Hours before the holding of a demonstration in Jerusalem to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the calling of early elections, the Government and the opposition of Israel have put aside their differences to receive Monday’s decision with unanimous indignation. of the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to request an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and his head of Defense, Yoav Gallant.
“Disgrace”, “crime of historic proportions”, “hatred of Jews unprecedented since Nazi propaganda”… The reactions followed shortly after the announcement. The Prosecutor’s Office’s decision strikes a particularly sensitive chord, by symbolically placing two Israeli leaders and Hamas, the organization considered terrorist by the United States and the European Union that launched the October 7 attack, on the same level. The Prosecutor’s Office also calls for the arrest of the leadership of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, the Ezedín Al Qasam Brigades, and its political leader, Ismail Haniya.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel Katz, mentioned it in a statement in which he calls the decision “scandalous” and “a frontal and unrestricted attack on the victims of October 7 and the 128 kidnapped in Gaza.” “As Hamas murderers and rapists commit crimes against humanity against our brothers and sisters, Attorney General [Karim Khan] mentions in the same breath the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense of Israel along with the abominable Nazi monsters of Hamas: a historical disgrace that will be remembered forever.” Katz adds that he will contact his counterparts in “the major countries of the world” to ask them to publicly announce that they reject the decision and will not comply with the arrest warrants if they are issued.
The country’s president, Isaac Herzog, a consensus figure from Labor, spoke of a decision of “bad faith” that “emboldens terrorists” and “shows the extent to which the international judicial system is at risk of collapsing.”
“We will not forget who started this war […] We will not forget our hostages, whose safe return should be the main concern of the international community. We hope that all leaders of the free world will openly condemn this decision and firmly reject it,” he continued in a statement.
Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, leaders of the two far-right parties (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) that have governed in coalition with Netanyahu since the 2022 elections, have had the harshest words. “Not since Nazi propaganda have we seen such a display of hypocrisy and hatred of Jews as that displayed by the Hague Tribunal. “The Nazis also spoke in the name of ‘morality’ when the only thing behind it was anti-Semitism,” said Smotrich, Minister of Finance.
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Ben Gvir, who holds the National Security portfolio, sees in the Prosecutor’s statement a demonstration that “sending representatives of Israel to the hearing before the Anti-Semitic Court was a serious mistake from the beginning,” in reference to the case for alleged genocide that South Africa initiated in the UN International Court of Justice – a different instance from the ICC, although both based in The Hague – and that he already advocated boycotting. Ben Gvir now proposes to respond with an intensification of the offensive in Gaza, where some 800,000 people have fled in the last two weeks from the last refuge, Rafah, by order of the Israeli army and for fear of a broad ground invasion.
Unanimous criticism
The criticism has not been limited to the partners of the most right-wing Government in the history of Israel that Netanyahu has retained since 2022. Benny Gantz, for example, the same leader who comes from the opposition and who threatened this Saturday to leave the unity Executive for war if they do not agree before June 8 on a realistic strategic plan for Gaza, has assured that the State of Israel fights “in the most moral way in history”, so equating its leaders with “bloodthirsty terrorists, is “moral blindness.” If the prosecutor’s request goes ahead, he added, it will be a “crime of historic proportions that will be remembered for generations.”
Yair Lapid, the previous prime minister, politically and personally at odds with Netanyahu, has also joined the chorus of criticism of a decision that touches on an issue considered to be a state issue and a war that the vast majority of citizens support. Lapid, who preferred to remain in the opposition rather than enter the war Executive due to distrust of Netanyahu, considered it “unforgivable” to request an arrest warrant at the same time as the leaders of Hamas in Gaza, Yahia Sinwar, and its military wing, Mohamed Deif, who are presumed hidden for seven months in tunnels in Gaza. “There is no possible comparison,” he added, before expressing his confidence that the United States, Israel’s main ally, will also support them on this occasion.
The symbolic equation has also stung in Hamas. The prosecutor calls for the arrest of three of its leaders: Sinwar, Deif and Haniya, in Qatar. In a statement, the Islamist movement regrets the “attempt to equate the victim with the perpetrator” and that the petition against the Israeli leaders is limited to two and arrives “seven months late.”
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