In fact, the court's treatment of Israel has been deeply mired in politics ever since the Palestinian Authority acceded to the ICC in 2015. Western allies have sought repeatedly to intimidate and strong-arm the court to ensure Israeli officials are not tried for war crimes.
It is no coincidence that ICC judges found the backbone to assert jurisdiction over the occupied territories immediately after Donald Trump stepped down as US president. His administration had waged a campaign to intimidate the court, which included a ban on ICC staff entering the US and threats to freeze their assets.
The timing of the ICC's ruling may also be related to the fact that its chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is due to quit her post in a few months. She is unlikely to launch any investigations of Israelis before then, leaving the task to her successor.
Such a delay will buy Israel more time. And under an onslaught of pressure, the new chief prosecutor may be persuaded that Israel - despite decades of law-breaking - is not a high enough priority to justify the court's limited resources.
Campaigning beginsJust such a campaign has already begun. On Sunday, the Israeli foreign ministry sent an urgent, classified cable to dozens of its ambassadors, urging them to recruit their respective capitals to a campaign to put pressure on the ICC.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi - a former military chief of staff who is almost certainly on Israel's secret list of war crimes suspects - rang his counterparts in foreign capitals, urging them to help. That will likely include lobbying for a more sympathetic chief prosecutor to replace Bensouda.
Israeli media reported security sources as saying that several ICC member states had already agreed to tip Israel off should they learn that any arrest warrants have been issued against Israelis.
Already, the Biden administration in the US, Germany and the Australian government, stalwart defenders of Israel, have issued denunciations of the ICC decision - and implicitly the international norms of war the court is supposed to uphold.
Responding to Germany's attack on the court, Hanan Ashrawi, a former senior Palestinian official, tweeted on Tuesday: "So your 'legal view' supersedes the ruling of the ICC judges and the resolutions of the UN [General Assembly]? No self-respecting state should accept instructions from (or intimidation by) Israel."
Other states, with their own self-interested calculations, may soon follow suit. Those that have allied themselves most closely with the US-led "war on terror", including the UK, have every reason to ensure that Israel - a state very much in the "western diplomatic club" - is not held to account for war crimes of the kind they too have committed. They prefer that the ICC continues to limit its indictments to African leaders.
Behind-the-scenes lobbying and intimidation may explain the seemingly perverse reasoning of the ICC in December to close its investigation of UK officials without issuing any indictments. It did so even while accepting that British forces had likely committed war crimes in Iraq. Israel may hope for a similar, fudged reprieve.
Shielding IsraelThe reality is that the case against Israel was always going to depend on political factors far more than legal ones once it became vulnerable to investigation. But the shielding of Israel over war crimes was evident long before Palestine's ratification of the Rome Statute in 2015.
Six years earlier, for example, Israel orchestrated a campaign of intimidation against a celebrated South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, over the report of his UN committee into Israel's 2009 attack on Gaza. The report found Israel and Hamas responsible for committing war crimes, and possibly even graver crimes against humanity.
Goldstone repudiated his strongest findings months later after the personal campaign against him culminated in the South African Zionist Federation barring him from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah.
Similarly, "universal jurisdiction" rules, which allow foreign citizens to seek the arrest of an official suspected of violating international law if his or her state refuses to adjudicate, have never been enforced in practice against Israelis.
After the incidents involving Almog and Livni, the UK government even changed its own universal jurisdiction law in 2011 specifically to protect Israeli officials from arrest on British soil.
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