ICC mandate against Netanyahu: “Denouncing the massacres of civilians in Gaza is not being anti-Semitic”

Published on November 28, 2024 at 8:15 a.m.updated on November 28, 2024 at 10:56 a.m.

By accusing the International Criminal Court of having rendered an “anti-Semitic” decision against his person and by comparing himself to Dreyfus, Benyamin Netanyahu maintains a toxic confusion between criticism of the Israeli government and hatred of Jews, Marwan Sinaceur is alarmed.

Montesquieu believed that it is institutions, not individuals, that guarantee the law. His phrase remains famous: “So that power cannot be abused, it is necessary that, through the arrangement of things, power stops power”.

By taxing the decision of the International Criminal Court “anti-Semitic” and by comparing himself to Dreyfus, Benyamin Netanyahu, who says so much about Western values, tramples on the principle of independence of the judiciary at the foundation of the Enlightenment.

The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued against Benyamin Netanyahu, as well as Yoav Gallant, does not target him because he is Jewish or Israeli (his identity), but for what he committed between October 8, 2023 and May 20, 2024 (his actions). Multiple evidence documents the massacre of civilians, the use of hunger as a means of warfare, and the explicit intent behind these acts as communicated by Israeli leaders themselves. For example, Minister Yoav Gallant called the Palestinians “human animals” and ordered a complete siege without water, food, or electricity for the population; another minister (Avi Dichter) explicitly spoke of mass displacement, and Netanyahu referred to the complete eradication of Gaza in a passage where he compared Gaza to Amalek, an enemy people mentioned in the Bible. Oxfam has documented that the annual toll of women and children killed in Gaza exceeds that of all other recent conflicts. Israeli historian Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust specialist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described the horrors of Gaza as genocide: “ What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, because Gaza no longer exists. » Schools, hospitals, nothing escapes it. 69% of water infrastructure was deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.

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Denouncing this, documenting it, recalling it does not in any way mean justifying or excusing the terrorist horrors of Hamas of October 7, 2023! The decision of the International Criminal Court took six months (three weeks against Putin): we cannot say that it was expeditious. The indictment does not deny Israel’s right to defend itself, but reiterates that this right does not absolve it, like other States, from respecting international humanitarian law.

Netanyahu’s government could have attacked Hamas: it attacked the civilian population of Gaza as a whole, women, children, doctors, nurses, journalists, humanitarian workers. The toll is terrible: tens of thousands of deaths, thousands of amputees, hundreds of thousands of refugees. At the start of the war, American soldiers sensitive to Israel’s right to defend itself tried to persuade Netanyahu that the fight to be waged was against Hamas, not against the civilian population of Gaza. Allowing the delivery of food, water and medicine to civilians would have helped win the ideological war against the fanatical movement. Wasted effort.

Ironically, the legal value of the International Criminal Court’s decision lies in the fact that the Israeli government has not established an independent commission of inquiry. Had he done so, the principle of complementarity would have required the Court to rely on such an Israeli commission. Of course, Netanyahu did not want an Israeli commission that could have exposed his role in the rise of Hamas.

The indiscriminate bombings in Lebanon, including in the very center of Beirut and near the Roman sites of Baalbek and Tyre, the thousands of deaths in Lebanon – a very large majority of civilians, women, children there too – and more than 1, 2 million refugees are also excluded from the arrest warrant. Continuing violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank (179 Palestinian deaths in the West Bank avant the attacks of October 7 on the year 2023 according to CNN) are also.

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To say all this is not to be anti-Semitic. Should we remember that many Jewish figures denounce the horrors of Gaza? Bernie Sanders, US senator, writes: “ Netanyahu’s extremist government did not simply wage war against Hamas. He waged a merciless war against the Palestinian people. » Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, whose father fled Nazi Germany, writes on The International Criminal Court has found sufficient reason to believe that the State of Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. » . A recent poll shows that 41.3% of American Jewish teenagers believe that Israel “commits genocide” in Gaza and 66% say they “sympathize with the Palestinian people”.

How then can we dare to make a comparison with the unfair accusation against Dreyfus, a French patriot, accused simply because he was Jewish? No evidence against Dreyfus, innocent victim of persistent anti-Semitism in French society. Overwhelming and macabre evidence in Gaza.

By taxing the decision of the International Criminal Court “anti-Semitic” and by comparing himself to Dreyfus, Netanyahu knowingly mixes criticism of Israeli policy and anti-Semitism. It is a game that is not only perverse, but dangerous. How can we explain to young people revolted by the horrors of Gaza that Netanyahu represents neither Israelis nor Jews, that anti-Semitism is abject and condemnable without reservation, if criticizing Israeli policy becomes “anti-Semitism”? Can we imagine saying that criticizing Macron is being anti-French?

As the president of CRIF notes in the face of growing anti-Semitism, there is today a “ toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of Jews in France “. By mixing the two, Netanyahu is fueling this porosity.

Let’s be clear: we must condemn anti-Semitism, without any reservation. Anti-Semitism, we must repeat, is racism against Jews, discrimination, hatred, verbal violence, physical violence. A hatred and violence that led to the unspeakable horror of the Shoah. In a creeping way, it is an essentialization, a conspiracy, a reduction of the individual to a categorization which locks him up.

We must recognize the State of Israel. Israel has the right to exist, viably as a country, within secure borders, with its destiny. The Jewish people have the right to self-determination with their state. The PLO recognized Israel in 1988. The Arab League proposed full normalization with Israel in 2002.
We must recognize the right of Israeli citizens to live in peace and dignity, without being killed or threatened.

But we must be able to denounce Israeli policy, whether it is the conduct of the war in Gaza or in Lebanon (the majority of those killed are civilians and are not “human shields”), or colonization in the West Bank (settler violence, continued land capture against the Palestinians).

And we must also be able to criticize Israeli political leaders, not for who they are, but for what they do. When Israeli ministers talk about deporting entire populations from Gaza or Lebanon, to remain silent is to be complicit.

Denouncing the massacres of civilians in Gaza is not being anti-Semitic.

BIO EXPRESS

Marwan Sinaceur is professor of social psychology at ESSEC, holds a doctorate from Stanford University in the United States. He is a specialist in conflict resolution, human emotions and Arab culture.