Hitler’s death was just several hours away when he dictated the will in which he tried to disown the war that was his – more than anything that ever belonged to anyone.
“It is untrue that I, or anyone else in Germany, wanted the war in 1939,” he stated in what would have been the biggest of his many lies, but for the line that followed: “It” – meaning the war in which he slaughtered Jews by the millions – “was designed and instigated by those… who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests.” That is why “that race, Jewry… is the real criminal of this murderous struggle” (Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 794).
Yes, the scales are different, but the absurdity is all the same, as Israel, while facing a genocidal enemy, is the one dragged to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for that very charge.
The Jews are used to the combination of libel and assault. What’s new is its origin. The torch that was kindled by Christian Europeans and later passed on to Islamist Asians is now picked by holier-than-thou Africans.
The mistake of South African leaders
South Africa’s leaders, who initiated the trial and wrote its diatribe, crave the limelight of the off-Gaza theater that will stage the fight they picked. Yet instead of becoming a courtroom drama’s heroes, as they clearly hope, they will emerge from this clash as an operatic farce’s fools.
ISRAEL COULD have avoided the trial, which according to this court’s rules has to be agreeable to its defendant. The Israeli decision is wise.
Unlike what many assume, this court is not automatically anti-Israeli. While one pair of its 15 members hail from patently anti-Israeli Lebanon and Somalia, and another pair represent the opportunistically anti-Israeli Russia and China, the rest – a collection of Western countries, including the US, alongside India, Jamaica, Brazil, and Uganda – are generally impartial.
That’s the political side. From the legal side, Israel should go to this showdown for two reasons: First, it has nothing to hide. And second, it has plenty to say, and also to show.
Israel has nothing to hide because to win, the prosecution will have to prove genocidal intent. How will they do that: Does South African President Cyril Ramaphosa have an Israeli cabinet protocol’s resolution to slaughter Palestinian civilians? He doesn’t, because none was ever taken.
The ones who did talk about genocide – plainly, publicly, and repeatedly – were the ones who would also gladly do genocide: Hamas.
Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric is well documented, as are the atrocities it committed on October 7, much of which will unfurl in The Hague, where Hamas’s barbarism will be laid bare the same way Nazi barbarism was exposed at the Eichmann trial.
That is why Israel is going to this trial, which will begin with Israel as the legal defendant but will end with Hamas as the moral convict, along with all those who effectively support its crimes.
As for the fighting in Gaza, the plaintiffs will be reminded of what they consciously ignore, namely that Israel is targeting military targets – troops, armories, tunnels, and rocket launchers – and when it hits civilians, it’s because Hamas deliberately hides among them. Such wartime conduct, according to the laws of war, is legal. What’s illegal is what causes it – the deployment of human shields.
Legality aside, the court’s deliberations will raise a simple question, if not legally then publicly: With your citizens machine-gunned, their babies butchered, their women raped, and their houses torched, what would you do in Israel’s place?
You see, President Ramaphosa, when you demand “ceasefire now,” what you effectively demand is that our enemies be allowed to return to Gaza’s streets and to the missile launchers they placed within and under them, and then return to hound us and our kids. In short, you are turning yourself into our active enemy. Did you realize this when you decided to take us to The Hague?
Not only have you just become an enemy of Israel, but you have become the enemy of the Jewish people, as the fight you picked will make plain.
WHEN THE court assembles, you will see among its justices Prof. Aharon Barak, one of the world’s greatest jurists, and an emblem of the Israeli judiciary’s independence, professionalism, morality, and guts.
Yet Justice Barak will represent more than all that. Justice Barak will be in The Hague as a Jew, and not just a Jew but a Jew who survived the Holocaust, the real Holocaust, the one that really happened, and the one that would happen again, tonight, if it were up to the religious fanatics you have chosen to hail, shield, and serve.
Not only do you face legal defeat and moral debacle in the fight you have picked, but you also face political disgrace.
To blame anyone of genocide, one must be moral; but to blame a nation of Holocaust survivors of perpetrating genocide, one must be not just moral but morally impeccable.
That’s not what your South Africa is, Mr. Ramaphosa.
Overcast by a world-leading homicide rate of 41 murders annually per 100,000 people, your country is a nexus of human trafficking, drug dealing, arms trade, embezzlement, rape, robbery, carjacking, burglary, mugging, pickpocketing, and every other form of crime whether petty, organized, financial, or political. Corrupt to the bone, your land is a social tragedy and a moral hell.
Now, the courtroom drama you have engineered will only make millions of foreigners tell you to first take care of South Africa before setting out to fix the rest of the world.
You are in no position to preach anything to anyone outside your land, least of all humanism, least of all to the Jews.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.