Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been told he can participate in the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland without fear of being detained, in a rebuke against the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant against him.
Images of the Israeli PM—that is, the current leader of the world’s only Jewish state—being arrested at the site of the former Nazi death camp would certainly have been something to behold.
Some Gaza activists appear expectedly disappointed that this won’t happen.
“Europe,” said Trita Parsi, a former president of the National Iranian American Council (otherwise known as the ‘Iran Lobby’), “is destroying the very laws and institutions it helped build to allow Netanyahu to continue his genocide.”
Poland’s conservative president Andrzej Duda wrote to liberal PM Donald Tusk this week to ask that Netanyahu’s potential visit be “unhindered” due to the event’s “absolutely exceptional circumstances.”
Tusk later confirmed that “whether it is the prime minister, the president or the minister … of education of Israel, whoever will come to Oswiecim for the celebrations in Auschwitz will be assured of safety and will not be detained.”
Netanyahu has attended such events at Auschwitz in the past but has not said whether he will make a visit this time around, having previously pointed to the threat of the ICC warrant.
The warrant was issued in November last year for what the ICC claimed were “war crimes” in Gaza. It also sent out warrants against Netanyahu’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Tel Aviv called the warrants the “New Dreyfus case” driven by antisemitism. All of the ICC’s 125 members—some of whom have repressive authoritarian governments—are, in theory, obliged to implement the decision of the court. However, some have already said that they would not do so. Indeed, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán called the decision “outrageously brazen.”
Israeli officials previously did not bother to ask if Netanyahu could participate in the event because “they knew what Warsaw’s response would be.” The commemoration will take place on January 27th.
