The Free Press
When world leaders gather in Poland this January 27 to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one seat will be ominously empty. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of all the leaders of the world, cannot set foot on Polish soil without risking arrest.
The reason is that the International Criminal Court has charged Mr. Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Biden administration has called out the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction and “troubling process errors,” denouncing a decision “we fundamentally reject.”
Given the blowback, the president of Poland has called on the country’s prime minister to allow Netanyahu to attend in light of the “absolutely exceptional circumstances” of the gathering, which takes place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But the Polish government has done nothing to contest the ICC’s charges. And Netanyahu, who has not traveled to Europe since the charges dropped, has not received an official invitation.
It would be hard to contrive a crueler or more emblematic set of ironies.
Not only will a major commemoration of the slaughter of six million Jews take place in the presence of all major foreign leaders except those of the world’s only Jewish state, but two of the legal terms erroneously deployed against Israel—“crimes against humanity,” as in the ICC warrant, and “genocide,” as alleged by human rights organizations—were pioneered by two Polish-born Jews. Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, both of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, developed these concepts for use in international legal proceedings after the war.
In recent years, allegations of such crimes have been made against China for its treatment of the Uyghurs; Ethiopia for its expulsion of Tigrayans; Iran for its systematic repression and torture of citizens. Yet while these atrocities are indisputable, the leaders of those regimes are regularly included and honored in international forums. Only Israel is singled out for ostracism and sanction, accused of the very crimes committed against it by the terrorist armies and their state sponsors determined to destroy the Jewish state.
This outcome reflects the victory of a decades-long campaign by Israel’s enemies to delegitimize, demonize, and apply double standards to the Jewish state. That campaign has succeeded in promoting the lie that Israel represents the last remnants of colonialism and that Jews are now doing to the Palestinians what Nazis once did to Jews. This calumny, which has spread from progressives in academia to international organizations, has now been adopted, whether cynically or sincerely, by many leaders and ordinary people throughout the world.
As a result, while Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are currently losing the battle to destroy Israel militarily, they have been given hope of winning on another front, that of global public opinion.
The countries most responsible for giving them this hope—another irony—are the major powers, particularly Britain, France, and Germany, who have the clout to determine whether such legal tactics will succeed. The leaders of these countries have all admitted in one way or another that they do not agree with the ICC warrants. Nevertheless, they claim they have to follow them in order to preserve international law and the peace and justice it supposedly promotes.
This reminds me of a conversation I had several years ago with the head of the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva. I asked how it could be that democratic Israel is condemned for human-rights violations more than all the dictators in the world combined, despite mass violence in China, Africa, the Arab world, Chechnya, and beyond. She agreed that this was unfair, but said she could do nothing about it, since while the worst human-rights violators all agreed amongst themselves to block resolutions against any one of them, there was no such means of blocking resolutions against Israel, no matter how distorted the charges. In effect, then, this respectable lawyer admitted that the very existence of the international body, sustained by the repeated sacrifice of the Jewish state, was more important than correcting perpetual injustice against one of its members.
The implications of this position are becoming increasingly clear.
Soon, not only will Israeli leaders be unable to land on European soil, but nearly any Israeli who travels abroad could be subject to prosecution merely for having served in the Israel Defense Forces given Israel’s mandatory conscription. We are already beginning to see this process unfold. Recently an Israeli was forced to flee Brazil for Argentina after the Brazilian Federal Court issued an arrest warrant, prompted by an international organization, the Hind Rajab Foundation, that describes its mission as “breaking the cycle of Israeli impunity,” according to The Jerusalem Post. Eventually, Israelis will be confined to our state like a modern-day ghetto or Pale of Settlement.
What Israel is facing now is a contemporary version of the blood libel raised against Jews for centuries. The original libel accused Jews of using Christian blood at Passover as a reminder of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus at the Last Supper, which took place during the seder. Though Jewish moral law made murder a universal crime, and Jewish dietary law abominates the use of blood, the sinister inverting logic of antisemitism persuaded generations that Jews were guilty of a cannibalistic ritual.
The same Orwellian principle is behind the charge of genocide and crimes against humanity, which takes core Jewish values embedded in Western civilization, like the sanctity of human life, and accuses the Jewish state of collectively violating them. The story is then repeated so many times that it penetrates popular consciousness and legitimizes our persecution, even among the most highly educated segments of the population.
The original libel led to the prosecution, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Jews over the centuries. For example, one of the most extensive trials for these alleged crimes, the Velizh affair, which took place over 12 years in nineteenth-century Russia, involved the arrests of over 40 people, four of whom died in prison. By the end, all of the accused had been exonerated. Yet when it came time to ratify a court judgment releasing them, Czar Nicholas I said that he regretted having to do so, since the fact that the same accusation had been made for hundreds of years meant that it must be true.
It is this assumption that has kept the libel alive. (As late as 1913, Mendel Beilis was put on trial for ritual murder in Kyiv.) I was shocked, for instance, when the man who would become my closest friend in the Soviet Gulag asked me, out of genuine curiosity to learn about the Pesach seder, what the ceremony was like when Jews used actual blood. He sincerely believed the allegation, despite being an educated man who was imprisoned for his enlightened Christian views.
While today’s version of the blood libel has not been repeated over the course of a millennium, it has been repeated countless times since the tragedy of October 7, 2023, when our enemies tried to launch an actual genocide against Israel. But just as in the Christian world every Jew knew that the original accusation was false, no matter what sanction it received from kings or clergy, today every Israeli on the street knows that the charges against us are untrue.
The current war is the longest and the most difficult that Israel has ever faced, and nearly everyone in the country has served on the front lines or has a family member, neighbor, or close friend who did. As a result, while we disagree deeply on many issues, including our attitudes toward the current government, we all know that there has not been an order to intentionally kill or starve innocent Palestinians. To be sure, there have been many civilian casualties, and every one of them is a tragedy. But these lives were taken not because the IDF targeted them; they were taken because Hamas used them as human shields.
Certainly there are experts and government officials, especially in the United States, who know and document the truth. But Israelis cannot afford to wait until the record is corrected, the fever breaks, and the historians catch up. Neither can countries who will themselves become targets of international courts that cover for dictators and illiberal regimes, not to mention those suffering in China, Iran, and myriad other countries whose crimes are ignored. Even in the Middle Ages, there were popes like Gregory X who did denounce the falsehood of the blood libel, though this was no guarantee of Jewish safety.
Knowing that the original blood libel was a lie, Jews historically had no choice but to continue their lives, preserving their values and spreading the light of justice to all the nations. This did not guarantee safety for the Jew. In the same way, Israelis today have no choice but to continue on our path, fighting for our right to exist as a Jewish democratic state and protecting the world against terrorism as we do.
But the rest of the free world does have a choice. While international law and institutions were intended to promote peace, they have been co-opted by those who seek the destruction of the Jewish state. If the words “never again” are to mean anything, then, they must mean rejecting this state of affairs. Anything less will return us to the same condition that the post-World War II international order was designed to prevent.
