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By: Aharon Friedman
The underlying charges that Israel’s self-defense constitutes starvation and murder mock reality and eviscerate international law.
The United States should boycott the upcoming international ceremony on Jan. 27 marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp unless Poland renounces its support of the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and guarantees his safe transit. Poland’s threat to arrest Israel’s leader if he attends the memorial labels the Jewish state as today’s Nazi regime, mocking the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, along with the victims of Oct. 7, 2023.
Poland’s stance is also a direct threat to America’s national security, as the ICC threatens to use the same lawless playbook to have countries seize American service members on trumped-up charges.
The ICC criminal charges are a blood libel demanding that Jews not defend themselves and attempting to erase a key lesson of the Holocaust: Never again will Jews be defenseless against genocidal enemies.
“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip (from where Israel completely withdrew in 2005), which is governed by Hamas and whose charter calls for genocide against the Jewish people. Fatah, which controls the Palestinian National Authority (P.A.), joined the attack, as did ordinary Gazans. The vast majority of Gaza residents and Arabs living in Judea and Samaria supported the Oct. 7 invasion and resulting atrocities.
The name Al-Aqsa Flood emphasizes the goal of destroying Israel, not creating a state alongside it. Al-Aqsa is the Muslim name for Jerusalem and derives from the Jewish Beit Hamikdash (Holy Temple). Islamists recognize the historic Jewish link to Jerusalem but are determined to supplant that connection. Yasser Arafat—the chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the founder of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority—hailed Nazi collaborator Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini as his role model and similarly styled his five-year war against Israel that began in September 2000 as the “Al-Aqsa Intifada.”
On Oct. 7, in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the invaders murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, mostly civilians, and also dragged as many as 251 men, women and children back into Gaza. The attack was also reminiscent of the Holocaust because of the unspeakable atrocities motivated by blind hatred of Jews.
The Gazan invaders bound victims, including young children, and burned them alive, leaving ashes that took weeks to identify. The invaders tortured and killed children and parents in front of each other. A terrorist ripped open the womb of an expectant mother, stabbed the baby and shot the mother. The Nazis attempted to hide the atrocities they were committing; not so the Gazans, who proudly committed torture, rape and mutilation, filming their atrocities with GoPro cameras and even the phones of their victims.
Hamas chose the joyous Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which commemorates the end and renewal of the annual cycle of the weekly reading of the Torah, not just because Israel’s guard would be down but to demoralize the Jewish people.
The Holocaust did not cause the Jewish people to capitulate. Heroic Jews celebrated Simchat Torah in Auschwitz itself. So, too, Oct. 7 did not break Israel; it made Israelis realize that they must defeat Hamas and other terror groups to have any level of security.
Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 genocidal invasion was and continues to be necessary to protect Israelis and entirely lawful.
Poland’s coordinator of the Auschwitz ceremony, Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski, claimed: “We are obliged to respect the decisions of the ICC.”
But the ICC decision has no basis in law or fact. And it has no jurisdiction because the P.A. is not a state. In addition, the ICC cannot exercise jurisdiction over Israelis because Israel is not a signatory to the ICC treaty. The ICC ignores its complementarity requirement that it must defer to countries with their own justice system addressing military misconduct, as Israel very much has.
The underlying ICC charges that Israel’s self-defense constitutes starvation and murder mock reality and eviscerate international law. The law regarding starvation, the Fourth Geneva Convention, does not require the provision of aid to civilians if it may advantage enemy combatants. Factually, there is no such crisis in Gaza, as Israel has been facilitating aid deliveries from the get-go.
Hamas and its allies in the media, coupled with global bureaucracies, have grossly exaggerated noncombatant deaths in Gaza. Israel has taken extraordinary steps to protect civilians well beyond its legal obligations. The destruction is entirely because Hamas made the war crime of using human shields its main strategy, hoping that casualties would stop Israel’s self-defense.
Bartoszewski should also know that “just following the law” is a particularly unpersuasive argument regarding the Holocaust. The Nuremberg tribunals rightly rejected this defense by Nazi war criminals, as did Israel when it tried and hanged Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi architects of the Final Solution to European Jewry.
As Holocaust survivors pass from this world, the upcoming 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation is important to making sure the world never forgets the unique horrors perpetrated against the Jewish people. But by threatening to arrest Netanyahu at Auschwitz, Poland is radically transforming the Holocaust’s lessons to attack Jews in Israel and perpetuate the ICC blood libel that also threatens the United States.
A boycott might cause Poland to reconsider. Otherwise, the United States should encourage Israel to mark Auschwitz’s liberation at the Western Wall, attended by a very senior American delegation. Jerusalem would be a fitting location that would also emphasize the ongoing lesson of the Holocaust on the dire need of the Jewish people to defend itself against today’s genocidal assaults, including the Al-Aqsa Flood.
(JNS.org)
