad women exited a building and started to approach soldiers. The IDF had about one minute to evaluate the situation, a soldier told me — they could not, and would not, start shooting at civilians, but they were certain that terrorists were among the group. IDF soldiers had to analyze the crowd to see if any of the women’s arms were not moving, which would suggest that that person held a weapon. A final story: One IDF soldier spotted a child’s underwear and a teddy bear in a doorway. When he went to retrieve them and investigate the scene, another soldier pulled him back suddenly. The underwear was booby-trapped.

Israeli women are used to international feminist organizations’ disregard. They do not expect, at this point, Amal Clooney or any figure from NGOs or so-called human-rights groups or the United Nations to agree with Israel that the monsters who carried out the October 7 attack must be destroyed. But only one party in this war — Hamas — believes what Clooney said she rejects: that “one child’s life has less value than another’s.” In conducting urban warfare in the densely populated Gaza Strip, against an enemy that has purposely embedded itself among civilians, Israel has achieved a remarkably low combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio. The ICC, as advised by Amal Clooney, who professes to care about justice, ignores this fact and twists the truth to suit its own desire to condemn Israel.

For the ICC to have decided that Hamas leaders and Israeli leaders alike should be subject to arrest warrants, the members of this “court” could not have thought much about the story of released hostages Dafna and Ela Elyakim, sisters aged 15 and eight, who witnessed terrorists murder their father, and whom Hamas filmed in a hostage video that came to light after their release. Nor about former hostages Emily Hand, aged nine, whose mother was murdered by Hamas, or Abigail Edan, aged three, whose parents were slaughtered by Hamas. They could not have thought much about the women at the Nova music festival who were sexually brutalized. It does not speak well of Amal Clooney as a human-rights advocate to categorize Hamas and Israel as equally guilty of crimes against humanity. Clooney’s apparent indifference to the stark moral differences between the two parties to the war provoked by Hamas is yet another slight against Israeli women who believed earnestly that women who claim to love justice would fight for them.