On July 16, 2026, delegates from sixty-six countries sat in the State Department in Washington while Secretary of State Marco Rubio told them the world had a blind spot.
Three days earlier, the department had announced a campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court.
Three months before that, a defence-data company, Palantir, posted twenty-two numbered points on social media and watched them reach twenty-one million views in a weekend.
This is the moment when a reader living an ordinary Tuesday, paying a mortgage, checking a news app between meetings, starts to feel that the ground under public life has shifted, without being able to name what moved.
That feeling is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition arriving slightly ahead of the vocabulary for it.
Here is the vocabulary.
The Label
Rubio’s ministerial did not simply condemn a series of attacks. It moved the centre of gravity of the word “terrorism” itself.
For twenty-five years, the security architecture built after September 11 organized itself around a foreign, religious enemy.
At the ministerial, Rubio named a new one: “extremist violence from the political left,” which he said had been treated, wrongly in his account, as protected political expression.
Some of the incidents cited were real. Firebomb attacks did hit the homes of Greek governing-party officials in Thessaloniki on July 1.
But a real incident and an unlimited category are different instruments.
Once terrorism is defined by ideology rather than method, the entire apparatus built to fight terrorism, financial tracking, watchlists, and cross-border intelligence sharing, has a new domestic population to apply itself to.
Sixty-six governments left that room having agreed, at minimum, to think about their own dissidents this way.
The Infrastructure
Five days later, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 211 to protect, from a floor vote, a provision called Section 219.
It creates something named the United States-Israel Defence Technology Cooperation Initiative: a Pentagon-appointed office fusing American and Israeli research, weapons development, and supply chains across missile defence, cyber, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.
A bipartisan effort to strip it, led by Representative Thomas Massie and Representative Ro Khanna, was blocked twice by the Rules Committee without a floor debate.
What makes Section 219 different from ordinary military aid is precisely what its defenders call its strength: once written into law this way, no single president can unwind it by executive choice, and much of it sits outside the annual appropriations process that lets Congress see where the money and the technology actually go.
The Philosophy Underwriting It
In April, Palantir’s chief executive, Alexander Karp, and his general counsel, Nicholas Zamiska, published excerpts from their book under the header “because we get asked a lot.”
Point one: Silicon Valley owes the country a debt and has an obligation to help build its defence.
Point twenty-one: some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive.
The manifesto argues that the tolerance of pluralism has become, in its words, hollow, and that hard power, built now on software rather than steel, is what a serious civilization requires.
That is the meaning: a serious civilization doesn’t tolerate pluralism, which is considered hollow, and the true power of dominance now lies in software-driven control—specifically through AI and digital identity systems—rather than traditional military force. The idea is that “hard power” today manifests as the ability to digitally incapacitate or exclude individuals (a form of “killing” in a socio-economic or civic sense) instead of physically eliminating them.
Palantir’s technology already runs through American immigration enforcement and Israeli defence operations. The manifesto is not a stray corporate opinion. It is the argument that makes Section 219 sound, to the people voting on it, like common sense rather than a surrender of oversight. It also names, with more honesty than its authors may have intended, exactly what a company like Palantir wants a court capable of investigating corporations to look away from.
What that hard power looks like on the ground has a name, several names, and they are not classified.
Israeli intelligence officers told the outlet +972 Magazine that a system called Lavender used cell phone and social media data to score tens of thousands of Gazan men for likely militant affiliation, with human review of each name averaging twenty seconds.
A second system, The Gospel, generated buildings and structures as targets.
A third, nicknamed Where’s Daddy, tracked flagged individuals until they returned home and alerted officers to strike there, at night, with their families present, because a house was an easier target than a man in the field.
None of this required a foreign company to pull a trigger. It required the cloud computing, the facial recognition, and the data infrastructure that companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have supplied to Israel for years under contracts like the 1.2 billion dollar Project Nimbus deal, and that Palantir has supplied to militaries more broadly.
The AI in Section 219 is not an abstraction. This is what the fusion is for.
The Firewall Being Removed
The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, issued over the conduct of the war in Gaza, are the specific trigger for what came next.
Sanctions against ICC judges and deputy prosecutors, first imposed in 2025, expanded three separate times that year to reach staff connected to the Afghanistan investigation and the Israel warrants.
In June 2026, three of the sanctioned judges sued the U.S. government in New York federal court.
Roughly a month later, the State Department announced what it called a whole-of-government effort to disable the Court entirely: expanded sanctions, visa revocation for its personnel, and direct pressure on Rome Statute member states, American allies among them, to withdraw altogether.
U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was placed under U.S. sanctions in June 2025, not, as she has said publicly, for documenting the war’s toll, but weeks after she published a report naming forty-eight corporations and institutions, Palantir among them, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, as financially embedded in what she termed an economy of occupation and genocide. She lost access to U.S. banking. Any American doing business with her risked twenty years in prison. Three Palestinian human rights organizations were sanctioned in the same sequence. The International Federation for Human Rights called it the most serious attack on the Court since its founding.
The Manipulation Exposed
A full sequence of documented actions from primary Senate records alongside the Holder’s recordings is precise and damning.
It did not begin in secret. On October 23, 2024, Graham’s office published a press release and a letter to the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, on the record, arguing that unresolved reports of misconduct by Prosecutor Karim Khan cast what Graham himself called “another cloud, a moral one,” over Khan’s pending decision on arrest warrants for Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Six days later, on October 29, in a call captured by documentary filmmaker Alex Holder for an unreleased film on Graham, the senator can be heard coaching Netanyahu through the next step: assembling more senators, Democrats especially, to sign a follow-up letter, and instructing Netanyahu to personally call two of them, Richard Blumenthal and Ben Cardin, to thank them, tying the request to Netanyahu’s interest in Saudi-Israel normalization, a deal Graham had long pushed and expected credit for. Graham told Netanyahu the calls would “encourage” the senators to sign and joked that the prime minister should pay him in “shekels” for the help.
On November 1, six senators, three Republicans and three Democrats, signed the letter Graham had assembled; Cardin, chairing the Foreign Relations Committee, said publicly that the unresolved allegations left “a shadow” over the prosecutor’s own investigation.
It did not work. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant three weeks later, on November 21, 2024.
On July 24, 2026, nearly two years after the call, Khan was removed from his post by the ICC’s own oversight body following a separate investigation into those same misconduct allegations, which he denies and is contesting.
What the recording adds to the public record is not the existence of the pressure campaign, Graham had already put that in writing, but its mechanics: a head of government personally working the phones to recruit the opposing party’s senators against the prosecutor investigating him, using a scandal his own ally had publicized days earlier, and settling the account afterward in the currency of an unrelated diplomatic favor.
That is not a defence of the Court against unfair attack. It is documentation of how a formally bipartisan, ostensibly independent congressional intervention was, at its origin, personally brokered by the person it was designed to protect.
Here is where the pattern resolves, and where precision matters more than momentum. These are not four instructions issued by one hand.
They are three institutions, a foreign ministry, a legislature, a private contractor, arriving at the same destination because each has a separate and rational reason to want it.
A government facing a war crimes investigation has an interest in a weaker court.
A defence-technology company has an interest in guaranteed, oversight-light integration into military procurement.
A security state expanding its domestic surveillance mandate has an interest in a terrorism category broad enough to include its critics.
None of them needed to conspire in the broad sense. But the recordings show that at least one part of it, weakening the specific court that had opened a case against a sitting prime minister, was in fact coordinated, in real time, by the two people with the most to gain from it.
International law, the only mechanism built to hold the powerful to the same standard as the weak, was the one thing standing in the way. That is why it was the first thing targeted.
The Confession
Two days after my article “The Day They Announced They Would Dismantle It” went up, the argument above stopped needing to be argued.
On July 31, at Camp David, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the cabinet that five countries have announced plans to leave the International Criminal Court since the dismantling campaign began this month. Then a reporter’s question got an answer nobody needed to extract.
Trump said he’d seen no sign anyone was coming after him personally. Then, describing his own secretary of state’s campaign, he said what this piece argued was its actual shape, not its cover story: Rubio, in his words, is trying to defend Bibi and various other people.
"There's no information that they're after me," Trump said. "It could happen, but just so you know ... he (Rubio) is not trying to defend me. He's trying to defend Bibi and various other people," Trump said, using Netanyahu's nickname. "But there are many people that shouldn't be looked at that way. But there is no indication that I'm one of them at this moment." CAMP DAVID, Maryland, July 31, 2026 (Reuters)
A government facing a war crimes investigation has an interest in a weaker court. A few paragraphs up, that was analysis. As of July 31, it is also a direct quote from the president who ordered the campaign.
What Happens When the Pattern Reaches Canada
Canadians watching this from outside American jurisdiction should not mistake distance for immunity, because three of these instruments already exist at home, and none is hypothetical.
Bill C-9
The Combatting Hate Act, Bill C-9, received Royal Assent on June 18, 2026, and its Criminal Code provisions came into force on July 18. It is a real law now, creating standalone hate-crime offences and new penalties for displaying certain symbols and obstructing access to religious and community spaces. Reasonable people can support most of what it does. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s concern is narrower and worth taking seriously anyway: that new offences built around intent to promote hatred, applied by police in the field rather than a court, create room for a broad and prejudicial reading of the law before that reading is ever tested.
Bill C-22
The second instrument fuses more directly with the American story above. Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, passed third reading in the House of Commons on the same day C-9 received assent, June 18, under a government motion that limited debate over opposition objection. It compels what the bill calls electronic service providers, a definition wide enough to reach messaging apps, cloud storage, and social platforms, to build and maintain the technical capacity to hand data to police and to CSIS on request, including a full year of retained metadata. The Senate has the bill now and will not begin studying it until it returns on September 21.
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has already flagged the part of this file American readers should recognize: the bill’s provisions overlap directly with what Canada would need to enter a CLOUD Act data-sharing agreementwith the United States, the same government simultaneously building Section 219’s AI and cyber fusion with Israel.
Bill C-34
The third instrument arrived while the ink on the other two was still drying. Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was introduced on June 10, 2026, by Heritage Minister Marc Miller. It would create two new statutes, the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act, and a new federal regulator empowered to enforce them. Some of what it does is not controversial: removing child sexual abuse material and non-consensually shared intimate images is a duty almost no one disputes. What the CCLA has flagged is the width of everything built around that core.
The bill requires platforms and AI chatbot operators to mitigate exposure to seven categories of “harmful content,” some of which describe speech that is currently legal, and CCLA’s Fundamental Freedoms Director, Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, has said the categories need tighter definition or the bill becomes, in practice, a censorship tool.
CCLA Executive Director Howard Sapers called it “a blank check for federal power.” Platforms facing fines of up to ten million dollars or three percent of global revenue for non-compliance have every incentive to over-remove rather than risk the penalty, which means the actual boundary of acceptable Canadian speech would be set less by Parliament than by a company’s legal department deciding what is safest to delete.
The Israeli Pitch to Canada
On July 26, 2026, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, made the sales case directly to The Canadian Press: Israeli firms could help Canada build safer artificial intelligence and stronger cyber defences, a pitch wrapped in the country’s longstanding self-branding as the “Startup Nation.”
Moed made the offer in the same interview where he described the bilateral relationship as being at its lowest point in nearly eighty years, and where the wire service noted a fact with its own weight: Prime Minister Mark Carney has never had a formal call or meeting with Netanyahu, whom Carney has accused of failing to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza by restricting aid deliveries.
Israel disputes that framing and says Canada’s criticism, its withdrawal of support in UN votes, and its recognition of the State of Palestine are what actually undermine peace in the region. Both positions are on the record; readers can weigh them.
What the trade pitch leaves out is specificity, and specificity is where this piece has tried to live throughout.
The same category of AI decision-support tool Israel is offering to help Canada build responsibly has already been documented, by name, doing something else first. And repetita iuvant.
A 2024 investigation by +972 Magazine, corroborated by CBC News, described an Israeli military system called Lavender that generated tens of thousands of Palestinian names as bombing targets, with intelligence officers telling reporters they spent as little as twenty seconds confirming each one before a strike was authorized.
The International Court of Justice found in January 2024 that Palestinians’ rights under the Genocide Convention were plausibly at risk in Gaza, a threshold finding, not a final verdict. U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, already sanctioned once in this piece’s timeline for her work on the ICC, went further in her own report to the Human Rights Council, concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe genocide was occurring.
Canada is free to weigh its own economic and security interests. It is not free to pretend the weighing happens in a vacuum.
The label travels. The infrastructure is built to be exportable by design, and in Canada's case the pipe runs both directions across the same border at once, a broadened terrorism category on one side, a mandatory data-retention regime, and an open-ended content regulator on the other.
A reader in Toronto is not a spectator to this architecture. She has less than two months before the Senate even opens its study of C-22, and no reason to assume distance, or the word “child safety” on a bill’s short title, is protection from what sits inside it.
None of this requires believing that Israel’s security concerns are illegitimate, or that political violence from any direction should go unnamed.
It requires believing that the same law should bind the powerful and the powerless, the same evidence standard should apply to a domestic protester and a head of government, and that a court built after the worst crimes of the last century does not become an enemy of the West the moment it names a Western ally’s own conduct, or the moment recordings show that ally’s leader trying to delay its verdict with someone else’s scandal.
That is not radicalism. It is the ordinary, exhausting work of insisting that words like “terrorism,” “safety,” and “sovereignty” still mean something specific, in an era working very hard to make them mean whatever power needs them to mean this week.
Sources
Section 219 provisions, vote, Massie-Khanna amendment blocked. Military.com, July 21, 2026; Military.com, July 2026 (Massie revival)
Palantir manifesto. Engadget, Apr 19, 2026; TechPolicy. Press, Apr 29, 2026
Rubio ministerial: date, attendance, quotes, U.S. Department of State, July 16 2026; ABC News, July 16 2026; CNN, July 16 2026
Thessaloniki firebombing (cited by Rubio), Fox News, July 2026 (administration officials’ account, their characterization)
ICC dismantlement campaign: measures, sanctions history. Al Jazeera, July 13, 2026; FIDH, July 20, 2026; Just Security, July 27, 2026
Albanese sanctioned over corporate-complicity report naming Palantir, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Business and Human Rights Centre, 2025-2026; Democracy Now, July 2025; Francesca Albanese interview on Double Down News July 28, 2026
Lavender, The Gospel, Where’s Daddy: mechanism and sourcing, +972 Magazine (original investigation); Democracy Now, Apr 2024; The Conversation, 2024/2026
Project Nimbus and Big Tech infrastructure to Israel, Al Jazeera Opinion (Michael Kwet), May 2024, labeled as opinion analysis, facts cross-checked against Al Jazeera news reporting cited within it
Graham’s Oct 23, 2024, press release, “moral cloud” language, letter to ICC Assembly of States Parties. Office of Sen. Lindsey Graham, official press release, Oct 23, 2024
Netanyahu-Graham recorded call, Oct 29 2024, coaching on lobbying senators re: Khan letter. Alex Holder documentary recording, aired/discussed on “Breaking Points” (independent political interview show, used here only for the portion of raw audio it presents, cross-checked against primary Senate documents, not relied on alone for any claim); corroborating description in Middle East Eye, July 29 2026, citing New York Times reporting; separate CNN broadcast of related material reported via Daily Beast, AOL, and The Mirror, July 28–29 2026 (secondhand descriptions of a CNN segment)
Nov 1 2024 letter to ICC, six signatories (Graham, Thune, Ernst, Cardin, Blumenthal, Fetterman), Cardin’s “shadow” quote. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, official press release, Nov 2024; Sen. Blumenthal’s office, official press release, Nov 2024
Karim Khan removed as ICC chief prosecutor, July 24 2026, following investigation he is contesting. New York Times, July 28 2026; Middle East Eye, July 29 2026
Trump on ICC campaign’s purpose, Camp David cabinet meeting. Reuters (Steve Holland, Simon Lewis), July 31, 2026; corroborated by Haaretz, “Trump Says Rubio Trying to Defend Netanyahu From ICC Arrest Warrant,” July 31, 2026.
Bill C-9: Royal Assent, in-force date, provisions. Department of Justice Canada, June 19 2026; Department of Justice Canada, “Combatting Hate Act” summary.
Bill C-22: third-reading date, Senate timeline, CLOUD Act overlap. BetaKit, June 18 2026; Dentons Canada Regulatory Review, June 19 2026; Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, June 2 2026
Bill C-34: introduction date, minister, structure, fine amounts. Government of Canada / Canadian Heritage, June 10 2026
CCLA response to Bill C-34, named quotes. Canadian Civil Liberties Association, press release, June 2026 (Howard Sapers, Anaïs Bussières McNicoll)
Israel pitches Canada AI/cybersecurity trade; Carney-Netanyahu non-contact; Moed quotes, The Canadian Press, republished CTV News/Global News/Yahoo News Canada, July 26, 2026
ICJ provisional measures, plausible genocide risk finding; International Court of Justice, order of Jan 26, 2024
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, “reasonable grounds” genocide finding; Report of the Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council, March 2024
