Pity the poor International Criminal Court. As the ICC’s annual gathering of member nations gets under way, a theme is emerging: The great threat to international justice is how mean everyone’s being to the ICC.

“The Court has been subjected to attacks seeking to undermine its legitimacy and ability to administer justice and realize international law and fundamental rights; coercive measures, threats, pressure and acts of sabotage,” warned court president and judge Tomoko Akane.

What’s causing the consternation? The fact that the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, of course. Since the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel, nor is there any serious argument it has jurisdiction over Gaza, some member states have questioned whether it would truly be prudent to comply with the ICC’s order to arrest the Israeli head of government in the middle of a war in which these nations are allied with Israel.

In fact, the insane part is not that they are flirting with noncompliance with the ICC warrants but that they are even considering honoring them in the first place. Russia, with Iran’s help, is making war on the European continent, and the ICC would like European states to side with Iranian terrorist proxies in the Mideast—all because a bored prosecutor in the Netherlands is mad at the Jews. You would have to be a lunatic to comply with a pyromaniac’s “order” to help him burn your own house down.

Even the European states that pledge to comply think it’s nuts. “Member country Austria begrudgingly acknowledged it would arrest Netanyahu but called the warrants ‘utterly incomprehensible,’ Italy called them ‘wrong’ but said it would be obliged to arrest him,” reports the Associated Press from the Hague.

But the most deliciously wounding reaction came from the Hague’s own national government: “Even the Netherlands, which hosts the court in The Hague, has said there could be circumstances in which Netanyahu might be able to visit, without spelling out what those conditions might be.”

In other words, the Hague’s host country does not intend to honor the Hague’s warrant.

The degree to which the ICC has shredded its own credibility cannot be exaggerated. The current head prosecutor is Karim Khan. In 2013, Khan wrote a blistering report about the ICC’s lawless, corrupt assault on the “fundamental rights” of the accused as laid out in the treaty that established the ICC. The clear point was: The ICC is in noncompliance with its own founding document. That Khan now spearheads the corrupt process he once decried and is leading the court into its biggest crisis of legitimacy is poetic, and arguably reinforces the point.

Meanwhile, the solution to this problem is hidden in one of the supposed pieces of evidence that the court is in crisis. Per the AP: “The court, which has long faced accusations of ineffectiveness, will have no trials pending after two conclude in December. While it has issued a number of arrest warrants in recent months, many high-profile suspects remain at large.”

Is it a bad thing that the ICC will have no trials pending after December? This is a good example of the upside-down incentives of a permanent international court: If it isn’t putting anyone on trial at the moment, it must be failing in its responsibilities. And so it has doled out a few extra arrest warrants in the hope that someone—the court doesn’t really care who—gets hauled in to the Hague so salaries can be justified. If the ICC cannot adjudicate any of the current war-crimes accusations, then it’ll just have to invent some.

What did the world do before the advent of the permanent court in 2002? It assembled courts to adjudicate specific cases of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials predated the ICC by a half-century. In 1994, a comprehensive international court was established to adjudicate the Rwandan genocide. The same is true regarding the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

The ICC’s need to justify its budget should not be Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant’s problem.

Cleveland State international-law professor Milena Sterio criticized the attacks on the ICC and the broad opposition to its recent arrest warrants as impediments to the court’s work.

“It becomes very difficult to justify the court’s existence,” Sterio told the AP. Indeed it does, professor.