Netanyahu Brought the ICC Ruling on Himself and Now He's Whining About Antisemitism
Haaretz
Yossi Verter
Nov 22, 2024 6:00 am IST
How symbolic it is that the International Criminal Court decision's to issue an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu (and Yoav Gallant) came the day after the latest installment in the series "This Is How We'll Bury the State Inquiry Commission" – a plan by the prime minister to form a political investigative committee.
There's not much to say about it, except that the proposal, as usual, is based on Netanyahu's assumption that we are all stupid. He wants to form a committee whose members will fight with each other morning, noon and night, and become deadlocked till the end of days. In the meantime, no "other commission" may be formed, in the words of this scandalous legislation.
But let's go back to the business at hand: In June, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter urging Netanyahu to stop delaying and establish a state commission of inquiry. Apart from all the self-evident reasons to do so, it might have enabled Israel to better deal with The Hague's threat, perhaps even remove it, certainly if the commission's mandate were expanded beyond the events of October 7 and the background to them.
Netanyahu, of course, refused. He won't establish a state commission of inquiry, period. He is a man of principles.
The other developments taking place in his governing coalition, from the expanding movement to resettle Gaza (which Netanyahu has not denounced, only dismissing it once, early on, as "unrealistic") to the renewal of the judicial overhaul, all are closely connected to the weakness of the prime minister versus international institutions.
If you campaign for years to weaken the legal system, don't be surprised that at the moment of truth, your own legal immunity is compromised. The conduct in the international arena was amateurish and shocking – there are hundreds of examples of this. For example, when the national security minister encourages militias to set fire to trucks carrying humanitarian aid, the responsibility falls on the prime minister. As the saying goes, he is the head, he is to blame.
Netanyahu brought the arrest warrant on himself through his stubbornness and arrogance. Now he is whining about antisemitism and Dreyfus. When it first became known that the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was leading the investigation, Netanyahu went into hysterics. He subsequently calmed down and, as usual, began to downplay the affair. As the process dragged on and various accusations began to surface against Khan, the old Netanyahu returned, the one whose hubris gives rise to layers of stupidity and blindness. He moved from legal deliberations to propaganda. The official line is that the court is antisemitic, and the prosecutor better not dare touch us.
It would be fine if this only involved Netanyahu and Gallant. But this warrant could bring a wave of secret warrants against scores of officers and soldiers for their part in the never-ending war in Gaza.
The entire ICC business was handled clumsily from the start – accusations of antisemitism, crimes against humanity, explicit threats against the prosecutor. The result: The prime minister of Israel finds himself on a very short list of serving world leaders with arrest warrants dangling over their heads. Another is Vladimir Putin, the one whose affinity put Netanyahu in "another league."
The Pavlovian reaction in Israel was shock and defiance. Opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz were quick (even before many coalition members) to condemn the court's decision. True, the arrest warrants border on scandal, but they didn't occur in a vacuum. The same goes for the vast majority of the Israeli public, which – encouraged by the Netanyahu coalition and most of the media about what has really happened in Gaza in the past year, and what has happened to Israel in the international arena – was blindsided.
Now Netanyahu and his cohorts will put their trust in the Trump administration. But the world is not just America. A pity. Ask Miri Regev's travel agent.
Between two Dreyfuses
Netanyahu was very agitated during his Knesset speech this week. Emotion overcame him when he referred to the investigation into the document that was stolen from Military Intelligence, passed on to his spokesman for security issues and used to besmirch the army brass and his former defense minister, then leaked to Germany's Bild, Netanyahu's preferred tabloid outlet for irresponsible stories.
"They are destroying the lives of young people," Netanyahu shouted. For a moment we might have thought he meant the hostages. "My death is better than my life," he quoted a statement attributed to Eli Feldstein, the now disavowed spokesman who overnight became the darling of the right. Again, we might have thought he was quoting a hostage's remarks from an intelligence report he had seen. "Everyone knows what's going on here," Netanyahu growled and pounded his fist on the podium, his eyes darting in every direction. "The people aren't stupid!"
Well, every poll we see what the majority thinks about Netanyahu's policies toward the hostages, his management of the war and his refusal to accept responsibility. If the prime minister had shown the same anguish and empathy for the "young people" (and adults) who are suffering in the tunnels in Gaza, they might already be back home.
What we can say is that Netanyahu's anger is authentic. It's not because he's heartbroken over Feldstein; he has no heart. Feldstein is a nonentity in his eyes.
In the background of the podium-pounding is his endless effort at evading the day when he has to give testimony at his corruption trial. He asked the Shin Bet for a security assessment that would allow him to appeal the judges' ruling that he must appear in court, Michael Hauser-Tov reported in Haaretz. Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar refused. (Meir Ben-Shabbat, his designated successor, would most certainly have agreed.)
Along with this come the frustrations of the hostage negotiating teams, including Bar. News reports this week said the entire team had once again asked the prime minister to expand their mandate and were turned down.
Netanyahu also mentioned this in his Knesset speech, insisting that "dozens of abductees" would soon be returned. What, how? It's unclear. The negotiating team doesn't think it can happen. It's more reasonable to assume that those were simply empty words and then when nothing happens, he can blame "Hamas' refusal." Along the way, he is playing on the feelings of the hostage families, who are shattered by anxiety and despair.
One way or the other, Bar's integrity and professionalism poses a clear and present danger to the dictator, one that must be removed quickly. That doesn't absolve the Shin Bet chief from his heavy responsibility for the October 7 catastrophe. But he, unlike others, has owned up to it. He will have to go home, as will army Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi. But the idea that the person who will remove them is the one chiefly responsible for the debacle, the father of conspiracies, the financier of Hamas and the one who disregarded the warnings should horrify any decent person. Certainly in light of Netanyahu's reasons for dismissing Bar and Halevi.
In the background lurks the Shin Bet investigation of Feldstein and Co. Feldstein is the new hero of the right. If Netanyahu is the Big Dreyfus being hunted down by The Hague and the "left," Feldstein is the Junior Dreyfus. The Bibi-ists fantasize about Feldstein being held prisoner in the "basements of the Shin Bet" and call for his release "now!" mimicking the slogan of the hostage families. They have no lower limit, after all. There's no point in burdening them with facts appearing in the indictment. It's a lie too good to be fact-checked.
If anything, they magnify it, like the tireless Likud MK Tally Gotliv, who accused the Shin Bet of leaving a "noose" (which wasn't there) in Feldstein's cell "as a strong hint of what he should do." The hoax about the rope remained a trope of the poison machine days after it was debunked.
After initially disavowing Feldstein, the campaign quickly got underway. The first complaint, you may recall, was the tired line of "selective enforcement." Where are all the left-wing journalists who are siphoning off leaks from the "deep state"? Why aren't they and the leakers rotting in prison? It caught on with the base, of course, but it didn't stop there.
All the poison machine needs to produce more and more poison is fragments of information on which it assembles an alternative reality. After the excerpts of the leak investigations were reported in which the alleged intel thief who passed it to Feldstein claimed that he thought Netanyahu should see it, a new campaign was born: "Bibi is being isolated." The disseminators of fake news, from Channel 14 to the lower reaches of X and Telegram, immediately embraced the propaganda. The line: The treacherous army and Shin Bet are serially hiding intelligence from Netanyahu to harm him politically and force him to surrender in Gaza.
This is how a bill by Amit Halevi, one of Netanyahu's more useful idiots in the Likud Knesset caucus, was revived. It was Halevi who signed the "donations law" to allow the prime minister to pay for his trial with money from foreigners.
The bill that won a preliminary vote in the Knesset this week seeks to establish a new intelligence body directly subordinate to the prime minister. The goal is to create an entity that provides the prime minister with a second opinion.
The reality is that nothing is kept secret from Netanyahu; he sees everything. Never was any important intelligence finding hidden from him, certainly not an intelligence alert. Indeed, the warnings he was given by Military Intelligence before October 7 regarding the judicial overhaul only piled up in his inbox to be ignored. A "second opinion" mechanism alongside the army also exists, or is supposed to, in the form of the National Security Council that operates under the prime minister.
According to the reliable testimony of Gadi Eisenkot, the council doesn't fill that role at all, it's just a sign on the door. That's the truth. But Netanyahu, as always, doesn't work to shape reality, he works to shape the perception of reality.
The real guardian of the walls
Like Sheffi Paz, the activist who harries African asylum seekers, Feldstein received loud support Thursday. The army of supporters who rushed to a hearing of Feldstein's case at a Tel Aviv court evoked the dark days of Elor Azaria, the soldier who killed a Palestinian assailant who was already lying motionless on the ground.
Once again, the phalanges are spreading lies about the army and state institutions; once again, they're defending suspects or the downright guilty in the name of corrupted principles.
In short, once again, it's the State of Netanyahu versus the State of Israel, and long ago the Netanyahu side identified the wicked, the guilty. Chief among them is Ronen Bar and especially Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
Against the attorney general, a Goebbels-like propaganda apparatus is being deployed that encompasses all the branches of the Bibi-ist network, from the government and the Knesset to social media and parts of the establishment media. The character assassination against Baharav-Miara is one of the most despicable and dangerous phenomena in the country's history. This demonization of a public servant is unparalleled, topping even what was done to her predecessor, Avichai Mendelblit.
The terms "mafia" and "criminal organization" understate what we see day after day from ministers and lawmakers in Netanyahu's coalition. This week, the attorney general was invited to a session of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee for a hearing supposedly on crime in the Arab community. It was one of the ugliest displays even for a committee where ugliness has become a hallmark under its chairman, Simcha Rothman. Sexism plays a role.
Of course, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Police Commissioner Danny ("the crime situation is excellent") Levy and the heads of Arab local governments weren't invited. In retrospect, the flea circus led by Rothman, whose feelings of inferiority are clear every time he sits down with a lawyer many times his superior, only benefited Baharav-Miara. She absorbed the vile slander with stoic restraint, wrote down comments and, when her turn came, treated all the allegations against her with remarkable seriousness.
Her mien was sober, her arguments professional and her attitude respectful – to people who only deserve contempt. You can't help but admire her strength. She goes through the seven circles of hell, receives death threats and has round-the-clock protection.
She has almost no life outside her home and the Justice Ministry. At any moment she could leave all this behind, earn many times more at a prestigious law firm and get her life back. She has honestly earned the respect of the legal establishment.
She stays because she knows that her departure would bring down the prosecution like a house of cards. The deputy attorneys general and senior prosecutors draw their strength from her. The moment she leaves, Justice Minister Yariv Levin will swoop down like a voracious vulture. He has countless ways to turn the ministry into an arm of the effort to weaken the judiciary, which he's working hard to revive.
To paraphrase former Supreme Court President Esther Hayut, the attorney general is the real guardian of the walls – Israel's name for its May 2021 operation in Gaza against Islamic Jihad. And contrary to Hayut's take at the time she made her remark, the walls are closer than ever to collapse.
Netanyahu is talking about firing the attorney general as if she were a junior spokesperson in his office who turned against him. He allows Likud's Shlomo Karhi to collect signatures for this purpose, while David Amsalem once again declares that Baharav-Miara is "the most dangerous person in the country" (when he's not demanding that she fix her hair). The shallow Amichai Chikli has her high up on his slander list.
The threat level has reached new heights. Her life is probably in much greater danger than that of the man whose supporters call the shooting of flares at his house an assassination attempt.
She remains and takes it all because she knows the alternative: a puppet successor who will work with these scoundrels, cover up their failures, whitewash their crimes, abuse decent people and promote the corrupt. Worst of all, the successor would work to please the prime minister. Somebody like Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs would fit the bill.
Baharav-Miara cares about the office she holds, about the rule of law and about the country. As long as she's not thrown out, she will stay and fight for Israeli democracy. Too bad The Hague's arrest warrants didn't take her dismissal off the table.
Yossi Verter
Nov 22, 2024 6:00 am IST
How symbolic it is that the International Criminal Court decision's to issue an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu (and Yoav Gallant) came the day after the latest installment in the series "This Is How We'll Bury the State Inquiry Commission" – a plan by the prime minister to form a political investigative committee.
There's not much to say about it, except that the proposal, as usual, is based on Netanyahu's assumption that we are all stupid. He wants to form a committee whose members will fight with each other morning, noon and night, and become deadlocked till the end of days. In the meantime, no "other commission" may be formed, in the words of this scandalous legislation.
But let's go back to the business at hand: In June, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter urging Netanyahu to stop delaying and establish a state commission of inquiry. Apart from all the self-evident reasons to do so, it might have enabled Israel to better deal with The Hague's threat, perhaps even remove it, certainly if the commission's mandate were expanded beyond the events of October 7 and the background to them.
Netanyahu, of course, refused. He won't establish a state commission of inquiry, period. He is a man of principles.
The other developments taking place in his governing coalition, from the expanding movement to resettle Gaza (which Netanyahu has not denounced, only dismissing it once, early on, as "unrealistic") to the renewal of the judicial overhaul, all are closely connected to the weakness of the prime minister versus international institutions.
If you campaign for years to weaken the legal system, don't be surprised that at the moment of truth, your own legal immunity is compromised. The conduct in the international arena was amateurish and shocking – there are hundreds of examples of this. For example, when the national security minister encourages militias to set fire to trucks carrying humanitarian aid, the responsibility falls on the prime minister. As the saying goes, he is the head, he is to blame.
Netanyahu brought the arrest warrant on himself through his stubbornness and arrogance. Now he is whining about antisemitism and Dreyfus. When it first became known that the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was leading the investigation, Netanyahu went into hysterics. He subsequently calmed down and, as usual, began to downplay the affair. As the process dragged on and various accusations began to surface against Khan, the old Netanyahu returned, the one whose hubris gives rise to layers of stupidity and blindness. He moved from legal deliberations to propaganda. The official line is that the court is antisemitic, and the prosecutor better not dare touch us.
It would be fine if this only involved Netanyahu and Gallant. But this warrant could bring a wave of secret warrants against scores of officers and soldiers for their part in the never-ending war in Gaza.
The entire ICC business was handled clumsily from the start – accusations of antisemitism, crimes against humanity, explicit threats against the prosecutor. The result: The prime minister of Israel finds himself on a very short list of serving world leaders with arrest warrants dangling over their heads. Another is Vladimir Putin, the one whose affinity put Netanyahu in "another league."
The Pavlovian reaction in Israel was shock and defiance. Opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz were quick (even before many coalition members) to condemn the court's decision. True, the arrest warrants border on scandal, but they didn't occur in a vacuum. The same goes for the vast majority of the Israeli public, which – encouraged by the Netanyahu coalition and most of the media about what has really happened in Gaza in the past year, and what has happened to Israel in the international arena – was blindsided.
Now Netanyahu and his cohorts will put their trust in the Trump administration. But the world is not just America. A pity. Ask Miri Regev's travel agent.
Between two Dreyfuses
Netanyahu was very agitated during his Knesset speech this week. Emotion overcame him when he referred to the investigation into the document that was stolen from Military Intelligence, passed on to his spokesman for security issues and used to besmirch the army brass and his former defense minister, then leaked to Germany's Bild, Netanyahu's preferred tabloid outlet for irresponsible stories.
"They are destroying the lives of young people," Netanyahu shouted. For a moment we might have thought he meant the hostages. "My death is better than my life," he quoted a statement attributed to Eli Feldstein, the now disavowed spokesman who overnight became the darling of the right. Again, we might have thought he was quoting a hostage's remarks from an intelligence report he had seen. "Everyone knows what's going on here," Netanyahu growled and pounded his fist on the podium, his eyes darting in every direction. "The people aren't stupid!"
Well, every poll we see what the majority thinks about Netanyahu's policies toward the hostages, his management of the war and his refusal to accept responsibility. If the prime minister had shown the same anguish and empathy for the "young people" (and adults) who are suffering in the tunnels in Gaza, they might already be back home.
What we can say is that Netanyahu's anger is authentic. It's not because he's heartbroken over Feldstein; he has no heart. Feldstein is a nonentity in his eyes.
In the background of the podium-pounding is his endless effort at evading the day when he has to give testimony at his corruption trial. He asked the Shin Bet for a security assessment that would allow him to appeal the judges' ruling that he must appear in court, Michael Hauser-Tov reported in Haaretz. Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar refused. (Meir Ben-Shabbat, his designated successor, would most certainly have agreed.)
Along with this come the frustrations of the hostage negotiating teams, including Bar. News reports this week said the entire team had once again asked the prime minister to expand their mandate and were turned down.
Netanyahu also mentioned this in his Knesset speech, insisting that "dozens of abductees" would soon be returned. What, how? It's unclear. The negotiating team doesn't think it can happen. It's more reasonable to assume that those were simply empty words and then when nothing happens, he can blame "Hamas' refusal." Along the way, he is playing on the feelings of the hostage families, who are shattered by anxiety and despair.
One way or the other, Bar's integrity and professionalism poses a clear and present danger to the dictator, one that must be removed quickly. That doesn't absolve the Shin Bet chief from his heavy responsibility for the October 7 catastrophe. But he, unlike others, has owned up to it. He will have to go home, as will army Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi. But the idea that the person who will remove them is the one chiefly responsible for the debacle, the father of conspiracies, the financier of Hamas and the one who disregarded the warnings should horrify any decent person. Certainly in light of Netanyahu's reasons for dismissing Bar and Halevi.
In the background lurks the Shin Bet investigation of Feldstein and Co. Feldstein is the new hero of the right. If Netanyahu is the Big Dreyfus being hunted down by The Hague and the "left," Feldstein is the Junior Dreyfus. The Bibi-ists fantasize about Feldstein being held prisoner in the "basements of the Shin Bet" and call for his release "now!" mimicking the slogan of the hostage families. They have no lower limit, after all. There's no point in burdening them with facts appearing in the indictment. It's a lie too good to be fact-checked.
If anything, they magnify it, like the tireless Likud MK Tally Gotliv, who accused the Shin Bet of leaving a "noose" (which wasn't there) in Feldstein's cell "as a strong hint of what he should do." The hoax about the rope remained a trope of the poison machine days after it was debunked.
After initially disavowing Feldstein, the campaign quickly got underway. The first complaint, you may recall, was the tired line of "selective enforcement." Where are all the left-wing journalists who are siphoning off leaks from the "deep state"? Why aren't they and the leakers rotting in prison? It caught on with the base, of course, but it didn't stop there.
All the poison machine needs to produce more and more poison is fragments of information on which it assembles an alternative reality. After the excerpts of the leak investigations were reported in which the alleged intel thief who passed it to Feldstein claimed that he thought Netanyahu should see it, a new campaign was born: "Bibi is being isolated." The disseminators of fake news, from Channel 14 to the lower reaches of X and Telegram, immediately embraced the propaganda. The line: The treacherous army and Shin Bet are serially hiding intelligence from Netanyahu to harm him politically and force him to surrender in Gaza.
This is how a bill by Amit Halevi, one of Netanyahu's more useful idiots in the Likud Knesset caucus, was revived. It was Halevi who signed the "donations law" to allow the prime minister to pay for his trial with money from foreigners.
The bill that won a preliminary vote in the Knesset this week seeks to establish a new intelligence body directly subordinate to the prime minister. The goal is to create an entity that provides the prime minister with a second opinion.
The reality is that nothing is kept secret from Netanyahu; he sees everything. Never was any important intelligence finding hidden from him, certainly not an intelligence alert. Indeed, the warnings he was given by Military Intelligence before October 7 regarding the judicial overhaul only piled up in his inbox to be ignored. A "second opinion" mechanism alongside the army also exists, or is supposed to, in the form of the National Security Council that operates under the prime minister.
According to the reliable testimony of Gadi Eisenkot, the council doesn't fill that role at all, it's just a sign on the door. That's the truth. But Netanyahu, as always, doesn't work to shape reality, he works to shape the perception of reality.
The real guardian of the walls
Like Sheffi Paz, the activist who harries African asylum seekers, Feldstein received loud support Thursday. The army of supporters who rushed to a hearing of Feldstein's case at a Tel Aviv court evoked the dark days of Elor Azaria, the soldier who killed a Palestinian assailant who was already lying motionless on the ground.
Once again, the phalanges are spreading lies about the army and state institutions; once again, they're defending suspects or the downright guilty in the name of corrupted principles.
In short, once again, it's the State of Netanyahu versus the State of Israel, and long ago the Netanyahu side identified the wicked, the guilty. Chief among them is Ronen Bar and especially Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
Against the attorney general, a Goebbels-like propaganda apparatus is being deployed that encompasses all the branches of the Bibi-ist network, from the government and the Knesset to social media and parts of the establishment media. The character assassination against Baharav-Miara is one of the most despicable and dangerous phenomena in the country's history. This demonization of a public servant is unparalleled, topping even what was done to her predecessor, Avichai Mendelblit.
The terms "mafia" and "criminal organization" understate what we see day after day from ministers and lawmakers in Netanyahu's coalition. This week, the attorney general was invited to a session of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee for a hearing supposedly on crime in the Arab community. It was one of the ugliest displays even for a committee where ugliness has become a hallmark under its chairman, Simcha Rothman. Sexism plays a role.
Of course, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Police Commissioner Danny ("the crime situation is excellent") Levy and the heads of Arab local governments weren't invited. In retrospect, the flea circus led by Rothman, whose feelings of inferiority are clear every time he sits down with a lawyer many times his superior, only benefited Baharav-Miara. She absorbed the vile slander with stoic restraint, wrote down comments and, when her turn came, treated all the allegations against her with remarkable seriousness.
Her mien was sober, her arguments professional and her attitude respectful – to people who only deserve contempt. You can't help but admire her strength. She goes through the seven circles of hell, receives death threats and has round-the-clock protection.
She has almost no life outside her home and the Justice Ministry. At any moment she could leave all this behind, earn many times more at a prestigious law firm and get her life back. She has honestly earned the respect of the legal establishment.
She stays because she knows that her departure would bring down the prosecution like a house of cards. The deputy attorneys general and senior prosecutors draw their strength from her. The moment she leaves, Justice Minister Yariv Levin will swoop down like a voracious vulture. He has countless ways to turn the ministry into an arm of the effort to weaken the judiciary, which he's working hard to revive.
To paraphrase former Supreme Court President Esther Hayut, the attorney general is the real guardian of the walls – Israel's name for its May 2021 operation in Gaza against Islamic Jihad. And contrary to Hayut's take at the time she made her remark, the walls are closer than ever to collapse.
Netanyahu is talking about firing the attorney general as if she were a junior spokesperson in his office who turned against him. He allows Likud's Shlomo Karhi to collect signatures for this purpose, while David Amsalem once again declares that Baharav-Miara is "the most dangerous person in the country" (when he's not demanding that she fix her hair). The shallow Amichai Chikli has her high up on his slander list.
The threat level has reached new heights. Her life is probably in much greater danger than that of the man whose supporters call the shooting of flares at his house an assassination attempt.
She remains and takes it all because she knows the alternative: a puppet successor who will work with these scoundrels, cover up their failures, whitewash their crimes, abuse decent people and promote the corrupt. Worst of all, the successor would work to please the prime minister. Somebody like Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs would fit the bill.
Baharav-Miara cares about the office she holds, about the rule of law and about the country. As long as she's not thrown out, she will stay and fight for Israeli democracy. Too bad The Hague's arrest warrants didn't take her dismissal off the table.
