Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, May 23, 2024
“The mainstreaming of anti-Zionist propaganda that denies rights to Jews no one would think of denying to anyone else comes with a cost both for Israel and the Diaspora.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic and American political opponents are not all cheering the decision of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to call for indictments of both the Israeli leader and three members of the Hamas terrorist group. While Israel-haters and antisemites everywhere are savoring the fantasy of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant being put on trial at The Hague for war crimes against the Palestinians, this deeply cynical and immoral move has had some short-term unintended consequences.
As even The New York Times reluctantly noted, the announcement made by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan outraged the Israeli public. The argument that Israel is no better than the barbaric terrorists of Hamas is amoral as well as rooted in the kind of double standards that is indistinguishable from antisemitism. Treating the measured actions of the country that was attacked and whose citizens were subjected to unspeakable atrocities by a genocidal terrorist movement as the moral equivalent of those very terrorists is itself an act of outrageous prejudice and injustice. And it has given Netanyahu an advantage over both his domestic and international opponents.
Still, it would be a mistake for supporters of Israel to discount the impact of the ICC’s gesture and other efforts by the worldwide community to isolate and smear the Jewish state as a criminal enterprise.
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